cubical in shape, thirty siemmes upon a side. No provision existed for opening this one; when time arrived, it would open itself. Judging from the condition of the liner, it had rested without attention some years longer, perhaps decades, than he had lived. He wondered whether it still worked. Stuffed beside it, a set of coveralls had been cut and sewn across the waist. He lifted the device, sealed it within this makeshift bag, and tied the arms about his neck so that it hung before his chest. Cords stitched in by whichever Mrs. Krumm had done the work allowed him to attach it about his waist.
Seizing a tumbuckle, he unfastened the cabelle and held it in his hands, feeling the impatient tug of its weight. He awaited a luff of starsail about him which would signal Krumm's part in the undertaking. Gyrfalcon would stop accelerating, allowing the corsair to overtake her. Before her master could help it (likely he would welcome it), the §-fields of both ships would merge. Before boarding parties might launch themselves across the bridge they had been provided, Arran would act.
He felt a mighty shudder through the mast which all but cost him footing and knew it for what it was, the vessel's protest at being taken aback. Not waiting to observe the starsails, he reached into his makeshift pack, flipped a cover, tipped a toggle beneath it, firmed his hold upon the tumbuckle, and leapt. For a timeless moment nothing happened, as if he were suspended above the foreyard and would stay there forever. Then, stomach complaining of being left behind, he descended in a swoop. The weight of cabelle and his burden carried him aft at a sickening rate. Starsails and spars streaked by in an undistinguished blur, punctuated by a staring eye or gaping mouth. Maintier, mizzentier, and deck rocketed toward him. The cabelle carried him outward—he was reminded of the path Jimbeau had followed, which had given him this idea—until, at a point he failed to notice, he crossed the line, no longer lethal, which marked the margin of the Gyrfalcon's field. Inertially, she was one with the enemy corsair, among whose mainyards he now found himself.
Likewise, among her defenders. Unlike those of the Gyrfalcon, these crewbeings—literal usage being necessary.
given the inhuman horrors swarming her decks and yards— were trusted with personal weapons. Having achieved (as they believed) the §-field coalescence they desired, they were occupied with preparations for boarding. Had more of them observed Arran alighting halfway along the corsair's mainyard, he would have died in an instant, battered to jelly within his suit by a hundred thrustibles.
Something desperate in the boy's temperament worked now to his advantage. His footing, as he ran along the yard toward the mast, was confident. Nor did he miss a step when a being which seemed to consist of nothing but sinuous arms rose before him wielding an oddly shaped thnistible. Arran lay his own designator upon its center of mass and thumbed its life away. It splayed its limbs and died without falling, draped over the yard like laundry, so that he was obliged to step over its steaming bulk and continue inboard. His second killing was even easier. A glint upon a nearby staycabelle, caught by the comer of his eye, led him to aim and thrust without thought. The starsailor, human, screamed through the whole long fall to the deck.
By then it was too late for anyone who noticed to stop the intruder. He had armed the device lest he should die before planting it. Removing it from its sack, he held it against the mast, leaning with his full weight, and pushed a button. A tin^ng jolt like that produced in the hand by striking an anvil with a hammer told him it could no more be torn away now than it might be taken and tossed overboard by mutineers. As he turned to escape, a limbless entity slithered down a cabelle before him, attempting to bring a thrustible to bear. Both of their first thrusts missed, as well as their second, the range being closer than that at which thrusting is habitually practiced. "Nose to nose" would have described it, had the crewthing possessed such an organ. Arran aimed with his third thrust at the cabelle supporting it. This parted, carrying the climber to its death upon the mesh.
It had no sooner hit than he was forced to duck as a bolt dashed against the mast. Many thrusts were being aimed at him, although he was hidden by folds of starsail which, like those of the Gyrfalcon, were deprived of rigidity. He seized a tumbuckle identical to that he had begun with, wrenched it free, and swung outboard. The carrack had squared herself
away, refilled her starsails, and departed from under the Jendyne lee. As agreed, he aimed himself at that portion of the double §-field which, as the vessels parted, grew more attenuated, trusting a suit constructed for such activity to protect him as he crossed the diluted margin. It had been Krumm*s opinion that nothing could preserve his life if he crossed a full-strength boundary.
