The Far Side (21 page)

“So,” Oliver Boyle said, summing up.  “I see two tasks for right now.  We need to find a way of retrieving the three who are missing.  I have no idea how we’re going to do that, from the descriptions of what the results at Crenshaw and Fox Two were.  The location here seems to be critical to where you go.  I have no idea how we’re going to find the specific spot.”

Linda spoke up again.  “I’m supposed to be pretty smart.  I don’t hold a candle next to Andie Schulz.  That said we were on track to be -- more than friends.  She trusted me with things.  One thing she trusted me with was asking me to make sure that we drilled holes at the corner of the machine bases at any spot we found that looked interesting.

“I think we can safely assume that she did the same thing to hers.  Which means, we can save one hell of a lot of work if we can make sure they don’t tear up the slab at Andie’s house.  The debris -- it would be nice if it was gently removed, but the slab -- we can probably figure it out eventually but it might take months of trial and error.  They have food for about seven months, and water for about that.  We don’t want to take longer than we have to.”

“I’ll get right on it,” Jack Schaeffer told Oliver.  “I’ll enjoin them six ways from Sunday.”

“What about those two, Richards and Foster?” the soldier asked.

Kurt turned to him and spoke coldly.  “Right now, lay off them.  People, this is Jacob Lawson, Ezra’s cousin.  They both served with special operations groups of the US military and Jake still is.  These guys, a lot of them, owe their lives to certain individuals, some of them many times over.  Ezra was one of the better soldiers and saved a whacking lot of lives.

“If those two were involved in what happened to Ezra, I’m sorry -- it’ll be ultimately out of our hands.  They’re dead.  That said, Jake, right now you need to lay off.  From the sounds of it, they’ve committed criminal acts.  Get them in a prison yard and they’ll be fair game, but right now, if one side starts piling up bodies, the other side will as well.  None of us want that.”

Jacob Lawson looked innocent.  “Kurt!  We wouldn’t hurt a fly!  They will have accidents!  Safes will fall out of airplanes flying over and land on top of their heads!  One-in-a-trillion accidents!”

David Solomon spoke up.  “And my tenants?  What about them?”

Jack Schaeffer smiled.  “Like I said, I’m going to enjoin the authorities every which way.  I would hope your attorney, as well as those of your affected tenants, would join in.  Have those with ongoing TV projects let it be known among their fans that the government has shut them down for no discernable reason.”

An administrative assistant rushed in and whispered in Oliver’s ear.  He looked at her incredulously for a second, and then told her he’d take care of it.

Oliver looked around the table.  “The government has sent agents here and to Crenshaw.  They are going to quarantine anyone who has had direct contact with Andie, Kris, or Ezra or anyone in close contact with that group.  It seems they’ve decided that the girls have gone to an alien planet and may have brought back alien pathogens.  They closed Crenshaw and the surrounding area because several thousand gallons of alien water ran into the sewers from there.”

“Jack, you need to alert your firm, right this second, because I have a hunch that that ‘detain’ order is going to include everyone here.”

Kurt Sandusky cleared his throat.  “We need to get Jake out of here, Ollie.  Our friends know we’re here.  If three of us vanish -- well they are going to be taking names and asking questions.  Those questions will be asked less than politely.  And, after that, they’ll get downright rude.”

Oliver looked at Jacob Lawson.  “The door in the side of this room goes into my private office.  The door directly opposite it is my private bathroom.  There’s a skylight about two feet on a side.”

“I can get through that,” Jacob said.  “See you Kurt; be well, the rest of you.”

He was out of the chair like a lightning bolt.

Linda was closest to the door and lifted a jeans-clad leg and pushed it shut behind him.

Oliver waved, and the assistant went towards the outer door.

Linda looked at Oliver curiously.  “Why haven’t they already come?”

Everyone else at the table laughed and chorused two words: “Studio security.”

Chapter 8 :: Melek

Melek stared out the observation bunker’s slit window, sipping his first mug of
kef
for the day, as he watched the sun set in front of him.

Behind him Private Landrew came up and joined him at the slit step and he too peered outwards.

“This is going to get very boring, Sergeant Melek, in the next twenty weeks,” Landrew told him.

Lieutenant Menim joined them.  “Men, we’re here to do a job!  How can you get bored with that?”

The three of them laughed.  Menim, as a lieutenant, had proved surprisingly competent, Melek had found, on the march out here.

Menim eyed the setting sun and spoke again.  “It is, so far as I can tell, second watch, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then, Sergeant, you and Private Landrew have the watch.  Corporal Kisson, Private Zerga and I will see about dinner.  You will, of course, alert me promptly if you see anything.”

Everyone in the bunker laughed at that.  No one had seen an intruder here in a hundred years.  But, of course, there had been that once, a hundred years before...

“Of course, Lieutenant.  Shall I log your order?”

“Don’t be crazy, Sergeant!  What a stupid log we would return with if we did that?  Twenty weeks of logging that one order, three times a day!  They’d think we faked it!”

