hours, or wait twelve for a post-mortem on that alehouse brawl, is Cyr’s problem. And yours.”
“ Post-mortem? ”
“Nobody’s dead, Commander, it was just an expression.”
An expression, thought Foord, which he had used deliberately. “Smithson, if we’re ready to leave in three hours we’ll leave! Do you understand?”
Smithson hated being asked Do You Understand; he took it as a personal insult, a fact of which Foord was aware. “Call Cyr, please,” he went on quickly, “and tell her I want the details of that incident. And she’s not to hand our people over to Swann. And even if Horus doesn’t set tonight, two things are certain: we leave when the refit is done, and we leave with all our crew.”
Foord felt like adding another Do You Understand, but decided it would be ill-judged. He snapped the wristcom shut.
•
At Pindar the evacuation really started to show itself. Foord looked out of the landchariot as it turned a bend into the main street, and swore.
Coming here from the highlands was like jumping from air into treacle. Pindar was the last Commonwealth settlement he had passed on his way up to Hrissihr yesterday, and the first on their way down today: a small market town with a longish narrow main street lined with houses and shops and civic buildings, all slightly uncared-for and all built on the same modest scale. It would have taken a direct bombing better than it was taking the evacuation.
They were embedded in traffic. Most of it was town vehicles, with a few trucks and offroaders from neighbouring farms, some of which had passed them on the way down, sounding their horns. They were not sounding their horns now. Pindar was gridlocked but eerily quiet.
Military groundcars were positioned at intervals along the main street, turning it into a one-way through road to the lowlands. The traffic was like a stream of food passing down a long mouth, with the groundcars as inward-pointing teeth.
It looked like much of Pindar was already evacuated. The main street resembled a table-top onto which the contents of buildings had been emptied like the contents of pockets. For collection later, Foord thought, as though the urgency dwindled once people were put on the road, and pointed in the unvarying direction of the lowlands.
Thahl was right. And this, thought Foord, must be happening all the way around the rim of the Bowl. Here, though the crowding was heavy, it was still rather small-scale, just one modest town in the foothills; the entire population of the foothills wasn’t that large, but if this was happening here, it was the tip of something far larger. And something quite desperate.
They can never do it, Foord kept thinking. There isn’t time. They can’t turn the lowlands into an undefended civilian area!
They could, and they were; not completely, but perhaps just enough.
Foord opened his wristcom, told it to seek the local broadcasts, and listened.
The broadcasts talked of hotels and commercial buildings in the Bowl being requisitioned. Of camps erected on unused land between lowland cities. Of the mobilisation of hospitals and social services and charities to take the sudden—but, as they described it, temporary—influx of people. Of special comm links to enable those who had relatives in the lowlands to contact them and arrange accommodation (the preferred option). Of detailed arrangements for farms to leave one or two people behind to tend crops and animals.
The broadcasts used as much of the truth as humanly possible, but no more than necessary. They said—it was common knowledge anyway—that She may be coming to Horus, and that people in outlying areas were being moved temporarily to the lowland cities where they could be better protected. It was, they repeated, only temporary, until the Charles Manson lifted off from Blentport to engage Her.
They didn’t simply have one official broadcast repeating this message. They got existing presenters to insert it in
“ Post-mortem? ”
“Nobody’s dead, Commander, it was just an expression.”
An expression, thought Foord, which he had used deliberately. “Smithson, if we’re ready to leave in three hours we’ll leave! Do you understand?”
Smithson hated being asked Do You Understand; he took it as a personal insult, a fact of which Foord was aware. “Call Cyr, please,” he went on quickly, “and tell her I want the details of that incident. And she’s not to hand our people over to Swann. And even if Horus doesn’t set tonight, two things are certain: we leave when the refit is done, and we leave with all our crew.”
Foord felt like adding another Do You Understand, but decided it would be ill-judged. He snapped the wristcom shut.
•
At Pindar the evacuation really started to show itself. Foord looked out of the landchariot as it turned a bend into the main street, and swore.
Coming here from the highlands was like jumping from air into treacle. Pindar was the last Commonwealth settlement he had passed on his way up to Hrissihr yesterday, and the first on their way down today: a small market town with a longish narrow main street lined with houses and shops and civic buildings, all slightly uncared-for and all built on the same modest scale. It would have taken a direct bombing better than it was taking the evacuation.
They were embedded in traffic. Most of it was town vehicles, with a few trucks and offroaders from neighbouring farms, some of which had passed them on the way down, sounding their horns. They were not sounding their horns now. Pindar was gridlocked but eerily quiet.
Military groundcars were positioned at intervals along the main street, turning it into a one-way through road to the lowlands. The traffic was like a stream of food passing down a long mouth, with the groundcars as inward-pointing teeth.
It looked like much of Pindar was already evacuated. The main street resembled a table-top onto which the contents of buildings had been emptied like the contents of pockets. For collection later, Foord thought, as though the urgency dwindled once people were put on the road, and pointed in the unvarying direction of the lowlands.
Thahl was right. And this, thought Foord, must be happening all the way around the rim of the Bowl. Here, though the crowding was heavy, it was still rather small-scale, just one modest town in the foothills; the entire population of the foothills wasn’t that large, but if this was happening here, it was the tip of something far larger. And something quite desperate.
They can never do it, Foord kept thinking. There isn’t time. They can’t turn the lowlands into an undefended civilian area!
They could, and they were; not completely, but perhaps just enough.
Foord opened his wristcom, told it to seek the local broadcasts, and listened.
The broadcasts talked of hotels and commercial buildings in the Bowl being requisitioned. Of camps erected on unused land between lowland cities. Of the mobilisation of hospitals and social services and charities to take the sudden—but, as they described it, temporary—influx of people. Of special comm links to enable those who had relatives in the lowlands to contact them and arrange accommodation (the preferred option). Of detailed arrangements for farms to leave one or two people behind to tend crops and animals.
The broadcasts used as much of the truth as humanly possible, but no more than necessary. They said—it was common knowledge anyway—that She may be coming to Horus, and that people in outlying areas were being moved temporarily to the lowland cities where they could be better protected. It was, they repeated, only temporary, until the Charles Manson lifted off from Blentport to engage Her.
They didn’t simply have one official broadcast repeating this message. They got existing presenters to insert it in
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