The effects of maintaining contact with other worlds might be subtler than money or birthrates could account for. Maybe they were no less important, though.
"Damn the government," she said.
Max laughed richly. "Spoken like a true Treyan," he said.
They flew on and the glow of the sunlit lands gradually fell over the horizon behind them. Timidly at first, then with graceful confidence, the aurora revealed itself in the sky ahead. Behind the aurora, the stars attended like an enraptured audience.
There was no shred of green left below. Rue's eyes adjusted quickly and she could soon make out the riot of color that had replaced Earthly tones on the land. Most of the grass was black and it rippled like velvet in the wind. The trees were dark shades of purple and red, but here and there furz and heather dominated and this was rainbowed with shades of lilac and lemon-yellow. These plants used a pigment more efficient than chlorophyll and tuned to the frequencies of light the aurora produced. They absorbed blue-green light, unlike chlorophyll which absorbed red. Hence, they appeared in any color but green itself. They normally grew with agonizing slowness, but whenever Erythrion flared they would undergo brief, explosive growth spurts.
The aircar was still following the road, which snaked between low hills and past rivers but maintained a westward tendency. After a while Max pointed ahead. "I think that's it," he said.
On the horizon Rue could make out a glittering building, tall as any she'd seen in the lighted country behind them. Rows of windows high on its flanks lit the hillsides around it and she could see that it sat on the edge of a cliff, above a lake or ocean that stretched out to the horizon. More than that she couldn't see, except that this building was the terminus of the road they had been following.
Rue rehearsed the arguments she'd been preparing. She was the legal owner of the cycler; she must be given a chance to assert her ownership… she was good at defending herself verbally, she knew. She'd done it all her life.
Beside her Max heaved a sigh and she was about to say something about his sounding relieved that they'd made it, when sparks flew up the canopy beside her. Rue shrieked and jumped back, catching up against her seat belt. The aircar dipped woozily.
"What's happening?"
A bright vertical line of light appeared, jittered around crazily outside, then vanished. It left spots in Rue's eyes.
"Laser!" shouted Max. He put the car into a hard turn; light flashed outside again. "They hit one of the jets!"
"Are we going down?" Rue figured she should be afraid— didn't objects pick up a lot of speed when they fell on a planet? The fear didn't come naturally, though; freefall was a sensation she associated with safety and stillness, not danger.
"They build these things with multiple redundancy, so—" Sparks flew again and all kinds of inscape windows appeared around Max— most of them flashing red. "There goes another jet."
Okay, now she was scared. There came another flash and then they were falling.
Max sat numbly staring at the instruments, which were now complaining of a computer failure. Rue looked around herself. Freefall itself felt natural— it was the idea that they were being shot at that scared her.
Off to the right was the sky and off to the left the planet was closing fast. Three of their jets were down, but according to Max's instruments they had a fourth.
She reached past Max and hauled on the control stick. The aircar responded by flipping over several times. The rotation was very similar to the spins you did when playing freeball and she was good at freeball. Max was screaming now, but Rue had a good idea of how the aircar was responding to its only remaining jet. She put the car into a tight, blood-pounding spiral and threw all power into that jet.
They seemed to be slowing down, but it was too late. The ground came whirling up at them and then everything flew apart.
5
"I DON'T BELIEVE it," she heard Max mutter. Rue seemed to be squashed between a number of giant pillows, which were making various rude noises as they deflated. She pulled herself free, to find herself standing in black grass, shaken but unhurt, next to the aircar's crash bags.
Max clawed his way out from the bundle of neon-green balloons. "Don't believe it," he said again. Then he laughed. "Love the way they design these things."
The rest of the aircar was a mangled wreck lying some meters away. The car must have ejected the cockpit at the very last second.
"Gods and Kami, when we went into that death spiral I thought we were dead," said her cousin as he inspected himself for damage. "You okay?"
The spiral had been deliberate: Rue had needed to stabilize the aircar so that she could keep their one remaining jet pointed down and that was the only way to do it. It seemed petty to bring that up now, though. "I'm okay," she said. "Have you called for help?"
Max looked around himself uneasily. "I tried. I can't raise the inscape net out here. Signal's jammed… Look, we should get out of here. They'll come to make sure we're dead."
"Then you're going the wrong way," she said, taking his hand. "The monastery's this way."
His hand was shaking. He clasped hers tightly. "I can't see it," he said. "Too dark."
"I can see perfectly well," she reassured him. The aurora lit the land with a flickering, inconstant ghost light. Still, Max wouldn't move until they'd rummaged through the wreck of the aircar and found a flashlight he kept stored there. "I know we don't dare use it," he said. "I just need to have it, that's all."
They had crashed in an area of mixed grassland and thickets. In the light of a flare the tall bushes might have been a bright orange color; in this diffuse green glow they appeared deep brown. The air was warm; Rue could feel heat from Erythrion on her face when she looked to the east.
Luckily the brown tangles were big enough that they afforded some cover. Rue and Max wove their way around them for a hundred or so meters. Then they had to stop, because an unmistakable sound reached them through the clear air.
"It's an aircar," said Max. They both dove for cover among the thorny stalks of an orange bush tall as a house. "It's coming in low."
Rue could see it now, a dark blot against the aurora. The car showed no running lights, which was supposed to be illegal. This had to be the people who'd shot them down.
"But who are they?" she asked. She hadn't been afraid when their aircar went down; that had been more of an exercise in soft docking than anything frightening. This, though… that circling car reminded her of the brutal men who'd frequented the bar at Allemagne. She knew what such men were capable of. She kept very still as the car passed directly overhead, but her heart was pounding like it would burst.
"It's landing at the crash site," said Max. "Quick, let's get some distance between us and them."
"Yeah." They ran, with Rue leading, weaving a drunkard's path around the thickets, which blocked their way like the walls of a maze. Every now and then, Rue would catch a glimpse of the distant lights of the monastery. Several times when she did this, she found it was way off to the side and once, behind them. She suspected they were making little progress in its direction, but she didn't have the heart to tell Max.
He was busy anyway, speculating about who their pursuers were. "Gotta be government thugs," he decided. "But which faction? The isolationists won't want anyone to catch the cycler. On the other hand, the generals at the core aren't isos, never have been. They're probably falling all over each other to go after the thing."