So the young man, deciding he couldn’t sit where he was forever, was trying to reach the woods. That took nerve. Tom laid his telescope to his good eye—his faceplate was open—and searched out details. Fiber helmet, as already noted; green tunic with cloth insignia, no metal; green trousers tucked into leather boots; a sidearm, but no indication of a portable communicator or, for that matter, a watch. Tom made sure his transmitter was off, trod a little further out in the lock chamber, and bawled from lungs that had often shouted against a gale at sea:
“Halt where you are! Or I’ll chop the legs from under you!”
The pilot had been about to scuttle from his place. He froze. Slowly, he raised his gaze. Tom’s armored shape was apparent to him, standing in the open lock, but not discernible by his mates. Likewise the blaster Tom aimed. The pilot’s hand hovered at the butt of his own weapon.
“Slack off, son,” the captain advised. “You wouldn’t come near me with that pipgun—I said ‘pip,’ not even ‘pop’—before I sizzled you. And I don’t want to. C’mon and let’s talk. That’s right; on your feet; stroll over here and use this nice ladder.”
The pilot obeyed, though his scramble across the log jam was hardly a stroll. As he started up, Tom said: “They’ll see in a minute what you’re doin’, I s’pose, when you come above the foliage. . . . Belay, there, I can see you quite well already. . . . I want you to draw your gun, as if you’d decided to come aboard and reconnoiter ’stead o’ headin’ for the nearest beer hall. Better not try shootin’ at me, though. My friends’d cut you down.”
The Hannoan paused a moment, rigid with outrage, before he yielded. His face, approaching, showed pale and wet in the first light. He swung himself into the lock chamber. For an instant, he and Tom stood with guns almost in each other’s bellies. The spaceman’s gauntleted left hand struck like a viper, edge on, and the Nikean weapon clattered to the deck.
“You—you broke my wrist!” The pilot lurched back, clutching his arm and wheezing.
“I think not. I gauge these things pretty good if I do say so myself. And I do. March on ahead o’ me, please.” Tom conducted his prisoner into the passageway, gathering the fallen pistol en route. It was a slug-thrower, ingeniously constructed with a minimum of steel. Tom found the magazine release and pressed it one-handed. The clip held ten high-caliber bullets. But what the hoo-hah! The cartridge cases were wood, the slugs appeared to be some heavy ceramic, with a mere skirt of soft metal for the rifling in the barrel to get a grip on!
“No wonder you came along meek-like,” Tom said. “You never could’ve dented me.”
The prisoner looked behind him. Footfalls echoed emptily around his words. “I think you are alone,” he said.
“Aye-ya. I told you my chums could wiff you . . . if they were present. In here.” Tom indicated the fire control turret. “Sit yourself. Now, I’m goin’ t’other side o’ this room and shuck my armor, which is too hot and heavy for informal wear. Don’t get ideas about plungin’ across the deck at me. I can snatch my blaster and take aim quicker’n that.”
The young man crouched in a chair and shuddered. His eyes moved like a trapped animal’s, around and around the crowding machines. “What do you mean to do?” he rattled. “You can’t get free. You’re alone. Soon the Engineer’s soldiers come, with ’tillery, and ring you.”
“I know. We should be gone by then, however. Look here, uh, what’s your name?”
An aristocrat’s pride firmed the voice. “Yanos Aran, third son of Rober Aran, who’s chief computerman to Engineer Weyer’s self. I am a fish in the air force of Hanno—and you are a dirty friend!”
“Maybe so. Maybe not.” Tom stripped fast, letting the pieces lie where they fell. He hated to abandon his suit, but it was too bulky and perhaps too detectable for his latest scheme.
“Why not? Didn’t you business Evin Sato?”
“You mean that plane I gunned?”
“Yes. Evin Sato was my camarado.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that, but wasn’t he fixin’ to shoot two o’ my people? We came down frien—intendin’ no harm, and you set on us like hungry eels. I don’t want to hurt you, Yanos, lad. In fact, I hope betwixt us we can maybe settle this whole affair. But—” Tom’s features assumed their grimmest look which had terrified stronger men than Aran— “you try any fumblydiddles and you’ll find out things about friendship that your mother never told you.”
