'Zakalwe, I had no idea. Let me offer you my apologies and those of the entire Special Circumstances Section; no, all of Contact; no: the entire Culture; no: all intelligent species.'
'Sma, you remorseless bitch, I'm trying to be serious.'
'No, I don't think you are. Maps...'
'But it's true! They turn them the wrong way up!'
'Then there must,' Diziet Sma said, 'be a reason for it.'
'What?' he demanded.
'Psychology,' Sma and the drone said at the same time.
'Two suits?' Sma said later, when he was making his final equipment selection. They were still in the armoury mini-bay, but Skaffen-Amtiskaw had gone off to do something more interesting than watch a kid shop for toys.
He heard the accusatory tone in Sma's voice, and looked up. 'Yes; two suits. So what?'
'Those can be used to imprison somebody, Zakalwe; I know that. They're not just for protection.'
'Sma; if I'm lifting this guy out of a hostile environment, with no immediate help from you guys because you have to stand off and be seen to be pure - fake though that might be - I have to have the tools to do the job. Serious FYT suits are numbered among those tools.'
'One,' Sma said.
'Sma, don't you trust me?'
'One,' Sma repeated.
'Goddamn it! All right!' He dragged the suit away from the pile of equipment.
'Cheradenine,' Sma said, suddenly conciliatory. 'Remember; we need Beychae's... commitment, not just his presence. That's why we couldn't impersonate him; that's why we couldn't tamper with his mind...'
'Sma, you're sending me to tamper with his mind.'
'All right,' Sma said, suddenly nervous-looking. She clapped her hands once softly, looked a little embarrassed. 'By the way, Cheradenine, ah... what exactly are your plans? I know better than to ask for a mission profile or anything formal, but how do you mean to get to Beychae?'
He sighed. 'I'm going to make him want to come to me.'
'How?'
'Just one word.'
'A word?'
'A name.'
'What, yours?'
'No; mine was supposed to be kept a secret when I was advisor to Beychae, but it must have leaked out by now. Too dangerous. I'll use another name.'
'Ah hah.' Sma looked expectantly at him, but he went back to choosing between the various bits of equipment he'd picked out.
'Beychae's in this university, right?' he said, not turning to look at Sma.
'Yes; in the archives, almost permanently. But there are a lot of archives and he moves around a lot, and there are always guards.'
'Okay,' he told her. 'If you want to do something useful, try finding something that the university might want.'
Sma shrugged. 'It's a capitalist society. How about money?'
'I'll be doing that myself...' he paused, looked suspicious. 'I will be allowed plenty of discretion in that area, won't I?'
'Unlimited expenses,' Sma nodded.
He smiled. 'Wonderful.' He paused. 'What source? A tonne of platinum? Sack of diamonds? My own bank?'
'Well, more or less your own bank, yes,' Sma said. 'We've beea building up something called the Vanguard Foundation since the last war; commercial empire, comparatively ethical, expanding quietly. That's where your unlimited expenses will come from.'
'Well, with my unlimited expenses I'll probably try offering this university lots of money; but it would be better if there was some actual thing we could tempt them with.'
'All right,' she said, nodding. Then her brow wrinkled. She indicated the combat suit.' What did you call that thing?'
He looked puzzled, then said, 'Oh; it's an FYT suit.'
'Yes; a serious FYT suit; that's what you said. But I thought I knew all the nomenclature; I've never heard that acronym before. What does it stand for?'
'It stands for a serious fuck-you-too suit.' He grinned.
Sma made a clicking noise with her tongue. 'Should have known better than to ask, shouldn't I?'
Two days later, they stood in the hangar of the Xenophobe. The very fast picket had left the GSV a day earlier, slung at the Voerenhutz cluster. It had accelerated hard, and now it was braking hard. He was packing the gear he would need into a capsule that would take him down to the surface of the planet where Tsoldrin Beychae was; the initial stage of his in-system journey would be on a fast three-person module; it would loiter in the atmosphere of a nearby gas-giant planet. The Xenophobe itself would wait in interstellar space, ready to provide support if needed.
