Charles Ingrid - marked man 02 The Last Recall (34 page)

Before Marshall could answer, Dusty said, "I don't trust him."

The commander turned to her. One of his soft-knit, graying eyebrows went up. "Senior officer. Relying on hunches again?"

"It's my job."

"Umm. Well, I'd say the morning light is going to reveal a lot. We'll get information from the dean, offload the hover, and take a look-see ourselves. In the meantime, I suggest you all get a good night's sleep. Reynolds, get an NL-program from Kerry to help you deal with your reaction to being out in the open. We need all team members at their optimum." He clapped his hands together softly. "Good night, one and all."

Dusty woke early. She used the refresher sparingly and dressed quickly, anxious to get another look at the landing site. But Marshall and Dubois had beaten her to the observation deck.

Dubois had just let out a low whistle and Marshall's forehead was heavily creased.

"What is it?" she asked, drawing near.

"We're surrounded," said the communications officer. "As far as the eye can see. It's like a damn cowboy and Indians video."

She looked out the window. The vista outside was dotted with teepees and canopy tents and slow, smoking campfires everywhere she looked. "My God," she said.

"I think," Marshall commented, "the dean has decided on a show of strength."

The moment he stepped onto the ghost road, Thomas was afraid. Reality bled away slowly, like a draining carcass, until all colors but a sepia overtone were gone. He was not in the barracks' tiny room and yet he was, poised before a vault of nothingness. He stood for a moment, clutching the finger bones in his left hand, right hand near the knife on his belt. By taking the bones from Lady and using them himself, he did not know if he'd severed her road or even put himself on the same one. Or was there always only one road? Could he go forward or she back?

He could no longer see Drakkar or the body he'd left behind. He didn't like traveling the road this way—he much preferred to go in the flesh—but he had no choice if he was to follow Lady.
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. . . .

He took another step more solidly into the road and found himself in a void, suspended over thin, black air, his sight as good as gone, his ears deafened, his voice mute—he gripped the bones tighter.

"Gillander!" He expended all his tension in a singular eruption of sound.

A cloud of sickly green and blue began to coalesce near him. Thomas backed up half a step. The cloud stopped its formation. A mocking voice said, "Back on my turf again, eh, boy? If you want to catch your lady, you'd best hurry up!"

He could see, then, a cable stretching ahead of him, like the tracings children made with sparkler fireworks in the evening air. Three cables actually, although one was so faint as to be nonexistent and the other followed it rapidly into nothingness. But Lady's cable—he knew it had to be hers, silver-blue entwined with sable—stretched out vibrantly before him.

"Go on, Gill," he said. "I've got this one."

The emanation dissolved. Ghostly, mocking laughter followed him.

Blade swallowed tightly. He began to draw on the only energy he knew that could fuel the road. He gathered the hatred and death of the millions who had once lived in this area. The hours of their death and despair filled him, gave fuel to his effort and substance to the span which supported him. He sucked in the bitterness until he could taste its bile. He was death, oh, yes, he knew that well, Protector and executioner, yes. He was death in his own land, but the ones he held himself responsible for had been clean ones. This spew that he took in from the ghost road sickened him. He breathed out and in again, deeply, trying to cleanse the ache from his lungs. This was a discipline Lady had begged him to master, yet every time he used it, he left a piece of his humanity behind. She had never understood his reluctance. Now he had no choice. Thomas began to run after the cables, taking a pace he knew he could hold for hours. He did not like astral realities. Life was tough enough.

The ghost road could, as nearly as he could tell, telescope or fold time and distance. But to travel it leeched his own time—his life's span and energy. He didn't know how to anchor it or how to force it in any particular direction. But he did know that primal forces, very basic ones, could intersect violently with it. Wolfrats, coyotes, even sharks had run it. Traveling it in the Vaults had very nearly trapped his life force inside solid rock. And traveling it years ago had still not saved Charles and Ronnie or even their daughter Jennifer.

He
would
not be too late this time.

He ran into a void that was like running into a night sky. He felt as though he paced uphill, yet there was only above and below. The firmament ahead of him was star-struck, pinpoints of brilliant fire that shot away from him and faded even as he ran after them. The cables stretched ahead of him like a rope bridge across eternity.

He ran.

* * *

He ran until the breath sucked from his lungs couldn't be sucked back in. Until he had a stitch in his rib cage as bad as any he'd ever experienced. Until the sweat flowing off his face obscured his sight. He plowed to a halt and bowed over, his hands on his knees, gasping.

Finally, when he had breath enough, he said, "God.' I must smell like a horse. I sound like one." He straightened slowly. His lungs wheezed and he coughed once or twice.

He could have been running for half a day or for two. The road was like that. He couldn't keep running forever.

He put a hand on the silver and sable strand pulling away from it. A shock ran through him. He let go of the wire with a grunt as if Lady had kicked him in the gut. He stood and rubbed the flat of his stomach.

There was a sound in the void. He turned, baffled by his bad ear, casting to see if he could tell what it was and where it had come from. It was . . . nothing and yet, he could hear it ... a vibration, a belling beyond his sensory capacity, a somethingness beyond his perception. The darkness around him welled and buckled. His legs went out from under him as whatever it was roiled about him, under him, through him (a thousand spears of ice), left him shivering and shuddering on the pathway, on hands and knees. Gone.

What had it been?

A shadow, vast and energetic, among shadows. He grasped for Lady's cable, afraid he'd seen death. His fingers met emptiness.

The strands were gone.

Thomas roared, "Where the hell are you?"

The void swallowed up his despair as if it had never been.

Dakin said, "He wants you to do
what?"

