AT THE PALIM-GEDEMONDAS BORDER
The Yaxa came in for a landing with a great beating of its tremendous wings. Coming down, it saw the large number of troops and materiel now massed at the border. It looked good. Convincing.
It had been a long trip, and almost a fatal one. The creature touched the ground gently and went down on all eight tentacles toward the portable command center, a huge circuslike tent established just inside Palim. The Yaxa were born to the air; on the ground they looked awkward and lumbering, never quite properly balanced because of the long folded wings along their back. In the air, however, they were the graceful masters.
The Yaxa entered the big tent, its huge death’s head, impassive as always, searching out someone of rank, finally spotting someone who would do over by the big situation map.
Communication between Yaxa was by a complex combination of noises from the thoracic regions and odd sounds made by antennae and slight wing rustles. Their names were untranslatable, so, when dealing with other races, they adopted nicknames that often were nonsense, ironic, or just plain crazy, and stuck to them for multiracial operations.
“Marker reporting in, Section Leader,” the newcomer said.
The section leader nodded. “Glad to see you back, Marker. We had begun to think that the enemy had gotten you.”
“It was close,” the advance scout said. “Those damned little blue men with their electricity and their flying horses. The Cebu are too clumsy to worry about, but even though the horses are slow and awkward, it only needs a touch to get you.”
The section leader knew this. She knew, in fact, as much about the physical, mental, and technological characteristics of the Makiem alliance as anyone could. The other side had had a much rougher trip than they; any force that could hammer its way through that much resistance so quickly was a force to be reckoned with.
“How far off are they?” the military commander inquired.
“Down the other side,” Marker responded. That meant at least three hundred kilometers, a good distance, and the plain that was the logical camp for the final campaign was only a hundred or so kilometers south of their present position. They would be first. “They’re a little slow with their airlift over Alestol, too. After all, they have to move everything they need a fair distance nonstop-more than either the flying horses or Cebu can normally fly. A lot of them are into exhaustion now; the ones who land soon find themselves put to sleep by those big, fat plants and then eaten. Don’t sell those Alestolians short, either-some of them have translators, would you believe, and they have a hypnotic gas as well. If one of those ones with a translator gets an Agitar or a Cebu, they’re sent back against their own people!”
The section leader chuckled dryly. “Oh, yes, I can . believe that. A rather large amount was transferred in Zone to get them those translators. I’m happy to see that the expenditure is paying for itself.” The tone changed, became more businesslike. “So how soon before they have a sufficient force to start the march?”
Marker was uncertain. “Two, three days at least. And maybe two more to move up to the plain. Call it five days.”
The Yaxa leader considered this. “You’re sure? As you know, we will be moving this afternoon; we should be in and mostly established on the plain by dark tomorrow. The advance party leaves at dawn by air. With luck we can hold it while our friends go after the engines.”
“Who’s going?” Marker asked, genuinely curious. “Some of the Lamotien, of course. Who else?” She knew that nobody would trust the Lamotien by themselves. They didn’t even trust them now.
“Only Yulin can assess the engines once located,” the section leader pointed out. “So we’ll send the Dasheen up. They’re better equipped for a nontech hex and narrow trails anyway, and they’re almost as big as the Gedemondas.”
“None of us?” Marker responded, appalled. “But how will we-?”
“We removed the guidance boxes from the bridge,” the Yaxa reminded her counterpart. “We’ll control it from the other end. But, no, up there there is no protection for the wings in the cold, and snow provides little traction. I think the Dasheen and Lamotien will keep each other honest. We’ll hold the plain for them.”
“But is it safe risking Yulin like that?” Marker wondered. “I mean, he’s the whole game, isn’t he?”
“No, the engines are. The only part of the ship that can’t be duplicated. If he gets us the engines, fine. If he doesn’t, what good is he to us anyway? To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t feel a bit sorry if some of those Dasheen bulls died.”
Marker nodded sympathetically. “Their system is not a logical one, and it grates to see them treated like that.”
“Unfortunately,” the section leader sighed, “that place is really a male’s paradise. You know that scientific study they’re always throwing up at everybody to prove male superiority? Well, we made the study, and they’re right. Evolutionary-speaking, those cows are mentally and physically designed to be dull-minded, willing slaves.”
