“Yeah, I think so. Probably gonna have a hell of a bruise on my hip, but it’s no big deal. The hardest part is getting back on my feet.” He made it with her help but needed to lurch forward and hold on to something. “Great body for running, particularly in sand or gravel, but it’s just not good with the casual stuff.” He was calming down now and took stock of the surroundings. “Wow! Feels like home, only worse! This is really hot!”
“It’s at least as hot as Erdom,” Mavra agreed, “but with an ocean’s humidity. Will you be all right here? I want to check on the girls in the back.”
“Yeah, sure, I’ll be okay. I’m just trying to get steady enough to go down and check on Alowi.” He gave a long, relieved exhale. “At least we made it!”
“Don’t feel so confident yet,” Mavra warned him. “They’re still back there, and they’re close. If we don’t lose them, we’ll have to fight, and we’ll be well within their gun range here. This is semitech, remember, not nontech. Cannons do their usual nasty job here.”
He stared after Mavra as she went aft to check on the Dillians, then said aloud, under his breath, “Yeah, thanks for telling me that cheery set of facts.”
The air felt wet and sticky, and there seemed to be a light rain or mist falling that did nothing to cool things off. He looked to the right of the ship and thought he saw some kind of shimmering, a distortion even of the night fog and mist.
The captain was running directly down the hex barrier, just inside the Dlubine side.
He shook his head and decided ne’d better put his trust in the ones who knew what they were doing and tend to his own business, which was going below.
It was a mess there; the turn had spilled more down there than up on deck, but Alowi seemed all right and relieved to see him.
“I—I was afraid something happened to you up there,” she told him.
“I fell. Hip’s gonna feel like hell later, but I’m all right. What about you?”
“I rolled over, but once things straightened out, I was all right. Everything was flying or rolling around . . . I just did not know what was happening. Come—let me heal your pain.”
“I’m all right for now.”
“Please! Now is the best time. The last time you almost died from a bad bruise. Let me give you what you need to keep it from happening again!”
It suddenly struck him. The key to the entire Erdomese way and why things were more dangerous for him than he’d realized.
The male Erdomese’s weakness, its Achilles’ heel, was that he and all the rest of them had a kind of hemophilia. The females, in that second set of breasts, carried more than spare water; they carried a clotting factor. The women’s nearly total dependence on the men for most things was counterbalanced by the men’s absolute need to have that which only the women could make readily available. They hadn’t told him or warned him about it. Why would they? Between their customs and their beliefs, and with such a huge proportion of females to males, they took it for granted. No wonder the men traveled with as many wives as they could afford to support!
For the first time he realized just how vulnerable he actually was to things that others took for granted. Even without cultural codes or his feelings for her, he would have to protect Alowi with every ounce of his strength and life. If anything happened to her, if they were even separated, out here, so many miles from Erdom, he was dead meat.
“My, that was positively thrilling,” Anne Marie gushed. “Almost like one of those James Bond thrillers.”
“I could do with a little less of that, particularly out here,” Tony responded. Although Dillians had a natural ability to swim, it took a lot of muscle power to do so, and they wouldn’t have much of a chance out here in the middle of the ocean, any more than a common horse might have. Sufficient to keep them from drowning in a river or enabling them to make a quick swim to shore or a raft, but considering their forward center of gravity, out here they’d be dead ducks.
“Well, I’m glad to see that you two are all right,” Mavra told them. “They’re slick, these guys. We’re outside any capability the gunboat might have to spot us electronically and out of range of any of his fancy weapons, too. Hugging this hex boundary, we’re in the natural mist and fog that’s usually at such a border, and under sail, there’s little noise.”
Tony didn’t feel as confident. “Wouldn’t they know that, too? And couldn’t they really bear down on us if it were steam against sail in this little wind?”
“They do, and yeah, they could overtake us, but they have 180 degrees of possibility. They’ll overshoot coming in and have to turn when they see they lost us, and they’ll do it gently. It takes time. Then they have to decide which way to turn. They’ll have to cut their engines and run silently to see if they can hear us, and when they don’t, they’ll know we’re under sail. From that point they’ll be farther behind and have a fifty-fifty chance of tracking us or missing us entirely. If they don’t fire up their boilers, they’ll be slower than we are in this slight wind, since they’re a heavier boat, and if they do, we’ll hear them and have a straight free shot at their bow from the stern gun. I don’t think they’ll risk that. They’ll pick a direction and run slowly along it until dawn, which is still many hours away. By that time the captain will have slipped away.”
