THE LAST ROUND
SUSAN R. MATTHEWS
Gavrill stood in the near-deserted main street of Warehouse Depot Drange, watching the plunderers come for him.
He didn’t want to die. He had too much to live for. He had the best marksman at Serac Hearths for a partner. They had a beautiful daughter, and a second child on the way.
Most of the pioneers of Serac Hearths were hidden away in safe places. It was Gavrill’s job to stall the plunderers for as long as possible to give the last of the pioneers a chance to get away.
“Listen to me,” the man with Gavrill’s death in his hand called out loudly, his voice carrying clearly from half a long block away. “There’s still time to come to an arrangement. Work with me here, Gav. I’m your friend, remember?”
Gavrill knew exactly how much time he had left. He could feel the heavy rumbling of the tankers underfoot from where he stood. If the plunderers weren’t on their way soon they wouldn’t reach the evacuation launch site before the detonation protocols destroyed it, and they’d be stranded here on Yegbenie Two.
Warehouse Depot Drange wasn’t much more than twenty heavy transport wheelers long, and Gavrill’s enemy, Berize, was standing just to one side of the last of the line that stood waiting in the street. Berize wasn’t likely to miss at this range. He favored a Tassicass C-fullfour, a survival from earlier days before pioneers had come to the dusty gold-tinged hills of Yegbenie Two hoping to found a farming settlement. There’d been nothing here but wild vermat herb, not then. Nothing but that.
Gavrill didn’t answer. He and Berize had argued it all out before. What could he say? I’ll split the bounty on pioneer heads with you? It wouldn’t be anything Gavrill hadn’t done before. He’d been a plunderer the same as Berize was.
Yegbenie Two had meant easy money, then; untouched riches waving beneath the warm sun over vast prairies of exotic culinary vermat herb. The first harvests had sold at a significant wildcrafted premium; but once Yegbenie Two’s store of native vermat had been exhausted and the soil was spent, the premium for wildcrafted herb went away, and the destructive nature of vermat’s hallucinogenic, narcotic properties became more difficult to ignore.
“We’re not friends anymore, Berize.” Gavrill didn’t think he’d have minded killing Berize. Not even after ten years’ partnership working for the corporations. “Not since you drowned M’liosh. Remember M’liosh?”
She’d come to Serac Hearths to join Yegbenie Two’s other pioneers, seeking to make a new life by developing a secondary vermat market with modified cultivars. She’d built a little one-room, half-buried, dirt-brick hut and a seed-lab for research. She’d planted flowers. Silly weeds, but they’d been flowers all the same.
Then Berize’s crew had flooded her out, just to discourage vermat poaching. Gavrill had had a thought, when he and the other pioneers of the Firewatch had found the ruins, that he might have tried to talk peace—even then—if the plunderers hadn’t pulled up M’Liosh’s flowers and scattered them over her corpse in mockery.
“We didn’t drown her, Gav. She was dead before the purge cycle got well started. No, she hit herself over the head with a rock.” There, a note of provocation in Berize’s voice. Sneering. “It was an accident, really.”
Gavrill was glad M’liosh had been dead. Drowning in the contaminated water from a vermat tanker—the so-called aftershot—was a horror to contemplate. Burned out a person’s lungs with concentrated alkali.
Nor was Berize finished with his threats. “And we’ll be back for more vermat, when the time comes.” When the spent soil had started to regenerate, though nobody really knew when that would be. “We’ll drown you all out. You should take your little lost lornlings out of harm’s way before we have to take steps, Gav.”
Gavrill took a deep breath, filling his lungs, savoring the flavor of the air. He could smell the ghost of the fragrance of vermat along with the dust of the temp-built road and the stink of spent fuel and the faint hints of the aftershot—resinous, with an undertone of sweet, musky night-blooming terlew. Flowers. Again with the flowers.
He had every hope of going quickly; Berize couldn’t flood him out in the street. The plunderers needed that road to trundle the transit wheelers out to the launch site, for transport to the nexus station at Wevlor on one of Yegbenie Two’s moons.
Gavrill could hear Berize’s men, moving quietly under cover of loading docks and warehouse lifts to get around him. Maybe they thought he’d cut a deal with them even now, sell the hopeful pioneers out in return for safety for him and his partner and their children. Joke was on them. Gavrill didn’t even know where the pioneers were. Not exactly.
Maybe Berize just wanted to be absolutely sure that Gavrill was dead, once Berize had killed him. But if Gavrill took any such deal, his partner, Remo, would shoot him herself. She was a good shot. It was one of the things he admired most about her.
“Well…” Gavrill said. If he let the moment stretch too long Berize might begin to hope that Gavrill could be talked into changing his mind. He wasn’t going to change his mind. “Any more drowning will have to be done over my dead body. Your quarrel’s with me, though, isn’t it? Not with any of your hangers-on.”
Over my dead body was as decisive a rejection as one man could offer another, but with luck Berize would be curious enough about what Gavrill meant to say to let him talk. Any delay Gavrill could create would work in the pioneers’ favor, whether or not Gavrill would be just as dead at the end of it one way or the other.
