The People of the Wind

by Poul Anderson

  The son-of-a-zirraukh was good, Vodan acknowledged happily. Lumbering and awkward as most space engagements were, this felt almost like being back in air. The duel had lasted until Avalon stood enormous in the bow screens. In fact, they were closer to atmosphere than was prudent at their velocity. They’d better end the affair.

  Vodan saw how.

  He went on slowing at a uniform rate, as if he intended presently to slant off. He thought the Terran would think: He sees what I plan. When I blind his radar, he will sheer from my fire in an unpredictable direction. Ah, but we’re not under hyperdrive. He can’t move at anything like the speed of energy beams. Mine can cover the entire cone of his possible instantaneous positions.

  For that, however, the gun platform needed a constant vector. Otherwise too many unknowns entered the equations and the target had an excellent chance of escaping.

  For part of a minute, if Vodan had guessed right, the Meteor would forego its advantage of superior mobility. And… he had superior weapons.

  The Terran might well expect a torpedo and figure he could readily dispose of the thing. He might not appreciate how very great a concentration of energy his opponent could bring to bear for a short while, when all projectors were run at overload.

  Vodan made his calculations. The gunners made their settings.

  The Meteor passed ahead, dwarfish upon luminous Avalon. A sudden, glittering fog sprang from her. At explosive speed, it spread to make a curtain. And it hid one ship as well as the other.

  Rays sliced through, seeking. Vodan knew exactly where to aim his. They raged for 30 seconds.

  The metal dust scattered. Avalon again shone enormous and calm. Vodan ceased fire before his projectors should burn out. Nothing came from the Meteor. He used magnification, and saw the hole which gaped astern by her drive cones. Air gushed forth, water condensing ghost-white until it vanished into void. Acceleration had ended entirely.

  Joy lofted in Vodan. “We’ve struck him!” he shouted.

  “He could launch his torps in a flock,” the engineer worried.

  “No. Come look if you wish. His powerplant took that hit. He has nothing left except his capacitor bank. If he can use that to full effect, which I doubt, he still can’t give any object enough initial velocity to worry us.”

  “Kh’hng. Shall we finish him off?”

  “Let’s see if he’ll surrender. Standard band… Calling Imperial Meteor. Calling Imperial Meteor.”

  One more trophy for you, Eyath!

  Hell Rock shuddered and toned. Roarings rolled inward. Air drifted bitter with smoke, loud with screams and bawled commands, running feet and threshing wings. Compartment after compartment was burst open to space. Bulkheads slid to seal twisted metal and tattered bodies off from the living.

  She fought. She could fight on under what was left of her automata, well after the last of the crew were gone whose retreat she was covering.

  Those were Ferune, his immediate staff, and a few ratings from Mistwood who had been promised the right to abide by their Wyvan. They made their way down quaking, tolling corridors. Sections lay dark where fluoro-panels and facings were peeled back from the mighty skeleton.

  “How long till they beat her asunder?” asked one at Ferune’s back.

  “An hour, maybe,” he guessed. “They wrought well who built her. Of course, Avalon will strike before then.”

  “At what minute?”

  “Daniel Holm must gauge that.”

  They crowded into their lifeboat. Ferune took the controls. The craft lifted against interior fields; valves swung ponderously aside; she came forth to sight of stars and streaked for home.

  He glanced behind. The flagship was ragged, crumpled, cratered. In places metal had run molten till it congealed into ugliness, in other places it glowed. Had the bombardment been able to, concentrate on those sites where defenses were down, a megaton warhead or two would have scattered the vessel in gas and ashes. But the likelihood of a precise hit at medium range was too slim to risk a supermissile against her remaining interception capability. Better to hold well off and gnaw with lesser blasts.

  “Fare gladly into the winds,” Ferune whispered. In this moment he put aside his new ways, his alien ways, and was of Ythri, Mistwood, Wharr, the ancestors and the children.

  Avalon struck. The boat reeled. Under an intolerable load of light, viewscreens blanked. Briefly, illumination went out. The flyers crouched, packed together, in bellowing, heat, and blindness.

