"What's going on here?" she asked.
"Dancing!" he spat out. "As Whores of Babylon—"
"James!" Rukh's voice snapped. He stopped speaking. She looked over the others, her gaze ending at last on the truck drivers who had drawn closer to each other in a ragged group around the man with the musical instrument.
"This is not a holiday," she said, clearly, "or a children's game; no matter what your community here allows you to do. Is that understood by all of you who've volunteered to help us?"
There was a shuffling silence among the truck drivers. The one with the accordion, a broad-chested individual with tightly curled brown hair, shrugged the strap of it off his shoulder, and—catching the strap with his hand—lowered the instrument until it sat on the ground at his feet.
"All right, then," said Rukh, when there was no further answer. "You drivers go and stand by your individual trucks. Our Command members have already been organized into truck teams. We'll begin counting from this end of the row of vehicles and the Number One team for the fertilizer plant will use that truck; Number Two, the next, and so on until all the teams for the fertilizer plant are assigned to trucks. Then the Number One team for the valuable-metals raid will take the first succeeding truck, and so on, down the line. Teams get together with your drivers now. I want you to know him, and him to know you, by sight."
She started to turn away.
"James, Howard!" she said to them. "Come back upstairs with me and we'll finish what we were doing—"
"Wait a minute!"
It was the voice of the accordionist, interrupting her. She turned back to face the crowd; and the local man, leaving his instrument on the ground, came forward toward her and Hal. The other locals edged after him.
"Him," said the accordionist, when he stood within arm's length of her, looking past her at Hal. "He's the one they're looking for, isn't he? If he is, hadn't we ought to be told about that?"
"What are you talking about?" said Rukh.
"This one," the accordionist pointed to Hal, meeting Hal's eyes squarely. "Isn't he the one all the fuss is about? And if he is, what's he doing coming along on something like this, when just having him with us can be dangerous?"
"I'll give you one more chance to explain yourself," said Rukh. "This is one of our Command members, Howard Immanuelson. If the Militia are looking for him, they're looking for all of us."
"Not like they're looking for him," said the accordionist. He glanced aside at Child, who had drawn close on the other side of Rukh. "They've got his picture up everywhere; and there's a special officer—one of the Elect, about forty years old, named Barbage, spending his time doing nothing but heading up the search. He's got the whole district looking for this Immanuelson. Like I say, it's dangerous just having him here with you, let alone taking him along on a raid. For everybody's sakes, he ought to be cleared out of the territory."
"This officer whom thou callest of the Elect—although when was one of God's enemies such?" broke in Child. "Is he taller than I am, with black hair and a way of squeezing his eyes together when he blasphemes in his attempt to use godly speech?"
The accordionist looked at him.
"You know him, then?"
Child looked at Rukh.
"It was the officer who commanded the ambush against us in the pass," said Child. "He saw both Howard and myself."
"But it's Immanuelson he wants," the accordionist said. "Ask anyone around here. What's he wanted for?"
"You don't ask that of the Warriors of the Commands," said Rukh. Her voice was clear and hard.
The other's eyes fell away for a second time from the gaze she bent on him, then raised stubbornly again.
"This isn't just a Command matter," he said. "We all came to help you, not knowing you had him with you. I tell you, he's a risk to all of us, just by being here! If you won't tell us why they want him so much, you ought to get rid of him."
"This Command is my responsibility," Rukh said. "If you join us, you take directions. You don't give them."
She started to turn away once more.
"That's not right!" called out the accordionist; and there was a small mutter from his fellow truck drivers to back him up. She turned back. "This is our district, Captain! We're the ones who have to put up with the Militia after you've gone and your raid's been made. We don't mind that; we even come to help you make it—like this. But when we're part of what you do we ought to have a say in the way you do it, when you make it risky for us. Why don't we vote on whether he goes or not? Wasn't that the way the Commands always used to operate—just like the mercenary soldiers? They had the right to vote, didn't they, if their leaders wanted to do something the majority of them didn't want?"
For a moment no one said anything in the farmyard.
"The mercenary code," Hal said, hearing his voice sounding strange in the new silence, "only allowed troops to vote down their officers when at least ninety-nine per cent of them—"
His words were overridden by a verbal explosion from Child-of-God.
"Ye would vote?"
They all turned to him. He stood, shoulders wide, hands a little raised at his sides and his head jutting forward, staring at the drivers.
"Ye would all vote?" The echoes of his voice cracked off the walls of the buildings surrounding them on three sides. "Ye, with the milk of your farms wet on your lips, the muck of stables thick on your boots, ye would vote on whether one who has fought for the Lord should be kept or sent away?"
He took two steps toward them. They stood without moving, watching him—almost without breathing.
"Who are ye to talk of voting? Howard Immanuelson hath fought by the side of those in this Command, as ye have not. He hath labored with us, walked with us, gone cold and hungry with us, to oppose the Belial-spawn and their minions; while ye have not, only grown up soft and played and danced under their indulgence. What business is it of such as ye that a Warrior of the Lord is being specially searched for in thy district? Ye are the fat and useless sheep on which our enemies feed. We are the wolves of God—and ye would raise your voice to command us?"