Berize eased the safety retard on the Tassicass back into “lock” from “loose” with an exaggerated gesture, apparently so that Gavrill would know what Berize was doing. The general form of the gesture was familiar enough. It meant I’m listening. So Gavrill talked.
“So, are you sure you’ve cleared the depot? There’s a storyteller. No reason he should be left behind to starve, is there?” Gavrill had listened in on the man’s stories with everybody else at the depot station, when he’d been able to. Amusing and good entertainment. The man earned his keep.
“Haldane-somebody?” Berize sounded confused. Did he think Gavrill was trying to play for time? Well, Gavrill was. But he was also trying to reduce the carnage. “Haldane, that’s right. What of him?”
“The man’s a vermat-head,” Gavrill said. “You’ll be taking him with you, surely. Looks bad to abandon your camp followers, Berize, you know that. And he could be useful. He’ll swear in court that we attacked you, if you give him enough v-juice. Judges appreciate a little humor as much as anybody else.”
“I know the man, now.” Berize shrugged. “I’ve no idea where to find him. We’ll take our chances with any judge in Jarizon system. We paid good money for each and every one of them.” Berize had apparently nerved himself up to the killing. Gavrill could hear it in his voice. This was the end for him.
But someone called out, clear-voiced and even cheerful in the thin afternoon air. “I’m right here, Berize.” Gavrill frowned, trying to locate the source of the voice in the still air. “Waiting for my ride out.”
Haldane. Who else could it be, really? Gavrill didn’t think he’d ever heard the storyteller so close to sober. Berize hadn’t asked Gavrill why he cared whether Haldane lived or died. Maybe Berize had simply marked it down to Gavrill’s sense of fair play; Berize used to have a lot of fun at Gavrill’s expense on that topic.
“Kind of you to spare a thought for me, Gavrill,” Haldane said, waving at Gavrill and Berize alike where they stood in the street. Gavrill saw Haldane now. He was sitting on the aft fender-end of the last of the transport rigs that were lined up with their backs to Gavrill and Berize, waiting to depart.
Specifically, maybe significantly, Haldane was comfortably perched on the tailshelf of the suckerhose apparatus. It was part of every transport rig, collecting the alkaline aftershot draining from the vermat to be dumped into tailings-pools. There the aftershot would dry up, and blow away, dust that could eat flesh off the living bone if the wind came on too strong and from the wrong direction.
“Yes, Gavrill, I do appreciate it.” Haldane patted the purge-box on the suckerhose for emphasis. “This one of the new rigs, Berize?”
Gavrill could sense some uncertainty coming from the Berize direction of the street. Unexpected complications set vermat harvesters off balance. Gathering wildcrafted vermat required thorough planning, not creative thinking; there were so many things that could go wrong.
“Get off the rig, you old beggar,” Berize said. His head was half-turned to speak to Haldane, but Gavrill could see that Berize was keeping his handgun—and presumably his eyes—fixed on Gavrill. “You don’t know these new flushers. There’s a speedsil in line, just ahead. Go on. Just as the dead man says.”
Gavrill could hear worn warehouse paneling creaking in the chill breeze, and the shrill scraping sounds of ventilation baffles coming loose and rubbing against one another. Spending money on maintaining soon-to-be-abandoned work sites wasn’t in the corporations’ best interest, clearly enough; that went for their employees, as well.
Berize and his plunderers were due to lose their livelihoods. Maybe—Gavrill told himself—Berize would be lucky, and the corporations would keep him on. Berize wasn’t any younger than Gavrill. There were only so many times that a man could start all over again, again.
“Do as he says, Haldane. No point in starving,” Gavrill said, feeling suddenly much older than twenty-eight standard. “I can hear your people trying to sneak up on me, Berize.” Why? Who cared? “You made a good choice, Berize. Haldane’s got stories in him yet.”
Haldane hadn’t moved, though. “No, there’s been a misunderstanding,” Haldane said. “Something I should probably clear up.” Gavrill didn’t hear any hint of awareness in Haldane’s voice of the risks he was taking. Haldane was just sitting there, toying idly with the snake-head valve assembly that controlled the suckerhose’s purge cycle.
“That misunderstanding,” Berize said, slowly, with the sound of a man as willing to shoot two men as one clear in his voice for Gavrill—who knew how to listen for it—to hear. “Care to explain, Haldane?”
Gavrill knew Berize was getting frustrated. An intervention seemed to be in order. “Now, Berize,” Gavrill said, in as calm and reassuring a tone of voice as he could muster, “you’ve got safes on that purge-valve, I know you do. No need to get trigger-happy.”
In one sense at least Haldane was doing Gavrill the best favor imaginable: distracting Berize so that the last of the pioneers could get to safe shelter before the corporations’ sanitizer bombs went off. Gavrill owed it to Haldane to return the favor. Killing a vermat-head was a waste of ammunition.
“The misunderstanding is the one about which of us is staying and which of us had better be on their way to the launch site with maximum speed,” Haldane explained, patiently. “Of course there are safety locks on the purge-valve. And on the discharge-authorization assembly. This one’s a code instruction”—Haldane pointed at it—“but the others are mostly mechanical. Don’t you think I know, Berize? I listen, when people talk. And I fiddle with things to calm my nerves. It’s because of my sickness, you know.”