  It passed. The boat had not been severely damaged. Backup systems cut in. Vision returned, inside and outside. Aft, Hell Rock was silhouetted against the waning luridness of a fireball that spread across half heaven.

  A rating breathed, “How… many… megatons?”

  “I don’t know,” Ferune said. “Presumably ample to dispose of those Imperials we sucked into attacking us.”

  “A wonder we came through,” said his aide. Every feather stood erect on him and shivered.

  “The gases diffused across kilometers,” Ferune reminded. “We’ve no screen field generator here, true. But by the time the front reached us, even a velocity equivalent of several million degrees could not raise our temperature much.”

  Silence clapped down, while smaller detonations glittered and faded-in deeper distances and energy swords lunged. Eyes sought eyes. The brains behind were technically trained.

  Ferune spoke it for them. “Ionizing radiation, primary and secondary. I cannot tell how big a dose we got. The meter went off scale. But we can probably report back, at least.”

  He gave himself to his piloting. Wharr waited.

  Rochefort groped through the hull of Hooting Star. Interior grav generation had been knocked out; free-falling, they were now weightless. And airless beyond the enclosing armor. Stillness pressed inward till he heard his heart as strongly as he felt it. Beads of sweat broke off brow, nose, cheeks, and danced between eyes and faceplate, catching light in oily gleams. That light fell queerly across vacuum, undiffused, sharp-shadowed.

  “Watch Out!” he croaked into his radio. “Watch Out, are you there?”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Helu’s voice in his earplugs, from the engine room.

  Rochefort found the little body afloat behind a panel cut half loose from its moorings. The same ray had burned through suit and flesh and out through the suit, cauterizing as it went so that only a few bloodgouts drifted around. “Wa Chaou bought it?” asked Helu.

  “Yes.” Rochefort hugged the Cynthian to his breast and fought not to weep.

  “Any fire control left?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I think I can squeeze capacitor power into the drive units. We can’t escape the planet on that, but maybe we can land without vaporizing in transit. It’ll take a pretty fabulous pilot. Better get back to your post, skipper.”

  Rochefort opened the helmet in order to close the bulged-out eyes, but the lids wouldn’t go over them. He secured the corpse in a bight of loose wire and returned forward to harness himself in.

  The call light was blinking. Mechanically, conscious mainly of grief, he plugged a jack into his suit unit and pressed the Accept button.

  Anglic, accented, somehow both guttural and ringing: “—Imperial Meteor. Are you alive? This is the Avalonian. Acknowledge or we shoot.”

  “Ack… ack—” Before the noise in his throat could turn to sobbing, Rochefort said, “Yes, captain here.”

  “We will take you aboard if you wish.” Rochefort clung to the seatback, legs trailing aft. It hummed and crackled in his ears.

  “Ythri abides by the conventions of war,” said the un-human voice. “You will be interrogated but not mistreated. If you refuse, we must take the precaution of destroying you.”

  Kh-h-h-h… m-m-m-m…

  “Answer at once! We are already too nigh Avalon. The danger of being caught in crossfire grows by the minute.”

  “Yes,” Rochefort heard himself say. “Of course. We surrender.”

  “
Good. I observe you have not restarted your engine. Do not. We are matching velocities. Link yourselves and jump off into space. We will lay a tractor beam on you and bring you in as soon as may be. Understood? Repeat”

  Rochefort did.

  “You fought well,” said the Ythrian. “You showed deathpride. I shall be honored to welcome you aboard.” And silence.

  Rochefort called Helu. The men bent the ends of a cable around their waists, cracked the personnel lock, and prepared to tumble free. Kilometers off they saw the vessel that bore three stars, coming like an eagle. The skies erupted in radiance.

  When ragged red dazzlement had cleared from their vision, Helu choked, “Ullah akbar, Ullah akbar… They’re gone. What was it?”