He paused. They stood, unmoving; even the man with the accordion seemed to be caught like a fly in the amber of Child's anger.
"I tell ye all now, so that ye may remember, that what ye fear so has no meaning for us," he said. "What is it to us who fight, that this district of thine should be under special search for Howard Immanuelson? What matter if all the districts between these two mountain ranges should be in search for him, or if this continent, this world, and all the worlds at once should be searching for him? Were none but the two hundred of our Command opposed by all other humanity, and should they offer us a choice of immediate destruction or all that we wished to gain, if only we would give up one of us—our answer would be the same as if a child in the roadway asked the same question of us, in our full and weaponed power."
He paused again. In his lined face, his eyes were dark as starless space.
"Ye so fear, some of ye, to be in the company of Howard Immanuelson?" he went on, at last. "Then take thy trucks and go. We have no need of such as ye, nor of anything ye have, for we who fight stand in the shadow of the Lord, who is all-sufficient!"
He stopped speaking and this time did not start again. Hal glanced at Rukh, remembering her relief when she had heard the sound of the trucks arriving. But she stood, watching the drivers and saying nothing. Beyond, the other members of the Command also stood and said nothing. Like Child, like Rukh, they waited, their eyes on the truck drivers. At last, one by one, the drivers stirred and began to move away from one another, each of them going to a truck and turning about to wait beside the door on the control side of the cab. Last of all, the man with the accordion dropped his eyes, turned and went to stand by the single vehicle that still lacked someone beside it.
"All right," said Rukh. She spoke dryly; but in the continued stillness her voice seemed to ring almost as loudly as Child's. "Teams, gather at your trucks. Team leade
rs, brief your drivers on where they're to take you and what's expected of them. James, Howard, come with me."
She led the two of them back to her room and to the interrupted briefing session.
Chapter Twenty-three
The metals-storage unit of Masenvale was a windowless concrete box surrounded by a high, static-charged fence and lit at night by floodlights that showed the fortified gatehouse and the heavy locked entrance doors stark against the surrounding darkness. It stood alone, in the warm, lowland spring night following the one on which the trucks had arrived at the Mohler-Beni farm, surrounded by a square, two business blocks from the District Militia Headquarters, in the downtown area of this middle-sized city. The relative darkness inside the windowed gatehouse made the man on guard there invisible to the twelve members of the Command who had been driven to the edge of the square by the man who owned the accordion. He had parked the vehicle around the corner from the square in the shadows between two floating street lights; and his passengers, Hal among them, had quietly slipped out of the van into the shadows, and were now gathered just behind the corner of a building facing on the square. The driver had remained with the truck, the vehicle facing away from the scene, his motor switch on warm, with his finger on the switch and the idle position only a finger-twitch away.
The metals unit and its surrounding fence slept in the unchanging pattern of light and shadow. Beyond its front gates and the gatehouse, the concrete surface of the square graded back into the darker shadow of the building, behind a corner of which they stood.
Hal felt a loosening of the muscles of his shoulders and the coolness of the night air being pulled deep into his lungs; and recognized the adaptations of the body to the expectation of possible conflict. A calmness and a detachment seemed, for the first time, to have come over him from the same source. He looked about for Jason, caught the eye of the smaller man, and led the way out into the square. Talking in low voices, apparently immersed in their conversation, the two of them started across the square on a slant that would take them past the front of the static-charged fence with its gate and gatehouse, guarding the unit.
As they moved down alongside the fence past the gatehouse, Hal was just able to make out through one of its windows the peaked cap of the single civilian guard seated within at his desk. Hal slowed his step, Jason slowed with him, and eventually they came to a halt just outside the gates themselves, apparently deep in conversation.
They talked on, their voices so low that their words would not have been understandable unless a listener was standing almost within arm's length of them. They stood, centimeters from the fence with its static charge that would be released at any contact to stun, if not kill, whoever had touched the metal of the fence. Time went on. After a while, the door to the guardhouse opened and the guard stuck his head out.
"You two out there!" he called. "You can't stand there. Move on!"
Hal and Jason ignored him.
"Did you hear me? Move on!"
They continued to ignore him.
Boots thumping loudly on the three steps down from the gatehouse door to the concrete of the square, the guard came out. The door slammed loudly behind him. He came up to the fence, careless about touching his side of it; for any touch from within deactivated the mechanism producing the static charge.
"Did you hear me?" His voice came loudly at them through the wide openings in the wire mesh, from less than an arm's length away. "Both of you—move on before I call Militia HQ to come pick you up for disturbance!"
Still they acted as if he was not there. He stepped right up against the fence, grabbed the wire and shouted at them; and as he did so, they stepped away, back along it on their side.
"What's going on here—" the guard began.
He did not finish. There was a distant, twanging noise, a hum in the air, and a second later a crossbow bolt with a blunt and padded head flickered into the lights to strike the side of the guard's head with the impact of a blackjack. The man slumped against the fence and began to sag down it toward the concrete; and, reaching swiftly through a couple of the wide mesh spaces, Hal caught and held him, upright but unconscious, against the fence.
