Part 23

The Invasion

When Mario arrived to open the bar, he found old Pedro sitting on the second from bottom step, waiting for him.

‘You’re late,’ he complained as Mario got the shutters up. ‘There’s some as would give their best customers a free drink for that.’ He collected his grubby coat around him as if it were a king’s cloak, sullied by the basement dust. Mario wondered how many days he’d come to see if the bar would open and how long he’d waited, but sensed that it would only lead to further discussion of free drinks if he asked. He grunted in reply and flicked up the last shutter with a practiced hand. He hadn’t seen the bar since the day before the attack started, but beyond a slightly thicker layer of grime it seemed untouched. Pedro settled on a stool at the counter, sipping on his first beer while Mario switched lights on and put the chairs back out. Not that anyone would sit in them.

Every day was money, of course it was, and with his wife pregnant again he couldn’t afford to miss one credit. If anyone had asked that was the reason, he even believed it himself. Sitting in his friend’s cellar for the three days of the bombing, in their one-room flat for the five days of perpetual curfew, he let the children climb, screaming, over his knees and told himself that he was going to open up as soon as he could. For the money, of course.

In the long lines at the Chi!me checkpoint, beside the rubble that used to be the station, it had occurred to him to wonder how many of his tattered regulars would never appear again. By the time he reached the bar his hands were sweating. When he had seen Pedro there’d been a moment he was so glad to see him he could have hugged him. It would have been unsavory, but then, after upwards of two weeks with no water he wasn’t too fragrant himself. He’d heard there was a broadcast saying that the water would be back on soon, but so far it hadn’t been.

There was no power either, but the power in the basement had always been erratic and he had a cylinder left for the generator. The beer in its fridge would be warm, but his customers were rarely discerning enough to care. He waited for the generator to chug noisily into life, then turned on the screen above the bar. It was set to one of the national channels, that had been showing sport from Benan on the night the Chi!me came. He thought, as he let the switch go, that it would just be static, but to his surprise it wasn’t.

The screen was almost black, but out the darkness came a low, urgent voice. ‘The snipers are over there, just behind that rubble pile, and over on the other side, is the Chi!me transport. They have the weapons, but the resistance has the willingness to fight and the knowledge of the ground, and so far they’re even. In the ruins of Nuerio, this is far from over…’ Feet sounded on the stairs outside. Mario dived for the controls and switched it over at random.

‘Hey!’ Pedro protested, ‘I was watching that!’

‘You’ll be watching it in jail if you’re not careful,’ Mario retorted, a response which lost its sting as he realized that the newcomer was not police but Beni, another one of his regulars.

‘Ha, Beni.’ Pedro greeted him vindictively. ‘Still alive? You’re not dead but you ain’t quick neither, you could have got a free drink if you’d been here sooner.’

Surprising himself, Mario reached into the fridge and pulled out another warm bottle. ‘There you go, Beni. I’m feeling generous.’ Beni looked at him incredulously, so grateful he felt shy. ‘I’ve got to see to the stockroom,’ he added quickly. ‘Don’t pinch anything.’

Beni pulled himself onto the stool beside Pedro and slowly divested himself of his coat. For a while they sat in silence, watching the flickering grey that was all Mario’s panicked channel-changing had found. Pedro finished his bottle, and since Mario was still in the back, helped himself to another one from the open fridge.

‘Still got your head on your shoulders, then, Beni?’

‘Oh, aye. Just about.’

Pedro shot him a look. ‘Bad?’

‘Bad.’

‘You stay in the house?’

‘No, not us. We went down St Mary’s. Fifty of us, from all up and down the street, all packed in the crypt and nothing to drink but water out of the font.’ He took a long gulp of his beer, remembering. ‘There was kids screaming and crying, all the women carrying on for something they hadn’t brought, or they hadn’t locked the door, or something. We had to carry Juanita Delterro down there, me and old Eddy Marguiles one on each side of her chair, and her carrying on and hollering she weren’t going to move, she’d stay behind and die before she moved, and her Nadia following on behind and screaming at her just as loud. We put her back in her house after, it weren’t hardly touched, and the look on the old bat’s face… Come off better than mine, anyway.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Something took half the wall down, everything got blown around.’

Pedro nodded as if this was familiar, but didn’t offer any information about his own home. Beni didn’t know where he lived, anyway. Instead he joked, with an edge of malice, ‘Surprised you noticed the difference.’

