Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [83]
Exiting the shed, he started back toward the house—and stopped. Shading his eyes with one hand, he stared in the direction of the capital. Rising into the crystalline air, smoke from numerous sources drifted together to form an enormous dirty brown cloud that had begun to block out the sun. What the hell…? he thought.
Moving a little faster, he hurried back to the house. Some kind of widespread industrial disaster had struck Weald. At the moment he could not imagine its nature. Modern fire prevention techniques prevented destructive blazes from spreading freely from house to house, building to building. Yet the distant glow of flames and widely separated pillars of smoke suggested not only spreading, but that the conflagration had broken out simultaneously in different parts of the city.
Hurrying straight to his den, he activated the tridee and waited for the first three-dimensional image to congeal above the floor. Colors and shapes appeared, but did not coalesce. No matter how much he fiddled with the controls he could not induce the flickering polygons and sparking clouds to come together into anything recognizable. Similar static dominated every infochute. Then he lost the static, too. The air in the room was silent.
Something was very wrong.
Not panicked yet, but anxious and concerned, he rushed back outside. If anything, the smoke cloud had grown larger in his absence. He couldn’t be certain, but it seemed as if new smoke pillars were appearing even as he watched. The recurrent booms he had heard before were sounding more frequently now.
He had never seen a city under attack, but he had seen tridee recordings, both fictional and historical. Who would assault a defenseless colony and why, he struggled to imagine. His first thought was of the AAnn. The thranx insisted the aggressive reptilian species would jump on any advantage it could find. But Treetrunk was much too cold to suit them, far from the nearest of their own worlds, and did not even lie along a potentially Empire-threatening vector. Nor was it a storehouse of valuable resources that could not be found elsewhere.
The same reasons only more so applied to the thranx. Like the great majority of humankind his feelings toward the insectoids was ambivalent. They wanted to be friends, but most people were not anxious to jump at the opportunity. Distance remained largely because of the species’ appearance. Having spent thousands of years battling the thranx’s much smaller very distant terrestrial relatives, it would take time before people were ready to invite them into their homes.
Who else, then? he wondered as he stood stunned and watching the distant destruction blossom. Surely not the Quillp, as inoffensive a species as humans had yet encountered. Still, the Quillp were colonizers and settlers, too, and their sphere of influence lay much closer to that of the rapidly expanding humans than did the empire of the AAnn, though not the thranx.
Might it be a new, previously unencountered race? Standing there on the mountainside watching the city he had helped to found burn, that seemed to him at that moment the most likely explanation. Whoever it was, they were technologically sophisticated.
Retreating back into the house, he returned to the porch carrying a handheld scoper. Methodically, he played it over the perimeter of the great cloud, then scanned the interior. There was no sign of aircraft. The descending explosives were extraatmospheric. They were being launched from orbit and then guided to their targets with precision. A more distant pillar of rising smoke marked the location of the city’s shuttleport. Two others indicated the sites of outlying towns.
While thorough, the intent of the attack was apparently not to annihilate completely.