Dancers in the Afterglow (5 page)

Seventy-three years after Bartol Lin claimed the place, Ondine was a wilderness paradise, teeming with life.

Lin himself supervised the final stages. Sixteen strategically placed cities were to be sparkling resorts, places where any kind of pleasure could be found—for a price. The Lin Corporation controlled everything. The gambling was guaranteed honest; justice was swift for those who disobeyed. Sex? Any kind, your perfect match guaranteed. Want to hunt a lion? Fine. Catch king sturgeon in a mountain lake? Great. The sixteen resorts could accommodate you whatever your dreams or desires.

For a price, of course.

And it paid. Oh, how it paid. It was the regular shore-leave port of call for just about everybody's service. It was
the
place to go, the
only
place to go. Lin even let the Groupies in.

They were called that because they were generally reflections of larger types of groups in society—disaffecteds, political, religious, or otherwise—whose followings, unlike those of the giants, were quite small. They made convenient villagers in the ulterior, tiny pockets of humanity that could live their own way—as long as they didn't foul up their surroundings—and, incidentally, provide human eyes and ears for the remote spots at no cost to Lin,

Nine million people, eventually, looking after the needs of an estimated six to twelve million tourists, year-round.

Lin retired there, in a way, living like a monarch and being treated like one. He died there, too, when he forgot to strap himself into the deck chair from which he was fishing on his yacht. He hooked one too big for him, was pulled over, and drowned.

But the corporation lived on, and Ondine lived. The dream lived.

Until the Machists attacked.

Man had discovered a few intelligent, nonhuman species as he spread, but most were too different to have much to offer, and they were all planetbound, primitive by human standards.

And then one day, a scout named Greedy discovered a world that was different. Populated by nonhuman land mammals that resembled giant raccoons. They had cities, factories, agriculture—and spaceports.

Creedy never returned. He had reached the edge of another expanding culture, the Machists; and he was absorbed, or destroyed, or whatever.

It was decades before anybody else learned of the other empire. When word came, it was the Machists— they named themselves—with the story of Creedy and an offer to join their empire, which, they said, was made up of tens of thousands of different races all united in a single culture. It was their aim to spread this culture as far as possible, as long as possible, uniting all intelligent creatures in a common union.

The Combine, never well organized to begin with, debated, hemmed, hawed, and finally sent out word that they welcomed contact, trade, and a mutual exchange of ideas.

This announcement seemed to upset the Machists. They hadn't, as it turned out, issued an invitation to humanity.

They had issued an ultimatum.

And they were strong, hard, and tough. They had done such things before, it was clear. Humanity needed the quick loss of only three worlds to unite against the common threat, but much, much longer to learn how to fight an interstellar war.

The Machists gobbled up world after world. Finally, enough strength and experience had been gained by humanity to enable it to dig in and fight. The Machist empire was indeed huge, and the human worlds relatively compact at about a million cubic light-years.

They held, and for some time the front had been stable, each side parrying and thrusting along it but unable to broaden its base.

Stalemate.

And now, thirteen years after the last Machist conquest, they had taken Ondine. It was a small prize, perhaps; a poor prize for such an expanding culture. But it was theirs now, and it had been man's.

Naval Command fretted, and fumed, and puzzled, and wondered why they had picked Ondine, and what motives lay behind their steadfast determination to hold an untenable military position as long as possible.

One thing everyone was certain of: the Machists weren't fools. They never did anything without a reason. They'd been at this sort of thing for centuries, certainly, perhaps for millennia.

The only thing everybody knew was that humanity, now geared entirely to a war footing, was building up its forces at a fantastic rate. Time was on the side of the defenders.

It was assumed the Machists knew this, too.

What did they expect to gain from Ondine?

Piangendo

THE PHONE BUZZED. GENJI DIMORDA HEARD IT FIRST
as a ghostly, far-off thing, and it was some time before he realized that it was a real sound with some relevance to him.

