“I think we must use a different calendar from you in Kraken,” Yasmin said. “And—being wealthier, you understand—not that Hanno isn’t—but we did suffer worse. We lost records and—Well, let’s see if Kraken and Sassania were attacked on the same day you heard about it. That was… let me think… dear me, now, how many days in a year?”
“What? Why, why, five hundred and ninety-one.”
Yasmin allayed Elanor’s surprise by laughing: “Of course. I was simply trying to recollect if an intercalary date came during the period since.”
“A what?”
“You know. The year isn’t an exact number of days long. So they have to put in an extra day or month or something, every once in a while.” That was a reasonable bet.
It paid off, too. Elanor spoke of an extra day every eleventh Nikean year. Yasmin related how in Kraken they added a month—“What do you call the moons hereabouts?… I mean by a month, the time it takes for them both to get back to the same place in the sky… We add an extra one every twentieth year.” Her arithmetic was undoubtedly wrong, but who was going to check? The important point was that Nike circled its sun in 591 days of 25.5 hours each, as near as made no difference.
And hadn’t much, in the way of seasons, but did suffer from irregular, scarcely predictable episodes when the sun grew noticeably hotter or cooler.
And was poor in heavy metals. Given all the prior evidence, what Yasmin wormed from the chattersome Elanor was conclusive. Quite likely iron oxides accounted for the basic color. But they were too diffuse to be workable. Metals had never been mined on this globe; they were obtained electrochemically from the sea and from clays. (Aluminum, beryllium, magnesium and the like; possibly a bit of heavy elements too, but only a bit. For the most part, iron, copper, silver, uranium, etc., had been imported from outsystem, in exchange for old-fashioned Terrestrial agroproducts that must have cornmanded good prices on less favored worlds. This would explain why, to the very present, Nike had such a pastoral character.)
The Empire fell. The starships came less and less often. Demoralization ruined the colonies in their turn; planets broke up politically; in the aftermath, most industry was destroyed, and the social resources were no longer there to build it afresh. Today, on Nike, heavy metals were gotten entirely through reclaiming scrap. Consquently they were too expensive for anything but military and the most vital civilian uses. Even the lighter elements came dear; some extractor-plants remained, but not enough.
Elanor did not relate this directly. But she didn’t need to. Trying to impress her distinguished guests, she made a parade of setting an aluminum coffeepot on the ceramic stove and mentioning the cost. (A foreigner could plausibly ask what that amounted to in real wages. It was considerable.) And, yes, Petar’s grandmother had had a lot of ironware in her kitchen. When he inherited, Petar was offered enormous sums for his share. But he had it made into cutting-edge implements. He cared less about money than about good tools, Petar did. Also for his wife. See, ladies, see right here, I use a real steel knife.
“Gold,” Dagny said, low and harsh in Yasmin’s ear. “Animals, buy, ride.”
The younger girl jerked to alertness. Tired, half lulled by Elanor’s millwheel voice, she had drifted off into contemplation. Dagny said this was a young world. Nevertheless it was metal-poor. The paradox had an answer. This system could have formed in the galactic halo, where stars were few and the interstellar dust and gas were thin, little enriched. Yes, that must be the case. It had drifted into this spiral arm… But wouldn’t it, then, have an abnormal proper motion? Tom hadn’t mentioned observing any such thing. Nor had he said there was anything peculiar about Nike’s own orbit. Yet he had remarked on less striking facts…
“Tell! Buy!”
Yasmin nodded frantically. “I understand. I understand.” They carried a number of Sassanian gold coins. In an age when interstellar currency and credit had vanished, the metal had resumed its ancient economic function. The value varied from place to place, but was never low, and should be fabulous on Nike.
“Good lady,” Yasmin said, “we are grateful for your kindness. But we have imposed too much. We should not take any of your men away from the hayfields when storms may be coming. If you will spare us two horses, we can make our own way to Vale and thence, of course, to your Engineer.”
Like fun we will! We’ll turn east. Maybe we’ll ride horseback maybe we’ll take passage on a river boat—whatevei—looks safest—but we’re bound for his enemy, the Prater of Silva!
“We’ll pay for them,” Yasmin said. “Our overlords provided us well with money. See.” She extended a coin. “Will this buy two horses and their gear?”
Elanor gasped. She made a sign again, sat down and fanned herself. Her youngest child sensed his mother’s agitation and whimpered.
“Is that gold?” she breathed. “Wait. Till Petar comes. He comes soon. We ask him.”
That was logical. But suppose the man got suspicious. Yasmin glanced back at Dagny. The Krakener made an imperceptible gesture. Beneath their coveralls were holstered energy weapons.
No! We can’t slaughter a whole, helpless family! I hope we won’t need to.
I won’t! Not for anything!
Tom reached the fire-control turret as two aircraft peeled off their squadron and dove.
The skyview was full of departing stormclouds, tinged bloody with dawn. Against them, his space-armored women looked tiny. Not so their hunters. Those devilfish shapes swelled at an appalling, speed. Tom threw himself into a manual-operation seat and punched for Number Two blastcannon. A cross-hair screen lit for him with what that elevated weapon “saw.” He twisted verniers. The auxiliary motors whirred. The vision spun giddily. There… the couple was separating… one to keep guard on him, its mate in a swoop after Dagny and Yasmin. Tom got the latter centered and pressed the discharge button.
The screen stepped down the searing brightness of the energy bolt. Through the open manlock crashed the thunderclap that followed. The Hannoan craft exploded into red-hot shards that rained down upon the trees.
“Gotcha!” Torn exulted. He fired two or three more times, raking toward the other boat where it hung on its negafield some fifty meters aloft. His hope was to scare it off and bluff its mates into holding their bombs—or whatever they had to drop on him; He didn’t want to kill again. The first shot had looked necessary if the girls were to live. But why add to the grudge against him?
Not that he expected to last another five minutes.
No! Wait! Tom swiveled around to another set of controls. Why hadn’t he thought of this at once?
The nearby pilot had needed a couple of seconds to recover from the shock of what happened to his companion. Now he was bound hastily back upward. He was too late. Tom focused a tractor beam on him. Its generator hummed with power. Ozone stung the nostrils; rewiring job needed, a distant aspect of Tom took note. Most of him was being a fisherman. He’d gotten his prey, and on a heavy line—the force locked onto the air-boat was meant to grab kilotons moving at cosmic Veloities—but his catch was a man-eater. ‘And he wanted to land it just so.
The vessel battled futilely to escape. Tom pushed it down near Firedrake’s hull, into the jumble of broken trees and canebrake that his own landing had made. Their branches probably damaged wings and fuselage, but their leaves, closing in above, hid any details of what was going on from the pilots overhead. Having jammed his capture against a fence of logs and brush, he held it there with a beam sufficiently narrow that the cockpit canopy wouldn’t be pulled shut. Quickly, with a second tractor-pressor projection, he rearranged the tangle in the clearing, shifting trunks, snapping limbs and tossing them about, until he had a fairly good view through a narrow slot that wouldn’t benefit observers in heaven. He trusted they were too poorly instrumented—or too agitated, or both—to see how useful the arrangement was for him, and would take the brief stirring they noticed as a natural result of a crash, heaped wood collapsing into a new configuration.