‘Very funny.’ Beni drained his beer and gestured to the screen. ‘Is there anything on?’ he asked. ‘We’ve not got power at home.’

‘Let’s see.’ Pedro reached for the terminal and started hitting saved stations at random. The static changed under his finger from grey to green to sparkling blue, crackling, shiftingly, up and down the screen. He pressed it again and the sharp pink lines swirled and resolved themselves into a face. ‘Here’s something,’ he said.

The young woman looked Terran, though she had a blue tunic buttoned in Chi!me fashion and her glossy hair was set in an unfamiliar style. She wore bright red lipstick and a general air of prosperity.

‘And now,’ she was saying, ‘another chance to see those inspiring pictures of the moment Airdrossa knew it was free. I don’t know about you, but I just don’t get tired of seeing these.’ Her Ty Terran was impeccable except for her accent, an odd, singing ending to her words that betrayed her as a foreigner. ‘This was the joyful scene in Airdrossa, five days ago.’

The screen flicked to the main shopping street. Some of the buildings, it could be seen, were burnt out. All had their windows broken and the shop displays had clearly been looted. Beni leaned forward, interested. ‘That’s that jewelers, isn’t it? What’s it called? They used to have all those necklaces in the window, my daughter was always on at me to get her one, never mind the price. Fair bothered me about it, she did.’

‘Well if you’d been quicker,’ rejoined Pedro unsympathetically, ‘you could have got her one for free, couldn’t you?’

In front of the shops was a line of people, one or two deep, looking back towards the camera. The faces were a mixture of anger, fear and a sort of defiant expectation. ‘Yeah, they look joyful,’ Pedro said. The first Chi!me carrier appeared at the bottom of the screen, making its way slowly up the road. The tops were open and the soldiers inside, five to ten in each, stared grinning around them. One of them waved and as if pulled by invisible strings the crowds burst into wild cheering. Flowers like torn paper rained down over the Chi!me convoy and a group of young men, breaking away from the main group, ran up alongside it, beating the sides of each carrier as they passed.

The soldiers inside redoubled their smiles but you could see, Beni thought, that they did not particularly relish this. It was clear that the youths were hitting quite hard. A group of women leaned from an upper window, stretching out their arms to the carriers and shouting something. The camera caught their pleading faces but not what they said. In the building next door, a sign in an unoccupied window, miraculously uncharred, read ‘Hooray for Chi!me,’ Terran first then Chi!me characters underneath. Handfuls of petals, as the camera dwelt on it, drifted across it like snow.

‘This is the Chi!me 47^th battalion, one of their elite squads justly famed for their peacekeeping all around the galaxy. They’ve been everywhere, but they can hardly have had a more rapturous reception. Just listen to that crowd! I hope you can hear me over the noise!’ The voice was male and Ty-accented this time. ‘That’s the sound of freedom on the way and, let me tell you, it feels good.’

The picture returned to the female announcer. ‘There’ll be another chance to see more of that incredible footage later in our program,’ she said. ‘But I’m now joined on the link by General Ta’Briel of the Chi!me Liberation forces and in the studio by Dr. Hans Bremmer, the former professor of politics at Airdrossa University, who was dismissed last year for what was called “political unreliability.” General, if I can start with you, what is the situation in Airdrossa now?’

The General’s face under his helmet was darker than most Chi!me and wide at the chin as if he favored plain speaking. He spoke in Chi!me, the Ty Terran translation emerging from a device on his shoulder. ‘The situation in Airdrossa is very good. The city is calm, there has been a limited lifting of the curfew for essential business and life is getting back to normal.’

‘That’s great news, I’m sure. And you have good news on the water and power supplies too?’

The General lifted his palms in assent. ‘The power and water are back on for all but a few districts and we are hoping to get them also restored within the next two to three days.’

‘Yeah, right,’ Beni muttered. ‘Believe that when I see it. Do you know anyone, anywhere, who’s got it? All meant to think you’re the last, that’s all that is.’

‘And the streets are peaceful? There has been some talk of insurgency, has that been a problem?’

‘There are a few diehard adherents to the old regime, criminals who know they’ll be taken to justice if they’re caught, but they are very few. We have the situation under control.’

‘Thank you, General. Now, turning to you, Professor, as someone who saw more than many, perhaps, the nature of the previous regime, what has made you happiest about the last few days?’

