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CHAPTER THREE

Justina Magna knelt over the body of Lieutenant Verdi, pulled the sunhat from his hand, and laid it over his face. Darkness was falling; the sun had set and there would not be a long twilight. It was possible that nightfall would bring a new attack, but she thought not. The wagons were out of the gully now, with open country to either side, and she was virtually certain that all but a handful of the er’kresha had fallen before the guns of the defenders. The bandits must have lost fifty men or more—their attack had been positively suicidal. Perhaps, as Garstone had suggested, they simply had not realized the strength of the force they were attacking. They could hardly have encountered this kind of firepower before.

Garstone saw her hide Verdi’s face, and came over to stare down at the dead lieutenant. He looked neither grief-stricken nor surprised. When the lieutenant had been hit the sergeant had known immediately that he was not going to make it. Garstone had never liked the officer, and had never trusted him, but that was all in the way of things. It had counted for nothing while Verdi was giving the orders.

“I don’t understand,” said the woman, looking up at Garstone. “Why didn’t they let us through and then attack the caravan? They could have hit the rearmost wagons and we wouldn’t have been able to get back to help. As it was, they ran right into our guns.”

“The reason they came at us,” said Garstone harshly, “was that we’re carrying something a great deal more valuable than the trade goods in the merchant’s wagons. Guns—grenades—explosives—ammunition. They must have thought that the long odds looked worthwhile.”

“Whatever happened to fear?” asked Justina Magna with equal bitterness.

“They may not have our educational advantages,” said Garstone, “but you can’t judge them by the standards set by creatures like Delizia. They aren’t afraid of death or injury...not because the possibility has been burned out of them, but because of their whole way of life. Death’s cheap on a world like this, and they know they have to face it. Never imagine that a man who can fear necessarily will. Fear and cowardice aren’t the same things at all.”

“Do you think they’ll come back with reinforcements?” she asked. “Is our cargo that valuable?”

“Maybe,” replied the sergeant. “But we can stand them off. We were unlucky to lose four men. It’ll teach the other young bastards not to be so damn complacent. Anyhow, we’re nearly halfway to the city. This is a corner of the desert, miles from anywhere—kresh territory. The closer we get to civilization the less will be the probability that we’ll have to face a further attack. In the city no one will dare to lay a finger on us. The last thing they want is a human invasion of Azreon.

“Don’t you think that you might be overvaluing yourself?” said a new voice. “What makes you think that Command Haidra would invade Azreon for revenge if anything happened to you in Ziarat?”

Garstone half-turned to see Ramon Delizia standing three meters away, watching him. Delizia was small and swarthy, and always seemed to move in a lazy, fluid manner. Garstone resented the face of his very existence.

“Get the hell out of here,” said the sergeant. “Stay under cover.”

“I came to see the lieutenant,” said Delizia evenly. “I see now that he’s dead. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

“It would be better,” said Garstone, with ill-disguised impatience, “if you’d all stay in the wagons and let my men take care of the dead. I don’t think we’ll be moving on. We might as well rest here until night-dark and then make an early start.”

When neither Delizia nor Justina Magna moved to go, he turned abruptly on his heel and went off down the line of wagons. Justina Magna stood up, brushing sand from her hands.

“My men,” said Delizia, calling her attention to what Garstone had said.

“They are his men,” she replied, quite calmly. “What did you want to say to the lieutenant? A few words of condolence—an apology—or a prayer?”

“Maybe a little of all three,” he answered, unperturbed by the irony.

“He’s all yours,” she told him. She turned to follow Garstone back along the line. He went beyond his own wagons to those of the veich, and when she caught up with him he was trying to inquire of one of the Calvar’s clanless servants what was likely to happen next. He wasn’t getting very far, because the only language the two had in common was that of the sioconi of Omer, and neither was proficient in it. She took over the questioning, using the language of the clanless.

“We will continue to Ziarat,” he told her.

“Immediately?” she asked.

He confirmed that that was his meaning. She explained this to Garstone, who seemed displeased. “It’s probably best,” she told him. “The less time we spend on the road the better. We can take the dead with us and bury them when we do stop for the night.”

Garstone shrugged, scowling. “We’d better ask Scapaccio. It’s his expedition.”

They walked back to the wagons they had brought from Omer, looking for Cesar Scapaccio, who was responsible for their being here. They found him in the back of one of the wagons talking to the optiman Andros. Andros had the casing of a heavy machine gun in his lap, having stripped it down to adjust the ammunition feed. The gun had jammed during the fighting. Of all the people in the party, only Scapaccio seemed to get on well with the optiman; the rest regarded him as a rather nightmarish prospect, an object of muted horror.

Scapaccio looked up as the sergeant and the woman approached, and brought the lamp from the front of the wagon to the back.

“They want us to move on,” explained Justina Magna. “I think they’ll proceed anyway. They don’t want to spend any more time on the road than they have to. Do we go with them?”

“Of course,” said Scapaccio, ignoring the scowl on Garstone’s face.

“I don’t...,” began the sergeant, but trailed off almost immediately as something caught his eye. It was something at or beyond the front of the wagon train, and he was the only one of the four in a position to see it. The other three could only watch the expression on his face changing.

“What is it?” asked Justina Magna, stepping around him so that she, too, could see.

“Visitors,” replied Garstone, grimly.

* * * *

Remy dismounted in front of Garstone and the woman. By this time Scapaccio had come out of the wagon, followed by Andros. All four stood and stared at the newcomers, and along the line all work had stopped. There was a momentary silence.

Scapaccio pushed his way in between Garstone and Justina Magna and looked Remy up and down.

