by Ginger Booth
Sass pounced. “People die in these battles?”
“Accidents happen. Apologies, but I have little involvement with the army. And again. Let us not converse in the street.” He drew pointedly away from Kassidy, who took the hint. She dropped back to walk beside Sass and Cope.
Three blocks later, in a rather dull commercial-looking district, they turned left into the hollow city’s interior. The short street dead-ended into trolley tracks with a faux stone wall beyond, three meters high.
But this time, a pedestrian ramp arched gracefully over the tracks and wall, in matching stone. A lone guy stood guard at the base, bearing a pike taller than he was. His uniform screamed ‘bell hop’ to Sass, cute cropped navy blue jacket reaching only to his waist, festooned with frog fasteners of golden braid, and broad scarlet lapels. He wore a mask, of course, the familiar lion, with an unruly mane of a hat. He kept eyes fixed forward and expressionless. Sass might have thought he was artwork, if she hadn’t caught his quick glance and widening eyes as they approached.
Monami ignored the man and pushed past him up the ramp. Sass’s party followed. She glanced back. No, the decorative guard wouldn’t be much impediment should they choose to reverse their path.
At the top of the ramp she expected a nice view over greenhouses. She was wrong. They’d reached the lair of the wealthy. A half dozen close-packed French chateaus stretched before them. A prettily graveled semi-circular drive linked them and the pedestrian bridge. The grounds and inner park featured brilliant green grass. Sass recalled the stunted columnar trees from Earth. The lawns were accented with stands of flowers or hedges, walkways and stone patios and fountains. The imposing four-story matching mansions clustered closely in the front, a short pebble-toss apart, with more generous back yards stretching behind them. The one farthest in featured a fountain that jetted man-high.
They climbed down a staircase. From this side, Sass could see that a separate curving ramp rose on the other side. She hadn’t spotted the down staircase, apparently. Pompous.
The house of honor proved to be Monami’s, as they traipsed past the others. Sass idly wondered whether anyone would put up real defenses should they suddenly turn tail and run.
We came here to talk to Cantons. To someone in power, she reasoned. Found him. She had questions. This guy obviously had power, money, and answers. Not time to run yet.
But her masquerade was over. She needed to find a chance to warn Ben soon. His risk of being identified as something more than traveling strangers just skyrocketed.
Conscience fairly clear, Ben had no idea why the Three Musketeers chased them across the interior of Italia. Granted they had no muskets, but the billowing capes, bandit masks and swords looked authentic.
Elise stumbled again, scraping hands and knees on the bone-dry clay of the low Italian hills. Rather than use her momentum to rise and keep going, she stopped, chest heaving, gasping for air. They’d long since stripped her of all burdens. She just wasn’t a runner.
Fee, Fie, and Foe behind them didn’t share that handicap.
“Breather,” Ben announced, making a virtue of necessity. “Drink.”
The Colosseum looked so promising in the distance when they set out for it. But it proved farther than they thought. And as every Italian show-piece he’d seen so far, the building proved a facade, an impressive scrap of wall with nothing behind it. The sculptor didn’t even bother with scaffolding. Barely a breeze troubled the raw domed interior of this canton.
The market place by the train station had been similar. They hung cloth reproductions of scenes Michelangelo once painted on some ceiling, for shade. Nothing at this latitude on Cantons needed shade. The temperature hadn’t warmed to shirtsleeve level yet, and the sun was lowering now. Tomorrow would dawn dark again.
“Just kill them,” Remi begged, bent double, hands on knees panting. Ben trusted the engineer would have done the honors of shooting long ago if he had a gun. Clay and Ben held custody of those.
“We can’t outrun them, Ben,” Clay concurred. “We certainly can’t leave Elise to them.”
Ben nodded and pulled his blaster, not his stunner, out of his pocket.
Alarmed, Milo leapt forward. Mercifully their baby wizard had no trouble keeping up a steady run. He emitted a frantic torrent of French and pointed to an armpit of the city walls beyond. The train to France lurked in that inward corner of the city-state.
“No idea,” Remi translated. “But he says that way. No gun.”
