Читать книгу War Games - Brian Stableford - Страница 7

CHAPTER FOUR

Inside the wagon the bright sunlight was softened somewhat—the sections of the plastic cupola were translucent but not transparent. Their color was yellowish brown, and the light that streamed through them made the faces of those within look distinctly jaundiced.

There were bunks inside the wagon for four people, stacked two on two, with space at head and tail for stacked boxes. Beneath the lower bunks there were fitted drawers. In one of the lower bunks there was a man sleeping. He was under sedation. Ramon Delizia lay on the opposite bunk staring into a microfiche reader, occasionally flicking the control switch with his forefinger. He looked up when Scapaccio climbed in over the tailboard, followed by Remy.

Remy took the sheet from Melcart’s body and inspected his wounded leg carefully, stripping away the dressing with surprising delicacy.

“He’ll do,” pronounced Remy, when he was through. “He’ll be able to keep the bullet in a jar on his desk.”

Scapaccio sighed with relief. “That’s something,” he said. “Of course, it had to be that the one man who ended up needing an operation was the doctor. I doubt if any of us could have taken the bullet out.”

“All you had to do was ask the caravan master to have his own doctor take over,” said Remy. “That’s all I did. Your interpreter could have done the same.”

“Maybe if you’d arrived sooner,” Delizia interposed, “we could have saved Verdi. Justina didn’t quite get around to asking the veich for help while he was still alive.”

Remy shook his head. “The rifles the er’kresha are using are long-bore things with a relatively slow muzzle velocity. Not much range, but the shells don’t need to hit a vital organ to smash you up irredeemably. I’ve seen people hit in the arm die of the shock. The doctor was lucky. The bullet that got him was Calvar-made—stolen or plundered from some siocon farmer near Ziarat and traded halfway across the continent since. That was probably the last round of ammunition he had for it.”

“And that makes him lucky?”

“If he’d stopped the next one,” said Remy, “he’d be dead.”

“I suppose that in time the er’kresha will all have veich weapons,” said Delizia. “After all, if the veich have factories turning out rifles for the sioconi, the sheer mass of the supply will ensure that in the end they’re liberally distributed throughout Azreon.”

“If the band that attacked you had had twice the strength and a more favorable time of day,” said Remy sourly, “they wouldn’t have needed Calvar rifles. They’d have had your guns—automatic rifles that can fire a dozen rounds in a ten-second burst and reload before the other guy can draw breath, grenades, a heavy machine gun and Earth knows what else. The veich show a damn sight more discretion than you do.”

Scapaccio intervened quickly, “I’m surprised that the Calvars can maintain factories turning out weapons like yours,” he said, pointing to the rifle slung across Remy’s shoulder. “There are supposed to be no accessible fossil fuels on this world since the mapirenes stripped it thirty thousand years ago. The sioconi and the colonial veich are supposed to be dependent on a wood-based energy economy as far as metalworking is concerned.”

“They are,” replied Remy. “But the siocon farmers in the south have been persuaded to go in for the right cash crops, including a kind of cane that produces sweet carbohydrates in its core and can be rendered into high-grade charcoal itself. Ziarat’s gradually committing more and more land to that kind of crop because with advice from the veich the yield of the cultivated land in terms of staple crops has been increased four- or five-fold. The next stage will be using the sugars to produce alcohol to drive internal combustion engines. There may be no coal or oil here—at least, none that can be easily extracted—but the veich can still produce a technological civilization, given time. And given the freedom to operate.”

Scapaccio did not respond to the challenge implicit in the last sentence, but went to the head of the bed where Melcart lay and produced a bottle of colorless spirits.

“Do you want a drink?” he asked Remy.

“Why not?” Remy replied.

Scapaccio produced three small tumblers made of clear plastic from the same box that had contained the bottle. He splashed liquid into each of them in a deliberately careless manner, and then passed one to Delizia and one to Remy. Before he could take up his own, the wagon jarred slightly as it hit a rut in the road, and some of it splashed out, though the tumbler did not fall over. Silently, he replaced the lost liquid.

“What makes you think that there was once a mapirene base in the Syrene?” asked Remy casually.

“As you probably know,” said Scapaccio, “there was practically nothing left of the base in Omer. Nothing recoverable. That’s the story all over the known universe. It’s easy enough to figure out that either the mapirenes or the cascarenes held these worlds at one time, but difficult to find out much more. Thirty thousand years is a long time, and most of the sites we know about were blasted out of existence by very powerful weapons. But the products of a technology like that can be very durable—certain aspects of it, anyhow. It’s not too difficult to find what remains of mapirene buildings, and sometimes mapirene machines. Metal casings rust, but they hold their form. Plastics can last almost forever, provided that they aren’t attacked by the wrong kind of bacteria. Here and there, we find relics which tell us a good deal, and sometimes we recover the remains of information storage systems from which a little bit of the information can still be retrieved. We can rarely get all of it—usually a very small fraction—but with the right equipment we can recover some.

