“Don’t tempt me,” Sarah started to pedal. “Let’s get the batteries good and charged.” A few minutes later, she said, “Okay-here we go.” She let the prop spin. Damselfly rolled forward. Irv and Louise ran with it, keeping the wing level.
“Airborne!” Irv shouted. Sarah took one hand off the control stick to wave, then gave all her concentration back to flying. Irv watched Damselfly slowly climb. “There goes the funniest looking warplane in the history of-two worlds,” he said.
“No arguments.” Louise was on the radio again, on a different frequency. “Emmett, are you there?” she called worriedly. “Come in.”
“I’m here,” he answered. “Busy, but still here.”
“Damselfly’s on its way now,” she told him.
“Not a minute too soon. Out.”
“Out.” Louise turned to Irv. “Now we can only wait.”
“The fun part,” he agreed. “I’d rather be doing something, doing anything, than just standing around here.”
“Me, too,” Louise said. “I hate it when something that’s important to me is out of my hands.”
“Sarah said the same thing when Emmett was landing Athena. It’s all in her hands now, though.” Irv made sure his radio was on Damselfly’s frequency. “How you doing there, honey? How does the plane handle with the changes we made in it?”
“Doing all right,” Sarah answered. “The extra weight isn’t bad, about what I’d have if I were pedaling in my parka. And I’m not getting enough extra drag even to notice-gaining altitude shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Good,” Irv said. “Out.” He wanted Sarah as high as possible above the slings and arrows, to say nothing of axes and spears-of outrageous fortune. To Louise, he said, “Now what? Head over toward Athena?”
She was gathering up Sarah’s discarded outer layers of clothing. “I think we’d better,” she said. “We’ve never all been away at once before, and we sure as hell don’t want to have to try to talk or fight our way through to the ship if-if Reatur loses.”
“No,” Irv said, although the odds of Emmett’s getting free if Reatur lost were slim, and without Emmett, getting back to the ship didn’t matter in the long run anyhow. Louise, of course, could figure that out for herself as well as he could and doubtless had.
They had only gone a couple of hundred yards when their radios crackled to life again. Ice that had nothing to do with the weather formed in Irv’s midsection as he lifted his set to his ear-only bad news would make Emmett call back so soon.
But Pat was on the radio, not Emmett. She was in Reatur’s castle, checking on Lamra. “Has Sarah taken off yet?” she asked.
“A few minutes ago,” Irv said. “Why?” He had a bad feeling he knew the answer before he asked the question.
He did. Pat said, “Because Lamra’s getting ready to drop those budlings now, and I don’t think she’s going to wait around.”
“Shit,” Irv said softly. He could still see Damselfly off in the distance. Sarah was banking into a long, slow, gentle turn, the only kind the ultra-ultralight could make. He could still call her back-and most likely throw away the battle and Emmett with it… and Lamra and her budlings, too, come to that, if Reatur’s males were beaten.
“What do we do?” Louise asked.
He kicked at frozen dirt, made his choice. “How are you at coping with gore?”
“I won’t lose my lunch, if that’s what you mean,” Louise answered at once. “You want me to help you try to save the Minervan?”
“That’s just what I want. Hang on to Sarah’s clothes. She’s got clamps and bandages in one of those pockets. Pat and I will coach you through as best we can. You’ve got to be quick and accurate twice. Each of us does, and if we are, we have a chance.” Irv wished he were as confident as he sounded. It hadn’t happened yet, not even once.
“I’m not the person you need,” Louise said.
“You’re the person I’ve got. Come on.” They ran for thecastle.
The world wheeled under Sarah as she began another slow, careful clockwise turn. The cold breeze coming in through the freshair tube helped take away the stink of the gunk sprayed all over the bottom of the cabin.
A great circle, she thought-surely this was the long way around to deliver a surprise to the Skarmer. It had a couple of advantages, though. For one thing, it gave her plenty of time in which to make Damselfly climb. She knew she had sugarcoated what she had told Irv. Even in dense Minervan air, the ultra-ultralight climbed like a fat man going up a tall ladder. It wasn’t any worse now than it had been before they fiddled with it, though, so she hadn’t really lied.
The route she was flying would also let her come up from behind the Skarmer, as far as the idea of behind meant anything when dealing with Minervans. This once, Emmett had argued- persuasively, worse luck, it just might. Males in a battle ought to have sense enough to keep all their eyestalks pointed in the direction from which danger came-toward Reatur’s warriors, in other words. They shouldn’t spot her till too late.
Ought to, shouldn’t, ought to, shouldn’t… “If you’re wrong, Emmett, I’ll never speak to you again.” Sarah panted.
That, she feared, was no joke. Her stomach did flipflops when she thought about what a burst of Kalashnikov fire would do to Damselfly-and to her.
Fighter pilots, she realized suddenly, earned every penny they got, and then some.
“Never seen this place so deserted,” Irv said, puffing. His footsteps and Louise’s echoed down the hallways of Reatur’s castle. On any other day, the noise of dozens of males would have drowned them out. Now he had only seen a couple, one barely full-grown and the other ancient.
“At the battle.” Louise, also getting her breath back, was short with words.
The usual racket pierced the doors of the mates’ chambers: mates were sheltered from worries about their fate. Or rather, Irv thought, they never got the chance to grow enough to understand what worrying about their fate meant. Maybe that would start to change today. Maybe.
The guard outside the doors widened himself as the humans came up. He was in his prime, standing by a post Reatur reckoned important enough to keep him out of the fighting. “What word?” he asked anxiously.
“I do not know,” Irv answered. “The battle still goes on.
Let us pass now, please.”
The male unbarred the doors, shut them again behind Irv and Louise. Mates rushed from everywhere at the boom of the falling bar, then drew back, disappointed, when they saw only humans, not Reatur.
“Pat?” Louise called.
“In here.” Irv shook his head when he noticed from which chamber the answer came. It was the one in which Biyal had died. He did not think of himself as superstitious, but he wished Lamra were somewhere else.
Lamra lifted an eyestalk when he and Louise came in. “Hello,” the mate said. “Pat told me I should not say goodbye, not yet.”
“No, not yet,” Irv said soberly. Soon, though, maybe, he thought and scowled at himself. He could hear the unease in his voice when he asked Pat, “How’s she doing?” “See for yourself. The skin is splitting.”
“So it is.” Irv stooped and switched to the Omalo language. “Lift the arm by me, please, Lamra.” Lamra did. The mate kept her fist closed, but Irv saw the graybrown of Minervan wood between her fingerclaws: the precious toy runnerpest, he supposed.
He smiled at that a little and waved Louise down beside him. “See?” he said, pointing at the growing vertical slit over the bud. Louise nodded. “In a few minutes, as the opening gets longer and wider, you’ll be able to see the whole budling, and how it’s hooked on to Lamra by its mouth. When it falls away- when it’s born, I mean-it’ll drop off. That’ll be that, unless we can clamp the vessel it was feeding from, and the ones for the other five, too. With two for each of us, we may have a chance.”
“We can’t afford any fumbling, though.” Pat sounded as if she was talking as much to herself as to Louise. “We’ve got to be right the first time.”
Louise got clamps, bandage packs, and rolls of tape out of Sarah’s parka. “I’ll do the best I can,” she said. She didn’t seem nervous; she sounded intrigued, like an engineer sizing up a new and challenging problem. Only fair, Irv thought-she was one.