Raising The Stones (60 page)

“Let’s quit talking about it,” said Zilia. “It’s over. The Voorstoders were the only tribal religionists in the System. The Gharmgods are now all over Ahabar. Phansure never did have that kind of religion. And the prophets are safely away from us all, on Ninfadel.”

“They have a Door,” said Sam in a bleak, uninterested voice.

Everyone looked at him, wondering if he had gone mad.

“What do you mean,” asked China at last.

“They had a Door, the one they came through into Voorstod. It was in the courtyard of the citadel. When I went up there and we buried Maire … Maire’s body, I saw that it was gone. I didn’t remember it until just now. They must have taken it with them.”

“You didn’t tell anyone?” asked Dern Blass, unbelieving.

“I didn’t remember it until just now.”

Again Emun made the revulsive gesture. “Bad,” he said. “People like that shouldn’t have Doors of their own.”

Spiggy said, “So they could … go through it from Ninfadel and come out … where?”

“I don’t know where,” said Emun. “Maybe anywhere.”

Theor Close raised his eyebrows into his hair. “What did this Door look like?”

Sam described it. Jep and Saturday added a few words.

“You have reason to be concerned,” the engineer said, casting his colleague a doubtful and worried look. “Doors of that type have not been made for civilian use for millennia. They operate one way only. They need no
other end
in order to function. They may be set, approximately, for any destination.”

“Where would the prophets go?” asked Africa Wilm. “To Thyker, perhaps. To the Baidee.”

“The Baidee are free thinkers,” remarked Dern. “They would not put up with the prophets’ claim to know the only holy truth. It’s unlikely the prophets would go to Thyker, but we don’t know where else they might go. Perhaps just Out, away. Let us hope so. Whatever they intend to do, we must tell the people on Ahabar, immediately.”

•
Howdabeen Churry counted
on youthful zealotry and a few ancient weapons to carry out his plans regarding Hobbs Land. A year before, one of his minions had been digging into old military records and had found mention of certain devices that had been ordered from Phansuri armorers and stored in the desert at the time of the Great Invasion. The minion had found no record indicating they had been disturbed since. When The Arm of the Prophetess had made a foray into the desert and uncovered one of the repositories, it had found the armament as described, much of it still in its original shipping cases.

Among other interesting devices was a thing called a Paired Combat Door, one of which was always keyed to the other, while the other could be keyed onto any existing Door within System range. The two interconnected Doors could be assembled quickly and taken apart as quickly. They would allow an invasion force to set up one Door at their home base, invade through an existing planetary Door, blow up that Door, and set about hostilities while carrying an escape route with them.

Even when quite new, the Combat Door had come without a guarantee. Nothing that complex, designed to be set up that quickly, could be guaranteed—so the disclaimer attached to the device stated, estimating a fifteen percent chance of failure during any sustained period of use. Churry chose not to mention this to his troops. He merely punched up the manuals for assembly and disassembly, uttered a perfunctory prayer to the Overmind, in whose service he was engaged, and suggested daily drills until proficiency was attained.

In a remote desert region of Thyker, both Doors were tested by being assembled and interlocked, and successfully transmitting men and materiel from point A to point B and back again. Everyone arrived intact at both places. Howdabeen Churry permitted himself a small sigh of relief. Losses at such an early stage of the exercise would have been difficult to explain away.

When the troops disbanded, with instructions to arrive early in the morning for the actual invasion, Churry sat with Mordy Trust over glasses of oasis wine and the charts of Hobbs Land which Shan Damzel had given to Churry in Chowdari.

