"Right. But to a flower, say, or a tree—"
The tiny transceiver in Dilullo's pocket-flap spoke with Bollard's voice. "John," it said. "Bixel's got those two blips on his radar."
"Coming," said Dilullo, and sighed. "What price perfect peace?"
XVIII
Labdibdin had been sent back to the domes with another Merc, and Chane sat in the bridge room waiting to know why Dilullo had wanted him here instead of on what was presently going to be the firing line. Through the door of the navigation room he could see Bixel hunched over his radar screen, following the approach of the cruisers. Rutledge was handling the ship-to-ship radio. Dilullo and the captain of one of the Vhollan cruisers were talking on it.
The Vhollan's voice came in loud and clear. Senior captain,
Chane thought, with spit, polish, and efficiency crackling in every word of his bad galacto.
"I will offer you this one chance to surrender. Your only other alternative, as you must realize, is death. I surely don't have to point out to you the hopelessness of fighting two heavy cruisers."
"Then why do it?" said Dilullo dryly. "Supposing I did surrender? What would the terms be?"
"You would be returned to Vhol for trial."
"Uh huh," said Dilullo. "It would be so much simpler for you just to turn out the firing-squad right here ... simpler and quieter. But assuming you really did take us back to Vhol, then we could plan on either A: execution for penetrating military secrets; or B: rotting in a Vhollan prison for the rest of our lives."
He looked over at Chane with lifted eyebrows. Chane shook his head. So did Rutledge. Bixel, who was listening over the intercom, said, "Tell him to ,go—"
"You would at least have a chance to live," said the Vhollan.
"This way you have none."
"My men seem to have a different opinion," Dilullo answered. "They say no."
The cruiser captain sounded impatient. "Then they're fools. Our heavy beams can blast your ship."
"Sure," said Dilullo. "Only you won't use them because if you do you will also blast this big prize package you're supposed to be guarding. Why do you think I cuddled up so close to it... because I loved it? Sorry, Captain. It was a good try."
There was a pause. The cruiser captain muttered something in low exasperated Vhollan.
"I think he's calling you names," said Rutledge.
"Very likely." Dilullo leaned to the mike. "By the way, Captain, how did you do with the Starwolves?"
"We drove them off," said the Vhollan curtly. "Of course."
"Of course," said Dilullo, "but not without some damage. How is the other boy feeling, the one that was screaming so loud for help?"
"I don't think he's feeling too good, John," said Bixel. "He's yawing around a lot, as though some of his drivetubes weren't functioning just right."
Chane thought, The Starwolves would have had him if the second cruiser hadn't come up. It must have been a great fight.
He wondered if Ssander's brothers had survived it. If they had, he was still going to have to face them some day. They wouldn't give up, and sooner or later ...
But he was proud of them.
The Vhollan captain was giving Dilullo one last chance to surrender, and Dilullo was saying no.
"You may get us, friend, but you'll have to fight for it."
"Very well," said the captain, and his voice was cold and flat and hard now as a steel blade. "We'll fight. And no quarter, Dilullo. No quarter."
He broke off transmission. Chane stood up, impatient, his belly tight with anticipation. Rutledge looked up at Dilullo.
"That's telling them, John. By the way, do you have any plan at all for getting us out of here?"
"Something will come to me," said Dilullo. "Are you tracking them, Bixel?"
"Tracking. They're coming in now...."
"What's the heading?"
Bixel told him, and Dilullo went to the viewport. Chane joined him. At first he could see nothing in the dirty green murk. Then two dark shapes appeared, very distant, and small. They grew with enormous swiftness. The constant screaming of the wind outside was drowned in rolling, booming thunder. The Merc ship trembled once, and twice. The cruisers swept past, high over the crest of the ridge, went into landing position, dropped their landing gear, and disappeared behind the ridge.
Dilullo sighed, much as though he had been holding his breath. "I hoped they'd do that."
Chane stared at him, surprised. "They just about had to, if they were smart. They can't use their heavy beams against us ... as you told him ... but we're not hampered. We could have peppered them with our portable missile launchers. I was hoping they'd be foolish enough to land within our range."
