“Wen, I’ll be damned,” said the pirate.

“I don’t think so.” Claude’s broad Slavic face wore an exultant smile. “Oh, Madame. The Ship’s Grave!” Martha’s voice broke her eyes spilled tears. “And now, now…”

“Now we will make camp,” the Frenchwoman said practically. “We will rest well and recover our strength. For tomorrow, our work really begins.”

The skeleton had been laid out in state in the belly compartment of the fifth flyer that they inspected.

Unlike the other craft, which had had their hatches closed, the sepulchre of Lugonn was wide open to the elements. For long years the mammals, birds, and insects of the maquis had made free with it. Felice had, as always, been first up the boarding ladder of the exotic craft. Her cry of triumph at finally finding the remains of the Tanu hero was followed by a tortured howl that raised the neck hairs of the other four members of the expedition.

“He has no torc! No torc!”

“Angélique!” Claude shouted in alarm. “Reach out and stop her doing any harm in there!”

“No… torc!” A shriek of diabolic rage echoed within the flying machine and there was a thudding sound. As Richard and Claude clambered up the ladder, Madame Guderian stood beneath the shadow of the metal bird’s wings, eyes wide, mouth drawn into a strained grimace, both hands clenching the gold at her throat. It took every bit of her coercive metafunction to restrain Felice, to force the girl to back off from the instinctive urge to destroy the source of her frustration. Driven by furious disappointment, the athlete’s latencies trembled on the brink of operancy. The old woman felt her own ultrasenses being tested to the limit. She held, pressed the volcanic thing that writhed within her mind-grasp while at the same time her telepathic voice cried: Wait! Wait! We will all search! Wait!

Felice let go her opposition so abruptly that Madame Guderian staggered backward and collapsed into Martha’s frail arms.

“Okay!” Richard shouted from above. “I popped her one. She’s out cold!”

“But did she ruin anything?” Martha called, easing Madame to the dusty ground.

“Doesn’t look like it,” Richard replied “Get up here Marty, and have a look at this frigger yourself. Like something out of a goddam fairy tale.”

Felice lay in a heap on the far side of the flyer’s belly compartment, which measured about three by six. She had managed to seize Lugonn’s helmeted skull and dash it to the desk in a paroxysm of rage; but the interior of the ancient craft was so deep in dust, animal droppings, and other organic trash that the relic had come to no harm. Claude knelt down and restored the head to its place. Resting on his haunches, he studied the legend laid out before him.

Lugonn’s armor, heavily jeweled and filmed with gold, was now so dimmed and crusted that his bones could barely be discerned within the articulated plates and scales of glass. The crystalline helmet, crested with a peculiar heraldic animal, was a baroque and incredibly intricate piece of craftsmanship, so gorgeous, even coated with grime, that one forgot that it had a utilitarian purpose: to deflect photonic beams. Carefully, Claude raised the visor and unfastened the overlapping gorget plates and hinged cheekpieces. Lugonn’s skull was mutilated by a great wound, perfectly circular and a full twelve centimeters in diameter, which drilled through the naso-orbital region and obliterated the rear of the skull opposite the eyes.

“So that much of the tale was true,” the old man murmured.

He could not resist inspecting the skull for nonhuman attributes. Most of the differences were subtle; but the Tanu had possessed only thirty teeth and he had been notably longheaded as well as massively built. Aside from anomalies in the positions of some cranial sutures and the mental foramina, the Tanu skull seemed almost completely humanoid.

Richard stared about the compartment, noting the adobe wasp nests that crusted almost every surface, the shredded bulkhead insulation, the exposed ceram framework of once luxurious cabin appointments. There was even a beehive in one of the open forward lockers.

“Well, we don’t have a prayer of getting this sucker off the ground. We’ll have to go back to one of the others.”

Martha was digging in the mounds of rubbish on the left side of the skeleton in armor. She gave a satisfied cry. “Look here! Help me get it out of the garbage, Richard!”

“The Spear!” He helped her push away the moldy mess. In a few minutes the two of them had laid bare a slender instrument nearly a meter taller than the great skeleton, connected by a cable near the butt to a large jeweled box that had once been worn at Lugonn’s waist. The box straps had now disintegrated, but the glassy surface of the box and the Spear itself did not seem to be corroded.

Martha wiped hands on hips. “That’s it, all right. Zapper and powerpack. Careful of those studs there on the upper armrest, lovie. Even cruddled up as they are, they might still trigger the thing.”

“But how,” Claude marveled softly, “how did he ever pull the trigger on himself?”

“Oh, for chrissake,” said Richard. “Forget that and help us get the thing outside before our little butch Goldilocks wakes up and goes bonkers again.”

“I am awake,” Felice said. She massaged the point of her chin, where a bruise was forming. “I’m sorry about that. I won’t lose control again. And no hard feeling for the love-tap, Captain Blood.”

Madame Guderian came slowly up the boarding ladder. Her eyes rested briefly on the glass-armored skeleton and then passed to Felice. “Ah, ma petite. What are we going to do with you?” A sadness weighted her voice.

The girl got up and displayed a gamine grin. “I didn’t really spoil anything with my little temper fit. And I guarantee it won’t happen again. Let’s forget it.” She prowled about the flyer interior, kicking at the trash. “I expect the torc’s around here someplace. Maybe some critter carried it away from the skeleton and stashed it in another part of the ship.”

Claude took up the pack and started to descend the ladder while Richard and Martha followed with the still-tethered weapon, not wanting to risk disconnecting the cable.

Madame regarded the skeleton. “So here you lie, Shining Lugonn. Dead before the adventures of your exiled people had scarcely begun. Your tomb defiled by the little vermin of Earth, and now by us.” Shaking her head, she turned to descend the ladder. Felice sprang to the old woman’s assistance.

“I’ve a wonderful idea, Madame! I won’t be any use working on the aircraft or the Spear. So when I’m not needed for camp chores or hunting, I’ll come here and clean this place out, I’ll make it all neat again and polish his golden glass armor, and when we leave, we can close the hatch.”

“Yes.” Madame Guderian nodded. “It would be a fitting work.”

“I’d have to move all this rubbish anyway,” Felice added, “when I was looking for the torc. It must be here somewhere. No Tanu or Firvulag would have dared to take it. I know I’ll find it.”

Standing on the ground now, Madame looked up at Felice, so small, so winsome, so dangerous. “Perhaps you will. But if you don’t? What then?”

The girl was calm. “Why, then I’ll have to hold King Yeochee to his promise, that’s all.”

Richard said, “How about getting down here and giving us a hand, kid? You can moon around with your ancient astronaut all you want when we get a work camp set up. Come on, we’re going to move back to the last bird in line. See if you can carry this whole Spear rig by yourself, will you? She’s an awkward bitch for a two-man tote.”

Felice dropped lightly down from the belly hatch, hoisted the eighty-kilo powerpack in one arm, and stood while Claude and Richard balanced the long weapon on her opposite shoulder.

“I can manage,” she said. “But God knows how that old boy ever used this gadget in a running fight. He must have been quite a lad! Just wait till I find his torc.”