I ought to ignore it, he told himself. Probably some schmuck with romantic dreams of Moira.

The buzzing persisted, and he finally bowed to its demand. He knew Moira would never get it; not only did she sleep with blinders and earplugs, but it would have been beneath her to answer her own phone, anyway.

He groped for the instrument on the bedside table and punched its glowing, dull-red button.

"Yeah?" he snapped.

"Mr. DiMorda—this is the hotel security service," the caller began, and suddenly he was wide awake. Thoughts of injury, burglary, everything he could imagine washed through his mind. He sat up, switched the light on hurriedly, and was relieved to see Moira still asleep in her bed and the room apparently undisturbed.

"What's the matter?" he asked nervously.

"We've just been informed that Ondine was attacked and captured by the Machists," the security agent told him. "Everyone is confined to his hotel or dwelling until further notice."

The news didn't sink in, not right at the start. He'd never followed the war, or politics, or anything like that. Such things were so far away and so unimportant. He took refuge in the familiar.

"Look, buddy, I don't give a damn about politics. We're supposed to shoot a commercial at dawn."

The voice sounded disgusted and more than a little tired.

"Mr. DiMorda, there is no more commercial. There is no contact with anybody anymore. Mr. DiMorda, we're trapped on Ondine, which is about to be occupied by an alien race that can do any damn thing it wants with us. We're prisoners, Mr. DiMorda. All of us."

There was a click and the line went dead. The security man didn't really care how they took the news. He had three hundred eighty rooms to call.

Genji sat on the edge of his bed, unable to move. At first he didn't know what to do, then his mind clicked and he dialed the spaceport. There were several long rings, then a click.

"Listen, I need two tick—" he managed before an automated voice cut him off.

"I'm sorry, but the spaceport in Lamarine and all spaceports and planetary public transportation centers are closed until further notice," it said. "Please do not move from your current home or hotel."

He sat back down on the bed, bouncing inanely.

"Jesus!" he said, over and over.

The phone rang in a room several stories below. A man stirred, suddenly discovering that his right arm was almost numb. The girl had been resting on it.

Grimacing in pain, he freed himself from her and reached over, punched the button on the phone.

As this was his two hundred and fourteenth call, the security man was by now painfully aware of the difficulty of his simple duty. "Sir," he began, "Ondine has been taken over by the Machists. They are currently occupying this and all other cities on the planet, and they have ordered me to call everyone in the hotel and tell them to stay put until further notice."

Fear gripped him suddenly. "It's not possible!" he protested. "The navy—"

"Is gone, sir," completed the weary caller. "Everybody's gone but the people. Excuse me, I have more calls to make."

There was a click, and everything went dead.

He sat, half erect, thinking of the call and its consequences. Ondine! Of all places, Ondine! And him! In the middle of it!

The girl turned slowly on one side, reminding him that, for once, he was not alone.

He looked at her in the near-darkness, noting that what little light there was came not from boardwalk reflections but from false dawn.

He shook her lightly. At first she didn't stir. He shook her again, a little harder this time.

"Wake up!" he said sharply. "C'mon! Please wake up!"

She stirred, wiped her eyes, opened them a trifle. "What's the matter?" she grumped.

"The hotel—they just called. They said the Machists have captured Ondine and we're all prisoners!"

She yawned strongly. "That's interesting," she managed, and started to go back to sleep again.

He fumed, but did nothing for a moment. Then he got up, suddenly, and turned the lights up slightly, enough to see the keyboard near the bed. He punched
VID
and watched the wall that had been so transparent and open to the sea suddenly flicker and change.

There was a scene, kind of fuzzy, of the spaceport area and the main roads out of it. The streets were crowded with traffic, mostly heading away. The area was brightly lit, and, in the background, several huge, squat ships sat like great golden cockroaches. They weren't anything like the ships he knew; they were alien. Machist ships.