  “Direct hit,” Rochefort said. Shock had blown some opening in him for numbness to drain out of. He felt strength rising in its wake. His mind flashed, fast as those war lightnings yonder but altogether cool. “They knew we were helpless and had no friends nearby. But in spite of a remark the captain made, they must’ve forgotten to look out for their own friends. The planet-based weapons have started shooting. I imagine the missiles include a lot of tracker torpedoes. Our engines were dead. His weren’t. A torp homed on the emissions.”

  “What, no recognition circuits?”

  “Evidently not. To lash out on the scale they seem to be doing, the Avalonians would’ve had to sacrifice quality for quantity, and rely on knowing the dispositions of units. It was not reasonable to expect any this close in. The fighting’s further out. I daresay that torp was bound there, against some particular Imperial concentration, when it happened to pass near us.”

  “Urn.” They hung between darkness and glitter, breathing. “We’ve lost our ride,” Helu said.

  “Got to make do, then,” Rochefort answered. “Come.” Beneath his regained calm, he was shaken at what appeared to be the magnitude of the Avalonian response.

  IX

  When the boat had come to rest, thundering and shuddering ended, only bake-oven heat and scorched smells remaining, Rochefort let go of awareness.

  He swam up from the nothing some minutes later. Helu stood over him, “Are you okay, skipper?” At first the engineer’s voice seemed to come across a whining distance, and the sweat and soot on his face blurred into the haze which grayed all vision.

  “Okay,” Rochefort mumbled. “Get me… ’nother stimpill…”

  Helu did, with a glass of water that wrought a miracle on wooden tongue and parchment palate. “Hand of Fatima, what a ride!” he said unevenly. “I thought for certain we were finished. How did you ever get us down?”

  “I don’t remember,” Rochefort answered.

  The drug took hold, giving him back clarity of mind and senses, plus a measure of energy. He could reconstruct what he must have done in those last wild minutes. The ergs stored in the capacitors had not been adequate to kill the boat’s entire velocity relative to the planetary surface. He had used them for control, for keeping the hull from being boiled off by the atmospheric friction that braked it. Hooting Star had skipped halfway around the globe on the tropopause, as a stone may be skipped over a lake, then screamed down on a long slant which would have ended in drowning — for the hole aft could not be patched, and a sealed-off engine room would have weighed too much when flooded — except that somehow he, Philippe Rochefort, had spotted (he recollected now) a chain of islands and achieved a crash landing on one…

  He spent a while in the awe of being alive. Afterward he unharnessed, and in their separate fashions he and Helu gave thanks; and they added a wish for the soul of Wa Chaou. By that time the hull had cooled to a point where they dared touch the lock. They found its outer valve had been torn loose when the boat plowed across ground.

  “Good air,” Helu said.

  Rochefort inhaled gratefully. It was not just that the cabin was hot and stinking. No regeneration system on any spacecraft could do the entire work of a living world. This atmosphere that streamed to meet him smelted of ozone, iodine, greenery, flower fragrances; it was mild but brisk with breezes.

  “Must be about Terran standard pressure,” Helu went on. “How does a planet like this keep so much gas?”

  “Surely you’ve met the type before,” Rochefort said.

  “Yes, but never stopped to wonder. Now that I’ve had the universe given back to me, I’d, uh, I’d like to know it better.”

  “Well, magnetism helps,” Rochefort explained absently. “The core is small, but on the other hand the rotation is rapid, making for a reasonable value of H. Besides, the field has fewer charged particles to keep off, therefore fewer get by it to bounce off gas molecules. Likewise, the total ultraviolet and X radiation received is less. That sun’s fairly close — we’re getting about 10 percent more illumination than Terra does — but it’s cooler than Sol. The energy distribution curve peaks at a lower frequency and the stellar wind is weak.”

  Meanwhile he sensed the gravity. His weight was four-fifths what it had been when the boat’s interior field was set at standard pull. When you dropped sixteen kilos you noticed it at first — a bounciness, an exuberance of the body which the loss of a friend and the likelihood of captivity did not entirely quench — though you soon came to take the feeling for granted.

