Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

after this
moment there would be no more to savour. And all through the
love-making, and the hours later they spent asleep together, he could
sense the strength in her - a strength she held back, as if afraid of
damaging him.

 
IV
     
     
    Luca huddled at the bottom of the trench. It was just a gouge
scraped roughly in the surface of the Rock.
    He stared up at a great stripe of sky that was full of cherry-red
light, a sky where immense rocks sailed like clouds. Sometimes they
came so close to his own Rock he could actually see people moving on
their inverted surfaces. It seemed impossible that such vast objects
could be crowded so close. The slightest touch of one of these great
jostling rocks against another could crush him and these shallow
trenches and chambers, utterly erasing him and any trace to show he
had ever existed, scraping clean his life from the universe. He was
in a heavily armoured skinsuit, but he felt utterly defenceless. He
was just a mote of soft blood and flesh, trapped in this nightmare
machinery of churning rock and deadly light.
    All of this in utter, inhuman silence, save for the shallow
scratch of his own breathing, the constant incomprehensible chatter
over his comms.
    The Rock itself was a swarm of continual, baffling activity.
Troopers crowded constantly past him, great files of them labouring
from place to place carrying equipment and supplies. They were
blank-faced, dogged, their suits carefully dusted with asteroid dirt
in the probably vain hope that such camouflage would help them
survive. Sometimes they stepped on Luca’s feet or legs, and he
cowered against the dirt in his trench, trying to make himself small
and invisible.
    Bayla, the trooper on the charge of religious sedition, was with
him, though. She had been assigned by Teel to ’supervise’ him. Luca
hadn’t seen anything of Teel herself since they had broken through
the last cordon of Navy Spline ships and into the full battle light,
and the final preparations had begun. Whatever fantasies he had had
of working alongside Teel, of somehow participating in this effort,
had long evaporated. The only human comfort he drew was from the warm
pressure of Bayla’s leg against his own.
    Bayla kept checking a chronometer and consulting lists that
scrolled over the surface of her skinsuit sleeve. But every few
minutes she took the time to check on Luca. ’Are you all right?’
    ’Yes.’ Again he had to push back to let a file of troopers past.
’I don’t understand how they can do their jobs.’
    ’What else is there to do?’
    ’They must be afraid.’
    He could see her frown. ’You learn to live with the fear. Like
living with an illness.’
    ’A fear of death, or injury?’
    ’No, not that.’ She spoke slowly. She seemed serene. ’It’s more
that it might not make sense. You feel you’re in the wrong world, the
wrong time. That it shouldn’t be like this. If you let that in,
that’s the true fear.’
    He didn’t understand, of course.
    A patch of Bayla’s sleeve flashed orange. ’Excuse me.’ Bayla
barked a command.
    A file of troopers came scurrying through the dirt and took their
position. They were carrying tools, he saw. The troopers all seemed
small, light. Young, he realised. Bayla held up her hand, checked the
time again - then brought her arm down in a chop. The troopers
swarmed up over the side of the trench, using rungs and cables or
just footholds gouged into the harder rock.
    In response, light stormed.
    Some of the troops fell back immediately, limp, like dolls. The
rest of the troopers flattened themselves on their bellies in the
dirt, under the light, and began to crawl away, face down, out of
Luca’s sight. Other troopers came scurrying along the trench with med
cloaks. They wrapped up the fallen and took them away, limp bundles
that were awkward to handle in the low gravity.
    There was a swirl of cubical pixels before Luca. It coalesced into
the compact form of Dolo. He wasn’t wearing a skinsuit, and his robe
was clean. In this place of dirt and rock and fire he was like a
vision of an unattainable paradise. He smiled. ’How are we bearing
up, Novice?’
    Luca found it difficult to speak. ’Those troopers who went out of
the trench in the first wave. They were children.’ Perhaps some of
them had come from the induction camp on New Earth.
    ’Think of it in terms of efficiency. They are agile, easy to
command. But they are poor soldiers. They suffer higher casualty
rates than their