Monsters of Men

“FIGHT TO THE LAST MAN!” screams the Mayor.

{VIOLA}

“Her?!” Mistress Coyle says. “She’s just a girl–”

“A girl we trust,” Simone says. “A girl trained to be a settler just as much as her parents were.”

My face flushes a little at this but only partly out of embarrassment. Because it’s true. I did train for this. And I’ve been through more than enough in this place for my opinion to count–

I look back at the projection, back at the battle, which seems to be getting even worse, and I try to think. It looks awful as anything down there, but the Spackle aren’t attacking for no reason. And their target could just be the Mayor and we did beat him before but–

“Your Todd’s down there,” Mistress Coyle says. “He’s going to be killed if you don’t do something.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” I say. Because that’s the thing, the thing that overrides everything. I turn to Bradley and Simone. “I’m sorry, but we have to save him. We have to. Me and him were this close to saving the whole planet until they screwed it all up–”

“But would saving him be at the cost of something greater?” Bradley says, kindly, but very serious, trying to make me see. “Think hard now. What you do first anywhere is remembered for ever. It sets the whole future.”

“I’m not inclined to trust this woman, Viola,” says Simone and Mistress Coyle glowers. “But that doesn’t mean she’s not right about this. If you say it’s right, Viola, we’ll intervene.”

“If you say it’s right, Viola,” Bradley says, echoing Simone with a little snap, “we start our new life here as conquerors and you’ll be setting up brand new wars for generations to come.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Mistress Coyle shouts in frustration. “The power is here, Viola! Here is where we can change everything! Not even for me, my girl, for Todd, for you! Right here, right now, what you decide can end all of this!”

“Or,” Bradley says, “you can start something even worse.”

They’re all looking at me. I look back to the projection. The Spackle are throughout the men now and more and more are coming–

And Todd’s down there in it–

“If you do nothing,” Mistress Coyle says. “Your boy dies.”

Todd, I think–

Would I start a new war just to save you?

Would I?

“Viola?” Simone says again. “What’s the right thing to do?”

[TODD]

I fire my gun but there’s so many Spackle and men mixed together I have to aim high to make sure I don’t hit none of my own side and cuz of that I don’t hit no Spackle neither and one is suddenly in front of me raising a white stick to Angharrad’s head and I swing the barrel of the gun round and hit the Spackle hard behind his too-high ear and he falls and another one is already right there and it’s grabbing my arm and I’m thinking VIOLA right into its face and it stumbles back and there’s a rip at my opposite sleeve and an arrow’s flown right thru it and just misses going into the soft spot underneath my jaw and I’m pulling Angharrad’s reins to turn her cuz there ain’t no way outta this alive and we gotta run and a soldier gets hit with a blast from a white stick right next to us and a spray of blood covers my face and I turn away not seeing where I’m going and I’m pulling Angharrad with me and all I can think, all I can think in the middle of so much Noise, all I can think as I hear men die and Spackle die and see them die in Noise even with my eyes shut, all I can think is–

Is this what war is?

Is this what men want so much?

Is this sposed to make them men?

Death coming at you with a roar and a scream so fast you can’t do nothing about it–

And then I hear the Mayor’s voice–

“FIGHT!” he’s shouting–

In his voice and his Noise–

“FIGHT!”

And I wipe away the blood and open my eyes and it’s plain as anything that fighting is all that’s ever gonna happen in the world till we die and I see the Mayor on Morpeth and both he and his horse are bloodied and he’s fighting so hard I can actually hear his Noise and it’s still cold as stone but it’s saying TO THE END, TO THE END–

And he catches my eye–

And I realize it really is the end–

We’ve lost–

There’s too many of ’em–

We’ve lost–

And I grab Angharrad’s mane with both my hands and I hold it tight and I think Viola–

And then–

The entire bottom section of the hill the Spackle are coming down explodes in a roar of fire and dirt and flesh–

Rising up and over everything, pelting us with stones and soil and bits of Spackle–

And Angharrad’s yelling and we’re both falling sideways to the ground and there’s men and Spackle screaming all round us and running this way and that way and my leg is pinned under Angharrad who’s trying to work her way back up to standing but I see the Mayor ride past–

And I can hear him laughing–

“What the hell was that?” I scream at him.

“A GIFT!” he screams back as he rides thru the dirt and the smoke and he’s yelling to the men, “ATTACK! ATTACK NOW!”

{VIOLA}

We snap our attention back to the projection. “What was that?” I say.

There was a sudden boom but all the probe is showing is a solid block of smoke. Bradley dials the screen of the remote and the probe rises again, but smoke is covering everything.

“Is it recording?” Simone says. “Can you rewind?”

Bradley dials some more and suddenly the picture is going back on itself, back down into the cloud, the smoke rapidly gathering together and–

“There,” Bradley stops it and runs it forward again in slow motion.

The battle is as chaotic and terrible as it was, the men being overwhelmed by the Spackle army and then–

BOOM!

There’s an explosion at the base of the hill, a sudden violent eruption sending dirt and rock and the bodies of Spackle and their battlemores flying up and out, spinning into the cloud of smoke that rapidly covers everything–

Bradley rewinds again and we watch it once more, a small flash and then a whole section of the hill is picked up and thrown into the air and right there on the screen we see Spackle die–

Die and die and die–

Dozens of them–

And I remember the one on the riverbank–

I remember his fear–

“Is this you?” Simone says to Mistress Coyle. “Has your army reached the fighting?”

“We don’t have missiles,” Mistress Coyle says, not taking her eyes off the projection. “If we did, I wouldn’t be asking you to fire yours.”

“Then where did it come from?” Simone says. Bradley’s fiddled with the controls and the picture is bigger and clearer and on the slowest setting you can see something flying into the base of the hill, see even more slowly the earth flying up, the Spackle bodies being torn, not caring what lives they had, who they loved, what their names are or were–

Just bodies flying apart–

Lives ending–

We did this to them, we made them attack, we enslaved and killed them, or at least the Mayor did–

And here we are killing them all over again–

Simone and Mistress Coyle are arguing but I’m really not hearing them–

Because I also know this.

When Simone asked me what to do–

I was going to say fire the missile.

I was.

I was going to cause this damage myself. I was going to say, yes, do it, fire it–

Kill all these Spackle, these Spackle with their real reason to attack someone who deserves it more than anyone on this planet–

If it would save Todd, it wouldn’t have mattered, I was going to do it–

I would have killed hundreds, thousands to save him.

I would have started an even bigger war for Todd.