THE CHRONOCIDE MISSION
Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
All of the characters and localities in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual places, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2002 by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. All rights reserved.
Songs Quoted in the Text: “We’ll All Remember Janie,” words and music copyright © 1976, by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. “Counting All the Stars,” words and music copyright © 1976, by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
DEDICATION
In memory of
JOHN FLORY,
who asked for it.
NOTE FOR THE READER
Much of this book’s action takes place in the future, and the characters taking part in that action are, of course, future characters. In the more than three hundred years postulated between the present and the novel’s setting, with a massive catastrophe in between, a great deal would have happened to our language. It may well have become unrecognizable to the reader of today.
As a reminder of this fact, fabricated words (some will look like typos or misspellings!) are used for flavoring throughout to remind the reader that a different—or greatly modified—language is being spoken by people living in, or originating in, the future. (This of course will not be true of the present-day characters who appear in the final chapters of the book!)
In the “future” language:
Day, days are rendered as Dae, daez.
Night, nights are niot, niots.
These words hold in combinations: middae, midniot, dae-light, overniot.
Sike is used for year; tenite, meaning ten nights, is the unit of temporal measurement used instead of “week.” Mont is used instead of month.
Lens and lenses become len and lens.
Some changes in common punctuation practices are also employed to contribute to that future “flavoring.”
—Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
CHAPTER 1
BERNAL
Bernal awakened suddenly to the drumming of horses’ hoofs on a forest road. “Some idiot peerlings on a drunken frolic,” he told himself indifferently. He had spent more than half of his life deep in this enemy Peerdom of Lant, and he was fond of telling young scouts he survived only because he was most alert when he was sound asleep.
He raised up briefly to determine where the horses were and what direction they were going. Then he lay back, stretched his arms and legs luxuriously, and considered the one serious problem he faced at that moment, whether his beard needed trimming. The niot was only half advanced, the weather mildly warm, and his bed, fashioned of a chance accumulation of leaves in the shelter of an enormous, drooping prickle bush, the most comfortable he had experienced in more than a tenite. He loved the forest’s pungent scents, loved living in the open. For the second time that niot, he composed himself for sleep.
The distant horses rumbled across a bridge and left the main road for a little-used branch that led to a long-abandoned lumber camp. Bernal continued to listen with closed eyes. An experienced scout in a thick forest was in no danger from a rackety enemy on horseback. Almost subconsciously he analyzed the sounds he heard and pondered the question of whether there were four horses or five. He decided on five.
He had begun to doze off again when his ear caught the yapping of dogs, and that brought him tensely to his feet. Dogs meant the riders were Lantiff, the vicious, mounted warriors of Lant, and the yapping meant they were on leash. The Lantiff used dogs for only one purpose, tracking, and they leashed them only when someone wanted a fugitive taken alive—which never happened when the ferocious beasts ran loose.
A runaway worth that much trouble to the Lantiff would be worth the loss of a little sleep to him. If nothing else, the fugitive might have useful information. Bernal gave no thought at all to the odds he faced in taking on five Lantiff with dogs. Everything one did in life involved some risk.
He unsheathed one of the two long knives he carried, his only weapons, and moved like a flitting shadow through the dense undergrowth toward the approaching horses. He had the confidence of long experience, but the silent, swift sureness of his movements through a dark and dense forest was purely instinctive. The Easlon scout in Lant who could not move with silent swiftness did not survive to acquire experience.
A full moon, shining brightly in a clear sky, had ruined many a hunt for Bernal, but on this niot it would not be a factor. Only where roads and widely scattered clearings had made rents in the dense overhead canopy could the moonlight penetrate the forest.
The sound of the chase altered abruptly, and he paused for a few seconds to listen. The hunters had dismounted to follow their dogs on foot. The advantage now belonged to Bernal, for the squat, muscular Lantiff were clumsy in foot combat and bunglers in a dismounted chase. They crashed through undergrowth, got caught up in vines and bushes, and soon were adding their curses to the dogs’ yapping.
The dogs’ killing instinct rivaled that of their masters, and both knew that a panicky, exhausted fugitive could not outdistance them for long. The Lantiff’s course shouts became frenzied; so did the dogs’ yapping, and they snapped at their leashes as they hauled their masters forward. The Lantiff were trying to whip them into line for a methodical search.
Listening alertly as he ran, Bernal used an angling approach that would overtake them from behind and downwind. He would attack one Lantiff and dog at a time, beginning with the pair on his right—the man first, before he could sound an alarm. His death grip on the leash should hold the dog long enough for Bernal to deal with it.
Then he would circle and take the pair on the left, leaving the odds tilted in his favor. He had the advantage of surprise and a fight on his own ground and terms, and the dogs, straining as they were to overtake their prey, would be a deadly encumbrance when their masters were attacked from behind in thick undergrowth. On horseback, the Lantiff’s most effective weapons were their long-handled, flesh-ripping, multiple pronged and barbed lances. These were left with the horses when they fought dismounted, and their clumsy, curved swords were of no use at all in a dense forest.
Bernal slowed his pace and began stalking his first victim, moving with long, silent strides.
Suddenly a beam of light cut through the darkness, passing over his head with a deafening crash, severing branches, searing the foliage, and leaving in its wake tiny flames that flickered momentarily on the leaves it had touched.
Bernal sank to one knee and froze there. The light stabbed again and again with the same violent clap of sound. A dog screamed, and a man, and Bernal caught the revolting reek of burnt flesh. Then the air was rent thunderously just above his head, leaving him momentarily deafened, and he ducked as flames enveloped a dead bush close behind him. There were more screams. A beam of light bored into the ground almost at Bernal’s feet, and the thick forest humus emitted a rancid cloud of smoke.
Keeping low, Bernal began to edge forward.
A clearing opened before him, half illuminated by moonlight and strewn with death. The Lantiff lay crumpled in the semicircle they had formed when they brought their quarry to bay. Nearby, three dogs crouched with fangs bared viciously, still straining on their leashes in death. A fourth had broken away from its dead master and died in the charge. At the far side of the clearing, the moon glimmered on the most horrible sight of all: the one dog that survived was tearing at its victim.
Bernal leaped forward. His knife flashed, and he heaved the dog’s massive body aside to bend over a pathetic, moaning figure. It was an elderly man, hideously wrinkled as though wasted by illness. His head was totally bald but with incongruously thick eyebrows. He was of an age rarely attained in those unsettled times, but that was not why Bernal stared at him. This was no ordinary fugitive. For one thing, he was a foreigner. He possessed