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Authors: Jo; Clayton

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BOOK: Changer's Moon
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Georgia held up his hand, stopped the convoy, dismounted and wheeled his machine after the dismounted riders. In a few minutes the street was empty, the big machine and the little ones tucked neatly away into the empty interior of the building.

Georgia walked over to the lounging youths, tapped the leader on the shoulder. “Angel.” He raised thick blond brows. “Run into trouble? Where's the other half?”

“Heading home with a new cavvy. We lifta buncha good horses from ol' Jurgeet's; don' worry, boss, they scatter and go way round. Nobody going to follow 'em through the brush. Us here, we each got a spare horse; seven of us c'n haul as much stuff as the dozen, yeah.” He grinned suddenly, his pitted face lighting into a fugitive comeliness. “And boss, we leave his prizes alone; don't want his goons on our tails, besides they too delicate, not worth shit except running.”

Georgia chuckled, shook his head. “Long as you're loose and considering it's Jurgeet. Take your horse thieves and brush out the tire marks from where we turned off the highway to here. I want to get this place neated up before the sun's out and they maybe send choppers after us.”

“Uh. We go.” Another flashing grin. Whistling his companions to him, Angel trotted out of the large room.

Georgia wiped his smile away, turned to frown at his raiders. Several were working together to peel the canvas off the ribs, the rest were stripping off the uniforms, folding them neatly and putting them aside against future use. “Liz,” he called.

The small intense woman who'd done all the talking at the armory ran a bony hand through her mop of coarse black hair, came over to him with short quick steps. “What is it?”

“Pick up a pair of binoculars and head back to the highway; find a place where you can get a clear view down the road. Dettinger should be along fairly soon. If he's got lice on his tail, I want to know it.”

She gave a quick assenting jerk of her head, rummaged through a stack of supplies and snatched up black tubes with a neck strap (Binoculars? Serroi wonders), slung her weapon over her shoulder by its webbing strap and went quickly out of the warehouse and along the street. She climbed the sandhill and settled on her belly in the weeds, brought the binoculars to her eyes, fiddled with them a while, then settled to her tedious watch.

Inside the building the raiders continued unloading the big vehicle, strapping packets on the back of the two-wheelers. As soon as one was ready, a raider mounted it and roared off into the foggy dawn. Before the sun was fully up, all twelve two-wheelers were gone, Angel and his band were gone, spread out on separate routes so they could be sure at least some of their captured supplies would get through to their base.

Silence settled back over the ruins and the dunes. Liz lay quietly among her weeds, Georgia and the strongman strolled along the street, using an ancient broom and some brush to scratch out wheel and hoof marks, apparently relaxed but keeping a close eye on the sky. Dawn was fading, the fog was fading, there were few clouds in the sky, it promised to be a warm pleasant day. The two men went back inside the warehouse, muscled the sliding door along its rusted track, leaving a crack wide enough for a man to walk through.

The Mirror blinked.

The sun leaped toward zenith, settled at about an hour from noon. A loud whopping sound. A speck in the sky grew rapidly larger. Two men sitting in a bulging glass bubble in a lattice of metal, rotors whirling overhead. The thing swept low over the wrecked village, slowed until it was almost hovering, moved in a tight circle and swung away, moving south along the highway until it vanished into the blue.

The Mirror blinked.

The sun flashed past noon, slowed to its usual pace. Liz thrust her head through the crack. “Van's coming. Far as I can tell, he's loose. No copters.”

A short while later, a familiar muted purring—the van came down the street, stopped while Georgia shoved on the sliding door, then drove in beside the military vehicle and stopped.

The dark woman came out the back, one arm hanging useless, a wide patch of drying blood on the shoulder of her tailored shirt. As the rest piled out after her, she lifted the dangling arm with her other hand and hooked her thumb over her belt so the arm had some support. Walking slowly so she wouldn't jar her shoulder, she crossed to stand beside Georgia.

“We had to fight loose,” she said. “We got Aguillar and Connelly out. Catlin's dead. He couldn't make it, too far gone, asked me to shoot him. Did. Ram's got a bullet in him, a crease on his leg, bled a little but he could run and did. Rest of us, well, we're mobile. As you see, we picked up a couple other prisoners. Connelly says he knows them both not just from the introg center, vouches for them. Woman's a doctor. Orthopedic surgeon. Man's a history professor at Loomis. Asked about Julia, says he knows her. Feisty dude for an academic type, saved my life just about. Hauled me up when the bullet knocked me off my feet, half-carried me till we reached the transport.” She grinned. “We jacked ourself a copcar. Bit of luck, got us in smooth enough. It was getting out the shit started flying. Took us awhile to get loose enough to connect with Det. Doc there did get the worst of the bleeding stopped with stuff in the copcar, but she didn't have much to work with.”

