The Legend That Was Earth (49 page)

They still had the link to Cairns, but it would be six or seven hours before Cairns would be able to link with the Querl. The unpublicized news from Beijing, obtained via Di Milestro's line from Sacramento, was even more alarming than what had happened in the previous forty-eight hours in the Midwest. A Chinese nuclear antisatellite missile had knocked out a major Hyadean vessel in orbit, and the Hyadeans were retaliating against military targets on the Asian mainland. Nothing of the kind had been heard in Australia. The entire global situation was unstable. Collapse into universal catastrophe seemed only a matter of time.

"I don't understand it," Cade said to Yassem and Vrel. "Why isn't Jeye doing anything to restrain them—after what's happened here? He must know it's all over."

"But that's the problem," Yassem said. "I don't think they
do
know. It's as Major Gerofsky feared. They're still talking about a decisive struggle going on along the Mississippi valley—as if they still think they really can be in Washington in days. None of the advisers there understands how fast Hyadeans can move. They've lost touch with the real world."

"Get Chester to find someone up there that he can talk sense into," Cade pleaded. "We may have to be out of here by morning. I'm not even sure the plane will be able to fly."

They slept, exhausted, in an adjacent trailer serving as a billet. As Cade was dropping off, he heard the first of the helicopters coming in, bringing wounded to the ambulance planes. Nyarl was still over in the signals dugout, sorting through clips that Gerofsky and Hudro had sent via the data line and adding his own histories and commentaries for the benefit of the Chryseans. Sounds of gunfire and explosions came continuously from the direction of Wichita like dull, intermittent thunder.

* * *

Cade regained consciousness sluggishly to the feeling that something was strange. A reflex inside him didn't want to know what. It wanted to retreat back into sleep and not face any more of reality. But a more responsible part of himself still in control forced him back to wakefulness.

The distant booming was still going on, but he had already learned to tune that out. Nearer, everything was too quiet. There were no sounds of helicopter rotors or the roars of planes taking off. He sat up in the bunk and looked around the trailer. Marie was still fast asleep. So was Nyarl—for once—and Hudro, who must have returned with Gerofsky sometime in the middle of the night. Voices sounded nearby outside, followed by a truck motor starting up. Cade felt a mind-deadening weariness. It was as if the adrenaline charge that had kept him going through the previous few days had finally worn off, letting him sink to rock bottom. He had no recollection of the names of the officer who had received them or the signals corporal. They were just faces in a daily pageant that unrolled, and beyond the immediate object of staying alive, was ceasing to mean anything. And right now, he admitted to himself, he was scared. He didn't care that much about the Federation, what happened on Chryse, or great plans for how things would be a hundred years from now. What mattered was getting through until next week.

He swung his legs down to the floor and pulled on his boots. His face, when he rubbed it, felt stubbly and greasy. He went through to the washroom at the end of the trailer and ran water into the metal basin. The water was cold. The only towel was wet. He dried himself with tissue, came back to put on his shirt and jacket, and went outside.

The scene in daylight was the kind of litter that only the military in wartime can produce. Cartons, cases, drums, and debris were everywhere, with scatterings of dead cartridge cases, oddments of ammunition, tangles of wire, emptied food cans and rations packs, remnants of clothing. All that was left of the air traffic were several disabled planes and a helicopter, which a demolition crew was wiring with charges. A huge pall of smoke hung in the sky to the northwest. The remainder of the detachment that hadn't already left was congregating around a mix of cars, trucks, a couple of tankers, and other vehicles in the final stages of loading. Some civilians had appeared in a gaggle of heavily loaded cars and pickup trucks standing along the road at the end of the strip. Evidently, they were pulling out but had decided it would be safer to stay with the soldiers. Several men were rummaging among the piles of discarded supplies. Gerofsky and the C22-E's crew were conferring by the aircraft, parked fifty yards or so away. They saw Cade emerge. Gerofsky and Powell came over.

"We've got a problem with one of the pumps," Powell informed him. "Davis has rigged a temporary fix, but it needs a part we don't have. If it fails, I wouldn't trust the other engine alone to keep us up. We can risk it, but we might not be so lucky finding a place to get down next time. The alternative is to go with these guys in one of the trucks."

Cade didn't like the thought of leaving all that equipment while it might still have some use. He looked at Gerofsky. "What do you think, Major?"

