A Circus of Hells

by Poul Anderson

  They did, though, rock it. Wheeling and soaring, they darkened vision. More terribly, they interfered with radar, sonic beams, every probing of every instrument. Suddenly, except for glimpses when they flashed aside, Flandry was piloting blind. The wind sent his craft reeling.

  He stabbed forth flame out of the single spitgun in the nose. A flyer exploded in smoke and fragments. Another, wing sheared across, spun downward to destruction. The rest were too many, too quickly reacting. “We’ve got to get out of here!” he heard himself yell, and crammed on power. Shock smashed through him. Metal shrieked. The world whirled in the screens. For an instant, he saw what had happened. Without sight or sensors, in the turbulence of the air, he had descended further than he knew. His spurt of acceleration was not vertical. It had side-swiped a mountaintop.

  No time for fear. He became the boat. Two thrust cones remained, not enough to escape with but maybe enough to set down on and not spatter. He ignored the flock and fought for control of the drunkenly unbalanced grav drive. If he made a straight tail-first backdown, the force would fend off the opposition; he’d have an uncluttered scan aft, which he could project onto one of the pilot board screens and use for an eyeballed landing. That was if he could hold her upright. If not, well, it had been fun living. The noise lessened to wind-whistle, engine stutter, drumbeat of beaks. Through it he was faintly astonished to hear Djana. He shot her a glance. Her eyes were closed, her hands laid palm to palm, and from her lips poured ancient words, over and over. “Hail Mary, full of grace—”

  Her? And he’d thought he’d gotten to know her!

  Chapter V

  They landed skull-rattlingly hard. Weakened members in the boat gave way with screeches and thumps. But they landed.

  At once Flandry bent himself entirely to the spitgun. Locked onto target after target, the beam flashed blue among the attackers that wheeled overhead. A winged thing slanted downward and struck behind the rim of the crater where he had settled. A couple of others took severe damage and limped off. The remainder escorted them. In a few minutes the last was gone from sight.

  No—wait—high above, out of range, a hovering spark in murky heaven? Flandry focused a viewscreen and turned up the magnification. “Uh-huh.” He nodded. “One of our playmates has stayed behind to keep a beady eye on us.”

  “O-o-o-oh-h-h,” Djana whimpered.

  “Pull yourself together,” he snapped. “You know how. Insert Part A in Slot B, bolt to Section C, et cetera. In case nobody’s told you, we have a problem.”

  Mainly he was concerned with studying the indicators on the board while he unharnessed. Some air had been lost, and replenished from the reserve tanks, but there was no further leakage. Evidently the hull had cracked, not too badly for self-sealing but enough to make him doubt the feasibility of returning to space without repairs. Inboard damage must be worse, for the grav field was off—he moved under Wayland’s half a terrestrial g with a bounding ease that roused no enthusiasm in him—and, oh-oh indeed, the nuclear generator was dead. Light, heat, air and water cycles, everything was running off the accumulators.

  “Keep watch,” he told Djana. “If you see anything peculiar, feel free to holler.”

  He went aft, past the chaos of galley and head, the more solidly battened-down instrument and life-support centers, to the engine room. An hour’s inspection confirmed neither his rosiest hopes nor his sharpest fears. It was possible to fix Jake, and probably wouldn’t take long: if and only if shipyard facilities were brought to bear.

  “So what else is new?” he said and returned forward.

  Djana had been busy. She stood in the conn with all the small arms aboard on a seat behind her—the issue blaster and needler, his private Merseian war knife—except for the stun pistol she had brought herself. That was bolstered on her flank. She rested a hand on its ivory butt.

  “What the deuce?” Flandry exclaimed. “I might even ask. What the trey?”

  He started toward her. She drew the gun. “Halt,” she said. Her soprano had gone flat.

  He obeyed. She could drop him as he attacked, in this space where there was no room to dodge, and secure him before he regained consciousness. Of course, he could perhaps work free of any knots she was able to tie, but—He swallowed his dismay and studied her. The panic was gone, unless it dwelt behind that whitened skin and drew those lips into disfiguring straight lines.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked slowly. “My intentions are no more shocking than usual.”

