That weapon did not break through either. She ordered a third launched.
She reached with the touch. Kublin, this is only the beginning. The bombs will fall forever unless you surrender. There is no other way to save the brethren. Your trap has been broken. Your ships are destroyed. You are powerless. It is you, or all tradermales.
His response would reveal the extent of his commitment to his dream. If cowardice ruled him completely, he would stay down there till the bombs reached him. If he screwed up his courage and came forth, and surrendered, she might allow his followers life.
He would receive her message, of that she was certain.
She watched the senior tradermale closely as he released each of the missiles. The ship boasted a great many. The rogues must have found themselves a world rich in uranium, and must have developed the skills to manufacture them. She recalled those they had used to try destroying the mirror project. How primitive they had been!
After the twelfth bomb struck down into the molten fury left by its predecessors Marika received a touch. Enough, Marika. Stop. I am coming up. Full surrender. Just stop destroying the world.
A darkship will pick you up. She touched the Redoriad Mistress, instructed her to descend and collect Kublin.
It would be hours. She took the opportunity to rest. IV A touch from the Redoriad. I have him, Marika. In chains. He is cooperating. He seems shocked.
Bring him up. Touch me when you clear atmosphere.
When that touch came she resumed bombing the more stubborn brethren facilities. She expended all the remaining rockets, without much concern for whom they might harm. Installations across the world perished. The surviving tradermales would find themselves hammered back into the past century.
That ought to convince all meth that she ruled the future, that she would accept no arguments.
The rogue senior reached his limit. He could not believe she had done what she had done. She asked, "You would not have employed the weapons against different targets? Is your thinking so parochial? If meth are to be changed, they must be convinced that they have suffered from the fury of the All itself." She ordered him to prepare beam weapons for use against surface targets. "I wield that fury. Let the world placate me."
He refused. Even in the face of unending shrieks from the hanging male, she refused. "String him up," Marika ordered. Once he was up she made him scream too. She told his crew, "I need meth able to operate the beam weapons."
They would not aid her. Killing some did not move them. They believed they would be slain anyway. Why help her?
A touch reached her. She told her bath, "Our guest is about to arrive. Meet him. Be careful. He is wehrlen."
Kublin entered ten minutes later. Marika did not recognize the creature he had become. For an instant she feared she had been tricked. But on closer examination she found the feel of the pup well hidden behind the surface of this ragged, graying male.
"Marika, you broke your word. I surrendered. You sent bombs down anyway."
"What would you have done differently? I gave you countless chances. You abused them all. Each time you made the reestablishment of order more costly."
"You are destroying everything, Marika."
"Perhaps."
"Do not obliterate the memory of the good you have done, Marika."
"The good has been forgotten. No one cares. I turned back the ice, and they fight for the power to control it. Meth care about me only because I represent power. They either want to take it from me or want to profit from my possessing it."
"Then why do you fight those who would free the world from the old silth wickedness?"
"Some things are worse, Kublin. Some things go against nature."
"It is too late for you, Marika. You are one meth trying to slow a flooding stream by bailing with a bucket. You cannot halt what has been set in motion. Silthdom is dying. And you are more to blame than I."
Marika leveled her rifle.
"You initiated the mirror project, which required so many changes in society. You made it possible for those who share my beliefs to move freely, telling males and bonds that there is hope for a world not always crushed beneath silth paws."
"It was you tradermales who made an unholy alliance with Serke and ... "
"Perhaps. But we would not have won the hearts of millions without your contributions, Marika. Without you we would have been nothing but what those old ones planned to become: replacements for silth. New oppressors. You made us over into liberators."
Marika slipped her weapon off safety. Her paws shook. Old memories from her early days at Akard howled in the back of her mind. Madness peeped out of its deeps. Ghosts of silth long gone muttered Jiana!
"Killing me will solve nothing, littermate."
"I will not be betrayed by my softness toward you again, Kublin. If you counted on that when you surrendered ... "
"I did not. I never have. You can kill every tradermale there is, Marika, but you will not stop it. Because you yourself have been the principal agent of the change. I have done nothing but channel it. You are the Jiana and you have reshaped the world already."
"Do not call me Jiana!"
"Why not? Can't you face the truth?"
"Do not!"
"You know the truth in your heart, Marika. Who but a doomstalker leaves all who cross her path dead upon her backtrail?"
Marika's bullets ripped into him. Her aim climbed. Bullets hammered the control center, racketed around, cut brethren and silth down. Even she was grazed by a ricochet.
The pain restored her sanity. She flung her weapon away, leaped to a silth she had injured, tried to help her. Her fury was spent. She became businesslike, shouting orders. The other bath eyed her warily. "Do not stand around! Help these meth."
She was disgusted with herself. In a moment anger returned, but it was a cold, reasoning anger that had little to do with hatred, that was turned inward.
Jiana, yes. At least on this small scale. Many meth had been injured needlessly.
To escape her shame she ducked through her loophole, into the peace of the otherworld. After a time she grabbed a ghost and raced through the dark, flitting from station to station, mirror to mirror. The crews there had begun to recover. Electronic chatter filled the ether.
Electronic communications. How things had changed during her lifetime. In her young years, at Akard, telecommunications had been a rarity, a carefully kept secret. There had been little of anything technical or mechanical in silth life. The whole world had been, in a way, a restricted technological zone. Roaming the world now, she found new technology everywhere, affecting every life, brought on by the demands of the long winter and the mirror project.
Electrical, petroleum, or gas heating had replaced coal and wood in the homes of many meth. Agriculture and mining had become mechanized. Once even the vast cloister farms had been worked by methods little different than those the Degnan had used in the Ponath. Only wealthy orders had possessed draft animals. Industry did not at all resemble what she recalled. She had to look long and hard to find a true dirigible airship. The great sausages had been retired from all but the most remote enterprises.
She should have paid more heed during her rare visits home. A drop to Ruhaack, on the borders of civilization, and a monomaniacal hunt for rogues beyond those borders had not been enough to show her the broader picture.
All that. All her fault, in a way.
The past was gone. And the past was silth.
Kublin might be right. Unless in her madness she had destabilized the new civilization so far that it would collapse.
She returned to her self, surveyed the control center briefly, stared at Kublin's still, mutilated form. That, at least, she had accomplished. The future would not be his. Down on the homeworld the rogues were on the run. This time the silth would show little mercy. They had learned. They would finish the job before returning to their feuds and their fear of her.