by John F. Carr
That was just a fact of life on Haven. One that part of him prayed for and another part cursed, because however much his daughter’s husband might cherish her, he might condemn her to death on their wedding night. For on this feebly-lit moon with the baleful Cat’s Eye gas giant looming overhead for most of the year, men and women could build fires against the bitter cold, they could band together against the beasts in the hills and the evil of their fellow human beings, but the one thing they couldn’t fight was the air. It was simply too thin and every mother faced that insidious enemy alone.
Valeria had given him two fine sons a year apart. The births had been as easy as could be hoped for on Haven, but four years later Natalya had come—and Valeria had nearly died, even though she had given birth in the Valley.
There had still been doctors then, doctors who would treat the steppe clans for barter. But most were far away, remaining relatively safe behind the Atlas Mountains and within the Shangri-La Valley. Sergei did not want to risk he and Valeria becoming used to the little pills they could barter for, only to find them used up one day and no doctor about.
Sergei had heard tales of a doctor in the Valley who could still perform a certain surgery on men, and because he valued the life and safety of his wife more than he did flaunting his virility in the face of Haven’s killing thin air, he had gone to see the doctor, four day’s ride away.
It was two days after the surgery before he could stand without pain and almost another week before he could even think of riding a horse without becoming ill. He returned sixteen days later to find it had all been for nothing; Chin raiders had stuck while he was gone. Valeria had been run through with a lance and the only mercy had been she was dead before the Chins had raped her.
His sons, Nikolai and Lavrenti, had killed their first men that day—as well as their second, their third, their fourth and their fifth. The boys had clearly inherited their father’s gift for marksmanship.
Sergei sighed. A lot of growing up for one afternoon in the life of two boys of eleven and twelve standard years of age. Natalya had been six years old then; her mother would have been thirty in another week. Sergei wiped his eyes and strapped his saddlebags to the harness.
The mare snorted as Natalya stepped up to stroke her nose, slipping something past the animal’s lips. “Shush, big girl,” she spoke soothingly, though the animal only crunched at something contentedly.
“Hey,” Kamov began the familiar litany. “Don’t waste sugar on the horses.”
“Sweets for the sweet,” Natalya grinned, popping a second rock candy crystal into Sergei’s mouth and a third into her own. “Besides, Anya’s been mine for a long time, Papa”—she resumed stroking the mare’s nose—“If I don’t spoil her, she won’t recognize me.”
Sergei grunted. “I’m sorry to steal your pet, Nat’ya.” He looked into his daughter’s face, seeing her mother’s there, reminding him once more how fiercely he loved his children. And his wife as well, still, although Valeria had been dead ten years last spring. “But a Cossack without a horse—”
“—is a man without legs. Yes, Papa, I know.” Natalya smiled and hugged her father with a strength that had frequently surprised both her brothers, and several over-eager boyfriends.
Sergei had failed to suppress a grunt. “Oof! You want Anya back so badly, take her! I can’t ride with broken ribs.”
She giggled, snuggling into the warmth of her father’s coat. Sergei held her closely and stroked her hair, then pulled the hood of her coat up onto her head. “Cover your ears, or you’ll get frostbite.”
“Pah! You just don’t want the boys to see my hair.”
Sergei rolled his eyes. “Too true.” He kissed her forehead and held her away. “Everything is ready inside?”
Natalya nodded firmly. “Our ship of the plains is ready for sailing, Kapitan Kamov. All cargo stowed and secured.”
Back on the near-mythic homeworld of Earth, hundreds of years ago, Sergei’s ancestors had been wet-navy captains and Natalya found the family legends passed down by her father endlessly fascinating. She read everything about the sea—any sea—that she could get her hands on.
“Good. Go back inside and watch over the fire coals,” Sergei said, as he swung up into the saddle and looked down at his daughter; the sun was behind him and his shadow fell over her face as she made to go to the yurt. “Natalya—”
She turned back, her face out of the shadow now and the sunlight blazing from her golden hair; Sergei could scarcely breathe.