"I say we risk it. Look at the jam we ran into yesterday—and that was up among hills. Everything's going to be squeezing through Wichita." A series of cracking sounds rippled from the north. They looked and saw the smoke of air bursts a mile or two off, that had come in several seconds previously. "And that's going to get worse," Gerofsky added.

"Where do we head for?" Cade asked.

"Anywhere. Union troops are already in Kansas City. Let's just get out of here."

"That's good enough for me," Cade said. He nodded to Powell. "Okay, let's have her loaded and ready. I'll get the others up."

* * *

Wichita had become a bottleneck of retreating infantry, armor, and support columns, and streams of refugees converging northward from Oklahoma City and Tulsa, and west from the region south of Kansas City toward routes west through Dodge City and Pueblo. The area had been under attack through the night, and by the time the C22-E skirted low over the city on the southern side, presented a virtually unbroken spectacle of burning and devastation.

Connecting the camera directly to one of the cabin displays, Nyarl brought telescopic views of knocked-out tanks, cratered malls and highways, streets ablaze, strewn with bodies and overturned vehicles. In one place, an overpass had fallen on a line of army trucks and yellow schoolbuses. A suburban airfield was covered with the wreckage of dozens of planes caught on the ground. Stranded vehicles were everywhere, their occupants sitting outside waiting for direction, besieging dressing stations and aid posts, or simply taking what they could and joining a tide of stragglers heading onward toward the west on foot, or at least just getting clear of the city.

Radio traffic was primarily local and concerned with emergencies: a hospital somewhere was on fire and being evacuated; a supply battalion was out of reserves of gasoline; a plane was in trouble and needed a directional fix. From an armchair up in the sky, it was easy to let it all feel unreal and detached. But just looking at Marie's face as they listened to the snatches of people in fear, people dying, calling for help, others just trying to do their jobs, forced Cade to be mindful that every one was a tragedy happening to somebody right now, each representative of a hundred others that they didn't know about, and very probably no one ever would know about. The pointlessness and the waste of it all came to him then in a way as never before. The inexhaustible potential of human creativity, and what it could produce, the limitless resource of young, educated minds to turn worlds into gardens, tame the power that drove stars, bring life and consciousness to the cosmos. And instead of what could have been, how much of it was squandered on death-dealing and destruction? The Hyadeans had created a whole legend out of what Earth could have been—what they described as the world of dreams. Was it to end as a nightmare?

As they came around onto a course heading for Denver, the skyline behind erupted in a series of black fountains from another salvo of missiles descending on the stricken city.

Nyarl made contact with an airborne command post flying somewhere above Colorado. The latest they had heard was that the attacks on China were now public news and intensifying. Houston was in Union hands, San Antonio was threatened, and Chicago encircled. Ellis in Washington was demanding unconditional surrender, but Jeye, following Beijing, had vowed to fight on and was escalating the use of battlefield nuclear devices. Nyarl sent off his latest package.

They covered a further four hundred miles, most of it over a flat, checkerboard Kansas landscape of straight roads and rectangular fields before the pump that Davis had jury-rigged failed. Soon afterward, the other engine began misbehaving under the added load, and Powell decided it would be better to land now, while they still had power at all. They were past the Colorado border, above dry prairie grasslands beginning to give way to desert. Powell found a road carrying military traffic widely spaced against air attack, mixed with clusters of civilian vehicles, all heading west, and put down on a stretch of sandy flat close by. The nose wheel collapsed, probably from a combination of plowing into the soft ground and the rough landing on the ridge the previous day, and they came to a spectacular skidding, grinding halt, shaken but otherwise unharmed.

Nyarl selected a minimum of equipment to be carried, while the others sorted out personal kit, tools, maps and documents, and supplies from the plane's galley. Davis broke out a cache of weapons that he had acquired and distributed them in addition to the ones that Marie and Gerofsky were already carrying, giving Cade an automatic rifle. Cade had never fired a gun. Marie promised him an improvised lesson.

Hudro refused. "No," he said. "I see too much. I no longer carry weapons."

