Part 25

Desailly

Desailly stood on the terrace, watching the transports come. It was colder than that day twenty years ago, a raw morning with a gusting wind. No yellow heat that threatened to burn out the fuel cells with every hill, no sweat trickling down the back of his collar as he waited. The market started later, too; they had to wait for dawn on windy days in case the lamps set fire to the nets.

The black-clad women were the same, scurrying away with three days’ food on their heads, and the market traders frantically packing up the stalls behind them. He had grown up among them, he had been further and learned more than they had ever dared to hope, but he had still never worked out how they knew when something was about to happen. It was something his mother had bred out of him, perhaps, to fill its place with dreams of glory. She had always thought he was better than everyone else.

Far below, the first transports edged into the market square, squat and black against the wet grey buildings. He remembered how the mission on the hill had seemed to glow with golden light, clouds massed around it like a halo, and he had been so sure he would prevail.

‘Never fight a battle unless you know the outcome,’ he said to himself, half laughing. ‘Well, at least I’m sticking to that.’

Footsteps pounded on the stairs and Agana emerged breathless behind him.

‘Sir, I told you, the Chi!me are in the city, their transports are nearly at the square! We should be away from here. What are you still doing here?’ He panted, shifting from foot to foot in his urgency. ‘Come on, we have to get out!’

Desailly kept his voice calm. ‘And go where?’ ‘Sir? I don’t know, Kayro…’

‘They’re bombing Kayro.’

‘Well, then Santos, or Corio or Aiga. What does it matter as long we get away?’

‘You forget yourself.’ He drew himself up, stiff and tall against the rail. ‘I have no intention of running. What, you thought I’d follow along with you, run till you’ve all left me and I’m left like a rat cornered by frilleh?’

Agana wailed, ‘but I told you, we have a transport standing by!’ and he overrode him.

‘I intend to make a stand while I still have the troops to do it and this is as good a place as any to do it. Station the men to cover the front entrance. You’ll need a few at the back but not many, I shouldn’t think they’ll try to get in that way. They’re just clearing the square now, I would say you have twenty minutes.’

‘And what are you going to do?’

‘I am going to stay here. Any questions?’

Agana regarded him as if looking for some way to talk him out of it, then despaired.

‘No, sir!’ he snapped.

Desailly could hear him bellowing orders all the way down the stairs.

‘Right, Gonsales, you and Morio go to the back door, yes, I said the back door… I don’t know, find a plank of wood or something, break down a door… for God’s sake, man, use your initiative!’ Something crashed to the ground and broke, unforgiving little tinkles bouncing down the steps. ‘For fuck’s sake, pick that up! … Yes, you! … You three, come with me… yes, bring that! And that! … Good, thank you Nico, nice to know someone’s paying attention. Alright, let’s go…’ The front doors were only wood and glass, not anything that had been made to withstand assault. Not that anything else could stand against the Chi!me. It was all only symbolic now.

The lead transports were past the square, winding slowly through the narrow streets that led up to the hill. As he watched, one of them misjudged a corner, clipping the side of a building. The frontage fell away with a roar, too loud to hear if there were screams. There were no people on the streets, the women had disappeared and the last few stalls in the square were empty and abandoned. In the settling dust there was a thick, breathless hush; no traffic, no voices, nothing but the faint drone of the transport engines and the soft howl of the wind around the hill. As if they had all run away and left him, all his people, and really, why shouldn’t they, for all he had done for them?

He came from their town, he had used it as a training ground, a battlefield to propel himself to power, then he had left and never come back. It had been poor and down-at-heel when he knew it and it was still poor and down-at-heel now. There was no loyalty, no romantic belief, no ideology that would lead the people of Chaireddan to fight for him, not the ideal of Benan nor the hopeless dream of another Terran empire. They knew him better than that.

He had used these time and time again to win people to his side, to convince them that he somehow stood for them when his intentions were the opposite, but clearly it hadn’t been fooled, his Chaireddan. Strangely, he found he liked it better for that. It was a shame, in a way, that he would never see the resistance. He would like to have watched how they fought the Chi!me.

He supposed he should be helping Agana get the guards into position, that he should possibly have allowed Agana to get him away in the transport, but he didn’t seem to be able to. He would not have called himself fatalistic; he was a modern man with modern ideas, he had always believed that he could change the world and nothing was beyond his control. It was against inevitability that he had fought on this hilltop twenty years before, against all the people who had said that police could do nothing against the might of ViaVera, and he had won. He could win again, if he would just try. Take hold of his mood, march down those stairs, take charge. Fight his way out, wipe the superior smiles off their smooth blue faces… He raised his eyes to the horizon and saw the black shape that had appeared on the south-eastern sky. In the end, all he could do was laugh at himself.

