He aimed the fusion gun first at Alcibiades.
It took a little over three hours. When he was finished, Sector C was a field of ashes, and a broad belt of emptiness stretched from the outer limit of the devastation to the nearest grove of healthy trees. He wouldn’t know for a while whether he had succeeded in saving the plantation. But he had done his best.
As he rode back to the plantation house, his mind was less on the work of execution he had just done than on the feel of Naomi’s body against his own, and on the things he had thought in that moment when he hurled her to the ground. A woman’s body, yes. But a child. A child still, in love with her pets. Unable yet to see how in the real world one weighs the need against the bond, and does one’s best. What had she learned in Sector C today? That the universe often offers only brutal choices? Or merely that the uncle she worshipped was capable of treachery and murder?
They had given her sedation, but she was awake in her room, and when he came in she drew the covers up to conceal her pajamas. Her eyes were cold and sullen.
“You promised,” she said bitterly. “And then you tricked me.”
“I had to save the other trees. You’ll understand, Naomi.”
“I understand that you lied to me, Zen.”
“I’m sorry. Forgive me?”
“You can go to hell,” she said, and those adult words coming from her not-yet-adult face were chilling.
He could not stay longer with her. He went out, upstairs, to Fred Leitfried in the info center. “It’s all over,” he said softly.
“You did it like a man, Zen.”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
In the screen he scanned the sector of ashes. He felt the warmth of Naomi against him. He saw her sullen eyes. Night would come, the moons would do their dance across the sky, the constellations to which he had never grown accustomed would blaze forth. He would talk to her again, maybe. Try to make her understand. And then he would send her away, until she was finished becoming a woman.
“Starting to rain,” Leitfried said. “That’ll help the ripening along, eh?”
“Most likely.”
“You feel like a killer, Zen?”
“What do you think?”
“I know. I know.”
Holbrook began to shut off the scanners. He had done all he meant to do today. He said quietly, “Fred, they were trees. Only trees. Trees, Fred, trees.”