The Price of Glory

"It still doesn't help us, does it, Gray? I mean . . . knowing who and what we're up against. I don't see any answers."

"I wonder ..." Grayson said absently.

"It's late," she said. "Or early, rather. Daylight in another couple of hours. Why don't we get some sleep."

Grayson shook his head. He had pulled a small, black computer clip from his jacket pocket and was looking at it thoughtfully. "You all go ahead. Get some sleep."

"What's that?"

"Something I picked up tonight. You go on," he told her. "I've got some studying to do."

21

Lori found Grayson four hours later, after two infantrymen on perimeter guard told her that he had checked out a hovercraft and was last been seen heading down the road toward Durandel. She had taken a skimmer herself and followed.

When she found him, Grayson was sitting inside the ruin of the briefing room in Helmfast. The ceiling was open to the sky, and shafts of early morning sunlight sliced through the gaps in roof and wall, brilliant in the mist of plaster dust that Grayson's activity had stirred up during the night.

He had maneuvered the hovercraft inside the room through the hole in the south wall. A pair of power cables snaked their way from the idling generators in the rear of the powerful little vehicle across the rubble-covered tiles. Then he had co

A charred piece of wood fell with a clatter when Lori brushed against it, and Grayson spun suddenly, obviously startled. His eyes were sunken and shadowed by exhaustion and had a wild look about them.

"Lori! What are you doing here?"

"I might ask the same question. Grayson, what do you think you're doing?"

He gave her a thin, tight-lipped smile. "Learning some things, for one thing. Graff told us more than he knew."

"He was holding something back from us?"

"Oh, no. I think he was scared enough that he was telling us everything he knew. No, I meant that literally. He told us more than he, personally, knew about."

"How did he do that?"

Grayson pointed to one of the maps displays.

"Remember how the map works?" She nodded, but he continued talking anyway. His words were slurred to the point where, at first, she thought he had been drinking. Then she realized that he must be at the point of utter and complete exhaustion. "We can key in the desired magnification at the terminal and study any part of the terrain we want. We can increase the magnification a tenfold step at a time and zoom in to where we can resolve objects about a meter across."

"Grayson . . . why don't you come and get some sleep?"

He continued as though he hadn't heard her. "This"— he indicated the left-hand screen—" is the map that was here in Helmfast . . . remember?

She nodded.

"It's out of date, based on data recorded . . . oh . . . three centuries ago. Things have changed a bit since then. For one thing, the Dead Sea wasn't dead." He used a screen pointer to indicate the pale green body of water south of Durandel, ru

"It's shallow," Lori said. The difference between the two bodies of water on the photographs was startling. The West Equatorial Sea was mostly a deep, royal blue, except for the light-green or green-blue streaks where sandbars rose near the surface along the coastland or surrounding islands.

"Calculating the Equatorial Sea at sea level, what we call the Dead Sea Flats, and what they called the Yehudan Sea 300 years ago, lies at almost 200 meters above sea level." Grayson slipped the pointer to a gray patch on the Yehudan Sea's western shore. "That is Freeport, before Minoru Kurita came calling. And yes, I've looked for the original Star League weapons complex. I think it must be inside a number of monstrous warehouses north of the city, but I can't tell for certain. Obviously, the cache would have been hidden from orbital observation."

"Obviously."

"Right here"—the pointer moved again—"is a river. The Vermillion River.”

“It's red."

"Pretty much. There's some kind of pollutant, or maybe algae or some other plantlife that grew very thickly along here." He indicated the coastline near Freeport. "It concentrated in the river enough that they named it the Vermillion.

"Now, Vermillion empties out of the Yehudan Sea at the site of Freeport. It flows this way, toward the west, and vanishes . . . here."

"Vanishes?"

"Goes underground. Watch." He typed in new commands. In response, the river flashed into extreme magnification, so that the view looked like a photograph taken from an aircraft only a few hundred meters up. The river wound across a level plain crisscrossed by the dark ribbons of ferrocrete highways. As it approached the mountains, it gradually sank into a deepening valley, until it took a sudden twist and vanished under a massive boulder.

"Rivers don't generally flow toward the mountains, Lori," he said. "But this is a special case. The Yehudan Sea is quite a bit higher than the West Equatorial sea over there. The mountains between them are raw and new, the result of mountain-building along the border between two tectonic plates, I imagine. As the plates collide, they're in the process of punching up these mountains. That means the area is not entirely stable. There must be earthquakes here from time to time, really big ones."

"Interesting. But so what?"

Grayson returned the left-hand view to the first magnification. "Now. Look over here." He indicated the right-hand map display. It showed the same view as the first, but changed. The area of the Yehudan Sea was cast in ochers, grays, and the stark white swirls and splotches of mineral incrustations.

"This is the copy of the map I took from the mobile headquarters van last night. The program notes show that it was made by a DropShip—the Assagai—in orbit over Helm five days ago."

"Before we got here."

"Right." Grayson used the screen pointer again. "Here's Freeport ... in ruins, of course, courtesy of Minoru Kurita. Up here is Durandel . . . not in ruins yet." His voice sounded brittle. Lori knew what he was thinking: that aerial view of Durandel was of the village before the Marik forces had come.

He leaned back in the chair, rubbing his long, bony fingers down across his eyes and face. He sat there for so long, head thrown back, eyes closed, that Lori thought he might have fallen asleep while talking her. "I came here last night," he said at last. "This morning, rather . . . because what Graff said was nagging at me. We'd heard about the Star League cache from King, of course. I confess I was curious about its never having been found . . . but I had other things on my mind at the time, and I just didn't think about it long enough. Then Graff said that ComStar had that same information, and was . . . interested."

"Interested enough to try to turn us out in disgrace."

"Damn it, Lori . . . interested enough to coldly arrange the murder of millions of people, just to establish a legal pretext! God, Lori ... do your realize what that means? ComStar has billed itself all this time as the perfect neutral, above any of the petty politics and squabblings between the major houses! Mercenaries out of every Successor State use ComStar's services as broker and banker in arranging contracts! They control the communications services on every world in their net from Apollo to the Pleiades! Now they callously condone— arrange!—the murder of ten or twelve million civilians . . . to establish a legal pretext!''