The captain in fact was waiting until they ran into the edge of one of the local storms, and when the first one was spotted, not too far from the border position, he took a chance and eased out of the cover of the boundary mist and, when nothing was obviously in sight, headed for it.
It made for a rough introduction to Dlubine, but they were alive, the ship was in good shape, and they were free of pursuit by dawn and able to engage the boilers once more and proceed in the heat regardless of the wind.
By midday there was some debate among both passengers and crew as to whether it was worse up top or below. Most chose to be on deck and relaxed under whatever cover they could rig up. Ultimately, it became too hot for anyone to even handle the boilers, and they went to sail and more or less just drifted along, taking four-hour shifts at the wheel.
All five of the passengers remained under the makeshift canvas shelter of the centauresses on the afterdeck. All had removed whatever clothing they’d had on; it was too hot to be wearing anything if one didn’t have to.
It was a particular shock for the two Erdomese, who were used to extreme heat, but theirs had been basically a desert environment and their bodies were designed to retain and recycle moisture. Both were as miserable as could be.
“I got a reading from the wheelhouse thermometer when I went forward for some water,” Lori managed. “Doing a rough conversion, assuming that the top of the mark with the big line is boiling and the black line on the bottom is freezing, I’d say well over 50 degrees Celsius—somewhere over 120 Fahrenheit, Anne Marie.”
“Goodness! How do people survive here?” she responded. Dillians at least could perspire over most of their huge bodies, but they required a lot of water.
“Because the people are a mile or so straight down,” Mavra reminded her. “Down there it’s probably a nice, comfortable day, although from what I can tell they’re nocturnals, like the captain.”
“I wish I was,” Lori groaned.
There wasn’t much more conversation after that. It was too hot to do just about anything.
Still, there was a moderate breeze, which helped slightly, taking them almost due west. Again, it was the short leg about twenty kilometers off the Agon coast, a bit too close to avoid the risk of more intercostal patrols but comfortably far enough out not to be seen or detected from shore. The only hope was to make full speed once night fell and be out of this boiling hotbox by sunup the next day. For all any of them cared at this point, Fahomma would be welcome even if it had icebergs and blowing snows.
Several times in the distance one ship or another would be sighted, but none of them ever closed with them, and such traffic was to be expected in this region. Some were even under steam, demonstrating clearly that whatever was stoking their fires might possibly have Satan as a relative but definitely bore little genetic kinship with anybody on the Star Runner.
Who was doing what became moot after a while as all of them drifted into varying degrees of uncomfortable sleep.
Nightfall wasn’t exactly cool, but it definitely had a psychological effect on everyone. The captain took the wheel, and the weird creature who usually took care of everything below decided it was cool enough to fire up the engines. The job wasn’t physically taxing—whatever fuel they used appeared to be a syrupy liquid stored in large tanks deep in the hull and moved to the engines by some sort of vacuum system—but the boilers got hot, and steam was always dangerous and needed constant monitoring and occasional release and regulation.
Captain Hjlarza wasn’t very friendly or communicative, but Mavra had managed to establish at least a working relationship with the vicious-looking Stulz, who reminded her of nothing more than a gigantic fruit bat although she doubted he could ever fly no matter what the leathery wing material might do otherwise.
“How long to the border?” she asked him.
“Dawn. Perhaps a bit longer if nothing happens to delay us. There are always patrols about in these waters, and a full day is long enough for word to have been passed along a pretty good chain, I’d suspect. Still, I expected if we were going to be chased it would have been during the day, when we’d have no chance of running, boilers down, and everyone at their worst. No, I’d say at this point our most probable roadblock would be a series of storms. It always rains at night here. All that ocean went up during the day and has to come back down.”
“What’s this Fahomma like, then?”
“Oh, not too bad. Nontech, which really helps us. Under sail there’s nothing that can catch us that might be able to hurt us. Warm, but cooler and more comfortable than this, but it tends to rain steadily for weeks at a time over parts of it. We will transfer our cargo there if all goes well and thus be free of patrol worries.”