"Maybe they did just that," Dilullo said. He pointed to the wall of cliffs, the jagged fingers holding back the sand. "Do you think you could climb up there?"
He knows I can, thought Chane ... and said, "It would depend on how much I had to carry with me."
"If you had two men to help you, could you muscle one of those portable launchers up to the top?"
"Ah," said Chane. "Now I see. The ridge screens us from their heavy beams, so if we took off on a low trajectory they couldn't stop us. But they could come right hot on our heels and catch us in space, unless ..."
"Exactly," said Dilullo. "Unless they couldn't."
Chane said, "I'll get in there."
Dilullo nodded and lifted the tansceiver button. "Bollard?"
Bollard's voice came back thready and small. "Yes, John."
"Pick me the two strongest men you can think of, break out some coils of heavy duty line, detach one missile-launcher from your perimeter, and get them all assembled. Don't forget the ammo, about ten rounds."
Chane said, "Make it twenty."
"You won't have time," said Dilullo. "They'll uncork their lasers and blow you off the ridge before you could fire that many." Then he paused, looking at Chane. He said into the transceiver, "Make it twenty."
"You don't want men," said Bollard's voice. "You don't even want mules. You want... yes, John. On the double."
Dilullo went to the door of the navigation room. "Stay with it, Bixel."
Bixel looked at him, round-eyed. "But why? The cruisers are down now, and he said the Starwolves had gone,so ..."
"Just stay with it."
Bixel leaned back in his chair. "If you say so, John. This is easier than getting shot at."
"Would you like me to stay with the radio?" asked Rutledge.
"No."
Rutledge shrugged. "No harm in asking. But I might have known. You're a hard man, John."
Dilullo grinned bleakly. "Let's go see how hard."
He beckoned to Chane. They went down from the bridge room to the open lock, and out into the cold gritty air and the shifting sand.
The Mercs were deployed along the defense perimeter, dug in behind the assault-fence or manning the emplacements. They were waiting quietly, Chane saw. Good hard tough pros. They would be fighting for their lives in a short while ... just as long as it took the men off the cruisers to get organized and make the long march around the end of the cliff wall. But nothing was happening now and so they were taking it easy, tightening their collars to keep the sand out, checking their weapons, talking back and forth unconcernedly. Another day, another dollar, Chane thought, and not a bad way at all to make a living. It wasn't like the Starwolf way, of course. It was a job and not a game; it lacked the dash and pride. These were hired men, as against the free-booting lords of the starways who had no masters. But since for a while at least he was denied the one, the other wasn't too bad a substitute.
"Still think you can do it?" Dilullo asked. They were walking down the line toward where Bollard was hauling one of the portable launchers out of its emplacement and shouting orders about regrouping and closing the gap. Chane looked up at the cliffs, his eyes narrowed against the dust.
"I can do it," he said. "But I'd hate to get caught halfway up."
"What are you h
anging around for, then?" asked Dilullo. "Concentrate on their drive-tubes. Try to disable both cruisers, but take the undamaged one first. Watch out for return fire, and when it comes, run like hell. We'll wait for you ... but not too long."
"You just worry about holding them off here," said Chane. "If they crack the perimeter we won't have any place to run to."
The coils of heavy-duty line had arrived, thin hard stuff with little weight to it. Chane draped one over his shoulder and took up one end of the launcher cradle. Bollard had provided him, as ordered, with the two strongest men in the outfit, Sekkinen and a giant named O'Shannaig. Sekkinen took the other end of the cradle.
O'Shannaig loaded himself with the missile belts ... nasty little things with warheads of a non-nuclear but sufficiently violent nature. They couldn't kill a heavy cruiser. Applied in exactly the right places, they could make it hurt.
Chane said, "Go." And they went, running in the soft sand, under the belly of the monster ship, and then out from under its ruined bow, past the huddled domes where the Vhollan technicians were locked up. Chane suddenly remembered Thrandirin and the two generals and wondered what Dilullo would do with them.
