Flandry's Legacy: The Technic Civilization Saga

by Poul Anderson

  The outercom buzzed. Someone was calling. “Take that, Yasmin,” Tom snapped. The ship wallowed. He felt it even through the cushioning internal gee-field, and the altitude meters were wavering crazily. Wind screamed louder. The clouds roiled near, coppery-headed blue-shadowed billows on the starboard horizon, deep purple below him. He had hoped that night and overcast would veil his arrival, but evidently a radar had fingered him. Or—“The knob marked A, you idiot! Turn it widdershins. I can’t let go now!”

  Yasmin caught her lower lip between her teeth and obeyed. The screen flickered to life. “Up the volume,” Tom commanded. “Maybe Dagny can’t watch, but she’d better hear. You on, Dagny?”

  “Aye.” Her tone was crisp from the intercom speaker. “I doubt if I’ll understand many words, though. Hadn’t you better start aloft and I leave the radar and take over fire control?”

  “No, stand where you are. See what you can detect. We’re not after a tussle, are we?” Tom glanced at the screen for the instant he dared. It was sidewise to him, putting him outside the pickup arc, but he could get a profile of the three-dimensional image.

  The man who gazed out was so young that his beard was brownish fuzz. Braids hung from beneath a goggled fiber crash helmet. But his features were hard; his background appeared to be an aircraft cockpit; and his green tunic had the look of a uniform.

  “Who are you?” he challenged. Seeing himself confronted by a girl, he let his jaw drop. “Who are you?”

  “Might ask the same o’ you,” Tom answered for her. “We’re from offplanet.”

  “Why did you not declare yourselves?” The Anglic was thickly accented but comprehensible, roughened with tension.

  “We didn’t know anybody was near. I reckon you had to try several bands before hittin’ the one we were tuned to. Isn’t a standard signal frequency any more.” Tom spoke with careful casualness, while the ship bucked and groaned around him and lightning zigzagged in the clouds he approached. “Don’t worry about us. We mean no harm.”

  “You trespass in the sky of Karol Weyer.”

  “Son, we never heard o’ him. We don’t even know what you call this planet.”

  The pilot gulped. “N-Nike,” he said automatically. “The planet Nike. Karol Weyer is our Engineer, here in Hanno. Who are you?”

  Dagny’s voice said in Eylan, “I’ve spotted him on the scope, Tom. Coming in fast at eleven o’clock low.’”

  “Let me see your face,” the pilot demanded harshly. “Hide not by this woman.”

  “Can’t stop to be polite,” Tom said. “S’pose you let us land, and we’ll talk to your Engineer. Or shall we take our business elsewhere?”

  Yasmin’s gauntlet closed convulsively on Tom’s sleeve. “The look on him grows terrible,” she whispered.

  “Gods damn,” Tom said, “we’re friends!”

  “What?” the pilot shouted.

  “Friends, I tell you! We need help. Maybe you—”

  “The screen went blank,” Yasmin cried.

  Tom risked yawing Firedrake till he could see in the direction Dagny had bespoken. The craft was in view. It was a one- or two-man job, a delta wing whose contrail betrayed the energy source as chemical rather than atomic or electric. However, instruments reported it as applying that power to a gravity drive. At this distance he couldn’t make out if the boat had guns, but hardly doubted that. For a moment it glinted silvery against the darkling clouds, banked and vanished.

  “Prob’ly hollerin’ for orders,” Tom said. “And maybe reinforcements. Chil’ren, I think we’d better hustle back spaceward and try our luck in some place more sociable than Hanno.”

  “Is there any?” Dagny wondered.

  “Remains to be seen. Let’s hope it’s not our remains that’ll be seen.” Tom concentrated on the controls. Lame and weakened, the ship could not simply reverse. She had too much downward momentum and was too deep in Nike’s gravity well. He must shift vectors slowly and nurse her up again.

  After minutes, Dagny called through the racket and shudderings: “Several of them—at least five—climbing faster than us, from all sides.”

  “I was afraid o’ that,” Tom said. “Yasmin, see if you can eavesdrop on the chit-chat between ’em.”

  “Should we not stay tuned for their call?” the Sassanian asked timidly.

