Warworld: The Lidless Eye by John F. Carr, Don Hawthorne Page B

Lordship?”
    “Yes, Duncan. You can leave.”
    “Thank you, Your Lordship,” the servant replied.
    John was still amazed at how quickly the staff had taken to their new roles and life in the refurbished castle. It’s like they shuck off another century every time I turn around.
    “The Brigadier asked me if Ingrid could stay for a while as a personal favor. It’s not safe for a young woman these days in Castell City; you know that? If you don’t, you should.”
    The Baron wasn’t usually this waspish. Things must be going to hell faster than I thought , John surmised. “I know that the constables are having trouble maintaining order there.”
    “According to Gary, it’s worse than that. He’s getting ready to pull out the Volunteers; he says it’s not safe for them anymore. The gangs and criminals have taken over the city. The Brigadier doesn’t have enough men to restore order, nor does he want to. ‘Soldiers make bad cops,’ was his last word on the subject.”
    The Baron snorted. “What’s Haven coming to when her soldiers are no longer safe on the streets of the capital.”
    John started to open his mouth.
    “Don’t answer, it’s a rhetorical question.”
    “But why send her here?”
    “Because I told him that if he ever needed a refuge for his family, we’d take care of them here in Greensward. We owe him a lot; without his help we’d have been at the mercy of that band of marauders who were raiding the countryside last fall.”
    John nodded, remembering the caravan of ramshackle cars and trucks that had made their way into the province; it was similar to King David’s attack twelve years ago. The raiders had hit several small farms before the Baron found out about them. When he did, he’d senttheir liegemen (too few to call an army) to fight them with some of the neighbors. The raiders hadn’t expected to find an armed opponent and were quickly dispatched. The armored cars had taken quite a toll of their vehicles, less than a dozen of them had escaped. The rest had been killed; those that had been captured had been hanged from the nearest trees as warnings. He still had to stifle a gag as he recalled the scores of hanging men, their faces a livid purple, some with distended tongues…the stench was ghastly.

     
II
    Brigadier Gary Edmund Cummings, commander of the Haven Volunteers, stared out of the Turbocopter’s cockpit and down at Castell City. The city’s linear streets were almost empty of motorized traffic with the exception of an occasional white motorcar. For the most part, only horse-drawn wagons, carts, coaches, bicycles and pedcabs traveled the thoroughfares of the capital. All motorized vehicles were under government control and ownership. Traffic was light, especially for the major arteries of a planetary capital—no matter how humble. Except for an occasional smoke plume from some factory, he might have been back on Earth in the Eighteenth Century.
    Cummings’ thoughts drifted back to when he’d first landed at Splash Island—eighteen years ago—to organize the evacuation of the Seventy-seventh Division of the Imperial Marines. In those days Castell City had been a bustling metropolis; nothing, of course, compared to major cities on Sparta, or even Churchill, but respectable. The streets were full of motorized vehicles, private cars and trucks, all the modern conveniences of a major city.
    Castell was a city in rapid decline; there was no denying it. Imperial Plaza was still the hub of the city, with streets radiating out in strict geometric precision. The former Imperial Viceroy’s Palace was a mound of blackened rubble—another relic of the War of Liberation, along with hundreds of other ruins that had once been factories, buildings and apartment blocks.
    He ran his fingers through his black hair. Everyone, including his wife, thought he dyed it, but he didn’t. If he did, it would be to dye it grey. The regeneration treatments he been given on Tanith had worked even