The Greens. That was what they called it, plunderers and pioneers alike. People who snuck into the fields to gather illicit vermat for personal use—without a ventilator in good working order—risked permanent physical damage, body and brain alike, with every breath they took. Haldane had been on the v-rigs once. Had Haldane breathed too much green vermat?
Haldane’s voice had dropped to a soft, breathy sigh now. It was harder for Gavrill to make Haldane out. “You can’t get at me in time to abort the purge-initiate command before it engages. I drop this collar—here”—Haldane tossed the suckerhose into the air and caught it on its way back down, like a man bouncing a baby—“for whatever reason, and there’ll be no stopping it.”
Then Haldane’s voice strengthened. “Aftershot all over everything, the way the suckerhose bucks when the snake-head hasn’t been fixed properly. Something to behold, they tell me. You mean to shoot Gavrill anyway, so he doesn’t care, but what about you, Berize? Can you get someplace safe in time?”
It was an outright threat, too flamboyant to be real. Yet Haldane sounded very confident, and not at all drunk. “No, Berize?” Haldane said. “Then I suggest you and your people not lose a moment’s time getting to the launch field. Never know when my hand might slip.”
Haldane did something with the suckerhose. A drop or two of the concentrated alkali aftershot dripped from the discharge nozzle into the dust of the street. The perfume in the air was suddenly much stronger.
“You’re bluffing,” Berize said. Gavrill didn’t think Berize sounded as confident as all that. “You’ll die too, Haldane.”
A few drops of aftershot vaporizing in the open air a man could bear, without injury. A few more drops and a man would cough for days no matter how healthy his lungs were. Too many more drops and a man would never speak in a normal tone of voice again, and after that there was too short an interval between long-term physical impairment and death by asphyxiation to risk a measurement error.
“Yes, but do I really care?” Haldane asked, thoughtfully. “Maybe I’m just tired to death of living. You could try to rush me, you know. Then we’d all find out. Well, find out something, though what that might be I’m…I apologize, I’ve forgotten what I was going to say. I’ll just lie down for a little nap. Once I get these safeties back into proper order.”
Berize raised his voice. “Emergency evac!” he shouted. “On me to the speedsils! Hurry! Run!” He was Gavrill’s enemy, but Gavrill still admired his leadership. Berize hadn’t lost his edge over the years.
Five people, well fed, well clothed, broke from the shadows behind Gavrill, sprinting for the line of tankers. Five people with near-panic to impel them.
Now, finally, Haldane shifted his rump off the tailshelf of the suckerhose apparatus, the suckerhose itself safely locked into its secure holding slot. Nothing was going to purge from that tanker while the suckerhose’s business end was locked into its tank.
“Look, Gavrill, here’s a tanker full of vermat,” Haldane said. “Prime herb, too. Probably trade well on the, oh, unregulated market. In time. Did you bring a speedsil with you? I don’t think any bombs are going to go off, but anything could happen.”
Gavrill had so many questions. What had just happened? Why had Haldane intervened? “Nothing will blow until they’ve got their tankers to the launch site,” Gavrill said. “Speedsil this way.”
When Gavrill had seen the sun rise this morning he’d expected to die before sunset. When he’d faced Berize in the street, he’d expected to be laying the dust with his own heart’s blood within an hour. It was a day of wonder, a day to write songs about.
In the great welter of confusion in Gavrill’s mind, there was one thing of which he was certain: there wasn’t enough vermat in all of Jarizon system to repay the debt Gavrill owed Haldane, for this day’s work.
Five years gone past and here they were again, facing off in the primary access corridor through now-abandoned Drange Depot. Gavrill and Berize. Gavrill was the one with the armed men to back him up this time: Haldane stood beside him. The one last vermat tanker had been moved out into one of the side streets. There was nowhere for Berize to hide.
“You said you wanted to make a deal,” Gavrill said. Berize had come from the launch site by speedsil transport. It was idled well back from where Berize stood, under guard. No escape for Berize there.
Berize shifted his feet, as if he was uncomfortable. As well he might be. Berize had murdered one of the pioneers of Serac Hearths, more than five years ago. Her name had been M’liosh. People hadn’t forgotten.
“I’m tired, Gavrill,” Berize said, sounding worn out, defeated. “I want out of the wars. You already know the worst things I’ve done, and I know the same about you, so we don’t have to worry about having any secrets from each other.”
That was true enough, Gavrill had to agree. As if sensing an opening, Berize pressed on. “I have something to offer. Not in exchange. As acknowledgment.”
“I’m listening,” Gavrill said. Serac Hearths had rules in place for self-governance. Murder without extenuation meant outlawry, but the council had been known to make adjustments. “What do you propose?”
Berize didn’t answer directly. He made an obvious show of looking around him at the warehouse buildings lining the streets with their crumbling loading docks and their pass-throughs jammed shut, their no-longer-structurally-intact walls starting to buckle under their own weight.
“Place is a mess, though, isn’t it?” Berize asked. “Have your people been inside any of the warehouses, Gav? Maybe Haldane thinks he remembers where something useful was stored, and you’ve tried to find it?”
