Table Of ContentPROLOGUE
"How long?" Amos ben Sierra Nueva said desperately.
"Another forty-five minutes, esteemed sir," the technician answered in a voice
flat with focused concentration.
Amos touched the pickup in his ear and turned back to the low hills ahead. They
were covered in pine forest, or had been, until about an hour ago. Now they were
burning, a furnace of resin-fueled candles fifty meters high.
The invaders had barred their own way with the blast of beam-fire from the
aircraft, but they seemed lazily indifferent about inflicting casualties on their
own forces. Hie Bethelite nobleman ground his teeth in fury at that lord-ly
disdain; unfortunately, it seemed justified.
For now. Most of the resistance to the Kolnari invasion had come from Bethel's
planetary con-stabulary, and the Guardians of the Temple. Those few who didn't
see the invasion as punishment for the sins of godless young Amos ben Sierra
Nueva and his followers had, of course, resisted. The faithful had effectively
offered their throats to the pirate knife.
Sheer luck that Amos and those followers had been preparing even if their
efforts had been made against the day when the Guardians came for them.
"Everything is in place, my brother," said the man beside Amos in the rear seat
of the pickup. Joseph ben Said was a commoner N worse than that, a bastard
from the slums of KerissNbut he had been the first of Amos' followers, and had
proved to be the most loyal.
. Stating
Not to mention certain skills, Amos reminded himself.
"Take me forward to the bunker," he said, and cut off Joseph's protest with a
brusque chop of his hand.
The gunner behind the pintle-mounted launcher swayed as the driver gunned the
fans and slid the vehicle down the dirt track. He was inexperienced; they all
were. The Second Revelation had trained in secret with their hoarded weapons,
preparing for the Second Exodus to Al Mina. Official Temple policy held there
was no need to venture beyond Bethel when three centuries of valiant breeding
left the Chosen still thin on the ground in the initial area of settlement.
There had been no time to acquire much real skill with the tools of destruction.
The measures had been insurance, really, in case the Elders actually were willing
to use force to prevent the settlement of the Saffron system's other habitable
planet
Ahead, the fire throbbed and roared. The pines were a native variety; candlestick
trees, they were called. They were explosively flammable this time of year, and
the air was thick with the heavy resinous smoke. Dust spurted from under the car
as they swung behind the bunker, just now thrown up with farming machines
and covered with raw dirt The driver backed and then let the vehicle settle on its
flexible skirt, keeping the fens running and the gunner's line of sight just over the
top of the mound.
"Good man," Amos said, thumping him on the shoulder before he hopped down
and ducked to enter the bunker.
A display film had been tacked to one wall. It showed footage from a pickup
located a kilometer down the road. Haifa dozen men and women in coveralls and
caps were talking into communicators or hovering over a schematic display on a
rickety camp table. In the bunker, the air was full of a crackling tension, louder
to the nerves than the burning forest was to the ears.
THE CTTY WHO FOUGHT 3
Amos nodded \o...the officer, he reminded himself. No longer friends and
retainers, but warriors.
"They are coming," Rachel bint Damscus said.
Her plain bony face was tightly impassive. She was an infosystems specialist,
rare for a woman on Bethel, where most females held to traditional feminine
careers like medicine or literature, Joseph made her a formal bow.
"You are well, lady?" he said.
She gave a curt nod, then turned back to Amos.
"They hit the forest with some sort of indirect-fire incendiary weapon, and now
they are advancing through it Powered vehicles. Fusion-bubble neutrino
signatures, fairly heavy ones."
"They probably do not know how common bad fires are here," Amos said. He
"They probably do not know how common bad fires are here," Amos said. He
worked a tongue in a mouth gone dry. Bethel vehicles used stressed-storage
batteries.
Rachel was holding up well, better than he had expected. She had a violent
temper, and he suspected a buried streak of hysteria. She was also a
daustrophobe: the bunker would add that distress to her burdens. The more credit
to her, for conquering her phobia.
"They thought to mask their approach in the flames," he said aloud.
Their first ambush had killed several of the invader infantry. Even a few hours
had shown how the strangers reacted to a challenge: strike back immediately
with overwhelming power. He cleared his throat and asked calmly:
"How far are they from the mine?"
"Two kilometers and closing. Closing at twenty kph.
Onscreen."
The view through the screen tacked to the wall trembled. That meant something
was shaking the ground under the pickup, even though it was spiked to solid
rock. Hills rose on either side ahead, everything
4 ArmeMcCaffrvy fcf SM Stirling
on fire except for the narrow stream and the road beside it, down at the base of
the massive granite slopes.
Shapes were moving through the burning trees on the lower slopes. Dull-
gleaming shapes, hard to make out against the background, as if the surfaces
were adapt-ing themselves, chameleon-fashion, as they moved.
Low turtle-backed outlines, with long weapons jutting from their sloped forward
plates, the barrels built up from coils or rings, some sort of wave-guide or
electromagnetic launcher.
One fighting vehicle pivoted. The muzzle flashed, bright even through the hot-
iron glow of the fires. The viewscreen fogged slightly as a pickup was blasted
into plasma, then cleared as the system compensated by spreading input from the
others.
"Well, that gives us a due to the sensitivity of their detectors," Joseph said. He
leaned forward. "Everyone is out of there?"
"Falling back to the launching ground. There is nobody within fifteen
kilometers," Rachel said. "We are closest"
"Do it, then," Amos said.
