Now he was hurtling downward. To Wayland…

  -3-

  He landed skull-rattlingly hard. Weakened members in the boat gave way with various screeches and thumps. Nevertheless, he landed.

  At once he bent himself entirely to the spitgun. Locked onto target after target, the beam flashed hell-blue among the attackers that wheeled overhead. A winged thing slanted downward and struck behind the rim of the crater where he had settled. A couple of others took heavy damage and limped off. The remainder escorted them. In a few minutes the last was gone from sight.

  High above, out of range, a spark hovered in murky heaven. Flandry focused a viewscreen and turned up the magnification.

  “One of our playmates has stayed behind to keep a beady eye on us.”

  Djana whimpered.

  “Pull yourself together,” he snapped. “You know how. Insert Part A in Slot B, bolt to Section C, et cetera. In case nobody’s told you—we have a problem.”

  Mainly he was studying the indicators on the board while he unharnessed. Some air had been lost and replenished from the reserve tanks but there was no further leakage. Evidently the hull had cracked, not too severely for self-sealing but enough to make him doubt the feasibility of returning to space without repairs. Inboard damage must be worse for the grav field was off—he moved under Wayland’s half a terrestrial gee with a bounding ease that aroused no enthusiasm in him—and, oh-oh, indeed, the thermonuclear generator was indeed dead. Light, heat, air and water cycles, everything was running off the accumulators.

  “Keep watch,” he told Djana. “Feel free to scream if you see anything suspicious.”

  He went aft—past the chaos of galley, head and the more solidly battened-down instrument and life-support centers—to the engine room. An hour’s inspection confirmed neither his rosiest hopes nor his sharpest fears. It was possible to fix Jake—and the job probably wouldn’t take very long—if, and only if shipyard facilities were brought to bear.

  “So what else is new?” he said and returned forward.

  Djana had been busy. She stood in the pilot cabin with all the small arms aboard on a seat behind her—the issue blaster and needler, his private Merseian war knife—except for the stun pistol she had brought herself. That was holstered on her flank. She rested a hand on its iridivory butt.

  “What the deuce?” Flandry exclaimed. “I might even ask, what the trey?”

  He started toward her. She drew the gun.

  “Halt,” she said.

  Her husky voice had gone flat.

  He obeyed. She could drop him as he attacked in this narrow space where there was no room to dodge—and secure him before he regained consciousness. He could perhaps work free of any knots she was able to tie, but—he swallowed his dismay and studied her. The panic was gone, unless it dwelt behind those whitened features and drew those lips into disfiguring straight lines.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked slowly. “My intentions are no more shocking than usual.”

  “Maybe there’s nothing wrong, Nick.” She attempted a smile. “I’ve got to be careful. You understand that, don’t you? You’re an Imperial officer and I’m riding Leon Ammon’s rocket. Maybe we can keep working together. And maybe not. What’s happened here?”

  “Interesting question,” he said. “If you think this a trap for you—well, really, my sweet, you know quite well no functional trap is that elaborate. I’m every bit as baffled as you—and worried, if that’s any consolation. I want nothing at the moment but to get back with a whole skin to vintage wine, gourmet food, good conversation, good music, good books, good tobacco, a variety of charming ladies and everything else that civilization is about.”

  He was ninety-nine per cent honest. The remaining one per cent involved collecting the rest of his million. Though not exclusively.

  The girl did not relax.

  “Well, can we?”

  He told her what the condition of the boat was.

  She nodded. Wings of amber-colored hair moved softly past delicate, finely molded cheekbones.

  “I thought that was more or less it,” she said. “What do you propose to do?”

  Flandry shifted his stance and ran fingers through his hair. “Another interesting question. We can’t survive indefinitely, you realize. Considering the outside temperature and other factors, I’d say that if we throttle all systems down to a minimum—and if we don’t have to fire the spitgun again—we have accumulator energy for three months. Food for longer, yes. But when the thermometer drops to minus one hundred even steak sandwiches can only alleviate. They cannot cure.”