The truth was, of course, that everyone assigned to the Southwestern Watch Point of the Eastern Finger faked everything.  This day would almost certainly be the high point in their attention to the surrounding landscape.

East Finger had been where their ancestors came to this land, twelve hundred and seven years before.  More than twenty cargo ships and fifty galleys had set out on that journey.  Two battered cargo ships and one that had somehow escaped unscathed had arrived on this shore after three months of sailing westwards.  All of the galleys and the other ships had been swallowed up by the great ocean, never to be seen again.

In those first days the East Finger was what they knew.  It was a southward-running peninsula, about four hundred miles long and sixty wide, except at the tip.  The eastern slopes of the mountains were relatively flat, and the rise of the mountains relatively slow.

It was a land of gentle winds, warm rains and beautiful nights.  The nearly four hundred surviving refugees had prospered quickly and well.

There were problems, of course.  No one had been surprised that there were problems.  There
were many hungry beasts in this land and they had to be guarded against.  Then, three hundred years after they arrived, King Ganno had a brilliant idea... for the next fifty years, everyone labored two weeks a year building a wall across the northern end of the peninsula, walling it off from the mainland.

By the time the wall was complete, King Ganno was in his grave, but for the first time, the cities and farms were safe from the depredations of the beasts.

A hundred years passed and the suggestion was made that they could do the same thing with Middle Finger, a hundred miles farther west.  That idea was blessed with the discovery of huge mountains of coarse sandstone that was relatively easily quarried and was actually better than the limestone of Ganno’s Wall.

That wall had taken a mere forty years to complete, and better still, had been functionally done after ten years, when the palisade of tree trunks had been completed.  Six hundred years after they’d arrived on this continent they started on the West Finger, which was twice as wide as the others and even longer, another four hundred miles west of the Middle Finger.

In year 840 of the Fingers, a ship from the East appeared.  Only three men survived of its crew, one of them mad with thirst, another near death, and the last only semi-lucid.

King Harad had contemplated the matter for a good ten minutes and decided that he didn’t need to know anything about the East other than what he already knew -- they were murdering, slaving scum.  The three survivors were dead moments later.

There had been talk of doing something like a wall, only much longer, on the mainland.  There was a major river that flowed south between East and Middle Fingers.  True, the wall was going to need to be two hundred miles long, but after a wall sixty miles long, another seventy miles long and one a hundred and fifty miles long it was obviously just a matter of will power.

However, things had changed.  In spite of the new territories that had been opened, the East Finger had been the heart of the kingdom, with more than sixty thousand people living on it, while the Middle Finger had twenty thousand and the West Finger ten thousand.  The main city was Arvala, the Golden City of the Kings, at the western terminus of Ganno’s Wall.

It hadn’t really been apparent at first.  There were a few really bad storms that came, one or two a year, worse than anything that they had seen before.  The eastern slope of the peninsula was gradual and relatively smooth, while the western slope was rougher and steeper in those days; there were quite a few swamps along its length as well.

It took twenty years of changed weather before anyone noticed that the swamps on the western slope were shrinking.  People took it altogether wrong.  Swamps were further drained and many people moved there.  But it was hard to ignore the changes by then.  Ten years of boom had been accompanied by rainfall that continued to shrink steadily, year after year.

The year 960 was the first year that the number of people moving to the western slope of East Finger was lower than those moving away.  In 968, the first of the really bad fires occurred, destroying two small towns and a half-dozen villages -- and nearly a thousand lives.

People looked around and saw that they were surrounded by tinder-dry former wetlands as well and decided it was time to go.  By 970 only a few die-hard farmers remained.

In 972 was the first raid by the Rangar outlaws.  No one knew where they came from or where they went, but they raided Cellus, the largest town remaining in the southern portion of the peninsula.  After three days of looting and rapine, the town burned, most of the inhabitants killed or dead from the fires.  Rangar and his outlaws had fled.  King Gonno VI led troops that scoured the west slope from south to north and didn’t find them.

Six months later, the Rangar outlaws struck Ambiny, right after the harvest was in.  Hundreds of defenders were killed, and the outlaws made off with hundreds of wagons of food.  Ambiny was in the center of the peninsula and was the last farming city of any consequence on the East Finger.

King Gonno raised another army and stormed after them.

It was the death of Gonno... again, he sought the outlaws, this time with a clearly marked trail.  In spite of many warnings that the number of wagons was decreasing, he kept on.  His own men killed him at the southern tip of the land when they discovered twenty wagons -- all of which were empty.  Again, Rangar and his band had vanished.

King Merwan was positive he could do much better, and it was first thought that his aggressive patrols had kept Rangar in check.  Rangar struck the eastern shore city of Triblem a year later and looted it and stole the harvest as well.  Hundreds of people were killed, dozens more women were missing and presumed abducted.  Triblem was close to the eastern terminus of Ganno’s wall and with the exception of Arvala, the only town still surviving.

