“Sure,” said Handsome Jack, who stood to Little Hugh’s left. “He waited until it was all over, and now he comes in to pick up the pieces.”
“Here, now,” said the ICC major. “We’ll have none of that.” But the threat was spiritless and he no longer had two hale battalions with which to enforce it. Eventually, that would occur to both Eireannaughta factions.
“The only thing,” Handsome Jack growled at the ICC major. “The only thing you were supposed to be good for was protecting my world—and look what you’ve let happen!” The injustice of the charge showed in the major’s basset-hound gaze, and Hugh quite suddenly desired to take him in his arms for comfort.
“Not quite the triumphal homecoming,” said Voldemar, as if speaking directly to the ruins, as if Hugh were not standing beside him. Hugh remembered how he and Voldemar and Sweeney the Red had spent a long, rainy night in a tumbledown ecologist’s station on the Crooken Moor, where basaltic granite thrust up through the terraforming bogs, and a Rebel death squad had combed the countryside for them. It hadn’t seemed possible then that three men could grow closer than they had that night. Sweeney moaned softly on a cot, his head wrapped in bandages where a sword cut had lopped off half his nose. Voldemar stood by the hut’s door, glaring out over the trackless black waste. They had not dared strike a fire. We’ll make it, Voldemar had said then with fierce conviction. The Glen’s just past the end o’ these bogs.
And so they had. But now…What had happened? Have ye grown too fond o’ the leadership, brother Voldemar? Or had the Fudir’s cynicism wriggled like a worm into his own heart, so that he saw treachery now where there was only anger and despair.
“They split her chest open,” Major Chaurasia said, again speaking as if to ghosts. “Down the breastbone with a cutting laser, and then they pried the rib cage apart and spread the lungs out over them. They looked…I saw her later, after. They looked like wings…”
Two in the knot of people around Little Hugh covered their mouths and ducked quickly aside to retch.
“Called the Blood Eagle,” said the Fudir, who had not been present a moment ago. He had gone off to the field hospital on some purpose of his own. Now he was back.
The ICC major looked at him. “Blood Eagle,” he repeated witlessly. “It’s an art form among the Cynthians. They even have special instruments to perform it.”
“Art.” The idea was incomprehensible. The major shook his head. “Why punish her for defending the world as best she could?”
“It wasn’t punishment,” the Fudir explained. “It was tactical, to take the will out of their enemies.” Looking around at the Eireannaughta, he added, “I’d say it worked.” Then, in a lowered voice, he whispered to Hugh, “I found what she did with the Dancer.”
“They used it more than once,” Handsome Jack murmured. “That…Blood Eagle.” He was a one-eyed man, now, as well as a one-armed one. “Not only on Jumdar…”
Little Hugh turned away from Council House and looked down the slope of Council Hill to the smoldering ruins of New Down Town.
“They set fires,” said O’Mulloy. “Sometimes, they didn’t even loot a house first. They simply torched it. For no reason.”
“They had a reason,” the Fudir told him. “It was fun.”
“But,” said the major, “what profit was there? To come, what, fifty days’ travel from the Hadramoo? And for what?”
“They didn’t come for profit,” the Fudir told him. “They came for honor and glory.”
The major drew himself up. “Honor…” But then he seemed to deflate. “There’s no profit here anymore. That’s a certain thing. The orbitals the Cynthians didn’t smash and loot are being abandoned. O’Carroll, would you take some of the factory personnel back to Jehovah on your ship? I’ve sent a swift-boat to Hawthorn Rose to call back the rest of the regiment, but…”
“It’s not my ship,” O’Carroll told him. “Ask January.” But that sounded too callous, so he added more kindly, “I’m sure he’ll take as many as he has room for.”
Later, Hugh met privately with Handsome Jack. No one was quite sure who held the management contract anymore. The ICC was going to break it—both men had read that in the major’s eyes. There’s no profit here anymore. But did that mean automatic reversion to House Oriel? Or was the contract, as some said, “up for grabs”?
They sat across from one another at a broad table in the old ICC factor’s residence. Cargo House had been looted along with most everything else in the capital. Pale outlines on the walls marked where paintings, watercolors, and digitals had once hung, and Hugh thought he remembered, from an earlier visit in another era, a chemical sculpture in which substances of changing hues and various densities had writhed snakelike in a tank in the corner. But the ICC building had not, withal, been burned, as so many others had. And there were even a few chairs that had not been reduced to splinters and scraps of fabric. The table had once been polished to mirror-finish—it was red gristwood from Nokham’s World—but too many boots had scuffed it in the looting and a twisted, puckered scar ran where a laser had burned a vulgar word in the chief language of the Hadramoo.
This had been the factor’s dining hall, Hugh remembered. Imported Gatmander salmon on plates of Abyalon crystal. Candlelight and sandalwood, and in that corner, a blind Terran pandit had played an evening rag on a santur. There had been no factions then. Or at least the factions had not yet made themselves known.
Earlier that morning, a larger meeting had sat around this table. The United Front for the Restoration of the Vale—a grand name, but no one had wanted to defer to another, and so it had been less full of decisions than of discussions. Hugh had kept silent throughout most of the proceedings. On-planet only a few days, he did not know enough about the current state to say anything useful. That had not impressed the Loyalists at the table, who had expected that their legendary leader would sweep away all problems with a few wise words. And on those few occasions when he did speak up, the Rebel faction had expressed their utter lack of confidence. Major Chaurasia had tried to impose order, but lacked the will to do so effectively.
“One thing I’ll say for the old bitch, Jumdar,” Handsome Jack Garrity said, now that the others had left. “She could lead. People hopped to when she spoke, not from servility, but because she inspired.” He ran his hand through barley-brown hair. “Chaurasia knows how to carry out orders, but damn me if he knows how to give them.”
Little Hugh steepled his fingers. “It will take me a while to get ‘up to speed,’ but…”
“We don’t have the time for your fookin’ learning curve, lad. People are hurting now.”
“I know that! We need to get a clear picture of the As-Is state and a vision of the Should-Be state and imagine the change-path that will get us there. Jack, we heard a report today on milk and grain from County Meath—but how accurate was it? Will there be enough to feed New Down Town? How will we get it here? Has anyone worked out the logistics, mobilized lorries and floaters, set up an Action Plan?”
“Mebd’s teats!” Jack slapped the tabletop, earning a splinter for his pains from the broken wood. He sucked at his palm as he spoke. “This isn’t one of those fookin’ management exercises they taught you at boot camp. There were relief lorries on the High Road out of the Mid-Vale before the rievers had jumped down the Avenue. The rievers didn’t touch the farm counties. They hadn’t come to rape sheep. Or maybe they just didn’t have the time. Maybe the lorries hadn’t been fookin’ mobilized and nose-counted by the fookin’ authorities, but they were on the fookin’ road! What would you do if there weren’t enough of them? Send them back? Pick volunteers to starve? My people will send all they can spare, and a little more—and they didn’t need the Planetary Manager to tell them how much and where. Damn this splinter!” He sucked again on his palm.