“Well, at least we have better material to send into the cold mountains than the Makiem,” Marker said, changing the subject to something more pleasant. “The Cebu could walk up there, but never fly, and they’re terrible on the ground. The Makiem grow semi-dormant in extreme cold, and the Agitar’s flying horses are valueless at those altitudes.”
“But those Agitar can move well,” the Yaxa commander pointed out. “And there are protective coverings for Makiem. Don’t sell them short. They’ve gotten far already. It’s going to be the roughest battle yet for both sides in a few days.”
ANOTHER PART OF THE FIELD
Antor Trelig was both confident and optimistic. The war had gone well; they were in Gedemondas, and after all they’d been through, not a single one of the soldiers, commanders, and politicians believed they could be stopped.
An Agitar general came into the command tent and bowed slightly, handing him a report. He looked at it with interest, and the Makiem equivalent of a grin spread on his face.
“Has anyone else seen this?” he asked.
The Agitar shook her goatlike head. “No, sir. From the recon man who took it to the General Staff to you.”
It was a photograph; a big black-and-white glossy. It was fuzzy and grainy, taken through a very long lens from far away, and it still wasn’t quite close enough, but it showed the most important thing.
Most of the picture was white; more had been cropped in the blow-up. But there, on a rocky ledge, was a sleek, U-shaped object reflecting the sunlight, and there were not quite legible markings on the side.
He didn’t need to read them. He knew it had a symbol of a rising sun with a human face flanked by fourteen stars, and the huge legend NH-CF-1000-1 on the side, and, in smaller letters underneath, the words PEOPLE’S VICTORY.
It was the engine pod.
“How did you get this?” he asked, amazed. “I thought nobody could fly that high.”
“One of the Cebu scouts pushed himself to the limit,” the general replied. “On his third try he managed to get over the second string of mountains and found a deep, U-shaped glacial valley there. His eyes are good; he saw the reflection, above him, but knew that it was beyond his reach and range, so he fitted his longest lens and snapped as many pictures as he could with the glare filter on. This was the best.”
He had a sudden thought. “What about the Yaxa? Can’t they or those little imitator bastards find this, too?”
“Not a chance,” the general assured him. “The Yaxa can’t possibly fly high enough to clear that second range. I would have said no Cebu could, either, and the scout is half-dead as it is. He’ll be a hero if he survives. As for the Lamotien, remember they can only simulate other forms, not become them. They have a flying mode, yes, based on the Yaxa, but it’s highly modified to their form and requirements, and the wings are as thick as our own mounts’, far too heavy to clear that altitude. No, I think we have the advantage here.”
Trelig nodded, satisfied. “But they will get to the plain first,” he noted. “And our reports say that the Lamotien can neutralize an Agitar shock, and the Yaxa can fly rings around any of us.”
“It’s about even, all told,” the general admitted. “They’ll be dug in by the time we get there, well fortified, and they have to play only for time, nothing more. I suggest we do it a little differently.”
Trelig’s huge eyes enlarged in surprise. “Something new?”
The general nodded, and spread out a commercial-looking map on the table in front of them. It was a relief map of both Gedemondas and Dilla next door to the east, and it showed great relief and, more important, it had a lot of little dotted lines all over it. Trelig couldn’t read a word on it, though.
“It’s a Dillian guide and trail map,” the Agitar explained. “They sell them to interested people. There are rodents and other animals in that wilderness, and they trap them. The Gedemondas don’t seem to mind or bother them, although our Dillian sources say they don’t know much more about the creatures than we do. They don’t overdo the hunting, and that’s been the balance.”
Trelig nodded, understanding. “So these little dotted lines are hunting trails?” he guessed.
“Exactly,” acknowledged the goat-woman. “And those little rectangles are Dillian shelters set up along the trails. The trails are mostly Gedemondan, not Dillian. I understand that too many Dillians get the locals upset, and they push a ton or two of snow down on them.”
That was an unpleasant prospect. He let it pass.
“Now, we’re here,” the Agitar continued, pointing to an area in the southwest corner. “The Yaxa will be here,” now pointing to the small plains area about two hundred kilometers north and slightly east, “and, if you look closely at the map, you’ll see something interesting.”
Trelig was ahead of her. At least three trails came within two kilometers of where they now sat, east of them a bit. One seemed fairly low.