Haldane had had a few ideas, true, but nothing much had come of them. They’d been able to salvage some materials, some equipment, but mostly just odds and ends. Gavrill waited.
“I brought something with me that could help,” Berize said. “Could be useful. Valuable. I don’t know.” There was a flat finality in Berize’s voice. Hopelessness. Weariness. “The depot schematics, where things might have been left behind. The key-codes. Here.”
Berize had brought a satchel with him. As Berize walked carefully and slowly toward Gavrill, Gavrill could see it was the size and shape of a standard inventory screen. Gavrill didn’t move. Berize put the satchel down in the street and backed away once more. Then he shrugged.
“I don’t know, maybe there’s nothing left. The corporations don’t want anything more from me, and I know I don’t want to die in a one-cell sleeper in some industrial slum, breathing filthy air. I still have some good years of hard work in me, Gavrill. Let me come in.” Gavrill could hear desperation now, muted, but it was there. “I stole a life. That’s on me. I’ll pay with labor. The schematics and the keys, those are yours already, because I owe.”
Beside Gavril, Haldane bestirred himself, shifting his weight from one foot to the other in a slow, contemplative manner. A signal meant for Berize’s benefit: If it was up to me I’d feed him to the wildporks. “Mistake, Gav,” Haldane said. “Take the warehouse information. Send Berize into the wasteland.”
The greater outlawry. An almost certain death sentence. No access to provisions, or what little medical help there was, or to that fundamental and astonishingly crucial requirement for long-term survival of human beings—social contact.
In his mind’s eye, Gavrill could still see handfuls of flowers torn up out of a meager flower bed, scattered over a woman’s corpse in mockery. But he couldn’t change history. And he was a servant of Serac Hearths, a keeper of the peace, with a voice on the governing council that carried no more weight than anybody else’s.
“I hear you, Berize,” Gavrill said. “I hear you too, Haldane. But it’s not my call.” He raised his voice to be sure that everybody could hear him clearly, the people Gavrill could see and the ones in field-expedient cover amidst the trash and the detritus in the street. “You’ll come before the council, Berize. There’ll be a vote. I get one, like anybody else.” One was all he got, too. “You can camp here, maybe get a start on finding us some speedsils. That’d make you popular.”
The bigger Serac Hearths got, the harder it became to get around the widening aggregation of farmlabs and experimental fields. They needed speed and agility. They needed swifter transport. They needed speedsils. A man couldn’t buy his way out of a murder, but useful donations could be taken as a sort of mitigation. Dead was dead, after all. Life went on.
Taking a breath so deep Gavrill could see it from where he stood, Berize nodded his head. “There’s some abandoned transport equipment out at the launchfields,” Berize said. “Maybe something salvageable. Send me a crew. I’ll get started.”
There was a cold energy sink at Gavrill’s elbow, a column of ice crackling with disapproval. Haldane was angry, but there wasn’t much Gavrill could do about that. Haldane, no less than anyone else, was learning to fit his behavior to other peoples’ standards because neither he nor Gavrill—nor Berize—made their own law anymore.
The wars were over. The peace was complicated. “Let’s get back, Hal,” Gavrill said. “We need to brief the council on this first thing.”
And Gavrill was just as happy that it was no longer up to him to decide exactly what should be done with people like Berize.
It had been ten years since the wars had ended and the plunderers had left Jarizon for good. A signal at the window in the middle of the night could still bring Gavrill out of the deepest sleep in a heartbeat. The tap at the window’s thermal membrane was quiet but firm, and Gavrill recognized it on a deep level before he’d so much as opened his eyes.
Gavrill was out of bed in an instant, falling heavily to his knees on the floor, picking his half boots up in one hand as though he’d planned it that way all along. It was their eldest daughter at the door, Garee.
“With you in three,” Gavrill said to the window, hopping on one foot, pushing the other foot toe-first into his boot. Remo was awake—of course she was—listening. Their daughter had come to her parents’ bedroom rather than coming through the kitchen, to avoid waking the baby. There was a room for Garee there, tiny, but hers. Her brother still slept in a box bed in the kitchen corner, and they’d be building a new room for the baby Remo was carrying. If it lived.
“What do you think?” Remo asked him, but quietly, so that their daughter needn’t overhear. Garee was only fifteen. They started their young on the Firewatch early at Serac Hearths because there was so much work to go around and still too few people to do it.
“Go back to sleep, Remo,” Gavrill said. “You have Council in the morning. Haldane’s sure to have a report for you. You need to rest.”
That was something that he could, in justice, demand. Remo wasn’t a young warrior of iron will and an insatiable taste for victory, not any longer. This was their third child, the last they could afford. Life was a challenge at Serac Hearths. Babies could be resource-intensive, and there were only barely enough resources to go around.
Remo rolled over on her side with her back to the room. Gavrill knew she’d have the hand-cannon—Behrendo class eight, triple barreled, but with only one round chambered. If worse came to worst, the sharp, destructive detonation of a killing stick would be the first sound their child would hear, outside of Remo’s heartbeat. But there was always the risk that it would be the last, as well.