  “Will you stop trying to be funny? We need help.”

  “No point in trying to radio for it,” Flandry said. “Air this thin supports too little ionosphere to send waves far past the horizon. Especially when, the sun, however bright, is so distant. We might be able to bounce signals off Regin or another moon, except that that would require aiming and monitoring gear our boat doesn’t carry.”

  Her mouth fell open in frank surprise.

  “Radio?”

  “To the main computer at the mining centrum,” Flandry explained. “It was originally a top-level machine, you know, complete with awareness—whatever may have happened to it since. And it commanded repair and maintenance equipment as well. If we could raise it and get a positive response, we should have the appropriate robots here in a few hours and be off on the rest of my circuit in a few days.” He smiled lopsidedly. “I rather wish now I had given it a call from orbit. But we’ve lost that option. We shall simply have to march there in person and see what can be done.”

  Djana tensed anew.

  “I thought that’s what you’d figure on,” she said, winter bleak. “Nothing doing, lover. Too risky.”

  “What else?”

  She had scarcely begun to reply when he knew the answer. The heart stumbled in him.

  “I didn’t join you blind,” she said. “I studied the situation whatever I could learn, including the standard apparatus on boats like this. They carry several couriers each. One of those can make it back to Irumclaw in a couple of weeks with a message telling where we are and what we’re sitting on.”

  He protested: “But, listen—the assault on us was hardly the last attempt. I don’t know if we can hold out. We’d better leave here duck into the hills—” ,

  “Maybe. We’ll play that as it falls. However. I am not passing up the main chance for survival, which is to bring in a Navy ship.” Djana’s laugh was a yelp. “I know what you’re thinking,” she went on. “There I’ll be, along on your mission. How many laws does that break? The authorities will then investigate further. When they learn about your taking a bribe to do Ammon’s work for him in an official vessel— I suppose at a minimum the sentence’ll be enslavement for life.”

  “What about you?” he countered.

  Her lids drooped. Her lips closed and curved. She moved her body from side to side.

  “Me? I’m a victim of circumstances. I was afraid to object—with all you wicked men coercing me—till I got this chance to do the right thing. I’m sure I can make your commandant see it that way and give me an executive pardon. Maybe even a reward. We’re quite good friends, really, Admiral Julian and I.”

  “You won’t get through the month of waiting here without my help,” Flandry said. “Certainly not if we’re attacked.”

  “I might or might not,” she replied. Her expression thawed. “Nick, darling, why must we fight? We’ll have that month to work out a plan for you. A story or—or maybe you can hide somewhere with supplies and I can come back later and get you. I swear I will—” She swayed in his direction. “I swear I want to. You’ve been wonderful. I won’t let you go.”

  “Regardless,” he said, “you insist on sending a message.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know how to launch a courier? What if I refuse?”

  “Then I’ll stun you, tie you and torture you till you agree,” she said, turned altogether impersonal. “I know a lot about that.”

  Abruptly it blazed from her. “You’ll never imagine how much I know. Remember your boasting to me about the hardships you’ve met, a poor boy trying to get ahead in the service on nothing but ability? You should’ve heard me laughing inside while I kissed you. I came up from slavery—in the Black Hole of Catawrayannis. What I’ve been through makes the worst they’ve thought of in Old Town look like a children’s game. I’m not going back to hell again—as God is my witness, I’m not.”

  She drew a shaking breath and clamped the visor once more into place. From a pocket she fetched a slip of paper.

  “This is the message,” she said.

  Flandry balanced on the balls of his feet. He might be able to take her if he acted fast and if luck fell his way. And suddenly he knew the risk was needless. He pulled in a slow, deep breath.

  “What’s the matter?” Djana asked.

  He shook himself.

  “Nothing,” he said. “You win. Let’s ship your dispatch off.”

