In Solitary (15 page)

I listened, without interrupting, to her account of the attack – how they had surprised sixteen Soal craft on the beaches, had fought a running battle with the crews after gaining control of several of the vehicles and had finally managed to escape with six of the chitons. She and Tangiia had split from Fridjt and three others.

‘Tangiia insisted on heading straight for his precious island, saying he had had enough,’ continued Stella, ‘and I had already sent Fridjt to the north via the Schooter tubes – which left me on my own …’

‘And what do you expect Fridjt to be able to do, with his craft? Hardly an armada Stella – not exactly the force with which to conquer the world.’

The evening was upon us now and I could hear the restless sounds of nocturnal creatures in the trees outside. I was having trouble focusing on Stella’s face in the dim night lights inside the room and I needed to see her expression to put the real meaning to her words.

‘Don’t sneer Cave – Fridjt doesn’t know it yet but he will save the world. He …’ But then she shut up, quickly, as if she had suddenly realized she was saying too much.

‘What do you mean Stella?’ I asked, gripping her shoulders, making her face me.

She pulled away, savagely. ‘Leave me alone. You wouldn’t approve because you don’t yet understand.’

I barked in frustration. ‘No, I never do understand, do I?’

I knew she would not say any more. I moved over to the doorway, which was of a transparent material. The guard stirred restlessly outside and I looked beyond him to one of the fibrous legs of the great tower, catapulting from the desert sand in a beautiful sweeping curve into the twilight’s redness. The Soal had brought with them their own techniques in architectural structuring when they took the Earth by force, but though they also brought some new materials they found it necessary to use native metals for large constructions. Plaxsteel was the toughest of the Earth compound metals and they used
it in conjunction with one of their stress-absorbing designs to form the intricate lattice-works of the towers that stroked the soft undersides of passing clouds.

It would take more power than the combined weapons that four chitons could muster to bring down a mushroom tower. I just could not see how it was going to be done and I felt that Stella was dreaming. I did not blame her. How could a girl from the mudflats know what physics were involved in bringing down a giant tower? To her, a Soal weapon could destroy any solid, whether it was a floating log or the metres-thick metal spar of a tower. She had turned the former to gas with the chiton guns – she expected the latter to follow suit given the same treatment.

‘You’ve lost your war Stella,’ I said over my shoulder, and was surprised at the despair in my own voice. ‘You’re a clever girl and I don’t know how you managed to get this far but it’s over now. There’s nothing Fridjt can do, and it would be a kindness if you could stop him trying.’

In complete contrast to my tone, hers was buoyant and full of optimism.

‘It seems silly to keep repeating it but
we haven’t lost yet!
If only I could tell you – but I don’t trust you fully. You’ve got too many principles, and they’re the wrong ones as far as my mission is concerned. If I told you what this was all about – really all about – you’d rush off to your precious Lintar and tell him everything. It’s much bigger than you think, Cave – you’ll be surprised how big.’

I turned and faced her again. Her dirty red hair fell over her face – one black eye stared sorrowfully between its curtains: blackened by Endrod no doubt. She would withstand his torture until doomsday if she thought it was important to him that she cracked – he was one of those that had helped to destroy her children.

‘The others – the Polynesians – they went home?’

She nodded.

‘Endrod felt that they would die soon enough anyway. Why clutter up his accommodation areas with scruffy vermin when a few puffs of gas will soon clear them out of their retreats? When he gets his licence he’ll have his fun. Did you know he’s now in line for the position of Klees of Filipine? At the moment he’s an honorary Military Head.
Ambitious little bastard!’ I moved away from her again. My desire for information was just leading us into petty quarrels. Outside, an unseen hand was skimming the building with bladed bats. I tried to catch their details as they curved in and away but the light was bad, and the bats too fast.