“Most of what we find is incomprehensible. Most of what we can understand is useless. But here and there we find something that tells us a little more about the mapirenes. One particular information disc, excavated out of an exceptionally well-preserved site on Kilifi, proved to contain what we think is a reference to a base or installation of some kind here in Azreon. We’re not entirely certain, and what the disc seems to say about the base is confusing and incomplete, but it seemed to us to be worth checking.”

“Us?” queried Remy.

“Ramon and I. Ramon is from Pajilla, where the disc was analyzed.”

“Why would the mapirenes build a base in the middle of a desert?” asked Remy.

“It wasn’t a desert then,” said Delizia. “We found that out when we came to Haidra. The Syrene appears to have been created by men—by lemuroids, that is.”

“And why all this?” asked Remy, indicating the interior of the wagon. “Why didn’t you have Command Haidra drop you on the spot by plane?”

Scapaccio laughed shortly. “Command Haidra has little or no interest in archaeological exploration. They refused to commit any substantial resources to the supply or support of this expedition. We had to finance the trip ourselves. All that Command Haidra would do for us was to give permission for a platoon of soldiers to escort us. Notionally, this is an army expedition, but for all practical purposes, it’s a private endeavor. You know the army, Sergeant Remy...can you imagine Command Haidra giving us their full-scale cooperation for something like this? All that they would do was to promise that if we found anything of military importance, or got into a situation where we needed pulling out, we could call for assistance. We have radio equipment in one of the other wagons which can get a signal to one of the comsats for immediate relay. That was the limit of their generosity. I’m sure the story is familiar.”

“I’m not a sergeant,” replied Remy. “Not any more. You can call me by my name. I don’t have a rank.”

Scapaccio apologized without sounding particularly sincere. There was a moment’s silence. Then Delizia asked, “Are you willing to take us into the Syrene?”

“I’ll take you,” replied Remy. “But I don’t take army paper for payment. For a first installment, I want the guns that came with the men who were killed in the raid, and two cases of ammunition for each gun. You can throw in a case of grenades for good measure.”

Scapaccio met his eyes. “That equipment isn’t mine,” he said levelly. “It belongs to the army.”

“So did I, once,” replied Remy. “What the hell—you’re a colonel, aren’t you? And it’s your expedition. Garstone won’t like it—so tell him to go to hell. What’s he going to do—lay charges against you when you get back?”

“You said the first installment,” said Delizia. “Does that mean there’ll be others?”

“Maybe,” said Remy calmly. “It depends how long you want my services.”

“And what else do we pay you with?” asked Scapaccio.

“I can always use more rifles,” said Remy. “Maybe wagons, too. Horses for sure. We’ll think of something, if the occasion arises.”

“I’m sure you will,” murmured Delizia.

“Is it agreed?” asked Remy.

Scapaccio hesitated for a second or two, then nodded. Remy handed back the plastic tumbler, and turned back to the tailboard of the wagon, vaulting over it and down to the ground without apparent effort. He stood beside the road, waiting, and the wagon rolled on, leaving him behind.

Scapaccio looked at Delizia, questioning him with his eyes.

“I don’t know,” said Delizia. “We’d be crazy to trust him because he’s human. He might be nasty and more dangerous than a cohort of veich clansmen. But he might get us through where Garstone wouldn’t stand a chance. Through...and back again.”

“And after all,” said Scapaccio, “he’s no friend of Command Haidra—and they’re no friends of ours.”

To that, Delizia did not reply—in fact, the remark seemed to make him extremely uncomfortable. His dark eyes settled on the serene face of the unconscious doctor for a few moments, and then he lay back, looking up at the wooden slats of the upper bunk with a concentration so intense that one might almost have believed that he, too, was unconscious.

* * * *

Doon brought Remy’s horse from the rear of the column, and Remy remounted. Then the two went forward to join Iasus Fiemme and Madoc riding in advance of the foremost wagon. Remy adjusted his veil and donned eyeshades to protect him from the slowly climbing sun.

“What are they doing here?” asked Madoc, his voice hoarse because of the dryness of his mouth and throat.

“Looking for buried treasure in the middle of the Syrene, or so they say,” replied Remy. “They want us to take them into the desert. I said that we would.”

“Why?” asked Doon.

“Because we’re going that way anyhow, and because their guns will come in very handy when we try to break up Belle Yella’s little party.”

“They don’t know about Belle Yella, of course?” commented Madoc.

Remy didn’t bother to answer. “What worries me,” he said instead, “is what Garstone’s doing here. According to Scapaccio, Command think he’s the next best thing to a lunatic—they wouldn’t release any substantial equipment to him or support the expedition in any tangible fashion. So why did they give him a platoon of soldiers? They must have had another reason for sending men over here.”