“Who are you?” he asked, taking no pains to control his surprise at finding a human on the road to Ziarat.

“I was about to ask you the same question,” said Remy dryly. He noticed that Garstone’s rifle had shifted in such a way that the muzzle was now directed at his head, though the sergeant’s finger was not as yet on the trigger.

“Remy,” said the sergeant flatly. “His name is Remy. He was once a sergeant in the army.”

Remy looked at the sergeant for a long time, his eyes hard and bright, trying to remember where he had met the man and what name he had borne. He couldn’t capture the essential memory until the other said, “I’m Garstone.” Then it fell into place—a minor incident in the pacification, involving the annexation of some property. There had been a squabble concerning the matter of how much annexation was to be done by two separate groups under different wings of Command Haidra’s network of authority.

“This man’s a deserter,” said Garstone to Scapaccio.

“That’s right,” said Remy. “I threw away my stripes.” He pointed behind him at his mounted companions. “This is Doon, and Madoc, and Iasus Fiemme. We make a living trying to keep the roads clear for the benefit of innocent travelers. We don’t always succeed.”

“My name is Cesar Scapaccio,” said the man in front of Remy. “Colonel, Command Kilifi. I’m an archaeologist.”

Remy’s eyes narrowed. “What brings an off-world archaeologist to Azreon?” he asked. “Or to Haidra, come to that?”

“I travel quite a lot,” replied Scapaccio. “Visiting sites of various kinds, mostly to do with the mapirenes. Haidra was once a mapirene world.”

“Thirty thousand years ago.” said Remy. “And there was just a small base—not far from our base in Omer. As I remember, the word was that it was taken out by a particle beam from orbit. Pulverized entirely—not that there was much of it to start with. That doesn’t explain why you’re here in Azreon.”

“I have reason to believe that there was a second base on this world. In the heartland of this continent.”

“The heartland!” Remy made no attempt to mask his astonishment. “You mean Syrene?”

“The area that’s now a desert—that’s correct.”

Remy glanced sideways at Iasus Fiemme, who looked quite impassive. One of the horses ridden by the humans snorted loudly.

“How badly did the er’kresha hit you?” asked Remy, his voice much softer now, with the aggressive edge quite gone.

“We lost four men, including the officer in charge of the platoon. Our doctor is also wounded, though not seriously. I don’t think the other party lost any men at all—the attack was concentrated on our wagons. There were about fifty in the group that attacked us—you can count the dead back in the canyon, if you wish.”

Remy let his eyes roam from Scapaccio’s face to the sergeant’s gun, then to the woman’s face and finally to the huge bulk of the optiman. Then his gaze passed beyond the group to meet the eyes of a newcomer who had come up behind them—the veir with whom Justina Magna had talked.

“They were from one of the hill tribes,” said the veir. “They must have been ahead of us, keeping just clear of the road, heading south. I don’t know where they were going.”

“I think I do,” muttered Remy. Automatically, he made the comment in the same language the veir had used, and Justina Magna looked at him sharply. She was the only one of the humans able to understand it.

“What do you mean?” she asked, also in the language of the clanless.

Remy looked at her, surprised to hear the alien words on her lips. “Who are you?” he asked.

“Justina Magna. I’m a linguist. I’m supposed to be the mission’s interpreter—I learned the languages of Azreon from strangers in Omer. This seemed to be a good opportunity to use and extend my knowledge.”

Remy turned his attention back to Garstone, more to evade the woman’s question than because he had anything to say to him.

“Still a sergeant,” he commented, “after all these years.”

“What are you?” retorted Garstone.

Remy pointed at the giant, and said, “What’s he?”

“My name is Andros,” said the optiman. His voice was surprisingly soft. Remy looked at him more closely. He was over two meters tall, with massive shoulders. Remy noted that he held the machine gun effortlessly, though an ordinary man would have staggered beneath the weight.

“You’re not in uniform,” said Remy calmly, as if that explained the question he had directed at Garstone.

“But I am a soldier,” said Andros. “One of a new breed. A product of genetic optimization. I was nurtured by an artificial placenta, and some would say that makes me an android rather than a man, but my genetic material was human in origin.”

“So the genetic engineering of people is no longer banned by law?” asked Remy, though the answer was obvious enough.

“It was considered to be a logical step in the development of new and more sophisticated fighting units,” said Andros, his musical voice precluding any hint of irony from creeping into his tone.

“And what are you doing here?” asked Remy.

“Gaining experience,” replied the optiman lightly. “There are several hundred of us scattered through this zone—perhaps a dozen on Haidra itself, attached to units of various kinds. As there are very few units on any kind of active service now, it was considered desirable that I should accompany this platoon.”

“I see,” said Remy. He turned back to Scapaccio, and said, “You’d better load up. I think the caravan is just about ready to get moving again. I don’t think there’ll be any more trouble, but the sooner we’re in Ziarat the better. Then we can discuss the matter of your going into the Syrene.”

“I don’t think we ought to take orders from this man,” said Garstone casually to Scapaccio. “In fact, I think we ought to arrest him.”

Remy laughed briefly, without any real humor. “That would be stupid,” he pointed out. “You need me. In fact, you don’t realize how much you need me. I can get you what you need in Ziarat, and I might even be able to get you into the heartland of the Syrene, if that’s really where you want to go. Is that what you want?”

As he spoke the last few words his eyes were fixed on Scapaccio’s face, and he saw there that this was, indeed, what the other man wanted—and it seemed to be something that he wanted very badly.

“I take it,” said Scapaccio dryly, “that you’re for hire.”

“Very much so,” replied Remy.