  “Maybe nothing’s wrong, Nicky.” She attempted a smile. “I’ve got to be careful. You understand that, don’t you? You’re an Imperial officer and I’m riding Leon Ammon’s rocket. Maybe we can keep on working together. And maybe not. What’s happened here?”

  He collected his wits. “Int’resting question,” he said. “If you think this is a trap for you—well, really, my sweet, you know quite well no functional trap is that elaborate. I’m every bit as baffled as you…and worried, if that’s any consolation. I want nothing at the moment but to get back with hide entire to vintage wine, gourmet food, good conversation, good music, good books, good tobacco, a variety of charming ladies, and everything else that civilization is about.”

  He was ninety-nine percent honest. The remaining one percent involved pocketing the rest of his million. Though not exclusively…

  The girl didn’t relax. “Well, can we?”

  He told her what the condition of the boat was.

  She nodded. Wings of amber-colored hair moved softly past delicate high cheekbones. “I thought that was more or less it,” she said. “What do you figure to do?”

  Flandry shifted stance and scratched the back of his neck. “Another interesting question. We can’t survive indefinitely, you realize. Considering the outside temperature and other factors, I’d say that if we throttle all systems down to a minimum—and if we don’t have to fire the spitgun again—we have accumulator energy for three months. Food for longer, yes. But when the thermometer drops to minus a hundred, even steak sandwiches can only alleviate; they cannot cure.”

  She stamped a foot. “Will you stop trying to be funny!”

  Why, I thought I was succeeding, Flandry wanted to say, and incidentally, that motion of yours had fascinating effects in these snug-fitting pullovers we’re wearing. Do it again?

  Djana overcame her anger. “We need help,” she said.

  “No point in trying to radio for it,” Flandry said. “Air this thin supports too little ionosphere to send waves far past the horizon. Especially when the sun, however bright, is so distant. We might be able to bounce signals off Regin or another moon, except that that’d require aiming and monitoring gear Jake doesn’t carry.”

  She stared at him in frank surprise. “Radio?”

  “To the main computer at the mining centrum. It was originally a top-level machine, you know, complete with awareness—whatever it may have suffered since. And it commanded repair and maintenance equipment as well. If we could raise it and get a positive response, we should have the appropriate robots here in a few hours, and be off on the rest of my circuit in a few days.”

  Flandry smiled lopsidedly. “I wish now I had given it a call from orbit,” he went on. “But with the skewball things we saw—we’ve lost that option. We shall simply have to march there in person and see what can be done.”

  Djana tensed anew. “I thought that’s what you’d figure on,” she said, winter bleak. “Nothing doing, lover. Too chancy.”

  “What else—”

  She had hardly begun to reply when he knew. The heart stumbled in him.

  “I didn’t join you blind,” she said. “I studied the situation first, whatever I could learn, including the standard apparatus on these boats. They carry several couriers each. One of those can make it back to Irumclaw in a couple of weeks, with a message telling where we are and what we’re sitting on.”

  “But,” he protested. “But.
Listen, the assault on us wasn’t likely the last attempt. I wouldn’t guarantee we can hold out. We’d better leave here, duck into the hills—”

  “Maybe. We’ll play that as it falls. However, I am not passing up the main chance for survival, which is to bring in a Navy ship.” Djana’s laugh was a yelp. “I can tell what you’re thinking,” she continued. “There I’ll be, along on your job. How many laws does that break? The authorities will check further. When they learn about your taking a bribe to do Ammon’s work for him in an official vessel—I suppose at a minimum the sentence’ll be life enslavement.”

  “What about you?” he countered.

  Her lids drooped. Her lips closed and curved. She moved her hips from side to side. “Me? I’m a victim of circumstances. I was afraid to object, with you wicked men coercing me…till I got this chance to do the right thing. I’m sure I can make your commandant see it that way and give me an executive pardon. Maybe even a reward. We’re good friends, really, Admiral Julius and me.”

