“Can’t,” came a breathless reply. “Winged me, lost tracking.”
“Their defenses are strongest around the weapon,” came another voice. “I’ve hit it twice straight on.”
“Do it again!”
“More pods! Out the aft portal, six, no seven!”
“Forget the pods. Hit that cannon.”
“I’m going in!” Before he could reflect upon what he was going to try, Rick switched all power to his lance and forward shields. His rear totally exposed to fire from the attack pods, Rick swerved away from the dogfight and aimed straight for the mother ship and its deadly ring of weaponry.
The blaster cannons formed a circle of malignant snouts halfway down the ship’s length. One swiveled about and began tracking him. Instantly he swerved, but not far, because it was only straight ahead that he was protected. The cannon fired, but his visor was down, and instead of being temporarily blinded, he saw how the near miss outlined his forward shield, now extended almost as far as the energy lance itself, layer after layer of cover, a series of golden lances formed one within the next. Rick took heart from the sight, hunched his shoulders, and powered straight for the ship.
There was a great shrill shrieking as the two shields met, a squeal so high he felt it more than heard it. His skull hummed like a tuning fork, his vision blurred, and for a moment of sheer panic he thought he had failed, that the Blade would shatter from the rending force. Then he was through, and the first cannon was chopped apart by his lance, then the second, the space now filled with spinning fragments of molten metal, the air in his cabin swollen with the crashing clamor.
He continued around the ship in his destructive circle, the cannons ahead firing in futile fury, the energy bolts shooting out in every direction, unable to strike him. One by one the snouts fell like great metal trees until the circle was complete and the space about the mother ship was littered with ruddy red bits of steel. And the cannons were silent.
The mopping-up procedures were swift and sure. Under Guns’ command, all their fire was directed aft to the thrusters, which soon glowed fiery red, and melted into a sullen heap. At that point the remaining attack pods traversed to the pirate transports and attached themselves in silent surrender. The two wounded Blades were returned to the hold, lines were attached to both the mother ship and the invading transports, then Guns rapped out, “Going to open channel.” There was a short pause, then, “Senior outrider calling the Merchant Ahmet and his Caravan Desert Queen.”
There was a long moment of silence, then through the hiss came a feeble voice. “Desert Queen here. Our flight deck took a direct hit, we surrender. Repeat, we surrender. Don’t shoot.”
“No need, laddie, the pirates beat you to it,” Guns replied, a glint of dry humor coming through. “The bandits have been routed. We are sounding the all clear. Repeat, all clear.”
There was a longer silence, then a very weak Mahmut himself came on and demanded hoarsely, “Can this be?”
“Just tell us where you want us to deposit the raiders,” Guns replied, “and you can see for yourself.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Firestones are more than a simple jewel,” Mahmut explained. “For some, it is almost a religion.”
Tucker shifted his weight on the cushion, and instantly Guns was alongside. “You all right, matey?”
“Just slide that pad up a notch, will you?” Tucker grimaced as Guns eased him more upright. The big man had been stepping into the transport when the stun bolt had struck, and he had fallen hard, straining his back. “That’s better, Guns. Thanks.”
“I shall have my personal physician attend to you again tomorrow,” Mahmut promised. “He reports that the massage has helped ease your discomfort.”
“Aye, perhaps,” Tucker reluctantly allowed. “But I can’t say as I enjoyed the experience.”
“You made enough noise,” Rick observed.
“Seems a bit strange,” Guns agreed, “a big fellow like you, being bested by an old fellow who couldn’t weigh as much as a wet breeze.”
“I’d like to see how well you manage,” Tucker blustered. “That man has fingers of solid titanium.”
“Easy, mate, I didn’t mean anything by it,” Guns said with a grin. “Anyway, it’s good to see you up and about again.”
“That it is,” Mahmut agreed. He raised his cup and said for the dozenth time that night, “A toast to the gallant warriors and their magnificent victory.”
