It took about ten minutes, at least as far as we were concerned as unaffected observers. I had a psychophysicist tell me once that “it” had both continued to “happen” forever and had never “happened” at all, and that neither statement canceled out the validity of the other, that each statement in fact was both “applicable” and “nonapplicable” to the same situation consecutively—and I did not understand. It took ten minutes.
At the end of that time, the world got very still.
We looked up. The land had stopped churning. A tiny star appeared amongst the rubble in the middle distance, small as a pinhead but incredibly bright and clear. It seemed to suck the night into it like a vortex, as if it were a pinprick through the worldstuff into a more intense reality, as if it were gathering a great breath for a shout.
We buried our heads in our arms as one, instinctively.
There was a very bright light, a light that we could feel through the tops of our heads, a light that left dazzling after-images even through closed and shrouded lids. The mountain leaped under us, bounced us into the air again and again, battered us into near unconsciousness. We never even heard the roar.
After a while, things got quiet again, except for a continuous low rumbling. When we looked up, there were thick, sluggish tongues of molten magma oozing up in vast flows across the veldt, punctuated here and there by spectacular shower-fountains of vomited sparks.
Our scattershield had taken the brunt of the blast, borne it just long enough to save our lives, and then overloaded and burnt itself to scrap; one of the first times that’s ever happened.
Nobody said anything. We didn’t look at each other. We just lay there.
The chrono said an hour went by, but nobody was aware of it.
Finally, a couple of us got up, in silence, and started to stumble aimlessly back and forth. One by one, the rest crawled to their feet. Still in silence, still trying not to look at each other, we automatically cleaned ourselves up. You hear someone say “it made me shit my pants,” and you think it’s an expression; not under the right stimuli. Automatically, we treated our bruises and lacerations, automatically we tidied the camp up, buried the ruined scatterfield generator. Automatically, we sat down again and stared numbly at the light show on the savannah.
Each of us knew the war was over—we knew it with the gut rather than the head. It was an emotional reaction, but very calm, very resigned, very passive. It was a thing too big for questioning; it became a self-evident fact. After D’kotta, there could be nothing else. Period. The war was over.
We were almost right. But not quite.
In another hour or so, a man from field HQ came up over the mountain shoulder in a stolen vacform and landed in camp. The man switched off the vac, jumped down, took two steps toward the parapet overlooking hell, stopped. We saw his stomach muscles jump, tighten. He took a stumbling half-step back, then stopped again. His hand went up to shield his throat, dropped, hesitated, went back up. We said nothing. The HQ directing the D’kotta campaign had been sensibly located behind the Blackfriars: they had been shielded by the mountain chain and had seen nothing but glare against the cloud cover. This was his first look at the city; at where the city had been. I watched the muscles play in his back, saw his shoulders hunch as if under an unraised fist. A good many of the Quaestor men involved in planning the D’kotta operation committed suicide immediately after the Realignment; a good many didn’t. I don’t know what category this one belonged in.
The liaison man finally turned his head, dragged himself away. His movements were jerky, and his face was an odd color, but he was under control. He pulled Heynith, our team leader, aside. They talked for a half hour. The liaison man showed Heynith a map, scribbled on a pad for Heynith to see, gave Heynith some papers. Heynith nodded occasionally. The liaison man said goodbye, half-ran to his vacform. The vac lifted with an erratic surge, steadied, then disappeared in a long arc over the gnarled backs of the Blackfriars. Heynith stood in the dirtswirl kicked up by the backwash and watched impassively.
It got quiet again, but it was a little more apprehensive.
Heynith came over, studied us for a while, then told us to get ready to move out. We stared at him. He repeated it in a quiet, firm voice; unendurably patient. Hush for a second, then somebody groaned, somebody else cursed, and the spell of D’kotta was partially broken, for the moment. We awoke enough to ready our gear; there was even a little talking, though not much.
Heynith appeared at our head and led us out in a loose travel formation, diagonally across the face of the slope, then up toward the shoulder. We reached the notch we’d found earlier and started down the other side.
Everyone wanted to look back at D’kotta. No one did.
Somehow, it was still night.
We never talked much on the march, of course, but tonight the silence was spooky: you could hear boots crunch on stone, the slight rasp of breath, the muted jangle of knives occasionally bumping against thighs. You could hear our fear; you could smell it, could see it.
We could touch it, we could taste it.
I was a member of something so old that they even had to dig up the name for it when they were rooting through the rubble of ancient history, looking for concepts to use against the Combine: a “commando team.” Don’t ask me what it means, but that’s what it’s called. Come to think, I know what it means in terms of flesh: it means ugly. Long ugly days and nights that come back in your sleep even uglier, so that you don’t want to think about it at all because it squeezes your eyeballs like a vise. Cold and dark and wet, with sudden death looming up out of nothing at any time and jarring you with mortality like a rubber glove full of ice water slapped across your face. Living jittery high all the time, so that everything gets so real that it looks fake. You live in an anticipation that’s pain, like straddling a fence with a knifeblade for a top rung, waiting for something to come along in the dark and push you off. You get so you like it. The pain’s so consistent that you forget it’s there, you forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you live on the adrenaline.
We liked it. We were dedicated. We hated. It gave us something to do with our hate, something tangible we could see. And nobody’d done it but us for hundreds of years; there was an exultation to that. The Scholars and Antiquarians who’d started the Quaestor movement—left fullsentient and relatively unwatched so they could better piece together the muddle of prehistory from generations of inherited archives—they’d been smart. They knew their only hope of baffling the Combine was to hit them with radical concepts and tactics, things they didn’t have instructions for handling, things out of the Combine’s experience. So they scooped concepts out of prehistory, as far back as the archives go, even finding written records somewhere and having to figure out how to use them.