In the room the air was still. So still that I could hear a large moth fluttering its dusty wings against one of the night lights. Did the moth consider that it too was in prison? Or was the room large enough for the creature to believe it was free? What size does a prison have to be before a man is aware of his confinement? Someone confined to one room – one building – definitely considers himself a prisoner. What about a defined area, an island or a country? It would depend on the length and breadth-of the person’s mind, the extent or limitation of previous movement. Someone confined to a room for a long period and then allowed to roam at will over an enclosed country might feel he had freedom. How about a world then? We were all prisoners of the Earth – its atmospheres and temperatures were our walls – did we consider ourselves prisoners? The answer for myself was, yes. I wanted to escape to other worlds, be they the size of a small room or almost sun-size. For Tangiia, freedom was to be able to roam his ocean – if he could not visit the neighbouring ocean it would not have worried him. Peloa would be happy with an atoll. The dead old lady on volcano island, happy with her house. It was an attitude of mind.

Poor Weyym, I thought suddenly. Weyym was a god, with a mind that expanded like gas to fill the space available. Even if the universe was infinite, he was crouched inside it, straining at its walls like a mouse in cupped hands. Always, all ways, a prisoner.

‘Peloa and her mother – I suppose they’re still with Tangiia?’ I asked.

‘I suppose so.’

‘And Fridjt? Where is he and his men?’

Her face darkened.

‘Somewhere to the north,’ she said tight-lipped.

‘Where? The Soal will have them wherever
they are.’

‘There are still some places which the Soal do not visit – the arctic circle for one …’

‘Then why didn’t we go and live there Stella?’ I blurted. ‘Instead of starting this foolhardy war. Maybe it’s not too late …’

‘It is too late,’ she snapped. ‘Much too late.’

The night was black as Stella’s face, and I sat and listened to the waves breaking with regular monotony on the sand. A slight onshore breeze was blowing and ruffling the feathers of the Soal outside.

Both of us were watching for the first sign of Fridjt but as the evening grew longer Stella became more and more nervous, screwing her fingers together and biting at her bottom lip. I took one of her hands thinking to comfort her, but her anxiousness was such that she jerked it from my grasp.

Then I heard her whisper. ‘Come on you stupid man, where are you?’

‘Who?’ I asked in an equally low voice.

‘That idiot Fridjt,’ she replied. ‘I had to make him the key to the whole operation. In the beginning I wanted you for this part but,’ she turned her eyes on me, her red hair catching some of the light from the rods in its folds, ‘when it came to choosing I just couldn’t sacrifice you. I know that when the time came you weren’t there anyway but I had already made the choice when we first landed on the island. I loved you enough to let you live, even though Fridjt might ruin the operation where you would have succeeded. I am not seeking your approval now. I just wanted you to know that I value you above my mission and the lives of all humans be they Martians or Terrans.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ I barked at her. Something was
bad, I could sense it. Stella had done something, I knew, for which I at least would be sorry. The Soal at the door turned to glance at us, casually, but then resumed his previous stance, looking out to sea.

‘Cave,’ she replied, ‘I’m going to be honest with you for once. About the only completely true words I have told you before this are that I love you. That I swear. Most of the rest has been lies. I’m a Martian …’

I felt a tingling go through my skin as she said it but at the same time I wanted to laugh.

There are no Martians,’ I said. ‘Martians are fictitious fun-figures that only appear in Soal jokes.’

‘I am,’ she repeated firmly. ‘I’m a human whose forebears left Earth to colonize Mars and whose ancestors fought the Soal from subsurface colonies and, unlike our Terran cousins, managed to beat them. I know this sounds like a campfire story to you Cave, but I was born on Mars, trained for a mission to Earth and am, so far as I know, the only Martian agent ever to survive the Soal barrier. Those “lightning” storms you love so much are not natural at all – they are the primary function of the mushroom towers in action. The towers form a network of beams that destroy anything that they come into contact with.’

Then how did you get through?’ I questioned suspiciously.

‘I made it because I was lucky – no other reason. Many agents have died trying to get through. In the beginning it was whole flotillas of ships. We put our greatest brains
to work on recovering the Earth. Some say we should have used our resources and intelligence in making Mars a fitter place to live – but in keeping the environment harsh we kept our minds and bodies tuned to the task in hand. Had we made ourselves comfortable we might have given up the struggle and accepted the Soal dominance over our mother world as inevitable.

