And fired.
The Hald fell, the Ilit; the Ren-barant fired and burned her arm, and she burned him, to the heart. Tand appeared in the doorway, hung there, mouth open.
And died.
“Stupid,” she muttered, beginning then to feel the pain. The stench was terrible. She felt of her own arm, feeling damage; but the right one had not been the strong one, not for a long time.
Azi servants crept in finally. “Clear this out,” she said. Her jaw trembled. She closed the door when they had gone, and locked it. There was food secreted about, an old woman’s senile habit; there was wine, bottles of it; there was the comp centre.
She sat, rocking with the pain of her wound, smiling to herself without mirth.
x
The ground was coming up fast and the sir was full of burning. They broke through haze and came in over bleak land, desert. It was not what the display showed on the screen; the ship’s computer was fouled. The sweating betas laboured over the board, retaining control over the ship, jolting them with bursts of the braking engines. There was no knowing where they were; cloud and panic had obscured that. They might yet land.
And all at once a mountain wall loomed up in front of them, vast beyond reason.
“Blast!” Raen shouted. “Altitude, will you?”
“That’s the High Range,” one of the betas said. “The winds—the winds—the shuttle’s not built for it, Kontrin.”
“We’re on the way home, we’re over East, blast you: take us up and get over it!”
The deck slanted. They were launching themselves for what altitude they could gain for that sky-reaching ridge. A beta cursed softly, and wept. The High Range loomed up, snow-crowned. Jagged peaks thrust up above the clouds which wreathed them. The mad thought came to Raen that if one must die, this was at least a thing worth seeing—that such a glorious thing existed, uncultivated by Kontrin, who hungered after new things: hers.
Istra, the High Range, the desert—all explored, all possessed, in this mad instant of ripping across the world.
The azi were silent, frozen in their places. The crew worked frantically, sighted their slot in that oncoming wall and aimed for it, the lowest way, between two peaks.
“No!” Raen cried, reckoning the winds that must howl down that funnel. She hit the captain’s arm and pointed, a place where needle-spires thrust against the sky—cursed and insisted, having flown more worlds than earthbound betas knew. He veered, tried it, through turbulence that jolted them. Needles reared up in the screens. Someone screamed.
They went over, whipped over that needled ridge and sucked down a slope that wrung outcries from born-men and azi, downdrafted, hurtling down a vast rock face and outward. She saw spires in the slot they had not taken, reckoned with a wrench at the stomach what they had narrowly done.
“Controls aren’t responding,” the captain muttered. “Something’s jammed up.”
“Take what you can,” Raen said.
The man asked help; the co-pilot lent a hand, muttered something about hydraulics. Raen set her lips and stayed still the while the frantic crew tried their strength and their wits. The rocks flew under them, tamed to gold and Grey-green, and ahead, the white-hot flare that was water under beta Hydri’s light, serpentine, the River, and horizon-wide, the Sea.
Poor chance they had if they were carried out into thatmaelstrom of Istran storms, of endless water, and glare.
The captain made the right decision: retros jolted them, and they began losing airspeed with such abruptness it felt as if they were halting mid-air. “Hold on,” she shouted at the azi, trying not to think of belowdecks, nigh a hundred men without safety harness. The engines continued to slam at them in short bursts, until they were lumbering along at a wallowing pace and dropping by sickening lurches.
Beyond recall now, with the controls locked up.
“Merry,” Raen called to below, “brace up hard down there; we’re going to belly in if we’re lucky.”
Another lurch downward, with alternate trees and grassland before them, with sometime bursts of the engines to give them more glide, and wrestlings by manual at the attitude controls.
Hills sprang up in their path. We’ll not make it, Raen thought, for the betas were at the end of their resources; and then the jolt of braking engines nigh took the breath out of them and they lumbered into a tilt, feathered with the attitude jets.
She braced then, for they were committed beyond recall, and the valley walls were right in front of them. The engines jolted, one and then the other, compensating for a damaged wing.
The nose kept up. Raen watched the land hurtle toward them, waiting for the contact; it hit, slewed—the straps cut in. Then the nose flew up, slammed down, and somebody hurtled past Raen on his way to the control panel. Another hit her in the back. A gun discharged.
And she remained conscious through impact, with azi bodies before her and about her, while sirens screamed and the shriek of metal testified what was happening below. She cursed through it, watching horrified as the azi in front of her bled his life out on the control panel and the betas screamed. The worse horror was that the azi did not.
And when the ship was still—when it was evident that the feared fire had not taken place, and the shriek of metal had died—there was still no outcry from the azi. Two of the betas were unconscious, a half dozen of the azi so. Raen gathered herself up on the sloping deck and looked about her. Azi faces surrounded her, calm, bewildered. The betas cursed and wept.
“We can manual this lock,” Merry’s voice came over the intercom. “Sera? Sera?”
She answered, looked at the betas, who had begun working at the emergency chute. Hot air and glare flooded the opened hatchway. Merry, down below, was attempting his own solution. Fire still remained a possibility.
“Get supplies,” she said. “All the emergency kits.” They were not going to be adequate for so many men. She opened a locker and found at least a reserve of sunsuits, lingered to put one on the while azi clambered out, and slid down—her own men, she thanked her foresight, with such clothing, and with weapons. Her own suit was in her luggage, and one of the azi had brought it, but at the moment she had no idea where it was…cared nothing.
Injured azi moved themselves; the betas she left to betas, and made the slide to safety, into the arms of her azi below, steadied herself and looked about: the hold chute was deployed, and men were exiting there. She staggered across the grass, angry that her knees so betrayed her, found Merry, whose battered face wept blood along a scraped cheek. “The hold—many dead?”
“Six. Some bad, sera.”
So few hours, from the null of the pens, and to die, after eighteen years of preparing. She drew a deep breath and forced it out again. “Get them all out.” She sat down on the grass where she was, head bowed against her knees, pulled up the sunsuit hood, adjusted her gloves, small, weary movements. They had to get clear of the ship. The ship was a target. They had to move. She shut her eyes a moment and oriented herself, slipped the visor to a more comfortable place on her nose, adjusted up the cloth about her lower face, as anonymous as the azi.
Warriors living-chained down from the hatch, hale and whole. She called to them and rose, bared a hand to identify herself. They came, humming and booming in distress at their experience, offered touch. “Life-fluids,” they kept saying, alarmed by the deaths.
“Watch,” she said, gesturing at all that empty horizon of fields, thinking of raided depots and murdered azi. “Let no majat come on us.”
“Yess,” they agreed, and hovered never far away.
An azi brought her luggage, her battered brown case, and she laughed with the touch of hysteria for that, extracted her kit of lotions and medicines and jammed those in her side pocket, cast the rest away.