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By Root 450 0

of one kind or another. A couple of hospi-Vans, a few of the small armored motorcycles that the villagers had found so easy to destroy, and maybe three more jeeps in various states of repair. I pulled at a hospiVan’s back doors, and they opened with a rusty squeal that seemed grotesquely loud in the silence. Rotting pieces of medical equipment lay broken and abandoned in the dark and musty interior. They hadn’t been able to use telesurgery in the Gap war, because the signals couldn’t make it across the divide, and so the banks of remote surgeons used in normal wars hadn’t been available to us. We’d had to make do with the hospiVans, staffed with terrified medics who were all at least as Rapt as we were and driven to vomiting panic at the sight of blood. I could almost hear the screams of the men who’d lain in the van, trembling and crying as people leaned over them with shaking hands.

None of the vehicles looked remotely functional, but that wasn’t the point. Someone had been traveling around The Gap collecting this stuff and bringing it here.

It was a memorial, a silent monument dedicated to a war which should never have happened.

The boy joined me, followed by the rest of the children. From the way they stood I understood that we had not yet found what I had been brought to see.

About two hundred yards farther on, the boy stopped again, and glanced up at me, expectant. I couldn’t tell what I was supposed to be looking at. One of the little girls broke from the group and walked steadily until she was standing about ten yards in front. She pointed ahead, then returned.

None of the other children seemed able or willing to clarify the matter further. I walked forward alone, peering in the direction she’d indicated. At first I could see nothing except the huge trunks of trees, and then my breath caught in my throat and I knew what I had been brought here to see.

It was a gunship, resting on its side between two of the larger trees and looming out of the blue mist as if lit from behind. I walked toward it, mouth open, wondering how the hell the children had brought it there. I didn’t know why, but I was sure they had, just as I now understood it had been the children who had collected all of the other debris.

The few gunships that were employed in The Gap were of a very unusual design. Because of the omnipresent trees, they were built rather like a flying wing tilted on its side. The nearest comparison lean think of is of a giant angelfish; a shallow triangle bulging out to ten feet in width near the front, but narrowing to virtual two-dimensionality at the nose and along the other edges. Observation windows on either side of the cockpit enhanced this impression, looking like a pair of eyes. The windows were there for little more than cosmetic reasons, because flying the gunships through The Gap had been far too difficult for anything other than high-powered warDroids, which didn’t need windows to see out of. It was about ten meters tall and painted a dark olive green, with insignia stamped large and black on both sides.

And it didn’t look damaged at all.

The children stood in ranks behind me. There was no sign of what they were expecting me to do, so I just did what occurred to me. I climbed the ladder bolted onto the lower wing of the gunship and tugged at the entrance hatch at the top. It opened silently.

I looked down, hoping for some reassurance, but the children had disappeared.

I felt bereft, as if abandoned by everyone I knew, but this must be why they had summoned me. They would only have left because their job was done. I knew next to nothing about gunships, having only set foot in one once to haul out a drunken officer whose so-called expertise was required. He’d tried to bribe me by saying he could get me sideslipped out of The Gap. I threw him out of the ship.

I pulled the hatch wide and climbed inside. The door opened onto a narrow corridor which ran the walk-able length of the craft. To my right it gave almost immediately onto a rounded area slightly smaller than eight feet square. The interior walls