“At least until everybody is dead,” Beecher said. He did not sound as if he was mocking. He was simply stating a fact.
“Yes,” the Colonel said. “At least until everybody is dead”
Beecher said, “We need to decide what we’re going to do about the Brood presence on the surface of our world. We need a plan.”
“Look at him trying to take charge,” Chernenko said. Genuine hatred thickened his voice. Their rivalry that was not going to end just because of something as petty as an Assimilator invasion. We were getting to the important stuff now. It was all about who had the biggest dick.
“I think we should all put our differences aside in the face of this ongoing catastrophe,” said Doctor Olson, showing admirable restraint. Under the circumstances, with most for people in the refugee camp, she did not have much option. The Aryan Jihad did not exactly have a mighty military presence at the moment. She spoiled the conciliatory effect by saying. “The Aryan Jihad is even prepared to work with the kaffirs on this.”
Beecher raised an eyebrow. His voice was dry. “That’s very generous of you.”
“There are a number of options,” the Colonel said as if Beecher and Chernenko were not glaring at each other and on the verge of drawing weapons. “We should take some time to examine them.”
Beecher’s eyes did not leave Chernenko’s. “I believe that makes a great deal of sense,” he said.
“You would, wouldn’t you?” Chernenko said, his very white teeth grinding against each other like great boulders caught in a glacier. “You would sell us out to these fools.”
“I believe that in the face of a xeno invasion, that would be justified,” Beecher said. “Although I would not use the word sellout. I would use the words make a sensible alliance.”
“You are a worm,” Chernenko said.
“I intend to be a live worm at the end of this,” Beecher said. He deliberately looked at the Colonel, making it clear that he was doing so because he chose to rather than because he could not continue the staring match with Chernenko. “Perhaps you would be so good as to outline our options, Colonel?”
“At the moment, we have citizens spread out throughout the city. All they’re doing is providing Raximander with a ready source of cannon fodder. He can infect them as he chooses, get more warm bodies to do his bidding.”
Beecher nodded as if he saw the sense of that. Chernenko spat on the ground and said, “None of my people would do that.”
The Colonel said, “Many of them already have.”
“Then there are no longer my people,” Chernenko said as if he had made a telling point. Perhaps in his mind, he had. The rest of us wondered when he was going to say something sensible. Given a century, he might manage it.
“I take it that you’re going to suggest that we evacuate the city next,” Beecher said.
“That would seem sensible,” the Colonel said.
“Difficult,” Monger said. “Many people are in hiding and do not want to come out. Many more would be reluctant to leave their possessions behind. They might be robbed in their absence.”
“They may have other things on their minds,” the Colonel pointed out. “Such a survival.”
Monger nodded as if he saw the sense in that.
“What can we do?”
“We will need to begin evacuating the city in an orderly manner,” said the Colonel.
“You want to put us in concentration camps,” said Chernenko, stroking his bristling mustache. “I will not allow that. We will not end up indoctrinated in your weak Federal ways.”
“We will need to put your people in camps so that can be scanned and inoculated and, if need be, isolated from the others, if they are infected,” said the Colonel.
“What if someone is infected and beyond treatment?” Beecher asked.
“We shall have to terminate them in the most merciful manner possible,” said the Colonel. No one looked particularly shocked. It was the answer they had expected, what they would most likely have done themselves. Perhaps skipping the merciful part.
“Go on,” said Beecher.
“Once the civilian population has been evacuated we shall commit the full force of the Federal Government to purging the city of the Assimilator presence.”
“You do not expect us to fight alongside you,” Chernenko said.
“With all due respect,” the Colonel said, “that would not provide us with any advantage. Quite the contrary, it would provide Raximander with more potential recruits or victims of hostage pressure.”
“Indeed,” said Beecher. “I am surprised my learned colleague could not think of that for himself.”
“So you would claim all the glory for the Federal Government,” said Chernenko.
“I am not sure there is any glory to be claimed here,” said the Colonel. Her expression was innocent but quite clearly she understood what was making Chernenko nervous. His people might get the idea that the Federal Government and not him was responsible for saving their lives. If we managed it.
“If there is glory to be claimed what does it matter who gets it?” Monger said. “Surely what is important is that this alien menace is removed.”
He continued to glare at the serpent man as if he represented some component of that alien menace. He was as bad as the rest of the inhabitants of Faith, I decided.
“Oh you would say that, wouldn’t you,” Chernenko sneered. “You have always wanted the Federal Government to intervene and take our freedom away.”
“The freedom to bully others and take what you like,” said Monger. “I could see how you could resent losing that.”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen, this is getting us nowhere,” said the Colonel. Her poker face was on again but I could sense her frustration. “We need to focus on the matter at hand.”
“Of course,” said Beecher. “That is the important thing.”
