Starfist: Lazarus Rising (6 page)

"We need food," the other woman said.

"We can find food in the river! Fish, clams, whatever," one of the other men said.

"Look, this trail is relatively fresh, made within the last day or two at the most,"

Military Operation said. "If we hurry, we can catch up with them. Goddamnit, we're starving, can't you feel it? We can't find enough food in the river to restore our strength. Besides, if there is a town or a city somewhere along that river, for all we know it could be five hundred kilometers from here—or the damned thing could just empty into the sea without ever passing anywhere near civilization."

"Yes," one of the men said, "but there could be a town only
five
kilometers from here, and I still maintain we'll find more food along the river than along that trail of yours."

"He's right!" Shaky shouted. It was the first words he'd spoken since the day before. "And who put you in charge?" he shouted at Military Operation.

"Well, I'm following this goddamned trail," Military Operation said. Nobody bothered to correct him on his language this time.

"All right. Who's for the river and who's for the trail?" Chet asked. He and Colleen voted for the trail.

The six of them stood silently in the tall grass. "Well, if we find civilization, we'll come back for you," one of the men for the river said.

"Same for us," Colleen answered. They shook hands all around. The three started off for the river, and the three who were taking the path watched them until their figures dwindled in the distance. A last wave and they started out on their own way.

They followed the trail all that day. It was easy to follow. Evidently, the people who had made it did know where they were headed and were anxious to get there.

All day long Military Operation constantly scanned the skyline and the surrounding geography, looking for the other people but also just checking. Several times he called for a halt as he went forward to a hillock or a ridge to survey the area before them, acting almost instinctively to avoid being seen until he was sure what lay ahead. He scanned the sky continuously and once shouted for them to fall to the ground. He'd spotted a high flier that turned out to be only a winged creature of some sort, soaring on the thermals, searching for much smaller prey.

"I thought it could be the monsters, or something," he apologized sheepishly.

Toward evening the trail skirted a small pond. The three did not hesitate to drink from it, although it was covered with a green scum, which they brushed aside with their hands to get at the cool water underneath.

They rested on the bank. "At least we won't die of thirst," Colleen said. Military Operation smiled at her and thought, She's a good soldier. The man called Chet was too, he realized. "I'm glad you two came with me," he said. He found himself wondering, for what reason he could not say, if they could handle weapons in a fight. He shrugged. Wherever that thought came from, they had no weapons.

"It'll be dark soon. What do you say we spend the night right here?" Chet suggested.

They pulled up some bushes, gathered leafy foliage, and made themselves a small bower beside the pond, then settled down into it for the night.

The second day dawned overcast and considerably cooler. Two hours into the journey, huge thunderheads rolled up from behind them and the wind picked up. The temperature dropped quickly. All the rest of that day it stormed. The three pressed on. At times they had to hold onto each other to keep from being knocked down by the gusts and the wall of cold rain that lashed at them. They grew faint from hunger and the loss of body heat in the cold.

"I can't go on," Colleen shouted at last, her voice barely audible above the roar of the storm.

"We can't stop," Military Operation yelled back, his words picked up and whirled away in the wind. "If we stop, we'll die from exposure." He and Chet each took one of Colleen's arms and helped her along, but the two men were suffering from hunger and exposure too. Worse, the trail had disappeared in the storm. They lost track of time and direction, concentrating only on putting one foot in front of the other and keeping Colleen upright between them, but soon they couldn't do that anymore either and they all collapsed into the mud in a heap.

"We have to get up. We have to go on," Military Operation gasped, but he made no move to get up or go on, just lay there and let the cold rain wash over him. It had grown very dark, but he wasn't sure if that was due to the lateness of the day or the heavy storm raging all around them. In the dim storm light he could see that Colleen's lips were turning blue and her eyes were closed. He rubbed her cheeks vigorously.

"Chet, help me!" The two men managed to revive Colleen enough so that she groaned.

Military Operation lay back in the mud and cursed. He wondered about the three who'd gone downriver. If they went along the river bottom, they'd have been swept away in the surge. But they would die here too, and once dead, be just as dead as if they'd drowned in the river. The shame of it was, he still had no idea how he'd gotten here or who he was before he was taken prisoner. Maybe we're all criminals, he thought. We'd been in a jail, and belonged there. That made him laugh just as there came a momentary lull in the storm.

