Finally they brought us to the edge of a canal where a massive cargo barge sat on the steadily freezing water. By now Rhodane had put on her helmet and gloves, so looked little different to the other Sudorians being forced into the barge. Typicaclass="underline" round up the aliens and intern them. I guessed some things would never change.
It was crowded inside, people sitting with their backs against the outer walls or scattered in groups about the cold alloy floor. I estimated there to be at least 200 people gathered here. Frightened chatter filled the area, but it always dropped to silence when the doors opened and more people were shoved inside. I supposed these Sudorians were used to dealing with Brumallians and well aware of how dangerous quofarl could be, but I also wondered how many had died already, for the one I had seen being carried over a shoulder had not been brought here with us but taken towards a barge moored further along the canal. Standing head and shoulders above everyone else, blatantly not wearing protective gear and evidently neither Sudorian nor Brumallian, I became the focus of much attention.
"What's he?"
"That Consul Assessor from the Polity."
"I thought he was dead."
"Looks very much alive to me."
"Is he anything to do with this?"
Finally seals thunked down in the doors, fans started running, and the temperature began to rise. After a little while someone called out, "It's safe!" and people began to remove their atmosphere helmets.
"Have you any idea what's going on?" I asked Rhodane once she had taken off her own.
"Not yet." She raised her hand in greeting to a woman just across the room, who began to make her way towards us. "Shleera will know."
"So this is him." Shleera looked me up and down, and I studied her in return. I realised that her bulk was not all due to her envirosuit. She was overweight and wore spectacles—both of which were never seen in the Polity unless as a matter of choice.
"It certainly is," Rhodane replied. "Shleera, meet the Polity Consul Assessor, David McCrooger."
"I would rather have met you under different circumstances," she said.
"Do you know what's going on here?" Rhodane asked.
"Fleet," Shleera spat. "What do you think?"
"Have they attacked?"
"Not yet." Shleera glanced around at those who were gathering closer. "Consensus Speakers have been in contact to deny any responsibility for the missile strike on his ship" — she gestured at me. "They investigated and retrieved enough evidence to refute Brumallian involvement but, before they could pass it on, Fleet cut communications. Now Fleet are pulling their personnel out of the ground bases."
"I have heard nothing about this." Rhodane was looking puzzled.
"Perhaps you're not as close to them as you would like to think," Shleera replied.
"We did hear something about an evacuation," I interjected.
"Evacuation," Shleera shook her head. "That's not the ground bases, that's Vertical Vienna. It started in secret shortly after the missile strike, and is now being conducted with some urgency."
"Fleet wouldn't dare," said Rhodane.
"Parliament has allowed Fleet to take the caps off its guns. You do realise the Carmel space station is working again?"
"Shit," said Rhodane, or rather used some nearly untranslatable Sudorian equivalent.
"Vertical Vienna?" I enquired.
She glanced at me. "The subterranean city nearest to the missile's launch site."
I considered that, and found my hand straying to the tiger pendant on my chest. After a moment I coughed into my hand and said, "Tigger."
Rhodane looked at me, "What?"
"Nothing. 'Tigger' is just an expletive in my language." The pendant moved against my chest. I casually took hold of it, and looped the chain off over my head. As soon as Rhodane returned her attention to Shleera, I opened my fist and glanced down to see that the miniature tiger now held one paw over its eyes and seemed to be wincing.
"You were saying Fleet would destroy an entire city in retaliation?" I asked.
"They'll call it a military excision," Rhodane replied. "And it will all look very neat in the media, because all anyone will ever see is a hole in the ground."
"Or not even that," Shleera added, "if they use a gravtech weapon."
"So you're saying that Fleet may very soon be launching an orbital strike against the Brumallian city called Vertical Vienna?"
The pendant squirmed in my fist. Rhodane gazed at me with a blank expression, but Shleera's look gave me the distinct impression she thought me rather thick.
"Yes, that's very likely," said Rhodane, before Shleera could comment.
I raised my fist, rubbing one eyebrow with my forefinger, opened my hand as I lowered it, then quickly closed it again. The tiger lay on its back in my palm, paws in the air and eyes crossed. In my own tongue—the language spoken on Spatterjay for a millennium and on Earth for a similar period before that—I said, "Tigger, stop those fuckers from destroying that city. Use any means necessary."
"What was that?" asked Rhodane.
"I believe in a supreme being," I replied, "and I just prayed for intercession."
Tigger—in the Past
With his two halves joined together Tigger gazed down at the river, tracking further along its course to where it poured into the fifty-yard-wide mouth of the underground pipe. Seismic mapping had shown only two breaks in the pipe, where water seeped into the surrounding limestone and sought out its previous natural routes from the time before the Brumallians had diverted it to New Pavonis—a city named after one on Mars that lay in the shadow of Pavonis Mons. New Pavonis had been one of Brumal's largest underground cities, its population topping five million.
"Okay, graverobber," said Tigger to himself, "let's take a look."
Still remaining combined, because for this task he felt he would require all of himself, Tigger descended alongside the massive waterfall into misty depths, tracking his progress by radar once the light from above ground began to fail. Two hundred yards down, the pipe began to curve, the waterfall becoming a torrent that gradually filled the entire pipe as it narrowed. He submerged, initiating sonar and switching on his headlights. Here he came upon the first rupture; the pipe being sheared through and displaced to one side by half its width. Some water had flowed into crevices throughout the surrounding rock, gradually widening its escape route, but not enough to make a visible difference to the main torrent. Five hundred yards further on, the pipe began to widen again, to level out, and here the flow hit a series of generator stations and baffles. Emerging from the main flow of water again, he kept his lights on as he cruised along above the surface. Some Brumallians had escaped from here through exit tunnels leading to the surface. Many others had not. After their exit tunnels were blocked by collapses they tried to head downstream back towards their city. Only death had lain in that direction.
Some 300 yards beyond the last generating station, Tigger entered a wide slice through the rock, where only a few remnants of the pipe remained, the river now spreading out into a wide shallow flow that disappeared off into darkness on either side. Ahead, he eventually came upon a continuation of the pipe again, bone-dry and high up in a rock face. He entered this and cruised along to where the pipe terminated in a canal bed, now roofed with stone where there had been open space. Either side of him there had once been a glittering grotto of underground tower blocks, homes, factories, shops: all the panoply of human civilisation. After the attack it had all been compressed down to a layer about three feet thick in which the humans had become thoroughly melded with their civilisation. He passed a barge lying on the canal bed, disconnected skeletons scattered all around it, the distorted skulls of Brumallians presenting nightmare mandibles. Further skeletons revealed broken bones. He wondered if they had died of their injuries here or drowned before the water drained away. There was no way of telling without some forensic work, and that was not what he was here for.