For a wonder, he sounded sincere. I thought there might be somebody else in the room aside from Doctor Olsen and the StarForce personnel who understood the gravity of the situation and was prepared to do something about it. Or maybe he just liked winding up Chernenko. It was hard to tell.
“So we will attempt to drive the Assimilators from the city,” said Monger. His chair rose a little on its suspensor field. He twisted it back and forward to that he could follow the course of the debate. “What if that does not work?”
I liked that we. So far StarForce had been doing all the fighting. The local militias had been providing Raximander with reinforcements.
“We’ll get to that,” the Colonel said. “But some other things need to be mentioned before we go on. Most important of these is that Raximander has been employing tactics that no Assimilator force has used in the past. He has been taking hostages and blackmailing representatives of the local militia into fighting for him using Ishtarian weapons.”
I don’t think this was news to anybody but they all managed to look outraged. There was lots of muttering and lots of denying that any of their militias people would have anything to do with such scurrilous behavior.
The Colonel held up her hand. Silence returned to the room. Outside, something exploded.
“Raximander is using his blackmail victims to wield Ishatarian weaponry,” she repeated.
“So you say,” the serpent man said. “So you say.”
“I don’t think anybody can deny what is happening. You’ve seen the images from Grid.”
“Images can be faked,” the serpent man said. With the sort of vehemence that you only have when you know you’re lying through your teeth.
“And I suppose that the blaster craters on our cyber troopers are faked as well?” I said. The Colonel give me a look that said shut up.
“We believe you,” the Captain Pilot said. She glared at the serpent man. His inhuman face was unreadable. His unblinking eyes scanned the room as if he was looking for his next meal. There was no more humanity in them than there was in Raximander. Maybe less.
“So we have an
Assimilator Warlord armed with the latest in high powered Ishtarian technology,” said Beecher. “That is not reassuring.”
“Indeed,” said Monger. Something in the way he glared at the serpent man spoke of deep depths of mistrust. Maybe exposure to the locals for so long had inculcated some of their prejudices.
“There are one or two crumbs of comfort,” the Colonel said.
“Well, praise be to God for that,” said Beecher. The other militiamen stared daggers at him. Maybe it was force of habit. “And what would those be?”
“Doctor Michaels,” the Colonel said. “Let’s hear it.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Medico Mark bounded up to the podium and made a hand gesture. A three-dimensional hologram glowed in the air above him. It showed a complex graph that clearly meant something to him, even if it meant nothing to the rest of us.
“One bright spot is that the rate of infection is much lower than all of our models would predict. By this stage of an Assimilator invasion we would expect well over 75 per cent of the population to have been absorbed unless aggressive steps were taken to contain this.”
“By that, you mean unless most of the local population had been massacred,” said Beecher.
“Or evacuated and inoculated,” said Medico Mark. He paid no attention to any sarcasm except his own.
“And to what do we owe this miracle?” Chernenko asked. His beefy fist stroked his thick blonde beard.
“That is what I have been trying to figure out,” said Medico Mark. He did not tell the locals that most of the figuring was being done by Orbital’s A.I. This was not the sort of stuff they would want to hear.
“And?” demanded Chernenko.
“So far I have not been able to work that out. We have done deep probes on all of the prisoners we have reclaimed from Raximander and have found no trace of infection.”
“That’s not possible,” said Doctor Olsen. “There should at least be traces.”
“That’s what I thought as well,” said Mark. “It’s not the case. We can find not the slightest trace of Assimilator biomaterial on them. It’s as if they have been sterilized.”
“Sterilized?” Doctor Olson asked. “You’re not suggesting that someone has actually used antibiotics on these victims? Or multi-stage decontamination?”
“It’s as if they had not been exposed to Assimilator biomaterial at all,” Mark said. “And we all know that’s impossible.”
The folk from the Weapon Ship were looking at him with unconcealed interest. Or possibly hunger in the case of the serpent man. “What do you mean?” the Captain-Pilot asked.
“It’s almost as if Raximander himself decided not to infect them.”
“And why would he do that?” the serpent man asked. Everybody in the room was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop. I wished I’d had one, just to experiment.
“We don’t know.”
Vague suspicion flickered through my mind. I remembered what Raximander had said about his progenitor needing more nodes to emerge. Just maybe he had been telling the truth. But it was not a risk I was prepared to take. It might just be another one of his games.
It was to his advantage to infect as many people as possible as quickly as possible particularly since he had access to the Ishtarian weapons. I studied the two people from the Weapon Ship. I wondered if they were nervous. Perhaps they should be. If word got out that they had been arming the Assimilators there would be a backlash. And that set alarm bells ringing in my head as well. Who would gain from that? There was a lot of deep politics concentrated in this small room.
“This is pure speculation,” the serpent man said.
“Yes,” Mark said. “It is. But at the moment that’s all we have. This particular incursion bears no resemblance to any previous Assimilator incursions and that, in itself, is troubling. “
There was another man with a fine gift for understatement. Troubling did not begin to describe it.