“After us?” suggested Madoc.

“There’s barely a dozen of us. It wouldn’t be worth the trouble. No, I think they just came to have a look around, at Ziarat and the surrounding territory. They’re gathering intelligence. Maybe they just want to know what the veich are up to on this side of the world.”

“Or...,” prompted Doon.

“It’s been a long time since the pacification. Command doesn’t like its troops to get bored. The war isn’t likely to swing back this way, so Haidra looks set to become a permanent backwater. In all probability, no ship’s rested in orbit here—except the fortress—in the last seven years. There’s been no opportunity to trade off units, and there’s not likely to be. It’s possible that Command is planning a small war, just to give the troops something to occupy their idle minds. It’s just possible that they’re planning to move in on Azreon—for no particular reason but to have something to do. A little game to keep everyone amused. They may have sent Verdi over to gather preliminary information that the comsat spies can’t glean from outside the atmosphere.”

Silence fell while Remy pondered that possibility further. If the army did come to Azreon—for whatever reason—the niche that he had carved out for himself in Yerema’s organization would cease to exist. He would become a fugitive again—and Yerema with him. All the mercenaries, in fact, would have to retreat into the wilderness or face internment.

After a few minutes, however, he put the matter aside and turned to Iasus Fiemme. “What do you know about the mountains in the Syrene?” he asked.

The siocon shook his head. “What is there to know? No one goes there, except the er’kresha.”

Remy shrugged. “The Calvar scholars will know, if there is anything to know. They’ve been working on their own archaeological projects since they first arrived here.”

“Does it matter?” asked Doon.

“Maybe not,” said Remy. He turned his mount away from the other three, and began to move back along the column of wagons, heading for the Calvar caravan.

The rearmost wagon in Scapaccio’s group was being driven by Justina Magna, who saw him approaching and waved him to a stop. He turned his mount to fall into step with her.

She was wearing a yellow scarf tied around her mouth and nose—a highly inefficient substitute for the veil which he and all the other nonhumans wore.

“What do you do about the dust?” she called.

He showed her how his own mask was secured.

“It’s vile stuff,” she said. “Probably poisonous.”

“High metallic content,” he told her. “It’ll kill you if you eat enough of it, and make you sick anyhow. Get one of the soldiers to drive and stay inside—they’re paid to take risks.”

She made a dismissive gesture, then asked, “Are you going to talk to the clansman?”

“Maybe,” he replied. He had no real reason for evading the question, but his immediate reaction was always to keep his intentions to himself.

“Do you talk his language, too?”

“I know the language of the clans,” he replied, keeping his voice low and his tone guarded. “What’s it to you?”

“In Omer,” she said, “we don’t find it easy to talk to the clansmen in their own language. They live to keep us at a distance. It’s their way of preserving some kind of superiority even while we rip them off. I just wondered whether things were different here.”

“No,” he told her. “They’re no different.”

She looked at him sharply. “So what does that make you? A clansman by adoption?”

“In a way,” he answered, deliberately going no further.

She kept looking at him, and smiled in a slightly wolfish manner.

“What do you do for sex, Remy?” she demanded.

He was surprised, but kept his features rigid without effort.

“After all,” she said, “you can’t have seen a human woman in ten years. The sioconi aren’t built for it, so it must be the veich. A clanless veich cast out of her protectorate would sleep with anything I guess—especially something that could stand eye-to-eye with a Calvar clansman. Or has Ziarat got more exotic pleasures to offer?”

Remy breathed out slowly. “Who are you with?” he countered, his voice relaxed and slow. “Scapaccio or Delizia? Or maybe Andros?”

She laughed, the implied insult bouncing off without threatening her composure in the least.

“Delizia’s a pacifist,” she said. “He doesn’t approve of me. The same goes for Garstone—that he doesn’t approve of me, I mean. He’s anything but a pacifist.”

“That still leaves a lot of choices,” Remy pointed out.

“I like a lot of choices,” she replied. “Garstone doesn’t approve of you, either—but I wouldn’t worry about it. I think I do.”

“That’s all right,” said Remy. “I promise not to worry about that, either.”

Abruptly, he turned his horse and rode away toward the other group of wagons.

* * * *

When they stopped for noonday the ribbon of green that marked the end of the Syrene was clearly visible in the south. There was a cool wind blowing from the east, where there was also green land, though it was temporarily shielded from view by a tall ridge. Away to the east, however, the desert stretched to the horizon, pock-marked with patches of scrub and dappled with the dark green grass that was its most prolific vegetation. The soft grayish sand had been rippled by the wind into dunes, and wherever it accumulated the grass took a firmer hold, capping the drifts with tangled tufts of spiky leaves.