Merwan marched his army hard south and, thinking they’d gotten ahead of the raiders, turned north.

That had been a mistake.  The wagons were found on the eastern shore, directly east of Triblem and a few miles away.  Empty again, with plenty of evidence that everything had been loaded onto ships that had then sailed away, no one knew where.

King Merwan decided that in order to save his life, he needed to do something drastic, so he told everyone he’d driven Rangar to flee.

People were upset, but two years later there had been no further raids and people started to relax.

The rains had, in the meantime, failed for most of East Finger.  The southern tip got enough to grow some crops, but there was no way to guarantee a crop.

Over the next hundred years, the East Finger dried out.  The forests vanished, the trees rotted, and then burned and they too vanished and the land looked, for the most part, like people had never been there.

There was plenty of room in Middle Finger and huge amounts of space in the Western Finger.  More importantly, while their rainfall had decreased, it wasn’t nearly as bad as the East Finger.

So, this watch position was the furthest south, watching to see if anyone came north or headed further west towards the other two Fingers of land.  About a mile away was one of the few remaining reliable waterholes on the Eastern Finger.  The watch position owed its location to being higher up on the same aquifer, and it had plenty of water as well.

Crews of nine men were assigned to it for five months at a time.  These were men who, for the most part, were considered troublemakers, but at the same time, not so much so that they couldn’t be relied on.  There was a lieutenant, a sergeant, two corporals and five privates.  They trekked south with four wagonloads of supplies, and when they went back home, they’d take four empty wagons back with them.

The men “worked” eight-hour shifts for six days of the week and had the last two days off.  The next time they went to work, they started eight hours later, and again they worked six days on with two off.  The second shift had their first day of work offset by two days, and they then repeated the same schedule of six on and two off and then rotating forward eight hours.  The third and fourth shifts worked the same.  The only one who had a different schedule was the lieutenant, who had to be awake only during the days and if anything untoward happened.

Since that had happened exactly once, a hundred years before, no one held their breath.

Generally speaking the people of the Fingers didn’t go to sea.  The winds either blew from east to west or didn’t blow at all.  Ships with sails couldn’t make any headway against the wind and ships with oars could, but they had to fight the wind.  It was a nasty conundrum -- a ship small enough to row couldn’t carry enough food to sustain the crew, and a ship large enough to carry sufficient food was too large to row.

A hundred years before, someone had seen a ship sailing south, off the East Finger.  They had sent messengers speeding south, and a boat was sent out and intercepted the ship.

There was nothing but corpses aboard; the sails were tattered ruins -- the ship was simply sailing free, following a southward-trending current.  Rumor had it that there had been scrolls aboard, but nothing had ever been said officially.

It was, Melek thought, part and parcel of the whole absurd thing.  The last ship assigned here had been broken up for firewood fifty years before.  All they could do if they saw a ship was to send a messenger running four hundred miles north to Arvala.  He sniffed.  Sure!  That would work!

He dragged his attention back to the view out the slit.  It was a regrettable thing that East Finger was no longer the safe place it had once been; dralka were returning where they hadn’t been seen for a long time.  True, there were none of the large terrestrial predators, predators that still frequented the lands north of the walls, but it was a different matter altogether to stop the flying predators.  Once on the journey south, they’d had to dismount from the wagons and put up a spirited defense to save the draft beasts.

It wasn’t that the aerial predators were stupid -- they weren’t.  But they didn’t like to quit and so they kept at you for longer and pressed harder than anyone could be comfortable with.  It was really exciting to try to fight predators with bows when there was only a six-inch patch that was two inches wide along the thin neck that wasn’t armored -- that and its anus.  A throat wound would bring one down quickly; the other tended to take a while -- a while where it would keep trying to kill something.

Those were called “dralka.”  Dralka were bad, but they had larger cousins, the “dralha” that lived in the crags of the mighty mountains to the west.  Dralka had long snouts filled with razor sharp teeth.  One nip and you lost an arm or leg.  The dralka would grab the severed limb and fly away with it.  Dralha, the smaller ones, bit you in half and carried half your body away.  The larger ones just took you all at once.  The people of the Fingers had not a single weapon that could kill one.  Twice, that Melek had heard of, someone had gotten lucky when one was on the ground, eating someone not so lucky, and who’d hit a dralha in the eye.  Usually that killed one -- if not, it got very, very angry.  You couldn’t even begin to run fast enough or dig deep enough if that happened.

At midnight, when Little Brother was high in the sky, Corporal Destu relieved him and he saluted and retired to his bunk.  The watch post was relatively warm, and was safe enough against anything, even a very determined dralha, but they didn’t live this far east.  One hundred and fifty-seven days to go!  All he had to do was grit his teeth and not lose track of what was important.  Still, this was shit!

How could Melek have known that the cutpurse he’d killed in the act was acting on a dare and that his father was a city councilor?

* * *