A trooper from Colville’s squad hurled a satchel charge through the doorway. Someone on the other side threw it back. Everybody flattened. There was a flash and a jolt. Everything jumped, and the rockdust lifted in a clinging pall. Colville scrambled to his feet.
In the hologram, a stone statue of the Virgin lay broken on the floor of the sanctuary. Wanda murmured a warning, but Ran’s feet were already avoiding an obstacle which had not moved in thirty years.
The flamethrower was the weapon of choice for clearing the room beyond, but before Colville’s nozzle steadied, two mercenaries jumped into the doorway firing their automatic rifles. Other troopers lobbed grenades past them. One of the men fell, but the other ducked clear just as the grenades slammed black pulses through the opening.
Wobbling like a drunk, Chick Colville reached the doorway with a woman from another APC carrying a magazine-fed grenade launcher.
Originally the space beyond had been a dressing room for the officiating priests. The followers of the Prophet had opened out the walls to create an inner sanctuary as large as the nave.
There were hundreds of people inside. Most of them were children, old folks, and the sick or wounded. They were chanting hymns, nodding to a dozen tempi. The eyes in their upraised faces were blankly glazed.
A handful of adult men, naked except for the sheen of blood, were cutting the throats of the others with butcher knives.
One of the healthy males, tonsured as a priest, turned and faced the recording lens. He bayed something that would have been madly unintelligible even if the helmet had recorded sound. The priest thrust his knife into the neck of an infant and jerked the blade forward through the tough gristle of the child’s windpipe. When he tossed the spouting corpse aside, its head and torso were connected only by the spinal column.
The flame rod struck the priest in the face, then swept right and left across the big room. Ten seconds worth of fuel remained in Colville’s bottles. When he had expended it, the abattoir had become a funeral pyre for dead and dying alike. The flames leapt and shuddered as the grenadier emptied her weapon also, and other mercenaries loosed into the charnel nightmare which the fire erased.
The recording ended.
Ran Colville sank to his knees. Wanda was holding him. “Are you all right?” she said. “Are you all right?” When he finally heard her voice, she was shouting.
Ran put his arms around the woman. He spat out words like bursts of automatic gunfire. “My Dad said, ‘When you’re old enough, kid, I’ll show you; but you won’t understand.’ But he didn’t show me. He died. And I found his chips. I watched them. I didn’t understand.”
He drew in a shuddering breath. “Only now I think I understand.”
Wanda patted his back awkwardly, then eased him to his feet. “I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I could use a drink.”
Ran forced a smile, hugged the woman close for a moment, then turned her loose.
“You know,” he said in a falsely cheerful voice as they headed toward a kiosk selling home-brewed beer in plastic cups, “I thought Dad was a cold-hearted bastard. He never gave me a pat on the back when I did something right, and he never let it pass when I screwed up. And then he died.”
Ran reached over without seeming to look and caught Wanda’s hand, squeezing it. “He was a bastard, I guess. But I wish the poor bastard was around. So I could apologize for all the things I thought about him.”
* * *
The single monorail car rocked around an outcrop almost concealed by the jungle. A trio of long-necked female herbivores cocked their heads at the vehicle. The male, forty meters long and twice the bulk of the members of his harem, hooted querulously and puffed out his bright red throat wattles. Ms. Dewhurst gasped in delighted amazement.
The car hummed back into its tunnel through the vegetation.
Wade chuckled contentedly. “There, old fellow,” he said to Dewhurst “I told you this is the way to sightsee on Hobilo. Basic passage on one of the local runs, none of this nonsense about renting an aircar.”