As he drifted further from his victim, the bomb exploded, contained, ironically, by her §-field, bathing all aboard in lethal radiation, and, as certain mechanisms were destroyed, exposing survivors to the Deep where they would die by suffocation, freezing, or decompression. The corsair herself remained in one piece, thanks to fields which, even as they failed, permeated her substance. He had succeeded. All that was left, before he claimed his reward, was to await the lubberlift, swinging at the end of its long tether.
Someone shouted, "She blows!" Bowmore required no darthelmed lookout to tell him his enemy was dead. He was wearing such a helmet, himself.
"Mr. Krumm, my compliments to all for a valiant fight. The gundeck may stand down.*' He had by this time recognized the child who had saved his ship, his cargo, and his life, from a thille once shown him, as the fugitive son of a disgraced Drector-Hereditary against whom, at Tarbert Morven's blackmailing insistence, he had offered peijurous testimony upon a moonringed world.
"Thankee, sir. Projecteurs, square away your weapons! Helpers, form squads for repairs! Idlers to another deck! Deploy the lubberlift—time t'look for our brave lad out there!"
Bowmore chuckled. Always the conscientious Krumm. What would he do, what would they all do, without him? He removed the darthelm and looked round. Krumm, the captain realized, would have to be handled with care. He was at heart a peasant, more like the crewbeings than the elite commanding them, while he—the captain—had never intended keeping any promises, whoever volunteered. It would not do to let any among them think to elevate themselves by a foolhardy act. Better they believe, as most already did, that no officer's word was to be trusted. He needed that two
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hundred thousand himself. And, to his knowledge, he had never had a daughter.
"Mr. Knimm, belay that last. Do not deploy the lubberlift." To settle past accounts and impose new debt upon Morven which might someday prove profitable, he would leave the boy to the same death as whoever among the corsair's crew had survived the blast. "Get us under weigh,'* he ordered, "with all deliberate speed."
Part Four: The Black Usurper Yearday 192, 3010 A.D.
DECIMUS 14, 1568 OLDSKYAN
NowE 33, 510 Hanoverian
"Oh no, oh no," cried Henry Martyn,
*'My homeworld you never shall hold.
For though I've turned ship-robber out in the Deep,
In the Deep,
In the Deep, 1 shall take back what was once mine of old."
Chapter XXIV: The Ambuscade
The new road, the guerilla commander thought, was like a long, open wound in the flesh of the planet.
Lying hidden with several dozen of his fighting comrades upon the grassy slope of a forested hillside, half a klomme distant from the furrow of fresh earth and upturaed boulders—a few hundred measures above the place they knew the Monopolitan supply column must soon pass—he contemplated changes which the past several months had inflicted upon his world. They were not good changes. In his experience, changes of any kind seldom were.
There had been a day when such a project as this would have been contemplated a klomme—perhaps only a measure —at a time, laid where it would be least conspicuous, where it would least damage the natural landscape, leveled and replanted edge-to-edge by hundreds of careful retainers. No more. This hateful gash ran true as the terr
ain permitted from a series of new pentagrams lying east and west of the old facility to a grim fortification which the Black Usurper had caused to be constructed in the foothills, just north of the mountains, for the purpose of controlling access between the starport and the rolling plains below.
It had not worked. Rather, its principal effect had been to the Black Usurper's detriment, supplying his enemies, rather than his establishment: a low cluster of gray, wall-rimmed cubes moulded not from ancient, honorable graniplastic which this world's first settlers had built with, nor woven from the glowing §-reinforced mesh which was preferred by thirty-first-century Hanoverians, but slurped in a rude process out of some grainy liquid stone which hardened in a few hours between plastic forms over metal rods, and which, if
damaged, could be repaired with great speed in the same haphazard manner.
