Part 27 (1/2)
”How many times did I ask for a transfer so that you could be near your work?” he retorted. There was a chill fear in his eyes. ”What's it going to be, me or your work? It won't do you any good to stay, you know. Rodrick's not the kind to cheat on his new bride.”
”You have a filthy mind!”
”What else am I to think? I'm your husband. You've a.s.sured me that you love me. If it's Rodrick you love, I think you'd better run to him now and tell him that you're ready for him, tell him not to marry Jackie.”
She swallowed her shame and her anger. She felt just enough guilt, for still loving Duncan Rodrick, to be vulnerable. ”There's to be no fighting, no armed resistance if they try to stop you?”
”No one will be hurt,” he a.s.sured her.
”I'll pack,” she said. ”I'll need a full medical kit from the lab.”
”It's already on a cargo crawler. Two of them, as a matter of fact.”
”You've been planning this for a long time.”
”Since Rodrick set the date for the wedding,” he said. ”We'll be gone while they're all weeping and smiling happily at the wedding. They won't use force to bring us back.”
”No, they wouldn't,” she said.
”I have things to do,” he said, rising. ”We're taking camp beds. All we'll take from here are personal necessities, clothing, the kitchen equipment. We're taking the electrical appliances as well. When we're settled, we'll trade for one or two of the wind generators. We won't be roughing it for long.”
She wept as she packed her clothing.
”I'm going to ground that young man for six weeks,” Stoner McRae fumed. It was ten minutes after eleven. Betsy was looking worried. ”Now, don't worry,” he said hastily. ”Nothing has happened to them.
They're just running late. We've still got fifty minutes.”
”But why haven't they called in?” Betsy asked.
Stoner had been wondering the same thing, but he wasn't going to let Betsy know that he was worried.”Communicator failed, most likely. It happened to us once, remember? They get a terrific jarring around on a crawler.”
Stoner went outside, looked up across the veld toward the north. He saw only a herd of silver-horned antelopes and the s.h.i.+mmer of heat over the plains. He walked to theSpirit of America . Ito Zuki had volunteered to act as communicator on the bridge during the wedding. He'd heard nothing from the admiral. It was twenty minutes past eleven. ”Who's on standby alert?”
”Jack,” Ito said. ”Want me to get him?”
Stoner nodded. Soon he was explaining the situation to Jack Purdy. He suspected that Jack had volunteered to miss the wedding because he was still mourning the death of his wife, although he hid it well.
”Ito, ” Purdy said, ”Renato Cruz is in line after me. Get him here to hold the fort while I take the scout for a little run up north.”
It was eleven-thirty when Jack lifted theDinahmite and started north at a speed that would give him visuals of the ground in case the crawler was somewhere on the veld.
Betsy, seething, drafted Tina Sells to wear the flower-girl's gown she so lovingly had made for Cindy. It took two tries to find a teenage boy who could wear Clay's suit. It was, by then, almost twelve. People were already seated in the meeting house. Others milled about outside in the pleasant suns.h.i.+ne, all dressed in their finest.
Recorded synthesizer music began to boom out of the meeting house. The stragglers hurried inside. Ito Zuki had the scene on one of his screens. He located Emi and thought she looked lovely in her best dress. Renato Cruz, just a little hung over, began to check all the detectors in weapons control. Shortly after twelve o'clock Dr. Robert Allano, the psychiatrist who was also a justice of the peace, took his place in front of the altar. The grooms' parties entered from a side room. Max Rosen's face was twisted up in agony. Rodrick was calm, handsome. He led Max to their a.s.signed places, then let his eyes play over the audience, which filled the meeting house to standing room only. In that brief glance he did not see the face he was looking for. He didn't blame Mandy if she hadn't come. Perhaps she was somewhere in the back.
The music masked the muted sounds of hydrogen engines from the equipment park on the opposite side of Hamilton. Renato Cruz saw several lights go on and pushed b.u.t.tons to see a caravan of crawlers begin to leave the park. He wasn't aware of any large-scale expedition scheduled to leave during the wedding, but he'd been on a weekend pa.s.s. He watched idly, seeing that Commander Miller was driving the last crawler to leave the park, and then Renato turned his attention to the wedding ceremony.
Rocky Miller was giving instructions on a seldom-used radio frequency. The caravan was straggling as it left Hamilton, and he kept coaxing and ordering until the gaps were closed, and then he had to contend with the fervent complaints about the dust.
The well-traveled crawler road to the south allowed for speed, and soon the entire caravan was moving along in a cloud of dust at just under fifty miles per hour.
Grace and Jackie had decided on a full orchestral arrangement of the wedding march, and it thundered out with the fullness of an entire symphony orchestra and a volume that made Max wince. From his scout s.h.i.+p, Jack Purdy saw only empty veld. He had flipped on the homing-device detector and was getting no signal. The low, rolling foothills of the Renfro Mountains were ahead of him. He had the coordinates that the admiral had given Stoner by radio for the location of the probable bauxite deposit. He zoomed up and over the foothills and punched the coordinates into the navigation computer.
Max's Adam's apple bobbed when he saw Grace start down the aisle. She was so beautiful that it made his mouth go dry. His agonized expression became a look of such bliss that those who knew him well smiled and nudged others, and then turned to watch as Grace, smiling, swept down the aisle. There was a chorus ofohs andahs and murmured approval. When she took her place beside Max, he had never looked quite as handsome, quite as at ease as he did at that moment.
