Throy (27 page)

The two began a terrible battle on the sands of Thurben Island, spitting, squealing, kicking, tearing out of hair, moaning and groaning in the extremity of their hate. Dame Clytie seized Smonny’s proud mass of hair and slung her down across the table, which broke beneath her weight. Snorting like an angry horse Dame Clytie marched forward to inflict further harm, but Smonny scrambled away. She wrested one of the legs from the broken table and heaving herself to her feet, delivered a blow to the side of Dame Clytie’s face, then another and another to head and shoulders. Dame Clytie tottered backward; she stumbled and fell flat on her back. Smonny panted forward and sat squashily down on Dame Clytie’s face, clamped her legs over Dame Clytie’s arms and started to beat on Dame Clytie’s abdomen with the table leg.

Julian, face stark with shock, stumbled from the pavilion. “Stop! Stop this insanity! Mr. Barduys –”

The Scuters seized him and pushed him back into the pavilion. “You may not interfere while the discussion is in progress. You heard the orders!”

Dame Clytie, with her torso and arms pinioned, waved her legs in the air. She gave a frantic lurch and managed to dislodge Smonny; red-faced and gasping, she pulled herself to her feet. She faced Smonny. “Before I was only annoyed. Now I am angry! I warn you: beware!” She lurched forward, wrested the table leg from Smonny and cast it aside. “Unspeakable thing with your foul haunches! Now we shall see!”

Dame Clytie was neither so tall nor so heavy as Smonny, but she was constructed of tough substances and her legs were like iron stanchions. Smonny’s insensate fury kept her fighting well past her ordinary endurance, but at last she collapsed, and fell to the sand. Dame Clytie, cursing and croaking, kicked at her, until she herself was overtaken by fatigue and reeled backward, and sat upon one of the chairs. Smonny watched through glazed eyes.

Barduys spoke. “Now then! We have cleared the air, and once again can direct ourselves to the issues. Shall we continue the meeting?”

“Meeting?” moaned Julian. “What is there to meet about?”

“In that -” Barduys began, but no one was listening. Julian and Roby Mavil were escorting Dame Clytie toward their flitter. Smonny, heaving herself to her feet, limped down the beach to her dinghy and was silently rowed to the boat.

The crew of the Rondine struck the pavilions, set the pieces of the broken table afire, and cleaned the site of litter. The embers were buried in the damp sand, and no sign remained that folk had come, met and departed.

Chapter 7, Part III

The
Rondine
lifted into the sly. To the general puzzlement, Barduys set a course to the north, where nothing existed save empty ocean and the arctic icecap.

Glawen finally asked: “Why are we going in this direction?”

          “What?” Barduys demanded. “Is it not obvious?”

“Not to me. Commander Chilke, is it obvious?”

“If Mr. Barduys says it is obvious, then it must be. But don’t look to me for an explanation. Flitz knows, of course.”

“No,” said Flitz. “Thurben Island has left me limp.”

“It was an affecting episode,” Barduys agreed. “We were exposed to emotions in the raw. If you recall, I refused to speculate upon what might or might not occur, and quite rightly; an attempt to predict the unpredictable is an epistemological outrage, even in the abstract.”

“And so we are flying north?” asked Glawen.

Barduys nodded “In a general sense, yes. Thurben Island served its purpose, but the meeting ended before we could turn to my own agenda. Smonny made no mention of the submarine nor of her debt, and Namour was conspicuously not on hand. Therefore, we are flying north.”

“Everything you say is clear in itself,” said Glawen. “But your chain of logic still lacks a link.”

Barduys chuckled. “There is no mystery. Smonny needed a submarine - why? So that she could travel from Yipton off-world without alerting the monitor. The submarine takes her to where she can transfer to the Clayhacker space yacht undetected. Where can she locate her depot? Only in the far north are privacy and isolation guaranteed. The submarine needs open ocean; the Clayhacker must rest on something more solid. We find these conditions where ice meets water.”