About him, where he lay concealed, soil, leaves, and grass were slick with dew which had not burned off this morning and would not before nightfall. Moisture darkened his makeshift uniform, misassembled Hanoverian livery captured in previous actions and rough peasant clothing, adding to his camouflage. His feet, always a soldier's first concern, were warm and dry. Otherwise, he had grown accustomed to being wet and dirty all the time.
A scarlet flash at the comer of his eye told him a scout had spotted the anticipated enemy column. This clever method of communication had startled him at first, the gentle fisting which caused coherent light to be generated by a thrustible and the firmer thumb-pressure which would unleash a bolt of deadly kinergy being of small difference to an adrenalinated fighter. It made his spine itch to lie within its focus. Nonetheless, the system worked uninterceptibly, and he had, in the end, grown accustomed to it as well. Close beside him as was prudent lay one another age might have labeled aide or chief of staff, Fionaleigh Savage, an appropriately named woods-runner girl, dark of hair and fiery of eye. Just out of her teens, she possessed a wild, unaccountable genius for strategy which sometimes arises without antecedent among a people pressed by great necessity. Seeing the signal, she turned to grin at him and concentrated again upon the roadway.
Fionaleigh. Day by day it became more difficult to avoid confronting her ardent desire to be something more than his assistant. Nor was he altogether immune, himself, to the aphrodisiac quality of a shared cause. Yet he had scant time or energy to spare, and a previous obligation claimed him.
Soon, sounds of the column's arrival were unmistakable even to the commander's uneducated ear. His talent lay elsewhere. It had been difficult learning to overcome centuries-old distrust which Skyans felt toward their now-displaced colonial rulers, or roiling factional conflict among the independent-minded woodsrunners which he must control while continuing to fight a war. Along the way he had learned much of politics (as well, to his dismay, of the more dismal side of human nature) and had, as much to his
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surprise as anybody's, proven himself as capable a leader as anyone had a right to expect. This stretch was a portion of the new road which had not been laid die-straight, but looped round a massive monolith of obdurate stone, upthrust from the planet's core, standing in the bird-flight between the Usurper's new pentagrams and his fort. It was not their first ambuscade in these surroundings, but most had occurred upon the bend itself. (The damages he and his partisans inflicted in this manner had been expensive to the new regime.) Still, the enemy had grown wary and would be upon their guard. By the time they were past the curve and upon the straight again, they would be relaxed and easier prey. So did the commander hope.
Aside from the thrum and hiss of the oncoming foe, he and his comrades lay in silence. Birds and animals were hushed, in part by the prospect of inclement weather, in part with an expectation which the enemy, unwise in the ways of this world, would not be sharing. Nor were Monopolitan recruits often given time to discover what was normal here. Mostly they perished, replaced by what seemed an endless reserve of newcomers, at the hands of woods-wise natives before they could acquire enough experience—if they were not taken before they could get here by Deep-rovers which reports claimed were striking Hanoverian vessels with increasing frequency and ferocity.
Among them was one with a curiously coincidental name. Henry Martyn, it was rumored, was not only a terror to all imperia-conglomerate within the black heart of the Deep, the normal provenance of brigandry, but swooped down upon ill-defended planetary installations—mines, refineries, marshalling yards where levies like Morven's were gathered, given minimal training, and sent to die for Ceo and Monopolity— as if he were waging war, rather than raiding for booty. The commander had entertained a notion that this Henry Martyn might be the missing grandson over whom another Henry Martyn had once grieved. He had dismissed it when it was pointed out (by independent advisors, both female) that even the crude census taken of this planet's natives every couple of decades produced hundreds of Henry Martyns, just as it did Robret Whytes and Donol Brownes. Well, he thought, may
Henry Martyn prosper, whoever he may be, as long as he keeps killing Hanoverians.