Since their return from the battle, all had changed within the caravan. The portal had been unsealed, and they had been granted free reign of the ship. Mahmut had loaded them down with gifts and declared that all money from the sale of the pirate vessel was theirs and theirs alone.
They were seated in Mahmut’s private quarters, a sumptuous chamber lined with brilliantly colored tapestries and luxurious carpets of intricate design. They rested upon ample silk cushions, and before each person stood an individual hand-carved table, laden with goblets of filigreed silver and the remnants of a grand feast.
Guns stretched out his legs and asked, “How’s your son getting on?”
“He rests easy, and the doctor promises that there will be no permanent damage,” Mahmut replied. A flicker of concern passed over his features. “If it had not been for your swift actions—”
“A stun bolt can knock the best of men for a loop,” Guns said, doing away with the need for more thanks. “You were saying something about those firestones of Yalla.”
“Of Yalla, indeed.” It was Mahmut’s turn to lean back, settle himself, and stroke his slender beard. Dark eyes moved from one guest to the next. “Do I perhaps detect more of an interest in Yalla than just that of mercenaries seeking their next posting?”
“We are honest men,” Guns protested. “There’ll be no thieving—”
Tucker cut him off with, “That’s not what the merchant is on about, matey.”
“Indeed.” The eyes continued to probe each of his four guests in turn—Tucker, Guns, Rick, and finally Consuela. They lingered long upon her, until he said, “You will forgive me for saying how strange it seems, that at the banquet to celebrate the victors, you choose to include a young lady who only today has regained her strength.”
“I’m fine,” Consuela said, misunderstanding him. And she was. She had powered down, but remained at the console with the damping headset in place in case they wanted her to search farther out. Instead, when the stun bolt struck, the headset had the effect of damping out much of the bolt’s effect. She had experienced the mental agony of a harsh electric shock but had not lost consciousness, and had been one of the first to recover. “Really.”
“I am delighted to hear this,” Mahmut said gravely. “And yet, still I fail to understand what grand role you have played in our rescue from the pirates.”
Tucker and Guns exchanged worried glances before Tucker responded, “That’s our secret.”
Mahmut gave a grave nod. “And I, in turn, am not in a position to refuse you anything. Yet I must warn you that if I tell you all that I know of these firestones and of Yalla itself, my life and all my possessions would be delivered into your hands.”
“You want an exchange of secrets,” Guns said slowly, “to know you can trust us.”
“Family honor requires that I trust you now,” Mahmut countered. “But the pirates, they will not stop with this one attack. I am not insisting, and yet, as a merchant plying the hazards of space, I would ask to know what your secret is.”
Guns and Tucker exchanged a second, longer look, before Tucker finally nodded and said, “Fire away.”
Guns turned back, sighed, and said, “We can only tell you what secrets are ours to share.”
Dark eyes widened in surprise. “Mercenaries who carry the secrets of others?”
“We’re not,” Tucker said quietly, “what you might consider your ordinary run-of-the-mill mercenaries.”
“The lass here,” Guns said, “is what they call a Talent.”
The merchant’s eyes became round in astonishment. “The legends come alive, one after another. First the pirates become more than myth, and now a true Sensitive shares my table.”
“You hold more than our lives in your hands,” Tucker warned.
“By the head of my only son, these are secrets I shall share with none other,” Mahmut promised.
Guns turned to Consuela and said, “Tell him.”
So she explained the shadowlanes and the pattern of searching down the lightways. Mahmut listened in a silence so focused and intense that she could literally feel the strength of his gaze upon her. When she stopped, he sat and sipped from his goblet, digesting the information, before turning to Guns and asking, “And these remarkable attack pods of yours?”
“That,” Guns replied, “is not our secret to share.”
“Someone has equipped you to hunt down pirates,” Mahmut breathed.
Guns and Tucker responded with faces of stone.
