by David Drake
The cut section now hung from the hinge of tape Piet had wrapped around it. When I ducked out, he taped the other side so that our entry wasn't obvious.
The prisoner was a dead weight, though a modest one. It was like carrying an articulated skeleton, more awkward than heavy. Piet took the man's other arm and we strode back the way we'd come.
"Do Chay get drunk, do you suppose?" I said.
"Let's hope so," Piet said. "We're a couple of fools to do this."
The few remaining pedestrians scurried along with their heads down. "If the Chay have a curfew . . ." Piet said, speaking my thought.
"The dome wall isn't very thick except where the door is," I replied. "I can cut a way out if the gate's closed. We can."
The tunnel was open. A Chay in a violet garment entered as we neared it. We passed him in the other direction. He called out in his language. We ignored him. I walked on my toes to approximate the mincing Chay gait until we were around the first bend in the gateway.
The sunlight outside was as faint as my hope of salvation. I drew a great breath through my filter and said, "So far, so good."
The crews of the airships on guard didn't challenge us. Some of the Chay were eating beneath their veils. The mat of vegetation rolled underfoot, absorbing high-frequency ground shocks and smoothing them into gentle swells.
A tall figure strode toward us from the shadow of a translucent brown dome. "I'll carry him, if you like," Stephen offered in a low voice.
"He's not heavy," Piet said.
We walked on. Stephen fell into step behind us and a little to Piet's left, where he could watch our front as well as guarding the rear. This final part of the route was over an organic causeway crossing scores of circular fields only ten or twenty meters in diameter.
The ground rumbled. A line of dust lifted in the distance, kicked into motion by the quake. The causeway swayed gently. Beneath us, plants waved their zebra-striped foliage at us.
"I hadn't expected that the two of you would do this together," Stephen said in a pale voice. We hadn't spoken during the trek, but we could see that now there were no Chay between us and the edge of the mat.
"We weren't, Stephen," Piet said. "Jeremy made a foolish decision quite independently of me."
"I jumped out of a year's growth when he spoke to me," I said.
My voice sounded almost normal. That surprised me. I'd just learned that Stephen thought I'd supplanted him in Piet Ricimer's friendship. I'd known there were a lot of ways this jaunt could get me killed, but that one hadn't occurred to me.
"Tsk," said Stephen. "I don't lose control of myself, Jeremy."
I stumbled, then stared at him past the sunken form of the man we carried. "Do you read minds?" I demanded.
"No," said Piet. "But he's very smart."
"And a good shot," Stephen said with a throaty chuckle.
I laughed too. "Well, nobody sane would be doing this," I said aloud.
Though the mat felt like a closely woven carpet to walk on, it was actually several meters thick. The edge was a sagging tangle of stems, interlaced and spiky. There were no steps nor ramp off the island of vegetation; the Chay never walked on bare soil. The ground beyond bounced the way tremors shake the chest of a sleeping dog.
Stephen hopped down ahead of us. "Drop him to me," he said, raising his arms. "I'll take him from here."
I looked at Piet. He nodded. "On three," he said. "One, two, three—"
Together we tossed the moaning prisoner past the border. Stephen caught him, pivoting to lessen the shock to the Fed's weakened frame. The landscape heaved violently. Stephen dropped to his knees, but he didn't let his charge touch the ground.
My cape tore half away on brambles as I clambered down, baring my legs to the knee. There was no longer need for concealment, only speed.
Stephen strode onward with the Fed held lengthways across his shoulders like a yoke. Small shocks were incessant now. I had to pause at each pulse to keep from falling when the ground shifted height and angle.
"I should have allowed more time," I muttered. The Oriflamme was still out of sight beyond the rim of the bowl in which we'd landed.
"You were there before I was," Piet reminded me.
"Don't worry," Stephen said. "They aren't going to leave without us."
Piet laughed. "I suppose not," he agreed.
"I'd thought . . ." I said. "Maybe I'd just put him out of his misery. But I couldn't do that."
Stephen gave an icy chuckle. "We've brought him this far," he said. "We may as well take him the rest of the way."
