The native officers—Captain, Lieutenant, Bosun, Engineer, Gunner and Purser—had been given four ounces, a quantity all the spacers thought was safe. Either the batch had been spiked with a little too much hydraulic alcohol, or the local tipple was pretty mild. All six were drunk: two sleeping, two arguing violently about something Daniel couldn’t understand, and the Captain was singing loudly with his eyes closed.
The Lieutenant had gotten extremely affectionate with Barnes. Under other circumstances Barnes might have been interested, but as things were he’d held the native’s arms until Dasi laid the fellow out with a judicious punch to the jaw.
Having delivered his ultimatum, Klimov stalked to the waiting aircar. Valentina walked behind him, throwing Daniel a bemused glance over her shoulder. It was going to be crowded with eight aboard, but it wasn’t a long flight.
Daniel glanced at Adele, standing beside him. She’d been reading something projected on her visor—her handheld data unit was stowed—but she looked up when she caught his movement. “I’m ready,” she said simply, answering the question he hadn’t needed to ask.
Daniel nodded and they walked together to the aircar. Hogg and Barnes, who’d be driving, had walked the Captain into the front seat between them. The bench wasn’t made for three, but planting the native between two strong men was the best way to be sure he wouldn’t decide to get out at a hundred feet in the air.
“Your excellency,” Daniel said. “Valentina. If you’d be so good as to take the rear pair of seats. That’ll allow me to sit directly behind our guest in case he needs steadying in the air.”
In case he needs to be cold-cocked, of course; but if Daniel said that, the Count in his present mood might insist he was able to take care of that if it became necessary. Daniel didn’t trust Klimov to act as quickly as might be required.
“Come, Georgi,” the Klimovna said, leading her husband into the back before he could decide to protest. The Count was a generally pleasant companion, but his tipsy fall into the muck had made him ridiculous in his own eyes . . . and, he correctly suspected, in the eyes of his wife and the spacers as well. He was in a foul mood.
Tovera smiled her cobra smile as she and Adele got in, squeezing themselves to opposite sides of the middle bench so that Daniel could sit between them. Tovera, like Hogg and Daniel himself, carried a sub-machine gun from the corvette’s arms locker. It was a good weapon for dense forest. In addition she had her own smaller weapon in a holster under her left shoulder.
The Captain was still singing, but the words were so slurred that Daniel wasn’t sure whether they were meant to be Universal. Barnes brought the drive fans up to 90% power, angling them against one another so that the aircar hopped and quivered like a hound straining at its leash.
“If you’re ready, Barnes,” Daniel said, “then take us along the plotted course at just above the treetops—and no faster than you have to, either.”
Barnes synched the fans and poured on the coal. He’d chosen too steep an angle for the present load: the car leaped upward at 30 degrees for a few seconds, then mushed and would’ve crashed into the slough if Barnes hadn’t slammed his yoke forward to drop the nose. They picked up speed in a swoop that he converted into a climbing turn just before they plunged into the forest. The car zoomed over the trees and kept rising till Barnes tilted the yoke at five hundred feet—overcorrecting again but this time with enough height that the maneuver wasn’t immediately dangerous.
The Count and Countess were shouting in terror. Daniel wasn’t especially worried, though now that he thought about it he understood why the Klimovs would be. He supposed he’d gotten so used to Barnes’ driving that it didn’t bother him any more than walking along a spar in the Matrix did.
The native in the front seat sat upright and stared in all directions, his eyes seeming twice the size they’d been when he closed them on the ground. “I’m dead!” he screamed. Daniel put a hand on the fellow’s shoulders, but he stayed firm in his seat. “I’m dead! I’m in Hell!”