  “You won’t get through the wait here without my help,” Flandry said. “Certainly not if we’re attacked.”

  “I might or might not,” she replied. Her expression thawed. “Nicky, darling, why must we fight? We’ll have time to work out a plan for you. A story or—or maybe you can hide somewhere with supplies, and I can come back later and get you, I swear I will—” She swayed in his direction. “I swear I want to. You’ve been wonderful. I won’t let you go.”

  “Regardless,” he said, “you insist on sending a message.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you launch a courier? What if I refuse?”

  “Then I’ll stun you, and tie you, and torture you till you agree,” she said, turned altogether impersonal. “I know a lot about that.”

  Abruptly it blazed from her: “You’ll never imagine how much I know! You’d die before I finished. Remember your boasting to me about the hardships you’ve met, a poor boy trying to get ahead in the service on nothing but ability? If you could’ve heard me laughing inside while I kissed you! I came up from slavery—in the Black Hole of Jihannath—what I’ve been through makes the worst they’ve thought of in Irumclaw Old Town look like a crèche game—I’m not going back to hell again—as God is my witness, I’m not!” She drew a shaking breath and damped the vizor once more into place. From a pocket she fetched a slip of paper. “This is the message,” she said.

  Flandry balanced on the balls of his feet. He might be able to take her, if he acted fast and luck fell his way…he just might…And swiftly as a stab, he knew the risk was needless.

  He gasped.

  “What’s the matter?” Djana’s question wavered near hysteria.

  He shook himself. “Nothing,” he said. “All right, you win, let’s ship your dispatch off.”

  The couriers were near the main airlock. He walked in advance, before her steady gun muzzle, though she knew the location. For that matter, the odds were she could figure out how to activate them herself. She had been quick to learn the method of putting the boat on a homeward course—feed the destination coordinates to the autopilot, lock the manual controls, et cetera—when he met her request for precautionary instruction. These gadgets, four in number, were simpler yet.

  Inside each torpedo shape—120 centimeters long, but light enough for a man to lift under Terran gravity—were packed the absolute minimum of hyperdrive and grav-drive machinery; sensors and navigational computer to guide it toward a preset goal; radio to beep when it neared; accumulators for power; and a tiny space for the payload, which could be a document, a tape, or whatever else would fit.

  Ostentatiously obedient, Flandry opened one compartment and stepped aside while Djana laid in her letter and closed the shell. Irumclaw’s coordinates were stenciled on it for easy reference and she watched him turn the control knobs. He slid the courier forward on the launch rack. Pausing, he said: “I’d like to program this for a sixty-second delay, if you don’t mind.”

  “Why?”

  “So we can get back to the conn and watch it take off. To be sure it does, you know.”

  “M-m-m—that makes sense.” Djana hefted the gun. “I’m keeping you covered till it’s outbound, understand.”

  “Logical. Afterward, can we both be uncovered?”

  “Be still!”

  Flandry started the mechanism and returned forward with her. They stared out.

  The view was of desolation. Jake lay close by the crater wall, which sloped steeply aloft until its rim stood fanged in heaven, three kilometers above. Its palisades reached so far that they vanished under the near horizon before their opposite side became visible. The darkling rock was streaked with white, that also covered the floor: carbon dioxide and ammonia snow. This was beginning to vaporize in Wayland’s sixteen-day time of sunlight; fogs boiled and mists steamed, exposing the bluish gleam of eternal water ice.

  Overhead the sky was deep violet, almost black. Stars glittered wanly across most of it, for at this early hour Mimir’s fierce disc barely cleared the ringwall in that area where the latter went behind the curve of the world. Regin was half a dimness mottled with intricate cloud patterns, half a shining like burnished steel.

  A whitter of wind came in through the hull.

  Behind Flandry, Djana said with unexpected wistfulness: “When the courier’s gone, Nicky, will you hold me? Will you be good to me?”