“Da, Papa?”
He found himself unable to speak. Just as Natalya’s smile was beginning to fade to a frown of concern, Sergei cleared his throat, frowned, and said, “Try not to let the place get burned down, won’t you?”
Natalya smiled again. “I love you, too, Papa,” she said quietly.
Sergei smiled and tapped his heels against Anya’s flanks to put the mare into a canter. He circled the yurt, inspecting it as he went. He was looking very hard for recent alterations he knew to be there, yet he could see nothing amiss. He knew Saurons had better eyes than normal men and he worried still. Leaning down from the saddle, he checked the suspension; the leaf-springs of the yurt’s low wheels and axles were carrying a bit more than usual, but appeared to be bearing up well nonetheless.
Kamov finally came around to the complex harness at the yurt’s front where the team of ten draft horses waited for the signal to move. As always, his sons had everything in perfect order.
Scattered about on the plain around them, several of their neighbors had already begun the exodus and the thin clouds of dust were whipped away by the chill wind. Lavrenti was up in the driver’s seat, the reins of the harness loose in his hand and a cloth-wrapped automatic rifle in a scabbard at his side.
“Hey!” Sergei called out. “What happened? Where’s your brother?”
Lavrenti waved and gave his father a rueful grin. “I flipped a coin with Nikolai and lost; now I have to drive first shift while he gets to ride.”
Nikolai came along riding up from around the other side of the team with a grin that made Sergei despair for the virtue of his neighbor’s daughters. “And a good thing, too,” Nikolai called. “The best rider should always go first.”
Immune to his brother’s jibes, Lavrenti only rolled his eyes—a gesture picked up from his father—and grinned.
Sergei smiled. “Huh. Using that two-headed coin again, were you?” he asked.
Nikolai’s brows shot up in mock protest, even as Lavrenti’s jaw tightened in feigned outrage.
Nikolai was suddenly serious. “Father—what is it? What’s wrong?”
Sergei’s face twisted into a frown of concentration so serious he looked stricken. He thrust his hand out, a gesture his sons knew commanded silence. He turned his gaze back over his shoulder, to the south. In the vast ranges of the Atlas Mountains was the Karakul Pass into the Shangri-La Valley, and in the middle of that meandering pass was the old fortress where the Saurons had taken up residence. He stared hard at the mountains, straining to listen for he knew what.
Suddenly his eyes caught movement. Dropping his eyes from the heights of the mountains to their base, he saw them. They looked like dragonflies, wings glimmering as they emerged from the shadows of the mountain range into the light of Byers’ Star and Cat’s Eye. As he watched, the dragonflies grew, gained detail and became helicopters.
“Raid!” Sergei cried out. He pulled the flare pistol from his belt and fired in one motion. The danger rocket was a blinding cobalt blue, sharply contrasting with Cat’s Eye’s orange haze that overwhelmed the feeble glow of Byers’ sun and made up the bulk of Haven’s normal light.
“Lavrenti, get moving. You know what to do! Nikolai, with me!”
Lavrenti had the yurt rolling in an instant; he kicked open a vent flap at his feet and shouted down a warning to those within. As the mobile tent swung about toward the other yurts and those riders already responding to Sergei’s flare, Natalya clambered up through the fla
p, dragging a huge vehicle-mount machine gun behind her. Sergei and Nikolai cut across the yurt’s path and made for the group of approaching riders.
Chapter Ten
I
“Commander Air Group, do you have a visual?”
Fighter Rank Stahler put his craft into a tight bank as he circled the vast plains below. Three other orbital fighters, each still bearing the flaming eye insignia, maintained their loose formation around him, scanning the surrounding skies.
There was virtually no chance of the Haveners mustering any aircraft which could threaten the Sauron fighters—or so Stahler’s squadron members had declared. He had corrected them by recounting his own experience with a squadron of Havener biplanes and a particularly determined pilot; an experience which had cost the life of his wingman, Fighter Rank Vil. This had sobered them up considerably.