About the only piece of good news we’d had so far was that Raximander had not been recruiting as fast as he normally did and that was more disturbing than reassuring. It showed that he had another agenda here.
“I’m sure it won’t come to that,” Beecher said. “I’m sure that the Assimilators can be overcome. God will help us prevail.”
“I wish I shared your confidence,” Monger said, voicing what most of us were thinking.
“I do not believe that the Lord will allow us to be driven from our homes permanently by this Beast of the Apocalypse.” Beecher sounded like a preacher now, like those men I remembered from my childhood wandering the streets of New York shouting their prophecies. “We must place our trust in him and believe in his mercy.”
The others in the room looked at him. Monger in particular was staring very hard. Beecher seemed to have changed the entire tone of the discussion. Even Chernenko merely grumbled and said nothing. He did not get up and stalk out of the room as I half expected him to. No doubt he would be around to make his own special contributions to our planning.
“So we are agreed,” the Colonel said. To her credit, she managed to keep the note of surprise at her voice.
“Under the circumstances, we do not have much choice,” Beecher said. “I am no admirer of the Federal Government but under the circumstances we must all work together or perish separately.”
It was a nice turn of phrase. I’d heard variations of it on a hundred worlds but that did not make it any less impressive. He sounded as if he meant it. That was the important thing.
“So what do we have to do now?” Doctor Olsen asked.
“You need to get the word out to your people,” the Colonel said, now all business. “You need to let them know that they will need to leave their homes. Take as little as they can. We need to move fast. The faster the better.”
“Very well,” Beecher said. The others nodded. “How are we to do this?”
The Colonel waved her hand dramatically and the map of the city opened out before us in all its 3-D holographic glory. “We’ll evacuate the sectors closest to the spaceport. StarForce will take control. Then we will be able to move evacuees through friendly territory.”
I studied the map. All the places that Raximander had already attacked were marked in red. There were sick looking blotches right across the city. So far only the central core had not been attacked. I would have been willing to bet that would be Rax’s next stop.
“We may want to place some priority evacuating the city core,” I said. Monger looked alarmed.
“So far we have been spared the ravages of the Beast,” he said.
I could see that the old man was nervous.
“Look at the map,” I explained. “It’s the only place, Raximander has not attacked. No doubt, he’ll correct that error soon. He’s always been an equal opportunity ravager.”
The Colonel could see the sense in what I was saying. “Very well,” she said. “We’ll begin evacuating the city core, starting immediately, I would not want Raximander to strike the local tax base.”
The leaders of the militia glared daggers at her. Obviously they did not like her little joke. Monger made a small shrug of agreement. “Then we should begin as soon as possible. I think we’ve all said we needed to say.”
Chernenko looked as if he disagreed. “We shall need separate areas for the different militias here at the spaceport,” he said. “We don’t want violence within your refugee camps.”
It was a surprisingly sensible thing for him to say but I suspected it had more to do with preserving his own authority with his people than preserving their lives. Not that it mattered. It was a good idea and it needed to be implemented.
The Colonel nodded. “Anything else?”
“I’ll get the nano factories working on inoculations,” Mark said. He looked pleased. He had something to do. In fact, he’d probably the most important task of any of us.
“Very well, let us be about our business,” the Colonel said. Everybody rose and made ready to
depart. There was no shaking of hands but there was a palpable sense of the fact that we had achieved something at this meeting.
Beecher came over to speak to me.
“I just wanted to thank you again for saving my life back in City Hall,” Beecher said. I could not remember him thanking me a first time.
“I was just doing my job.”
“You did not have to do it. You could have left me to my fate, and my people.”
“I would not leave anybody in the hands of the Assimilators.” I wondered why Beecher had really chosen to talk to me. “You have something on your mind.”
“Like you, I am troubled as to what your friend Raximander intends.”
“He intends to assimilate this world.”
“But it seems he has chosen an unusual way to go about it.”
“I am sure he will get to where he wants to go eventually. Unless we stop him. It is in his nature.”
“Just as it is in your nature to oppose him.”
“Just as it is in my nature to avoid being eaten.”
“You think he intends to devour us body and soul?”
“Body and mind at least, and if you have a soul I am sure Raximander would not mind nibbling on that either.”
I glanced around. Monger was chatting with the Colonel but his eyes flickered in our direction. He was clearly wondering what we were talking about.
“Monger looks nervous,” Beecher said.
“I wonder why.”
Beecher glanced in the direction of the Ishtarians. “He does not like the serpent man. That much seems clear.”
“Maybe he just shares the local prejudices.”
“I had not heard that. He was dealing with the Weapon Ship until recently. His only prejudice I have ever heard of was concerning money. He is prejudiced in favor of that, or as much of it as it is possible for him to get for himself.”