Remo didn’t need a hand-cannon for her protection. She was by far the better marksman of the two of them; it was Gavrill who didn’t trust his aim at close quarters. Remo kept a Tassicass C-fullfour sidearm on her side of the bed. Gavrill had bought it out of common stores for Remo as a gift six years ago; a peace offering, because she’d opposed granting Berize probation and been overruled.
Stepping out into the cool night air, Gavril closed the door quietly behind him. Garee stood waiting, leaning up against the outside wall with her arms folded across her chest.
For a moment, the familiar conflict in Gavrill’s heart threatened to overwhelm him. She was beautiful beyond measure, in his eyes. She’d been a difficult child, an angry child, but that wasn’t her fault. He was proud of her courage and her will and her aptitude as one of Haldane’s most genuinely promising students. He was terrified of harm coming to her. The too-many unkindnesses the world might inflict on Gavrill’s beloved daughter were his personal enemies.
“Sorry to wake you,” Garee said, as Gavrill smoothed his shirt into his waistband, settling his jacket across his shoulders. “Haldane’s special request.”
She had a bit of a crush on Haldane. Most of Haldane’s students did. It wasn’t anything to do with actual physical beauty, because Haldane was not a beautiful man. It was charisma plain and simple, the endless fascination Haldane evoked by simply being himself, delighting in battle, courageous to the point of insanity. Maybe just flat-out insane. Gavrill didn’t mind. For ten years he’d trusted Haldane with the most precious things he’d ever had: his partner, and his children.
“What’s on?” Gavrill asked, and gave his daughter a quick hug. She was tense.
“No check-ins from Berize since yesterday,” she said. “Special watch on that one. Haldane’s concerned.”
Nobody at Serac Hearths had forgotten that Berize had been a plunderer—nor that Gavrill had been one too, once upon a time. Nor that Berize had been at least involved in M’liosh’s murder.
“Harvest coming up,” Gavrill said carefully. “Maybe Berize is just too busy to check in.” Berize had been with them for nearly five years, now, working hard, keeping to himself in respectful solitude. Three more years and Berize would be granted half a vote on common council business, if the community’s judgment went his way.
“Haldane’s been putting a dossier together,” Garee said. “Pattern of petty harassment, getting worse. There’ve been some changes lately, though.”
Gavrill was completely dressed, half boots securely fastened, bind seams smoothed flat, outer layers of clothing in good order. Clean. Repaired. Like new, almost, Gavrill told himself, though it’d been so long since he’d had new clothing that he didn’t think he’d know what to do with it.
“Tell me,” Gavrill suggested. If Haldane had thought anything was heading downhill too fast he’d have come to Gavrill with a special report. Wouldn’t he? Haldane had been getting a little moody, of late.
“Nobody’s seen anything, heard anything. Ripe grain evaporating from Berize’s field. The egger-house broken open, alarms disabled, no telling whether the hens were stolen or ran away or were eaten.”
Or evaporated, like the grain. It could be mere noise, background malice. Serac Hearths wouldn’t let Berize starve if his crops were stolen and his livestock likewise. It would stress the limits of his welcome, though, which was still tenuous at best.
“Let’s get going,” Gavrill said. “Haldane waiting for us, main road? Speedsils on line?”
Serac Hearths owed most of its transport to Berize’s warehouse depot maps. The speedsils didn’t look like much anymore, but they were still running, longer than anybody had hoped. And they still ran whisper-silent, whether in fourplex mode or on tripod rollers.
“Ready,” Garee said, pointing.
As the man responsible for answering to the council on maintaining the peace and good order, Gavrill had a speedsil assigned to him for official use. So did Haldane, as captain of the Firewatch. Everybody else took turns. Now Gavrill’s speedsil was prepped and ready; all that was left was for Gavrill to step into the operator’s station at the front of the vehicle, and be off.
The body-shell’s command module gave him full range of night vision. He got situation reports, time, temperature, contour, mapping, threat assessment. He also got the terse and irritated voice of his friend Haldane, the man whose support—and talent for chaos and mayhem—had frustrated residual plunderers’ best efforts time and again.
“Consternation to the ungodly,” Haldane said, over Gavrill’s comm channel, “are you coming or not? Hurry it up.”
Garee herself had one of the shared community speedsils. She pulled out toward the main road slowly; Gavrill followed her. The gravel-paved track had been deliberately designed to create a little noise by way of advance warning. No security officer liked being snuck up on.
One of Haldane’s best tricks was sneaking up on people in plain view. He could be so harmless in silhouette, so innocuous in outline, that even after ten years Gavrill’s eye could still slide right past him without really noticing that he was there. Remo was the only person Gavrill knew who saw Haldane clearly, every time, and—since Gavrill wasn’t sure whether that meant Haldane was something more to Remo than Gavrill might like—he tried not to think too hard about it.
There was no gravel on the main road, the track that joined each holding in Serac Hearths together. As Gavrill neared the road, he saw two little red flashes alongside the track that told him where Haldane sat waiting, and the convoy-loop—closely linked radio communication, tightly shielded—sent an alert-ping.