With the fence registering an upright and still-living body pressed against its inner surface, its static charge was quiescent. Reaching through it, past Hal's straining shoulder-muscles, Jason unclipped the picture-crowned identity badge of the guard from the left pocket of his uniform jacket, and carried it over to the sensor plate in the right-hand gatepost. He pressed the face of the badge against the plate. There was a slight pause and then, recognizing the badge, the gates swung smoothly and quietly open.
Jason dodged through and put his hand against the interior control plate on the back of the same gatepost. He held it there and the gates stayed open. Hal let go of the guard, who slid down to lie still at the foot of the fence.
Jason went swiftly to stand at one side of the closed doors of the building, drawing a handgun from under his shirt as he did so. Hal came around to pick up the guard, take him into the gatehouse and immobilize him there with tape and a gag. The other ten Command members flooded smoothly across the square and through the open gate of the fence—which the last of them closed behind him.
Hal came out of the gatehouse, carrying the sidearm from the leg holster of the once more conscious, but trussed and now-undressed, guard. He handed the clothes to the member of the Command they seemed most likely to fit and the man who had taken them put them on, pulling the cap low over his eyes. Tilting his head down to pull his face back into the deep shadow below the visor of the uniform hat, the spurious guard stood directly before the sensor plate to the right of the doors blocking out its view of anything else and pressed the doorcall button.
There was a second's wait.
"Jarvy?" said a voice from a speaker panel above the plate.
The uniformed member grunted wordlessly, still holding his head down.
"What?" demanded the speaker panel.
The spurious guard grunted again.
"I can't hear you, Jarvy—what is it?"
The member said nothing, still looking down with his face in shadow.
"Just a minute," said the speaker panel. "There's something wrong with the voice pickup out there—"
The two doors swung open in neat mechanical unison. Framed in the white glare of illumination from the interior of the metals unit stood another guard, peering out into the darkness.
"Jarvy, what—" he began; and then he went down, silenced by hands on his mouth and throat even as he fell under the unified rush of several bodies.
"Where's the metals room?" Jason asked Hal, soft-voiced.
"Straight back," answered Hal, an image of the plan of the unit's interior which Rukh had shown him clear in his memory. He pointed along the hand-truck-wide corridor they had just entered. "But the guard-office's to the right. You'd better wait until we clear that."
Jason nodded and fell back. Hal, with two other men and three women of the Command, all armed now with handguns produced from within their clothing, went swiftly and quietly ahead down the corridor and burst in through the first door to their right, which was standing ajar. But inside there was only a single other guard, sitting on a cot at one end of a small room filled with surveillance screens, a power rifle on his knees.
At the sight of them he stared—grasped the rifle as if he would swing it up into firing position, then dropped it as if it had burned his fingers. Going forward before the protection of the handguns those behind him held levelled on the man, Hal picked up the power rifle and found it, not broken open for cleaning as he had expected, but loaded and ready to use.
"What were you going to do with it?" Hal asked the guard.
"Nothing…" The guard stared up at him, hopelessly, with frightened eyes.
"How many other people on duty here, now?" Hal loomed over him.
"Just Ham—just Ham and me, and Jarvy on the gate!" said the guard. He was white-faced and shock was lo
sing out to fear.
"How do you unlock the metals room?"
"We can't," said the guard. "Really—we can't. They don't let us. It's a time lock on the door."
Hal looked down at him through a long moment of silence.
"I'm going to ask you again," he said. "This time, forget what they told you to say. How do you open the metals room door?"
The guard stared up at him.
"You're the man they're looking for so hard, aren't you?" he blurted out.
"Never mind that," said Hal. "The door to the metals room—?"
"I—code KJ9R on the control keyboard—" The guard nodded almost eagerly toward the other side of the room. "The one under the large screen, there. That's the truth, that really opens it."
"We know." Hal smiled at him. "I was just checking. Lie down where you are, now, and we'll tie you up. You won't be hurt."
The other Command members with him converged on the guard; and Hal took the power rifle with him as he went back toward the door. As they began to tie the man up, he stepped to the screen the guard had indicated and keyed in the code the man had given. Rukh had explained to him that the Commands normally had little trouble finding out ahead of time the information they would need for raids on places such as this; but it was the practice to always check such information when that was possible. Holding the power rifle, he went back out to the corridor.
"The metals door ought to be open now," he told a senior member of the Command, a man named Heidrick Falt. "The guard gave me the same code Rukh had."
Falt nodded, his eyes thoughtful upon Hal. Falt had been named group leader for this raid. Rukh's instructions had been to let Hal lead only on the way in. As far as Hal could tell, Falt had not resented that exception to his authority; but it was a relief to hand the command back to the other man, now.
"Good," said Falt. He had a reedy voice too young for his face and body. "We'll start to load up. You go back and sit with the driver."
"Right." Hal nodded.
He left the building. Outside, the square showed no change. It still seemed to slumber under the same lights and shadows as before; and from the outside the metals unit sat with the same air of impregnability it had seemed to wear earlier. He turned the corner, reached the truck and climbed back into the cab. In the small interior glow of the instrument panel the driver turned a round face toward him in which there was no hint of friendliness.