Nylan looked at the wiry silver-haired marine.
“I’m Istril,” the marine explained apologetically.
“That’s a help,” said Ryba slowly. “You’re all going to have to use blades, I think, before the year is out, anyway. Maybe sooner. Unless we can manufacture bows and learn archery.”
“Why …” started a voice farther back in the twilight. “Oh … sorry.”
“Exactly. Fierral took inventory. That little firefight cost us nearly three hundred rounds. That’s actually pretty good. One in nine shells counted. Except we only have about six hundred rounds left. That’s maybe two battles like we just went through.” Ryba bowed to the marine force leader. “Without the marines, we’d all be dead or slaves.”
Ryba turned to Nylan. “I fear you were correct, Ser Engineer, about the need for a defensive emplacement, a tower.”
Nylan nodded. “You never answered the question about blades.”
“Most of their blades are hatchet-edged crowbars. That hand-and-a-half blade the leader carried is a fair piece of work, and so was one other thing like a sabre. Why did you ask?” Ryba smiled tightly. “You don’t ask questions, ser, unless you know the answer.”
“I saw what your blade did to the local leader,” Nylan replied honestly. “I just wondered what the comparisons were.”
“If we could find blades like mine, it would give us an advantage-not so much as slug-throwers but I don’t see those for a long, long time to come.”
Neither did Nylan.
“But,” continued the captain, “I don’t know how we could find or forge blades like mine.”
Nylan frowned, then pursed his lips. Was there any way? He shook his head.
“What about the language?” Ryba turned to Ayrlyn.
“That doesn’t make sense, either. It sounded like an offshoot of Anglorat,” said the comm officer.
Nylan nodded, mostly to himself He should have recognized it, but he hadn’t expected the demon tongue to show up here.
“What was that idiot saying? Where were you, anyway?” asked Ryba.
“Where you put me … on the other side.” Ayrlyn gave aslight shiver. “I didn’t get it all, and some of the words didn’t make any sense, but the general idea was that we had to surrender because we were trespassing on his lands-”
“His lands?”
“His lands.”
“Darkness help us,” said Ryba. “We would knock off the local ruler. That can’t be good.”
“It might be very good,” mused Nylan. “Anyone else might decide to wait a while before taking us on.”
“Either that, or they’ll all be up here on some sort of holy war against their version of the demons. That’s what we probably look like to them.”
Nylan laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“We got here because we were fighting the demons, and as soon as we land, we’re fighting more demons.”
“You think this place was a Rationalist colony?” Ryba’s eyebrows knit together.
“How could it be? It’s not even in our universe,” snapped Gerlich.
“Maybe they got here like we did,” suggested Saryn.
“We don’t even know how we got here, not for sure,” pointed out Nylan. “Or where here even is.”
“You obviously have some ideas, O Bright One,” snapped Gerlich. “So how do you think we got here?”
“We were at the focus of a lot of energy, more than enough to blow the boards and the Winterlance right out of existence. We’re still around, even if it’s someplace strange-”
“Are you sure we’re just not dead, or imagining things?” asked Ayrlyn.
“The physical sensations seem rather intense for being merely spiritual and mental … and I explained the limitations of a nest …”
“So you did.”
Nylan turned to look fully at the taller man. “So … listen. I’ll listen to your knowledge. If we don’t listen and save every bit of knowledge we have to share, we’ll be dead-orour descendants will suffer more than they have to-or both.”
“That assumes we’ll live that long,” snapped Gerlich.
Ryba’s blade flickered again, and the cold steel touched Gerlich’s neck. “I’m getting very tired of having to use force to keep you in line, but it seems like that’s all you respect.”
“Without that blade …”
Ryba handed the blade to Istril, the small marine. “Hold this.”
Gerlich looked puzzled.
“Some people never learn.” Ryba’s foot lashed out across the bigger man’s thigh.
“Missed, bitch.” Gerlich charged.
Ryba danced aside, and her hands blurred. Gerlich slammed facefirst into dirt and clover, then scrambled up and took a position, feet wide, hands in guard position.
Ryba feinted with her shoulder, once, twice.
Gerlich did not move.
The captain seemed to duck, then with a sweep kick knocked Gerlich off his feet, although the brown-haired man scrambled and slashed at her arm. Ryba took the arm, and Gerlich went flying into the meadow.
He rose slowly, holding his arm.
“It’s only dislocated,” snapped Ryba. “I could have broken your worthless neck. So could most of the marines.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because you have some stud value. But I could break both your arms and keep that.”
Nylan shivered at the chill in Ryba’s voice. He looked up at the unfamiliar stars. They looked very cold, and very distant.
Gerlich slumped and slowly walked forward toward the fire.
“Jaseen, can you snap that back in place?” asked Ryba.
“Yes, ser.”
“Do it.”
Gerlich sat down on a boulder, while Ryba reclaimed her blade and sheathed it. Nylan glanced across the faces of thetwenty-two women-all but the two standing in the rocks as sentries-and then at Gerlich. Things were going to be different … very different.
He repressed a shudder.
XI
NYLAN LAY ON his side of the couch in the darkness listening to Ryba’s soft and even breathing. A faint cold breeze wafted forward from the open lander door, bringing with it the scent of fire smoke and evergreens.
The engineer closed his eyes, then opened them. Less than six hundred rounds of ammunition-that was what stood between them and being captured or killed by the locals. The battle laser might be good for another skirmish, but it wouldn’t be much good once the fighting reached the handto-hand stage, and that meant a cold decision to wipe out the locals before they even charged the angels.
And after that? The locals wouldn’t go away. It might be a few seasons or years before they attacked again, but given human nature, they would. Then what would the angels have left for defense? Ryba had agreed to build a tower, and that meant he had to design one that was simple and relatively quick to construct, big enough for growth, and proof against a cold, cold winter that probably lasted more than half the local year. Ensuring that the tower could hold off any lengthy attack also meant figuring out a water supply that couldn’t be blocked …
He sighed.
“You’re still awake?” asked Ryba.
“I thought you were asleep,” said Nylan.
“No. I was thinking.”
“So was I. What were you thinking about?”
“You name it, and I was thinking about it,” she answeredslowly. “Weapons, the locals, weather, crops, housing, your tower, the next generation, how to feed horses through the winter, how to get to the winter …”
Nylan nodded, then added, as he realized that, while he could see her, she didn’t seem to have the same night vision he did, “I was thinking about the tower.”
“I told you that you could use the lasers to cut stone to build the tower. Just make it big enough for three times the numbers we have.”
“Four,” suggested the engineer.
“If you can do it. There’s not that much power in the firin cells.” Ryba reached out and squeezed his hand. “It isn’t going to be easy.”
“No. And the building season won’t be much longer than the growing season. Some of the evergreens look solid enough, and straight enough to provide the timbering we need. But we’ll have to cut green timber, and that’s going to be hard with one axe and one portable grip saw.”