  “I doubt they aim to call. If ever anybody acted so scared and angry as to be past reason—No, hold ’er.”

  The screen had suddenly reawakened. This time the man who stared forth was middle-aged, leonine, bearded to the waist. His coat was trimmed with fur and, beneath the storm in his voice, pride rang. “I am the Engineer,” he said. “You will land and be slaves.”

  “Huh?” Tom said. “Look, we was goin’ away—”

  “You declared yourselves friends!”

  “Yes. We’d like to do business with you. But—”

  “Land at once. Slave yourselves to me. Or my craft will open fire. They have tommics.”

  “Nukes, you mean?” Tom growled. Yasmin stifled a shriek. Karol Weyer observed and looked grimly pleased. Tom cursed without words.

  The Nikean shook his head. Tom got a glimpse of that, and wasn’t sure whether the gesture meant yes, no or maybe in this land. But the answer was plain: “Weapons that unleash the might which lurks in matter.”

  And our force-screen generator is on sick leave, Tom thought. He may be lyin’. But I doubt it, because they do still use gravs here. We can’t outrun a rocket, let alone an energy beam. Nor could Dagny, by herself, shoot down the lot in time to forestall ’em.

  “You win,” he said. “Here we come.”

  “Leave your transceiver on,” Weyer instructed. “When you are below the clouds, the fish will tell you where to go.”

  “Fish?” Tom choked. But the screen had emptied, save for the crackling and formlessnesses of static.

  “D-d-dialect?” Yasmin suggested.

  “Uh, yeh. Must mean somethin’ like squadron leader. Good girl.” Tom spared her a grin. The tears were starting forth.

  “Slaves?” she wailed. “Oh, no, no.”

  “Course not, if I can help it,” he said, sotto voce lest the hostiles be listening. “Rather die.”

  He did not speak exact truth. Having been a slave once, he didn’t prefer death—assuming his owner was not unreasonable, and that some hope existed of getting his freedom back. But becoming property was apt to be worse for a woman than a man: much worse, when she was a daughter of Sassania’s barons or Kraken’s sea kings. As their husband, he was honor bound to save them if he could.

  “We’ll make a break,” he said. “Lot o’ wild country underneath. One reason I picked this area. But first we have to get down.”

  “What’s gone by me?” Dagny called.

  Tom explained in Eylan while he fought the ship. “But that doesn’t make sense!” she said. “When they know nothing about us—”

  “Well, they took a bad clobberin’, ten years back. Can’t expect ’em to act terribly sensible about strangers. And s’posin’ this is a misunderstandin’ . . . we have to stay alive while we straighten it out. Stand by for a rough jaunt.”

  The aircraft snarled into sight, but warily, keeping their distance in swoops and circles that drew fantastic trails of exhaust. For a moment Tom wondered if that didn’t prove the locals were familiar with space-war techniques. Those buzzeroos seemed careful to stay beyond reach of a tractor or pressor beam that could have seized them. . . . But no. They were exposed to his guns and missiles, which had far greater range, and didn’t know that these were unmanned.

  Nevertheless, they were at least shrewd on this planet. From what Tom had let slip, and the battered condition of the vessel, Weyer had clearly guessed that the newcomers were weak. They could doubtless wipe out one or two aircraft before being hit, but could they handle half a dozen? That Weyer had taken the risk and scrambled this much of what must be a very small air fleet suggested implacable enmity. (Why? He couldn’t be so stupid as to assume
that everyone from offplanet was a foe. Could he?) What was worse, his assessment of the military situation was quite correct. In her present state, Firedrake could not take on so many opponents and survive.

  She entered the clouds.

  For a while Tom was blind. Thunder and darkness encompassed him. Metal toned. The instrument dials glowed like goblin eyes. Their needles spun; the ship lurched; Tom stabbed and pulled and twisted controls, sweat drenched his coverall and reeked in his nostrils.

  Then he was through, into windy but uncluttered air. Fifteen kilometers beneath him lay that part of the north temperate zone he had so unfortunately chosen. The view was of a valley, cut into a checkerboard pattern that suggested large agricultural estates. A river wound through, shining silver in what first dawn-light reddened the eastern horizon. A few villages clustered along it, and traffic moved, barge trains and water ships. A swampy delta spread at the eastern end of a great bay.