“Why no gun?” Ben eyed the distance to their pursuers. He couldn’t do much damage yet. If they didn’t know what a blaster was, shooting the hard ground wasn’t likely to slow them.
“Zeep, zeep. He insists,” Remi reported. Milo understood Ben fairly well, though he couldn’t pull together whole sentences in comprehensible English. “Zeep? I don’t know.”
Ben held the kid’s eye and pointed at the wall corner beyond. “Milo? No train to France. No.” He sliced his arms in negation. The captain might not speak Italian, but he was an Acosta! His rude gestures were fluent. They’d worked a treat in the marketplace of the ‘Roma’ district they fled. Roma proved a center for ancient religion buffs and mechanical horse races – clearly a boring backwater of Italia. Milo claimed Venice, where the train to Hellada lay, was much nicer. Ben swung his arm toward the far wall across the bare empty interior. “Hellada.”
“Zeep!” Milo wailed urgently. Frustrated in both English and French, he stooped to charades. He executed a full body swoop, from armpit corner, across baked empty, to the distant wall. Then he pantomimed a smaller dip, from the wall to a tower a couple hundred meters north of them. He repeated the performance for two more towers.
Ben couldn’t imagine what the kid was trying to convey.
“A zip line!” Clay cried out. “There’s a zip line from that train station, to the other train? Suspended from those towers?” His finger poked to indicate the three towers.
“Oui! Yes! Run!” Milo begged.
“Elise, I’ll carry you.” Clay didn’t wait for agreement. He bent to haul Elise over his shoulder.
“Wait, Clay.” Ben relieved him of backpack and gun. The latter he passed to Remi, whose outlook brightened immediately. “Don’t use it before me. We’re here to make friends.”
“Not friendly,” opined the Saggy, with a sniff toward their pursuers.
With the breather, the goon trio closed another twenty meters, despite running with swords. Awkward. Like Ben’s team, the Musketeers were slowing down, and never were very fast.
Clay heaved a sobbing Elise over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
“I’ll take a turn as soon as you need,” Ben promised. “You set the pace.”
33
For Ben’s team running across the Italian interior, this leg was brutal. Ben and Clay already bore the heaviest packs. They’d abandoned their handy cart because it couldn’t move quick enough over the rough ground. When Clay had to break from carrying Elise, she tried on her own power for five minutes. But she was spent. Then Remi took Ben’s pack instead of Clay while the captain took a turn with Elise over his shoulder.
They made not for the wall, but the nearest tower. Now that he could spare the breath, Clay explained to them what a zip line was. To Ben, bowed under Elise’s weight, it sounded like a great idea! He’d assumed those towers supported the dome roof above.
Ben’s inner geek longed to check out that dome roof. The rest of him feared he’d need to climb at the end of this ghastly run.
But that was not to be. They reached the tower at last, Elise stumbling for herself again the last of the way. The structure wasn’t solid, but rather a scaffolding that tapered upward. As advertised, cables ran to it, and away, high and low, in either direction. Ben’s hopes rose at he spotted a box at the top. Do we ride in that?
Milo pushed a button, and the chamber descended, in a straight track. Drat, a simple elevator. Still, it felt grand to stand and catch his breath as the box descended. The pur
suers had closed another thirty meters though. By now, they were only 100 meters away or so.
The door opened, and they piled in. The elevator bore them happily to the top, which did indeed connect to the dome fretwork. Ben suppressed his temptation to take pictures. His pursuers put on a burst of speed when they boarded the elevator. They were now scarcely fifty meters from the base of the tower. He could clearly see the whites of their painted mask eyes.
Milo got busy in an equipment locker. He hauled out a net, and six T-shaped things with a wheeled hook on the bottom, each T-gizmo the size of Ben’s torso. He dumped his backpack onto the net, and gestured urgently for the rest of them to do likewise.
With reservations, Ben complied, tossing his gear over. He stuck by the elevator, with one foot jamming the doors and an eye on the pursuers’ progress below. “Remi, grab me another of those T’s.” The engineer did so. Ben jammed the elevator doors with it, to reclaim his foot.
