A varyak leaped through the doors. The arms of the soldier aboard it shielded his face against flying glass. Flandry shot before the man had uncovered himself. The varyak, sensitively controlled, veered and went down across the doorway. The next one hurtled over it. The rider balanced himself with a trained body, blazing away at the Terran. Bourtai dropped him from above.
She sprang down unassisted. “I got two more outside,” she said. “Another pair are lurking, calling for help—”
“We’ll have to chance them. Where are the nearest gates?”
“They will be closed! We cannot burn through the lock before—”
“I’ll find a means. Quick, up on this saddle. Slowly, now, out the door behind me. Right the putt-putts of those two men you killed and stand by.” Flandry had already dragged a corpse from one varyak (not without an instant’s compassionate wondering what the man had been like alive) and set the machine back on its wheels. He sprang to the seat and went full speed out the shattered door.
So far, energy weapons had fulfilled their traditional military function, giving more value to purposeful speed of action than mere numbers. But there was a limit: two people couldn’t stave off hundreds for very long. He had to get clear.
Flame sought him. He lacked skill to evade such fire by tricky riding. Instead, he plunged straight down the path, crouched low and hoping he wouldn’t be pierced. A bolt burned one leg, slightly but with savage pain. He reached the gloomy, high-arched bridge he wanted. His cycle snorted up and over. Just beyond the hump, he dropped off, relaxing muscles and cushioning himself with an arm in judoka style. Even so, he bumped his nose. For a moment, tears blinded him, and he used bad words. Then the two enemy varyaks followed each other across the bridge. He sprang up on the railing, unseen, and shot both men as they went by.
Vaguely, he heard an uproar elsewhere. One by one, the palace windows lit, until scores of dragon eyes glared into night. Flandry slid down the bridge, disentangled the heaped varyaks, and hailed Bourtai. “Bring the other machines!” She came, riding one and leading two more by tethers to the guide bars. He had felt reasonably sure that would be standard equipment; if these things were commonly used by nomads, there’d be times when a string of pack vehicles was required.
“We take two,” he muttered. Here, beneath an overleaning rock, they were a pair of shadows. Moonlight beyond made the garden one fog of coppery light. The outer wall cut that off, brutally black, with merlons raised against Altai’s rings like teeth. “The rest, we use to ram down the gates. Can do?”
“Must do!” she said, and set the varyak control panels. “Here. Extra helmets and clothing are always kept in the saddlebags. Put on the helmet, at least. The clothes we can don later.”
“We won’t need them for a short dash—”
“Do you think the spaceport is not now a-crawl with Yesukai men?”
“Oh, hell,” said Flandry.
He buckled on the headgear, snapped down the goggles, and mounted anew. Bourtai ran along file varyak line, flipping main switches. The riderless machines took off. Gravel spurted from their wheels into Flandry’s abused face. He followed the girl.
A pair of warriors raced down a cross path briefly stark under the moons and then eaten again by murk. They had not seen their quarry. The household troops must be in one classic confusion, Flandry thought. He had to escape before hysteria faded and systematic hunting was organized.
The palace gates loomed before him, heavy bars screening off a plaza that was death-white in the moon radiance. Flandry saw his varyaks only as meteoric gleams. Sentries atop the wall had a better view. Blasters thundered, machine guns raved, but there were no riders to drop from those saddles.
The first varyak hit with a doomsday clangor. It rebounded in four pieces. Flandry sensed a chunk of red-hot metal buzz past his ear. The next one crashed, and the bars buckled. The third smote and collapsed across a narrow opening. The fourth flung the gates wide. “Now!”
At 200 KPH, Bourtai and Flandry made for the gateway. They had a few seconds without fire from the demoralized men above them. Bourtai hit the toppled machines. Her own climbed that pile, took off, and soared halfway across the plaza. Flandry saw her balance herself, precise as a bird, land on two wheels and vanish in an alley beyond the square. Then it was his turn. He wondered fleetingly what the chances of surviving a broken neck were, and hoped he would not. Not with the Khan’s interrogation chambers waiting. Whoops, bang, here we go! He knew he couldn’t match Bourtai’s performance. He slammed down the third wheel in midair. He hit ground with less violence than expected: first-class shock absorbers on this cycle. An instant he teetered, almost rolling over. He came down on his outrigger. Fire spattered off stone behind him. He retracted the extra wheel and gunned his motor.
A glance north, past the Tower toward the spaceport, showed him grav-beam air-boats aloft, a hornet swarm. He had no prayer of hijacking a Betelgeusean ship. Nor was it any use to flee to Zalat in the yamen. Where, then, beneath these unmerciful autumnal stars?
Bourtai was a glimpse in moonlight, half a kilometer ahead of him down a narrow nighted street He let her take the lead, concentrated grimly on avoiding accidents. It seemed like an eyeblink, and it seemed like forever, before they were out of the city and onto the open steppe.
VI
Wind lulled in long grasses, the whispering ran for kilometers, on and on beyond the world’s edge, pale yellow-green in a thousand subtle hues rippled by the wind’s footsteps. Here and there the spiky red of some frost-nipped bush thrust up; the grasses swirled about it like a sea. High and high overhead, incredibly high, an infinite vault full of wind and deepblue chill, the sky reached. Krasna burned low in the west, dull orange, painting the steppe with ruddy light and fugitive shadows. The rings were an ice bridge to the south; northward the sky had a bleak greenish shimmer which Bourtai said was reflection off an early snowfall.
Flandry crouched in grasses as tall as himself. When he ventured a peek, he saw the airboat that hunted them. It spiraled lazy, but the mathematics guiding it and its cohorts wove a net around this planet. To his eyes, even through binoculars taken from a saddlebag, the boat was so far as to be a mere metallic flash; but he knew it probed for him with telescopes, ferrous detectors, infrared amplifiers.
He would not have believed he could escape the Khan’s hundreds of searching craft this long. Two Altaian days, was it? Memory had faded. He knew only a fever dream of bounding north on furious wheels, his skin dried and bleeding from the air; sleeping a few seconds at a tune, in the saddle, eating jerked meat from the varyak supplies as he rode, stopping to refill canteens at a waterhole Bourtai had found by signs invisible to him. He knew only how he ached, to the nucleus of his inmost cell, and how his brain was gritty from weariness.
But the plain was unbelievably huge, almost twice the land area of all Terra. The grass was often as high as this, veiling prey from sky-borne eyes. They had driven through several big herds, to break their trail; they had dodged and woven under Bourtai’s guidance, and she had a hunter’s knowledge of how to confuse pursuit.
Now, though, the chase seemed near its end.
Flandry glanced at the girl. She sat cross-legged, impassive, showing her own exhaustion just by the darkening under her eyes. In stolen leather clothes, hair braided under the crash helmet, she might have been a boy. But the grease smeared on her face for protection had not much affected its haughty good looks. The man hefted his gun. “Think he’ll spot us?” he asked. He didn’t speak low, but the blowing immensities around reduced all voices to nothing.