The Shadow and Night (105 page)

Forty minutes later, the sled glided to a halt in a shallow but steep-sided river valley. It was still dark; indeed, the night was now thicker and more impenetrable than ever before.

There were whispered commands from Frankie; the sled sank slowly to the ground, and the faint hum of the engine died away. Stiffly, but with great care, the men dismounted from the sled and, trying not to make the slightest noise, began taking out their weapons and their packs.

In low whispers, Frankie assigned duties. “Three hours sleep, one hour on guard. If you're not on guard now, go and sleep. Everyone keep your weapons next to you.” Then he turned and touched Merral on the arm. “If it's all right with you, Captain, shall we go and take a look?”

Putting on light-enhancing goggles that, in happier days, Merral had used for monitoring wildlife, he and Frankie grabbed their guns and picked their way down the stony valley bottom. There was little vegetation, just straggly thistles and wiry grass clumps around the flanks of the sluggish shallow stream. After a hundred meters, they began climbing up a slope, trying not to slip on the loose stones. A few minutes' labor brought them to just below the rounded summit, and there they hesitated for a moment.

If we are in the right place,
Merral thought,
then just over the top will be the lake and, on the other side of that, will be the ship.

Frankie gestured him forward. They crawled up on their hands and knees and, lying uncomfortably on the cold and pebbly ground, peered eastward.

With the image distorted in color and texture by the goggles, it took time for Merral to work out what it was that he was seeing. Before them was the rough descent down to the lake edge, and beyond the dark, immobile waters he could see the other shoreline. In the middle of that, like some sort of strange reclining ebony sculpture, was the intruder vessel.

“The ship.” Merral's whispered words rang with soft wonderment and fear. At first, all he could make out was the general shape of the intruder craft. Even when Frankie passed him a fieldscope, he could still make out little more than he had seen on Vero's images. There was the single front leg, the paired and larger rear legs, and between them, the forward-descending entrance ramp. He could see no sign of life but felt that in the irresolvable blackness around the ship there could easily have been any number of sentries.

Merral put down the scope. Although actually seeing this vessel added little new to what he had already observed on the images, there was nevertheless something almost overwhelming about the experience. The intruder ship had been progressively an abstract theory, a computer image, and a crude piece of imagery. Now, at last, it was a solid and tangible reality, and with that the whole operation had assumed a dire immediacy. After all, with a real ship went real battles and real deaths.

Frankie tapped Merral's arm and together they slid down below the crest of the hill.

“Well, it's
there,
” Frankie said in low, awed tones, and Merral knew that he had, in his own way, felt the same arresting intrusion of reality.

“Did you expect something else?” he asked.

“I don't know,” Frankie answered, and Merral could make out his shrugging his shoulders. “I suppose, sir, that's the thing about this business. I've given up knowing what to expect. I was concerned, I suppose, that it might have gone. To have been a bad dream.”

“No, it's there. But that may be the bad dream.”

“Yeah. So it's as we planned then, sir?” Merral identified disquiet in the voice. “It looks awful big. To try and blast that front leg and maybe get a hole in the ramp doorway?”

“Yes,” Merral answered, sounding more confident than he felt. “We can do it. That's what Perena preferred. Her argument was that we were more likely to disable the ship by concentrating on the front. I think she was also worried that there might be fuel at the rear.”

Frankie seemed to chew on that. “Yeah, sir. It makes sense. Right; I'll make sure we keep a continuous watch on the ship from here. Get us an optic fiber communications link down to the sled. What watch do you want, sir?”

“Me? I'll take the last hour before dawn. I need to be here to watch the diplomatic team approach anyway.”

“Yeah, I worry about them,” Frankie said in a sad voice. “I feel they are going to be in trouble.”

“Yes, I think so too. And I think they know it. I think they are the bravest of the lot of us.”

“True. Anyway, Captain, if it suits you, let's go and get the cable set up to here. Then you can go and snatch some sleep.”

Down by the sled, Merral settled down on a more or less flat spot, put his cutter gun within reach, rolled himself in a thermal blanket, and tried to switch his mind off.

Despite his tiredness, he found sleep elusive. The cold, pebbly ground and the inadequate blanket were factors in keeping him awake, but what ultimately kept sleep at bay were the wild swings of emotion he felt. He struggled against the near certainty of a battle and the unnerving possibility that, in the darkness, a sheet-dragon creature circled above them. To seek relief, Merral turned his mind to warm thoughts of Anya and again felt excited that she cared for him and that he cared for her. Yet from that peak of exhilaration, he would soon slide into guilty feelings about Isabella, and then the fear would return. Eventually sleep came, only to be broken after what seemed mere seconds by a gentle shaking and Philip Matakala's apologetic voice in his ear asking him to wake up.

Stiffly, Merral pulled himself to his feet, yawning and rubbing his face, aware he was covered in a cold dew. His watch told him it was almost five. Now, an hour before dawn, the dark of the western sky was already becoming lighter.

Philip had prepared him a cup of coffee, and Merral gratefully drank it and ate some biscuits. Then putting his armored jacket and the goggles back on, he picked up his gun and walked slowly back down the stream valley. Ahead he could easily make out the figure of the watching soldier on the ridge, the circuitry of his goggles painting his warm body orange against the cold blue of the ground. Carefully, Merral climbed to the summit of the mound and crawled forward to get alongside the man who, hearing his footsteps, turned toward him as he approached.

“Morning,” Merral said quietly.

“Morning, sir. Good to see you. Very good.” Merral recognized who it was and noted the relief in the voice of Lorrin Venn.

“See anything, Lorrin?”