  The couriers were near the main airlock. He walked before her steady gun muzzle. She knew the location. The odds were she could figure out how to operate them herself. The gadgets, four in number, were built as simple as possible. Inside a torpedo shape—a hundred and twenty centimeters long but light enough for a man to lift under Terran gravity—were packed the absolute minimum of hyperdrive and grav drive machinery; sensors and navigational computer to home on a pre-set destination; radio to beep advance notice when it neared; accumulators for power and a tiny space for the payload, which could be a document, a tape or whatever else would fit.

  Ostentatiously obedient, Flandry opened one compartment and stepped aside while Djana laid in her letter and closed the shell. He slid the courier forward on the launch rack.

  He said, “I’d like to set this for a sixty-second delay.”

  “Why?”

  “So we can get back to the conn and watch it take off. To be sure that it does, you know.”

  “That makes sense.” Djana hefted the gun. “I’m keeping you covered till it’s outbound, understand?”

  “Logical. Later can we both be uncovered?”

  “Be still.”

  Flandry deftly activated the mechanism and returned forward with her. They stared out.

  The view was of desolation Their boat lay close by the crater wall, which sloped steeply aloft until its rim stood fanged in heaven, three kilometers above. Its palisades reached so far that they vanished under the near horizon before their opposite side became visible. The darkling rock was streaked with white, which also covered the floor-carbon dioxide and ammonia snow. This was starting to vaporize in Wayland’s sixteen-day time of sunlight. Fogs boiled and mists streamed, exposing the bluish gleam of eternal water ice.

  Overhead the sky was deep violet, almost black. Stars glittered wanly across most of it, for at this early hour Mimir’s fierce disc barely cleared the ringwall in that sector where it went behind the curve of the world. Regin was half a dimness mottled with intricate cloud patterns, half of it shining like burnished steel.

  A whistling wind came in through the hull.

  Behind Flandry, Djana said to him with unexpected forlornness, “When the courier’s gone, Nick, will you be good to me?”

  He made no immediate reply.

  His shoulder and stomach muscles ached from tension.

  The torpedo left its tube. For a moment it hovered, while the idiot pseudo-brain deep within recognized it was on a solid body and which way was up. It rose. Above atmosphere it would take sights on beacons such as Betelgeuse and lay a course to Irumclaw.

  Djana screamed.

  The spark high above had struck. As a single point of glitter the joined machines staggered across the sky.

  Flandry went to the viewscreen and set the magnification. The courier had nothing but a parchment-thin aluminum skin, soon ripped apart by the flyer’s beak while the flyer’s talons held tight. The courier had ample power to shake off its assailant but not the wit to do so. Besides, the stresses would have wrecked it anyway. It continued to rise but didn’t get far before some critical circuit was broken. That killed it. The claws let go and it plummeted to destruction.

  “I thought that might happen,” Flandry murmured.

  The flyer resumed its station. Presently three others joined it.

  “They must have sensed our messenger,” Flandry said. “No use trying to loft more. We need their energy for other things.”

  Djana crumpled weeping into his arms. He stroked her hair and made soothing noises.

  At last she collected herself, looked at him and said, “You’re glad, aren’t you?”

  “Well, I can’t say I’m sorry,” he admitted.

  “You’d rather be dead than—”

  “Than a slave? Yes, ’fraid so.”

  She considered him for a while. “All right,” she said quietly. “That makes two of us.”

  -4-

  He had nearly topped the ringwall when the bugs found him. His aim was to inspect the flyer which had crashed on the outer slope, while Djana packed supplies for the march. Perhaps he could get some clue as to what had gone wrong here. The possibility that those patrolling would spot him and attack seemed among the least of the hazards ahead. He could probably find a cave or crag or crevasse in time—a shelter where they surely couldn’t get at him—on the rugged craterside. Judiciously applied at short range, the blaster in his hip sheath ought to rid him of them in view of what the spitgun had just accomplished—unless, of course, they summoned so many reinforcements that he ran out of charge.