'Are you positive you don't want Skaffen-Amtiskaw to come with you?'
'Absolutely positive; keep that air-borne asshole to yourself.'
'Some other drone?'
'No.'
'A knife missile?'
'Diziet; no! I don't want Skaffen-Amtiskaw or anything else that thinks it can think for itself.'
'Hey; just refer to me as though I'm not here,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said.
'Wishful thinking, drone.'
'Better than none at all, so above par for you,' the machine said.
He looked at the drone. 'You sure they didn't issue a factory-recall on your batch number?'
'Myself,' said the drone, sniffily, 'I have never been able to see what virtue there could be in something that was eighty per cent water.'
'Anyway,' Sma said. 'You know all the relevant stuff, yes?'
'Yes,' he said tiredly. The man's tanned, smoothly muscled body rippled as he bent, securing the plasma rifle in the capsule. He wore a pair of briefs. Sma - hair still tousled from bed, for this was early morning by ship time - wore a jellaba.
'You know the people to contact?' she fretted. 'And who's in charge and on what side...'
'And what to do if my credit facilities are suddenly withdrawn? Yes; everything.'
'If - when you get him out - you head for...'
'The enchanting, sunny system of Impren,' he said tiredly, in a sing-song voice, 'Where there are lots of friendly natives in a variety of ecologically sound space Habitats. Which are neutral.'
'Zakalwe,' Sma said suddenly, taking his face in both hands and kissing him. 'I hope this all works out.'
'Me too, funnily enough,' he said. He kissed Sma back; she pulled away eventually. He shook his head, running his gaze down and up the woman's body, grinning. 'Ah... one day, Diziet.'
She shook her head and smiled insincerely. 'Not unless I'm unconscious or dead, Cheradenine.'
'Oh. I can still hope, then?'
Sma slapped his backside. 'On your way, Zakalwe.'
He stepped into the armoured combat suit. It closed around him. He flipped the helmet back.
He looked suddenly serious. 'You just make sure you know where -'
'We know where she is,' Sma said quickly.
He looked at the floor of the hanger for a moment, then smiled back into Sma's eyes.
'Good.' He clapped his gloves together. 'Great; I'll be off. See you later, with any luck.' He stepped into the capsule.
'Take care, Cheradenine,' Sma said.
'Yes; look after your disgusting cloven butt,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said.
'Depend on it,' he said, and blew both of them a kiss.
From General Systems Vehicle to very fast picker to small module to the lobbed capsule to the suit that stood in the cold desert dust with a man encased inside it.
He looked out through the open faceplate, and wiped a little sweat from his brow. It was dusk over the plateau. A few metres away, by the light of two moons and a fading sun, he could see the rimrock, frost-whitened. Beyond was the great gash in the desert which provided the setting for the ancient, half-empty city where Tsoldrin Beychae now lived.
Clouds drifted, and the dust collected.
'Well,' he sighed, to no-one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky. 'Here we are again.'
VIII
The man stood on a tiny spur of clay and watched the roots of the huge tree as they were uncovered and washed bare by a gurgling w
ash of dun-coloured water. Rain swarmed through the air; the broad brown swell of rushing water tearing at the roots of the tree leapt with thrashing spray. The rain alone had brought visibility down to a couple of hundred metres and had long since soaked the man in the uniform to the skin. The uniform was meant to be grey, but the rain and the mud had turned it dark brown. It had been a fine, well-fitting uniform, but the rain and the mud had reduced it to a flopping rag.
The tree tipped and fell, crashing back into the brown torrent and spraying mud over the man, who stepped back, and lifted his face to the dull grey sky, to let the incessant rain wash the mud from his skin. The great tree blocked the thundering stream of brown slurry and forced some of it over the clay spur, forcing the man further back, along a crude stone wall to a high lintel of ancient concrete, which stretched, cracked and uneven, up to a small ugly cottage squatting near the crown of the concrete hill. He stayed, watching the long brown bruise of the swollen river as it flowed over and ate into the little isthmus of clay; then the spur collapsed, the tree lost its anchorage on that side of the river, and was turned round and turned over and transported bodily on the back of the tumbling waters, heading into the sodden valley and the low hills beyond. The man looked at the crumbling bank on the other side of the flood, where the great tree's roots protruded from the earth like ripped cables, then he turned and walked heavily up towards the little cottage.