The boy seemed to crumple. “I . . . yes, I slave me to you,” he whispered.
He wouldn’t stay crumpled long, Tom knew. He must be the scion of a typical knightly class. Let him recover from the dismay of the past half hour and the unbalancing effect of being surrounded by unknown power and he’d prove a dangerous pet. It was necessary to use him while he remained useable.
Wherefore Tom, having peeled down to coveralls, gave him his orders in a few words. A slight demurral fetched a brutal cuff on the cheek. “And if I shoot you with this blaster, short range low intensity,” Tom added, “you won’t have a neat hole drilled through your heart. You’ll be cooked alive, medium rare, so you’ll be some days about dying. Seize me?”
He didn’t know if he’d really carry out his threat, come worst to worst. Probably not.
Having switched off the tractor beam, he brought Aran far down into the ship, to an emergency lock near the base. It was well hidden by leaves. The vague dawn-light aided concealment. They crept forth, and thence to the captured aircraft.
It had taken a beating, Tom saw. The wingtips were crumpled, the fuselage punctured. (The covering was mostly some fluorosynthetic. What a metal shortage they must have here!) But it ought to fly anyhow, after a fashion. Given a gravity drive, however weak, airfoils were mainly for auxiliary lift and control.
“In we go,” Tom said. He squeezed his bulky form behind Aran’s seat so that it concealed him. The blaster remained in his fist, ready to fire through the back.
But there was no trouble. Aran followed instructions. He called his squadron: “—Yes, you’re right, I did ’cide I’d try looking at the ship. And no one! None aboard. ’Least, none I saw. Maybe robos fought us, or maybe the rest of the crew got away on foot, not seen. I found a switch, looked like a main powerline breaker, and opened it. Maybe now I can rise.”
And he started the engine. The airboat climbed, wobbling on its damaged surfaces. A cheer sounded from the receiver. Tom wished he could see the face in the screen, but he dared not risk being scanned himself.
“You land, if Engineer Weyer approves,” Aran directed. “Go aboard. Be careful. Me, best I take my craft back to base immediately.”
Tom had figured that would be a natural move for a pilot on Nike, even a squadron leader. A plane was obviously precious. It couldn’t get to the repair shop too fast.
He must now hope that Aran’s expression and tone didn’t give him away. The “fish” was no actor. But everyone was strung wire-taut. Nobody noticed how much more perturbed this fellow was. After a few further words had passed, Aran signed off and started west.
“Keep low,” Tom said. “Like you can’t get much altitude. Soon’s you’re out o’ their sight here, swing north. Find us a good secret place to land. I think we got a bucketful to say to each other, no?”
One craft was bound eagerly down. The rest stayed at hover. They’d soon learn that the spaceship was, indeed, deserted. Hence they wouldn’t suspect what had happened to Aran until he failed to report. However, that wasn’t a long time. He, Roan Tom, had better get into a bolt-hole quick!
The volcano’s northern side was altogether wild. On the lower flanks, erosion had created a rich lava soil and vegetation was dense. For some reason it was principally native Nikean, dominated by primitive but tree-sized “ferns.” An antigrav flyer could push its way under their soft branches and come to rest beneath the overhang of a cliff, camouflaged against aerial search.
Tom climbed out of the cockpit and stretched to uncramp himself. The abri was rough stone at his back, the forest br
ooded shadowy before him. Flecks of copper sunlight on bluish-green fronds and the integuments of bumbling giant pseudo-insects made the scene look as if cast in metal. But water rilled nearby, and the smells of damp growth were organic enough.
“C’mon, son. Relax with me,” Tom invited. “I won’t eat you. ’Specially not if you’ve packed along a few sandwiches.”
“Food? No.” Yanos Aran spoke as stiffly as he moved.
“Well, then we’ll have to make do with what iron rations I got in my pockets.” Tom sighed. He flopped down on a chair-sized boulder, took out pipe and tobacco pouch, and consoled himself with smoke.
He needed consolation. He was a fugitive on an unknown planet. His ship had been taken, his wives were out of touch; an attempt to raise Dagny on the plane’s transmitter, using a Krakener military band, had brought silence. She must already have discarded her telltale space armor.
