“She will be theirs,” Dagney said, troubled. “And we will be hunted. Shouldn’t we surrender peacefully and bargain with them?”
“What bargainin’ power has a slave got? Whereas free, if nothin’ else, I bet we’re the only two on Nike that can run a spacecraft. Besides, we don’t know what these fellows are like. They could be mighty cruel. No, you go stand by that manlock along, with Yasmin. The minute we touch dirt, you two get out—fast and far.”
“But Tom, you’ll be, on the bridge. What about you?”
“Somebody’s got to make that landin’. I dunno how they’ll react. But you girls won’t have much time to escape yourselves. I’ll come after you. If I haven’t joined you soon, figure I won’t, and do whatever comes natural. And look after Yasmin, huh?”
Silence dwelt for a moment amidst every inanimate noise. Unticlass="underline" “I understand. Tom, if we don’t see each other again, it was good with you.” Dagny uttered a shaken laugh. “Tell her to kiss you for both of us.”
“Aye-ya.” He couldn’t, of course, with that suspicious countenance glowering out of the screen. But in what little Pelevah he had, he gave Yasmin her orders. She didn’t protest, too stunned by events to grasp the implications.
Down and down. The tilted wilderness swooped at him.
“The steerin’s quit on me!” Tom yelled in Anglic. “Yasmin, go fantangle the dreelsprail! Hurry!” She flung off her safety webbing and left the bridge, as fast as possible in her clumsy armor. “I’ve got to make an emergency landin’,” Tom said to the Nikean officer.
Probably that caused them to hold their fire as he had hoped. He didn’t know, nor wonder. He was too busy. The sonoprobe said firm solid below. The altimeter said a hundred meters, fifty, twenty-five, ten—Leaves surged around. Boughs and boles splintered. The farther trees closed in like a cage. Impact shook, drummed, went to silence. Tom cut the engines and gee-field. Native gravity, one-half standard, hit him with giddiness. He unharnessed himself. The deck was canted. He slipped, skidded, got up and pounded down the companionway.
The manlock valves opened at Dagny’s control while Firedrake was still moving. The drop in air pressure hurt her eardrums. She glimpsed foliage against a sky red with dawn, gray with scattering stormclouds. The earthquake landing cast her to hands and knees. She rose, leaning against a bulkhead. Yasmin stumbled into sight. The faceplate stood open before the terrified young visage. “Chaos! Dog that thing!” Dagny cried. “We’ll be at top speed.” She was not understood. She grabbed the girl and snapped the plate shut herself.
“You… know… fly?” she asked in her fragment of Anglic.
“Yes. I think so.” Yasmin wet her lips. Her radio voice was unsteady in the other’s earplugs. “I mean… Lord Tom explained how.”
“No practice, though?” Dagny muttered in Eylan. “You’re about to get some.” In Anglic: “Follow I.”
She leaned out of the lock. High overhead she descried the gleam of a wheeling delta wing. The forest roared with wind. A little clearing surrounded the ship where trees had been flattened. Beyond the shadowy tangle of their trunks and limbs, their neighbors made a wall of night.
“Go!” Dagny touched her impeller stud and launched herself. She soared up. Flight was tricky in these gusts. Curving about, she saw Yasmin’s suit helplessly cartwheel. She returned, caught the Sassanian girl, laid one arm around her waist and used the other to operate her drive units for her in the style of an instructor. They moved off, slowly and awkwardly.
A scream split the air. Dagny glanced as far behind as she could. Two of the aircraft were stooping… One took a hoverstance above Firedrake, the other came after her and Yasmin. She saw the muzzle of an energy gun and slammed the two impeller sets into full forward speed. Alone, she might have dived under the trees. But Yasmin hadn’t the skill, and two couldn’t slip through those dense branches side by side. Tom had told her to look after Yasmin, and Dagny was his sworn woman.
She tried to summon before her the children they had had together, tall sons and daughters, the baby grandchildren, and Skerrygarth, their home that was the dowry she had brought him, towers steadfast above a surf that played white among the reefs.
Explosion smashed at her. Had she been looking directly aft, she would have been dazzled into momentary blindness. As it was the spots before her eyes and the tolling in her ears lasted for minutes. A wave of heat pushed through her armor.
She yelled, clung somehow to Yasmin, and kept the two of them going. Fury spoke again and again. It dwindled with, distance as they fled.
Finally it was gone. By that time the women had covered some twenty kilometers, more or less eastward. The sea-level horizon of Nike was only about six kilometers off; and this was not flat country. They were well into morning light and far beyond view of the spaceship. Dagny thought she could yet identify an aircraft or two, but maybe those sparks were something else.
Beneath her continued hills and ravines, thickly wooded, and rushing streams. The volcano bulked in the north; smoke plumed from a frost-rimmed crater. Southward the land rolled down to the quicksilver sheet of the bay. Its shore was marshy—an effect of the very considerable tides that the nearer moon raised—but, a village of neat wooden houses stood there on piles. Sailboats that doubtless belonged to fishermen were putting out. They must exist in such numbers because of a power shortage rather than extreme backwardness; for Dagny saw a good-sized motorship as well, crossing the bay from the gate to the lower, more populous south side. Its hull was of planks and its wake suggested the engine was minimal. At the same time, its lines and the nearly smokeless stack indicated competent design.
Here the wind had gentled, and the clouds were dissipating fast. (Odd to have such small cells of weather, she thought in a detached logical part of herself. Another indication of an atmosphere disturbed by violent solar conditions?) They shone ruddy-tinted in a deep purple vault of sky. The sun stood bright orange above, mists that lay on the Nereid River delta.
“Down we go, lass,” Dagny said, “before we’re noticed.”
“What happened? Lord Tom. where is he?”
The sob scratched at Dagny’s nerves. She snapped, biting back tears: “Use your brain, you little beast, if it’s anything except blubber! He went first to the main firecontrol turret. When he saw us attacked, he cut loose with the ship’s weapons. I don’t see how he could have gotten all those bastards, though. If they didn’t missile him, they’ve anyhow bottled him up. On our account!”
She realized she’d spoken entirely in Eylan. Suppressing a growl, she took over the controls of both suits. With no need for haste, she could ease them past the branches that tried to catch them, down to the forest floor.
“Now,” she said in Anglic. “Out.” Yasmin gaped. Dagny set the example by starting to remove her own armor.
“Wh-why?”
“Find us. In . in… in-stru-ments. Stnell metal, no? Could be. Not take chance. We got—got to—” Dagny’s vocabulary failed her. She had wanted to explain that if they stayed with the suits, they ran the risk of detection from afar. And even if the Nikeans didn’t have that much technology left, whatever speed and protection the equipment lent wasn’t worth its conspicuousness.
She was almost grateful for every difficulty. It kept her mind—somewhat—off the overwhelming fact that Tom, her Roan Tom, was gone.
Or maybe not. Just maybe not. He might be a prisoner, and she might in time contrive to bargain for his release. No, she would not remember what she had seen done to prisoners, here and there in her wanderings, by vengeful captors!