Lisa Ducharme Morgan smiled. “Tell me again,” she said softly.

“I’m going to kill him,” Alec repeated. “For all he’s done to you, Mother. I’m going to find him and kill him.”

Chapter 11

He was born in a ditch alongside the road that twisted through the hilly wooded territory between bombed-out Knoxville and abandoned Oak Ridge. His mother left him half-immersed in rain water that had accumulated in the muddy bottom of the ditch. Her only act of mercy toward him was to bite off the umbilical cord and knot it. He never saw her.

If a pair of scavengers had not passed by a few hours later he would have died. If the woman of the pair—girl, actually, she was barely past fourteen—had not lost her own week-old baby a few days before they would have left the infant squalling there in the mud. As it was, the man scowled and grumbled when his woman took up the redfaced, naked baby.

“Leave ‘im fer the varmints,” he told her.

But her eyes welled up and she started sputtering and he relented.

They had been following in the wake of a larger band of raiders, a few dozen ragged men and women who scoured the countryside, picking it clean of everything edible, wearable, or tradable. The band had a few guns, a clever hard-faced leader who knew how to set up an ambush, and the desperation of hunger. The two scavengers had tried to join the band, but had been rebuffed angrily and threatened with death if they got close enough to be seen again.

So the two of them hung well behind the band, gleaning what they could from their leavings. It was not much. When the band attacked a farm or village they usually burned what they could not carry.

“Yer maw must’ve been one o’ them raiders,” the girl told her foundling child, once he was grown up enough to halfway understand her. “Prob’ly her man din’t want t’ be saddled with a newborn baby and made her leave yew fer us t’ find.”

Her man would nod and mutter to himself when she crooned the story to the youngster. Feeding an extra mouth was not to his liking. Besides, the baby’s crying meant they had to stay even farther behind the raiders than they had before. He wandered off one day, less than a year later, as the autumn rains began to strip the trees of their leaves. Two weeks later she found him nailed to a tree, his gut sliced open to make a nest for teeming maggots. From the look on his face he had still been alive when they did it.

She stopped wandering then and built a crude hut of sticks and mud for herself and her baby. They nearly starved that winter; only her forays into the shattered, haunted remains of suburban Knoxville saved them. It was pure desperation; everyone knew that the buildings and streets were poison. Lingering agonizing death lurked in them, invisibly. But she slunk through the shadows night after night to take the cans of food from the abandoned store shelves that others were too frightened to touch.

By the time he was six, she was obviously dying of cancer. She hung on for four years of pain and terrifying strange growths that twisted her body horribly. He buried her and faced the world alone, a skinny pinch-faced ten-year-old who knew how to run and hide in the woods, but little else.

After months of living alone, trapping small game and avoiding all human contact, he was snared by a wandering gang of teenaged boys. They had split off from a larger, older band of roamers and were on the prowl for food, fun, and women when they found him with a brace of rabbits tucked into his ragged shorts. Their first thought was to take the rabbits and roast him along with them over a hot fire. But their leader, wise beyond his years, asked the emaciated youngster how he caught the rabbits.

Once they realized how much he knew about hunting and surviving in the woods they adopted him into the band. He was officially named Ferret, partly because of his looks, partly because of his quick furtive movements, but mainly because he killed small game by biting through their throats.

Ferret he was, and by the time he was twenty years old he had risen to second-in-command of the band, which now numbered more than fifty men and their women. It was the most feared band of raiders throughout the rolling, wooded hills around Oak Ridge.

* * *

The satellite station revolved at a steady one g.

Alec had spent at least one hour a day over the past five years in the lunar settlement’s big centrifuge, feeling six times his normal weight. His Earth-gened muscles had always responded to the full one-gravity load without complaint.

But here on the space station, after nearly a solid month of six lunar gravities, he was worried. He woke in the mornings tired and aching. His back felt sore, the sullen kind of pain that never quite goes away. His pulse drummed in his ears after the simplest exertions, such as climbing a ladder from the sleeping deck to an observation blister.

