Child of Grass: Sea of Grass, Book Two Read online

  Jorge replied in English too. “Don’t mince words, Kaer. Tell me what you really think.”

  “You can’t let them do this, Jorge! You just can’t! I mean—I don’t know as much about God and religion as some people, but these read like the instructions for a dictatorship. This is scary.” I turned to da. “You know all that stuff I just said before—forget it. These people deserve to be punished!”

  “In the name of the Mother of the World?” asked Jorge.

  I caught myself before I said yes.

  The bear trap again.

  Ouch.

  I looked at da, then back to Jorge.

  I took a breath and phrased my reply in Linnean, “No. Not in anyone’s name. We do it because we have to do it—because if we allow it to happen, if we don’t do act to stop them, then our silence and our inactivity makes us accomplices to their crime.”

  Even before I finished the sentence, I felt da pat my hand approvingly. I felt good about that, but still not as good as I wanted to. The thought was not yet complete. I had to work on it some more.

  Jorge glanced to da. “Lorrin? What do you think?”

  “I think this will start a war,” said da, blandly. “The Linneans will never let it spread.”

  “A couple of months ago, I might have agreed with you. Now, after what I’ve seen . . . well, I worry. Don’t underestimate the power of the Hale-Stones’ miracles. The people see something outside of their experience, something they can’t explain, and they have no choice but to believe. Having an experience like that, a tangible experience of God—well, it will transform your experience of your life. I’ve met the believers. They scare me. If the Hale-Stones can continue to spread this belief through Linnean society like a virus—with enough visitations and encounters and sightings, they could create a very dangerous critical mass. Our own history demonstrates plenty of precedent. They know what they intend.”

  “Yes, Jorge, I hear you. I don’t argue with your conclusions. But do they really have the resources to continue staging miracles across a whole continent?”

  “We don’t know—because we don’t know how much equipment they’ve smuggled through. We don’t know how long a pipeline they have or how extensive a support network. We do think that they’ve had to start their program long before they really wanted to—that we forced their hand, so now in retaliation, they’ve decided to make our job impossible by creating a wave of religious hysteria, fear, and panic. They can use the social unrest to put themselves into positions of power. Smiller fears that they could entrench themselves so deeply that we’ll have to negotiate a truce with them. And if they can negotiate from strength, they can buy themselves a beachhead for long-term subversion.

  “If I believed that any of them had a rational thought in their heads, I’d endorse that scenario. But I just got out of Callo, five hours ago. We’ve ridden all night. I fear we’ve killed the horses, we drove them so hard to get here, I hated having to do that; but Lorrin, what I’ve seen, scares me silly. Smiller’s thesis only has validity if the Hale-Stones think rationally. They don’t. They have an apocalyptic death wish. If they can’t have Linnea, no one can. They don’t care about a truce, or a negotiation, or any kind of compromise with us. They don’t believe in compromise. You know Revelationists. They say, ‘You cannot compromise with Satan.’ If they can infect the Linneans with that mind-set, it’ll take us forever to undo the damage. Assuming we can.

  “They see Linnea as fertile ground for the seeds of their new society. No, they won’t negotiate. They started this because they think we forced their hand. They’ll escalate. They’ll regroup at Mother Land—one of the senior brothers will go out into the grass and have a new revelation—and then they’ll start heading to Mordren to stage their miracle there. They think to use the imagined destruction of Callo as a warning to Mordren. And we may have miscalculated. Because if we don’t destroy Callo, they may have to, to make their prophecy come true. A handful of short-range ground-to-ground rockets with incendiary warheads would do it. Or maybe a massive fireworks display set off simultaneously with some phosphorous bombs smuggled into the city center. I can think of a dozen ways to destroy that ugly little pesthole. And given half a reason, I’d do it gladly.

  “But now it all comes back to Mordren. If they stage one of their miracles there—if their messiah enters the city with suitable smoke and mirrors, then they could capture the major religious center on this continent. And then we’d have a real nightmare on our hands. I didn’t want to say any of this to Smil, until we got out of Callo.” He fiddled in his vest pocket and held out what looked like a metal button.