Chet looked up from where he lay. "What's so funny?" he asked weakly, and then began to laugh himself. Both men laughed uncontrollably.

Military Operation laughed so hard he began to cough. He fought to recover himself. "Okay," he gasped at last. "Okay, enough of this! I've never been one to miss cadence on the grinder. Full field inspection in fifteen minutes, goddamnit! I'm getting up and I'm going on." Painfully, he rose to his knees, but could not get back on his feet. The storm returned then in full force and buffeted him onto his elbows.

He began to crawl, shouting curses into the wind. In seconds he no longer knew where he was or where the others were. He crawled in a circle.

He paused to get his breath. Someone was shouting. At him? The wind screamed around him and he thought it carried a voice calling "Charlieeeeeee! Charlieeeee!"

That name sounded so familiar. He looked into the wind-driven rain lashing his face, stinging like hale and blurring his vision. Wait! Was that someone's
face
out there in the rain? Yes, clearly! It was a young face, a man with red hair, he could see the apparition distinctly! He looked familiar. In reaching out toward the man, he became unbalanced and pitched forward into the mud. He shook his head to clear his vision, and when he looked back into the storm, the face was gone. He felt great disappointment. He knew that face. But who was it? Where had it gone?

"Charlieeeee!" the wind screamed. He realized then that it was the Angel of Death and she was calling to him. He smiled. Well, he'd done his best and now it was time to go. High time. He couldn't feel the cold anymore. He was so tired. He just wanted to rest—forever. The angel came for him and lifted him up and stood him on his feet.
Aw, Jesus, she was beautiful!
He had never seen such radiant beauty. She smiled at him, and the warmth of her love washed over him. I'm going home, but I'm going out like a man, he thought, and he felt very good about that. They would have soup and sandwiches and beer in heaven. The thin metallic sheet he'd wound about himself had come off long ago, and his packs were somewhere behind him, lost in the mud too, but even if he'd known he was stark naked, he wouldn't have given a damn.

At that moment the wind died away and the rain slackened. He turned and looked around.

Before him, a gentle slope rolled away. At the bottom glowed lights in the windows of houses.

CHAPTER 5

The four students, naked, arms bound tightly behind their backs, knelt shivering on the cold concrete floor in one of Wayvelsberg Castle's innermost interrogation rooms. Behind each stood a black-uniformed shooter at rigid attention, a heavy, black truncheon at the ready. The boy and his three female companions appeared much the worse for the interrogations they'd just undergone.

"How old are you?" Senior Stormleader Herten Gorman asked the boy. As a senior stormleader, a grade in the Special Group equivalent to that of full colonel in the Confederation Armed Forces, Gorman was the ranking officer in the SG.

"The spirit lives," the young man muttered. "Down with the usurper!" His defiance, although genuine, was somewhat marred by the tears and snot all over his face.

Gorman nodded to the shooter, a rank equivalent to that of private in the army, standing behind the boy, and he jammed his truncheon into the young man's kidneys.

The three girls howled in terror. After the boy stopped retching and got his breath back, Gorman said, "I ask you again, how old are you?"

"S-Seven-teen," the young man gasped.

"Good. And what is your name?"

"Down—Down with the usurper," the young man croaked.

Gorman nodded at the shooter, who raised his truncheon again, but Dominic de Tomas, who'd been standing by silently, stepped forward and held up a hand. "That will be enough," he said, and the man returned to the position of attention. Gorman looked questioningly at his leader. De Tomas nodded. "That will be enough," he repeated. "Tell me your name," he demanded of the young man.

"Chris—Christopher Graf," the boy mumbled.

"They call themselves the Order of the Yellow Rose, my leader," Gorman offered.

"They are all second-year students at the College of the Immaculate Conception, a liberal arts school founded by the Fathers of Padua, Cardinal O'Lanners's religious order."

"O'Lanners," De Tomas repeated, and nodded.

"You murdered him!" one of the girls screamed, staring up defiantly at the two.

Gorman glanced at de Tomas, who shook his head no; the stormer behind the girl made no move to punish her for the outburst.