  He stepped forth and looked around. Those viewscreens which remained functional had shown him this area was unpeopled. Inland it rose steeply. On the other side it sloped down to a beach where surf tumbled in a white violence whose noise reached him across more than a kilometer. Beyond, a syenite sea rolled to a horizon which, in spite of Avalon’s radius, did not seem appreciably nearer than on Terra or Esperance. The sky above was a blue more bright and deep than he was used to. The sun was low, sinking twice as fast as on man’s home. Its disk showed a bit larger, its hue was tinged golden. A sickle moon trailed, a fourth again the angular diameter of Luna seen from the ground. Rochefort knew it was actually smaller but, being close, raised twice the tides.

  Occasional sparks and streaks blinked up there — monstrous explosions in space. Rochefort turned his mind from them. For him the war was presumably over. Let it be over for everybody, soon, before more consciousnesses died.

  He gave his attention to the life encircling him. His vessel had gouged and charred through a dense mat of low-growing, beryl-green stuff which covered the island. “I suppose this, explains why the planet has no native forests,” he murmured, “which may in turn help explain why animal fife is underevolved.”

  “Dinosaur stage?” Helu asked, watching a flock of clumsy, winged creatures go by. They each had four legs; the basic vertebrate design on Avalon was hexapodal.

  “Well reptiloid, though some have developed features like hair or an efficient heart. By and large, they don’t stand a chance against mammalian or avian life forms. The colonists had to do quite a lot of work to establish a stable mixed colony, and they keep a good deal of land reserved, including the whole equatorial continent.”

  “You’ve really studied them up, haven’t you?”

  “I was interested. And… seemed wrong to let them be only my targets. Seemed as if I ought to have some reality on the people I was going to fight.”

  Helu peered inland. Scattered shrubs and trees did exist. The latter were either low and thick or slim and supple, to survive the high winds that rapid rotation must often create. Autumn or no, many flowers continued in bloom, flamboyant scarlets and yellows and purples. Fruits clustered thick on several other kinds of plant.

  “Can we eat local food?” Helu asked.

  “Yes, of course,” Rochefort said. “They’d never have made the success they did, colonizing, in the time they’ve had, if they couldn’t draw on native resources. Some essentials are missing, assorted vitamins and whatnot. Imported domestic animals had to be revamped genetically on that account. We’d come down with deficiency diseases if we tried to eat Avalonian material exclusively. However, that wouldn’t happen fast, and I’ve read that much of it is tasty. Unfortunately, I’ve r
ead that much is poisonous, too, and I don’t know which is which.”

  “Hm.” Helu tugged his mustache and scowled. “We’d better call for somebody to come get us.”

  “No rush,” said Rochefort. “Let’s first learn what we can. The boat has supplies for weeks, remember. We just might be able to—” He stopped. Knowledge stung him. “Right now we’ve a duty.”

  Perforce they began by making a spade and pick out of scrap; and then the plant cover was tough and the soil beneath a stubborn clay. Sunset had perished in flame before they got Wa Chaou buried.

  A full moon would have cast ample light; higher albedo as well as angular size and illumination gave it more than thrice the brilliance of Luna. Tonight’s thin crescent was soon down. But the service could be read by two lamp-white companion planets and to numberless stars. Most of their constellations were the same as those Rochefort had shared with Eve Davisson on Esperance. Three or four parsecs hardly count in the galaxy.

  Does a life? I must believe so. “—Father, unto You in what form he did dream You, we commit this being our comrade; and we pray that You grant him rest, even as we pray, for ourselves. Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy.” The gruesome little flashes overhead were dying away.

  “Disengage,” Cajal said. “Withdraw. Regroup in wide orbits.”

  “But, but, Admiral,” protested a captain of his staff, their ships — they’ll use the chance to escape — disappear into deep space.”

  Cajal’s glance traveled from screen to screen on the comboard. Faces looked out, some human, some non-human, but each belonging to an officer of Imperial Terra. He found it hard to meet those eyes.