When the means of great violence are widespread, nothing is more dangerous to the powerful than that they create outrage and injustice, for outrage and injustice will certainly ignite retaliation in kind.
- BuSab Manual
''It is no longer classifiable as rioting," the aide said. He was a short Gowachin with pinched features, and he looked across the room to where Broey sat facing a dead communicator. There was a map on the wall behind the aide, its colors made brilliant by harsh morning light coming in the east windows. Below the map, a computer terminal jutted from the wall. Occasionally it clicked.
Gar came into the room from the hall, peered around as though looking for someone, left.
Broey noted the intrusion, glanced at the map.
"Still no sign of where she's gone to ground?"
"Nothing certain."
"The one who paraded McKie through the streets . . ."
"Clearly an expendable underling."
"Where did they go?"
The aide indicated a place on the map, a group of buildings in the Warrens to the northwest.
Broey stared at the blank face of his communications screen. He'd been tricked again. He knew it. That damnable Human female! Violence in the city teetered on the edge of full-scale war: Gowachin against Human. And still nothing, not even a hint at the location of Gar's Rim stores, the blasphemous factories. It was an unstable condition which could not continue much longer.
His communications screen came alive with a report: violent fighting near Gate Twenty-One. Broey glanced at the map. That made it more than one hundred clearly defined battles between the species along an unresolved perimeter. The report spoke of new weapons and unsuccessful attempts to capture specimens.
Gate Twenty-One?
That wasn't far from the place where McKie had been paraded through . . .
Several things slipped into a new relationship in Broey's mind. He looked at his aide, who stood waiting obediently at the map.
"Where's Gar?"
Aides were summoned, sent running. Gar was not to be found.
"Tria?"
She, too, was unavailable.
Gar's fanatics remained neutral, but more of Jedrik's pattern was emerging. Everything pointed to an exquisite understanding of the weakness implicit in the behavior of Gar and Tria.
And I thought I was the only one who saw that!
Broey hesitated.
Why would the God not speak to him other than to say "I am watched."
Broey felt tricked and betrayed in his innermost being. This had a cleansing effect on his reason. He could only depend on himself. And he began to sense a larger pattern in Jedrik's behavior. Was it possible that Jedrik shared his goals? The possibility excited him.
He looked at the aides who'd come running with the negative information about Gar and Tria, began to snap orders.
"Get our people out of all those Warrens, except that corridor to the northeast. Reinforce that area. Everyone else fall back to the secondary walls. Let no Humans inside that perimeter. Block all gates. Get moving!"
This last was shouted as his aides hesitated.
Perhaps it already was too late. He realized now that he'd allowed Jedrik to bait and distract him. It was clear that she'd created in her mind an almost perfect simulation model of Broey. And she'd done it from a Liaitor position! Incredible. He could almost feel sorry for Gar and Tria. They were like puppets dancing to Jedrik's strings.
I was no better.
It came over him that Jedrik's simulation probably encompassed this very moment of realization. Admiration for her permeated him.
Superb!
Quietly, he issued orders for the sequestering of Gowachin females within the inner Graluz bastions which he'd had the foresight to prepare. His people would thank him for that.
Those who survived the next few hours.