“About time, too, slab-asleep.” Haldane, again. “Come on, come on. I have a bad feeling, Gav.”
Berize’s holding was nearly an hour away, even with the speedsils’ batteries at full and traveling at the top of their range. No time like the present, then, Gavrill thought, though he didn’t waste his breath. Communications discipline in effect. No social chatter.
It was a clear night. There wasn’t much between the road and the stars and the bright beacons of the habitable worlds of Yegbenie Two catching the light of their cooling sun. The air coming half-strength through the speedsil’s ventilators was cool and pleasant. But ten minutes from the place where the road would branch away to Berize’s holding, Gavrill started tasting the smoke of smoldering grain stalk waste. That wasn’t right, and everybody—Haldane, Gavrill, Garee, the three others from the Firewatch Haldane had brought with him—knew it.
Stalk waste was low-moisture cellulose, saved up for insulation and manufacturing sun-dried mud bricks. The sturdy little scrubland hoppers that were native to Yegbenie Two thrived on it, growing tamer with each passing year. One adult hopper would feed a family all dearth-season if the meat was processed carefully enough. So a fire in a stalk-waste stack was a significant loss.
It could be taken as a signal that there was no further need to hurry, as well.
The house Berize had built for himself—still in the process of construction, but with two rooms and the waste-pit finished—seemed undamaged and intact in the beams of the speedsils’ headlamps. Gavrill decided against going into Berize’s house with a weapon in each hand. It would be dawn soon. He wanted to be able to see what was what in the clear light of day before he went inside.
Haldane led one of the other speedsils out to the backbehind of Berize’s house but Gavrill kept Garee with him. If they found a murdered man, it would be her first encounter with death by violence, and Gavrill wanted to be there.
The flashing signal from a speedsil’s headlamps—a rapid pattern, three pulses in blue, shining from the back of Berize’s house—told Gavrill that Haldane had found a body. Gavrill sighed. “I expect we’d all better go around back, Garee.”
Out behind the little low-built house, the stalk-waste fire was down to scant embers smoldering in a field-expedient firepit. It was a well-built firepit, with a good wide firebreak surrounding it and a fine mesh net over all to protect against stray sparks blowing into dry grass beyond the firebreak on a breezy night.
But the night was calm. Anybody could have built that pit in practically no time. Gavrill had put them up himself. All it took was a pass or two in a speedsil with an improvised drag to scrape the dirt down to bare earth, and a few basic supplies. Serac Hearths had been built on prairie land. It didn’t take much to scrape off the topsoil.
This fire had been going for the most part of a day, Gavrill thought, judging by the probable rate of consumption and how close to extinction it was. There was a body laid out alongside the firepit; it seemed to be intact, as well as still fully clothed. Gavrill didn’t see any obvious wounds, no sign of interference. But people like Berize almost never died of natural causes.
“Cleanup crew?” Gavrill asked Haldane, who nodded.
“On its way, Gav. One of my people will make a report once the sun’s up and we can see better.” There’d be an autopsy, of a sort. Which wouldn’t tell them much. Someone with experience and training had done—or supervised—this killing, judging by the elegance of the firepit. “It’ll have been someone who knew too much of Berize’s history, maybe. I’m sorry, Gav. I know you wanted it to work.”
Too much history. Somebody at Serac Hearths had let Berize work like a bondslave for years, and then killed him before he’d won through to a limited sort of membership in the community. It wasn’t for Gavrill to judge, but he didn’t like it, because he smelled malice underneath it all, not a clean settling of scores. Violation of a social contract.
“Too early to tell about a culprit, I suppose,” Gavrill said. Garee had retreated to the company of her peers, the other members of the Firewatch, younger people all. Gavrill was alone with Haldane. They could talk.
There weren’t altogether many people in the settlement that Gavrill could talk to about some things. Haldane and Remo. Remo wasn’t here. Gavrill didn’t think he’d be ready to talk to her about what this meant for a few days yet.
He’d got distracted, Gavrill realized, and Haldane had apparently noticed. Gavrill shook his thoughts back into order to finish his point. “We’ll have to try to find out who it was, anyway. There was an agreement. And we’re only as good as our word, any of us. This can’t happen again, Haldane. Ever.”
History had to stay history. There could be no hope for hope, for safety and security and confidence in the future, if people could be murdered without consequences. And yet Gavrill was confident within a fair degree of certainty that they’d never be able to prove who’d killed Berize.
“Maybe we don’t say there was a crime,” Haldane suggested. “Maybe once the dawn comes we’ll find it might not have been a killing. The young and innocent aren’t going to see things their tired, old, used-up seniors might. Could be we’ve made a mistake, you and I. Could be it was just an unfortunate accident. I don’t see any wildflowers.”
Haldane was right. All of those things were perfectly plausible. But one of the people here was Gavrill’s daughter; Gavrill wanted a clear-cut resolution for her sake, to nurture her faith in justice. It was important for people to have something to believe in, and Gavrill was suddenly unsure whether Haldane could be that man any longer.
“If only I could be confident.” He didn’t have to spell things out for Haldane. “Sure that it won’t happen again. It’s a stain on Serac Hearths. I want to be certain, Hal.”