Remy sheltered in the lean shadow of one of the wagons while he ate cold meat and crumbling dry bread and sipped water from his canteen. Virtually all of Scapaccio’s party had chosen to remain inside the wagons, shading out the sunlight with opaque screens that covered the translucent plastic of the cupolas, but Remy preferred the brightness of the sun to the stifling heat of the wagons.

He was about to roll out his bedding in order to take his rest when Ramon Delizia approached, sidling along in the shadow.

He stopped beside Remy and glanced out toward the desert. “Can we cross it?” he asked.

“If you want to,” said Remy. “The season’s about right for it. By the time we get into the heartland the rain should be due in the mountains. That’ll fill up the rivers that flow out of the range, and will give us all we need in order to get back again without dying of thirst. There are two or three permanent water holes between Ziarat and the mountains. The er’kresha move about in the wasteland without too much trouble. The dust is bad, though—the er’kresha are used to it but you’re not.”

He nodded. “I know about the dust,” he said.

“Tell me then,” said Remy. “I don’t.”

“We think that Azreon was a casualty of the war,” said Delizia slowly. “The war between the mapirenes and the cascarenes, that is.”

“You mean that’s when the middle of the continent became a desert?”

“That’s right. This plain never recovered. Once the soil was eroded to sand and dust, it couldn’t be reclaimed. For the coastal regions it was different, and most of the hill country. But the Syrene is probably very little different today from its appearance twenty-five thousand years ago. For thousands of years before that there wouldn’t even have been the grass. Nothing could live here then—nothing at all. The cascarenes dusted the heartland of the continent with short half-life radioactives. Not bombs—they just sowed the atmosphere with small particles. That’s how they took out the second mapirene base.”

“Why didn’t they just hit it with a particle beam, the way they smashed up the other?” asked Remy.

“That’s a matter for pure conjecture,” replied Delizia.

“Have they figured out who won the war yet?” asked Remy. “Ten years ago, we didn’t even know that.”

“We suspect that the cascarenes won it,” Delizia said. “But we don’t know for sure. Both species disappeared rather abruptly, in terms of our dating techniques. We don’t know why, but the prevailing opinion is that the cascarenes finally wiped out the mapirenes in an all-out fight in which they took such heavy losses that they couldn’t recover. Their war had been going on for well over a thousand years. The supposition is that one side or the other finally threw aside all constraints and went in with everything they had left—some kind of doomsday maneuver. Just the way our war with the veich looks like it’s going.”

Remy squinted up at the small man, remembering that Justina Magna had described him as a pacifist.

“I thought we were winning the war against the veich,” he said.

“We are. Slowly. It could drag on for hundreds of years, though, at our current rate of progress—and it’s escalating all the time. We keep looking around for a new advantage to press on a little harder, and the veich keep producing new technology that slows us down again. You’ve seen Andros; you know how far the war mentality has progressed. If we could turn creatures like that out of factories by the billion, then we’d do so. We’re already busy tailoring plagues to kill veich without affecting humans...but that’s not easy, because we’re too much alike physiologically.”

“I take it that your own mentality isn’t very warlike?” said Remy.

“Is yours?” countered Delizia.

“It’s gotten to the point where I couldn’t see much merit in the way it was being fought on Haidra,” agreed Remy. “I didn’t think that it needed me any longer, and I certainly didn’t need it. It thought I might do better on my own.”

There was a moment’s silence, and then Delizia said, “I’m branded as a kind of deserter myself. Worse, in a way. My training didn’t take—my phobic responses wouldn’t yield to suppression. I scare easily.”

Remy didn’t reply. He had already reached this conclusion, and the confession was therefore unnecessary as well as ill-mannered.

“Sometimes,” said Delizia, “I wonder how effective the training really is, in general. And what happens when the repression breaks down.”

Still Remy said nothing. But his memory dutifully called forth images: images of a man named Pavese, who had indeed broken down. Remy had known him for years, and had never known him to show the least sign of fear of apprehension. Indeed, he had seemed unusually cold-blooded in every aspect of his being. Through the brief war that followed the initial landings he had come unscathed, and had entered into the pacification as ruthlessly as any man of his rank. The terror that had overwhelmed him had arrived quite without warning, when he wrenched open a crate of fruit with a crowbar and a spider had crawled out onto his hand. He had to be carried away, foaming at the mouth.

It wasn’t even a particularly large spider.

He had heard no more about the incident thereafter, and never saw Pavese again. Such things were known to happen, but were known to be extremely rare. A one-in-a-million chance. But when you added up the total number of men in the army, as Remy once had, those odds somehow came to seem less impressively long.

“You’d better get some sleep,” said Remy casually, when the images subsided. “It’s still a long way to Ziarat.”