“Has problems of his own,” Sarah finished for him. She sighed. “Don’t we all?”
VIII
Minervan summer days were not bad, not for someone used to Moscow weather as Oleg Lopatin was. Minervan nights were something else again, almost always ten below Celsius or worse. Every night reminded Lopatin of his military snow-survival course.
That he was in the middle of an armed camp now only brought the memory into sharper focus. Fralk’s forces, battered and scattered by the crossing of Jotun Canyon, were back together now, as much as they ever would be. The Omalo had not struck at them. Tomorrow, with luck, the Skarmer would be out of the immense canyon altogether and up onto fiat ground. Lopatin did not plan to be with them.
Helping the Skarmer win the war against their neighbors to the east, maybe squeezing off half a clip at any Americans foolish enough to try to help the feudal Omalo resist the ineluctable logic of the historical dialectic…, all that would be wonderful, so long as he did it step by step, in contact with Tsiolkovsky. Then he would be not only one of the instruments through which the dialectic unfolded but also carrying out Soviet policy, as defined before he headed east with Fralk’s army. Losing his radio changed everything.
Any Soviet officer who took matters into his own hands asked for trouble and usually got it. If he showed hostility toward Athena’s crew without being hooked into the chain of command that could authorize such behavior, he knew exactly what would happen. The Americans would scream bloody murder. They were probably screaming bloody murder already about Frank Marquard.
Moscow would say, would have to say, that Lopatin had been sent across Jotun Canyon purely as an observer. All the blame would land right on his shoulders. He could see it coming, just as he had seen that mountain of ice bearing down on his coracle.
As he had done in the coracle, he intended to get away now. He only saw one course that might let that happen, and he hated it. But if he yielded himself up to the Americans, and told them how Marquard had died, he might put out for his own benefit the line he expected from Moscow. As far as his actions went, all he needed to do was tell the truth. Unfortunately, though, as a KGB man he knew for how little the truth often counted.
The Skarmer slept all around him. In an Earthly camp, fires would have lit his way-and let sentries see him. The Minervans had no fires; they liked the weather fine. Lopatin knew they had set sentries. With luck, he could evade them in the dark.
He slid out of his sleeping bag, quietly rolled it up, and stuffed in into his pack. He slung his rifle over his shoulder. He wanted to carry it, but knew he might need both hands free. Shooting his way to freedom would surely fail anyhow; even if it didn’t, it would wreck the Soviet mission. But he missed the comfort of having the Kalashnikov ready to fire.
He slipped through the slumbering natives. Going in the right direction was easy, even in the darkness: any way uphill was right.
He wondered how he would ever get back across Jotun Canyon to return to Tsiolkovsky-after abandoning the Skarmer here, he would not be popular among them. Perhaps it would not matter. With Marquard dead, the Americans would have the supplies to let him fly home aboard Athena.
Home? No, to fly back to Earth. He doubted he could ever go home again. Times had changed since the Great Patriotic War, when so many Soviet soldiers earned time in the Gulag merely for seeing what western Europe was like. They had not changed so much, however, that a KGB man could expect to be greeted with open arms after being debriefed by the CIA, as Lopatin knew he would be.
He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. He wanted to swear. He was a good Party man and a loyal Soviet citizen, and he knew he would have to defect. Very slowly, he kept creeping out of the Skarmer camp.
Finally, after what seemed forever, the Skarmer began to thin out. Lopatin no longer had to pay attention to his every footstep for fear of falling over a native. He could move faster now.
The wind picked up. Clouds scudded by. One of the Minervanmoons-Lopatin had no idea which one-shone through a break in the cover overhead. Far fainter than Earthly moonlight, it was better than the near-blackness he had known before. He picked up the pace again.
The moonlight also let a Skarmer sentry spot motion he might otherwise have missed. “Halt!” the male called. “Who goes?” Lopatin froze. Too late-the sentry had already picked up the alien quality of the way he moved. “The human! The human is running away!” the Minervan screamed.
That did it, Lopatin thought, hearing hubbub break out behind him as the outcry jerked warriors from sleep. “This way! This way!” the sentry shouted.
Swearing now in good earnest, the KGB man ran that way. Don’t panic, he told himself. The terrain gave him plenty of cover. He dashed from boulder to boulder, keeping low, trying not to give that cursed sentry another glimpse of him. The Minervan moon stayed visible. Where moments before he had been glad to see it, now he wished it into the hottest pits of hell.
He scuttled over to yet another rock and paused, listening.
Most of what he heard from the camp was chaos, but not all. Some males were moving purposefully after him, calling as they came. He shivered in his latest hiding place. Not even his darkest nightmares included pursuit by a pack of screaming maenads.
They were getting closer, too, terrifyingly fast. That alarmed him in a way different from their banshee cries-he had swerved away from his earlier direction of travel, away from where the sentry spied him. Yet the Minervans somehow still tracked him.
He found out how a moment later, when the warriors drew close enough for him to make sense of some of their shouts. “No, fool,” one male yelled to another, “the scent trail leads this way!”
Scent! Lopatin was up and running again in an instant. Hiding would do him no good if the Minervans did not need to see him to find him. The KGB had cooked up a dozen stenches to throw dogs off the track. They would have been of more use to Lopatin had they been on the same planet as he was.
He was tempted to turn around and fire a couple of clips into the warriors behind him. That would drive them off, he knew. What he did not know was what would happen to his crewmates if-no, when-someone from here got back across Jotun Canyon with word that he had opened fire.
And so he hesitated and suffered the usual fate of those who hesitate. A Minervan sprang out from in back of a rock. Either Fralk had shouted orders at the beginning of the chase or the warrior was uncommonly wise about firearms: the first thing he did was smash the rifle out of Lopatin’s hand with a spear. It clattered to the ground and rolled away. Lopatin dove after it. The Minervan jumped on him.
The spear had fallen, too. Even so, it was not much of a fight. Lopatin got in a kick that made the warrior wail, but the Minervan’s fingerclaws stabbed through clothes to pierce the KGB man’s flesh. One scored his cheek and missed his eye by only a couple of centimeters.
By then, other males were rushing up. “Human, we all have spears!” one shouted. “We will use them if you do not yield.”
Lopatin went limp. The male he had been wrestling with cautiously disengaged. “Good idea,” he said when he was convinced the fight was gone from his foe. “You almost kicked my insides out-those cursed funny big legs you humans have.” He sounded more professionally interested than angry; after a moment, Lopatin recognized Juksal’s voice.
“Here is his strange weapon,” a male said from a few meters away.
“Good,” Juksal said. “Hang on to that. We need it. We need it more than we need him. Without their fancy tools, these humans aren’t so dangerous.” If any Minervan had the right to say that, Lopatin thought dully, Juksal did. He wished none of them had the right.