“And all ’count of a stupid lingo mistake!” he groaned.
Aran sat down on another rock and regarded him with eyes in which alertness was replacing fear. “You say you are not truly our friend?”
“Not in your sense. Look, where I come from, the Anglic word ‘friend’ means . . . well, fellow you like, and who likes you. When I told your Engineer we were friends, I wanted him to understand we didn’t aim him any harm, in fact we could do good business with him.”
“Business!” Aran exploded.
“Whoops-la. Sorry. Said the wrong thing again, didn’t I?”
“I think,” Aran replied slowly, “what you have in mind is what we would call ‘change.’ You wanted to change goods and services with our people. And to you, a ‘friend’ is what we call a ‘camarado.’”
“Reckon so. What’re your definitions?”
“A friend is a space raider such as did business with our planet some five years agone. They destroyed the last great cities we had left from the Terran Empire days, and none knows how many million Nikeans they killed.”
“Ah, now we’re gettin’ somewhere. Let’s straighten out for me what did happen.”
Aran’s hostility had not departed, but it had diminished. He was intelligent and willing to cooperate within the limits of loyalty to his own folk. Information rushed out of him.
Nike did not appear to be unique, except in its planetology. Tom asked about that. Aran was surprised. Was his world so unusual per se?
He knew only vague traditions and a few fragmentary written accounts of other planetary systems. Nike was discovered and colonized five hundred-odd years ago—about a thousand standard years. It was always a backwater. Fundamentally agricultural because of its shortage of heavy metals, it had no dense population, no major libraries or schools. Thus, when the Empire fell apart, knowledge vanished more quickly and thoroughly here than most places. Nikean society disintegrated; what had been an Imperial sub-province became hundreds of evanescent kingdoms, fiefs and tribes.
The people were on their way back, Aran added defiantly. Order and a measure of prosperity had been restored in the advanced countries. As yet, they paid mere lip service to an “Emperor,” but the concept of global government did now exist. Technology was improving. Ancient apparatus was being repaired and put back into service, or being reproduced on the basis of what diagrams and manuals could be found. Schemes had been broached for making interplanetary ships. Some dreamers had hoped that in time the Nikeans might end their centuries-long isolation themselves, by re-inventing the lost theory and practice of hyperdrive.
For that, of course, as for much else, the tinkering of technicians was insufficient. Basic scientific research must be done. But this was also slowly being started. Had not Aran remarked that his father was head computerman in the Engineer’s court? He used a highly sophisticated machine which had survived to the present day and which two generations of modern workers had finally learned how to operate.
Its work at present was mainly in astronomy. While some elementary nucleonics had been preserved through the dark ages—being essential to the maintenance of what few atomic power plants remained—practically all information about the stars had vanished. Today’s astronomers had learned that their sun (as distinguished from their planet) was not typical of its neighborhood. It was unpredictably variable, and not even its ground state could be fitted onto the main sequence diagram. No one had yet developed a satisfactory theory as to what made this sun abnormal, but the consensus was that it must be quite a young star.
One geologist had proposed checking this idea by establishing the age of the planet. Radioactive minerals should provide a clock. The attempt had failed, partly because of the near-nonexistence of isotopes with suitable half-lives and partly, Tom suspected, because of lousy laboratory technique. But passing references in old books did seem to confirm the idea held by latter-day theorists, that stars and planets condensed out of interstellar gas and dust. If so, Nike’s sun could be very new, as cosmic time went, and not yet fully stabilized.
“Aye, I’d guess that myself,” Tom nodded.
“Good! Important to be sure. You seize, can we make a mathematical model of our sun, then we can predict its variations. Right? And we will never predict our weather until then. Unforeseen storms are our greatest natural woe. Hanno’s self, a southerly land, can get killing frosts any season.”
“Well, don’t take my authority, son. I’m no scientist. The Imperialists must’ve known for sure what kind o’ star they had here. And a scholar of astronomy, from a planet where they still keep universities and such, should could tell you. But not me.” Tom struck new fire to his pipe. “Uh, we’d better stay with less fun topics. Like those ‘friends.’”