“Liz says you're clean.”

“Yeah, or I wouldn't be standing here flapping my mouth.” There was sweat on her forehead and her rich brown had gone a dull mud-gray, but the spirit in her was a wine-glow in her light eyes.

Georgia touched her cheek, his stolid face deeply serious. “You go sit down before you fall down.” Then he grinned at her. “Picking up a medical doctor.” He looked over her shoulder at the battered, middle-aged woman bending over a wounded man, a medipac already open beside her. “Anoike's luck.”

“Ain' it de trut'.” Refusing Georgia's arm, she went over to the military vehicle, sat down on the flat ledge that ran between the wheels, resting her head against its metal side, waiting her turn for treatment.

The Mirror blinked.

Night. Fog or low-hanging clouds. Trees swam in and out of the fog as the Mirror's eye swept along. A creek cut through a small clearing. Condensation dripped off needles and leaves, off rocky overhangs. A man came from under the trees, another, two more, carrying a third on a stretcher—Ram, the doctor walking beside him. Another two, another stretcher, Anoike on it. A man in his fifties with thick unruly gray hair. Liz. More of the raiders, the strongman, finally Georgia. A soft whistle came from somewhere among the trees; he answered it without breaking stride.

As they moved into the trees again Serroi began seeing small camouflaged gardens, the plants growing haphazard in the grass and brush, then some lean-tos and crude pole corrals with horses in them, more shelters, tents huddled close in to trees, more and more of them, heavy canvas tops with walls and floors of rock or wattle and daub. Faces looked out of some, some men and women came out and watched the raiders pass, called softly to one or the other, getting soft answers. A whole little village under the trees, hidden from above, a portable community able to pick up and move itself given a few hours warning, leaving only depressions and debris behind. Thick, netting stretched overhead, open enough to let in some moonlight and certainly any rain. The Mirror's eye swept up through the web and circled over it, showing her, showing them both, the hillside below them, empty except for vegetation and trees, the tent village wiped away as if it had been a dream, nothing more.

The Mirror blinked.

The sun shone with a pale watery light through a thinning layer of clouds. The Mirror's eye roamed about the village, showing them children playing, laughing, chasing each other among the trees and tents, others gathered around a young man, listening as he talked to them, writing in notebooks they held on their knees. Some women and men were washing clothing in the stream, others were cooking, working in the gardens, talking and laughing, some stretched out on mats, sleeping. There were sentries keeping a desultory watch on the approaches to the camp, young men and women, mostly in their teens, perched in trees or stretched out under brush. They weren't exactly alert, but there were enough of them to make it very hard for any large group of men to catch the villagers off-guard.

A whup-whupping sound. Serroi remembered it and wasn't surprised when the Mirror's eye swept above the camouflage netting and focused on the sky. Huge and metallic, twice the size of the searcher she'd seen before (copter, Georgia had called it, she remembered that after a moment; copter, she said to herself as if by naming the thing she could draw some of the terror out of it), it slowed in the air, hovered over a slope some distance from the camp. Fire bloomed under it, it spat out darts so swift she guessed at them more than saw them until they hit the hillside and exploded, blew a hole in the rock with a loud crunch, a fountain of stone and shattered trees.

The copter hovered over its destruction until the reverberations of the explosion had died, then a loud voice boomed from it, a man's voice, many times magnified. “Terrorists,” it trumpeted, metallic overtones and echoes close to defeating the effect of the volume, turning the words into barely understandable mush. “Surrender. Save your miserable necks. We coming after you, gonna burn these hills down around you. Defoliants, you scum, remember those? Napalm. Rockets. We gonna scrub these hills bare. Ever seen third-degree burns? Want your kids torched? Surrender, scum. You got no running room left.”

Before the last echoes died out, the copter was moving on along the range. Serroi held her breath as it passed over the village, but the men in the machine were blasting slopes at random intervals without any real hope of hitting anyone. They blew a chunk out of the next mountain, over, repeated the message with a few added descriptions, and flew on, the whump-crump of their assault on stone and dirt and living wood fading gradually to silence.

The Mirror's eye dipped back under the webbing. Shaken, angry, excited, afraid, the folk from the tents converged on the largest of the camouflaged clearings. Some were silent, turned inward in their struggle to cope with this new threat. Others came in small groups, talking urgently, voices held to whispers as if they feared something would overhear what they were saying. At first it was a confusion of dazed and worried people, but gradually the villagers sorted themselves out and settled on the dirt and grass while three men and two women took stools to the far edge of the clearing, set them in a row and climbed up on them so they could see and be seen. The low buzzing of the talk grew louder for a short while, then died to an expectant silence as one of the five, a lean tall man with thick glasses he kept pushing up a rather short nose, came to his feet and walked a few steps toward the gathered people. “We got a little problem,” he said. His voice was unexpectedly deep and carried through the clearing without difficulty.