"... this perch is all we have managed so far," a voice was saying excitedly. "There seem to be a large number of troop transports rolling, and we can see some Ondine trucks and busses being pulled up, but nothing else. Back to you, Rolfe."

The scene shifted to two bleary-eyed correspondents. One, a distinguished-looking man with a bald head and goatee, looked out at the televisor.

"And that's it so far from our rooftop perch," he concluded, then shifted manner and position.

"Repeating what has happened, at about 17:30 yesterday the Machists launched a surprise attack in full force for Ondine, catching the navy totally unprepared. The battle ended about two hours ago, with the crippling of our main defense ships. The navy had no choice but to destroy its supplies here and evacuate what it could before it was cut off. Since that time we have been receiving instructions from the Machists that everyone is to stay where they are, no matter where they are, or be subject to immediate execution. We repeat, they say they will kill anyone attempting to move in the city, and we already know of dozens of incidents where this has occurred.

"About an hour ago four giant transport ships of the Machist fleet put down at the spaceport and began unloading what appears to be troops. We understand from our offices in the other cities that the same thing is also taking place at Ondine's four other spaceports. Machist troops are fanning out all over the city..."

What do they look like, I wonder? the man mused. They were supposed to be multiracial. What strange forms were advancing in those dark trucks?

The noise front the televisor finally woke the girl, and she sat up, uncomfortably rubbing her eyes.

"What the hell?" she managed.

"I told you," he responded, still watching the 'visor, which had shifted back to the rooftop view. "The Machists took over Ondine last night while we slept The navy's gone, beat it out of here. Those are the Machists you see there, occupying the city."

She saw, and shivered at the endless stream of forms moving along the boulevards. The scene had an unreal quality, like watching a movie. She shivered again, then asked quietly, "What will they do to us?"

He shrugged. "Who knows?"

She looked again at the military procession on the screen.

"
They
sure as hell do," she said quietly.

Sten Rolvag picked up his transceiver, noting that he'd cleared the mountains now.

"Sten to Kiley, Sten to Kiley. You there, Kile?"

There was a crackle, and then a faint voice said, "Go ahead, Sten."

"You heard the news?" he asked gruffly.

"About the Machists, you mean? Yeah, I been on the damn network all night alertin' folks," came the thin, reedy voice of the emergency monitor for the mountains district.

"Tell everybody you can to take whatever they can and set up bush camps," Rolvag told him crisply. "They'll have the locations of the base camps from company records in a matter of hours. They're already down, you know."

"Oh, shit," came the response. "You think that's really necessary?"

"You goddamn better well believe it is," the ex-marine replied emphatically. "We don't know what they do to people when they catch them, but I
do
know they round everybody up and march 'em out of the cities and set up c-camps. You tell everybody that before they jam you. Tell 'em no fires, nothin' that'll give 'em away. As soon as we can we'll try and get in contact with everybody in the area and talk over what to do. Right now, the name of the game is not to get caught"

The man at the other end gave a low whistle. "Okay, Sten, I'll get on it. My God! Who'd ever have thought this would happen
here?"

"Yeah, I know," Rolvag sympathized. "Look, they're probably monitoring right now, so I won't say where I'm goin'. Just remember the Hurley Mama's. You beat it there when you're through. Okay?"

"Hurley Mama's, right," the comm repeated. Then he added, "Good luck and God be with ya, Sten."

"You too, Kiley," Rolvag responded, suddenly feeling empty. He switched off.

"What's that about Hurley Mama?" the marine asked in her little girl's voice.

"Oh, some time back Edun Ferricks, another guide, had this big, fat couple named Hurley out in the bush. Well, there they are, these two hippos and Edun, and suddenly the Hurley woman goes into yelling about pain and all that stuff. There were some caves nearby so Edun and Mr. Hurley, they get her into one just before the fat woman gives birth to twins! And she was so damned fat she didn't even know she was pregnant!" Nobody laughed at the story, not even Rolvag. "So that's where we're going? To those caves?" one of the women asked.