“Affirmative, Assault-Group Leader,” Stahler answered. A thousand meters below, long streams of dust trailed from behind the circular black lumps that were the nomad yurts and still more from their herds and the outriders of their mounted warriors.
“Continue present heading. Beginning first pass.” Stahler’s group would provide pinpoint bombing of anything that looked as if it might threaten the assault groups’ aircraft. Not wishing—or needing—to risk the remaining shuttles, the incoming attackers under Assault Leader Bohren were all rotary-winged aircraft captured from Havener armories. Fast, heavily armored and well-armed, even by Sauron standards, the “helicopter gunships,” as their manuals identified them, would land and put Soldiers on all sides of the horse nomads, then take off once more to prevent any of the herd or their mounted defenders from escaping.
The land was flat steppe all the way south to the foot of the Atlas Mountains, with only a slight depression to the north. A river flowed along the eastern border of the strike zone, with a small copse of trees bordering to the north. The weather on the steppes was fickle, with the North Sea winds able to sweep unopposed across the desolate flatlands. Meteorology ranks had assured them that a storm currently out to sea would remain there for at least another day.
Blinking in coded pattern, Stahler activated the optic-nerve link to his ground-attack weaponry. Wherever his eyes went, the barrels of six gauss cannon, swivel-mounted beneath his aircraft’s wings, turned to follow. Hands free, Stahler manipulated the vertical thrusters which would stabilize his craft for sustained firing on any ground position which might warrant that attention.
Coming up beneath him, along the northern edge of the nomad mass of warriors, a large domed tent filled his vision.
All things considered, Stahler thought, as the fighter swept forward, it looks like an easy day’s work.
He would not have believed anything so apparently simple could go so horribly wrong.
II
Lavrenti watched the fighters bearing down on them with something like religious awe. He slapped the reins over the team and stood up in the seat, shouting at them. Beside him, his sister Natalya was fumbling with the pedestal mount for the heavy machine gun she had wrestled up from the tent.
The yurts of Lavrenti’s people were a far technological cry from their Asiatic forbearers; anything the Mongols had done, the Cossacks declared they could do better. Scavenged vehicle axles, huge pneumatic tires and advanced suspensions made the mobile tents as fast as their horses could run—eventually. The yurts still comprised a great deal of mass and even at top speed, when compared to a Sauron fighter, they were as still as stones.
Lavrenti kept turning to watch as the lead fighter approached. Dark shapes moved beneath its wings and two yurts in its path exploded like puffer spores, scattering carpets, pillows, household utensils and human body parts from their tops in great gouts of dust and flame and blood. There was no flash from the weapons on the Sauron craft, no roar to be heard above the surrounding din. Lavrenti knew the magnetic-accelerator weapons of the Saurons were virtually silent. Though there was nothing subtle in the attack, the next fighter could pounce upon them with no warning at all. If, of course, we survive the attack by this fighter.
He heard a clanking beside him and his sister’s shout, “Get down, L’asha!”
The long barrel of the machine gun whipped about, clipping his shoulder painfully as he ducked, then it was going off near his head with an ear-punishing roar. “You crazy girl! You can’t hurt that thing with a pop-gun!”
Lavrenti knew as he was driving the yurt that they were going to die—if so, it would be good to go down fighting.
III
Behind him and to each side, Stahler’s squadron members were completing their passes over the yurts. So far, all their attacks had destroyed a number of rolling tents, but with no damage to the teams pulling them. Such was the expertise of Soldiers and the quality of their equipment. This first strike was to deprive the cattle of much cover against the ground forces now landing all around them. In a moment, the assault ships would disgorge their cargoes of Soldiers, then return to the air to take over the air-support role now being provided by Stahler’s squadron.