Clay assisted Milo. The kid tied the net bag securely. Then he stuck the arms of a T through reinforced leather-liked bands on the net. Then he flipped the T upside-down and pantomimed heaving it upward.
“Brakes!” Remi warned. “Ah, Elise?”
The materials scientist understood immediately, though Ben didn’t. She stepped forward and helped Milo figure out how to set brakes on the wheels which would ride the cable down. As Remi suggested, apparently more than one speed was offered.
Then they heaved the bag of their belongings up, hooked the wheel onto the cable, and let fly.
Well, it rolled anyway. Not fast enough! Ben was about to fix the problem, but Remi beat him to it. The engineer took a running jump, cut in some antigravity, and caught the T-hook already trundling away. Space-agile, he hauled himself to a crouched stand, and adjusted the speed of his flying steed.
Ben was still watching to make sure Remi was safe when the next hook went up. “Milo!” he barked. “You next! Advise Remi!”
Milo nodded in sharp resolve. He pulled himself on to the upside-down T, straddling its crossbar, and Clay set him loose.
“Elise next,” Ben deemed. “I’m bringing up the rear.”
“No,” Clay insisted. Conversation halted as they both lifted a terrified Elise onto her hook and sent her on her way.
Clay finally finished his thought. “Remi has my gun.” He held his hand out to demand Ben’s.
“Not a chance! I lead this party!”
Clay nodded. “I’ll belt myself onto the T. I don’t die. You fly starships. Hand me the gun.”
By now, the pursuers had reached the tower. They realized the elevator, still obstructed, wasn’t coming. And they began to climb the scaffolding.
“Dammit!” Ben handed over his gun. He hauled his T onto the wire himself, to make sure Clay could manage it single-handedly. Clay simply stuck the blaster in his waistband and hauled his inadequate conveyance onto the cable at the same time, a few steps away.
Ben repositioned his stunner to make it likewise easy to grab. But the things were useless at any range at all, and Clay would be in the way. No helping it. “Don’t fall. See you downstairs.” They grasped each other’s free arm momentarily. Then Ben hopped onto his swing and let it ride.
And promptly realized he forgot to set the brake on it at all. He caromed toward Elise at speed. “Elise, hold on!” A quick twist of anti-gravity lightened his load as he hopped up onto the T-bars. He found the unfamiliar mechanism, but couldn’t get the brake to engage. The distinctive whine of a blaster whiplashed his head toward Clay, falling behind him as quickly as he caught up to Elise. Oh, yeah. Finally he gouged a deep hole in his thumbnail getting the balky brake knob to engage at the next level.
That slowed him, but Elise’s brake was apparently slower. Ben cast an anxious eye back at Clay. This was why a captain was supposed to issue orders and never do anything himself. Keeping tabs on his people was sometimes all he could manage. Clay swung crazily. The wheel bits pivoted. The older man currently faced sideways from their destination, rocking back and forth. One of the pursuers was down hard beneath the tower. Two others were rolling toward Clay with no brake engaged whatsoever.
Ben noted erratically that this was one hell of a cable. Despite all these grown men dangling on it (plus a slight woman), and a descent over two kilometers long and scarcely 30 meters high, the line barely sagged at all. And he was about to crash into Elise, the Saggy scientist’s eyes gazing over her shoulder at him in terror.
Anti-grav! No sooner thought than tried. Ben tilted his gravity to drag his feet rather closer to Clay than Elise, and quartered it. That relieved enough stress on the brake that it engaged the next level just seconds before he hit Elise. He reached with an outstretched boot to her shoulder to fend her off.
“Beast!” she assured him. “Kidding!”
Sort of, Ben easily interpreted. She might seek revenge soon. He clambered down to straddle his perch again. The two hangers now rolled barely a meter apart, and rocked alarmingly. With difficulty, he skewed Elise’s T around so she faced him. “Put your feet up! Beside my legs.”
She pursed her lips, untrusting. They’d bagged their masks long ago, unable to afford the cost in obstructed airways.
He shook his head. “OK, but you’ll need to fend me off.” He pivoted his bar around to give his right arm the option of shooting the stunner past Clay.
