"We knew the Oberon pirates had cleaned out the Castle. We watched what was left of your Lance heading down the Avenue Coraza toward the spaceport. But by daybreak, it looked like the pirates had pulled out of the Castle and followed them. There was a lot of gunfire going on at the port.
"I figured the pirates would be back to the Castle soon, but I thought I might find out what happened, and maybe find out if the Sarge had gotten away."
Grayson saw Riviera in his mind's eye once more, kicking back in slow-motion horror across the well deck of a hovercraft transport, blood geysering from half a dozen shocking wounds. "Sergeant Riviera... he was killed. I was there."
"I know," Claydon said softly. "I found him in the Vehicle Bay. And then I heard you groan, and saw you were still alive.
"There was an awful lot of blood on your head. The doctor said scalp wounds bleed a lot, and I think that's why they left you. They must have thought you'd been shot clean through the head, and left you for dead. But the bullet just creased your scalp." Claydon touched the left side of Grayson's head. "Here."
Grayson repeated the gesture, and felt the burn of the grazing wound under the bandages. He remembered the sight of the attacher's submachine gun leveled at his face, and suppressed a shudder. The man must have fired only a single shot and not checked the results closely. If he'd fired that deadly little weapon on full auto...
"I put you on a skimmersled I found undamaged in a storage area and brought you out. Doc Jamis said you have a slight skull fracture, but that there was no brain damage, and youll recover."
"Thank you," Grayson said, feeling how inadequate were the words.
Again, Claydon shrugged. "I couldn't very well just leave you there." He paced away from the window, passed close by Grayson's bed. "Like I said, if you want to thank us, you'll hurry up and get better and then get out of here. If the anti-Commonwealthers find out we're keeping you here..."
Grayson remembered the riots, the burnings, the screaming mobs of people when rumors first circulated through the city that Trellwan was being turned over to Hendrik III. "Yeah, I can imagine."
"Can you? I doubt that!" Claydon's bitterness was fully visible now. "This city, this entire planet is wide open to Hendrik's pirates now... and it's YOUR fault."
"Hey! Not MINE. I didn't have anything to do..."
"Your people then, same difference! Look, I thought Trellwan was a protectorate of the Commonwealth! Why abandon us? Why hand us over to those monsters?"
"Are they that bad?"
"I don't remember much of their last raid," Claydon said. "Just confused pictures of people running... a night sky on fire... a cave crowded with scared and screaming people... I was pretty young at the time. But I remember my mother. She was killed when they burned Sarghad... killed or carried off as a slave." He shook his head. "I prefer to think she was killed."
Grayson was silent for a long moment, eyes shut. He'd had no idea that such angry, bitter feelings ran this deep among the people of Sarghad. Finally, he opened his eyes. "Why did you help me, Claydon?"
The astech paused before answering. "I don't know. Maybe it was because of Riviera. If ithadn't been for him, I'd still be working a stall on the Street of the Merchants, maybe dreaming of following my father someday as a prosperous Sarghadian merchant. For a time... for a time... there was something better. I can't put it into words. It's gone now... all gone. But I figured I owed the Sergeant this much, at least"
"Do you hate me... for what's happened?"
"Hate you? Personally? No, I don't think so. I don't even hate the Commonwealth for what happened. I do think your people were stupid for trying to bargain with those devils."
As there seemed no answer to that, Grayson decided to change the subject. "How long have I been out?"
"Seventy hours or so. The Doc had you on something to make you sleep."
"Seventy?" That was three standard days. "It's the morning after the attack?"
One of Trellwan's leisurely days was 30 standard days long. He'd returned to the Castle perhaps ten hours before Thirday dawn, which meant it must now be early morning.
Claydon nodded. "Thirday, fourth morning period. You understand our timekeeping?"
"Pretty well." Carlyle's Commandos had stuck with their own routine based on a standard 24-hour day divided into three watches. The Trellwan day-night cycles were somewhat more complex, with each 732-hour day divided into night and day segments called "Firstday,” “Firstnight," and so on, with three days and nights equal to two of the planet's years. Each segment was divided into 12 periods of IS and a quarter hours each.
Grayson still had trouble converting from standard hours to Trell time, but had taught himself enough so that he could match his schedule with Mara's. Trells alternated work periods with periods for sleep or recreation, but which daily period was for what was a matter of personal choice. The city of Sarghad was always awake, whatever the hour.
Numbers clicked into place. Three days!
"God!" What happened to the Lance? You say you saw them moving toward the spaceport?"
"That's right. Most of them got aboard their shuttle and took off just before dawn."
"They're... they're gone? You're sure?"
The Trell nodded. "Sure. I've pulled duty at the port. I know what your shuttle looked like — huge, blunt-nosed, stubby wings, with the bridge perched 'way up high above the prow." He held up a clenched fist, imitating the graphic symbol of House Steiner. "I saw the unit patches on the 'Mech exit panels. It's a good thing Hendrik's people didn't have any fighter's handy. The pirates took some shots at them from the ground, but I think they got away clean. They passed almost directly overhead, jets full out, and the sonic boom when they boosted to hi-G rattled my teeth. The firing stopped down at the port then, though I saw lots of the bandits running around putting out fires after that"
Grayson sagged back into the pillow. He felt a quiver of relief in the knowledge that the shuttle had gotten away. Lieutenant Hauptman must have organized a good enough defense to keep the enemy off the shuttle, or maybe Rama Xiang had managed to hold a perimeter until the Castle forces had reached him.
His relief was quickly overwhelmed by a rising despair. If Claydon was right, Grayson had been left for dead. Though still alive, he was alone and far from safe on this hostile, god-forsaken world.
6
The city of Sarghad was laid out on the edge of the desert as concentric wheels with unevenly spaced spokes that stretched beyond the city into the encircling ocher sands. Northward, the mountains of the Crysanden Range thrust jagged ice-capped peaks against the reddish sky. The mists hung low now above Thunder Rift, while on the plain to the south, the spaceport shimmered in the growing heat Every hour, the swollen red sun crept higher above the horizon, and the dry winds from the south turned hot. The Castle crouched on Mount Gayal's western flanks, brooding above the city and its port.
It was growing hotter, though the sun would not be overhead for another 150 hours. The searing passage of Periasteron occurred at midday of Thirday, and the time of rising heat was accompanied by the boom of temporary glaciers shattering within the Rift's narrow caverns and crevasses. To the north, distant volcanos smudged the sky as Trellwan began to feel the twisting of the sun's tidal grasp.
Most of Sarghad's streets were partially covered over by massive slabs of ferrocrete or stone, heavily reinforced by arches and buttresses against seismic tremors, and strung with lights that let business continue even through the long planetary night. The planet's sun was a red dwarf so weak in ultraviolet that humans could stare directly at it without danger or discomfort, even thought its disk was over three times larger than that of Earth's sun as seen from Earth. The parent star's single danger lay in its rare but periodic flares, when patches on its mottled red surface turned white hot and scorched the surface of Trellwan with light, heat, and storms of high-energy atomic particles.