Barrington Bayley - Collision with Chronos

The yellow face of the dev Chink, Hueh Su-Mueng, came up on the screen. Only a faint habitual expression of distaste came to Brask’s features, and none at all to Limnich’s.

“It appears that your ploy has worked, leader,” Su-Mueng said. “My instruments tell me Retort City’s ship sent down a lighter to the Amhrak reservation, and now has left orbit.”

“So soon?” mused Limnich. “But my tip-off can’t even have reached Heshke yet. There must be other information pipelines at work—either that or he couldn’t stomach life on the reservation!” He smiled unpleasantly.

“I presume that nothing further need delay the expedition?”

“No, I’ll issue the requisite orders.” The remaining work to be done should only take a week or two, he thought. The drive-units had already been constructed to the Chink’s design, and now could be ferried into space to be fitted to the interplanetary spaceships that had been prepared to take them. The men, the weapons, the organisation, were all ready.

It should be a grand adventure, Limnich told himself. He almost wished he could go along.

Herrick had brought in a tape that had appeared on the reconstituted network somehow.

“It shows the closing down of the Bugel reservation,” he said to Heshke, a little apologetically. “You needn’t watch it if you’d rather not.”

“Please go ahead,” Heshke told him, though with a tightening in his stomach.

Herrick put the tape on the playback. “This didn’t come through the usual channels,” he said. “In fact it looks as if it might be a plant.”

“A plant?”

“Yes. The Titans might have wanted us to see it.”

The tape came to life, feeding the screen a long, roughly edited succession of sequences from the cameras of the official recordists, without any proper order or commentary. After a few minutes Heshke found himself wanting to close his eyes.

The landscape was not unlike the one outside his door: dusty and bare. As the Titan units advanced into it their half-tracks sent up clouds of dust which drifted in from the horizon.

The Bugels were a copper-skinned, pigmy-like people of a comparatively low cultural standing – little more than savages, in fact. Never very numerous, their reservation was a small one. They ran hither and thither before the implacable Titan vehicles, facing their end without dignity but with much excitement and terror.

The Titans herded the Bugels into compounds. They were given injections or else shot, and buried in lime pits.

Heshke imagined the same happening here – the clouds of dust as the exterminators rolled forward (during the wars, when operating behind the lines in dev-populated territory, they’d been known as SMD’s – Special Measure Detachments), the compounds, the clerks checking off names against endless lists (though with the Bugels those lists covered only the noble families), the medics giving the injections and the doctors signing death certificates.

From the looks on their faces, the Titans plainly didn’t relish their work. They regarded it as unpleasant, distressing – but necessary. It would have been worse if they’d been killing people; but these were only verminous animals.

Why on Earth had the Titans sent the tape into the Amhrak reservation, Heshke wondered? – if in fact they had, as Herrick suspected. To taunt? To strike fear? Perhaps it was an act of nastiness on the part of some hate-filled official.

Herrick was watching the tape placidly, smoking a tobacco roll, as if he were thinking of something else.

Shiu Kung-Chien and his able assistant Leard Ascar had nearly finished setting up the all-sense transmitter when the vidphone at the other end of the observatory tinkled. A cybernetic servitor rolled forward with the screen, on which the face of Prime Minister Hwen Wu looked out.

“Forgive the intrusion,” Hwen Wu apologised, “but a matter of greatest urgency has arisen. Evidently our posting that young man Hueh Su-Mueng to Earth, so as to end his ‘awkward presence’ here, so to speak, has misfired. He has returned with an invasion fleet.”

“I take it you refer to those lumpish vessels which have been hovering outside my observatory window for the past hour,” Shiu replied with a trace of exasperation. “I had thought they were part of your own improvident plans. Fortunately they appear to rely on reaction motors for close manoeuvring and are no longer jamming our instruments.”

“They’re entirely the work of Hueh Shao’s son and his new friends,” Hwen Wu assured him. “That family seems capable of endless mischief. The invaders have discharged four ship-loads of men through the dock, which they now control, and are rapidly discharging the rest. Haven’t you heard the rumpus? They’re proving quite destructive.”

“Yes, I’ve been aware of an undignified amount of noise and have several times sent out requests for it to be diminished,” Shiu said acidly. “Why are you calling me about it?”

“Well, you’re a cabinet minister,” Hwen Wu pointed out. “I feel we should meet to dicuss the situation. Hueh Su-Mueng has sent a message demanding our unconditional surrender.”

The Prime Minister’s words were punctuated by a low, distant roar: the sound of an explosion.

“Very well,” Shiu consented resignedly. “I’ll come at once.”

He turned to Ascar as the servitor rolled away with the vid-phone. “This really is tiresome,” he complained. “Are your countrymen accustomed to behaving like this?”

“I’m afraid so,” Ascar said laconically.

“Barbarians!” muttered Shiu.

“May I continue in your absence?” Ascar asked politely.

“Yes, of course… you understand everything?”

“Yes, thanks to an unexampled teacher.”

Shiu Kung-Chien departed. Ascar, impatient to get on with it, continued checking the work of the servitors, carefully scanning the streams of calligraphic ideograms that came up on the monitor.

It was damned good to get away from desk-work. He’d been hungering for action for some time.

Titan-Major Brourne stood in a large concourse, a sort of intricate plaza, watching the flood of men, materials and weapons that came surging in a disciplined operation through the docking ports. The flowers and shrubs, the miniature trees and tinted screens, had all been trampled down and cast aside to make way for the traffic, which was heading deeper into the space city. The immediate area was solidly secured, ringed by heavy machine guns and even light cannon, and hour by hour came reports of whole districts taken without any show of resistance.

At this rate the whole city would be in his hands in a day.

Already he’d made an excursion into the occupied areas and everything he saw confirmed his instincts. It was exactly as he would have expected: decadence, nothing but decadence. Decadent art, decadent science, decadent customs. The Chinks were effete, ultra-sophisticated, wallowing in sensual pleasure – the whole city was simply an orgy of effeminate prettiness. And the people didn’t seem to know how to react to the invasion. They had none of the rude, healthy vigour that made True Man great.

Brourne strode to a small building near the ports where he had set up his field HQ. Hueh Su-Mueng sat looking over a complicated map he’d prepared of the city. As the reports came in he was marking more and more of it in blue, his code for “taken”.

The plan of operations was largely his brainchild. His idea was to have the whole city under control before the masters of the Leisure Retort could gather their wits sufficiently to take any effective action. He was striking down toward the bottleneck joining the two retorts, so as to cut off any retreat in that direction or any orders for weapons that might be given to the workers. Once the Leisure Retort had been seized he’d been promised that he himself could take a small force of Titans into the Production Retort. He hoped for a good response from its inhabitants to his news.