The sky was beginning to show pink and gold on the horizon. Gavrill could see Haldane’s expression—calm, confident, even compassionate. That was a side of Haldane’s character that nobody but Gavrill—and Remo—had ever, would ever, see.
“I’m quite secure in that,” Haldane said. “No more Berizes. No more murders. You’ll see.”
And with no better assurances than that, Gavrill had to get on with things.
Standing on the river’s ancient banks above the Serac Steeps that descended down to the river’s flood plain, Gavrill folded his arms across his chest to signal his concern. He had to be calm.
They’d found young Esko alive. That was good news. Esko had been swept down toward the river by a shallow avalanche and trapped in the scree in the run-out zone; that was all. Other news was not so good. Esko had had no business being here—alone—in the first place.
Gavrill watched for the ambulance.
That limp and unresponsive body could have been Gavrill’s own son, Rega. Rega and Esko were the same age, not quite fifteen turnings. But Esko would be all right. The children of Serac Hearths were well fed and lovingly nurtured, and if meals didn’t vary much at least there was plenty for everybody these days. There was no reason why Esko’s bones wouldn’t knit straight and true.
“Transport just arriving, Provost Marshal.” Gavrill’s oldest daughter, Garee—now nearly twenty—would know that there was something wrong between Gavrill and Haldane because she’d known them both for most of her life. “Sickhouse on alert. Do either of you want to come with? Provost Marshall Gavrill? Cadre commander Haldane?”
“We’ll hang on out here for a while.” Gavrill had a few choice words to share with Haldane. “Meet you back, Garee.”
Haldane had been about to speak, then didn’t. It had been years since they’d needed words to know what was on each other’s minds.
“I’ll notify the council rep, then, Provost Marshal,” Garee said, with a crisp nod. “I’ll be at the sickhouse. Leaving you to it, sir.”
The medivac team had arrived. Gavrill watched his daughter join the rescuers at Esko’s stretcher-side.
It had only been good luck that they’d found Esko when they had, after two days’ lying in the scree. Gavrill knew he wasn’t going to be so lucky when Esko’s parents found out. They’d be demanding he take steps. Gavrill knew he should have taken steps years ago.
“You were telling old stories, I suppose,” Gavrill said, at last. The medivac team wasn’t losing any time; they were already on their way back to Serac Hearths’ main base. “To the trainees.”
Haldane scowled. It was a sore subject. Haldane felt embellishments improved the educational value of old tales. “Inspiring the next generation, Gav. These younglings have never had to run for their lives. We owe it to them to give them something to strive for.”
Haldane inspired each new class of trainees on the Firewatch with a passionate desire to prove themselves against a standard that was meant to be aspirational, based on exaggerated exploits and only just achievable feats of endurance and daring. Haldane was good at inspiring people to overextend themselves, take ill-considered risks. It made him dangerous.
“We’ve had this conversation, Hal,” Gavrill reminded him. “Several times. We shouldn’t still be trusting you with people’s children. This has got to stop. Once and for all.”
This wasn’t the first time a trainee had taken unnecessary risks without understanding what they were getting themselves into. And that wasn’t the worst of it. Berize’s murder—five years old, now—still lurked at the edges of people’s consciousness.
It was widely assumed to be Haldane’s doing. And it didn’t matter if it was or not, only that Haldane’s romantic appeal to restless young people encouraged the idea that vigilante justice was a higher sort of law. That idea in itself was as deadly a challenge to the future of Serac Hearths as any plunderers’ raid.
Hal didn’t argue the point with Gavrill; he just argued. The specter of age and infirmity was coming up on the horizon to remind them all that they’d have to cede authority to the next generations, and it made Haldane cranky. “We owe it to them to raise them up as best we can. Teach them, Gav. Train them. Test them—”
Gavrill interrupted. “Serac Hearths has outgrown both of us, Hal. You won’t change. You should leave, old friend.”
Haldane snorted derisively. “You’ll be coming with me, then, I suppose? You and Remo, and the rest of the old pioneers?”
That was Haldane’s mean streak showing. Yet the taunt was not unfounded. “I haven’t almost gotten anyone killed for at least ten years, Hal. You’re a danger to our children. You have to go.”
If Hal wouldn’t go, he’d have to be removed. And if anybody was going to do that, it should be one of the veterans of the plunderer wars that did the deed, or the very act would reverberate in community mythology to poison the next generation. After all, Gavrill reminded himself, he could be a destabilizing influence, too. But he could be easily repudiated in the name of civil order, and his history of violence along with him. He was far from the man that Haldane was.
“Fight you for it,” Haldane said suddenly. “That’s only fair.”
For a moment, Gavrill struggled with a sudden sense of the absurd—a conflict between didn’t see that coming and oh yes, you did. More than anything, he was going to miss the way Haldane could come at him with that kind of thing, perfectly reasonable, perfectly insane.
Haldane nodded, clearly taking Gavrill’s perplexity for agreement. “All right, then. We’re lucky in the moon, wouldn’t you say? Full, or as good as. We can do it in the street at Drange. You know where. There will be a final reckoning, Gav, once and for all, I promise.”