Aran’s enthusiasm gave way to starkness. He could relate little. The raiders had not come in any large fleet, a dozen ships at most. But there was no effective opposition to them. They smashed defenses from space, landed, plundered, raped, tortured, burned, during a nightmare of weeks. After sacking a major city, they missiled it. They were human, their language another dialect of Anglic. Whether in sarcasm or hypocrisy or because of linguistic change, they described themselves to the Nikeans as “your friends, come to do business with you.” Since “friend” and “business” had long dropped out of local speech, Tom saw the origin of their present meaning here.
“Do you know who they might have been?” Aran asked. His tone was thick with unshed tears.
“No. Not sure. Space’s full o’ their kind.” Tom refrained from adding that he too wasn’t above a bit of piracy on occasion. After all, he observed certain humane rules with respect to those whom he relieved of their portable goods. The really bestial types made his flesh crawl, and he’d exterminated several gangs of them with pleasure.
“Will they return, think you?”
“Well . . . prob’ly not. I’d reckon they destroyed your big population centers to make sure no one else’d be tempted to come here and start a base that might be used against ’em. They bein’ too few to conquer a whole world, you see. ’Course, I wouldn’t go startin’ major industries and such again without husky space defenses.”
“No chance. We hide instead,” Aran said bitterly. “Most leaders dare allow naught that might draw other friends. Radio a bare minimum; no rebuilding of cities; yes, we crawl back to our dark age and cower.”
“I take it you don’t pers’nally agree with that policy.”
Aran shrugged. “What matter my thoughts? I am but a third son. The chiefs of the planet have ’cided. They fought a war or two, forcing the rest to go with them in this. I myself bombed soldiers of Silva, when its Prester was made stop building a big atomic power plant. Our neighbor cavedom! And we had to fight them, not the friends!”
Tom wasn’t shocked. He’d seen human politics get more hashed than that. What pricked his ears up was the information that, right across the border, lived a baron who couldn’t feel overly kindly toward Engineer Weyer.
“You can seize, now, why we feared you,” Aran said.
“Aye-ya. A sad misunderstandin’.
If you hadn’t been so bloody impulsive, though—if you’d been willin’ to talk—we’d’ve quick seen what the lingo problem was.”
“No! You were the ones who refused talk. When the Engineer called on you to be slaves—”
“What the muck did he expect us to do after that?” Tom rumbled. “Wear his chains?”
“Chains? Why . . . wait—oh-oh!”
“Oh-oh, for sure,” Tom said. “Another little shift o’ meanin’, huh? All right, what does ‘slave’ signify to you?”
It turned out that, on Nike, to be “enslaved” was nothing more than to be taken into custody: perhaps as a prisoner, perhaps merely for interrogation or protection. In Hanno, as in every advanced Nikean realm, slavery in Tom’s sense of the word had been abolished a lifetime ago.
The two men stared at each other. “Events got away from both sides,” Tom said. “After what’d happened when last spacemen came, you were too spooked to give us a chance. You reckoned you had to get us under guard right away. And we reacted to that. We’ve seen a lot o’ cruelty and treachery. We couldn’t trust ourselves to complete strangers, ’specially when they acted hostile. So . . . neither side gave the other time to think out the busi—the matter o’ word shift. If there’d been a few minutes’ pause in the action, I think I, at least, would’ve guessed the truth. I’ve seen lots o’ similar cases. But I never had any such pause, till now.”
He grinned and extended a broad, hard hand. “All’s well that ends well, I’m told,” he said. “Let’s be camarados.”
Aran ignored the gesture. The face he turned to the outworlder was only physically youthful. “We cannot,” he said. “You wrecked a plane and stole another. Worse, you killed a man of ours.”
“But—well, self-defense!”
“I might pardon you,” Aran said. “I do not think the Engineer would or could. It is more than the damage you worked. More than the anger of the powerful Sato family, who like it not if a son of theirs dies unavenged because of a comic mix in s’mantics. It is the policy that he, Weyer’s self, strove to bring.”
Flandry's Legacy: The Technic Civilization Saga Page 42