The search began at a point directly north of Lutwen Atoll, at the edge of the icecap. Halfway through the night an infrared detector noted a glimmer of radiation. The
Rondine
moved aside and stood by until dawn, then approached the area from the north. Glawen and Chilke, with two men from the crew, descended in a flitter and scouted the area. They discovered an artificial cavern under the ice, communicating with the sea by a tongue of water. The landing dock was empty; neither submarine nor any other vessel lay at moorings. Adjacent, on a pair of runways, rested Titus Zigonie’s Clayhacker and Lewyn Barduys’ Flecanpraun.

Another ten men descended to the ice, and the group unobtrusively made their way into the depot.

Eight Yips comprised the staff of the depot and all were discovered taking their breakfast in the mess hall. They surrendered with rueful resignation. None gained access to the communications office, so that no messages were transmitted to the outside world.

The three space craft flew south. Behind them the depot had been destroyed. The overburden of ice and snow had slumped into the cavity so that nothing remained of the base except a gully in the white landscape.

Barduys flew his Flecanpraun, in company with Flitz; Chilke and three of the crew flew the Clayhacker, while Glawen remained aboard the
Rondine
, with the Yips and the balance of the crew.

Glawen noticed that the Yips all wore the shoulder braid of the Oomp caste. He spoke to the commander. “May I ask your name?”

“Certainly. I am Falo Lamont Coudray.”

          “How long have you been an Oomp?”

“For twenty years. We are an elite corps, as you know.”

“Then it would be limited to a very few persons. How many? A hundred? Two hundred?”

“One hundred ordinaries, twenty captains and six commanders, such as myself.”

“There is an Oomp named Catterline. Is he a commander?”

“He is a captain only. He will progress no further, due to a lack of flair.” Here the Yip used a term essentially untranslatable, comprising fortitude, grace, and much else, and which was reflected by the mask of smiling tolerance by which the Yip concealed his emotions.

Glawen asked: “And what of Selious? Is he also a captain?”

“So he is. Why do you ask regarding them?”

“When I was young they were stationed at Araminta Station.”

          “That was long ago.”

“So it was.”

The Yip hesitated a moment, then asked: “Where are you taking us?”

“To Araminta Station.”

“And we are to be killed?”

Glawen laughed. “Only if we can prove that you have committed a capital crime.”

The Yip considered. “I doubt if you can prove any such crime.”

“Then I doubt if you will be killed.”

Chapter 7, Part IV

Upon leaving Thurben Island, Smonny’s boat proceeded west, skimming the swells at high speed. It arrived at Yipton during the middle evening.

Smonny waited not a moment. She knew her most immediate enemy - indeed, the knowledge had been with her for months. She had temporized, hoping that the problem might resolve itself, but this was not to be the case, and she could wait no longer. She went immediately to her desk, sat with a groan, every ache and twinge almost a pleasure, since they foreshadowed what now would and must be.

Smonny touched a button and spoke carefully into a mesh. In response to the request for verification, she repeated her orders, and received acknowledgment.

That was all there need be done. Smonny painfully doffed her garments, bathed, soothed her bruises with analgesics, then sat down to a meal of oyster tart and steamed eel roe in sweet sauce.

Meanwhile a large fishing boat had drifted from the harbor: nothing here to excite the attention either of the crew or the instruments aboard the monitor ship hovering overhead.

The fishing boat moved placidly off to the south until out of range of the monitor; then the deck slid open and a flitter took to the sky. It flew at speed due south, and so passed the night. As Lorca and Sing rose into the sky, bringing a false pink pre-dawn light, the flitter arrived at Cape Faray, at the northernmost tip of the continent Throy.

Below passed the mountains and moors, the crags and crevasses, of the southern land, and presently the flitter, now flying low, arrived at a great gash into the mountains, with a channel of gray-green water at the bottom: Stroma Fjord.

The flitter landed close beside the brink of the cliff. Five Yips alighted, each one carrying a pack, which he slung over his back upon leaving the flitter. Crouching under the weight of their packs, they ran to the elevator terminals. They unslung their packs, arranged reels on the ground and lowered the packs into the shafts, the line paying smoothly from the reels.

The packs grounded at the bottom of the shafts. At a signal the Yips sent impulses down the line. Then they turned and ran to their flitter. A man emerged from a nearby warehouse. He shouted at them and ordered them to halt, but the Yips paid no heed.