A new chorus ofohs andahs escorted another beautiful bride down the aisle-Jackie Garvey, in pink.
And behind her, looking positively angelic, the flower girl and ring bearer, Tina, all smiles, and the teenage boy holding himself stiff and stern.
Only ninety families, just over two hundred people, had decided to join the group that was seceding from the colony at fifty miles per hour. That, Rocky Miller felt, was enough. If the others were too cowardly to make the break, let them rot in that desert in back of Stanton Bay. The caravan was still moving through the veld, and Rocky had steered his crawler to one side to be able to keep an eye on the entire column. He had to watch for rough ground and an occasional old miner trap.
It was Clive Baxter's wife, riding beside her husband, who first saw the airs.h.i.+ps.
”Clive, what on Earth?” she asked, pointing.
Baxter was negotiating a curve in the well-beaten crawler track and couldn't take his eyes off the road.
”You should say what on Omega, dear,” he said, feeling quite good, almost jolly. He'd had all the military rule he wanted. He was looking forward to freedom, to being able to carry on his work as he saw fit. He looked up just in time to see an apparition from the past, a lighter-than-air vessel, long, rounded on both ends. He threw on the brakes in shock, and the crawler behind him, its driver having also spotted the airs.h.i.+p, slammed into the Baxter crawler from the rear at a speed of fifty miles per hour. Baxter, his head up at an unnatural angle, his mouth open, didn't expect the collision. His neck snapped, and there was one terrible moment of pain before a round, bulky object landed squarely on his stomach and blew bits of human flesh and shattered metals and plastics high into the air.
Two more crawlers slammed into the wrecked pair, and others steered wildly, shooting out at angles from the column, trying to avoid the wreckage.
”Weapons! Man your weapons!” Rocky Miller was screaming into a dead communicator, having forgotten to switch it on.
Mandy was looking at the airs.h.i.+ps that were converging on the halted column. She knew now what it had been that Allen Jones had salvaged from the bottom of Stanton Bay, because a boatlike gondola, open, long, and rounded, was suspended below each gasbag. And from the open gondolas a steady stream of winged things were leaping, forming up quickly in the air, swooping down toward the halted caravan.
Rocky flipped on the communicator to a confused jumble of screaming voices. ”Man your weapons!” he bellowed.
A vee of flyers swept over the vehicles at a height of about one hundred feet and dropped bombs.Several of the crawlers erupted in smoke and flames. The hydrogen tanks on one were breached, and flames reached out, charring screaming men, women, and children.
Paul Warden, sitting beside Evangeline, was thinking how beautiful Sage would look in a white wedding gown. The music was still thundering as Jackie swept down the aisle. He turned his head and c.o.c.ked one ear. He thought he'd heard something but decided that it might just be Jack Purdy'sDinahmite going supersonic up toward the north. By the time the music stopped and Dr. Allano began to speak, the explosions had also ceased, and the screams of the members of Rocky Miller's separationists, several miles to the south, could not carry that distance.
Organized flights swept the length of the wrecked caravan. Spears lanced down with deadly accuracy.
People ran to escape, only to be skewered by the long spears. A group of the flyers landed, quickly discarded their wings, and began to pick off the screaming, running survivors with arrows.
”We've got to go for help,” Rocky said, his face white. He gunned the engine of the crawler, and the vehicle slewed in a circle, throwing dust, attracting the notice of a vee of flyers.
”Let me have your laser,” Mandy said.
”Got to get help,” Rocky panted.
She jerked the weapon out of his holster, turned in her seat, braced her hands on the back of the seat, and sent a lance of fire upward. One of the flyers screamed shrilly and tumbled, but others released spears, and she saw them coming, spelling death. She kept pulling the trigger to see another and then another of the flyers go out of control.
There was a sound like a dropped watermelon beside her, a gasping gurgle, and she felt the crawler swerve violently. A spear had entered Rocky's neck just at the base of his skull and the point had exited at his crotch to make a little hole in the plastic cover of the seat. She knew that he was dead. The spear held him in an erect, seated position for a moment, and then, as the vehicle swerved again, he toppled against her. The crawler was moving faster and faster; his foot was jammed on the accelerator. Spears fell around her, and she glanced up to see three flyers soar past to the front. She raised her pistol, and the crawler, at that moment, hit an old miner trap, the front of the treads dropping. She was thrown over the windscreen, taking a nasty b.u.mp on her knee. She saw the gra.s.s coming up and felt a thud, and then all was black.
Each bride and groom recited the ancient rituals. The teenage ring bearer had to scratch his ear and almost dropped the velvet-covered tray on which rested two double sets of wedding rings. Max said his ”I dos” in a loud, almost belligerent voice. Grace squeezed his hand and winked at him.
A relieved ring bearer saw all four rings disappear from his velvet-covered tray and watched as the ring vows were mutually exchanged, couple by couple. And then the quiet voice of the justice of the peace was saying the old, beautiful words, and Max was grinning down at Grace as he heard, ”I now p.r.o.nounce you husbands and wives.” Max and Grace were already lifting Grace's veil when the justice said, ”Gentlemen, ladies, you may now kiss your spouses.” Max had his lips puckered. He didn't care if everyone in the whole d.a.m.ned colony was watching. His eyes were on Grace's, then s.h.i.+fted down to her parted, full lips. He bent toward them.