“I understand,” Mahmut said, and set down his goblet. “Very well. It is now my turn.
“Among merchant caravans, Yalla is known as the impenetrable world,” Mahmut began. “It is a world of secrets and levels. I have known success there only because my mother was a Yalla native, from a chieftain’s family. She fell in love with a merchant trader, my father, and agreed to exchange the desert reaches for his life of spacing. Because of this, I have been granted leave to sit at the edge of the tribal fires and share in the bounty of firestones. Only a handful of traders carry the gems, and fewer still are ever permitted to land. Lifetimes have been spent transporting wares to Yalla and shipping the gems away, without once setting foot upon the golden sands.”
“Why the secrecy?” Guns demanded.
“Ah, the mystery. Yes.” Another sip to fortify himself, and then, “You understand, to say more places all that I have in your hands.”
“We have already shown you,” Guns said, “that we can both be trusted, and hold our secrets well.”
“It is as you say.” Mahmut leaned forward and said with quiet intensity. “It is said that the firestones do not come from Yalla at all, but rather from another system entirely. One so mysterious that no record of its existence remains anywhere.”
Guns did not even notice that he spilled his goblet as he catapulted to the front of his cushion. “What?”
“Ah, I see that this interests you. Yes, this rumor has never even been whispered to me, one who has spent a lifetime trading for the Yalla chieftains, and who has traced his way through the secret caverns since he was able to walk. But I have learned the ability to sift through the sands of time and desert, and capture the hidden meanings. A word here, a shrug there, and over the years I have come to believe that this is why the chieftains are so reluctant to allow any visitor to set foot upon their globe. Because, in truth, there is nothing there.”
“You don’t say,” Tucker breathed.
“Why else,” the merchant continued, “would there be great dunes hollowed out, to conceal fleets of small, swift-running craft?”
“For planetary defense?” Guns hedged.
“Perhaps,” Mahmut conceded. “And yet, not even the Hegemony is granted much leave upon Yalla. Firestones are coveted by the dark couriers, and it said that the emperor himself has been known to lose himself within the cabalism of firestone worship.”
Consuela exchanged a glance with Rick, saw him blanch at the words. Guns said for them all, “Sounds a strange way for the ruler of all the Hegemony to conduct himself.”
“My mother made me swear never to handle a polished firestone,” Mahmut replied. “So I can say nothing from experience. But I hear from others that it is a rite as addictive as any drug.”
“So the Imperium leaves the planet alone,” Guns suggested. “These gems or whatever they are, they’re too valuable to risk cutting off their supply.”
“So do I think,” Mahmut agreed. “And the tribes have spent centuries perfecting the art of guarding secrets.”
“Have you ever,” Tucker demanded, “heard the name of this hidden world?”
“There was once a word spoken,” Mahmut replied, his voice dropping to a whisper. “A word murmured in the late of night, by one so old he did not realize what it was he said. After that night, I never saw the elder again.” Mahmut looked from one face to the next, then finished, “The word was Citadel.”
Chapter Fifteen
Tucker followed her across the oasis, back toward the cavern entrance and their transport, and asked once more, “Are you sure you want to keep this up?”
“I have to.” Consuela massaged her neck with one hand, more tired than she had ever been in her life. “There’s no other hope, is there?”
“Even so, lass, you’ve set yourself a killing schedule.”
“It’s not that bad,” she insisted, trying for a light tone. But her voice sounded flat and drained even to her ears, and her eyes were gritty with more than just the desert sands. “All I do is sit behind the console.”
“Anybody who looks at you knows you can’t go on like this much longer,” Tucker replied worriedly. “And without you we have no hope of finding Wander, lass. None at all.”
Consuela had been resting beyond the last trees, where tall flat stones acted as a natural break-wall against the desert winds. Before her had stretched endless waves of golden sand, rising and falling in sweeping ridges to the distant horizon. Now as she walked back toward the looming entrance, a trio of ruddy peaks rose to her right. Other than these three lonely mountains, the desert reached out boundless and forbidding. Under the utterly empty sky, the setting sun glowed huge and orange, as though it were melting into the sands.
