The scout pilot came to like him, not least because he did not take himself too seriously. For all that, the Zan was a clever interrogator, adept at sliding smoothly from one subject to the next. One secret, though, he did not penetrate: the scout pilot was careful always to speak of the Confederacy in the present tense. He was so perfectly consistent that Liosh never thought to doubt him. Still, it was not an easy time. Liosh extracted a good deal of information. and yielded little in return. Chang started seeing those probing golden eyes, started hearing that guttural voice in his sleep. He dreamed they were trying to talk during a storm. Thunder boomed; lightning seared the sky. When he woke, for a long moment he was unsure he had. The night was pitch-black, but lurid flashes of light came stabbing into his chamber. The crashes that tore the air were louder and more continuous than those from any tempest.
He heard shouts through the turmoiclass="underline" the harsh yells of the Zanat and different cries, high thin wails that rose and fell in weird ululation. The wails grew ever louder and ever closer. The Zanat had not bothered to disarm him. He belted on his pistol, dashed to the window and looked out. Carbon arc lamps on tall poles spread a hellish blue glare over the spaceport tarmac; the shadows of the figures dashing across it were black and sharp as if cut from dies. Most moved with a sinuous grace the Zanat did not possess.
A machine gun chattered from a gun pit. spitting flame. Running shapes toppled, one after another. A couple, Chang thought. were Zanat. Then the gun stopped—a jammed cartridge? A broken firing pin?
The scout pilot had no way of knowing. Some of the graceful runners leaped into the pit. The machine gun stayed silent.
Crump! Front the great cloud of smoke that shot up. it was a black-powder explosion. primitive but effective. An arc-light support tottered, swayed, fell with a heavy boom. A moment later another lamp was taken out, and a quarter of the field plunged into twilight. The Slayor yowled in triumph. Not all of them toted only their native arms. A burst of half a dozen bullets thudded into the wall near Chang's window. He hurriedly pulled away. That had to be a captured gun.
Another explosion was followed by the iron clang of a starship smashing against concrete. Chang's gut clenched with fear. If Praise of Folly went down under the locals' attack, he was marooned as inevitably as if the Zanat smote her with a nuclear warhead,
The Zanat inside the spaceport buildings had not been taken entirely by surprise. The sentries were alert, and the species as a whole was not so sunk in sleep of nights as Terrans would have been. Alarms yammered. There were shouted orders in the next room, a tinkle of glass as a window was broken out, and a rattle of rifle fire. "That got a couple of the motherless fargs!" a trooper shouted. But the Slayor must have been building their attack in secret for months, maybe years. They were throwing everything they had at the hated invaders from the stars. Somehow they had even hauled one of their clumsy field-pieces to the edge of the spaceport to oppose Zanat artillery. Back at his window. Clang saw the muzzle flash and belch of smoke. A solid shot smacked into the building. The Zanat, though, had built to withstand a lot of that kind of pounding. And when the natives tried to force the stout door through which Chang had entered, they were bloodily repulsed. The Zanat raked their retreat with fire. The scout pilot thought the assault had been wrecked. But it was only a diversion, to draw the enemy's attention while a squad of Slayor set a charge against the far side of the port building, lit a fuse, and fled.
The blast hurled Chang from his feet. He rolled into a tight protective ball. The floor lurched beneath him. The noise was stunning, a blow at the ears.
He staggered upright, dazed, half-deafened. Faintly, as if through roaring water, he heard injured Zanat screaming. The air was thick with the smell of smoke and blood. There were other screams too, of wild excitement. The Slayor were in the building.
The door burst open. Only wan auxiliary lights burned in the hallway. but they sufficed to show Liosh and a pair of soldiers with rifles. The contact officer was limping; someone had slapped a rough bandage on his lower leg.
"Come on!" Liosh barked at the scout pilot. "We'll get you away. We may not hold here, and you're too precious to leave for the savages to butcher."
Chang agreed with that, though for reasons very different from the Zan's. Yet being taken from the neighborhood of Praise of Folly was the last thing he wanted. When he hesitated, one of Liosh's troopers hefted his gun menacingly. He yielded.
Liosh made no concessions to his wound as he hurried through the maze of corridors, picking his way over rubble and corpses. Chang saw his first Slayor, dead, a slim, gray, hairless being still clutching a large musket. Neat bulletholes stitched its chest; the exit wounds chewed its back to red ghastliness. The contact officer followed his eyes. "They are fools, brave fools but fools. They do not see they will be better off once we pacify them and bring them into our Sphere." The Romans had sung that song in Gaul. Cluing thought, and the British in India. and the Americans in Indochina, and the Confederacy on Epsilon Eridani I. Sometimes they turned out right in the end, sometimes not. Either way, a lot of people got killed finding out.
A live native poked its head round the corner, let out a yell, and charged. It was armed only with a rapier. A burst of fire from the Zanat chopped it down.
Behind them, a gun spoke, the dull report of Slayor powder. One of the troopers with Liosh pitched forward on his face. A squeal of agony said the local had not enjoyed its victory long. Liosh knelt, asked the wounded soldier a question too low for Cluing to catch. The answer came in a choked grunt. Liosh drew a knife across the Zan's throat in a quick, practiced motion, touched the ears, eyes, and nose of the body in turn, then straightened and hurried on.
He led the remaining trooper and Chang to a door, "In here," When his companions were through, he dogged it shut behind them. "Now down, all the way." On the spiral stair his injury did trouble him. His thin, dark lips skinned back from his teeth as he forced the pace.
There were no Slayor in the sub basement, not yet. Even the auxiliary lights failed, though, as Chang emerged from the stairwell. Before he could think of escape, the two Zanat had electric torches out. Liosh went ahead with such confidence that he hardly needed light. At last he came to the door he was seeking. "Escape tunnel," he explained to Chang, "in case of such embarrassments as this. I hope there's a vehicle left at the far end."
The passage was several hundred meters long, with only thin orange beams of light stabbing into the blackness ahead. Then the scout pilot smelled fresh air ahead, night-cool and moist. Liosh swarmed up a metal ladder. "You next." he called. Very conscious of the trooper's rifle at his back, Chang climbed. A belt of thick, shrubby vegetation had hidden the vehicle park from the spaceport. Two or three pieces of heavy armor still sat there, squat and deadly. but most were already in the fight; their passage had flattened wide swathes of the native plant life.
Liosh ignored the behemoths, heading instead for lighter, swifter transport. A military historian would have called it an armored personnel carrier; Chang had seen similar machines on several human worlds.