The Gates of Creation

He followed her, and presently they came upon Rintrah, crouching under a frond. He gestured at them for silence. When they were beside him, Wolff looked at where Rintrah was pointing. Five abutal warriors were standing not twenty yards from them. The tail of a wrecked glider rose from behind a crushed bush to their left. They carried small round shields of bone, javelins of bone tipped with bamboo, and several had bows and arrows. The bows were made of some hornlike substance, were short and recurved, and formed of two parts that were joined in a central socket of horn. The warriors were too far away for him to overhear their conference.

“What’s the range of your beamer?” Vala said.

“It kills up to fifty feet,” he said. “Third-degree burns for the next twenty feet, and after that, second-degree burns up through a light singe to no effect.”

“Now’s your chance. Rush them. You can kill all five with one sweep before they know what’s going on.”

Wolff sighed. There would have been a time when he would not even have waited for Vala’s urgings. He would have killed them all by now and been tempted to continue the work with Vala and Rintrah. But he was no longer Jadawin; he was Robert Wolff. Vala would not understand this, or if she did, she would see his hesitation as a weakness. He did not want to kill, but he doubted that there was any way of forcing the abutal to call off their attack. Vala knew these people, and she was probably telling him the truth about them. So, like it or not, he had to take sides.

There was a yell behind them. Wolff rolled over and sat up to see three more abutal warriors about forty feet from them. They had burst out from behind a frond and were charging towards them, their javelins raised.

Wolff twisted around to face the three abutal, and he pressed on a plate on the underside of the three-foot long barrel. A dazzling white ray, pencil-thick, traced across the bellies of all three. The vegetation between and in back of them smoked. The three fell forward, the javelins dropping from their hands, and they slid on the grass, face down.

Wolff rose to one knee, turned, and faced the five. The two archers stopped and took aim. Wolff dropped them first, then the other three. He continued to crouch and looked about him for others who might have been attracted by the cries. Only the wind through the fronds and the hushed cries and muffled explosions of the battle at the village could be heard.

The odor of burned flesh sickened him. He rose and turned over the three corpses, then the five. He did not think that any were still alive, but he wanted to make sure. Each was almost cut in half by the beam. The skin along the gashes was crisped under the blood. There was not much blood, since the energy of the beam, absorbed by the bodies, had cooked their lungs and intestines. Their bowels, contracting, had ejected their contents.

Vala looked at the beamer. She was very curious but knew better than to ask Wolff if she could handle it. “You have two settings,” she said. “What can it do on full power?”

“It can cut through a ten-foot slab of steel,” he replied. “But the charge won’t last more than sixty seconds. On half-power, it can project for ten minutes before needing recharging.”

She looked at his pockets, and he smiled. He had no intention of telling her how many fresh charges were in his pockets.

“What happened to your weapons?” he said.

Vala cursed and said, “They were stolen while we slept. I don’t know whether Urizen or that slimy Theotormon did it.”

He started to walk towards the battle; the two followed close behind. The island above threw them into a pale shadow which would be deepened soon when the night-bringing moon covered this side of the planet. Ilmawir, men and women both, were still dropping out of the openings in the bottom. Others, buoyed up by larger clusters of bladders, were working on the bottom as fire-fighters. They used many-faceted objects that, when squeezed, spurted out water. “Those are living sea-creatures,” she said. “Amphibians. They travel on land by spurting out jets of water and rolling with the thrusts.”

Wolff set the beamer at full power. Whenever they came near a rope tangled in a tree or a stone anchor, he cut the cable loose. Three times he came across abutal and set the beamer on half-power. By the time he was a few yards from the village, he had severed forty cables and killed twenty-two men and women.

“A lucky thing for us you came when you did,” Vala said. “I don’t think we could have driven them off if you hadn’t arrived.”

Wolff shrugged. He ejected a power-pack and slipped another of the little cylinders into the breech. He had six left, and if this continued he would soon be out. But there was nothing he could do to conserve them.