Part 9 (1/2)

The Commandant was left alone with his thoughts and his guilt. What should the next move be? The war had already taken far too many civilian casualties, and the Commandant felt himself responsible for each and every one. What, after all, was an acceptable casualty?

He tried to picture his opposing number. He did not know his name or his face.

The Phracton Commandant found it hard, in any case, to tell the difference between humanoids despite the variations in hair, skin tone and weight, they all basically followed the same four-limbed, binocular model, which in his opinion made them too similar to tell apart. Obviously humans felt the differences more profoundly, as the Phracton Commandant had just discovered.

Following his earlier speculations about human hatred, he had accessed, out of curiosity, all the details of Earth history held in the High Command archives. He had read of the humans' former internecine struggles on Earth and its colonies, some of which had been based on seemingly trivial qualities: gender, or subtle variations in skin colour, or belief, or customs.

He had been fascinated to see how impa.s.sioned, and often violent, humans could become about that which they had no way of proving their super-natural beliefs. Far from unifying them over their centuries of existence, the humans' wors.h.i.+p of deities had become so disparate and extremized that it led to the most horrendous conflicts. The Phracton had found, by checking foot-notes and elaboration globes, that one popular sect emerged again and again as a group of humans practising tolerance and love, while in truth unable 76 to accept elements of any doctrine other than their self-proclaimed, ancient interpretation.

He had also read with interest and some disgust of the tensions between white humans and black humans which had erupted into violence in the conurbations known as Los Angeles, London and Johannesburg. The Phracton liked to pretend that he found this kind of hatred hard to understand. In truth, he did not.

He was not keen on meeting the humans' leader. Given their history, he would not be surprised if, employing subterfuge, the bipeds lured him to a place of negotiation and then The Commandant checked himself. How easy it was to start thinking like the Secondary.

So he did not want to speak to the humans. But he wondered if it might be the only way.

The globe surveyed Bernice.

She shrugged, trying to suppress the urge to turn and run as fast as she could. 'Look,' she said, 'I'd really love to talk to you all day, but I have to be somewhere terribly boring right now. I hope you don't mind.'

She smiled and started to back away.

To her surprise, the floating globe did not appear to move with her. She thought she saw the creature inside move slightly.

'You will remove yourself from this sec-tor.' It was a voice, which seemed to ride on a wave of squeals and static interference from the grille next to the weaponry panel.

'Right, right,' Bernice said hastily. She nodded, and began to move towards the exit.

'Over here!'

It could have been a worse moment, but not much. A stone was lobbed straight between Bernice and the giant globe at the same time as the voice echoed through the building.

The creature's weapon swivelled with alarming speed and blasted the stone to dust.

It gave Benny just enough time to see a boy, dressed in what looked like old-fas.h.i.+oned coveralls, beckoning to her from behind a pile of rubble.

Benny thought she had better warn him that negotiations worthy of a conciliation agency had been entered into, and that intervention at this stage by a well-meaning third party could well prove disruptive. This flashed through her mind in about half a second, as she considered the best way to put it into words. What would the Doctor say?

'Don't do anything stupid!' she shouted.

77.The boy grabbed what looked like a half-brick from his pile of rubble and sent it spinning towards the giant globe.

Bernice dropped to the floor. The dust had a hot and pungent smell, she noticed, as the half-brick was blown to smithereens with an echoing report.

Now they would be in trouble.

At the edge of her vision, she could see the boy ducking uncertainly up and down. And she herself was right in the middle of an open s.p.a.ce.

The alien fired again. Brightness cut the air and shattered what remained of the windows looking out over the city. Plexigla.s.s blossomed in the sky and she imagined it falling outside.

Bernice scrambled across the floor, grazing her hands and knees. Her breath seemed to tear her apart. Was she safe? Some instinct had taken her towards the nearest cover. She realized she was behind a pillar, about two metres away from the boy.

'What the h.e.l.l did you do that for?' she hissed at him, flattening herself against the cold stone. 'We were just becoming chums.'

The boy rubbed his bloodshot eyes. 'The Phractons are killing again,' he said, in a voice that carried an edge of desperation. 'Would have had you.'

'Can we make it to the door?' Benny asked.

The boy judged the distance. 'Yeah,' he said.

'Go, then. I'll follow.'

The Phracton reacted quickly to the flash of movement, but its beam blew out chunks of stone and plastic, and no more.

Though Bernice had not been able to get her hands on her image-intensifier, others were better equipped. Pale fingers held the handgrip, and large eyes surveyed the scene from the top of the sports centre.

One finger performed a simple action and the image zoomed, providing the watcher with a close-up view of two figures scurrying from a shattered building. One was recognizable to the watcher: it was the scrawny, hunted-looking boy who had come with the others and escaped in the elevator. The other was unknown: a tall woman with short, dark hair who moved with a kind of professional litheness.

The watcher smiled grimly as a Phracton flamer swivelled around from the junction the pair had been heading for, s.h.i.+ning in the dawn light. They were forced to duck into a shop doorway.

Shanstra lowered the viewer and her glittering eyes became opaque once more. Her night-black hair streamed out behind her, making her an impressive, dark silhouette against the morning sky.

She turned. She looked down at the huntress and the archivist, who were perched on the raised skylight by which they had accessed the roof. The 78 archivist was looking at Shanstra in her antic.i.p.atory, slightly puzzled way.

The huntress had her crossbow still in her hands, but sat with her hair lank over her eyes, her gaze downcast, sullen. As if waiting for an order.

Shanstra smiled. 'I think we have the potential for a fine day,' she said.

She rested her hand gently on the forehead of the huntress.

And drew strength.

The morning sun showed up the tiny segments of the comsat like the scales of a marine creature. It rose into the sky, an elegant, fragile curve mounted on a cylinder, thrusters burning gently as they lifted it on a pillar of smoke.

From the lip of the crater where they had launched the comsat, Horst Leibniz and Ca.s.sie Hogarth watched, monitoring the progress of the first non-computerized piece of machinery they had dealt with for quite some time.

'Supposing they shoot it down?' Leibniz muttered, chewing at a fingernail.

Hogarth monitored the readouts on her portable oscilloscope. 'You'd like that, wouldn't you? Then you'd have an excuse to tell everyone what a waste of time it was launching it.' She nodded, apparently satisfied, and directed a smile towards him.

'Without having innumerable, endless tests carried out in artificial conditions.' Leibniz's white-blond hair was waving in the breeze like a flag of surrender. He pushed it back with an angry gesture. 'I just think that when you're forced to downgrade your technology, your standards don't have to come down with it. You obviously don't agree.' He looked up at her for a second, met her one-eyed, mocking gaze. After a second he slammed his equipment case shut and set off down the slope back towards the valley where the Phoenix Phoenix lay. Clouds of dust followed him like a vapour trail. lay. Clouds of dust followed him like a vapour trail.

Ca.s.sie Hogarth nodded ruefully and allowed herself a moment's grudging respect for Leibniz. If she had to be honest, she didn't ever like to meet his stare like that, though there was something very probing about it.

She looked up at the receding dot of the comsat, rising to the stars on its pillar of smoke.

' Bon voyage, Bon voyage, ' she said to herself. ' she said to herself.

Cheynor was on the bridge when he got the message. Given the apathetic state his crew was in these days, he was surprised that someone managed to relay it to him.