She touched a control surface. The screen flashed white and went blank. Haifa
second later an actinic glare flashed through the bunker, reflected in from the
rear entrance but still bright enough to make their goggles darken protectively.
Sound and shock followed in a few heartbeats: a roar like God returning in
anger, an earthquake rumble through the soil, then a wave of heat and pressure
making their ears pop.
"So Keriss died," Rachel said absently, to herself.
"So Keriss died," Rachel said absently, to herself.
"Tamik saw it He said the flash was like the sword of God, and the waves a
kilometer high when they broke over the Peninsula mountains."
"Everyone leave," Amos said quietly, glancing down at the watch woven into his
sleeve. There was nothing else to say. Rachel's family had lived in Keriss, the
THE CITY WHO FOUGHT 5
capital city of Bethel. So had most of Amos' surviving kindred, and Joseph's, if
he had any. "We will rendezvous in forty minutes at the shuttle." He paused.
"And Rachel?"
"Yes, sir?"
"Well done. Very well done."
When they left the bunker, the pillar of cloud was already flattening out high in
the stratosphere.
CHAPTER ONE
"SSS." The sensor overwatch AI filtered a possible message out of the
interstellar background and passed it through to the controller of Station SSS-
900.
"Hissing again, are we?" Simeon muttered absendy at the subprogram, and
turned his attention back to the simulacrum.
Napoleon had just pushed the British north of Not-tingham. Wounded, exhausted
soldiers sprawled across the fields where the defeated army camped, as the rain
drained down, gray skies darkening over trampled muddy fields. Away across
the rolling landscape fires still flickered, where dead men lay gaping around
smashed cannon. The women were out with lanterns, looking for their husbands
and sons.
A dispatch rider came clattering up to Wellesley's tent with news of the Jacobin
uprisings in Birmingham and Manchester, and a landing of the Irish rebels. The
big beak-nosed man stood in the open flap of the tent as the dripping militiaman
saluted clumsily and handed over the dispatches, blinking in the driving rain.
"The devil with it," he muttered, turning to the map-table within and unfolding
the heavy wax-sealed papers. "It's too bad. If we'd won that last battle ... if
wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Still, it was a damned near-run thingNa
very near thing."
He looked up. "You are to inform His Majesty that he and the royal family must
take ship for India
take ship for India
THE CrrY WHO FOUGHT 7
immediately. TheseN" he extended the reports from his folding desk "N are for
Viceroy Arnold in Calcutta."
I concede, the computer said.
"Of course," Simeon answered smugly.
He switched his primary visual focus from simulation back to the lounge and
looked down at the big holotable. An excellent model for use in war-gaming, the
map of England was scattered with unit symbols.
Finer and finer detail could be obtained by magnifying individual sectors N right
down to die animate models of soldiers and horses. Or tanks and artillery, for
some of the other games. He focused: on a horse tiredly nip-ping at its neighbor
on the picket line, on the stubbled gap-toothed face of a sentry yawning.
"SSS."
"What is that?" Simeon asked.
The answer floated up into his awareness from the peripherals; tightbeam signal,
modulated subspace waves, picked up by one of the passive buoys out on the
fringes of the system. A subroutine had flagged it as possibly interesting,
Hmmm, he thought. Odd. It might just be the last fading noise from a leaking
mini-singularity about to go pop. The things tended to cluster in this area, which
was full of third-generation stars and black holes, though this one tasted like a
signal. The problem with that was that there was nothing much out that way;
nothing listed as inhabited for better than two hundred lights. Certainly no traffic
into the sphere of Space Station Simeon-900-X's operations. He would have to
see if anything more came of it. Presumably if someone was calling, they would
try again.
Idly, he ran a checklist of station functions. Life-support was nominal, of course;
any variation of that was red-flagged. One hundred seventy-two craft of various
sorts from the liner Altair to barge-tugs were
8 AimeMcCaffrey&SM. Stirling
currendy docked. Twenty-seven megatons of various mineral powders were in
transit, in storage, or undergoing processing in SSS-900-X's attendant fabrication
modules. Two new tugs were under construction in the yard. A civic election
was underway, with Anita de Chong-Markowitz leading for councilrep in station
sector three, the entertainment decks.
Death in the Twenty-First was still billing as most popular holo of the month.
Simeon sneered mentally, with a wistful overtone. Historical dramas were
impossible for a serious scholar to watch because the manufacturers would not
do their research.
It was not necessary to investigate much more in detail.
With the connectors, shellperson Simeontyos SSS-900-X.
Little awareness remained of the stunted body inside its titanium shell in the
central column of the lounge. He was the station, and any weakness or failure
was, like pain, intense and personal. As far as his kinesthetic sense was
concerned, he was a metal tube a kilometer long, with two huge globes attached
on either end.
on either end.
The Abair was in. Simeon had docked die incoming ship with his usual
efficiency but without his usual close scrutiny. He deliberately turned his
attention away from disembarking passengers, refusing to study their faces,
especially the faces of the women.
Radon's replacement as Simeon's brawn was on this ship, and all he knew was
her work record and her name.
Channa Hap. Probably from Hawking Alpha Proxima Station, Hap being a
common surname for those born in that ancient and wealdiy community. He
wasn't entirely sure. He'd fought Radon's retirement too hard to have much
personal interest in his replacement All right, I was sulking, he told himself.
Time to get with the program. He'd established a subroutine to trash the
applications of replacements. That hadn't been personal, merely a ploy.
He hadn't wanted her, but they were stuck widi each other now.