Before him, he saw a flicker of light on one of the yurts, at the point where the team of horses met the dome of the tent. A faint tapping of shells against his canopy informed him that it was small-arms fire. Aborting his climb, he increased forward and vertical thrust, slowing his fighter to a virtual crawl. A machine gun on such a mount could provide a very unpleasant surprise for the ground troops now closing in on the position and he had no intention of leaving it intact.
With his ground speed, barely at a hundred kilometers an hour and his fighter effectively a floating tank, Stahler focused on the stillfiring machine gun. There was a young man urging the wagon team and someone behind him firing the weapon.
Matching speed with the yurt, Stahler focused on the driver; his fighter’s weapons could take out both the driver and the gunner in a single burst. The sighting-implant painted twin hexagonal reticles over his field of vision, converging patterns which closed over one another and abruptly shifted to green. The weapons were locked onto the target, and as Stahler blinked to fire them—the gunner became visible.
“Shit!” Stahler roared in reflex.
In all species of humans, the instinct to preserve the opposite sex is nowhere stronger than in young normal males; of all males, the instinct for the preservation of women is strongest in Saurons. In all species of humans, the reflexes of Saurons are without equal: among Saurons, the reflexes of pilots are something almost beyond the laws of physics.
Stahler was completely unaware that he had jerked his control stick back, jerking the nose of his fighter over the heads of the boy and girl on the yurt. The tent rolled on, passing out of his forward field of fire, its riders displaying a crazy exultation over the antics of the bobbing fighter behind them.
Stahler recovered control in a haze of red fury. Had he not been under orders to preserve the livestock and females of these nomads, he would have emptied every weapon pod on his craft into that damnable tent; its team and its cattle, too. He did not indulge in the slaughter of opponents; it was pointless and inefficient. But dear god, he thought, startled by the pretty face of a female human norm at a machine gun. He almost groaned. He would never live this down.
IV
“What is he doing?” Cyborg Rank Stern asked.
Cyborg Rank Sargun did not answer, remaining as motionless as only a Cyborg could be. Such stability was necessary to the function of the optical enhancer—mere binoculars would have done little to improve a Cyborg’s visual acuity—which was feeding data directly into Sargun’s optic nerve through the small receptor patches on his forehead.
The effect was to place his point of view in any scene within range of the optical enhancer, or OpEn, unit. Right now he was watching Stahler’s fighter as it leveled off, recovering from the seemingly pointless gyrations to which he had subjected it to in order to avoid firing on the female human norm.
Switching the OpEn unit to standby, Sargun drew a short breath and
finally answered Cyborg Rank Stern: “Apparently, he wished to save the life of the gunner, a cattle female.”
Stern considered this for a moment. “Priority for captured females is this high?”
Sargun made the ghost of a shoulder movement that was the Cyborg equivalent of throwing one’s hands up in the air. “Fighter pilots tend toward romanticism. The violence of the maneuver suggests it was reflexive.”
Stern’s lips flickered in a way that suggested he didn’t think much of the pilot. Looking back over his shoulder, he gestured to the other Cyborgs in the salvage team: Remain in position; engagement occurring ahead.
All twelve cyborgs were motionless shapes spread out in the grass behind him, all twelve gave the subtle hand signal acknowledging his order: Understood; advise discretion.
The sounds of battle were carrying across the plains to them now. They were perhaps five kilometers distant; a two minute run for cyborgs should they choose to intervene. Stern was not yet sure of Sargun’s position on violating direct orders against committing Cyborg ranks to combat.
He decided to be patient.
V
Sergei and Nikolai had joined a dozen riders and made for the right flank of the herds. Helicopters were sweeping slowly over the fields beyond, dropping men from three meters above the ground, at speeds that would have killed human norms. The dark forms hit the ground running, leaving wakes in the steppe grasses as they moved toward the Cossacks.
Sergei cross-drew a pistol and a long, curved sabre. To his right, Nikolai had drawn two revolvers of an indecent caliber. Having heard a rumor that Saurons had two hearts, his son had acquired the pistols during the first week of the Sauron invasion, declaring his desire for weapons capable of removing both organs at once.