Foord felt like adding another Do You Understand, but decided it would be ill-judged. He snapped the wristcom shut.
•
At Pindar the evacuation really started to show itself. Foord looked out of the landchariot as it turned a bend into the main street, and swore.
Coming here from the highlands was like jumping from air into treacle. Pindar was the last Commonwealth settlement he had passed on his way up to Hrissihr yesterday, and the first on their way down today: a small market town with a longish narrow main street lined with houses and shops and civic buildings, all slightly uncared-for and all built on the same modest scale. It would have taken a direct bombing better than it was taking the evacuation.
They were embedded in traffic. Most of it was town vehicles, with a few trucks and offroaders from neighbouring farms, some of which had passed them on the way down, sounding their horns. They were not sounding their horns now. Pindar was gridlocked but eerily quiet.
Military groundcars were positioned at intervals along the main street, turning it into a one-way through road to the lowlands. The traffic was like a stream of food passing down a long mouth, with the groundcars as inward-pointing teeth.
It looked like much of Pindar was already evacuated. The main street resembled a table-top onto which the contents of buildings had been emptied like the contents of pockets. For collection later, Foord thought, as though the urgency dwindled once people were put on the road, and pointed in the unvarying direction of the lowlands.
Thahl was right. And this, thought Foord, must be happening all the way around the rim of the Bowl. Here, though the crowding was heavy, it was still rather small-scale, just one modest town in the foothills; the entire population of the foothills wasn’t that large, but if this was happening here, it was the tip of something far larger. And something quite desperate.
They can never do it, Foord kept thinking. There isn’t time. They can’t turn the lowlands into an undefended civilian area!
They could, and they were; not completely, but perhaps just enough.
Foord opened his wristcom, told it to seek the local broadcasts, and listened.
The broadcasts talked of hotels and commercial buildings in the Bowl being requisitioned. Of camps erected on unused land between lowland cities. Of the mobilisation of hospitals and social services and charities to take the sudden—but, as they described it, temporary—influx of people. Of special comm links to enable those who had relatives in the lowlands to contact them and arrange accommodation (the preferred option). Of detailed arrangements for farms to leave one or two people behind to tend crops and animals.
The broadcasts used as much of the truth as humanly possible, but no more than necessary. They said—it was common knowledge anyway—that She may be coming to Horus, and that people in outlying areas were being moved temporarily to the lowland cities where they could be better protected. It was, they repeated, only temporary, until the Charles Manson lifted off from Blentport to engage Her.
They didn’t simply have one official broadcast repeating this message. They got existing presenters to insert it in existing programmes, not merely reading a prepared text but speaking around a summary they’d been given, so they could preserve some spontaneity. Even so, Foord heard similar phrases being repeated by different voices. The most common was We Have To GET You, To Where We Can PROTECT You. Once or twice, though, he actually heard the phrase Drawing The Wagons Into A Circle. He suspected the authorities hadn’t fed them that; their plan might be desperate, but they weren’t stupid.
They mentioned that large military detachments were being deployed to the highlands to prevent looting of evacuated properties. They did not mention that they were also moving defence emplacements to the highlands, or creating the impression (hasty and partial, but maybe just enough) that the lowland cities were undefended. Such an impression could not be other than hasty and partial. They could never move all the military out of the lowlands, even if they wanted to. What they wanted was to move the most visible garrisons. The fixed defence emplacements around the Bowl and especially around Blentport would remain, but would be visibly undermanned.
Foord left the wristcom on speaker. It scrolled up and down all the lowland frequencies, repeating substantially the same material. Foord and Thahl listened in the landchariot as it moved, at walking pace, through Pindar. The web in the window continued to salivate.
“This is their endgame, Thahl. We haven’t even left to engage Her. She hasn’t even appeared in Horus yet. And they’re gambling that if She defeats us and comes to Sakhra, this—this, will keep Her from attacking the lowlands!”
The broadcasts continued to murmur out of Foord’s wristcom. We Have To GET You, To Where We Can PROTECT You.
“It may not work, Commander, but it’s all they’ve got. Their ships can’t fight Her because they’ve been told to stay in the defensive cordon, while we fight Her. If She comes here, it means She’s destroyed us and destroyed their cordon. They have to have an endgame, even one like this.”
Foord did not answer for a while. Then, “You of all people. I thought you’d be outraged at the military going into the highlands.”
“Commander, the way they see it, they’re decoying Her away from the cities. If She comes, those in the highlands know they won’t have a chance against Her.”
We Have To GET You, To Where We Can PROTECT You. Nothing is simple, Foord thought but did not say. He snapped his wristcom shut. Immediately it started buzzing.
“Foord.”
“Cyr, Commander. I’ve just left Director Swann’s offices.”
“And is he still demanding we hand over our people?”
“No, Commander.” She laughed, rather unpleasantly. “He almost disappointed me. Before I could invoke our priority he invoked it for me. Keep them, he said, and just go. He’s desperate to get us off Sakhra.”
“Good. Should I know who did what to who or will it keep?”
“You can guess most of it, Commander. It does happen every time, doesn’t it?”
It was a voice-only channel, but Foord nodded; he knew that Cyr would read the quality of his silence. Outsiders were always treated, especially by regular military forces, like the carriers of a disease. Everyone knew the Department recruited most Outsider crew members from prisons, and psychiatric hospitals, and orphanages; sociopaths and psychopaths who could never work with regular forces. And when one or two of them walked into a bar, or were seen anywhere in public, the results were almost inevitable. Most were not openly aggressive, which made them even more of a provocation; they were loners or depressives who tended to sit in corners, in ones or twos or small groups. On this occasion, two were set upon by four from a Horus Fleet cruiser, also on Blentport for refit.
“Was anybody killed?”
“No, Commander. Our two went immediately back to the ship. I refused to hand them over to Swann, and now he’s given up. The other four were all injured, one of them seriously, but he won’t be permanently scarred or disabled: I checked with the hospital.”
“Alright, Cyr, thank you…No, wait, something’s happening here.”
The traffic jamming the main street of Pindar had been strangely quiet. Now, Foord could hear klaxons and sirens, and soldiers shouting at vehicles to move to one side of the road, further and further to one side until they mounted the pavement. Something huge was coming.