Jason sat down then, half fell down, drained of strength. He lay and
listened as the debate went back and forth, Plies ordering it and kee1 ing it going. Difficulties were raised and eliminated. No one could fin a basic fault with the plan. There were plenty of flaws in it, things th~ might go wrong, but Jason didn’t mention them. These people wante his idea to work and they were going to make it work.
It finally broke up and they moved away. Rhes came over to Jason.
“The basics are settled,” he said. “All here are in agreement. The are spreading the word by messenger to all the talkers. The talkers ai the heart of the attack, and the more we have, the better it will go of We don’t dare use the screens to call them; there is a good chance th~ the junkmen can intercept our messages. It will take five days before i~ are ready to go ahead.”
“I’ll need all of that time if I’m to be any good,” Jason said. “Now let get some rest.”
.
26
“It’s a strange feeling,” Jason said. “I’ve never really seen the perimeter from this side before. Ugly is about the only word for it.”
He lay on his stomach next to Plies, looking through a screen of leaves, downhill toward the perimeter. They were both wrapped in heavy furs, in spite of the midday heat, with thick leggings and leather gauntlets to protect their hands. The gravity and the heat were already making Jason dizzy, but he forced himself to ignore this.
Ahead, on the far side of a burnt corridor, stood the perimeter. A high wall, of varying height and texture, seemingly made of all the odds and ends in the world. It was impossible to tell what it had originally been constructed of. Generations of attackers had bruised, broken, and underniined it. Repairs had been quickly made, patches thrust roughly into place and fixed there. Crude masonry crumbled and gave way to a rat’s nest of woven timbers. This overlapped a length of pitted metal, large plates riveted together. Even this metal had been eaten through and bursting sandbags spilled out of a jagged hole. Over the surface of the wall detector wires and charged cables looped and hung. At odd intervals automatic flamethrowers thrust their nozzles over the parapet above and swept the base of the wall clear of any life that might have come close.
“Those flame things can cause us trouble,” Rhes said. “That one covers the area where you want to break in.”
“It’ll be no problem,” Jason assured him. “It may look like it is firing a random pattern, but it’s really not. It varies a simple sweep just enough to fool an animal, but was never meant to keep men out. Look for yourself. It fires at regularly repeated two, four, three and one minute intervals.”
They crawled back to the hollow where Naxa and the others waited for them. There were only thirty men in the party. What they had to do could only be done with a fast, light force. Their strongest weapon was surprise. Once that was gone their other weapons wouldn’t hold out for seconds against the city guns. Everyone looked uncomfortable in
the fur and leather wrappings, and some of the men had loosened them to cool off.
‘Wrap up,” Jason ordered. “None of you have been this close to the perimeter before and you don’t understand how deadly it is here. Naxa is keeping the larger animals away and you all can handle the smaller ones. That isn’t the danger. Every thorn is poisoned, and even the blades of grass carry a deadly sting. Watch out for insects of any kind and once we start moving breathe only through the wet cloths.”
“He’s right,” Naxa snorted. “N’ver been closer ‘n this m’self. Death, death up by that wall. Do like ‘e says.”
They could only wait then, honing down already needlesharp cross~ bow bolts, and glancing up at the slowly moving sun. Only Naxa didn’i share the unrest. He sat, eyes unfocused, feeling the movement ol animal life in the jungle around them.