Speyer helped him lay the howitzer. He jerked the lanyard. The gun roared and sprang. The shell burst a few yards short of target, sand spurted and metal fragments whined.
Speyer had the next one loaded. Mackenzie aimed and fired.. Overshot this time, but not by much. The car rocked. Concussion might have hurt the Espers inside; at least, the psi blasts had stopped. But it was necessary to strike before the foe got organized again.
He ran toward his own regimental car. The door gaped, the crew had fled. He threw himself into the driver’s seat. Speyer clanged the door shut and stuck his face in the hood of the rocket-launcher periscope. Mackenzie raced the machine forward. The banner on its rooftop snapped in the wind.
Speyer aimed the launcher and pressed the firing button. The missile burned across intervening yards and exploded. The other car lurched on its wheels. A hole opened in its side.
If the boys will only rally and advance—Well, if they don’t, I’m done for anyway. Mackenzie squealed to a stop, flung open the door and leaped out. Curled, blackened metal framed his entry. He wriggled through, into murk and stenches.
Two Espers lay there. The driver was dead, a chunk steel through his breast. The other one, the adept, whimpered among his unhuman instruments. His face was hidden by blood. Mackenzie pitched the corpse on its side and pulled off the robe. He snatched a curving tube of metal and tumbled back out.
Speyer was still in the undamaged car, firing repeaters at those hostiles who ventured near. Mackenzie jumped onto the ladder of the disabled machine, climbed to its roof and stood erect. He waved the blue robe in one hand and the weapon he did not understand in the other. “Come on, you sons!” he shouted, tiny against the sea wind. “We’ve knocked them out for you! Want your breakfast in bed too?”
One bullet buzzed past his ear. Nothing else. Most of them, horse and foot, stayed frozen. In that immense stillness he could not tell if he heard sun or the blood in his own veins.
Then a bugle called. The hex corps whistled triumphantly; their tomtoms thuttered. A ragged line of his infantry began to move toward him. More followed. The cavalry joined man by man and unit by unit, on their.flanks. Soldiers ran down the smoking hillsides.
Mackenzie sprang to sand again and into his car. “Let’s get back,” he told Speyer. “We got a battle to finish.”
“Shut up!” Tom Danielis said.
Philosopher Woodworth stared at him. Fog swirled and dripped in the forest, hiding the land and the brigade, gray nothingness through which came a muffled noise of men and horses and wheels, an isolated and infinitely weary sound. The air was cold, and clothing hung heavy on the skin.
“Sir,” protested Major Lescarbault The eyes were wide and shocked in his gaunted face.
“I dare tell a ranking Esper to stop quacking about a subject of which he’s totally ignorant?” Danielis answered. “Well, it’s past time that somebody did.”
Woodworth recovered his poise. “All I said, son, was that we should consolidate our adepts and strike the Brodskyite center,” he reproved. “What’s wrong with that?”
Danielis clenched his fists. “Nothing,” be said, “except it invites a worse disaster than you’ve brought on us yet.”
“A setback or two,” Lescarbault argued. “They did rout us on the west, but we turned their flank here by the Bay.”
“With the net result that their main body pivoted, attacked, and split us in half,” Danielis snapped. “The Espers have been scant use since then ... now the rebels know they need vehicles to transport their weapons, and can be killed. Artillery zeroes in on their positions, or bands of woodsmen hit and run, leaving them dead, or the enemy simply goes around any spot where they’re known to be. We haven’t got enough adepts!”
“That’s why I proposed gettin’ them in one group, too big to withstand,”
“And too cumbersome to be of any value,” Danielis replied.
He felt more than a little sickened, knowing how the order had cheated him his whole life; yes, he thought that was the real bitterness, not the fact that the adepts had failed to defeat the rebels—by failing, essentially to break their spirit—but the fact that the adepts were only someone else’s cat’s paws and every gentle, earnest soul in every Esper community was only someone’s dupe.
Wildly he wanted to return to Laura—there’d been no chance thus far to see her—Laura and the kid, the last honest reality this fog-world had left him. He mastered himself and went on more evenly:
“The adepts, what few of them survive, will of course be helpful in defending San Francisco. An army free to move around in the field can deal with them, one way or another, but your ... your weapons, can repel an assault on the city walls. So that’s where I’m going to take them.”
Probably the best he could do. There was no word from the northern half of the loyalist army. Doubtless they’d withdrawn to the capital, suffering heavy losses en route. Radio jamming continued, hampering friendly and hostile communications alike. He had to take action, either, retreat southward or fight his way through to the city. The latter course seamed wisest. He didn’t believe that Laura had much to do with his choice.
“I’m no adept myself,” Woodworth said. “I can’t call them mind to mind.”
“You mean you cant use their equivalent of radio?” Danielis said brutally. “Well, you’ve got an adept in attendance. Have him pass the word.”
Woodworth flinched. “I hope,” he said, “I hope you understand this came as a surprise to me too.”
“Oh, yes, certainly, Philosopher,” Lescarbault said unbidden.
Woodworth swallowed. “I still hold with the Way and the Order,” he said harshly. “There’s nothin’ else I can do. Is there? The Grand Seeker has promised a full explanation when this is over.” He shook his head. “Okay, son, I’ll do what I can.”
A certain compassion touched Danielis as the blue robe disappeared into the fog. He rapped his orders the more severely.
Slowly his command got going. He was with the Second Brigade; the rest were strewn over the Peninsula in the fragments into which the rebels had knocked them. He hoped scattered adepts, joining him on his march through the San Bruno range, would guide some of those to him. But most, wandering demoralized, were sere to surrender to the first rebels they came upon.
He rode near the front, on a muddy road that snaked over the highlands. His helmet was a monstrous weight. The horse stumbled beneath him, exhausted by—how many days?—of march, countermarch, battle, skirmish, thin rations or none, heat and cold and fear, in an empty land. Poor beast, he’d see that it got proper treatment when they reached the city. That all those poor beasts behind him did, after trudging and fighting and trudging again until their eyes were filmed with fatigue.
There’ll be chance enough for rest in San Francisco. We’re impregnable there, walls and cannon and the Esper machines to landward, the sea that feeds us at our backs. We can recover our strength, regroup our forces, bring fresh troops down from Washington and up from the south by water. The war isn’t decided yet ... God help us.
I wonder if it will ever be.
And then, will Jimbo Mackenzie come to see us, sit by the fire and swap yarns about what we did? Or talk about something else, anything else? If not, that’s too high a price for victory.
Maybe not too high a price for what we’ve learned, though. Strangers on this planet ... what else could have forged those weapons? The adepts will talk if I myself have to torture them till they do. But Danielis remembered tales muttered in the fisher huts of his boyhood, after dark, when ghosts walked in old men’s minds. Before the holocaust there had been legends about the stars, and the legends lived on. He didn’t know if he would be able to look again at the night sky without a shiver.