Only one musketeer remained, now 30 meters from Clay. Ben spotted the other on the ground, his empty T dangling some ways behind. Apparently they didn’t roll well when not bearing weight. Ben couldn’t see how that helped him, though. The final musketeer had his sword out. He hollered at them in German – Deutsch – as they had all along.
Pity none of them understood Deutsch. Not that it was possible to miss the gist. But subtle distinctions mattered at times like these.
“Do you understand English?” Ben yelled.
“Nine!” The dangling attacker slashed at the air with his sword, which set his T swinging. His momentum ratcheted the wheel assembly around another quarter turn. Aggravated, the Deutsch-speaker switched his sword to the other arm to swing himself right again. His left was apparently much weaker. Aggravated, he switched back to his right, to slash himself the long way around instead.
“That means no,” Clay clarified in an over-the-shoulder yell. They were perhaps 50 meters apart now. “I could just kill him.”
“Did you kill the others?”
“I shot his T. He fell. No burns. The first one fell climbing.”
Ben considered the angles. A stunner or blaster directly at the guy would leave inconveniently inexplicable traces of the shots. They’d already stunned Milo’s master in France. Someone sufficiently knowledgeable and suspicious could connect the two stunner injuries. A blaster burn was unmistakably strange in this society whether they understood what caused it or not. Red flags would be raised.
He wondered how high up the first guy was when he fell from the tower. He might be alive as a witness.
Do I want this one dead? A single goon wasn’t much of a challenge between Clay and himself. No, what he wanted was answers. “Going topside,” he remarked to Elise.
“You what?” She glanced behind in concern, toward the next tower, growing larger before them. This trip would soon come to an end.
Ben didn’t explain. He flipped his gravity to .2 and stepped up onto his T, transferring to the cable above. He stood on guylines all the time on his ship. At one fifth gravity, balancing wasn’t too difficult. Elise rolled away, with both of their zip-line hooks, as Clay and his attacker approached. “Heads up, Clay. I’ll try to take him.”
“Take him?” Clay glanced back only to find Ben above him. Ben stepped over his hook as it rolled past.
The approaching goon saw him climb up on the cable, of course. He struggled to get his feet under him on the crossbar. He could hardly manage this with a sword in hand, so he sheathed that. Just a few seconds more…
The goon tried to swipe at Ben’s legs with his arm. Ben n
imbly hopped up. At 0.2 g, he hopped high. Fortunately, he was well below the dome roof now. As he slowly floated back down, he pivoted to run along the guyline. This part he was less nimble at. Running along guylines in the hold, he fell off maybe one time in four.
But he was certainly shifting the musketeer out of his comfort zone. The pursuer was still rattled by the hunted suddenly becoming the hunter, with moves physically improbable. He was facing the wrong way, and struggling to turn toward Ben, while closing on Clay.
“For questioning,” Ben belatedly elaborated. “Gravity down.” He was too busy to say more. This part was tricky. How could he jump onto the guy’s T while low gravity had him in slow motion? Cloak? No, the weight of a man would surely tear the fabric, or button, or whatever held it closed.
Sword belt, worth a shot. He certainly had the advantage of surprise. He took a bounding leap along the cable, one, two, jump, and sailed toward the man.
34
The zip-line goon didn’t even try to fend off Ben, too astonished to react to the otherworldly specter of an outflung man gliding toward him. Besides, he was half-clambered up at this point, one booted foot and one knee on his cross-bar, while both gauntleted hands choked up on his upright section leading to the cable wheel.
Thus Ben hit him with full momentum. The sword being a fairly large and exposed target, he managed to grab it. The swordsman let go with his left hand to flail at him ineffectively. Ben levered his feet up to the cross bar and pushed, thus pulling the man from his precarious one-handed grip with the weight of two men.
The grip failed, and they were falling – at 0.2 g. By now, though, they were only about 3 meters up from the ground. This was a nasty fall at 1 g, but at Ben’s setting, barely enough to knock the wind out of a man. Unlike his victim, Ben had fought like this before. The goal was to make sure the other guy hit the ground first. As with so many things in life, he who had a clear intention won.