“Off Agon? They’re smuggling into a high-tech hex?”
“Who knows? It goes to another freighter, and it’s off here. Where it goes from there is not my concern.”
“Well, it can’t be soon enough for us, either. I think everybody except me is ready for dry land at this point.”
Everyone, from Mavra to Lori, Alowi, and the Dillians, was entranced by the colorful underwater lights that became quickly clear as darkness fell.
“Those can’t be electric- or nuclear-powered, can they?” Lori asked, as always as curious about how things worked as about how pretty they looked.
“Not likely,” Tony responded. “I rather think they are chemical. Still, the layout, like a vast city-state deep under the water, makes you wonder what kind of creatures they are and what their lives must be like, does it not? I have tended to just regard the ocean as ocean very much like back on Earth. I suspect most of us have. But it takes something like this to remind us that there is an entire alternative set of people, species, and cultures down there. How sad that much of the contact between us up here and those down there involves drugs and crooked elements.”
“Well, we know there are centaurs here, don’t we, dear? One must wonder if there are also, somewhere, mermaids.”
The night was still hot but bearable to a degree, although nobody felt all that energetic. At least there were some very pretty things to look at and a few impressive if less than welcome thunderstorms as well. Still, both captain and crew seemed well satisfied with the progress and also with the fact that the only thing that really was approaching them was dawn.
It was heating up pretty quickly when they reached the Fahomma border, and the captain ordered all steam shut down and shifted entirely to sail. The area ahead, through the hex barrier, looked somewhat forbidding, dark and gray, in sharp contrast to the brightness of Dlubine. As they passed through, the temperature dropped but the humidity got even worse—it was raining steadily, although not the hard driving rain and high winds of a Dlubinian storm.
Late that night, while under full sail, they passed a small trawler that gave the correct recognition sign. Captain Hjlarza was both puzzled and alarmed at this break with procedure and somewhat suspicious of it, but he turned and paralleled the trawler’s course. From the deck of the other ship, something big and barely seen in the rain and darkness threw a spear attached to a long rope to the deck of the Runner. Zitz ran to it, removed the small attached tube, and then pried the spear from the deck and tossed it overboard so that the other ship could retrieve it. The mate then brought the tube to the captain, who frowned and opened it, pulled out a sheet of paper, read it, then put it with his grids and had Zitz toss the tube, both ends open, into the sea, where it would fill with water and sink.
“Trouble, Captain?” Zitz asked a bit nervously.
“New orders. Don’t like ’em. Not at all happy about ’em, but orders are orders. They will owe us all for this, though, Zitz. They will owe us a lot. Cost us a damned fortune, this will. Take a look at it when you get the chance and then very quietly pass it on to the crew. I’ll need you all tomorrow night, but if anybody spills the beans, they’re dead meat.”
When Zitz did get the opportunity to look at it, he saw just what the captain meant and liked it even less. It was a new, local grid, a very specific and specialized one, for a new job. Still, there was no question of not doing it. They followed the grids only for a rendezvous, yet the trawler had shown no problems at all finding them in this weather in a nontech hex. Even the authorities had failed to do that except by chance. You didn’t mess with the kind of people who could pull off that trick if you wanted to keep on living.
The next day, the ocean was relatively smooth, although it continued to rain. The steady, light rain didn’t cause any real problems for a sailing ship, and there was always something of a wind but rarely more than you wanted. The air temperature felt almost chilly, although in fact it was twenty-six degrees Celsius or better. The contrast, however, with the neighboring hotbox was dramatic.
Mavra sensed a little difference, perhaps a bit more coldness from the crew, but it wasn’t much and could have been put down to a number of things. She knew they’d gotten a message the previous night, and clearly the message had given them some nerves, but they didn’t really want to discuss what was in it.
About two hours after nightfall Captain Hjlarza swung in more toward the coast, almost without anyone noticing until they were too close to ignore it. They were still off Agon, a high-tech hex, and there were automated lights and electrically illuminated small settlements within view. Sensing that something wasn’t all that right, considering the officers’ aversion to getting in close to high-tech coastlines, Tony walked forward and alerted Mavra and the Erdomese, who were below staying dry. Mavra immediately came up on deck and saw that Tony was quite correct. She went to the captain.