Right back where this had all started, on that day so many years ago, when Gavrill had faced Berize at Drange Depot and only lived because Haldane had intervened for inscrutable reasons of his own.
Haldane had given Gavrill the weapon that had ultimately won the war for all of them, that day: himself. His genuine indifference to whether he lived or died, which made him uniquely dangerous. And the fact that Haldane did impossible things without thinking twice about them, because he didn’t have any patience for trivialities like reason or common sense or consideration of alternative outcomes.
Gavrill had owed his life to Haldane from that day forward. But he wasn’t going to give it back now without a fight for the future of Serac Hearths.
It was a beautiful night. The moon was so full that its pink-tinged gold light cast shadows down the long-deserted streets of Warehouse Depot Drange. The stars and the eight planets of the Jarizon system shone clear, easily counted one by one. Gavrill had taught the nursery rhyme to his children. Shining brightly in the sky, ask them by name why, oh, why.
Gavrill’s daughter should be sitting under a green tree on a little rise, listening to hoppers grazing in the dark, sharing a snack with friends, drinking pale, thin beer coaxed out of last harvest’s gleanings. She wasn’t. She was at the sickhouse with the rest of the young people, arguing about whether Esko had been stupid or brave, or neither, or both. Halfway to a mob.
Some of them would come looking for Haldane. Tripping over unseen obstacles on the ground beneath the beguiling moonlight would be the least of it. People would get hurt. Gavrill needed to work fast.
“Did we ever dream we’d come to this, Gav?” Haldane asked, with wistful regret in his voice. He’d kept his appointment, as Gavrill had known he would. Haldane was a man of his word. And because that was so, Gavrill had constructed an entire cathedral of excuses for Haldane’s behavior over the years, gilt and glass and a vaulted ceiling, bells, choirs, chanting.
But the sorrowful fact was that Haldane was unfit for peace, he who’d been so perfectly fit for war. The aging warriors of Serac Hearths fought against new enemies now—wind and weather, crop blight, animal predation. Not Hal.
Gavrill shook his head. But Hal probably wouldn’t be able to see it, because although the moon shone bright down the center of the street, the sides of the street were in shadow.
“Never,” Gavrill said, loudly enough to be clearly heard across the thirty paces’ separation between them. “I’ll never forget that day, Hal. I was as good as dead.”
“And it’s proper that you remember,” Hal agreed. But there’d been a third party there that day. There’d been Berize. Haldane had put himself body and soul into winning the war against Berize and his plunderers for no reason Gavrill had ever understood except for pure deviltry. Now, new fruit of Haldane’s dangerous indifference to the consequences of his actions was ripening on the branch, carrying its own kind of poison.
“Still,” Gavrill said, reluctantly but determined, “you’re a danger to Serac Hearths, Hal. And I don’t believe you’ll leave without a fight.” Because where in all of Jarizon space was there a place left for men like Haldane, like Gavrill?
“Indeed not,” Haldane said, as thoughtfully as Gavrill had ever heard Haldane speak. Hal wasn’t a thoughtful man. “In fact, Gav, I think that since our fellowship is over, I have every right to—”
Only at that instant did Gavrill realize that the little signs of restlessness he’d discerned imperfectly by moonlight was what Haldane looked like when he was raising a projectile weapon. Taking aim—at him.
By then it was already too late for Gavrill, betrayed by aging eyesight and shadows. He pulled his own sidearm out of his waistband anyway. He could at least get a shot off, for appearances’ sake.
He never got the chance.
It was a whisper-rifle, for hunting small game. Gavrill didn’t even hear the report. Haldane was already crumpling to his knees in the street, a black stain running like a bursting dam from Haldane’s throat down his chest, his head hanging down by the merest thread of flesh like a grotesque ornament. The blood followed the bullet, a long black spray behind Haldane in the street. Haldane was dead already. Gavrill knew that.
And that Gavrill’s partner, Remo, was still one of the best hunters in Serac Hearths.
Hal fell slowly backward into the dust, his hand held on the level as he toppled. There was another shot, then—but a much louder one, and from Haldane himself. Haldane had meant to kill him. It was a strange sort of a parting word, sorrowful respect, companionship, love.
Gavrill could hear the muted crunching of a speedsil coming up the street behind him. “Get moving,” Remo said. “Someone will have heard. They have to find him dead, Gav. Come on.”
She’d aimed carefully, a grazing shot to one side of the neck to leave the head sufficiently intact for Hal to be recognizable, even dead. She was right. If the body wasn’t found before the night-predators got to it, if it couldn’t be definitely identified, some of the young people would believe that Haldane was still out there, somewhere, and go out in search of the vanished hero.
Remo and Gavrill had to get clear. Gavrill slipped into the speedsil as it moved past him, hanging on to a grab-bar as it picked up speed.
The time for transcendent gallantry, for desperate courage, for iron determination to overcome overwhelming odds—
That time was past. Gavrill and Remo would raise their children, build a secure society, look to the future. Haldane would live forever, a monument to heroic legends of times gone by. The future of Serac Hearths would bring its own challenges, but—at the end of all things—the legendary warrior Haldane would have no further part in it.