At least the blister was in the zero-gravity hub of the satellite station. Alec warned himself against spending too much time there; it would be too easy to allow his complaining body to subvert the purpose of his will.

Kobol was already there when Alec poked his head up through the hatch in the blister’s floor. The older man was sitting at one of the observation ports, safety belt latched loosely across his lap, peering intently through one of the stubby telescopes built into the bulkhead.

The observation blister had four such ports, spaced around its circular perimeter, and a fifth station dangling from the center of its domed ceiling. Taking up most of the floor space was a horseshoe set of consoles and viewscreens, where an observer crew of three monitored all the automated sensors that kept watch on the Earth.

Alec floated weightlessly up through the hatch. Touching his slippered feet to the bare metal floor, he bent over slowly and pushed the hatch shut. The action made him drift toward the horseshoe console. Reaching for the console’s edge, he pushed off and glided toward an empty port.

The sight of Earth so close still made him gasp. A huge curving blue immensity streaked with dazzling white, constantly changing as it drifted past the observation port, colors shifting, different textures revealing themselves as it slid past his widened eyes. It’s so huge, Alec thought. And so... alive.

“That’s the east coast of North America,” Kobol’s voice drifted to him, like an ancient woodwind playing in its upper register, too refined to be impolite, but condescending, bored by the need to explain everything to inferiors.

“I know,” Alec snapped. “And our prime target area...”

“Look through your number three ‘scope,” Kobol said. “I’ve got it slaved to mine.”

Alec sat lightly on the swivel chair and leaned toward the little telescope on his right.

“Clouds...” Kobol muttered.

Through a break in the white, Alec glimpsed brown and green ripples like old lava flows along the edge of a ringwall. But there were no craters in view. These ripples were razorback ridges, hundreds of meters high. Or so he had been told.

“There... in the clearing...”

Alec caught a glimpse of gray, a slightly lighter form that looked like a lopsided letter X.

“That’s the airport,” Kobol explained as clouds covered the scene again. Alec pulled away from the telescope and turned toward Kobol, who was still talking. “The Oak Ridge complex is only a few kilometers from the airport. If it’s still intact, that’s where we’ll find both processed and raw fissionables—enough for half a century, at least.”

Nodding, Alec pushed away from his seat and glided to the monitoring consoles.

“Any activity in that area?” he asked the youth sitting in the center chair.

He turned to face Alec. “Nothing much... at least, nothing we can detect. No vehicles, of course. No fires or signs of life that the infrareds can pick up. The area’s heavily forested; I don’t think we’d be able to detect small numbers of people moving around in there.”

Alec glanced at the fifty-odd screens that blinked and glowed across the curving bank of consoles. The other two technicians were steadily watching the screens, touching dials, making notations.

“We’ve got the strength to handle small numbers of raiders,” Alec said. “You keep your sensors alert for larger bands.”

The youth smiled. “Yessir. We’ll do that.”

The smile irritated Alec. He’s only a year or so younger than I am, but I’m in command, by order of the Council, so he has to call me “sir.” He wouldn’t grin like that at Kobol.

Then he noticed Kobol watching him, face impassive behind his brows and mustache. Abruptly, Alec went back to the hatch and made his way down to the living and working area of the station.

Speed. Speed and firepower. Those were the keys. Alec lay on his bunk and watched the tapes play out on his viewscreen. His compartment was no bigger or better than anyone else’s: a bare little cell with a bunk, a desk, a chair, and a viewscreen.

We’ve got to get in and out before anyone realizes we’ve landed, Alec told himself. He knew that his fifty men, armed with automatic rifles and lasers, could deal with any ragtag band of barbarians that might stumble across them. But the observers had occasionally seen larger groups, more organized, marching along the crumbling old highways. Some on horses. Even a few mechanical vehicles now and then.

Suppose they have Oak Ridge defended? Douglas knows the value of those fissionables. He might attempt to keep them from us.

Why?