sixteen-day time of sunlight; fogs boiled and mists steamed, 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 area where the latter went behind the curve
of the world. Regin was half a dimness mottled with intricate cloud
patterns, half a shining like burnished steel.
A whitter of wind came in through the hull.
Behind Flandry, Djana said with unexpected wistfulness: “When the
courier’s gone, Nicky, will you hold me? 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 within recognized it was on a solid body and which way was
up. It rose. Once above atmosphere, it would take sights on beacons such
as Betelgeuse and lay a course to Irumclaw.
Except–yes! Djana wailed. Flandry whooped. The spark high above had
struck. As one point of glitter, the joined machines staggered across
the sky.
Flandry went to the viewscreen and set the magnification. The torpedo
had nothing but a parchment-thin aluminum skin, soon ripped 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 acumen 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’d happen,” Flandry murmured.
The flyer resumed its station. Presently three others joined it. “They
must’ve sensed our messenger, or been called,” Flandry said. “No use
trying to loft more, eh? We need their energy packs worse for other
things.”
Djana, who had stood numbed, cast her gun aside and crumpled weeping
into his arms. He stroked her hair and made soothing noises.
At last she pulled herself together, looked at him, and said, still
gulping and hiccoughing: “You’re glad, aren’t you?”
“Well, I can’t say I’m sorry,” he admitted.
“Y-y-you’d rather be dead than–”
“Than a slave? Yes, cliché or not, ‘fraid so.”
She considered him for a while that grew. “All right,” she said most
quietly. “That makes two of us.”
VI
—
He had 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 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
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, 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