The Professor leaned back in his chair, palms spread upwards as if to underline the new honesty. ‘I think it must be the fact that civilian casualties have been so few, and that the Chi!me were able to free Nuerio, Airdrossa and the other towns without bloodshed. Before they arrived there were many doom-mongers, supporters of the criminal Desailly and his cronies, who were telling us that we’d all be bombed to bits and that the army would fight to the death outside the city.

‘We were all supposed to be preparing, weren’t we, for a long fight and the fact that that didn’t happen is, I think, one of the very best aspects of this liberation, that it is possible to have justice without fear. I think some of us always knew that the troops would have no heart to fight for Desailly’s gang, that they would just disappear, but,’ he smiled, modestly, ‘it’s good to be proved right.’

‘And what do you think has been the Chi!me’s most impressive achievement in these last few days?’

‘Well…’

‘There’s got to be something better than this on,’ Pedro snarled. ‘Where’s the terminal, let’s try this one.’

The screen flickered into static.

‘There is nothing else, man,’ Beni objected. ‘You can see for yourself, they’re the only ones doing any broadcasting. Got to watch what we’re told, haven’t we? D’you suppose he’ll notice if we get another beer?’

‘Be his guest. Hang on, here’s something.’

There was no picture save for a steady blue background, but the voiceover was clear. ‘This is Ty broadcasting, Kayro division,’ the voice said. ‘We don’t know how much longer we can stay on the air, but as long as we can keep evading the jammers, we’ll keep on telling the truth about what’s happening out there to Ty. Keep your footage coming in, pictures, eyewitness stories, whatever you’ve got. If you can get it to us, we’ll show it. The link is at the bottom of the screen. Next up, a Benan team have more pictures of the terrible casualties in Airdrossa as the full extent of the bombing is revealed. Keep refreshing.’

The blue gave way to a street, a straight road between two lines of tall houses. Those that were standing had an air of decay to them, peeling paint and crooked pediments as if they had fallen on hard times much longer than five days before, as if this was merely the final indignity among many. It could have been any southern town. The picture was grainy, shifting, occasionally half-obscured as if the camera was concealed.

‘We’re now in the outskirts of Airdrossa,’ said a voice. It spoke Terran with a flat accent, long nasal vowels like the commentators on the Benan sports channels, with a tightness like just before a penalty. ‘This is one of the major residential districts and it’s been pretty badly hit, by all accounts. We’re going in to see just how badly. We have to hide the camera because journalists still aren’t allowed out without a Chi!me escort and we haven’t got the right permits. We’ve all heard about that Gargarin crew yesterday, so we’re pretty nervous, but we’re hoping that there won’t be many Chi!me around this time of day. We just have to keep a low profile…’

He was interrupted by a scream, off-camera. The picture swung wildly as they tried to find it. Another scream followed, more loudly.

‘You screen? You screen?’

‘Over there. Mike, over there, on that pile. Have you got her?’

A black-haired young woman, waving from among the ruins of one of the demolished buildings. She came slowly nearer as the team ran towards her.

‘What’s your name?’ the main speaker asked.

‘You journalists? You put this on screen? I show you. I show you, come.’ She gestured to them to come round the back of the pile. The first journalist peered round after her, drew back suddenly with a hand over his mouth. ‘Mike, get…’

Mike looked. ‘God…’ he exclaimed weakly. ‘God.’ ‘Tell me you’re getting this.’

‘Yeah.’ A long breath, shuddering. ‘I’m getting this.’ Behind the highest heap of rubble, the woman had made a little shelter, a piece of metal balanced on two columns extending out from the main mass to make a roof. Underneath it was another woman, a girl a little younger with the same black hair and the same empty eyes. She was sitting on her feet, and resting across her, so that the head was pillowed on her arm, was a corpse.

The face was mostly gone, only one eye looked fixedly out of the mass of black blood. The left side of the body, nearest the screen, was also the worst hit; no arm, no hair, the stump of a leg ending in no foot. The girl looked up at the camera. Her face was splashed with old blood. ‘This is our father,’ she said. ‘He brought us here for good life. He was out working for us; he drove his cab to make money for us. And this is what they did to him.’