          From deep within the shafts came the rumble of five explosions, sounding as one. At the top the ground shook and split. A person standing across the fjord would have seen a great slab of rock peel slowly away from the cliff and fall with dreamlike deliberation into the fjord eight hundred feet below. Where the town Stroma had stood, with row after row of tall narrow houses, the first rays of daylight shone on a fresh scar on the side of the cliff.

There was no more Stroma. It was gone as if it had never existed. The population, those who had not removed to Araminta Station, were deep below the waters of the fjord and dead.

On the brink above the warehouseman stared incredulously down to where his home had been, with spouse, three children and furnishings a thousand years old. It was gone. So swiftly? Yes; in the time it might take him to turn his head! He looked to the north, where the flitter was now only a speck. He ran back into the warehouse and spoke into a telephone.

Ten miles south, a camouflaged hangar occupied a clearing in the dense forest. The negotiators, upon departing Thurben Island, had flown to the hangar. The hour was late, Dame Clytie was sore, and the group had decided to delay until morning their return to the town.

The telephone was answered by Julian Bohost. He listened to the frantic voice, then blurted the news to the others.

At first they rejected the information, declaring it a fantasy, or a hallucination. Then climbing into a flitter, they flew to the site of their ancient home, and were dumbfounded, both by the clean simplicity of the disaster and its incomprehensible magnitude.

Julian said huskily: “We would have been as dead as the others, had we not stayed over at the hangar!”

“So she planned it,” said Roby Mavil. “Never has there been a deed so evil!”

They returned to the hangar. In a faltering voice Dame Clytie said: “Now we must take counsel, and -”

          Kervin Mostick, director of the Action Brigade, cried out: “No more counsel! My home, my family my little children, my precious things - all gone, in a twinkling! Bring out the gunboats! Let them fly! Let them ram their blaze down that she-demon’s throat!”

No one disputed him. The two gunboats took to the air and flew north. Toward middle afternoon they arrived at Lutwen Atoll. The first notice of their presence was the demolition missile fired into Titus Pompo’s palace beside the Hotel Arcady. Titus Pompo, born Titus Zigonie died instantly. Another missile destroyed the hotel itself and sent a tongue of fire blazing high. Back and forth flew the gunships, disseminating mindless destruction, leaving in their wake gouts of roaring flame and clouds of vile black smoke, which billowed and wallowed downwind like a viscous fluid.

From the structures of bamboo, cane and palm fronds came screams of terror and despair. The canals became choked with barges and boats, all thrusting toward open water. Some escaped; others were seared by the blaze, until the occupants jumped overboard and tried to swim. At the docks, the fishing boats were swarmed over with terrified men and women. The best of the boats were commandeered by the Oomps, who thrust the previous occupants overboard. The flames roared high; the vile black smoke roiled up, curled and drifted away from the atoll. Boats heavy with survivors moved away from the blazing city; those denied a place on the boats died in the flames, or flung themselves into the sea, hoping to find a trifle of flotsam to which they might cling.

For a dramatic three minutes Yipton burned with a single flame, with rushing winds converging from all sides. Then the fuel began to fail and the fire dwindled and separated into hundreds of separated flames. In an hour nothing was left but steaming black slime littered with charred corpses. The gunships, their mission complete, returned at best speed to Throy and the hangar in the forest.

The monitor ship above Lutwen Atoll had notified Bureau B of the conflagration. At once all available transport vessels and aircraft, were sent north, including the
Rondine
, the Clayhacker, the Flecanpraun, and a pair of tourist packets currently at the terminal.

The rescue vessels plied back and forth between the waters surrounding Lutwen Atoll and the Marmion Foreshore. The efforts continued three days and nights, until no more survivors were discovered afloat in the waters surrounding the charred crescent of stinking mud. The Yips who had been succored and brought to the Marmion Foreshore numbered twenty-seven thousand persons. Two-thirds of the population had been destroyed either by fire or water.

Chapter 8

Chapter 8, Part I

The Yip survivors were settled in a series of camps on the Marmion Foreshore: beside the sea and along the banks of the Mar River. Titus Pompo had been observed lolling in his palace immediately before the attack; he was certainly dead. Several reports placed Smonny and Namour on the submarine dock under the Arkady hotel and the probabilities were good that they had escaped in the submarine - though now, with the arctic base destroyed, they had nowhere to go.