Jack Chalker - Priam's Lens

And, as the night wore on, he had the strangest feeling that something had fallen to earth. He still felt the presences above, sort of, but now he felt the same kind of draw down here, to the south, where the great sea was, and where he’d been taught that there was nothing but monsters and endless deep waters.

They would spend the next two days patrolling up and down the riverbank, looking for anyone alive, but if anyone else had survived, they had taken off for the brush. The sounds the two women had told about were made by a hollowed reed specially carved to sound a deep, penetrating note. It was reserved for the greatest of emergencies, and would bring the scouts in and also tell the people to grab what they could and scatter and hide because the defenses had failed.

He had never heard that sound except in practices, nor had any of the others, but they were all properly drilled. If the family could not be defended, it must scatter and preserve as many as possible and merge again when the danger was past.

It was possible that many were now hunting for one another over there, on the other side, but nobody was showing themselves by the river, nothing but some sad corpses.

We should gather them and give them burial,” Littlefeet said, feeling oddly guilty that he’d not been there and had survived mostly for that reason alone.

“No!” Spotty responded. “None of the Hunters will guess that any of us could make it across the river. Some will come, and if they see it like this, they’ll just figure, with no battle signs, that the bodies floated down or from the other side and that’ll be that. If we do anything more, then they’ll know there are some alive on this side and maybe go on a hunt. Their souls are in heaven now and ours aren’t. Leave what’s left.”

He nodded sadly. “Then let’s get away from here. This is an evil place.”

“But to where?” Froggy asked him. “There’s nowhere left to go.”

“We’re on the right side of the river,” he pointed out. “We know this area, at least beyond this new river. I say we follow the river down and stay just out of sight, but look for signs of others across the way. They’ll have gone south along the river because it’s the only way to find any others. If we find any signs, maybe we can get ’em across. If not, at least we’ll know. After that, well, we’ll see about finding Family marks and be on our own. They’ll either find us or else we’ll be starting a new Family. What else can we do?”

“South…” Froggy looked out at the river. “How far south? If this is like all the other rivers we know, it’ll get bigger and wider as it goes on. If they’re on the other side, they’re gonna stay there.”

He sighed. “Maybe. But what else can we do? C’mon. There are no nurseries now. We’re all three scouts and guards and gatherers. Let’s find something to eat and then get on.”

How could he explain about the pull? How could he explain when even he didn’t know what caused it, or what he was being drawn to? Like everything else, he knew he’d simply have to trust his instincts and hope that the pull was God’s and not any of the demons’.

As time grew near for the run to the surface, tension mounted within the whole party, not just among those who were going. This was the start of the truly dangerous part of the mission, and none of them even knew what the full price of failure would be, only that they might well be the only hope the human race had for survival.

Katarina Socolov had been cool to Harker and everybody else for much of the time, but suddenly she was quite friendly to him. He suspected that it was less his magnetic charm than the sudden realization that she was going down to a primitive world so alien they might not have imagined just how different it would be, and she was going to be the only woman along with three big military guys, a priest, and a Pooka. N’Gana and Mogutu were good men on your side in a fight, that was certain, but she wasn’t even sure how they felt about women, although she knew full well that they would have preferred she not be along. Not because she was a woman, she suspected, but because she wasn’t military, wasn’t One of Them. They weren’t too thrilled about the priest, either, but they weren’t the ones paying for this trip.

Still, of them all, Harker, who was One of Them but also an outsider to this happy group, seemed to be the one common sense said would be the best friend to have in a hostile environment.

The infiltration team had left the scientists in the control center, attempting to master the system and determine that it would work as advertised. Even if the ones who were going down to the surface were totally successful and got themselves or at least the code data out, they knew they would get only one try with the weapons system. If it worked, that was all they would need; if it didn’t, they were literally dead ducks.

The tiny lifeboat-style ship that would take them down to the surface was cramped and not built with comfort in mind. It could take up to eight people, more than was needed, but those eight would be stacked in tubelike compartments unable to see or do much of anything. There wasn’t even an intercom; that had been stripped out, lest its use alert the Titans below of something unusual.

“You look uncomfortable, Mister Harker,” Alan Mogutu commented with a slight, sardonic smile.

One of these days somebody’s gonna knock that superior grin off your face, you asshole, Harker thought, but instead he replied, “I’m not used to going into a hostile situation without a suit. These camouflage fatigues and boots are no substitute.”

“True,” the mercenary responded. “Still, it is essential to occasionally test yourself against the elements with nothing but your own body, skills, and wits.”

Colonel N’Gana looked up from where he was securing some equipment in one of the small boat’s compartments and added, “Your suit would be your coffin down there. That’s the problem. Always has been. If they notice you at all, they will simply drain all power from your equipment. We don’t know how they do it, but nothing we’ve tried in the way of insulation works at thicknesses you can carry around. That old weapons station back there, for example, is shielded, but the shields involved are of very rare and expensive substances and they’re over a meter thick. Even then, once that shield is breached just long enough to direct fire, just once, and used—they’ll know. At that point, they’ll have a matter of minutes, perhaps as few as seven minutes, depending on how ready our friends down there might be to respond to a threat from such an unlikely area, to live. There is no way they could be evacuated in that amount of time without the ship itself being caught and drained by probable planetary defenses. No, this is one for history, Harker. We do it and we’re the heroes of all humanity. We fail, we die. It’s that simple. I wonder just how many people could actually pull this off, getting down there and doing this job with minimal power, almost like in the ancient times.”

“We’ve all gone soft,” Mogutu continued as N’Gana went back to checking the pack one last time. “I doubt if any of us—you, me, even the colonel—would be any sort of match for a Roman legionnaire in Julius Caesar’s army, or Alexander the Great’s infantry, Ramses II’s conquering horde, or in particular Genghis Khan’s. Imagine those Mongols—they had the largest empire on earth and held it without modern communication. The only thing that stopped them from conquering all of ancient Asia, Europe, and probably Africa as well was that they kept knocking off the conquest to go home every time they needed to elect a new emperor. You much on the ancient history of our people?”