“Twelve hundred sixty-three meters,” the Agitar told him. “Low enough for an unobtrusive air drop.”
“Then we might not have to fight at all” he exclaimed, excited. “We can beat them by going in with a small force and heading straight for the engines, while they have to poke and hunt!”
The Agitar shook her head slowly in the negative. “No, there will have to be a battle, if only to cover you. They are not dumb. If we didn’t move as predicted they would smell a rat and they would have you. No, the battle goes on, everything as planned. The only difference will be that we will not have any rush to win it, or take needless risks. When you secure the engines, others can be sent to try and disassemble them, if that’s possible, or figure out how to move them, anyway. By the time whatever force the Yaxa sends gets there, we’ll have already won the objective, no matter how the battle goes.”
Trelig liked the plan. “Okay, so it’s me and some Agitar males. But what protects me from the cold? I shut down below freezing, you know. Can’t help it.”
The general got up and walked out of the tent, then came back in with a large carton. She opened the carton and pulled out a strange, silvery costume with a huge dark globe.
“You didn’t know we have had five Makiem Entries in the past century, then?” she said, satisfied. “And we don’t need the mechanical stuff, either. Air you’ve got.”
He grinned again. Things were going his way now, as they had always done. The Obie computer, New Pompeii, the Well World itself-all were within his grasp.
The general excused herself, and he sat there a minute or two, alone, looking at the map. Then he sighed, got up, and slow-hopped to a curtained-off passage between this tent and his portable living quarters. He pulled it aside. There was a flash of movement, and an object landed on the bed in the far corner.
She could hop quickly, she could, he thought admiringly.
It had been a marriage of convenience, of course. All Makiem marriages were marriages of convenience in a race that had no sex except one week a year, underwater, when they had nothing but. The convenience of the scoundrels that ran Makiem, the inconvenience of himself, naturally. She was the good minister’s daughter, and, if anything, she was slicker and nastier than her father.
What a team we’d make, he sighed once again, // only we could be on the same side!
“You needn’t pretend, my dear. You know everything and I know it, so what’s the difference? You can’t go this time.”
“I go where you go,” she responded. “It is law and custom. And you cannot stop me!”
He chuckled. “But it’s cold up there, baby! What good would you be as a sleeping beauty?”
She reached over, opened a wicker basket, and removed something. It was a slightly different design, but unmistakably a spacesuit.
He gaped. “How long have you had that thing?” he asked.
“Since Makiem,” she replied smugly.
CAMP 43, GEDEMONDAS
The trails weren’t bad. Gedemondans, it was known, were large creatures, and limited but steady use by the horselike Dillians had made them even more comfortable, on the whole around two meters wide.
It was a strange party that set off from the chilly shack into the snow cover: Tael, the Dillian guide, was in the lead, then the two Lata, occasionally walking but more often riding on Tael’s back, then Renard leading the winged pegasus, Doma, with the strange figure of Mavra Chang tied between wings and neck. The air was becoming cold; there was little conversation between them, nor was much possible without yelling, for blowing wind howled through the rocky clefts as if it, too, were a strange and living creature of this strangest of worlds.
It was only on the occasional breaks, done mostly for Renard’s benefit, that they could say anything. The plain was far behind; the twists and turns that the switchbacked trail forced upon them had all but the confident Tael totally lost, and the bright snow reflecting the glare of the sun, even when cut with sun goggles, made distance impossible to judge. They were tiny figures moving in a sea of white.
The trail itself seemed often lost in the snow, yet Tael went on as if it were a paved and marked highway, never hesitating in the slightest-and the footing was always there.
After they had been climbing for what seemed like a full day, they rounded one more mountain curve and, suddenly, the plain was spread out below them once more.
“Wait!” Mavra called to them. “Look! They’ve arrived!”
They stopped, and saw immediately what she meant. Tiny puffs of orange seemed everywhere in the air, and large numbers of creatures could be seen erecting tents and digging into the rock that was the start of the mountains. The cabin was invisible, but they all knew that, if it was there at all, it was being converted into a fort.
“Look at them!” Tael breathed. This was her first taste of armies and war. “There must be thousands of them!”
“The Yaxa,” Vistaru said flatly. “They will be coming up only a day or so behind us. This is not good.”
Tael laughed confidently. “Let them try and find the trail!” she boasted. “Without a guide they haven’t a prayer!”
