Chapter Sixteen
The aircar’s central compartment had luxury seating for eight. Sun, Vesey, and the eight ordinary crewmen found it uncomfortably roomy: spacers liked close quarters or they’d have found some other line of work. The rear compartment had jumpseats for servants as well as cargo tie-downs; the expedition’s food and luggage rode there now.
Daniel and Hogg were on either end of the bench seat in front, sandwiching their driver/guide Dorotige, the attendant Daniel had met guarding the Captal’s gate. Today he wore a gray jacket over loose khaki trousers instead of the clown suit he’d been in for the party.
“I wish to God that you’d packed those guns away in the back,” Dorotige said, shouting over the sound of wind and the fans’ vibration. The central compartment was slung in elastic to isolate the passengers from the noise of operation, but the driver had no such luxury. “Or left them back in Spires, better yet. There’s nothing bigger than your thumbnail on South Land.”
“You’ve been here before,” Daniel said, looking down at a plain broken by ravines where russet vegetation found enough moisture to grow. In the forward distance rose sandstone hills which the wind had weathered out of the surrounding clay. “My crewmen haven’t, and this isn’t the sort of business they’re trained for anyway. They’re more comfortable being armed.”
In truth, Daniel’s only real concern about the expedition was the same one the Captal’s man had voiced. The spacers weren’t for the most part any more familiar with hand weapons than they were with camping in the middle of a barren desert. Even though he’d ordered them to leave the guns’ power switches off, there was a real chance that somebody’d put a bullet through himself, a fellow, or the car’s drive fans.
“They’ll be all right, buddy,” Hogg said. “Most of this lot know which end the slug comes out of. And I told ’em that if anybody looses off a round, it’d better kill me straight out, because I’m sure as shit going to cut his throat if it don’t.”
Hogg was quite capable of exaggeration. He was also capable of cutting somebody’s throat. Daniel hoped the comment was in the former category, but he even more hoped that he’d never have to learn.
An intercom connected the vehicle’s three compartments, but Sun used his helmet’s unit channel to ask, “Captain? What’s the ETA now? We ought to be getting close, right?”
“Hold one,” Daniel said, flipping down his visor and cueing the geographical overlay. It didn’t show what he expected it to. Frowning, he used the thumb dial under his left ear to increase the scale until the destination pip showed on the same screen as the point where the helmet’s inertial navigation system placed the aircar. They were to the north of the plotted ruins and well inland of them as well.
“Dorotige,” Daniel said without raising his voice more than the noise level required. Hogg must have heard something in the tone, because he reached into his pocket.
“Yeah?” Dorotige muttered.
There was a snick from Hogg’s side of the compartment. “Look at the master when he’s talking to you, fishbait,” Hogg said. He didn’t speak loudly either, but with the point of a seven-inch knife blade resting against Dorotige’s throat, he didn’t have to.
“What the hell!” Dorotige screamed. The aircar lurched sideways. If Hogg hadn’t been very fast, the jolt would have done exactly what the driver was afraid of; but while you could fault Hogg’s judgment occasionally, Daniel was pretty sure his servant would never kill anybody that he didn’t mean to. He had the knife back and closed before Dorotige managed to spit himself on it.
Daniel steadied the control yoke with his left hand, bringing the car straight and level again. He said, “We aren’t heading for the ruins like we’re supposed to be, Dorotige. Why is that?”
“What do you mean not the ruins?” the driver shouted, angry and terrified at the same time. He pointed through the windscreen toward the ground five hundred feet below. “What the hell do you think that is down there? Look, right at the bottom of the hill, there! We’re here, you—”