"Make war on the mutant society down here that he calls the Seven Counties. He's got cause. I've seen the damage they did to the installation called the College Vaults. A direct hit wouldn't have touched the facility, but they got in by subterfuge and blew it up from the inside," Marshall replied. The shuttle com room had been cleared but for the two of them. The others had tumbled exhausted into their cots and hammocks. Dusty hung onto his elbow. A day riding the hover had left her skin feeling dry and tight, grit permanently wedged between her teeth, and a keen desire to throttle Klegg and his partner.

Also with an aching hole through her heart and soul. All that could have been left of her sister was gone, blasted away in the aftermath of the disasters. The dean had been vague about what had happened—ensconced below, he probably had not been aware of everything that had happened. A meteor hit, even a glancing blow, had left an immense crater in what had been the greater L.A. basin. Earthquakes and toxic pollution, riots and the inability to raise technology again to deal with the after effects had destroyed the country she'd known.

The enviros had been ecstatic examining the path of destruction, mapping out pools of gas, radioactivity, toxicity, even botulism. They had hung from their straps on the hovercraft as it skimmed over the area, collecting info and readings by the seat of their pants. To their morbid fascination, the dean had replied only, "They say the quickest way to kill a man here is to take him In-City.''

His flat, laconic acceptance of the hover helped to convince Marshall and Dusty that he was what he said he was—a single man of many lives. But that did not convince her he was entirely sane.

And trapped within her thoughts was that other voice. Indubitably masculine and powerful, she found it intrusive and yet . . . her own thoughts incredibly alone when she could not hear it. Was it the dean, product of a civilization forty years more advanced than the one she remembered? He watched her with a predatory keenness that disturbed her. She knew that Marshall would never have bowed to his demands alone, even under siege from the hundreds of warriors who had faced them in the morning. They could simply have shut up the shuttle and stayed aboard until the demands of water and food had driven the nation away.

But it was the witnesses they had borne with them that Marshall had listened to that day. They had lined up man by man to speak to Marshall. They had told of generations of being outcast, shunned, held to a substandard of living by water rationing. They bore on them marks of extra limbs, eyes, gills, privation, famine, and pestilence. And these were only the men. The women and children had been left in the safety of camp.

A voice droned into her musings. She looked up at the screen. Dakin's half-irritated, half-amused glance was fixed on her. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm dead on my feet."

"And I could have sworn those were gears I saw churning."

She gave a rueful smile. "I don't necessarily agree with Marshall, sir," she returned.

"About what?"

"About anything. This . . . dean's . . . story. He crawls out of the ruins of this underground repository and the nesters take him in and heal him. Once healed, he looks around and sees the terrible conditions under which they've been forced to live and decides to liberate them? He's as old as I am, basically. Why did it take him two hundred and fifty years to decide to help his fellow man? I think he's out for somebody's ass and needs an army to help him collect it."

Marshall cleared his throat as Sun's face split into an open grin. Dusty felt her face grow warm. The
Challenger
commander answered, "Plain speaking, as always."

She shrugged. "I don't trust him."

Marshall rumbled, "I'm not sure of my stance, either, Commander, except that we can't afford to dismiss him. He has the loyalty of a significant amount of manpower— and we need to be able to explore this area freely.''

"I agree. How many is significant?"

"We scanned maybe three hundred men. Add women and children and those nesters the dean says are still out-land, double it—maybe two thousand."

The commander's face went smooth. "Two thousand in an area that once supported millions prosperously."

"I understand the Seven Counties numbers closer to five thousand."

"Still a drop in the sea of humanity." Dakin appeared to sigh though she could not hear him. ' 'Marshall, I agree with your assessment. We can't afford to antagonize this man even if we're of dubious feelings about him. We're extremely vulnerable away from the shuttle."

"I hear that one," Marshall countered. He scratched the corner of a soft brow. "I don't want to take sides in a war to wipe out whatever is left."

Dakin's image began to blue as he closed down transmission. "Unfortunately," the commander's sad voice lingered, "we may not have much choice if they're committed to warring upon us."

The dean sat cross-legged upon the fragrant stuffed pillows of his tent. Ketchum hunkered down in the dirt and dried grass across from him. Dinner had been cleared. Most of the nation had been sent back to their campgrounds. The shuttle and its occupants had shut themselves up for the night. Both were intent upon the pipes in their hand. After the puffs of blue-gray smoke filtered away gently, the dean took a deep breath.

"I think I have them where I want them," he said.

Ketchum, for whom the world had changed immeasurably in the last few days, not only stopped puffing his pipe, but took the time to clean the burning weed from its clay bowl and crush the last sweet embers out upon the ground. Then he looked up. He had washed his face that day and taken care to plait his unruly hair into a sort of war-braid. It did not disguise the craggy bestiality of his face, but nothing that he did would. He put the clay pipe carefully in his shirt pocket. "Where is that, my chieftain?"

"In the palm of my hand. They doubted my story until they saw the Vaults for themselves."

Ketchum could not be convinced to travel on the hover. Instead, he had watched the machine leave and return in one long day, a distance that would have taken a week on horseback. He had a sense now of how his ancestors could have become so careless and had lost everything. Life had been too easy for them. Ease made a man careless. It had made the dean careless, and he had lost the College Vaults because of it. He made a mental note to himself not to fall in the same way. "They believed you?" He

had not seen belief in all their faces. He wondered how the dean could have.

"They saw the destruction! It was graven in the earth, a testimony they could not overlook.''

Ketchum felt the mellow influence of the smoke phasing through him. He relaxed from his hunkering stance to a cross-legged sit. His legs had gone pleasantly numb. "They will help you attack the Seven Counties."