  He made no immediate reply. His shoulder and stomach muscles ached from tension.

  The torpedo left its tube. For a moment it hovered, while the idiot pseudo-brain within recognized it was on a solid body and which way was up. It rose. Once above atmosphere, it would take sights on beacons such as Betelgeuse and lay a course to Irumclaw.

  Except—yes! Djana wailed. Flandry whooped. The spark high above had struck. As one point of glitter, the joined machines staggered across the sky.

  Flandry went to the viewscreen and set the magnification. The torpedo had nothing but a parchment-thin aluminum skin, soon ripped by the flyer’s beak while the flyer’s talons held tight. The courier had ample power to shake off its assailant, but not the acumen to do so. Besides, the stresses would have wrecked it anyway. It continued to rise, but didn’t get far before some critical circuit was broken. That killed it. The claws let go and it plummeted to destruction.

  “I thought that’d happen,” Flandry murmured.

  The flyer resumed its station. Presently three others joined it. “They must’ve sensed our messenger, or been called,” Flandry said. “No use trying to loft more, eh? We need their energy packs worse for other things.”

  Djana, who had stood numbed, cast her gun aside and crumpled weeping into his arms. He stroked her hair and made soothing noises.

  At last she pulled herself together, looked at him, and said, still gulping and hiccoughing: “You’re glad, aren’t you?”

  “Well, I can’t say I’m sorry,” he admitted.

  “Y-y-you’d rather be dead than—”

  “Than a slave? Yes, cliché or not, ’fraid so.”

  She considered him for a while that grew. “All right,” she said most quietly. “That makes two of us.”

  Chapter VI

  He had topped the ringwall when the bugs found him.

  His aim was to inspect the flyer which had crashed on the outer slope, while Djana packed supplies for the march. Perhaps he could get some clue as to what had gone wrong here. The possibility that those patrolling would spot him and attack seemed among the least of the hazards ahead. He could probably find a cave or crag or crevasse in time, a shelter where they couldn’t get at him, on the rugged craterside. Judiciously applied at short range, the blaster in his hip sheath ought to rid him of them, in view of what the spitgun had accomplished—unless, of course, they summoned so many reinforcements that he ran out of charge.

  Nothing happened. Tuning his spacesuit radio through its entire range of reception, he came upon a
band where there was modulation: clicks and silences, a code reeling off with such speed that in his ears it sounded almost like an endless ululation, high-pitched and unhuman. He was tempted to transmit a few remarks on those frequencies, but decided not to draw unnecessary attention to himself. At their altitude, he might well be invisible to the flyers.

  The rest of the available radio spectrum was silent, except for the seethe and crackle of cosmic static. And the world was silent, except for the moan of wind around him, the crunching of snow and rattling of stones as his boots struck, the noise of his own breath and heartbeat. The crater floor was rock, ice, drift of snow and mists, wan illumination that would nonetheless have burned him with ultraviolet rays had his faceplate let them past. Clouds drove ragged across alien constellations and the turbulent face of Regin. The crater wall lifted brutal before him.

  Climbing it was not too difficult. Erosion had provided ample footing and handholds; and in this gravity, even burdened with space armor he was lighter than when nude under Terran pull. He adapted to the changed ratio of weight and inertia with an ease that would have been unconscious had he not remembered it was going to cause Djana some trouble and thereby slow the two of them down. Other than keeping a nervous eye swiveling skyward, the chief nuisance he suffered was due to imperfections of the air renewal and thermostatic units. He was soon hot, sweating, and engulfed in stench.

  I’ll be sure to fix that before we start! he thought. And give the service crew billy hell when (if) I return. Momentarily, the spirit sagged in him: What’s the use? They’re sloppy because the higher echelons are incompetent because the Empire no longer really cares about holding this part of the marches…In my grandfather’s day we were still keeping what was ours, mostly.

  In my father’s day, the slogan became “conciliation and consolidation,” which means retreat. Is my day—my very own personal bit of daylight between the two infinite darknesses—is it going to turn into the Long Night?