We reached the lip of the bowl. The center of the depression was only twenty meters or so lower than the rolling plain around it, but that was still enough to conceal a starship. Sight of the Oriflamme warmed my heart like the smile of a beautiful woman.
A squeal similar to that of steam escaping from a huge boiler sounded behind us. It was more penetrating than a siren and so loud that it would be dangerous to humans any closer than we were.
I turned. Three cannon-armed dirigibles lifted above the city.
"Here," said Stephen, swinging his burden to Piet as if the Fed were a bundle of old clothes. "I'll watch the rear."
He locked a separate visor down to protect his eyes. A full helmet would have been obvious even under his cowl. Stephen parted his cape and threw the wings back over his shoulders, clearing his flashgun and the satchel of reloads slung on his left side.
I seized the Fed's right arm. "Run," Piet said, and we started running.
The Oriflamme was three hundred yards ahead of us. The ground had been still for a moment. Now On Chay shook itself violently. I stumbled but caught myself. The prisoner's legs swung like a pendulum to trip Piet and send him sprawling.
As Piet picked himself up, I glanced over my shoulder. The Chay dirigibles were a hundred meters high. Stephen walked sedately twenty meters behind us, watching our pursuers over his shoulder. The alarm still screamed from the Chay city.
Piet and I ran on. We'd taken only three strides when the bolt from a plasma cannon lit the soil immediately behind us into the heart of a sun.
The shock wave flung us apart. I smashed into a waist-high bush that might have been the ancestor of the mat on which the city was built. It clawed my chest and my legs as I tore myself free.
The cannon that had fired was a bright white glow in the bow of the center dirigible. Stephen swung his own weapon to his shoulder. A meters-long oval of soil blazed between him and us where the slug of plasma struck.
Stephen fired. The bolt from his laser was a needle of light against retinas already shocked by the plasma discharge.
The underside of a gas bag supporting the right-hand dirigible ruptured in a veil of thin blue flames. The Chay used hydrogen to support their craft. The fire spread with the deliberation of a flower opening, licking the sides of the bags adjacent to the one the bolt had ignited. The craft sank out of sight. The crew was trying desperately to land before the conflagration devoured them as well as their vehicle.
Piet stumbled forward alone with the prisoner. I grabbed the Fed's free arm and shouted, "D'ye have a gun?"
"Only a bar!" Piet said. "I didn't want to hurt the Chay, just free this poor wretch."
A laser pulse plowed glassy sparkles across the ground ahead of us. The bastards were shooting at us with the flashgun we'd given them that morning!
Stephen fired. A microsecond following the snap of his bolt, our world erupted in another plasma discharge.
The shock threw Piet and me sprawling, but this time the cannoneers were aiming at Stephen. Dirt fused into shrapnel and blew outward in a fireball which kicked Stephen sideways with his cape afire.
Fifty meters from us, Salomon or Guillermo lit the Oriflamme's thrusters momentarily to check the fuel feeds. Bright exhaust puffed across the encampment, blowing down tents and disturbing the piles of Chay goods we were abandoning. Grit sprayed the back of my neck.
We had no secrets now. Stampfer would be scr
eaming curses as he tried to rerig the Long Tom for combat, but that would take minutes with the Oriflamme laden as heavily as she was now.
I started toward Stephen. His flashgun had ignited a bag of the left-hand dirigible an instant before its plasma cannon fired. Blue hydrogen flames, hotter than Hell's hinges for all their seeming delicacy, wrapped the mid-line gas bag and involved the sides of the bags adjacent to it.
I'd seen Stephen shoot before. If he hadn't hit the Chay gunner, even at five hundred meters, it was because he didn't choose to kill even at this juncture.
The dirigible's crew dumped their remaining lift to escape. The platform dipped out of sight, taking with it the white glare of the plasma cannon's stellite bore. Only the center vehicle was still aloft; its cannon would be too hot to reload for some minutes yet.
Stephen rolled to his feet before I could reach him. His fingers inserted a charged battery in the butt of his flashgun and snapped the chamber closed over it before he tore away the blazing remnants of his cape. The rocky soil still glowed from the second plasma discharge, and a nearby bush was a torch of crackling orange flames.