“We go into the Central Management area,” said Mordy Trust, reviewing the plan for one last time. “We blow the Doors behind us as we come in, to prevent Hobbs Land from sending any messages out. The flier park is nearby. We take twelve fliers from the park. One team goes to each settlement and destroys any God they find there, the twelfth team stays in CM and destroys the God there, if they’ve got one, then everybody goes to this point here,” and she pointed out a place north of CM, halfway between Settlements Ten and Five, which had been computed to be the minimum aggregate distance from all settlements. “There the twelfth team will have set up the return Door. Everybody returns through that Door except the pilots, who take the fliers out on the plain about here,” she pointed, “leave them there, and return to the Combat Door together in one flier. We de-bond that one flier with the de-bond rifle we found in the old armory, then we return to Thyker through the Door, which we have concealed as well as we can. We will have destroyed only the Gods plus one flier, and we will have left nothing behind us except one Door, which they probably won’t find and which they can’t use for anything if they do find, because it’s permanently keyed to the one here.”

Churry nodded his agreement. “After returning here,” Churry concluded, “we disassemble this Door, leaving Hobbs Land without communication for the near future but otherwise essentially unharmed. Our Door, the one we leave there will be well hidden, and later we can sneak back and see what’s happening.”

Mordy nodded. “They’ll be effectively cut off. It’ll take a long time before anyone finds out what happened. By the time it is generally known what did happen, we will have put phase two into action, our propaganda campaign concerning the danger posed by the Hobbs Land Gods. By the time people realize we have killed something that could have taken them over, they will be very glad we did and ready to assist us in doing the same on Ahabar.”

Every member of the Arm was sure of this. Churry himself was sure of it. Churry had computed the time it would take to get another Door built on Phansure and shipped to Hobbs Land. He felt the farm world would be effectively cut off for at least half a lifeyear, plenty of time to confirm the danger posed by the Gods. Everyone would be glad, when they finally found out.

“We can go there anytime we want to,” he mentioned to Mordy Trust. “To collect evidence.”

“Provided they don’t find our Door.” She considered this the weak point in the plan.

“It’s in a broken area where no one ever goes, according to Shan Damzel. They’re unlikely to find it.”

“When we do the raid, they’ll see us flying toward it, or away from it.”

“That’s why we’re using their own fliers. They won’t know who’s inside them. They’re used to seeing their own fliers going back and forth. No one will pay any attention.”

“And then?” she had asked.

“Well, Mordy, we see what happens. The purpose of leaving a Door hidden there is so we can see what’s happening. If these people have been swallowed up and changed, that offers a threat to the rest of us. Shan Damzel is sure they have been and it does, and so am I.” Churry had said this often during training. Though he did not realize it, he had portrayed the Hobbs Landians as monsters, possessed by terrible things. He hadn’t meant that, but it is what his followers had heard, more or less.

“It won’t be necessary to kill anybody,” Mordy said flatly, reaffirming what she’d been told.

“Of course not, Mordy. They’re farmers on Hobbs Land. They won’t put up any fight. They see a fully armed Baidee coming through a Door, they’ll turn tail and run.”

He had often said this also during training. He had visualized the scene frequently, himself at the head of an intrepid band making the strike, finding out what needed to be known with no nonsense about it. There had been many such raids, many such decisive actions in the history of the Baidee. Since he did not know what was in his followers’ minds, he did not see the fundamental dichotomy in his vision. Farmers would run, but farmers would be harmless. Monsters wouldn’t be harmless, and monsters probably wouldn’t run.

Churry had visions of medals and glory, after the fact. System would approve and admire, after the fact. So he assured himself, right up to the moment his hundred and twenty fully armed and equipped Baidee troops stamped their booted feet upon the sands of Thyker, readying themselves to go through the Combat Door into Hobbs Land.

•     •     •

•
Tandle Wobster was
the first to see the Baidee invaders. She was also the first to die. She happened to be in the vicinity of the Doors, on her way back from the flier park, when the first Baidee came through. Seeing the weapons, she panicked and ran for the Security building. The young trooper shot her in the back to keep her, he said later, from setting off the alarm. Actually, he didn’t think of anything when he shot her except that this was one of the possessed, possibly a monster. He’d been taught to shoot at anything moving, and he did.

Hearing the weapon, the security people, all three of them on duty, came out to see what had happened, and the same trooper, seeing weapons in their hands, fired again. More monsters, he told himself, without realizing it. One of the security people got off a lucky shot with a stunner and paralyzed the trooper’s right arm. All three of the security people were dead before they hit the ground.