  That bay was as yet in the hour before sunrise, but glimmered with reflections. It had a narrow mouth, opening on a sea to the west. Lights twinkled on either side of the gate, and clustered quite thickly on the southern bayshore. Tom’s glance went to the north. There he saw little trace of habitation. Instead, hills humped steeply toward a mountain which smoked. Forests covered them, but radar showed how rugged they were.

  The outercom flashed with the image of the pilot who had first hailed him. Now that conditions were easier, Tom could have swiveled it around himself to let the scanner cover his own features. Yasmin could have done so for him at any time. But he refrained. Anonymity wasn’t an ace in the hole—at most, a deuce or a trey—but he needed every card he had.

  “You will bear east-northeast,” the “fish” instructed. “About a hundred kilos upriver lies a cave. Descend there.”

  “Kilos?” Tom stalled. He had no intention of leaving the refuges below him for the open flatlands.

  “Distances. Thousand-meters.”

  “But a cave? I mean, look, I want to be a good fellow and so forth, but how’m I goin’ to spot a cave from the air?”

  “Spot?” It was the Nikean’s turn to be puzzled. However, he was no fool. “Oh, so, you mean espy. A cave is a stronghouse. You will know it by turrets, projectors, set down fields.”

  “Your Engineer’s castle?”

  “Think you we’re so whetless we’d let you near the Great Cave? You might have a tommic boom aboard. No. Karol Weyer dwells by the bay gate. You go to the stronghouse guarding the Nereid River valley. Now change course, I said, or we fire.”

  Tom had used the talk-time to shed a good bit of altitude. “We can’t,” he said. “Not that fast. Have to get low first, before we dare shift.”

  “You go no lower, friend! Those are our folk down there.”

  “Be reasonable,” Tom said. “A spaceship’s worth your havin’, I’m sure, even a damaged one like ours. Why blang us for somethin’ we can’t help?”

  “Um-m-m . . . hold where you are.”

  “I can’t. This is not like an aircraft. I’ve got to either rise or sink. Ask your bosses.”

  The pilot’s face disappeared. “But—” Yasmin began.

  “Shhh!” Tom winked his good eye at her.

  He was gambling that they hadn’t had spacecraft on Nike for a long time. Otherwise they wouldn’t have taken such a licking a decade ago; and they’d have sent a ship after him, rather than those few miserable, probably handmade gravplanes. So if they didn’t have anyone around who was qualified in the practical problems of handling that kind of vessel—

  Not but what Firedrake wasn’t giving him practical problems of his own. Wind boomed and shoved.

  The pilot returned. “Go lower if you must,’”he said. “But follow my word, go above the northshore hills.”

  “Surely.” Right what I was hopin’ for! Tom switched to Eylan. “Dagny, get to the forward manlock.”

  “What do you say?” rapped the pilot.

  “I’m issuin’ orders to my crew,” Tom said. “They don’t speak Anglic.”

  “No! You’ll not triple-talk me!”

  Tom let out a sigh that was a production. “Unless they know what to do, we’ll crash. Do you want live slaves and a whole spaceship, or no? Make up your mind, son.”

  “Um-m . . . well. At first ill-doing, we shoot.”

  Tom ignored him. “Listen, Dagny. You’re not needed here any more. I can land on my altimeter and stuff. But I’ve got to set us down easy, and not get us hit by some overheated gunner. They must have what we need to make our repairs, but not to build a whole new ship, even s’posin’ we knew how. So we can’t risk defendin’ ourselves, leastwise till we get away from the ship.”

  “She will be theirs,” Dagny said, troubled. “And we will be hunted. Shouldn’t we surrender peacefully and bargain with them?”

  “What bargainin’ power has a slave got? Whereas free, if nothin’ else, I bet we’re the only two on Nike that can run a spacecraft. Besides, we don’t know what these fellows are like. They could be mighty cruel. No, you go stand by that manlock along with Yasmin. The minute we touch dirt, you two get out—fast and far.”

  “But Tom, you’ll be on the bridge. What about you?”