Gorman regarded the girl and was struck by the bright blue of her eyes. Her body, despite the recent beatings she'd received, was still in the full bloom of youth. He wondered briefly if she might be the type de Tomas had asked him to find to be his consort, but he rejected that thought immediately. She was less than half his leader's age. They had nothing in common. After sex, what would they talk about? Burning heretics? He almost laughed aloud at the thought. But she'd still be a virgin, unless that boy had already deflowered her, the lucky little swine. The men of the Special Group had strict standing orders never to take sexual advantage of their prisoners.

"Ah, yes, my dear, we executed the dear old cardinal," de Tomas said. "He was just too goddamned stupid to be allowed to live any longer. You are ‘students,’

then, at this ‘College of the Inaccurate Reception’?" A storm man, a sergeant, standing behind one of the girls burst out in laughter at the pun. "Get that man's name, Gorman!" de Tomas shouted, pointing at the storm man, who stopped laughing immediately.

"He is a good soldier, my leader!" Gorman protested.

"I don't know about that, my dear Gorman," de Tomas replied, "but he laughs at my jokes, and I want to keep him close by after this. Very well, then what have these little bastards been up to?"

"This!"
Gorman held out a crumpled leaflet. "They were caught distributing hundreds of these seditious lies!"

The leaflet read:

THE DAY OF REKONING HAS COME! THE REKONING OF

KINGDOM'S YOUTH WITH THE MOST ABOMINABLE TYRANNY

THAT OUR PEOPLE HADS EVER SUFFERED! BRING DOWN

DOMINIC DE TOMAS AND HIS MINIONS! FORWARD IN THE FIGHT

FOR OUR FREE SLEF-DETERMINATION, WITHOUT WHITCH

SPIRITUAL VALUES CANNOT BE CREATED AND DESTORY THE

TERROR OF THE SPECIAL GROUP BY THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT!

DOWN WITH DOMINIC DE TOMAS.

"They didn't waste any time getting started," de Tomas mused. "Vocabulary, purple. Punctuation unsure. Double-check your spelling," he advised the young man.

"You misspelled a word in the final sentence." He crumpled the leaflet and dropped it to the floor. He turned to an overstormer, a rank equivalent to captain in the Marines, who'd been standing by the door. "Clean them up. Take them home. I want you to personally escort each to his home. Leave them in the custody of their parents with a warning—and my best wishes. Accentuate my best wishes to their parents. I am giving them back the lives of their children. Then I want you to take a platoon to the college campus. Hang the dean in the quad. Post a detail to make sure the corpse hangs there until it rots. Let the faculty know, any more of this nonsense and we close down the college." He whirled and headed for the door, Gorman close behind.

"My leader! Those young puppies are traitors! Are you just going to let them go, to continue spreading their treason?"

"They deserve to be hung for their poor prose." De Tomas laughed. "What's education coming to on Kingdom, eh, Gorman?" He paused in the hallway outside and put a hand on Gorman's shoulder. "Look, my dear Herten, we have to have the goodwill of the people with us to succeed from now on. We can't get that by killing their children. Those kids, back there? No, Herten, I think their days of treason are well over after what your shooters did to them."

Gorman reflected that not so long ago de Tomas would have fed the students into the furnace and not thought twice about it.

"I know what you're thinking, Herten." De Tomas wagged a finger at Gorman.

"But we are no longer the Collegium, with a license to kill whomever we want. That worked fine—was actually fun, wasn't it?—when there was nobody really in charge on Kingdom. But all that's changed now." He paused. "And remember this: every man has his price. You find out what that is, and he's yours to control. For some it's money, for others, power, and so on. But the ‘price’ of all parents is the lives of their children. Save their children for them and they'll do anything you want. The word will get around about this morning's little incident, Herten, and the parents of those kids will think I'm a saint. One of our major propaganda themes from now on is that we do what we do for the ‘good of the children.’"

"Well, with all due respect, my leader," Gorman said, adroitly shifting his argument in keeping with what de Tomas had just announced, "then executing the dean of the college might not be such a wise move—in keeping with your new policy, that is. He is well-respected in the community, and such an action might alienate some of the most prominent people, people whose cooperation we will need."