Churry came through in the next bunch, took one look at the bodies, made a thin-lipped grimace, sent the offending trooper back through the Door, and ran for the flier park. Others at CM, alerted by the firing, had peeked out, had seen what was happening, and the more foolhardy among them had found weapons of sorts—power tools or something they could use as clubs—and tried to defend CM. Two troopers dropped, shot through the heads by fasteners fired from the guns used to put sponge panels together. One of the Hobbs Land tool wielders was killed, the other escaped.

Meantime, a clerk in the personnel department got to the main network stage outside Dern’s office and sprayed a warning to all the settlements that CM was being invaded. The clerk did not know enough to key the audible warning, which meant that the warning light blinked unobserved in most of the settlement administrative offices. It was lunchtime, and no one was there. In Settlements One and Ten, however, people were present, the audible alarms were set off, and both defensive and offensive tactics were hastily planned.

The invading force was unopposed as it took twelve fliers, disabling but not destroying all others in the park. Eleven of them set off for the settlements. The twelfth, which contained the linking Door and was commanded by Mordy Trust, lifted only briefly, then set down again outside the temple of Horgy Endure. The God Horgy was dragged out of the temple by grunting Baidee. Churry had decided not to destroy the temples. He didn’t want to appear wantonly destructive, and the temples themselves weren’t implicated in the possible swallowing Shan was afraid of. Once outside, the God was laid on an incinerant pad, another was thrown over the top, and the assemblage was ignited.

Five people came running out of the management area, brandishing one thing or another and screaming at the Baidee to leave the God alone. Mordy Trust started to tell the troopers to ignore them and get into the flier, but she was too late. None of the intensive drills in which the Baidee had engaged had focused on withholding reaction or minimizing damage. Every drill had had as its purpose shortening reaction time to any observable threat. The troopers saw threat and reacted with deadly force. The five Hobbs Landers went down in a flurry of broken bone and spattered blood before Mordy could get her mouth open. Several of the missiles used, which were lethal at great distances, went on down into the management area and killed other persons who were merely standing there, watching. One of the missiles hit a fuel store in a repair building and set it on fire. The fumes of the fuel were lethal. One hundred CM staff members died from inhalation of poison before the confused, grieved fire-squad got the flames out.

Mordy didn’t stay to see the God burn. She had decided that things were already out of hand. Praying that the damage in Central Management had been the only damage done, she got her troopers into the flier and set off for the meeting point. Her group had yet to find an appropriate hiding place and set up the linking Door.

Meantime, in settlement after settlement, the Baidee troops encountered what they interpreted as resistance or threat by monsters, with the same unthinking responses they had shown at CM. Some settlers moved to defend their temples and were killed. A few troopers were killed by hidden defenders. Despite the carnage, each of the Gods was pulled from its temple and burned. In one settlement, the God was defended by children, though the troopers did not realize until they had killed them that they were children, some of them not more than eleven lifeyears old. The God in that settlement had been less solid than in the others, more crumbly. When they threw it down upon the mat, it broke into fragments, dirtying their uniforms with the fine, black dust.

Sweating and sick, one of the troopers said to Churry that they ought to kill everyone. ‘They’ve seen us,” he said. “They’ve seen us, and we’ve killed the kids, and we have to kill them, too, so they don’t …” The trooper had begun to doubt that the victims were monsters. They acted like people. They acted like kids. And killing people, kids, wasn’t going to set well with those in Authority.

Churry slapped him, hard, and told him to get into the flier. All the way to the meeting point, he kept wondering if that had been the right response. Maybe the man had been right. They had sufficient weaponry with them to wipe out the settlements. Maybe …

Common sense prevailed. What had happened was unfortunate, he told himself, but explainable as the kind of mistakes untried men make in their first combat situation. If the Baidee wiped out Hobbs Land, however, no explanation would be acceptable. Besides, they couldn’t guarantee to wipe out everyone unless they stayed here for days, and it would mean killing the children and babies as well, and by that time they’d be outlawed in the System.