  Da took it and examined it closely. He held it so I could see too. It was a button, but one that had been pried open. Inside was a tiny chip.

  “We didn’t make that one,” said Jorge. “Don’t worry, you can talk. We fried it, three times over. But we’ve got a few more wrapped in heavy foil for the science lab to play with. They might know that we know, they might not. But we have to assume they’ve compromised our entire operation, until we can determine otherwise. These folks—they’ve planned this for a long time. They prepared themselves well. We have a serious crisis going. Anyway, I trust the tight-beam communications between this chopper and the next. She knows now. When we get to the target zone, we’ll launch the spybirds and jam everything in a thousand kilometer radius. Then we’ll talk about what to do next.”

  Da said, “Sounds like a good plan.”

  “You understand, Lorrin, we can’t communicate with Earth at all on this. We don’t know how badly they’ve compromised our channels. We have to act on our own out here. We have to use our own judgment—even if it means we risk violating the Charter.”

  Da nodded. “I assumed that risk from the beginning. I agree with Kaer. We can’t allow this to go on.”

  The Target Zone

  The lifters with the great-horses went back to the Hole. The vets would tend to the horses there, and send them on to Stopover and North Mountain in a few days, after everyone was sure they were no longer needed. Transporting a great-horse by air is said to be a nightmare. And after what Jorge had said about riding them too hard, I was worried about their condition. I hoped they would be all right and that someone would make sure they got lots of carrots and apples and oats as soon as possible.

  Jorge was afraid they’d have to pull a lot of Scouts out of the field. The entire Scout program might have to be reinvented. And after this business, it would probably be a while before Jorge could return to active service. Jorge wasn’t happy about that, and after he’d talked to Smiller again he was unhappier still. He paced up and down the aisle of the chopper, apparently frustrated at not being able to punch something.

  But once he stopped and leaned down to whisper in my ear, “Don’t fear, angel. I have to act this way so my team knows how much I care.” I didn’t know if he was joking or serious or what.

  After picking up Jorge, the target zone was only forty minutes northeast. The boulder would already be in place when we arrived. Even though the heavy-lifters were slower than the assault choppers, they’d still get there before we did—not only because we’d left later, but also because we’d had to detour a hundred klicks to meet Jorge and the other Scouts.

  About fifteen minutes before arrival, the control-officer for the mission passed through the cabin, making sure everyone had working night goggles and comm-sets on their helmets. Da pulled ours down from the overhead just before they turned off the last of the cabin lights. The control officer waited until we’d put our helmets on and powered up. As soon as she had green lights on her clipboard, she moved on to the next.

  I put my helmet on, lowered the goggles, and tried looking through them. The view through the all-purpose vision enhancement unit was spooky. It was like I’d suddenly fallen into a cartoon world—everything was flattened into simple colors with distinct outlines. People looked the strangest, because you couldn’t read expressions very well. If they weren’t wearing th
eir goggles, their eyes were just dark hollows; and if they were, they looked like they had bars of pink light across their face. The funny thing about the goggles, though, was the way they made people’s hair look weird and frizzy. They didn’t use light amplification only; they also used infra-red and radar and hypersonic-sonar a couple of other things I didn’t understand, and composited the image from all the separate signals, with false or approximate colors applied; so you could adjust the goggles for different field conditions. If you adjusted them far enough into the hypersonic, you could make people’s hair disappear altogether, and everybody looked bald with lumpy skulls—at least until they all put their helmets on.

  There were communications channels in the helmet too, but I was told to stay on Channel B, the all-talk channel, and not fiddle with anything else. The helmet was filled with all kinds of other electronics too—long distance listening, position locator, inertial guidance, terrain scanning, and probably a bunch of other stuff they forgot to tell me about. I didn’t understand half the readouts on the back of it or in the heads-up display. Finally, da told me to stop playing with it and strap the helmet on securely. We were almost there.