‘He lived three days like that,’ the first girl added, her voice rising. ‘We have nothing. Our house is gone, our father is gone, they have taken everything away from us. We have nothing, we have no power, we are little people. We cannot fight them. But you tell them, Mr. Screen, you tell them for us. They will be punished for what they do.’ She stared into the camera, screaming now, crying out. ‘They think they are gods but they are not, they are nothing. God has instruments everywhere and God will punish them. He sees what they do. You tell them. He sees what they do.’

‘I’ the man filming began and was abruptly cut off as the signal dissolved into static.

‘It’s funny how you don’t see any Jeba dead,’ Beni remarked when the silence became oppressive. ‘Plenty of ‘em alive before the bombing, but now not a single one and no bodies. It’s strange, like they’re birds or something. You never see dead birds.’ Pedro only grunted in reply. Trying again, Beni went on.

‘D’you think they’ve caught Desailly yet? They must be pretty close to it.’

Pedro snorted into the dregs of his bottle.

‘Oh, they’ll make sure we know when they have.’

‘I heard he’s on Trentama.’

‘And I heard he’s fled to Terra. Can’t you stop yammering and get me another beer?’

‘Alright. By the way,’ remarked Beni, his face in the slowly-cooling fridge, ‘did you hear about his wife?’

***

Agana heard in the middle of the afternoon from one of the guards and thought he was going to have to tell him. He avoided him for as long as he could, but when he slunk onto the roof terrace after dinner, he saw he already knew. Desailly acknowledged him briefly then bent his head again over the note in his hand.

‘Someone down in the town brought the message. An old school friend of ours, actually. Hadn’t seen him for thirty years. He said he’d heard we were here and thought he’d tell me. Considerate of him.’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Agana said, woodenly professional. ‘Shall I have the guards stop him leaving?’

‘What? Oh, no. No. It was bound to get out sooner or later. We’re hardly inconspicuous, are we? And I don’t really think it matters.’

Agana couldn’t think of an answer to that. He didn’t have the knack for grief.

He had hardly ever spoken to Julia Desailly, for all he was her husband’s aide. All he knew about her was what everyone knew, that she was plain, dumpy, provincial, shy in public and uncomfortable in politics. That she had been his girl from their schooldays, married as soon as he had come back home for the Chaireddan job. That whatever went on behind the quiet mask she had had something sufficient hold him, sufficient to be worth keeping for him despite the sniggers and the young women of whom she surely could not have been ignorant. That she was dead beneath the charcoal rubble of the palace, in the hulk of the bunker that was not, after all, Chi!me-proof, after they had left her behind.

She had not wanted to come. In the haste of their departure for Chaireddan her accompanying them was not something that would have occurred to Agana, but he was sure that if she had protested he would have known about it. He remembered waiting, foot tapping, at the end of a dim corridor while she and Desailly said goodbye. There had been nothing anxious about her then, nothing out of the ordinary. He had even wondered then, impatient, what it would take to move her.

Desailly had said something to her, briefly; he couldn’t hear what it was. She had replied as quick and low as he. No tears, no recriminations: they had been married a long time, those two, beyond passion. Only Desailly had taken her by the shoulders, kissed her, light and ceremonial, on each cheek, before he turned and walked away. Agana remembered how his words had echoed against the empty walls, as he’d called out to him, too loud, ‘Come on, sir, we have to go. The transport’s waiting.’ How she hadn’t watched them go.

There was one obvious place to fortify in Chaireddan: the hilltop overlooking the market square. By the time they arrived, on the morning of the Airdrossa bombing, the government buildings were largely abandoned and the local police were finishing the clear out of the shanties that had sprung up between them. They should be loyal to Desailly in Chaireddan. Agana, Desailly and his personal guard had moved into the biggest building, the former Office of Northern Trade, with its wide roof terrace on the edge of the ridge. Since the bombing they had had no communication from Airdrossa, no reports but snatched messages passed hand to hand. Anything else would be too dangerous, would give away their position without a doubt. Desailly had spent most of his time on the terrace. It had the advantage, Agana thought, that you always knew where he was.

The evening was close and humid now that the clouds were drawing in, though to Agana’s southern sensibilities it was hardly hot. Leaning on the rail beside Desailly he watched the café owners in the square taking the tables in, the rattles as they chained them together loud on the yellow evening. A little two-wheeled transport, puttering under the weight of three youths, careered unsteadily along a side street and skidded at the corner. Desailly played with a chip from the balustrade, digging it gently into the top of the rail.

