The scenery was impressive in a gaunt fashion. The river rolled on the parry’s left, broad, brown, noisy and dangerous despite being at its low point. A mat of annual plants made a border whose sober hues were relieved by white and scarlet blossoms. Here and there grew crooked trees, deep-rooted, adapted to inundation. Beyond, the canyon floor reached barren: tumbled dark rocks, fantastically eroded pinnacles and mesas, on to the talus slopes and palisades. Gray sky, diffuse and shadowless light, did not bring out color or detail very well; that was a bewildering view. But human lungs found the air mild, dry, exhilarating. Two krippos wheeled on watch overhead. Harvest Fetcher stayed complete, and every ruka rode a noga. The outworlders walked behind, except for Kathryn, Flandry, and Havelock. She was off to the right, wrapped in her private thoughts. This landscape must have made her homesick for Aeneas. The commander and the ensign kept out of their companions’ earshot.
“Damn it, sir, why do we take for granted we’ll turn ourselves in at Port Frederiksen without a fight?” Havelock was protesting. “This notion our case is hopeless, it’s encouraging treasonable thoughts.”
Flandry refrained from saying he was aware of that. Havelock had been less standoffish than the rest; but a subtle barrier persisted, and Flandry had cultivated him for weeks before getting this much confidence. He knew Havelock had a girl on Terra.
“Well, Ensign,” he said, “I can’t make promises, for the reason that I’m not about to lead us to certain death. As you imply, though, the death may not necessarily be certain. Why don’t you feel out the men? I don’t want anyone denounced to me,” having a pretty fair idea myself, “but you might quietly find who’s … let’s not say trustworthy, we’ll assume everybody is, let’s say enthusiastic. You might, still more quietly, alert them to stand by in case I do decide on making a break. We’ll talk like this, you and I, off and on. More off than on, so as not to provoke suspicion. We’ll get Kathryn to describe the port’s layout, piecemeal, and that’ll be an important element in what I elect to do.”
You, Kathryn, will be more important.
“Very good, sir,” Havelock said. “I hope—”
Assault burst forth.
The party had drawn even with a nearby rock mass whose bottom was screened by a row of crags. From behind these plunged a score of Didonians. Flandry had an instant to think, Ye devils, they must’ve hid in a cave! Then the air was full of arrows. “Deploy!” he yelled. “Fire! Kathryn, get down!”
A shaft went whoot by his ear. A noga bugled, a ruka screamed. Bellyflopping, Flandry glared over the sights of his blaster at the charging foe. They were barbarically decorated with pelts, feather blankets, necklaces of teeth, body paint. Their weapons were neolithic, flint axes, bone-tipped arrows and lances. But they were not less deadly for that, and the ambush had been arranged with skill.
He cast a look to right and left. Periodically while traveling, he had drilled his men in ground combat techniques. Today it paid off. They had formed an arc on either side of him. Each who carried a gun — there weren’t many small arms aboard a warship — was backed by two or three comrades with spears or daggers, ready at need to assist or to take over the trigger.
Energy beams flared and crashed. Slugthrowers hissed, stunners buzzed. A roar of voices and hoofs echoed above the river’s clangor. A krippo turned into flame and smoke, a ruka toppled to earth, a noga ran off bellowing its anguish. Peripherally, Flandry saw more savages hit.
But whether in contempt for death or sheer physical momentum, the charge continued. The distance to cover was short; and Flandry had not imagined a noga could gallop that fast. The survivors went by his line and fell on the Thunderstone trio before he comprehended it. One man barely rolled clear of a huge gray-blue body. The airborne flyers barely had time to reunite with their chief partners.
“Kathryn!” Flandry shouted into the din. He leaped erect and whirled around. The melee surged between him and her. For a second he saw how Didonians fought. Nogas, nearly invulnerable to edged weapons, pushed at each other and tried to gore. Rukas stabbed and hacked; krippos took what shelter they could, while grimly maintaining linkage, and buffeted with their wings. The objective was to put an opponent out of action by eliminating heesh’s rider units.
Some mountaineer nogas, thus crippled by gunfire, blundered around in the offing. A few two-member entities held themselves in reserve, for use when a ruka or krippo went down in combat. Eight or nine complete groups surrounded the triangular formation adopted by the three from Thunderstone.
No, two and a half. By now Flandry could tell them apart. Harvest Fletcher’s krippo must have been killed in the arrow barrage. The body lay transfixed, pathetically small, tailfeathers ruffled by a slight breeze, until a noga chanced to trample it into a smear. Its partners continued fighting, automatically and with lessened skill.
“Get those bastards!” somebody called. Men edged warily toward the milling, grunting, yelling, hammering interlocked mass. It was hard to understand why the savages were ignoring the humans, who had inflicted all the damage on them. Was the sight so strange as not to be readily comprehensible?
Flandry ran around the struggle to see what had become of Kathryn. I never gave her a gun! he knew in agony.
Her tall form broke upon his vision. She had retreated a distance, to stand beneath a tree she could climb if attacked. His Merseian blade gleamed in her grasp, expertly held. Her mouth was drawn taut but her eyes were watchful and steady.
He choked with relief. Turning, he made his way to the contest.
A stone ax spattered the brains of Smith’s ruka. Cave Discoverer’s ruka avenged the death in two swift blows — but, surrounded, could not defend his back. A lance entered him. He fell onto the horn of a savage noga, which tossed him high and smashed him underfoot when he landed.
The humans opened fire.
It was butchery.
The mountaineer remnants stampeded down the canyon. Not an entity among them remained whole. A young Terran stood over a noga, which was half cooked but still alive, and gave it the coup de grace; then tears and vomit erupted from him. The Thunderstoners could assemble one full person at a time. Of the possible combinations, they chose Guardian Of North Gate, who went about methodically releasing the wounded from life.
The entire battle, from start to finish, had lasted under ten minutes.
Kathryn came running. She too wept. “So much death, so much hurt — can’t we help them?” A ruka stirred. He didn’t seem wounded; yes, he’d probably taken a stun beam, and the supersonic jolt had affected him as it did a man. Guardian Of North Gate approached. Kathryn crouched over the ruka. “No! I forbid you.”
The Didonian did not understand her pidgin, for only heesh’s noga had been in Cave Discoverer. But her attitude was unmistakable. After a moment, with an almost physical shrug, heesh had heesh’s ruka tie up the animal.
Thereafter, with what assistance the humans could give, heesh proceeded to care for the surviving Thunderstone units. They submitted patiently. A krippo had a broken leg, others showed gashes and bruises, but apparently every member could travel after a rest.
No one spoke aloud a wish to move from the battleground. No one spoke at all. Silent, they fared another two or three kilometers before halting.
In the high latitudes of Dido, nights around midsummer were not only short, they were light. Flandry walked beneath a sky blue-black, faintly tinged with silver, faintly adance with aurora where some of Virgil’s ionizing radiation penetrated the upper clouds. There was just sufficient luminance for him not to stumble. Further off, crags and cliffs made blacknesses which faded unclearly into the dusk. Mounting a bluff that overlooked his camp, he saw its fire as a red wavering spark, like a dying dwarf star. The sound of the river belled subdued but clear through cool air. His boots scrunched on gravel; occasionally they kicked a larger rock. An unknown animal trilled somewhere close by.