“Armed Shutdown, Colonel?”
“It may come to that. Or it may not, it’s hard to read…Excuse me.” He opened one of the comms on the table and spoke into it without activating the screen. “He’s here now, start sending, I want him to see for himself…. Thank you.” He activated the comm screen, and spun it round to face Foord, whose expression did not change.
“This is presumably from one of your VSTOLs?”
“Yes. I have four hovering over Grid Nine at the moment.”
Thahl’s expression didn’t change either, but only because his face was made that way. Inside, there was a surge of feelings he couldn’t precisely identify when he saw his ship—a slender silver delta, sixteen hundred feet long—on Grid 9. At times he’d felt he might not see it again. The sound of Foord’s voice jerked him back.
“And the people crowding the Grid, who are they?”
“A large part of Blentport’s civilian population. Plus the crews of Horus Fleet ships waiting to join the cordon, plus a large detachment of my troops.”
As if on cue, the comm screen went blank. Boussaid had not deactivated it.
“And that’s it. Nothing has happened yet but anything might. And I may be one of the last people on the Port prepared to do anything about it.”
“You said you could get me back to my ship. How?”
“A couple of hours ago, Commander, I sent a large detachment from what’s left of my garrison to clear Grid Nine.”
“And?”
“As I said, they’re still there, among that crowd. They reported initially that the mood was too tense to attempt any dispersal. Then they said that unless I actually ordered them back they’d stay, to maintain a discreet presence and contain any disorder. I understood.” He paused, then laughed softly. “They’ve become like the people they were sent to disperse. With most of my garrison in the highlands, and the problem of how to get you through that, particularly when you insist on doing it in a landchariot, the last thing I want to do is even hint at mutiny.” Again he laughed. “You may already have protected us from Faith, Commander, because every minute your ship remains here, Blentport becomes less and less worthy of Her attention as a target.”
Out of Foord’s sight, Thahl smiled privately and thought I like him, how he looks askance at the world. Smithson was right. He usually is.
Another ship roared overhead. Another light went out.
“I’ve tried to defuse the situation by hurrying the liftoff of the Horus Fleet ships grounded here, some of them before their refits have been completed, but too many of them are still grounded. The call I made just now activated plans to take you—yes, and your landchariot—under heavy escort to your ship on Grid Nine, and to get you and Thahl safely aboard. I’ll be going along in the lead escort vehicle, with what remains of my garrison.”
“How do you intend to get us aboard?”
“You’d think it ridiculous if I told you, and there isn’t time to argue. Call it a last throw of the dice. Just go along with whatever happens.”
Foord thought about what Smithson had said, added his own impression so far of Boussaid, and said “All right, Colonel. And thank you.”
“One more thing before we move off, Commander. When we reach Grid Nine, and when you see what happens there, you may start to question my judgement, so remember this. I believe it’s inevitable that someone, almost certainly a member or members of my garrison, is going to die before we get you back on your ship today.”
6
Nobody hated Foord except Other People. Nobody would ever refuse him cooperation (indeed, left to themselves they would heap it upon him) except that there were Other People. Other People had to be considered. Other People still clung to preconceptions, still harboured gangrenous prejudices—in short, hated him—and clicked their tongues at the vast majority who would otherwise have flocked to welcome the Commander of an Outsider. These Other People even hated the shape of an Outsider, because it was unlike ordinary ships: elemental and simple, a slender delta without corrugations or excrescences or power-bulges.
Always it was Other People. And Other People when asked would cite others, who when asked would cite others, so that wherever the Charles Manson made planetfall and Foord had to leave his ship to have dealings with what Other People would call the real world, he would find himself shunted through a series of shadowy anterooms where conversations died as he entered and restarted as he left and where always those Other People, the ones who really did hate him, had gone just moments before, leaving a chair still warm or a drink half-drunk or something daubed on a wall. He understood this and recognised that many of them genuinely believed it. In his absence, he knew they would turn to each other and remark on how much some Other People hated him.
When he and Thahl left the gatehouse and walked back to the landchariot they found it surrounded by heavy armour, with guns peering down at it from all angles. The six medium-calibre rapidfire guns trained on the landchariot’s rear belonged to the two triple-turreted sixwheels which had followed them through the outer and middle gates; the slender swivelguns ahead, along the top of the inner fence, would coldly track anything which moved; and the heavy-calibre guns massed further ahead were mounted on ten huge armoured twelvetracks waiting to escort Foord safely across the last few miles to Grid Nine, where, it seemed, most of Blentport waited to watch him rejoin the Charles Manson. Or watch him try to rejoin it.
Outside, a loudspeaker emitted a single harmonic and some three or four hundred troops apparently sprang from the ground and started milling silently around the ten huge twelvetracks. A second harmonic and they disappeared inside them, as if soaked up. A third, lower harmonic and the inner gate began to open: it was a large section of the fence, a chain-link and girder latticework over thirty feet wide, and it took its time. The ENTER NOW sign flashed, the driver’s whip uncoiled and spat in the heavy air, and the chimaera, heaving their great grey buttocks from side to side and forced forwards only after some abortive plunges to the left and right, reluctantly took the landchariot through the gate. The ten twelvetracks immediately clotted around it, two in front, three on either side and two behind, as though parcelling the infection entering a wound; and then the whole cavalcade—in scale, a mongrel dog escorted by ten elephants—started down the long wide road leading to the Grids at the heart of Blentport. The same slow mechanisms which had prised the gate open now closed it deafeningly behind them, causing a great voiceless flock of white birds to rise from the grass and resettle, like shaken powder.
The swivelguns on the long curve of the inner fence, either side of the gate for hundreds of feet, tracked them through in finely graduated arcs and continued to track them into the distance; and then, ten minutes later when Boussaid signalled the gatehouse from the lead vehicle that they were ENTERING GRID AREA NOW, swung away and forgot them.
•
“Grid 19,” Boussaid announced over Foord’s wristcom, unnecessarily, as they passed a junction in the road where a large sign said GRID 19. “One of the outlying minor grids. About fifteen minutes to your ship, unless we encounter anything on the way.”
“Looks like we already have,” Foord replied, referring to a VSTOL which was now following them, hovering silently a hundred feet directly above with full grappling tackle hanging underneath it like entrails.