‘I used to do that,’ he said, suddenly, nodding at the streets below.

‘Sir?’

‘Ride around on a two-wheeler, three or four of you all clinging to each other’s shoulders, shouting at girls. I’m amazed they still do it. We always used to come off at that corner, too, couldn’t take the angle. How about you? Did you ride?’

‘Me?’ Agana was taken aback. ‘No, sir. I was… well, I suppose I was too busy studying.’

‘Hah.’ Desailly nodded. ‘Maybe in the circumstances, not such a wise choice.’ He paused. ‘Do you think it’s ever justified to torture torturers, Agana? I don’t mean it as a plan for the future, just a moral question. What do you think? Is it just?’

‘I… um… well… I don’t know, sir. I suppose you could say it was a due return, but… I don’t know. I can’t say.’

‘I suppose we’re not at home with moral questions, are we? Morality, all you have to turn to in the aftermath of power. The sop of the weak-minded and the defense of the fool.’ The stone chip clattered far below, but when Agana looked at him he was smiling. ‘But we may as well indulge it, don’t you think? Since we have time for reflection?’

Agana collected himself. ‘Sir, we had no way of knowing they would go after her, as far as we knew she was safest staying behind. Your wife hadn’t done anything. She was innocent, just like everyone they’ve killed.’

‘She didn’t live in my palace, wear my clothes, eat my salt? She was not the slightest bit complicit?’

‘She was not involved in politics, everyone knows it. Sir, she had nothing to reproach herself for, and neither do you.’

Desailly laughed. ‘I think there are some who would disagree with you there, but we’ll let it go for now. But we’re missing the point, aren’t we? She wasn’t killed because of her deserts, she was killed for mine, because she was mine. This is a thing the Chi!me have done to me. So the question remains, is it justified to do bad things to a very bad man?’ He was quoting a broadcast, Agana recognized the reference all too well. ‘They don’t know what they’re talking about,’ he rejoined, stoutly.

‘But, hypothetically…?’

‘Hypothetically, then… no. No, it’s still not. It doesn’t matter what someone’s done. You can stop them doing it, you can punish them under the law, but killing their…’ he broke off. ‘Anything else,’ he substituted, ‘anything else, well, it’s just vindictive, isn’t it? When they could choose to do otherwise, when they picked a fight, created their excuse simply so that they would have a chance to attack in the first place, when it has nothing to do with… anything. It’s not just, not unless you have no other choice.’

‘Which is something of which no one could accuse the Chi!me, with all the resources of the galaxy at their command. So it’s one law for the powerful and one for the powerless, is it? The responsibility of power? I can’t say that’s a concept I would have had any truck with before now, I think if anything I rather thought it was the duty of the weak to be good. It’s funny how a little thing like an invasion makes you suddenly see things from the other side’s point of view.’

‘Sir?’

‘Never mind. Too much time standing around here waiting, that’s the trouble. Too much time to think.’ He paused again. ‘I wonder if it was the same for her.’

‘I… that is, I’m sure she didn’t have time to think anything,’ said Agana awkwardly. ‘She probably didn’t know anything about it.’

‘What? Oh, Julia. Yes, I’m sure. That wasn’t actually what I was thinking of.’ He moved away from Agana, along the terrace. Almost out of earshot, he added, as if to himself, ‘It always does end here, after all. All you have to wonder is which side you’ll be on.’

***

They came for Cico while he was finishing his breakfast. Later he found he resented that lack of style in them, that they had found him so negligible they had not even troubled to make it in darkness. His mother had answered the door. He’d heard her voice, the tone she used for door to door hawkers, then the melodic reply. He’d heard his name. He didn’t know who had betrayed him; his mother had been so proud when he’d got the job it could have been anyone. His chief feeling then was embarrassment, that it was mid-morning and he was still in his nightclothes, his mother’s broth still dripping off his spoon. Since the office had been bombed there hadn’t seemed any reason to rise early.

‘Cico, these soldiers say…’ his mother quavered.

‘You are Cicero Donato?’ It was strange, the way such a pretty voice could be so brusque. He pushed back his chair, got to his feet. At least he could keep his dignity. ‘That’s me,’ he said and held out his hands.

They seized his arms behind his back, tied his wrists with wire. His mother began to shout, ‘Cico! Cico! Let him go, he’s done nothing, he’s innocent, what are you doing to him? Cico!’ One of them took a step towards her, there was a snap and she screamed.