  “Somebody’s got to make that landin’. I dunno how they’ll react. But you girls won’t have much time to escape yourselves. I’ll come after you. If I haven’t joined you soon, figure I won’t, and do whatever comes natural. And look after Yasmin, huh?”

  Silence dwelt for a moment amidst every inanimate noise. Until: “I understand. Tom, if we don’t see each other again, it was good with you.” Dagny uttered a shaken laugh. “Tell her to kiss you for both of us.”

  “Aye-ya.” He couldn’t, of course, with that suspicious countenance glowering out of the screen. But in what little Pelevah he had, he gave Yasmin her orders. She didn’t protest, too stunned by events to grasp the implications.

  Down and down. The tilted wilderness swooped at him.

  “The steerin’s quit on me!” Tom yelled in Anglic. “Yasmin, go fantangle the dreelsprail! Hurry!” She flung off her safety webbing and left the bridge, as fast as possible in her clumsy armor. “I’ve got to make an emergency landin’,” Tom said to the Nikean officer.

  Probably that caused them to hold their fire as he had hoped. He didn’t know, nor wonder. He was too busy. The sonoprobe said firm solid below. The altimeter said a hundred meters, fifty, twenty-five, ten—Leaves surged around. Boughs and boles splintered. The farther trees closed in like a cage. Impact shook, drummed, went to silence. Tom cut the engines and gee-field. Native gravity, one-half standard, hit him with giddiness. He unharnessed himself. The deck was canted. He slipped, skidded, got up and pounded down the companionway.

  The manlock valves opened at Dagny’s control while Firedrake was still moving. The drop in air pressure hurt her eardrums. She glimpsed foliage against a sky red with dawn, gray with scattering stormclouds. The earthquake landing cast her to hands and knees. She rose, leaning against a bulkhead. Yasmin stumbled into sight. The faceplate stood open before the terrified young visage. “Chaos! Dog that thing!” Dagny cried. “We’ll be at top speed.” She was not understood. She grabbed the girl and snapped the plate shut herself. “You . . . know . . . fly?” she asked in her fragment of Anglic.

  “Yes. I think so.” Yasmin wet her lips. Her radio voice was unsteady in the other’s earplugs. “I mean . . . Lord Tom explained how.”

  “No practice, though?” Dagny muttered in Eylan. “You’re about to get some.” In Anglic: “Follow I.”

  She leaned out of the lock. High overhead she descried the gleam of a wheeling delta wing. The forest roared with wind. A little clearing surrounded the ship where trees had been flattened. Beyond the shadowy tangle of their trunks and limbs, their neighbors made a wall of night.

  “Go!” Dagny touched her impeller stud and launched herself. She soared up. Flight was tricky in these gusts. Curving about, she saw Yasmin’s suit helplessly cartwheel. She returned, c
aught the Sassanian girl, laid one arm around her waist and used the other to operate her drive units for her in the style of an instructor. They moved off, slowly and awkwardly.

  A scream split the air. Dagny glanced as far behind as she could. Two of the aircraft were stooping . . . One took a hoverstance above Firedrake, the other came after her and Yasmin. She saw the muzzle of an energy gun and slammed the two impeller sets into full forward speed. Alone, she might have dived under the trees. But Yasmin hadn’t the skill, and two couldn’t slip through those dense branches side by side. Tom had told her to look after Yasmin, and Dagny was his sworn woman.

  She tried to summon before her the children they had had together, tall sons and daughters, the baby grandchildren, and Skerrygarth, their home that was the dowry she had brought him, towers steadfast above a surf that played white among the reefs—

  Explosion smashed at her. Had she been looking directly aft, she would have been dazzled into momentary blindness. As it was, the spots before her eyes and the tolling in her ears lasted for minutes. A wave of heat pushed through her armor.

  She yelled, clung somehow to Yasmin, and kept the two of them going. Fury spoke again and again. It dwindled with distance as they fled.

  Finally it was gone. By that time the women had covered some twenty kilometers, more or less eastward. The sea-level horizon of Nike was only about six kilometers off; and this was not flat country. They were well into morning light and far beyond view of the spaceship. Dagny thought she could yet identify an aircraft or two, but maybe those sparks were something else.