“No!” Raen cried, reckoning the winds that must howl down that funnel. She hit the captain’s arm and pointed, a place where needle-spires thrust against the sky—cursed and insisted, having flown more worlds than earthbound betas knew. He veered, tried it, through turbulence that jolted them. Needles reared up in the screens. Someone screamed.
They went over, whipped over that needled ridge and sucked down a slope that wrung outcries from born-men and azi, downdrafted, hurtling down a vast rock face and outward. She saw spires in the slot they had not taken, reckoned with a wrench at the stomach what they had narrowly done.
“Controls aren’t responding,” the captain muttered. “Something’s jammed up.”
“Take what you can,” Raen said.
The man asked help; the co-pilot lent a hand, muttered something about hydraulics. Raen set her lips and stayed still the while the frantic crew tried their strength and their wits. The rocks flew under them, tamed to gold and Grey-green, and ahead, the white-hot flare that was water under beta Hydri’s light, serpentine, the River, and horizon-wide, the Sea.
Poor chance they had if they were carried out into thatmaelstrom of Istran storms, of endless water, and glare.
The captain made the right decision: retros jolted them, and they began losing airspeed with such abruptness it felt as if they were halting mid-air. “Hold on,” she shouted at the azi, trying not to think of belowdecks, nigh a hundred men without safety harness. The engines continued to slam at them in short bursts, until they were lumbering along at a wallowing pace and dropping by sickening lurches.
Beyond recall now, with the controls locked up.
“Merry,” Raen called to below, “brace up hard down there; we’re going to belly in if we’re lucky.”
Another lurch downward, with alternate trees and grassland before them, with sometime bursts of the engines to give them more glide, and wrestlings by manual at the attitude controls.
Hills sprang up in their path. We’ll not make it, Raen thought, for the betas were at the end of their resources; and then the jolt of braking engines nigh took the breath out of them and they lumbered into a tilt, feathered with the attitude jets.
She braced then, for they were committed beyond recall, and the valley walls were right in front of them. The engines jolted, one and then the other, compensating for a damaged wing.
The nose kept up. Raen watched the land hurtle toward them, waiting for the contact; it hit, slewed—the straps cut in. Then the nose flew up, slammed down, and somebody hurtled past Raen on his way to the control panel. Another hit her in the back. A gun discharged.
And she remained conscious through impact, with azi bodies before her and about her, while sirens screamed and the shriek of metal testified what was happening below. She cursed through it, watching horrified as the azi in front of her bled his life out on the control panel and the betas screamed. The worse horror was that the azi did not.
And when the ship was still—when it was evident that the feared fire had not taken place, and the shriek of metal had died—there was still no outcry from the azi. Two of the betas were unconscious, a half dozen of the azi so. Raen gathered herself up on the sloping deck and looked about her. Azi faces surrounded her, calm, bewildered. The betas cursed and wept.
“We can manual this lock,” Merry’s voice came over the intercom. “Sera? Sera?”
She answered, looked at the betas, who had begun working at the emergency chute. Hot air and glare flooded the opened hatchway. Merry, down below, was attempting his own solution. Fire still remained a possibility.
“Get supplies,” she said. “All the emergency kits.” They were not going to be adequate for so many men. She opened a locker and found at least a reserve of sunsuits, lingered to put one on the while azi clambered out, and slid down—her own men, she thanked her foresight, with such clothing, and with weapons. Her own suit was in her luggage, and one of the azi had brought it, but at the moment she had no idea where it was…cared nothing.
Injured azi moved themselves; the betas she left to betas, and made the slide to safety, into the arms of her azi below, steadied herself and looked about: the hold chute was deployed, and men were exiting there. She staggered across the grass, angry that her knees so betrayed her, found Merry, whose battered face wept blood along a scraped cheek. “The hold—many dead?”
“Six. Some bad, sera.”
So few hours, from the null of the pens, and to die, after eighteen years of preparing. She drew a deep breath and forced it out again. “Get them all out.” She sat down on the grass where she was, head bowed against her knees, pulled up the sunsuit hood, adjusted her gloves, small, weary movements. They had to get clear of the ship. The ship was a target. They had to move. She shut her eyes a moment and oriented herself, slipped the visor to a more comfortable place on her nose, adjusted up the cloth about her lower face, as anonymous as the azi.
Warriors living-chained down from the hatch, hale and whole. She called to them and rose, bared a hand to identify herself. They came, humming and booming in distress at their experience, offered touch. “Life-fluids,” they kept saying, alarmed by the deaths.
“Watch,” she said, gesturing at all that empty horizon of fields, thinking of raided depots and murdered azi. “Let no majat come on us.”
“Yess,” they agreed, and hovered never far away.
An azi brought her luggage, her battered brown case, and she laughed with the touch of hysteria for that, extracted her kit of lotions and medicines and jammed those in her side pocket, cast the rest away.
The azi were all out, she reckoned. She walked among them, saw that Merry had taken her at her word, for the dead lay in a group, half a dozen not counting the one above, on the bridge; and a little apart from them were four with disabling injuries; and apart from them was a large group of wounded; and a group which bore virtually none. She looked back that course again, suddenly understanding how they were grouped, that the wounded, huddled together, simply waited, knotted up as she had seen Jim do when he was disturbed.
Waiting termination.
She cast about in distress, reckoned what would be the lot of any left in beta care. “We carry those that can’t walk,” she told Merry, and cursed the luck, and her softness, and turned it to curses at the hale ones, ordering the emergency litters, ordering packs made, until men were hurrying about like a disturbed hive.
And the beta captain limped to her…she recognised the greying brows through the mask. “Stay with the ship,” he urged her.
“Stay yourself.” Her head throbbed and the sun beat through the cloth; she forced herself to gentle language. “Take your chances here, ser. Kontrin feud. Stay out of it.”
And seeing her own folk ready, she shouted hoarse orders and bade them move.
North.
Toward Newhope, toward any place with a computer link.
xi
Morn Hald paced the office of the ISPAK station command, waited, settled again at the console.
Such resources as the Family had at its command he called into use; a code number summoned what vessels waited at Meron, and long as it would take for the message to run via intercomp, as long as it would take those ships to reach Istra—they were as good as on their way.
He relied on the Hald for that.
The Meth-maren had provided the overt provocation the Movement needed, the chaos she had wrought at station, that elevated the matter above a feud of Houses. Panicked Outsiders were running, refusing all appeals to return—had firedon a Kontrin vessel. Morn’s thin hands were emphatic on the keys, violent with rage.
Hiswitness, under hiswitness the Meth-maren had managed such a thing; and he was stung in his pride. Outsiders were involved. He had hesitated between destroying them and not; and the thought of embroiling himself with that while the Meth-maren found herself escape and weapons—for that he had pulled away, to his prime target, to the dangerous one. There was no knowing in what she had her hand, where her agents were placed by now.