Laughter, nervous, short-lived, rippled across the assembly.

“We also got no answers.” He clasped his hands behind him and ran milky blue eyes over the very miscellaneous group before him. “Seems like some of you should have some questions. Don't want to drag this out too long, but …” he smiled suddenly, a wide boyish grin that took years off his age, “.…your elected councellors need to do a bit of polling before we make our recommendations.” He glanced at the timepiece strapped to his wrist. “You know the rules. Say your name, say your question or comment, keep it short and to the point. You want to argue, save it for later. You stand, I point, you talk.” There was a surge as a number of the listeners jumped up. He got his stool, climbed up on it, looked them over and snapped a long forefinger out. “You. Tildi.”

The dumpy gray-haired woman took a deep breath, then spoke, “Tildi Chon. Any chance they're bluffing?”

The finger snapped out again. “Georgia, you know them better than most.”

The chunky blond man got to his feet, looked around at the expectant faces. His own face was stolidly grim. “Georgia Myers,” he said. “No. Not this time. For one thing, they've already hit a camp south of here, got that from one of our friends in the city. For another, same friend says they're just about ready to put up new spy satellites.”

“Any chance we could ride it out?”

“Always a chance. Most of us beat the odds getting here. You know that. Almost no chance if we stay together. Have to scatter, groups of two or three, no more.”

Tildi Chon nodded and sat down, shifting her square body with an uneasy ease, settling with her hands clasped in her lap, her face calm.

“You next, Arve.”

The pudgy little man wiped his hands down his sides. “Arve Wahls,” he said in an uncertain tenor. “Something not for me, but anyone who needs to know and don't like to ask. What happens to anyone wanting to surrender? Who can't take the pounding any more?”

One of the rescued prisoners, the history professor, jumped to his feet. “Don't,” he burst out. He smoothed a long handsome hand over a rebellious cowlick, looked around, made a graceful gesture of apology. “Simon Zagouris. Sorry. New here.”

“Samuel Braddock, professor. From what I hear, you're one to know well as any what would happen. Finish what you got to say and keep it short.”

Zagouris looked down at his hands, then took a few steps out from the others and turned to face them. “If you're lucky, you'll be shot.” He waited for the shocked murmurs to die, then went on. “Look at me. Tenured professor, fat cat in a fat seat, doing what I enjoyed, no worries about eating or rent, fighting off a bit of back-stabbing, office politics, nothing serious. When they leaned on me, told me what I had to teach and how I had to teach it, I sputtered a bit, they leaned harder, I caved in. But they didn't trust me even then. My classes had watchers with tape recorders. My lectures had to be cleared through someone in the Chancellor's office. And a blackshirt truth squad searched my office, my house, clearing out anything they thought subversive or immoral. My books …” His mouth snapped shut as he fought to control his anger and distress. “Came back again and again. Stealing whatever they fancied, daring me to say boo. Time and time again I was called in to listen to some airhead rant. I remind you, I didn't fight them, I didn't do more than protest very mildly at the beginning. Kept my mouth shut after, did what I was told like a good boy. And still they kept after me, never trusting me a minute, just looking for an excuse to haul me in for interrogation. And when they pulled me in, my god, you wouldn't believe the shit they tried on me. Until you have to listen to them, you can't imagine the stupidity of those men. Twice I was taken out of the University and held in a room somewhere—I don't have the faintest idea where it was—just put there and left, not knowing what was going to happen. I started looking about me for some way to fight them that wouldn't get me killed. I say that for my self-respect, but Im not going to talk about it more than that. The ones that questioned me never got near anything that was really happening, it was what was in my head that bothered them. This last time, though, it wasn't questions and a few slaps, it was cattle prods and purges, and wanting to know about friends of mine, what they were doing, where they were. Again I remind you, I didn't challenge them, I didn't reject their claims on me or work against them, not in the beginning. If any of you think about surrendering, consider how much more they've got against you. Say they use you for propaganda to get other holdouts to come in, let you live awhile. As soon as you're beginning to feel safe, they come to your house and question you, then they take you away and question you. They'll question you about things so crazy you can't believe they're serious, until you start thinking there has to be something more behind what's happening. But there's nothing there. They'll come back at you again and again until you're crazy or dead. No matter what happens here, I'm not going back alive.” He returned to where he'd been sitting, settled himself, waiting with a calm that didn't extend to his hands, long fingers nervously tapping at his thighs.

BOOK: Changer's Moon
8.75Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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