Freebooters of the star-roads aside, the rate of casualties upon both sides was dismaying. Supplies were never adequate. To the commander's consternation, his opponent anticipated his best-aimed blows. Even he could not have attested, at this point and over all, how well the resistance fared. Unlike the Ceos' celebrated interstellar conflicts— themselves mere episodes of a Thousand Years* War which threatened to become humanity's normal mode of existence —it was no matter of clear-cut victory and defeat, but of grinding attrition, not of destroying an enemy (which appeared impossible), but of dissuading the faraway and faceless entities who paid his bills.
This ambuscade, however, had been thought out long in advance, kept secret from almost everyone involved until the last minute, and appeared to have caught the Black Usurper's legions flat-footed. Between the hill where the conmiander lay and that from the flank of which the offending roadway had been cut, lay a creekbed, almost dry this time of the year, deep, but with climbable slopes upon both sides. The road appeared here as a shelf scraped from the hillside with projectibles calipretted upon the military equivalent of the Holdings' draywherry. Fearful of attack, the builders had remained within their vehicles, never setting foot upon the ground. In consequence, it was neither as well planned nor well executed as it might have been, providing many opportunities and advantages to the woodsrunners.
The sky was an unbroken bowl of pearl-gray overcast. Upon the hill the air was clear, but a thin mist filled the creek and lapped over the road, sweetening the woodsrunners' chances for success. The commander took a deep breath, always conscious that it might be his last. The smells about him were those of the forest, seasoned by the lubricant with which his thrustible had been coated, as well as by the woodsmoke of a himdred campfires permeating his clothing and the odor of his own tension. Nearby, where he could not see them, which was as it ought to be, half a hundred other rebels lay, each in a pool of similar smells, and waited.
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Forms moved upon the roadway. Scouts straddling their §-field riders hummed through the ambuscade unharmed. Without humor, the commander grinned to himself. They were traveling too fast to afford the countryside proper inspection. He was grateful for an incompetence upon their part which was the one thing he had discovered he could rely upon. War, he had come to realize, far from consisting of valorous deeds, of brilliant stroke and counterstroke, was simply a matter of not committing as many errors as the other fellow.
Soon the leading element of the column proper rumbled into view, a low-riding vehicle bristling with projectibles, pulsing with protective energies, pierced at such frequent intervals with thrustible ports that it looked like an openwork basket. This machine, like the unobservant scouts which had preceded it, would be permitted to pass unmolested. For the moment. It was followed by another like it. And another.
Upon the figurative heels of the ponderous, death-dealing escorts followed freighters,
slowed by their own considerable weight of §-armor, full of frightened troops beginning to realize they were still unharmed after their danger-fraught passage of the blind curve. This, too, represented longstanding fortune to the commander and his woodsrunners. More often than not, in this backwater war, they faced human opposition instead of the dreaded Oplytes their enemy might have brought to bear. Even with the Ceo's active abetment, the Black Usurper's resources, it appeared, were limited. The near-invincible warriors were expensive to acquire and maintain.
The same was only by comparison less true of peasant conscripts drawn, unwilling, from nearby Monopolitan possessions, and ferried, shipload by brigand-vulnerable shipload, to a planet, in their view encircled by a funeral wreath, which it was the rebels* objective to make their graveyard. Nor could the Usurper count upon supplementing their numbers from the native population. In open countryside, the likeliest candidates for conscription melted into the woods. Morven's henchmen were afraid to venture forth in less than regimental strength. In more settled areas, less given to recalcitrant individualism, the people grew sullen under
what they considered illegitimate rule, and through slowdowns and sabotage endeavored to cost more than they were worth. Pressgangs and tax-collectors returned to the Holdings and their master empty-handed or, for one reason or another, not at all. The commander was aware of half a dozen men among his companions who had not been bom upon this planet, who had deserted rather than work the Usurper's will (or face the consequences of doing so or of failing). Some offworlders had even married rebel women. Others, more determined and courageous, remained as spies in their old jobs, at what was now designated (as it had never been) the world's capital.
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