“Something’s going on—between where the flyers are and the wall.” Keene squinted to try and resolve the detail. “Are those people there, all bunched together? What are they doing, Kerry?”
Figures—a dozen of them, maybe—were standing close together in a line along the inside of the wall. Another line stood facing them from a short distance away, with others formed up behind and to the sides. Another group was clustered around flyers farther back, while what looked like the rest of the population crowded in a background semicircle.
“I can’t make out what they’re doing,” Heeland said.
Keene stared at the screen on the handset. To him it was too obvious. What experience would a Kronian have of such things? “That’s a firing squad,” he said. “They’re executing them.”
“Why? Who are they?”
“I know as much as you, but it can’t be good. Get me down there.”
“You’re still minutes away.”
“Then break it up. Buzz them with the probe.” That was all Keene could think of. It had worked at Joburg.
But instead of enlarging, the view on the screen shifted and tilted, and then sky appeared across one corner. Heeland had put the probe into a climb. A horizon materialized and then vanished, and the cliff line came into view again, this time from vertically overhead. The walled settlement was dead center. Enlarging rapidly . . .
* * *
For Heeland, on his high-resolution screen, had seen what Keene hadn’t. The figures lined up against the wall were natives, the one in the center wearing a red headdress and cape. The squad holding rifles and facing them were also natives, as were the ranks immediately behind. But the group of uniformed figures farther back, standing around the flyers and looking on, were in Kronian garb. The red shoulder tabs on the tunic of the one in the center marked him as the Acting Planetary Governor.
The picture of Gallian staggering back and falling replayed itself in Heeland’s mind. Owen Erskine shot down, dragged away, his dead companions . . . He centered the crosslines of the pilot graticule, gunned the probe’s motor up to maximum, his jaw clamped grimly. Surrounding details flowed off the edge of the image as it leaped upward. Heads lightened in hue as faces turned suddenly upward in alarm.
“Kerry? What in hell are you doing?”
Heeland thought he caught a glimpse of Zeigler’s features, eyes wide in disbelief, mouth gaping, an instant before the image blacked out. Maybe it was just wishful thinking and imagination. But it didn’t alter the satisfaction.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The discipline that they had worked so hard to perfect was lost. Half of Rakki’s warriors were fleeing this way and that, heedless of Enka’s shouts and exhortations, terrified that they would be next, while others stood petrified where they were. Some who had been nearest were groaning or crawling on the ground, hit by flying debris. The rest of the cave population were shouting and boiling around in confusion. Rakki stood stunned, staring at where the four flying war engines of the gods had been just moments before, symbols of the power that was to be his to command one day. Two of them were unrecognizable, just heaps of twisted wreckage, one starting to flare up in flames; the other two had been hurled aside like baskets in a wind storm, one lying on its side, the other overturned, both smashed and broken. Of the gods that he’d thought had proved the mightiest, nothing was left. A smoldering hole in the ground marked where Zeigler, his Warrior Chiefs Jorff and Kelm, the woman who spoke tongues, and the others who had arrived with Zeigler at the meeting point, had been standing. The god-warriors who had stood with them had been struck down and scattered. Rakki couldn’t see one who had been missed. What force, unleashed from where, had done this?
His triumph had been complete. Exactly as Jorff and Kelm had foretold, they had come out of the sky with the speed of streaking fire-stars, stormed from their carriers to find Jemmo where the eyes of the metal bird had seen him, and taken him before either he, his bodyguards, or anyone was able even to summon the will to react. Embodying the ultimate of terror and power, Rakki had stood before the ranks of his invincible warriors and proclaimed to the cowed yet marveling Cave People that he, Rakki, had returned to claim the overlordship that was his by valor and force of arms, not by the ways of lies, deception, and treachery that were the resorts of cowards. Then he had turned to look contemptuously at Jemmo, disarmed and disgraced, menaced by weapons that he had been able only to wave like a toy but which Rakki’s men had mastered, and ordered his warriors to dispose of him.