Already by this fifth day on Yalla, they had formed the habit of going aloft for the day’s final hour. This was the hour of calm, so named because the heat and the fierce winds of day had dimmed, and the cold winds of night had not yet begun. One of the elders had told them at the feast marking their arrival that Yalla had a second name among its desert folk. They called it “The Place of Storms.”
Consuela shivered at the memory of their arrival, the heat and huge sun and triple moons, the wind and lightning and desert sands. From the portal in Mahmut’s quarters she had watched their descent and felt as though she were diving into a boiling yellow sea.
When they had passed the system’s second gas giant, the ones that the ship Avenger had been intended to mine, a trio of Yalla battleships had arrived to escort them forward. Tucker and Guns had told Mahmut they would have preferred to stay aloft in the caravan, but the trader had nervously requested that they descend. He said that the tribesmen wanted to formally thank the ones who had saved one of their own from the pirates. Then he had drawn them aside and explained that the chieftains did not want to have leaders of such a strong fighting force out in space, and that even he and his son would be required to remain in their custody until negotiations and off-loading were completed. Never before had strangers been made welcome on Yalla, Mahmut had told them. Clearly the desert warriors were worried about allowing the leaders of such fighters to remain overhead, circling their planet.
Tucker and Guns had reluctantly agreed, then watched as Yalla guard pods came to station themselves about the caravan. A suspicious lot, was all Mahmut had said. If you want to keep your pods a secret, make sure your troopers stay on the alert, and weld your hold-doors shut.
Now as Consuela approached the vast cave entrance with its decorations of burnished metal and intricate carvings, the sun disappeared below the horizon. Almost instantly the first night winds began blowing their chill whispers of coming cold. Consuela shivered again, wanting to stay out of the stone-lined hall, knowing she had to go in.
“Aye, back where I come from, they’d call this a lazy wind,” Tucker said, leading her around the last stand of stumpy trees, their short height sheltered from the worst of the storms by the ring of stone guarding the cavern entrance. “It can’t be bothered to go around you, so it just blows straight through.”<
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“You’ve never said anything about where you are from.”
“That’s because there isn’t much to say.” He nodded to the portal guard, who ignored them entirely. Since the feast marking their arrival, the desert clan had not spoken a single word to any of them. Even so, with each day the air of resentment over their presence grew stronger. The desert soldier was dressed in traditional garb of robe and hood and cloak against the coming night, his blaster slung across his back. “The best thing I can say about my homeworld is I’m not there anymore.”
“Do you ever miss your family?” Consuela entered between the tall stone pillars carved from the rock entrance and rising up to five times her height. The portal was large enough for even the caravan’s transport to have entered through, and was flanked by a pair of great iron doors.
“My mother passed over while I was still a lad. My father was a good man, but he married again, and his second wife preferred her own children to the one from his first wife. She wasn’t sorry to see the back of me.” They proceeded across the entrance hall, a cavern that dwarfed the transports nestled at their center. Only one of the tribesmen they passed even looked their way, and that was to pierce Consuela with a look of bitter hostility.
This first cavern was as far into the tribe’s underground hive as they had been permitted to enter. They skirted around the caravan’s transport, a vessel large enough to contain both a residence for Mahmut and a large cargo hold. Beyond both rested their one guard pod, which remained encased within its plasteel shell. This was the pod that had been struck by the stunner and kept out of the battle. They had decided to leave the plasteel cover in place for precisely such a time as this. Rick waved to her from his station at the pod’s base. One of Mahmut’s most trusted personal guards kept him company. None of their own troopers had been permitted to land.
Tucker walked her over to their transport’s portal and asked once more, “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“I have to,” Consuela replied, and cut off further argument by entering the transport and shutting the portal.
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