“Fire?” Mildred asked.
“Damn, but I thought you blacks were smart,” Harvey replied, ignoring both Mildred’s angry look and the fleetingly hostile glances from Ant and Dee, who were busy with the nuke, but not so busy as not to hear. It didn’t escape Jak’s notice that Blake also cast a glance in the sec chiefs direction.
Perhaps there was an ally there when the crunch came down.
Harvey continued. “Look, this place ain’t got no one left alive. It’s just some charnel house shitpit for the buzzards. Who knows what disease could spring up here unless we clean it up. Cleanse the area, y’know?”
“Alien’s orders?” Ryan asked.
“Sure,” Harvey replied. He called over to the baron. “Fire the place, Alien?” The baron replied with a noncommittal wave of his hand.
Harvey grinned. “Sure as shit good enough for me, Cyclops. So you want to do this?”
The sec chiefs insolent and superior gaze met the rock-steady steely blue eye. Ryan’s gaze was stronger, harder. The sec chief looked away. “Find Cyclops Jr.?” he added as a final shot.
“No, but I think you knew that,” Ryan replied. “I know he’ll turn up. But not here.”
Ryan turned to his friends. “We might as well get this over and done with.”
None of them were happy with the circumstances surrounding the firing of Samtvogel, but the catch was that the sec chief had a valid point. Samtvogel could become a hotbed of disease with so many rotting chilled corpses within the valley, and this disease could then be borne to the forest by the bird life. So it was essential that the valley be cleansed with fire.
Ryan and his companions joined the members of the Raw war party who were engaged in preparing the firing. There were already numerous small fires blazing around the valley floor, and these would be the source of the bigger blaze. The lamps were being extinguished, and their oil collected. Some of the war party had discovered the storehouse where the supplies of fuel were kept, in an old outhouse to one side of one of the ranch houses, and this was added to that collected from the lamps.
Now came the part that seemed the most vile: the chilled mutie Sunchildren had to be doused with the oil, to enable them to burn. The areas in between were also drenched with trails of oil, stopping short of the fires. For the whole thing to go up before the war party had left the valley would be disastrous, and it was a fine line between leaving a gap that would prevent immediate firing, a gap that would be too large for the fire to jump when the real firing began.
But finally it was done. The war party assembled in the center of the ville.
“Okay, plan is this,” Harvey called over the crowd. “The boys here haul the nuke out first, followed by Cyclops and his people, who get the pleasure of carrying that bastard—” with which he spit at the bound Sunchild, still tied to the stake. “—and then the rest of us follow. Firing party take torches, start the burning at the back, then run like fuck to join us.”
There was a ripple of laughter at this touch of humor, and the crowd parted to allow the sec men pulling the makeshift platform with the nuke on it. Using scrap from the camp, they had rigged up a trolley and pulleys that enabled the missile to be rolled with a relative smoothness, and once they had breasted the gentle incline of the track it became a simple task to haul it.
Ryan and J.B. followed, supporting the stake with the mutie baron so that it sat easily on their shoulders. They would take the first haul, followed by Jak and Doc, then Mildred and Krysty. They were none too happy at being volunteered for the task by Harvey, but had elected between them to say nothing and see how matters developed—especially in view of the manner in which the sec chief had assumed control of the situation, and the baron had said nothing.
The main body of the war party followed, with the firing party at the rear. Composed of the fastest and most nimble members of the war party, they lit torches from the fires that still burned, then skipped among the corpses and oil trails in a macabre dance, firing the oil trails and corpses at the rear of the valley and the outer edges, then outrunning the spreading fire as it consumed the ville.