The rock beside him began to glow. Thomas leaped to the right as the rock erupted in molten orange. A tiny splash of it burned his left arm. He ignored it, shouted: "Attack!"
His mob started a shambling run toward the Redoubt. As they moved, exterior hatches in the Redoubt's perimeter snapped open. Defenders swarmed onto the plain carrying 'burners and lasguns. They raced forward in a confused mass toward Panille's projected images. As they came within a few meters, their confusion increased. Targets dissolved before them. They stumbled left and right, shooting. Random shots dropped some of the army. The Redoubt's cutters began to sparkle with incandescent beams which probed the plain.
"Fire!" Thomas screamed. "Fire!"
Some of his people obeyed. But the Redoubt's defenders presented the same genetic mix as the army's. Attackers and defenders, indistinguishable without uniforms, stumbled into each other. Searing beams wavered in wild arcs, cutting friend and foe alike. Bloody bodies lay on the plain - some dismembered, some screaming. Thomas stared in horror at the arterial geyser from a headless torso directly to his left. Red spray splashed all around as the body tumbled forward.
What have I done? What have I done?
None of these people, attackers or defenders, knew how to fight a proper war. They were hysterical instruments of destruction - nothing more. Fewer than a fourth of the defenders had reached his army. What did it matter? The plain around the Redoubt was a bloody shambles.
He signaled to the cutter crew on his left. "Cut through their wall!" But his crew had been decimated, the cutter's improvised wheels disabled. It stood canted over to its right, the deadly muzzle pointed at the ground. The survivors crouched behind the cutter.
Thomas whirled and looked back at Panille. The poet stood immobile amidst the waiting pack of demons. Two Dashers crouched on his right like obedient dogs. The horrible line of Pandora's killer species reached left and right in a wide arc around the scene of carnage.
Rage coursed through Thomas. You haven't beaten me, Ship! He stumbled, panting across to the cutter, grasped its heavy barrel and heaved it around. Four strong clones had been needed to lift the thing back at the cliff. In his rage, he moved it by himself, tipping it against a rock until it was trained on a blank stretch of Redoubt wall. The surviving crew members cowered away from him as he leaped to the controls and activated the beam. A blinding blue line leaped out to the Redoubt, melting the wall. Upper structure sloughed away, slipping down into the molten pool.
Reason returned to Thomas. He stepped back, again, again. He was twenty paces from the humming cutter when the defense weapons found it. The cutter exploded as beam confronted beam. Thomas did not even feel the sharp chunk of metal which penetrated his chest.
***
Why shouldst Thou cause a man to put himself to shame by begging aid, when it is in Thy power, O Lord, to vouchsafe him his necessities in an honorable fashion?
HALI KEPT a careful watch on Waela as the E-clone assistants prepared an obstetrics area within their temporary medical shelter. The cliff shadow covered them, and the confusion of the army departing filled the air with discordant noise: shouts, grunts, the crunching of the cutter's wheels on the sand. She felt a sense of relief as the demons moved off with Panille. He frightened her now. Her soft-voiced poet friend had become the keeper of a terrifying inner fire. He was keeper of the kind of terrible power she had seen at Golgotha.
Heavy as she was with the unborn child, Waela moved with a supple quickness. She was in her natural habitat: Pandora. This place had changed Waela, too. Was that why Panille had mated with her? Hali put down an anguished stab of jealousy.
I am a med-tech. I am a Natali! An unborn child needs me. I want joy!
She tried not to think about what might happen out there on the plain. Thomas had warned her what to expect. Where had he learned about battle? She had been unable to suppress feelings of outrage.
"Those people who will die, how are they different from us?"
She had hurled the question at him as they moved down from the clifftop, steadied by hylighter tendrils, the red streaks of dayside fingering a gray horizon on their right. It had been a nightmare setting: the babble of the army, the muted flutings of hylighters. The great orange bags had floated some people down to the plain, carried equipment, guarded the descent of those who stayed afoot.
Hundreds of people, tons of equipment.
Thomas had not answered her question until she repeated it.
"We have to take over the Redoubt. Ship will destroy us if we don't."
"That makes us no better than them."
"But we will survive."
"Survive as what? Does Ship say anything about that?"
"Ship says, 'When you shall hear of wars and the rumors of wars, be you not troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet.'"
"That's not Ship! That's the Christian Book of the Dead!"
"But Ship quotes it."
Thomas had looked at her then and she had seen the pain within his eyes. Christian Book of the Dead.
Ship had shown parts of it to her on request, displaying the words within the tiny cubby where Panille once had studied. If Thomas really were a Ceepee, he would know those words. She wondered if Oakes knew them. How strange that no one shipside had responded to her careful questions and probes about the events on the Hill of Skulls.
Thomas had frightened her then as they paused to regain their breath on a little rock platform deep in a fissure.
"Why did Ship show you the crucifixion? Have you ever asked yourself that, Hali Ekel?"
"How do yo.... how do you know abou.... ?"
"Ship tells me things."
"Did Ship tell you wh.... . ?"
"No!"
Thomas set off down the steep trail. She called after him: "Do you know why Ship showed me that?"
He stopped at a gap in the fissure, looked out at the morning light growing on the plain, the glistening brilliance of reflections off the Redoubt's plaz in the distance. She caught up with him.
"Do you know?"
Thomas rounded on her, the pain terrible in his eyes. "If I knew that, I'd know how to WorShip. Did Ship give you no clues?"
"Only that we must learn about holy violence."
He glared at her. "Tell me what you saw there at the crucifixion!"
"I saw a man tortured and killed. It was brutal and awful, but Ship would not let me interfere."
"Holy violence," Thomas muttered.
"The man they killed, he spoke to me. H.... I thought he recognized me. He knew I had come far to see him there. He said I was not hidden from him. He said I should let them know it was done."
"He said what?"
"He said if anyone understood God's will, then I must understand i.... but I don't!" She shook her head, tears close. "I'm just a med-tech, a Natali, and I don't know why Ship showed me that!"
Thomas spoke in a whisper: "That's all the man said?"
"N.... he told the people in the crowd not to weep for him but for their children. And he said something about a green tree."
"If they do these things in a green tree, what will they do in a dry?" Thomas intoned.
"That's it! That's what he said! What did he mean?"
"He mean.... he meant that the powerful grow more deadly in times of adversity - and what they do in the roots can be felt to the ends of the branches - forever."