Some of the Sissies were good shots, and a few were excellent. The picked detachment of twenty waiting on the shore with Daniel and the Klimovs could withstand the attack of hundreds of Morzangans armed with bows and spears.
But nobody on the Princess Cecile was Tovera’s equal with a pistol . . . unless it was Adele herself. As she’d said, that shouldn’t matter today.
Crewmen had unloaded the aircar while Adele sat at her console. She hadn’t seen it since Barnes flew staggeringly back to the Sissie in San Juan, barely able to stay airborne carrying the Count and three of the worst-injured spacers. Nobody’d mistake the vehicle for new, but the dents were hammered out and the twisted fan blades replaced.
Barnes stood beside the driver’s seat again; his friend Dasi was across the vehicle from him. Both cradled stocked impellers and were eyeing the vegetation fifty yards inland where the ground was dry enough to support sizeable trees. Most of the other spacers were looking that way too.
“There’s six men with spears at the edge of the jungle,” Tovera said in a low voice. “They’re watching us.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Adele said as she joined Daniel.
“With your permission, your excellency,” Daniel said to Klimov, “I’ll walk toward them alone. They’re probably afraid to come out in the face of our weapons. Hogg, hold this if you will.”
The Count didn’t even bother to shrug assent to what was obviously a pro forma request. Daniel offered Hogg his stocked impeller.
“Like hell you’re going without me!” Hogg snapped. He held out his own weapon to the nearest spacer. “Here, Castro,” he said. “Hold this for a bit while me and the master prove we’re bloody heroes.”
“I’ll go with the Lieutenant, Hogg,” Adele said quietly. “You can cover us from here.”
Hogg opened his mouth to protest, then closed it into a grin. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess there’s nothing I can do with a knife that you can’t handle your own way. Eh, Tovera?”
Tovera shrugged. Her smile could’ve cut glass.
“I’m glad to have your company, Mundy,” Daniel said with a grin that melted the public formality of the words. “It’s always reassuring to know that whatever information I need will be immediately available.”
They stepped forward, side by side. Near the ship, plasma had seared the ground cover into a twisted mat over mud which had dried to a crust. It bore Adele’s weight, but Daniel repeatedly broke through and splashed his boots and trouser legs.
“This is awkward going . . . ,” he murmured, grinning. “But by landing in the slough, I didn’t risk the reflected exhaust flipping us over on our back as I would on dry land. I think of the mud as one of life’s minor trade-offs.”
“I don’t mind the mud,” Adele said. “But nobody else aboard is afraid you’d botch a landing, so I don’t see why you should be.”
“Ah, perhaps so that nobody else has reason to be afraid,” Daniel said. He raised his left arm, palm forward, and waved to the brush twenty yards away. Trees more than a hundred feet tall rose in a green/black backdrop slightly farther inland.
“Good day, gentlemen!” he called. “We’re visitors from Cinnabar, and we hope you’ll accept gifts from us in return for our intrusion.”
“Do they have atlatls?” Adele asked in an undertone. “Spear-throwers, that is?”
“Uncle Stacey didn’t say anything about that,” Daniel said, “but of course it wasn’t the sort of thing that interested him. Mind, we’re far too close ourselves for that to matter.”
A lanky man nearly seven feet tall rose from the brush. He wore only a feather breechclout, but for a moment Adele mistook his tattoos for a woven garment covering his torso from neck to elbows. His spear was made from a thin jointed reed. Adele noted with a flush of pleasure that it was fitted into a knobbed stick whose leverage would more than double the cast possible with an unaided arm.
“What gifts?” the man demanded. He spoke Universal, the pre-Hiatus trade language, with a thick but intelligible accent. Where he wasn’t tattooed, his skin was startlingly white, and his red hair didn’t seem to be dyed. “Do you have slash?”