He walked round it. The vast square concrete plinth, nearly a half-kilometre to a side, was still surrounded by water; brown waves washed its edges on every side. The towering hulks of ancient metal structures, long since fallen into disrepair, loomed through the haze of rain, squatting on the pitted and cracked surface of the concrete like forgotten pieces in some enormous game. The cottage - already made ridiculous by the expanse of concrete around it - looked somehow even more grotesque than the abandoned machines, just because of their proximity.
The man looked all about as he walked round the building, but saw nothing that he wanted to see. He went into the cottage.
The assassin flinched as he threw open the door. The chair she was tied to - a small wooden thing - was balanced precariously against a thick set of drawers, and when she jerked, its legs rasped on the stone floor and sent chair and girl sliding to the ground with a whack. She hit her head on the flagstones and cried out.
He sighed. He walked over, boots squelching with each step, and dragged the chair upright, kicking a piece of broken mirror away as he did so. The woman was hanging slackly, but he knew she was faking. He manoeuvred the chair into the centre of the small room. He watched the woman carefully as he did this, and kept out of the way of her head; earlier when he'd been tying her up she'd butted him in the face, very nearly breaking his nose.
He looked at her bonds. The rope that bound her hands behind the back of the chair was frayed; she had been trying to cut through the bindings using the broken hand-mirror from the top of the set of drawers.
He left her hanging inertly in the middle of the room, where he could see her, then went over to the small bed cut into one thick wall of the cottage, and fell heavily into it. It was dirty, but he was exhausted and too wet to care.
He listened to the rain hammering on the roof, and listened to the wind whining through the door and the shuttered windows, and listened to the steady plopping of drops coming through the leaking roof and dropping onto the flagstones. He listened for the noise of helicopters, but there were no helicopters. He had no radio and he wasn't sure they knew where to look anyway. They would be searching as well as the weather allowed, but they'd be looking for his staff car, and it was gone; washed away by the brown avalanche of river. Probably, it would take days.
He closed his eyes, and started to fall asleep almost immediately, but it was as though the consciousness of defeat would not let him escape, and found him even there, filling his nearly sleeping mind with images of inundation and defeat, and harried him out of his rest, back into the continuing pain and dejection of wakefulness. He rubbed his eyes, but the scummy water on his hands ground grains of sand and earth into his eyes. He cleaned one finger as best he could on the filthy rags on the bed, and rubbed some spit into his eyes, because he thought if he allowed himself to cry, he might not be able to stop.
He looked at the woman. She was pretending to come round. He wished he had the strength and the inclination to go over and hit her, but he was too tired, and too conscious that he would be taking out on her the defeat of an entire army. Belting any one individual - let alone a helpless, cross-eyed woman - would be so pathetically petty a way of trying to find recompense for a downfall of that magnitude that even if he did live, he would be ashamed forever that he had done such a thing.
She moaned dramatically. A thin strand of snot detached itself from her nose and fell onto the heavy coat she wore.
He looked away, disgusted.
He heard her sniff, loudly. When he looked back, her eyes were open, and she was staring malevolently at him. She was only slightly cross-eyed, but the imperfection annoyed him more than it should have. Given a bath and a decent set of clothes, he thought, the woman might almost have looked pretty. But right now she was buried inside a greasy green greatcoat smudged all over with mud, and her dirty face was almost completely hidden; partially by the collar of the heavy coat, and partially by her long, filthy hair, which was attached to the green greatcoat in various places by glistening blobs of mud. She moved oddly in the chair, as though scratching her back against the chair. He could not decide whether she was testing the ropes that bound her, or was just troubled by fleas.