‘The ship I came in was ingenious in design and took many Earth months to construct it. It consisted of many canisters that slotted into one another – basically the idea was that while the outer shell was disintegrating under the Soal beams, which took time, if only a millisecond, the next hull, still travelling, would be that much further inside the web of beams – and so on. It was calculated that the innermost canister would be inside the network as the penultimate shell disintegrated.’

‘And you were within the innermost canister?’

‘I and three others. Two of us landed on the mud between Brytan and Hess. My companion’s soft-landing gear failed. He died on impact. The other two I never saw or heard of again. They may even still be alive for all I know.’

I shifted uncomfortably under her intense gaze. It was not that I did not
want
to believe her now, but the whole thing was incredible – not the least that it had taken the Martians very many months to penetrate the Soal barrier and then with only one person. Nevertheless I had always considered Stella strange, in that she had too much knowledge for one whose life had been spent without any form of learning except a mother’s words.

‘How can I know you are telling the truth now?’ I asked.

‘If Fridjt comes, then you will know,’ she said. Again, that cold stare that frightened me so much. What was going to happen? Something terrible. But I dared not ask her for fear of the answer.

‘But the baby and the rest?’ I finished weakly.

‘The baby was real enough,’ she said, surprisingly with some bitterness in her voice, ‘but it wasn’t Fridjt’s. It was some Weyym-high bastard that raped me in a needle tower one night. Fridjt was in the segment above and he heard and beat the man’s brains against a stone. It was not the first rape but it was an unlucky one. It got me pregnant.
Here,’ she offered a lobe of her ear and an invitation. I fingered it gingerly.

‘Have you ever felt that before? When we were mating?’

‘Our couplings were always too quick to feel
anything
,’ I replied testily. ‘What is it? It feels like a stone.’

She laughed. ‘It’s a Soal detector. It tells me when one or more of their craft is near by, by gentle vibration. It’s doing it now. That’s probably a patrol. How else do you think I …’

Suddenly there was an enormous explosion. We were both thrown to the floor and the whole sky seemed to be alight with sparks and splinters of flame. The Soal in the doorway was gone, his light frame lifted and thrown into the night like a rag.

Then came another, and yet another explosion, each more deafening than the last. I screamed, clutching my head as the concussion burst one of my eardrums causing me intense pain. My eyes, screwed tight, were blinded by the light and I could feel the ground moving beneath me. A second later the building collapsed around us but fortunately the wall we were leaning against still stood, with the taller roof supporting it.

Next came the screeching of metal grating against metal, that penetrated the ringing in my good ear, and I knew the tower was falling. We were finished if it came our way because its size would ensure that everything for a kilometre along the shoreline would be destroyed in a tangle of giant metal girders. Even falling in the opposite direction it would hit the ground hard enough for the springboard effect to flip us into the air, as objects will jump on a table when somebody bangs a fist down hard on its surface. I heard Stella crying, but not for help. She was screaming into my ear.

‘We’ve done it. The tower …’

A fourth blast, of equally terrifying proportions, drowned her words and I opened my eyes to see a star nova just a kilometre above our heads.

The tower did not fall. When the dawn came and the acrid smoke began to clear, we looked upwards to see a crease on one of its five corners. The section above the buckle was leaning over as if it were bowing stiffly from the waist. It looked like a giant stick insect bending down to inspect the lower orders of life, its mushroom head leaning rakishly on its spindly neck.

The spot that was warped was black from the
impact of the missiles that had struck it – chitons hurtling into the girders at three thousand kilometres an hour. For Stella, if that was her real name, had told me after the thunder and flashing had ceased, and all we could hear was a wind rushing in from somewhere above the world, that it was Fridjt and Lipsua who had bent the tower – with their bodies. While I had slept in my small cell last night, Stella had been to the Schooter tubes that approached the Ostraylean coast, and in the wheelhouses had turned the last four in an arc which curved towards the tower. Unwittingly Fridjt had sacrificed himself, and those other poor humans he had recruited, in order to gain Stella the entry onto Earth which she desired for her Martians.