It was the sort of web he loved. But he remembered, as a cold tautening, that a bullet was still the ultimate simplicity which clove all webs.
He took the cover off and began probing. He could not simply have given Kit the frequencies and wave shapes in a recognition signaclass="underline" because Ardazirho equipment would not be built just like Terran, nor calibrated in metric units. He must examine an actual set, dismantle parts, test them with oscilloscope and static meters — and, surreptitiously, modify it so that the required pattern would be emitted when a single hidden circuit was closed.
She watched him, as she should if she expected him to believe this was her means of escape. And doubtless the Ardazirho spy watched too, over a bugscreen. When Flandry’s job was done, it would be Svantozik who took this ship to Ogre, generated the signal, and saw what happened.
Because the question of whose side the Ymirite Dispersal truly was on, overrode everything else. If Flandry had spoken truth to Kit, the lords of Urdahu must be told without an instant’s pause.
The man proceeded, making up a pattern as he went and thinking wistfully how nice it would be if Ymir really did favor Terra. Half an hour later he resealed the unit. Then he spent another hour ostentatiously strolling around the turret examining all controls.
“Well,” he said at last, “we might as well go home, Kit.”
He saw the color leave her face. She knew what that sentence meant. But she nodded. “Let’s,” she whispered.
Flandry bowed her through the door. As she came down the companionway, the guards at its base got up. Their weapons aimed past her, covering Flandry, who strolled with a tigerish leisure.
Kit pushed through the line of guards. Flandry, still on the companionway, snatched at his pocket. The four guns leaped to focus on him. He laughed and raised empty hands. “I only wanted to scratch an itch,” he called.
Kit slipped a knife from the harness of one guard and stabbed him in the ribs.
Flandry dove into the air. A bolt crashed past him, scorching his tunic. He struck the deck with flexed knees and bounced. Kit had already snatched the rifle from the yelling warrior she had wounded. It thundered in her hands, point-blank. Another Ardazirho dropped. Flandry knocked aside the gun of a third. The fourth enemy had whipped around toward Kit. His back was to Flandry. The man raised the blade of his hand and brought it down again, chop to the skull-base. He heard neckbones splinter. The third guard sprang back, seeking room to shoot. Kit blasted him open. The first one, stabbed, on his knees, reached for a dropped rifle. Flandry kicked him in the larynx.
“Starboard lifeboat!” he rasped.
He clattered back into the turret. If the Ardazirho watcher had left the bugscreen by now, he had a few minutes’ grace. Otherwise, a nuclear shell would probably write his private doomsday. He snatched up the navigator’s manual and sprang out again.
Kit was already in the lifeboat. Its small engine purred, warming up. Flandry plunged through the lock, dogged it behind him. “I’ll fly,” he panted. “I’m more used to non-Terran panels. You see if you can find some bailing-out equipment. We’ll need it.”
Where the devil was the release switch? The bugwatcher had evidently quit in time, but any moment now he would start to wonder why Flandry and Party weren’t yet out of the spaceship — There! He slapped down a lever. A hull panel opened. Harsh sunlight poured through the boat’s viewscreen. Flandry glanced over its controls. Basically like those he had just studied. He touched the Escape button. The engine yelled. The boat sprang from its mother ship, into the sky.
Flandry aimed southward. He saw the fortress whirl dizzily away, fall below the horizon. And still no pursuit, not even a homing missile. They must be too dumbfounded. It wouldn’t last, of course … He threw back his head and howled out all his bottled-up laughter, great gusts of it to fill the cabin and echo over the scream of split atmosphere.
“What are you doin’?” Kit’s voice came faint and frantic. “We can’t escape this way. Head spaceward before they overhaul us!”
Flandry wiped his eyes. “Excuse me,” he said. “I was laughing while I could.” Soberly: “With the blockade, and a slow vessel never designed for human steering, we’d not climb 10,000 kilometers before they nailed us. What we’re going to do is bail out and let the boat continue on automatic. With luck, they’ll pursue it so far before catching up that they’ll have no prayer of backtracking us. With still more luck, they’ll blow the boat up and assume we were destroyed too.”
“Bail out?” Kit looked down at a land of stones and blowing ash. The sky above was like molten steel. “Into that?” she whispered.
“If they do realize we jumped,” said Flandry, “I trust they’ll figure we perished in the desert. A natural conclusion, I’m sure, since our legs aren’t so articulated that we can wear Ardazirho spacesuits.” He grew grimmer than she had known him before. “I’ve had to improvise all along the way. Quite probably I’ve made mistakes, Kit, which will cost us a painful death. But if so, I’m hoping we won’t die for naught.”
XIV
Even riding a grav repulsor down, Flandry felt how the air smote him with heat. When he struck the ground and rolled over, it burned his skin.
He climbed up, already ill. Through his goggles, he saw Kit rise. Dust veiled her, blown on a furnace wind. The desert reached in withered soil and bony crags for a few kilometers beyond her, then the heat-haze swallowed vision. The northern horizon seemed incandescent, impossible to look at.
Thunder banged in the wake of the abandoned lifeboat. Flandry stumbled toward the girl. She leaned on him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I think I twisted an ankle.”
“And scorched it, too, I see. Come on lass, not far now.”
They groped over tumbled gray boulders. The weather monitor tower rippled before their eyes, like a skeleton seen through water. The wind blasted and whined. Flandry felt his skin prickle with ultraviolet and bake dry as he walked. The heat began to penetrate his bootsoles.
They were almost at the station when a whistle cut through the air. Flandry lifted aching eyes. Four torpedo shapes went overhead, slashing from horizon to horizon in seconds. The Ardazirho, in pursuit of an empty lifeboat. If they had seen the humans below — No. They were gone. Flandry tried to grin, but it split his lips too hurtfully.
The station’s equipment huddled in a concrete shack beneath the radio transmitter tower. The shade, when they had staggered through the door, was like all hopes of heaven.
Flandry uncorked a water bottle. That was all he had dared take out of the spaceboat supplies; alien food was liable to have incompatible proteins. His throat was too much like a mummy’s to talk, but he offered Kit the flask and she gulped thirstily. When he had also swigged, he felt a little better.
“Get to work, wench,” he said. “Isn’t it lucky you’re in Vixen’s weather engineering department, so you knew where to find a station and what to do when we got there?”
“Go on,” she tried to laugh. It was a rattling in her mouth. “You built your idea aroun’ the fact. Let’s see, now, they keep tools in a locker at every unit—” She stopped. The shadow in this hut was so deep, against the fury seen through one little window, that she was almost invisible to him. “I can tinker with the sender, easily enough,” she said. Slow terror rose in her voice. “Sure, I can make it ’cast your message, ’stead o’ telemeterin’ weather data. But … I just now get to thinkin’ … s’pose an Ardazirho reads it? Or s’pose nobody does? I don’t know if my service is even bein’ manned now. We could wait here, an’ wait, an’—”