‘Mama? Mama?’ he couldn’t turn his head, couldn’t find her. ‘Let me see, you bastards, is she all right? Mama!’ As they dragged him out of the door he could hear her wailing. ‘Mama!’ One of the soldiers chirruped something to the other and they both gave a high, hissing laugh.

The transport was waiting outside the door. The street would usually have been busy; it was empty now but Cico felt the unseen eyes upon him. The Chi!me flung him against the back corner. He couldn’t put his hands up to defend himself. Pain blossomed iridescent over his face and he felt the blood spurt from his nose as he landed. He leaned on the metal, winded. They opened the back door of the transport and one of them leaned in and brought out something soft and black. He couldn’t work out what it was.

The Chi!me turned back to him, brought his face so close to his that all he could see were his sharp-cornered features, the dark blue skin and opaque eyes so deep you could drown in them and still not know what they meant. He had a small cut across the bridge of his nose; an absurd thing to notice.

‘You shit-faced fucker,’ said the Chi!me to Cico in precise Ty Terran. He smiled, jovially. ‘Think of this as the last thing you’ll ever fucking see.’

Cico felt the spit spatter his face, then the black hood slammed down over his head and there was only darkness.

They pushed him on to the floor of the transport, tied his feet together with wire. His trousers, loose for sleep, caught on the catch of the door and dragged down over his behind. He couldn’t pull them up himself, not with his hands tied. One of the soldiers slapped him on his bare flesh, said something in Chi!me he didn’t want to understand. They slammed the doors and, in a moment, he felt the transport move.

Lying on his front on the metal floor, every vibration seemed to go right through him. He crawled along the floor until, reaching out blind with his tied hands, he could touch the side wall and lever himself up to a sitting position, his legs bent beside him. The maneuver pulled his trousers even further off, but he couldn’t do anything about that. He sat against the transport wall, panting with the effort, until he realized he could hear more than one breath.

‘Is there anyone there?’ he asked. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t see you, they put something over my head.’

‘Yeah, I’m here.’ The voice was low, as if very tired.

‘Have they got you tied up too?’

‘Tied, battered, hooded, you name it. I’ve been in this van so long, I don’t know how long, feel like I’ve forgotten there’s an outside.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Michel. You?’

‘Cico. Well, Cicero really, but everyone calls me Cico.’

‘What were you, CAS?’

He hesitated before answering, but after all, what could it matter now?

‘Yeah. I worked the desk in one of the offices. You?’

‘Army. Palace guard.’

‘Oh.’ They sat in silence, listening to the engine. He wondered what the other man looked like. It was so strange, talking to someone when you couldn’t see anything. His voice sounded middle-aged, tough; he would have to be a palace guard. Tough enough to take anything they could do to him, they would have trained for it, in case they were caught by ViaVera, how to survive the torture and not talk. But he had not been trained and he did not have anything to say. The darkness pressed on him, stifling.

‘Where are they taking us?’ He’d meant it to sound calm, even cynical, but it came out as a plea. ‘What’re they going to do to us?’

‘I heard they had a camp down at the spaceport, a big camp with wire and guards and guns round the terminal buildings, and they’ve got people there from all over that they’ve taken, keeping them there. And there are rooms in those terminal buildings you go into, but you don’t come out. They’ve got all sorts there, electrodes and needles, wave machines and good, old-fashioned beatings. Don’t matter what you’ve got to confess, they’ll make you do penance right off, no question. You’ll be screaming every little thing you ever knew and you know what?’ His voice seemed very close to Cico now, though he couldn’t have moved, ‘They won’t even be listening.’

‘I… I don’t believe you,’ Cico stammered. ‘I don’t believe you. I… they wouldn’t. I haven’t done anything. I just sat at a fucking desk, I did nothing, all I did was process fucking reports, what difference did it make? I didn’t do anything!’

‘Yeah? Well, they don’t care. But, don’t worry, kid. You with your bare ass, you’re going to fit right in.’

‘What? You said you’re hooded. How did you know I…? Who are you?’

A different voice, high, mocking, answered him. ‘Not your friend.’ A fist, judiciously, slammed into his face. He slumped over his bound hands. ‘Not your friend.’