Sekkinen began to blow and flounder, and Chane slowed down impatiently. He was going to have to pace himself or wear out his team too early. O'Shannaig was doing better because he had his arms free. Even so, he was sweating and his steps had lost their spring. It was hard going in the sand. The weight of their burdens pressed them down so that they waded in it, and it slipped and rolled and clutched their ankles. They found themselves on solid rock at last, right under the loom of the cliffs.
"Okay," Chane said. "Sit a minute while I have a look." He pretented to be panting hard, to match their panting, and moved away slowly, craning upward at the black cliffs.
They looked sheer enough, standing straight up in a monolithic wall until they broke at the top into those eroded pinnacles that tore the passing wind and made it shriek.
O'Shannaig said in his quiet burring voice, "John must be daft. Tis not possible to climb yon, not with all this around our necks."
"With or without it," said Sekkinen. He looked at Chane without love. "Unless you can pass some kind of a miracle."
XIX
Chane didn't know about miracles, but he knew about strength and obstacles and what a man could do if he had to. No, not a man, a Starwolf. A Varnan.
He walked along the foot of the cliff, taking his time. He knew the men from the cruisers would be moving by now and that if he did not reach the top of the cliff before they came around and spotted him, he was going to be caught with either the launcher or the ammunition or one of the other men dangling helplessly midway and it was going to be bad. Even so, he did not hurry.
The wind was going to be a problem up there. In the dead calm under the cliff, he could look up and see the wind, made physical by the sand it carried in smoking clouds from the dune. Wind like that could carry away a man, or a missile launcher, with equal ease, even though it might drop them sooner.
He wished the drowned sun would burn a little brighter. That was one reason the cliff looked so smooth. The flat dim light did not show up the faults and roughness. Green on black ... that didn't help any either. Chane began to hate this world. It didn't like him. It didn't like life of any kind. All it liked was sand and rock and wind.
He spat the taste of dust and bitter air out of his mouth and went on a little farther, and found what he was looking for.
When he was sure he had found it, he lifted the transceiver button and said, "I'm about to see what I can do about that miracle. Bring the stuff along."
He rearranged the coil of rope and his other gear so that nothing stuck out to catch, and he began to climb up the chimney he had found in the rock.
The first part of it wasn't so hard. The trouble came when the chimney washed out and left him on a nearly sheer, nearly vertical face, halfway to the top. He had thought the face was roughened enough to give him a chance, and he had gambled on it. It turned out to be very poor odds.
He remembered that other climb he had made, down the outside of the city-mountain on Kharal. He wished with all his heart he had those gargoyles here.
Inch by inch he worked his way up, mostly by the sheer strength of his fingers. After a while he found himself in a kind of hypnotic daze, concerned only with the cracks and bulges of the rock. His hands hurt abominably; his muscles were stretched like ropes to the breaking point. He heard a voice saying over and over in his head, Starwolf, Starwolf, and he knew it was telling him that a man would quit now, and fall, and die, but that he was a Starwolf, a Varnan, too proud to die like an ordinary man.
The shrieking wind deafened him. The hair of his head was plucked and tweaked with such sudden violence that it almost blew him off the rock. A shock of panic went through him. Blown sand bit into his flesh like a shot. He cowered tight against the cliff-face, looked up, and saw that he had reached the top.
He was still not home free. He had to worm his way a little farther, laterally now, below the crest of the ridge until he was in the lee of a pinnacle. He clambered up into a kind of nest in the eroded rock and sat there, gasping and trembling, feeling the rock quiver under him with the violence of the wind, and he cursed Dilullo, laughing. I'm going to have to stop this, he thought. I let him sucker me into one thing after another because I have to show off how good I am. He knows that, and he uses me. Can you do it, he asks, and I say yes....
And I did it.
A tiny voice sounded under the noise of the wind. "Chane! Chane!"
He realized now that it had been calling for several minutes. He lifted the transceiver.