The shape was rather larger before the guards noticed it, rather more identifiably a flyer. He heard someone calling in one of the lower rooms, ‘Sir? Sir? I think you’d better come and have a look at this,’ then Agana’s voice, loud and hoarse with tension. ‘Fuck! Fuck! It’s a flyer, it’s a fucking flyer! Get the anti-aircraft! Get it right now… well, where the hell is it? … building like this’s got to have some… well fucking well find it! You, Morio, you and Peters help him look, the rest of you, up to the roof. Come on!’

Several feet pounded up the stairs and Agana emerged on to the roof with a group of guards. There were, Desailly couldn’t help noticing, rather fewer of them than there had been earlier. ‘Take position!’ Agana screamed at them. ‘Sir, can you at least get into cover?’ Desailly shrugged, remaining by the edge, and after a moment, Agana turned away.

There was no cell housing hiding his view this time. The flyer loomed above him, its black shape covering the sky. It didn’t have the folding wings that ViaVera’s had had, instead they seemed to retract almost into its body. It lowered itself over the farthest patch of roof, bolts from the guards bursting around it in swirls of color like a welcome. He remembered how, when he had leveled his blaster at her, Mara had turned around and greeted him smiling.

‘We can’t get at them,’ Agana yelled. ‘It’s just bouncing off; the blasters can’t do any damage. Where’s the fucking anti-aircraft, those useless bastards…’ He sounded almost tearful. ‘Fuck this, we’re sitting ducks out here!’ He stood up, blaster in hand. ‘You won’t do anything, you won’t save yourself, there’s a limit to what an aide can do for you!’ He didn’t look at Desailly. ‘I’ve done my best for you and I’ve done enough. Just because you want to sacrifice yourself doesn’t mean I have to! I have a life to lead! I’m going.’ He looked for a moment as if he wanted Desailly to dissuade him, and when nothing came he ran for the door and plunged down the stairs.

The flyer touched gently down. Two of the guards followed Agana as it landed; one made it to the stairs. Leisurely, the blasters picked off the others, so easily it was clear they didn’t have to try. Down below, the ground troops blew the main door in. Somewhere in the building there was a brief exchange of fire, then silence. Desailly stayed by the rail, by the edge of the roof. The blaster ports opened their black mouths towards him but didn’t shoot. He waited.

A ramp slid out from the underside of the flyer and anchored itself on to the roof. Two soldiers marched down it, blasters held ready in front of them, followed by a Chi!me in civilian dress, a side-buttoned jacket with gold lacework on the shoulders and along the lines of the lapels. The three of them walked across the roof and stopped a few feet away. The civilian chirruped something to one of the soldiers. The soldier waved a bleeping gadget in Desailly’s direction, then handed it to the civilian, who nodded.

‘You are Petrus Desailly?’ His accent was stilted but understandable enough.

Desailly nodded. ‘I am.’

‘And you are not armed. So.’ He pulled a small screen from his jacket and started reading from it. ‘Petrus Desailly, formerly known as President of Benan Ty, you are charged with crimes against sentience. By the authority of United Planets and at the behest of the peoples of the galaxy I hereby take you into custody pending your trial for these crimes at a court to be determined. Do you have anything to say?’

Did he have anything to say? He would like to think of something cutting, some phrase that would show them that he despised all of it, how the serpentine pretense of virtue made him gag. The last words of Petrus Desailly, to be told to wide-eyed children for decades, centuries to come. He couldn’t think of anything.

‘No. You Chi!me, you’re so loquacious you leave all the rest of us speechless.’

They didn’t bind his hands. They allowed him to walk to the flyer with them almost as if he was still President and this was a state visit, except for one light steel touch on his arm. He didn’t think they would mistreat him, not physically. They would want him to show to an audience eventually, even if the trial they promised never actually took place. They would lock him up somewhere and feed him and clothe him and keep on talking at him in their persistent voices until one day he would be converted, he would renounce his past, accept their way and they would bring him blinking into the light to proclaim it. The prospect of it scared him almost more than anything else they might do.

They let him sit by the window as they took off. The pilot had to circle the building to face back to the spaceport. Desailly looked out at the northern mountains, hazy with distance, the huddled grey roofs of Chaireddan in the rain; the flat expanse of the terrace, wreathed now in smoke from the lower floors burning and stained, here and there, with blood. He thought, suddenly, that there should be something more, as if the husk of his Presidency could lie there crumpled on the roof behind him, but of course there was nothing. The flyer completed its turn and sped away into the clouds.