***

They found a wood to hide in, that first night when they escaped the ditches, by the Santana road, close enough to the capital that each bomb seemed to shake the trees. Nothing flew overhead, which Iro said was a good sign, and he wouldn’t let them move on until the bombardment stopped. ‘We’ll sit tight,’ he said, ‘they aren’t fucking with us here.’ Raffi and Juan went hunting for obeo, the small scuttling creatures of the plains, in the fields around, while Mario boiled roots for the pot.

They left their uniform jackets behind when they did this, but always picked them up afterwards. If asked, they would not have been entirely clear why. On the third night, Paulo went into the city to see what was happening and did not come back. They didn’t know what had happened to him; the bombing was especially fierce that night and they had only the macabre hope that he had been hit rather than captured. Still, Iro said, everyone was too busy to look for deserters. ‘It’s when they’ve got their feet under the table we’ll have trouble.’

On the fifth night they heard not only bombing but blaster fire, far away, and guessed that the Chi!me were storming the city.

‘We’d better move,’ Raffi said. ‘They’ll be coming for Santana soon enough, now, we don’t want to be sitting right here in the middle.’

Mario piped up. ‘Yeah, but where do we go? I mean, what are we doing? Shouldn’t we just go home?’

They all looked at Iro, stretched against a tree with his hands behind his head.

‘Go home? Yes, we could go home. They’ll be looking for us mind, might find us, too, if our neighbors don’t like the look of our face. Might cart us off to prison, might put us up against a wall and shoot us, how can you tell?’

‘They might not. Anyway, how’re they gonna find us? There was thousands in the army, you telling me they’re gonna round up them all? We go home, we keep quiet, they leave us alone. Simple. Anyway,’ he went on defensively, ‘my ma’ll be worrying.’

Raffi snorted and Iro shushed him with a wave of the hand. ‘You want your ma, son, you go home and welcome. You’re right, they might not come for you. You could just take off your uniform, hang it in the back of the cupboard, do as you’re told. But could you face yourself in the mirror in the morning? Because I fucking well couldn’t.

‘These Chi!me, they come here, bomb us to shit, take our land and we do what? Run away from them, sneak home and hope we don’t get caught? I did that when I was seven, I’m too old to do it again now. Way I see it, we wanna be free we gotta fight for it. We owe it to the next planet they’re planning on bombing to teach them a lesson now.’

‘If you wanted to fight them, why didn’t you stay in the trench, then?’ Mario’s tone was mulish. ‘Why’d we all run away?’

‘Because we were all gonna get killed, you little fuckwit!’ Iro roared. ‘You got to pick your time, pick your place, take them from behind when they aren’t expecting it. You can’t stand there in two feet of mud and expect them to stop for you. They’d’ve gone right over us and not even known we were there. But now, they’re more vulnerable. We can hurt them, if we want to. Do we want to?’

Juan got slowly to his feet. ‘You know my girl was in Nuerio when it fell,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what happened to her, I might never find out. All I know is that she could be dead because of those bastards and yes, I want to hurt them. I’m with you.’

‘Raffi?’

‘What the hell, didn’t fancy going home, anyway. What d’you reckon, head north? Best covers on the Biterra road.’

‘Alright.’ Iro stood up. ‘North it is then. You coming, or what, Mario?’

Mario heaved a sigh. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Of course I’m coming.’

They took two days to get round to the Biterra road. They traveled only at night, the better to dodge the Chi!me patrols, but still the world was replete with running shadows, a whispering darkness, full but unseen. It was on the second night that they met them. They had been moving faster than usual, pressing on through open fields to get into the trees by the road before dawn. There were no Chi!me north of the city yet and they’d been tired, not keeping an eye out. That was the excuse, later for how they hadn’t seen them, but at the time it seemed as if they had sprung fully-formed from the ground. There were perhaps ten of them, all armed with as varied a collection of weapons as possible. The leader, dark and heavyset, wore a green bandana tied over one ear.

‘Stop,’ he called, raising his blaster.

Iro mirrored the gesture. ‘You stop.’

They stood still and looked at each other. Ferns, starlit, eddied in rustles around their feet.

‘ViaVera?’ Iro asked. The leader nodded. ‘Desailly’s men?’

‘We’re soldiers, yes.’

The leader’s face split into a grin, showing very white teeth. ‘Don’t worry, we won’t hold it against you. There’s more than one with us has been on the other side, at one time or another. Where were you headed?’

‘Biterra road. Good cover for ambushes, we were thinking.’

