Gregory Benford by The Stars in Shroud (epub)

Author:The Stars in Shroud (epub)
Format: epub
Published: 2022-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

4

THE COPTERS BUZZED all around us, ringing the area. I lumbered away from mine. A thick acrid stench of burning buildings drifted down the broad street. It seeped in through my suit filters. Sirens wailed; they were coming this way.

“Majumbdahr!” I called. He came trotting over. “What happened to that sleeper gas?”

“Ordnance couldn’t locate any more,” he puffed. “They used the last of it an hour ago. It didn’t stop them.”

I ground my teeth. No time to have a batch made up; I wasn’t even sure there was a chemist in Kalic who knew the process.

“Form up the men you have. They still carry anamorphine?”

“Yes, most of them.” He nodded slowly, dazed with fatigue.

“Gharma and the Lancers were slowing down.”

“I think they are,” Majumbdahr said. He blinked rapidly to clear his vision. Smoke drifted across and paled Lekki’s great eye. “They’ve been going for six hours. Our men are sagging, too.”

“This should be the last of it, then, for a while,” I said and saluted. Another copter decked with a whine behind me. Gharma jumped out.

“It’s dying down elsewhere, sir,” he reported.

“About time.” I’d followed the riot from Fleet Control since morning, until I couldn’t stand to be inside any longer. It was good to be out in the field and get the taste of things.

Troops formed up in a line across the street. The muted bass of the crowd deepened.

“It’s hard to understand,” I said, looking at the thin column moving up. “Only a month since the first Plague victim.”

“How does it go in most cases?” Gharma asked.

“All I know is what I saw on Earth,” I said, trying to shrug in my suit. The constant-volume joints impaired me. “It wasn’t anything like this. People simply waited. Sometimes they died. They didn’t turn out into the streets, burn, and loot.”

“They had more Phase, on Earth?”

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t have guessed it. There’s something peculiar about the Veden personality. They seem to be coming out from under some inhibition at last and the pressure is blowing the top off.”

“The old ways are not enough,” Gharma said flatly.

“Why? Why should they fail now?”

“It is a crisis point,” he said. “The order we had is lost.”

I looked at him closely. Behind his plastiform face shield his skin was polished walnut. “You say that? You, believer in formalized religion?”

“Formalized, yes. Perhaps dead as well. When something is finished, you cast it aside. We need a new social ordering here, a new dedication.”

Two blocks down the mob swept around the corner and flowed into the street. Tinkling of glass. Roughedged cry of frustration.

I glanced at Gharma. What did he mean? How could he watch his world dissolve so calmly? He looked content. Almost smug.

The mob streamed toward us. I licked away a salty tang of sweat. My contact filters stung my eyelids when I blinked; I’d been wearing them too much, indoors and out.

I could feel the hollow drumming of a thousand running feet. Fifty meters in front of me the mob bore down on the line of troops.

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