It was an instant and it was a century across the clearing, until they reached the fence. Axor’s free arm curved around to keep torn strands off her while he crashed through. Nevertheless, several drew blood. She barely noticed.
Men ran from the terminal, insectoidal at their distance, then suddenly near. She saw pistols in the hands of some. She heard a buzz, a thud. Axor grunted, lurched, went on. Diana opened fire. A figure tumbled and lay sprattling.
Targovi bounded alongside. The cargo carrier was straight ahead. He raised his arm, veered, and went for the Merseians. Diana’s vision swooped as Axor came around too. She glanced past his clifflike shoulder and saw the Zacharians in bewilderment. They numbered perhaps a dozen.
Targovi mounted the entry ramp of the dock. An airlock stood shut against him. He shielded his eyes with an arm and began to cut his way in with the blaster. Flame spurted blue-white, heat roiled, air seethed, sparks scorched his fur. A light ship like this relied on her forcefields and interceptors for protection in space. Nobody expected attack on the ground.
The Zacharians rallied and pelted toward him. They had courage aplenty, Diana thought in a breath. Axor went roaring and trampling to meet them. She threw a barrage. The men scattered and fled, except for one wounded and two shapeless.
Diana’s trigger clicked on an empty magazine. Above her, Targovi’s blaster sputtered out, its capacitors exhausted.
Axor thundered up the ramp. “Diana, get down!” he bawled. “Both of you, behind me!”
They scrambled to obey. He hammered his mass against the weakened lock. At the third impact it sagged aside.
Four Merseians waited. Their uniforms revealed them to be soldiers, unqualified to fly the craft they defended. Rather than shut the inner valve and risk it being wrecked too, they had prepared to give battle. Merseians would.
Axor charged. Beams and bullets converged on him. That could not check such momentum. Two died under his hoofs before he collapsed, shaking the hull. Targovi and Diana came right after. The Tigery threw his knife. A handgun rattled off a bulkhead. He and the Merseian went down together, embraced. His fangs found the green throat. Diana eluded a shot, got in close, and wielded her own blade.
Targovi picked himself up. “They’ll’ve sent for help,” he rasped out of dripping jaws. “Lubberly warriors though Zacharians be, I give us less than ten minutes. While I discover how to raise this thing, you close the portal.” He whisked from sight.
The lock gave her no difficulty; the layout resembled that of Moonjumper. With the ship sealed, she made her way across a slippery deck to Axor. He lay breathing hard. Scorch marks were black over his scales. Redness oozed from wounds, not quite the same hue as hers, which was not quite the same as the Merseians’, but it was all blood—water, iron, life—“Oh, you’re so hurt,” she keened. “What can I do for you?”
He lifted his head. “Are you well, child?”
“Yes, nothin’ hit me, but you, darlin’, you—”
Lips drew back in a smile that others might have found frightening. “Not to fear. A little discomfort, yes, I might go so far as to say pain, but no serious injury. This carcass has many a pilgrimage ahead of it yet. Praises be to God and thanks to the more militant saints.” The head sank. Wearily, soberly, he finished, “Now let me pray for the souls of the fallen.”
A shiver went through Diana’s feet. Targovi had awakened the engines.
Atmospheric warcraft zoomed over hills and mountains. He did not try keying in an order to shoot. Instead, he outclimbed them. Missiles whistled aloft. By then he had learned how to switch on the deflector field.
And after that he was in space. The planet rolled beneath him, enormous and lovely, burnished with oceans, emblazoned with continents, white-swirled with clouds. Once more he saw stars.
He could only take a moment to savor. Single-handing, he hadn’t a meteorite’s chance against attack by any Naval unit. “Diana,” he said over the intercom, “come to the bridge, will you?” and devoted himself to piloting. He couldn’t instruct the autosystem the unfamiliar manual controls responded clumsily to him, and the navigational instruments were incomprehensible; he must eyeball and stagger his way. At least he’d managed to set a steady interior field of about a gee. Otherwise his comrades would be getting thrown around like chips in a casino.
Well, if he and they could walk from the landing, that was amply good—if they walked free.
The girl entered and took the copilot’s seat. “I hope to bring us down at Aurea port,” he told her. “No doubt the Zacharians will call frantically in, demanding the Navy blow us menaces out of the sky, and no doubt there are officers who will be happy to oblige. I lack skill to take us away on hyperdrive. You are the human aboard. What do you counsel?”
She considered, hand to smoke-smudged cheek—tangle-haired, sweaty, ragged, begrimed. Glancing at her, scenting her, knowing her, he wished he could be, for some hours, a male of her species.
“Can you set up a strong audiovisual transmission, that’ll punch through interference on the standard band?” she asked.
He studied the console before him. “I think I can.”
“Do.” She closed her eyes and sagged in her harness.
But when he was ready, she came back to strength. To the computer-generated face in the screen she said: “I have a message for Commandant General Cesare Gatto. It’s not crank, and it is top priority. If it don’t get straight to him, courts martial are goin’ to blossom till you can’t see the clover for ’em. The fact I’m in a spacecraft you’ll soon identify as Merseian should get you off your duffs. He’ll want a recognition code, of course. Tell him Diana Crowfeather is bound home.”
Chapter 21
The database contained much that became priceless to the Navy in its operations against the revolt. Some continued valuable afterward, to Terran Intelligence, until the Merseians had completed necessary changes of plan and organization—an effort which, while it went on, kept them out of considerable mischief abroad. A part of the record dealt with Sir Olaf Magnusson. From previous experience and knowledge, Flandry reconstructed more of the story, conjecturally but with high probability.
A man stern and righteous lived under an Imperium effete and corrupt. Emperor Georgios meant well, but he was long a-dying, and meanwhile the favorites of the Crown Prince crowded into power. After Josip succeeded to the throne, malfeasance would scarcely trouble to mask itself, and official after official would routinely order atrocities committed on outlying worlds entrusted to them, that wealth might be wrung into their coffers. Erik Magnusson, space captain and trader of Kraken, forswore in his heart all allegiance to the Empire that had broken faith with him.
Somehow a Merseian or two, among those whom he occasionally met, sensed the unhappiness in him and passed word of it on to those who took interest in such matters. Upon his next visit to their mother planet, he received baronial treatment. In due course he met the great lord—not the Roidhun, who has more often been demigod than ruler, but the chief of the Grand Council, the day-by-day master of that whole vast realm, insofar as any single creature could ever be.
This was Brechdan Ironrede, the Hand of the Vach Ynvory, an impressive being whose soul was in many respects brother to the soul of Captain Magnusson. Well did he know what would appeal. There were humans by race who were Merseian subjects, just as there were Merseians by race who were Terran subjects—tiny minorities in either case, but significant on many levels. Those whom Brechdan summoned must have joined their voices to his. Why should Kraken pay tribute to an Imperium which enriched toadies, fettered commerce, and neglected defenses? The law of the Roidhun was strict but just. Under him, men could again be men. United, the two civilizations would linger no more in this handful of stars on a fringe of the galaxy; they would fare forth to possess the cosmos.