"Sekkinen, I'm sending down the line. You can toss a coin, but one of you is going to have to come up here with another line. Third man to stay down and make fast. We'll have to haul the stuff up."
He found a solid, sturdy tooth of rock to anchor the line on.
Apparently O'Shannaig had won the toss, or lost it; it was his long body that came gangling up the cliff, his red-gold hair and craggy face that appeared over the lip of the hollow. Chane laughed, panting now in all honesty. "Next time I'll ask them to send me a small weakling. You weigh, my friend."
"Aye," said O'Shannaig. "I do that." He flexed his arms. "I was pulling, too."
They sent the second line down. Sekkinen made both of them fast on the launcher and they hauled it up and wrestled it into the hollow, and then brought up the belts.
"Okay, Sekkinen," said Chane into the transceiver. "It's your turn now."
They hauled him up in double-quick time, a big and tough and very unhappy man, who crawled into the hollow muttering that he was never built to be a monkey on a string. The hollow was getting overcrowded. Chane knotted a line around his waist, and a second one over his shoulders. The second one was hitched at the other end to the launcher.
"This is the tricky part," he said. "If I blow off, catch me."
With Sekkinen paying out and O'Shannaig snubbing around the rock tooth, Chane slid out of the hollow and over the crest, into the full fury of the wind.
He didn't think he was going to make it. The wind was determined to fly him into space like a whirling kite. It hammered and kicked him, tore his breath away, blinded him and choked him with sand. He hugged the pinnacle, finding plenty of handholds now where the full force of erosion had been at work, working himself around to the windward side. He was at the crest of the great dune now, and it was like riding one of the giant waves on Varna's lava beaches, high and dizzy, breathless with the spume. Only this spume was hard and dry, flaying the skin from his face and hands. He cowered and crawled in it, and presently the wind was pinning him flat against the rock and he could see the cruisers resting down at the foot of the dune.
He could also see the tail end of a line of armed men marching out of sight around the end of the cliff.
There were hollows on this side of the pinnacle as well, where the softer parts of the rock had been gnawed away. The w
ind fairly blew him into one and he decided not to argue with it; this would do as well as another. He spoke into the transceiver.
"All right," he said. "Up and over, and watch yourselves."
He braced himself in the hollow, right at the front, with his back against one wall and his feet against another. He laid hold of the second line and began to haul it in, hand over hand.
Praying as he did that the launcher wouldn't get away from his friends and fall down the cliff—because if it did, he would go with it.
It felt as though he were hauling on the rock itself. Nothing moved and he wondered if Sekkinen and. O'Shannaig were not able between them to manhandle the launcher up and over those vital few feet of the crest to where he could get a purchase on it. Then all of a sudden, the tension eased and the launcher came leaping at him in a flurry of sand and he shouted to them to snub it. It skidded and slowed to a stop, the belts trailing after it on the snubline.
Chane heaved a sigh of relief. "Thanks," he said. "Now get on back to the ship, quick. The Vhollans are coming."
He wrestled the launcher into position in front of the hollow, a two-man job. While he was doing it, O'Shannaig's voice, maddeningly slow, replied that, "It wouldna be richt to go without you."
In desperation, Chane shouted into his transceiver.
"Bollard!"
"Yes?"
"I'm in position. Will you tell these two noble jackasses to clear out? I can run faster than they can; I'll have a better chance without them. When these lasers cut loose, I don't want to have to wait for anybody."
Bollard said, "He's right, boys. Come on down." From the noises he heard then, Chane gathered that since it was an order, Sekkinen and O'Shannaig were going down the ropes a lot faster than they had come up. He finished laying out the belts and slapped the first one into place in the launcher.
"Chane," said Bollard, "the column has just come in sight."
"Yeah. If I don't see you again, tell Dilullo ..."
Dilullo's voice cut in. "I'm listening."
"I guess not right now," said Chane. "I'm too busy. The cruisers are practically underneath me. The wind is murder, but these missiles don't much care about wind.... One of these cruisers has taken a beating, all right. I can see that."
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