“No, sir, but I feel it.” Merral sensed him shudder. “Nasty-looking ship. Gives me the creeps.” Merral found it hard to remember the bubbly young man whom he had first met and realized that he hadn't heard Lorrin whistle at any time during the night.

“Wish you were back working in Isterrane?”

There was a faint pause. “I won't say, sir, that in the last hour, the idea hasn't come to me,” Lorrin answered; then Merral felt he smiled. “But I asked for this. I asked you to get me in on this. And I'll stick with it. . . .”

“That's the spirit, Lorrin. I can't say I'm very happy about it.”

“Yes. Well, I suppose back in Isterrane it all seemed . . . well, exciting. Like a sort of grand sports event. Know what I mean, sir? I couldn't miss it, could I?”

“No, I guess you couldn't,” Merral replied.

“I've been thinking about this. I mean this is the—I don't know—
strangest
event in the history of the Assembly. This is history in the making. And when it gets talked about in the future, I want to be able to say, ‘I was there.' Yet I'm still a bit scared, sir.”

“I don't blame you, Lorrin. The key thing is, I suppose, to do what you have to do. That's what I tell myself.”

“I'll do my best, sir.”

Merral suddenly felt sorry for Lorrin. “I know you will. Now, any signs of life?”

“I think they vented steam a few minutes ago. A cloud of something warm, but otherwise it's quiet. I thought I saw something move around just now below the ship, but I couldn't be sure.”

“Nothing on this side then. No birds or bats?”

“No, sir,” Lorrin said with just a hint of hesitation. “But I find your eyes play tricks after a while.”

“In what way?” Merral asked, feeling that something lay behind his words.

“Well . . . I thought I heard footsteps earlier. Lee Rodwen was with me and he agreed. But there was no sign of anything. Or anybody. But we felt, well . . . watched.”

Unsettled by his words, Merral glanced around with the night goggles but saw nothing but cold ground and a gnarled pine tree to his left.

After dismissing Lorrin, Merral stared again at the ship for several minutes but saw nothing new. He found the silence odd; it was a strange and tense quietness, as if some colossal storm was brewing. He slid his goggles up and squinted into the darkness with his unaided eyesight. Above him, the stars were glowing. In the sky ahead, the pure blackness of night was now turning into shades of indigo, and above the jagged horizon the stars were fading out. Indeed, by straining his eyes, Merral could make out the silhouettes of the eastern Rim Ranges standing black against the purpling sky. Wreathes of mist drifted this way and that in the slight westerly breeze.

Merral slid the goggles back down and examined the ship again with the scope. There was no sign of activity. He gave up looking and concentrated on listening, stretching his senses as far as he could, swinging his head this way and that. He wondered whether Lorrin and Lee had really heard anything. Or had it simply been their imaginations?

He listened carefully, but all he could hear was the faint rustling of the breeze in the branches on the solitary pine tree nearby and the feeble gurgle of water in the stream behind. There was no sound of animal life: no birds, not even the buzz of an insect. Merral felt ill at ease.

Then he looked again at the distant ship and felt suddenly almost overwhelmed by its power and menace. In contrast to that machine, his own force for the initial attack seemed pathetic; a mere sixty men, mostly dragged from college studies barely days ago, with almost every piece of equipment improvised from quarrying, farming, or forestry. True, they had courage and dedication, and Merral knew he could rely on them to do their best, but what he had seemed so puny. Our only real asset is surprise, and even that might have been compromised. . . . Surely, we are like a bunch of village children suddenly thrown into playing a Team-Ball game against the Isterrane champions.

As Merral stared across the still, dark waters of Lake Fallambet Five and considered the sheer inadequacy of his forces, he slipped into silent prayer. Yet, here and now, it seemed that prayer was not easy. Merral was able to say the words in his mind, but as he tried to pray for the day ahead, words were all that they seemed to be. Irritatingly, Anya's form and face seemed to teasingly pop up into his prayers and distract him with guilt and desire. Finally he ended his praying, feeling that there was no answer.

As he considered the situation, Merral felt himself drifting toward self-pity and even anger. Here he was, on the verge of awesome events and about to lead men to possible—even probable—death, and badly in need of God's support. Yet instead, he had silence.
Say something, Lord!
But the silence only continued.

Suddenly Merral heard the tiniest of noises off to the right. He knew with certainty that another man had joined him. He felt a spasm of irritation that he had been so absorbed in his own struggles that he had missed his arrival. Merral swung his head round but, to his surprise, the goggles showed only the cold ground and the single forlorn pine.

I must have imagined it.

As he looked back across the lake to the ship, there was another slight sound from his right. It was as if one of the men was adjusting his position on the ground. Mistrustful now of his goggles, Merral slid them up and peered into the darkness toward where he had heard the sound.

He stopped breathing.

A mere arm's length away from him, a large, dark shape was lying on the ground.

Slowly, taking strained breaths and aware that his hands were shaking, Merral put the goggles back over his eyes. To his surprise, he could make out no form there and no hint of any heat source disturbing the uniform chill blueness of the ground. Alarm threatening to flood his mind, Merral slid the goggles up again and stared to his right. Were his senses playing tricks on him?

The shape was still there and Merral peered at it. He shivered, certain now that something was lying next to him—something the size and shape of a man.

The dark form next to him stirred, and abruptly Merral felt under a gaze that seemed to go right through him. Suddenly he felt terribly exposed, as if he was being examined. An almost irresistible urge to run and hide descended on him.

In the silence the figure spoke. “Man, a time has passed. The war deepens.”

“I'm sorry,” Merral replied, hearing his voice wobbling with fear. “I can't remember your name.”