  A few minutes after that, they told us to grab our packs and line up in the aisle. They didn’t want to land, they wanted to bounce. As soon they touched ground, they were going to pop the door and they wanted us out as fast as possible. Jorge said to make it a game. Can we get everybody off in less than thirty seconds?

  We could and we did.

  There were eighteen of us, with Jorge and his Scouts. He briefed us all. “Throw your pack. Jump, grab it, and run straight ahead ten paces—then go still. If you can see over the grass, throw yourself flat.” He walked down the line, checking that our helmets were securely fastened. “If you lose your helmet, freeze where you are. We’ll come get you. Don’t go tramping all over everywhere looking for it. Your helmet has a transceiver. We’ll home in on that, so you stay put and we’ll find you.”

  Abruptly the sinking feeling below our feet turned into a bump, the door was open, and people were tumbling out, one after the other. Da was right behind me. When I got to the door, I was ready to jump and run, just as I’d been told, but Jorge reached up, grabbed me, and swung me down in one swift movement. “Hey—” I started to protest, but he barked right back. “We can’t have an angel with a broken leg. Now move!” And he shoved me forward into the sea—

  For a moment, all I felt was stems and stalks and leaves in my face. The grass was taller than me, taller even than da, taller than we’d ever let it grow in the Dome. I pushed forward through it—until I bumped into one of the Scouts, a girl named Beck. She didn’t look much older than me, but I remembered her from the Dome, and I knew she was twenty-three or twenty-four.

  She saw me and whispered, “Stay!”

  I froze.

  A moment later, I heard the whine and felt the wind of the chopper lifting off.

  We were alone on Linnea.

  In the middle of the sea of grass. The endless sea of grass.

  And totally cut off from all communication with Earth.

  The night air was cool, but not chilly. A slight breeze rustled through the tall stalks. I closed my eyes and sniffed the deep musty scent of sun-dried stems and leaves, resting in the dark. I could smell the sun and the rain and the good dark earth. And in the distance, very faint and far away, perhaps, the scent of boffili too. Hard to tell. Last I’d herd, the southern edge of the boffili migration was only twenty klicks north of here. They’d be resting for the night. Sometime tomorrow evening perhaps . . . the herd would start moving in. The idea worried me. What if they were wrong. What if the boffili were closer than we thought? What if they were just over there a little way—?

  We had to be very, very quiet.

  I didn’t know where da was, so I waited silently behind Beck. I began to get impatient, and shifted my weight from one foot to the other. This pack was getting heavy too. The grass around us glowed green and gold in our night-vision goggles. Only the sky was black. It was like being inside a cyberworld.

  Finally, a voice whispered in my ear. “Count off.” I was number nine, da was ten. I listened as everybody else counted up to me, then spoke my number as loud as I dared. I waited for da to come in right after me, like we’d practiced on the chopper—but there was only silence. Da? After a little more silence, somebody else said “eleven” and the count continued to the end.

  “Da?”

  Beck waved angrily back at me. “Shh!” She had her rifle out and was pointing it forward through the grass. After a moment more, she stepped back to me. She stepped in very close and pulled a retractable wire out of the base of her helmet and jacked it into mine. She flipped a switch and said, “We don’t know if anyone saw us. We don’t if the bad-guys can hear our radios. We don’t think they can, but we can’t take any chances. So just stay quiet and follow me. We’ll find your da. I’ll bet his helmet failed. It happens sometimes. Don’t worry. And don’t talk.” She pressed her index finger to my lips—stay silent.