A STAFF CAR STOPPED IN RESPONSE to Gerofsky's flagging. It was carrying the acting commanding officer of a motorized infantry regiment pulling back to a redoubt that was being formed south of Denver. Apparently, the armies of the central front were attempting to consolidate a line along the eastern edge of the Rockies. The vehicles were already crammed with wounded and stragglers picked up along the way, and the group from the downed plane had to be spread out among several to find room. Gerofsky squeezed into the staff car with the officers. Koyne insisted on accompanying Hudro in an armored personnel carrier to make it clear to any objectors that "this guy is okay." Nyarl went with Powell and Davis in a supply truck. Cade and Marie found space in an open truck carrying a field-gun crew with their artillery piece hauled behind. Cade felt as if he were back in Brazil after the helicopter crash. But this wasn't happening in Brazil; it was the middle of what used to be the U.S.A. At least, whatever lay ahead this time, he and Marie would face it together.

The air attacks came in at intervals ranging from twenty or thirty minutes to an hour or more. Sometimes they took the form of jets screaming in low to strafe and walk bombs and rockets along the column; at others, air-bursting missiles launched from several miles away. These were Terran weapons systems, not Hyadean, and Cade saw a number of the attacking aircraft brought down. Existence degenerated into a dull, stomach-churning, constant awareness of vulnerability and feeling helpless. The shouts of "
Cover! Air incoming!
"; the sour taste of fear, face pressed to the sand while the ground shuddered and white-hot metal hissed overhead; climbing wearily back into the truck, blurred into a routine that he found himself acting out mechanically with deadened senses. A few images remained etched in his memory: a soldier staggering from a truck that had been hit, one arm and one side of his face a blackened mass; a limbless torso in a ditch; a civilian bus with corpses hanging out of the shattered windows. And he began to understand how it was possible for people to see others killed, maimed, burned, blown apart, and no longer be capable of feeling anything. When survival became the driving consideration, something primitive and protective took over, shrinking one's focus to a narrow world of self and the few who qualified for the time being as one's "own."

Changing drivers in shifts, the depleted column carried on through the night through Pueblo, the terrain becoming more broken and craggy. Flashes and lights continued to light up the horizon all around, but the immediate attacks slackened to a few intermittent missiles coming in just often enough to make rest impossible when physical and nervous exhaustion craved relief into sleep. Cade sat hunched by Marie, his body aching and protesting more as with every mile the truck's metal-and-fabric seats seemed to get harder and grow new sharp corners. If life ever returned to normal, and if they survived to enjoy it, he would never complain about airlines again, he told himself.

Daybreak brought a scene of dry gulches, mesas, and rocky bluffs rising among broken, dusty mountains of brown and gray ahead. This seemed to be the outer edge of the defensive line, with forward positions being prepared and activity visible away into the distance on both sides. The commander called a halt to regroup the regiment's scattered vehicles, give the stragglers time to catch up, and assess losses. Two trucks were missing, which was not as bad as the attrition that some units had suffered. One of them, however, was the one that Nyarl, Powell, and Davis had been riding in. Radio calls for it to report in brought no response. Hudro and Koyne were the most shaken by the news—understandably.

Heroic and desperate, maybe, but it all seemed an invitation for a repeat of the carnage that had happened yesterday. Cade and the others made themselves as useful as they could, all the time waiting apprehensively; but as the morning drew on, the skies remained strangely quiet. Subtly but significantly, something had changed. Everyone could sense it, but nobody was quite able to say what.

Cade watched a tank crew carrying out repairs under camouflage netting to something in the engine compartment of their machine, which they had opened up. None of them could have been more than in their early twenties, except maybe the captain, who could have been brushing twenty-five. They worked calmly and competently, despite the stress and fatigue they had to have suffered over the past few days. Cade had never had much of a head for machinery or technicalities—his talents lay more with human foibles—but he had always respected and marveled at the mentalities that could conceive and construct generating plants, jet planes, automobiles, and telephone networks, and generally bring into being the world of material productivity that enabled his world to exist comfortably and prosperously. He marveled at it now, seeing the exposed, precisely machined gears, tangles of piping, bundles of color-coded cables snaking like vines to reach mysterious cylinders and inscrutable metal boxes. What had it taken in human worth and ingenuity, education, training, dedication to make possible the display of skill that he was witnessing now? And by how much more would that need to be multiplied to take into account everything else that was going on across the continent right now? And then add the factories that had produced it all, and behind them all the mining, drilling, rolling, forging, refining, processing that sustained them. For what? The price in expended human value was incalculable.