I turned again. Piet was beside me. The Fed had managed to lift his torso off the ground. We snatched him up again and bolted for the Oriflamme's ramp, dragging the fellow's feet. Stephen staggered behind us like a drunk running.
Twenty men spilled out of the Oriflamme's main hatch. Those with rifles banged at the dirigible. Given the range and light conditions, I doubt any of them were more effective than I would have been.
"Get aboard!" Piet screamed. Kiley and Loomis each took the prisoner in one hand and one of us in the other, as if they were loading sacks of grain. "Don't shoot at the Chay, they're—"
The sky behind us exploded. A sheet of fire flashed as bright for a moment as if the primary had risen. I looked back. Bits of the last dirigible cascaded in a red-orange shower while hydrogen flames lifted like a curtain rising.
A Chay plasma cannon would cool very slowly because of its closed breech and the high specific heat of the metal from which it was cast. The gunners had tried to reload theirs too soon, and the round cooked off before it was seated. The thermonuclear explosion shattered the platform, rupturing all six hydrogen cells simultaneously.
Parts of the fiery debris were the bodies of the dirigible's crew.
We tumbled together in the forward hold. The ramp began to rise. Dole was shouting out the names of crewmen present. I hoped nobody'd gone so far from the hatch that he was still outside.
The Oriflamme lifted before the hatch sealed. Reflected exhaust was a saturated aurora crowning the upper seam.
Men of the support party disappeared up the ladderway in obedience to the bosun's snarled orders. I lay on my back, too wrung out to move or even rise. Piet bent over the rescued prisoner, so Piet at least was all right. Rakoscy ripped away Stephen's smoldering trousers with a scalpel.
I rolled over, but my stomach heaved and I could barely lift my face from the deck. Molten rock had burned savage ulcers into Stephen's calves above the boot tops. Bloody serum oozed as Rakoscy started to clean the wounds. Stephen rested on one elbow, holding his flashgun muzzle high so that the hot barrel wouldn't crack from contact with the cooler deck.
"Christ's blood, I shouldn't have gone back to the city!" I said. Piet was there to free the prisoner also, but that didn't change my responsibility. "Now I've made the Chay enemies for all their soldiers we killed."
"Dole," Piet ordered, "send this man up to the forward cabin and get some fluids in him. We don't want him to die on us now."
"We didn't kill anybody, Jeremy," Stephen said. He wasn't looking at me. He wasn't looking at anything, though his eyes were open.
"Ferris and Lightbody!" Dole snapped. "You heard the captain. And a bath wouldn't hurt him, neither."
I managed to sit upright. I didn't speak. Maybe Stephen hadn't seen the third dirigible explode, hadn't seen the Chay bodies trace blazing pinwheels toward the ground . . .
"As for what the plasma cannon did . . ." Stephen continued in an emotionless voice. "I'll take responsibility for my own actions, Jeremy, but not for what others choose to do."
"Here, I've got your flashgun, Stephen," Piet said, gently lifting the weapon from his friend's hand.
"I've got enough company in my dreams as it is," Stephen said as our thrusters hammered us toward orbit.
NEW ERYX
Day 177
The portable kiln chuckled heavily on the far side of the Oriflamme, spraying a smooth coat of glass onto the cracks in the hull. The run from On Chay hadn't been unusually stressful, but the Oriflamme was no longer the vessel that had lifted in maiden glory from Venus.
The constant drizzle didn't affect the kiln, but I already felt it was going to drive me mad in much less time than the week Piet said we'd need to refit. "Does it ever stop, do you think?" I muttered. "The rain, I mean."
"The globe was almost entirely overcast when we orbited," Piet said mildly. He smoothed the throat closure of a Chay cape. Because of the confusion of loading, we had fifty-odd of the garments aboard. They'd turned out to be waterproof. "There's no pilotry data, of course."
The world he'd named New Eryx—after the factorial hold of Stephen's family on Venus—was uncharted, at least as far as the Federation database went. Piet and Salomon had extrapolated the star's location by examining the listed gradients and found a planet that was technically habitable. Even if it was driving me insane.