  Somebody was talking over the channel. I tapped my earpiece meaningfully and nodded. She unjacked and listened. “—Six and nine, move 235 ten paces. Thirteen, move 220 five. Fourteen and fifteen, 215 seven—” Our radios used a new algorithm for chaos coding all over the spectrum. Anyone who didn’t have the same chip would hear only static. But we didn’t know how deeply the Hale-Stones had penetrated our security or if they’d gotten copies of the algorithm or the chip. So all communications had to be short-range and cryptic, just in case. And I couldn’t talk at all, because they didn’t want to risk the Hale-Stones hearing my voice, so I had to keep my helmet mike turned off except when we were directed to count off. Maybe we were being too paranoid about this . . . but I knew what da would say. “Not in this case.”

  Beck finished listening to our instructions. She gestured to me to stay close to her and I followed her southwest.

  My goggles had a stereoscopic compass overlay that looked like I was standing in the center of a big circle with degrees marked off. It was so accurately calibrated to the landscape that when I turned my head, it looked as if it was nailed down. When I followed Beck, I could see that we were moving exactly 235 degrees southwest. Except maybe not. Sometimes, when you don’t know if your security has been compromised, you can set all of the goggles in a control group to an arbitrary zero-point—and anyone who shouldn’t be listening won’t know where you’re going because he won't know where your “north” is, or any of the other headings on your compass. I assumed we were doing that now.

  A red dot on the left side of my projected circle showed me that our control-officer was off in that direction. If she gave the order to form up, all I had to do was turn toward the red dot and start walking. But according to what the heads-up display showed, we were being directed to space ourselves widely in a kind of skirmish line and push forward toward . . . the boulder, I hoped.

  I followed Beck through the grass so thick it was like trying to swim. I had to push the stems to either side with my arms and I had to lift my feet high just to push the springiest tufts down, so I could step on them. The grass was over my head. Every stalk had a slippery waxy coat—the source of the tarpay oil. And there was just too much of it. So when it was pressed down underfoot—if you could even get a foothold to press it down—all the blades slipped and slid against each other. I’d take a step and my foot would skid sideways, left or right, but never down. Every step was cautious and the footing was so uneasy I felt like I was walking on foam, I couldn’t get purchase. Beck seemed to be having the same problem—and she was supposed to be an experienced Scout. The resistance of the grass on either side, the uncomfortable bounciness of the ground beneath me—it all felt as if the grass was trying to knock me down and keep me down.

  And the nine-percent lighter gravity didn’t help either. It didn’t make me any stronger, but it made the resistance of the grass a lot more effective than it would have been otherwise. It simply
pushed back harder. The grass in the Dome hadn’t been this aggressive. I began to understand the stories the Scouts told about the grass fighting back—and their warnings. “Don’t fall down in the grass, it’ll never let you stand up again.” I tried to stay close behind Beck, hoping to follow in her wake, but the grass wouldn’t allow that. As hard as we pushed, we couldn’t move very fast—even so, I had to struggle like hell to stay up with her. It would be awfully easy to get lost in this mess, I realized. All I had to do was stop to catch my breath and lose sight of her. Surrounded by all this grass, I’d be instantly alone. Forever.

  And I was still worried about da.

  The heads-up display was useful for holding back part of my worries. All I had to do was glance up and a map appeared as if hanging on a large wall in front of me. A blue circle indicated the boulder, almost straight ahead—but more than a kilometer away. Pushing to it through the heavy grass was going to take a while. And I was tired already.

  There should have been 18 little numbers on the map, but number 12 was blinking orange in the last known position. The map display was a composite also. Every helmet scanned and transmitted its local terrain information, the control-board correlated everything and returned a combined view to everyone. Da wasn’t on it. I wanted to turn back and go looking for him. All I had to do was turn around and head back exactly the way we’d come—except we’d turned to move into position.

  But the compass overlay included a projection of “electronic string” so I could trace my exact path backward if I needed to. It also showed my projected course forward, so if I got lost I could find my way again. If I turned around, right now, and followed my path back, I could probably find where the chopper had come down. I could scan for da. The goggles would pick up his heat-signature with no difficulty at all. The heads-up map showed several suspicious patches of warmth, including one large fuzzy patch where the chopper had rested for less than a minute.