‘We’ve just come from there. You’re right, it is good cover, and we’ve got a few other ideas as well. We’re camped just a mile or so down west, if you want to come with us.’

Iro turned to the others. ‘What do you think?’

ViaVera, Juan was thinking. ViaVera, the only enemy he had ever fought, the enemy who were so bad they weren’t even human. He realized that the men behind the leader were studying them, as if they were curious too to meet the enemy they had been fighting until death only a few days before. They were good fighters; everyone had always allowed them that. And they knew how to resist. He glanced at Raffi and Mario, saw them nod. ‘We think yes,’ he said.

Then the field was a confusion of back-slapping and introductions, too many names to keep track of after a long night march. Juan found his head swimming with it, all the more so when they got back to the camp and there was food, and drink and more stories until he could stand no more and had to crawl off somewhere to sleep. The camp was strangely familiar, he thought as he lay down, as if, if you didn’t know, you could think it was an army camp and not ViaVera at all. Of course, they were not soldiers and ViaVera now, it was one of the things Iro and their leader had said. Like the bare patch on his jacket, he would have to get used to it.

The leader had introduced himself to Iro as soon as they’d agreed to join them.

‘Marius,’ he’d said, smiling. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ He was very polite for a terrorist. He’d held out his hand. Iro had wiped his palm down his army trousers, as if it was sweating. ‘There’s one thing first.’ He’d reached up to his shoulder, where the badge of his regiment was sewn, and with one, brutal movement, tore it off. ‘We’re not Desailly’s men,’ he’d said, and Juan behind him had felt that every word was suddenly true. ‘We’re not fighting to get that bastard back, or his kind. We’re fighting for us.’

***

The shiny young woman on the Chi!me Free Ty station was enthusing about the interim government. The new head of state had already been appointed, as there was one very obviously suitable candidate. Stevio Gonsales was not only a wealthy businessman but had known and worked with the Chi!me for many years through his involvement in several companies, particularly space transport and ore extraction. He was open to the intergalactic community; he would not pursue isolationist policies that would damage the people.

Mr. Gonsales was not able to come into the studio, but they had a picture of him, looking smooth and slightly pleased with himself in a side-buttoned navy suit. Of course, as soon as possible they would hold elections, but Ty had to get used to democracy after having been without it for so long, it would take time. And there were the rogue elements, the insignificant little resurgences that followed in the Chi!me’s wake.

These would soon be put down, but the liberating forces would also have to deal with the ViaVera problem that the previous regime had allowed to go unchecked for so long. There was a long way to go but, the young woman said, smiling, the people of Ty could be assured of UP and through them the Chi!me’s full support in this difficult period of transition. Because the Chi!me, of course, had only justice at heart.

***

On the Kayro channel, the Benan team were approaching the cathedral.

‘This was one of the centers of the bombardment,’ one of them whispered into his hidden mike. ‘Here, on the north side of the cathedral close, was a nightclub that was hit on the first night. It was full of people. No one knows how many died, the ruins are still too hot for any clear-up to begin. They haven’t been able to recover any bodies, but looking at it, there are probably none to find.’

The camera regarded the pile of charred debris, faintly smoking like the aftermath of a volcano. In amongst the concrete, pathetic pieces of possessions could be seen; a bag, a snatch of glittering cloth, a silver shoe, dried blood caking its high heel.

‘And, of course, in the later bombardment, the cathedral itself was also hit. The top half of the spire fell down onto the nave; no one has been able to tell us how many people were sheltering there. It’s odd, if you look at the stump you can see that the force of the explosion actually made the spire twist round before it fell. You can make out the stretch marks where it pulled itself around. This jagged remainder can be seen all over the city and you know, it seems to symbolize everything we’ve witnessed over the last days here. It must have been a terrifying sight when it moved and fell, like the end of the world.

‘It reminds me in fact of a Terran story I once heard. There is a famous twisted spire somewhere in the north on Terra and the story went that it was so because the spire cared so much for its people that it leaned over whenever there was something interesting happening, so that it could watch. I look at these ruins now and I wonder what Airdrossa’s spire watched those nights while the city burned around it. I wonder if it thought those flames were just and necessary, when all these uncounted people were dying. I wonder if it was surrender or relief when it made its final turn and fell down to join them. A symbol for a new age of Ty, for those who lived to see it, and the end of the world.’