"I've never gotten used to a bright sky," Stephen said. "Too much Venus in my blood, I suppose. I like the overcast, and I don't mind the rain."
Lacaille, the prisoner we'd rescued, came by with a file of sailors who carried the trunk of one of the squat trees growing here in the dim warmth. They didn't notice the three of us sitting on a similar log.
Lacaille had been first officer on a ship in the Earth/Back Worlds trade, a year and a half's voyage in either direction for Federation vessels. Now he was talking cheerfully with men who'd helped kill a hundred like him the day we boarded Our Lady of Montreal.
"I'm glad we rescued him," I said. "He's a . . ."
"Human being?" Piet suggested. There was a smile in his voice.
"Whatever," I said. Trees like the one the men with Lacaille carried had a starchy pith that could be eaten—or converted to alcohol. Lacaille said identical trees were common on at least a score of worlds throughout the region. New Eryx wasn't on Federation charts; but somebody'd been here, and a very long time ago.
"He's fitting in well," Stephen said. "Of course, we saved his life. You did."
I snorted. "I can't think of a better way to make a man hate you than to do him a major favor," I said. "Most men. And damned near all women."
Stephen stood and stretched powerfully. He'd slung a repeating carbine over his right shoulder with the muzzle down to keep rain out of the bore. The only animal life we'd seen on New Eryx—if it was either animate or alive—was an occasional streamer of gossamer light which drifted among the trees. It could as easily be phosphorescent gas, a will-o'-the-wisp.
"Think I'll go for a walk," Stephen said without looking back at us. He moved stiffly. The burns on his legs were far from healed.
"Do you have a transponder?" Piet warned.
"I'll be able to home on the kiln," Stephen called, already out of sight. "Low frequencies travel forever."
"Because he seems so strong," Piet said very softly, "it's easy to overlook the degree to which Stephen is in pain. I wish there was something I could do for him."
He turned and gave me a wan smile. "Besides pray, of course. But I wouldn't want him to know that."
"I think," I said carefully, "that Stephen's the bravest man I'll ever know." Because he gets up in the morning after every screaming night, and he doesn't put a gun in his mouth; but I didn't say that to Piet.
I cleared my throat. "What'll happen with the Chay, do you think?" I said to change the subject.
"There's enough universe for all of us,
Chay and Molts and humans," Piet said. "And others we don't know about yet. I wouldn't worry about what happened at On Chay, if that's what you mean. There'll be worse from both sides after we've been in contact longer, but eventually I think we'll all pull together like strands in a cable. Separate, but in concert."
"Optimist," I said. Christ! I sounded bitter.
Piet laughed and put his hand over mine to squeeze it. "Oh, I'm not a wide-eyed dreamer, Jeremy," he said. "We'll fight the Chay, men will, just as we fight each other. And the Chay fight each other, I shouldn't wonder."
His tone sobered as he continued, "The real danger isn't race or religion, you know. It's the attitude that some men, some people—Molts or Chay or men from Earth—have to be controlled from above for their own good. One day I believe the Lord will help us defeat that idea. And the lion will lie down with the lamb, and there will be peace among the nations."
He gave me a smile; half impish, half that of a man worn to the edge of his strength, uncertain whether he'll be able to take one step more.
"Until then," Piet said, "it's as well that the Lord has men like Stephen on His side. Despite what it costs Stephen, and despite what it costs men like you and me."
The kiln chuckled, and I began to laugh as well. Anyone who heard me would have thought I was mad.
UNCHARTED WORLD
Day 232
We touched the surface of the ice with a slight forward way on instead of Piet's normal vertical approach. For this landing, he'd programmed a ball switch on his console to control the dorsal pairs of attitude jets. He rolled the ball upward as his other hand chopped the thrusters.
The three bands of attitude jets fired a half-second pulse. Their balanced lift shifted enough weight off the skids to let inertia drag us forward. Steam from the thrusters' last spurting exhaust before shutdown hung as eight linked columns in the cold air behind us as the Oriflamme ground to a halt.