“What’s this all about? I thought we weren’t stopping until Lilblod.”
“Change in orders. Special drop just up here,” the captain responded. “Stick around. You may find this interesting.”
They came in close, perhaps a hundred meters from shore, no more—close enough to see the hex barrier and the illuminated buoy that was just inside Agon. It was a relatively desolate part of the coast; there were a couple of individual lights atop what might have been high cliffs but nothing approaching a pier or settlement.
Two fairly good-sized black launches came out of the darkness just at the hex barrier, then turned so that the Star Runner could come alongside. Zitz and one of the spiders threw down ropes that tied the launches to the larger ship, then lowered rope ladders. Soon four heavily armed creatures climbed slowly up and onto the deck. All four resembled nothing so much as human-sized turtles without shells, wearing black outfits, and they carried what looked like a stylized futuristic automatic rifles over their shoulders and nasty-looking crossbows of equally advanced design in their hands.
Two of them walked over toward the bridge and spotted Mavra. The nasty-looking crossbows lowered and pointed straight at her.
“What is this?” she asked the captain, suddenly realizing that she was the drop.
“Sorry. Orders. Call the Erdomese man up on deck, very naturally. Try anything funny and I’ll kill his wife and the two Dillians. Be nice, no tricks, and I swear that I’ll deliver them to safety.”
“You swore you’d deliver me to safety,” she noted acidly.
“Quickly now. Just the man. And I didn’t give my word on that to you. I was paid to do it.”
“Yeah, and you’ll lose that fortune, too.”
“I hate the idea like the plague, but I’m ordered to give all the stuff back and report that we disposed of the thieves. A fortune’s no use at all to a dead man. Now—call him! Very pleasantly, since there’s nowhere he can go down there and all you can do by pulling anything is get your people killed. Don’t expect the Dillians to the rescue. Zitz and the other Agonese have them covered.”
She sighed. There wasn’t anything to do, and she didn’t doubt for an instant that he’d kill the others with hardly a thought even if she managed an escape. She’d gotten them into this; she couldn’t very well lead them to such an unnecessary doom. But why Lori?
She opened the door. “Lori? Can you come on deck for a minute? Got a problem here I think you can help with.”
“Yeah, sure,” the Erdomese replied from below. She heard him come out of the cabin and come slowly up the stairs, and it wasn’t until he’d squeezed out onto the main deck that he saw the situation and froze. “What the hell is this?” He paused and had that sinking feeling. “They caught us.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think these guys have anything at all to do with any government on this planet.”
“Move out into the open, hands up,” one of the Agonite gunmen hissed. “You! Big man! Bend over against the rail! Yes, that’s it!”
Mavra started forward, but large, extremely powerful hands seized her from behind and put a foul-smelling mask over her face. Gas! She barely had time to struggle and just saw two of them doing the same to Lori before she blacked out.
Dlubine
ever since gus had slid into the water, he’d had no contact with anyone for several days. He had looked on some of the islands for Brazil and Terry but hadn’t found any sign of them and wondered if, in fact, those were the same islands they’d wrecked on or if he’d been carried along farther in the chain before managing to make shore.
At any rate, he’d been unable to find the one with the lava coming down the side in that pattern, and that suggested that he was in the wrong place or at the very best on the wrong side.
It didn’t take him long to discover as well that the islands bore no sign of anything a Dahir could eat. Some of the insects were large enough, but they not only didn’t smell right, they smelled very much all wrong, and since being out on his own in this world he’d learned to trust his nose beyond all else. In any event, someone of his size couldn’t expect to sustain himself on those things for very long.
That meant getting off, and the nearest mainland was at least fifty, maybe a hundred kilometers away—there was no way of telling for sure, but even if he set off in the right direction, he’d be dead of exhaustion long before he arrived. He was already all in.
He was not, however, the only one who’d lost Brazil and Terry, as he discovered the second day on the island while weighing what few options he had. He heard it first, then saw it—a patrol boat, a big steamer with metal plates on its hull not unlike the one back at the island harbor. Maybe—no, probably—the one that had caught and sunk them!