  Nothing happened. Tuning his spacesuit radio through its entire range of reception, he came upon a band where there was modulation—clicks and silences, a code reeling off with such speed that in his ears it sounded almost like an endless ululation, high-pitched and unhuman. He was tempted to transmit a few remarks on those frequencies but decided not to draw unnecessary attention to himself. At their altitude, he might well be invisible to the flyers.

  The rest of the available radio spectrum was silent, except for the seethe and crackle of cosmic static.

  And the world was silent, too, except for the moan of wind around him, the crunching of snow and rattling of stones as his boots struck, the noise of his own breath and heartbeat. The crater floor was rock, ice, drift of snow and mists, wan illumination that would nonetheless have burned him with ultraviolet rays had his faceplate let them past. Clouds drove ragged across alien constellations and the turbulent face of Regin. The crater wall lifted brutal before him.

  Climbing it was not too difficult. Erosion had provided ample footing and handholds and in this gravity, even burdened with space armor, he was lighter than when nude under Terran pull. He adapted to the changed ratio of weight and inertia with an ease that would have been unconscious had he not remembered it was going to cause Djana some trouble and thereby slow the two of them down. Other than keeping a nervous eye swiveling skyward the chief nuisance he suffered was due to imperfections of the air renewal and thermostatic units. He was soon hot, sweating and engulfed in stench.

  I’ll be sure to fix that before we start. And give the service crew billy hell when and if I return. Though what’s the use? They’re sloppy because the higher echelons are incompetent because the Empire no longer really cares about holding this part of the marches. In my grandfather’s day we were still keeping what was ours—mostly. In my father’s day, the slogan became conciliation and consolidation—meaning retreat. Is my day—my very own personal bit of daylight between the two infinite darknesses—is it going to turn into the Long Night?

  He clamped his teeth together and climbed more vigorously.

  Not if I can help it…

  The bugs appeared.

  They hopped from behind boulders and ice banks, twenty or more, soaring toward him. Some thirty centimeters long, they had ten claw-footed legs each, a tail ending in twin spikes, a head on which half a dozen antennae moved. Mimir’s light shimmered purple off their intricately armored bodies.

  For a second Flandry seriously wondered if he had lost his mind. The old records said Wayland was barren, always had been, always would be. He had expected nothing else. Life simply did not evolve where cold was this deep and permanent, air this tenuous, or metal this dominant or the background radiation this high. And supposing a strange version of it could. Mimir was a young sun coalesced with its planets only a few hundred megayears ago from a nebula enriched in heavy atoms by earlier star generations. The system hadn’t yet finished condensing, as witness the haze around the sun and the rate of giant meteorite impacts. There had not been time for life to start.

  Thus Flandry’s thoughts flashed. They stopped when the shapes were murderously upon him.

  Two landed on his helmet. He heard the clicks, and then felt their astonishingly heavy impact. Looking down, he saw others at his waist, clinging to his legs, swarming around his boots. Jaws chomped and claws dug. They found the joints in his armor and went to work.

  No living thing smaller than a Llynathawrian elephant wolf should have been able to make an impression on the alloys and plastics that encased Flandry. He saw shavings peel off and fall like sparks of glitter. He saw water vapor puff white from the first pinhole by his left ankle. The creature that made it gnawed industriously on.

  Flandry yelled an obscenity. He shook one loose and managed to kick it. The shock of striking that mass hurt his toes. The bug didn’t arc far, nor was it injured. It sprang back to the fray. Flandry was trying to pluck off another. It clung too strongly for him.

  He drew his blaster, set it to needle beam and low intensity, laid the muzzle against the carapace and pulled trigger.

  The creature did not smoke or explode or do whatever else a normal organism would. But after two or three seconds it let go, dropped to the ground and lay inert.

  The rest continued with their senseless, furious attack. Flandry cooked them off him and slew with a series of energy bolts those that hadn’t reached him. No organism that size, that powerful, that heavily shelled, ought to have been that vulnerable to his brief, frugal beams.