Mavra turned and looked out at the sky. There were thin, wispy clouds and an occasional big, fat cumulus puff, but it was basically crystal clear.
“They’ll follow our own tracks,” she told them. “There’s no snow, nothing to cover them. They might mistake them for animal tracks, or Dillians alone, but where a four-footed animal or Dillian can go, so can they.”
The centaur frowned. A good snow guide, Mavra thought, but naive as hell. Dillia must be a very peaceful place.
“We could lay a false trail,” Tael suggested. “Run tracks off a cliff. It’s not that hard. The powder here could be brushed for a few hundred meters.”
Mavra considered it. “All right, do it,” she told them. “But it won’t do much. Slow them up, get a couple, that’s all. Better than nothing, though.”
They rigged the deception fairly simply. The Dillian girl picked a point, walked out to where there seemed to be continuous snow, then stopped. Renard removed his small snowshoes and followed gingerly behind in her tracks, then guided her feet as she backed up into her old tracks.
Mavra surveyed the results. “A little too deep,” she said critically. “An experienced tracker would catch on, but I think it’ll work. Does that snow fall off there and I just can’t see it, or what?”
Tael laughed. “This is the edge of what we call Makorn Glacier. A river of slowly moving ice with a snow-cover on top. There is a crevasse there at least three hundred meters down and a good ten meters wide. I could almost feel the edge of it.”
The small Lata then went back after they went around another bend with Tael’s fur hat and used it to fill in the tracks. Not an expert job, but they weren’t trying to fool experts.
They went on, into the hex and up at the same time. More frequent rest periods were called for. The air was becoming thin.
During one of these stops, Mavra said, “Still no sign of the Gedemondans. Hell, if they’re big bastards there must be awfully few of them to be this invisible.”
Tael shrugged. “Who knows how many there are? Sometimes there seem to be a hundred sneaking around the mountain tops; sometimes you will go completely through the hex without seeing one. That is not the trouble here, though.”
“Huh?” they all said at once.
She nodded. “We’re being watched. I can feel it. I’m not sure where they are, but there is certainly more than one. I could barely hear some intermittent deep breathing.”
They looked around, suddenly nervous. No one could see anything.
“Where?” Renard pressed.
Tael shook her head. “I don’t know. Mountain sounds are deceptive. Close, though. They have networks of trails they, ah, discourage us from using.”
“They’d have to,” Mavra said dryly. She strained but could hear nothing but the howling wind. The working part of her ears was still the same as ever, good but not fantastic; all the bigger ears had done was to give her a little better localization and add a slightly hollow sound to everything, which the wind magnified.
She was freezing to death, too, despite being covered by an amazingly resourceful patchwork set of clothes. Her face and particularly her ears were killing her; still, it was no worse on her than on the others, and they didn’t complain.
“Let’s keep going,” Hosuru said after a moment’s listening. “If they’re shadowing us, they’ll either make a move or they won’t. Just keep listening and looking.”
“Don’t strain too hard,” Tael warned. “If they don’t want to be seen, they won’t be. All bright white like the snow, they could be ten meters away and out in the open and you’d never know it.”
They pressed on.
They reached Camp 43 before sundown, but Tael insisted that this would be their stop for the night. “We couldn’t possibly make the next camp before nightfall, and you don’t want to be out here after dark.”
“I hope those Yaxa or whatever feel the same way,” Renard worried.
“I hope they don’t,” Mavra responded. “That’ll kill a lot more of them a lot quicker. Vistaru? Hosuru? You’re nocturnals. You want to try this trail in the dark?”
Vistaru laughed. “Not in the dark, not in the daylight, not anytime without a guide who knows what she’s doing!” she responded.
The crude shelter was built for two Dillians; the stalls were fine for Tael and Doma, and the others just sort of scrunched in as best they could. With the supplies, it was hard to close the door, and the old iron fireplace was so close to them they had to choose freezing or burning. But, it would do.
It had been a trying day; they were all dead tired, half-snowblind, and ready for a rest. There seemed little point in setting a guard; if the Gedemondans wanted to do them in, they could do it any time. If they wanted contact, well and good. And if the Yaxa coalition party somehow managed to close in on them, they had little means to fight it anyway. As the fire burnt down, they slept.