He doubted she had been sent to kill him; almost certainly she was what she was dressed as; an auxiliary. Probably she had been left behind in a retreat and had wandered about too frightened or proud or stupid to surrender until she had seen the staff car in difficulties in the storm-washed hollow. Her attempt at killing him had been brave but laughable. By sheer luck she'd killed his driver with one shot; a second had struck him a glancing blow on the side of the head, making him groggy while she threw the empty gun away and leapt into the car with her knife. The driverless car had slid down a greasy grass slope into the brown torrent of the river.
Such a stupid act. Sometimes, heroics revolted him; they seemed like an insult to the soldier who weighed the risks of the situation and made calm, cunning decisions based on experience and imagination; the sort of unshowy soldiering that didn't win medals but wars.
Still dazed from the bullet-graze, he had fallen into the car's rear footwell as it pitched and yawed, caught in the swollen force of the river. The woman had nearly buried him in the voluminous thick coat. Stuck like that, head still ringing from the shot that had grazed his skull, he'd been unable to get a good swing at her. For those absurd, confined, frustrating minutes, the struggle with the girl had seemed like a microcosm of the plain-wide muddle his army was now embroiled in; he had the strength to knock her out cold, but the cramped battleground and the hiding weight of her enveloping coat had muffled him and imprisoned him until it was too late.
The car had hit the concrete island and tipped right over, throwing them both out onto the corroded grey surface. The woman had given a little scream; she'd raised the knife that had been caught in the folds of the green greatcoat all that time, but he had finally got his clear punch, and connected satisfyingly with her chin.
She'd thumped back to the concrete; he'd turned round to see the car scraping off the slipway, torn away by the surging brown tide. Still on its side, it had sunk almost immediately.
He'd turned back, and felt tempted to kick the unconscious woman. He'd kicked the knife instead, sending it whirling away into the river, following the drowned staff car.
'You won't win,' the woman said, spitting. 'You can't win, against us.' She shook the little chair, angrily.
'What?' he said, shaken from his reverie.
'We'll win,' she said, giving a furious shake that rattled the chair's legs on the stone floor.
; Why did I tie the silly fool to a chair, of all things? he thought. 'You could well be right,' he told her, tiredly. 'Things are looking... damp at the moment. Make you feel any better?'
'You're going to die,' the woman said, staring.
'Nothing more certain than that,' he agreed, gazing at the leaking roof above the rag bed.
'We are invincible. We will never give up.'
'Well, you've proved fairly vincible before.' He sighed, remembering the history of this place.
'We were betrayed!' the woman shouted. 'Our armies never were defeated; we were -'
'Stabbed in the back; I know.'
'Yes! But our spirit will never die. We -'
'Aw, shut up!' He said, swinging his legs off the narrow bed and facing the woman. 'I've heard that shit before. "We was robbed." "The folks back home let us down." "The media were against us." Shit...' He ran a hand through his wet hair. 'Only the very young or the very stupid think wars are waged just by the military. As soon as news travels faster than a despatch rider or a bird's leg the whole... nation... whatever... is fighting. That's your spirit; your will. Not the grunt on the ground. If you lose, you lose. Don't whine about it. You'd have lost this time too if it hadn't been for this fucking rain.' He held up a hand as the woman drew breath. 'And no, I don't believe God is on your side.'
'Heretic!'
'Thank you.'
'I hope your children die! Slowly!'
'Hmm,' he said, 'I'm not sure I qualify, but if I do it'd be a long spit.' He collapsed back on the bed, then looked aghast, and levered himself back up again. 'Shit; they really must get to you people young; that's a terrible thing for anybody to say, let alone a woman.'
'Our women are more manly than your men,' the woman sneered.
'And still you breed. Choice must be limited, I suppose.'
'May your children suffer and die horribly!' the woman shrieked.
'Well, if that's really the way you feel,' he sighed, lying back again, 'then there's nothing worse I can wish on you than to be exactly the fuckhead you so obviously are.'