Richard stared about the compartment, noting the adobe wasp nests that crusted almost every surface, the shredded bulkhead insulation, the exposed ceram framework of once luxurious cabin appointments. There was even a beehive in one of the open forward lockers.
“Well, we don’t have a prayer of getting this sucker off the ground. We’ll have to go back to one of the others.”
Martha was digging in the mounds of rubbish on the left side of the skeleton in armor. She gave a satisfied cry. “Look here! Help me get it out of the garbage, Richard!”
“The Spear!” He helped her push away the moldy mess. In a few minutes the two of them had laid bare a slender instrument nearly a meter taller than the great skeleton, connected by a cable near the butt to a large jeweled box that had once been worn at Lugonn’s waist. The box straps had now disintegrated, but the glassy surface of the box and the Spear itself did not seem to be corroded.
Martha wiped hands on hips. “That’s it, all right. Zapper and powerpack. Careful of those studs there on the upper armrest, lovie. Even cruddled up as they are, they might still trigger the thing.”
“But how,” Claude marveled softly, “how did he ever pull the trigger on himself?”
“Oh, for chrissake,” said Richard. “Forget that and help us get the thing outside before our little butch Goldilocks wakes up and goes bonkers again.”
“I am awake,” Felice said. She massaged the point of her chin, where a bruise was forming. “I’m sorry about that. I won’t lose control again. And no hard feeling for the love-tap, Captain Blood.”
Madame Guderian came slowly up the boarding ladder. Her eyes rested briefly on the glass-armored skeleton and then passed to Felice. “Ah, ma petite. What are we going to do with you?” A sadness weighted her voice.
The girl got up and displayed a gamine grin. “I didn’t really spoil anything with my little temper fit. And I guarantee it won’t happen again. Let’s forget it.” She prowled about the flyer interior, kicking at the trash. “I expect the torc’s around here someplace. Maybe some critter carried it away from the skeleton and stashed it in another part of the ship.”
Claude took up the pack and started to descend the ladder while Richard and Martha followed with the still-tethered weapon, not wanting to risk disconnecting the cable.
Madame regarded the skeleton. “So here you lie, Shining Lugonn. Dead before the adventures of your exiled people had scarcely begun. Your tomb defiled by the little vermin of Earth, and now by us.” Shaking her head, she turned to descend the ladder. Felice sprang to the old woman’s assistance.
“I’ve a wonderful idea, Madame! I won’t be any use working on the aircraft or the Spear. So when I’m not needed for camp chores or hunting, I’ll come here and clean this place out, I’ll make it all neat again and polish his golden glass armor, and when we leave, we can close the hatch.”
“Yes.” Madame Guderian nodded. “It would be a fitting work.”
“I’d have to move all this rubbish anyway,” Felice added, “when I was looking for the torc. It must be here somewhere. No Tanu or Firvulag would have dared to take it. I know I’ll find it.”
Standing on the ground now, Madame looked up at Felice, so small, so winsome, so dangerous. “Perhaps you will. But if you don’t? What then?”
The girl was calm. “Why, then I’ll have to hold King Yeochee to his promise, that’s all.”
Richard said, “How about getting down here and giving us a hand, kid? You can moon around with your ancient astronaut all you want when we get a work camp set up. Come on, we’re going to move back to the last bird in line. See if you can carry this whole Spear rig by yourself, will you? She’s an awkward bitch for a two-man tote.”
Felice dropped lightly down from the belly hatch, hoisted the eighty-kilo powerpack in one arm, and stood while Claude and Richard balanced the long weapon on her opposite shoulder.
“I can manage,” she said. “But God knows how that old boy ever used this gadget in a running fight. He must have been quite a lad! Just wait till I find his torc.”
Claude and Madame looked at each other wordlessly for a moment, then helped Martha gather up their things. They began the half-kilometer trudge back along the crater lip to the Number Four Aircraft.
Madame said, “We have been fortunate, finding the Spear so readily. But there is another factor that may preclude an attack on Finiah this year.”
“And that is?” Claude inquired.
“The matter of who shall fly the ancient craft during the actual firefight.” She looked back over her shoulder at Richard, who was supporting Martha. “You will recall that he agreed merely to fly the machine back to the Vosges. If we must train another pilot for the battle…”
Martha had heard every word, of course. She turned to the ex-spacer with a stricken expression.
Richard gave a terse little bark of laughter. “Madame, you prove it again and again. You’re no mind reader. D’you really think I’d miss our little war?”
Martha clutched him tighter and whispered something to him. Madame said nothing, but as she turned away from them to resume the march along the rim trail, she smiled.
After a while, Richard said, “There’s something else we ought to think about, though. Wouldn’t it be best if we concentrate first on fixing up the flyer and hold off on the Spear until we get back home? Today is September twenty-second and the little King said that the Truce begins on October first. We’re cutting things damn short if the spooks are gonna need a week to mobilize. And what about getting your people ready, Madame? And working out the tactics for the iron weapons, if they got ’em? Seems to me, the faster we get outa here, the more time’ll be left for organizing. And back at your village, Martha can get proper medical care from Amerie. Maybe somebody like Khalid Khan could help out with the Spear repairs, too.”
It was Martha who demurred. “Don’t forget we’ve got to test the Spear. We must get it working, then install it in the aircraft somehow and try it out from the air. If this zapper is as powerful as I think it is, every Tanu with a microgram of farsense would be able to detect its atmospherics if we shot it off within a hundred kloms of the Vosges.”
“God, yes,” Richard said, crestfallen. “I forgot about that.”
Madame said, “We must do the best we can to put both flyer and Spear in working order before we leave this place. As for those back home, we will trust Peo to have everything in readiness. He knows every nuance of the plan against Finiah. If we have even one day remaining before the start of the Truce, we will still mount the attack.”
“Well, let’s get hopping then!” Felice said. She broke into a brisk trot, leaving the rest of them straggling far behind. They saw her wave at them briefly from the vicinity of the neighboring flyer, then vanish down the outside of the crater into the scrub. When they reached the great metal bird, they found the Spear placed carefully in the shadow of its wings. Beside it, scratched in the dust, was a message:
Gone hunting.
“For what?” Richard wondered cynically. Then he and Martha climbed up the ladder of the undisturbed aircraft, opened the simple hatch lock, and disappeared inside.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It took three days to get the flyer airborne.
Richard had known that these exotic craft were gravo-magnetic the moment he had looked inside the first specimen. The flight deck and passenger compartment of the thirty-meter bird had simple easy-seats, not acceleration couches. Ergo, “inertialess” drive, the universal propulsion system for aircraft and subluminal spaceships of the Galactic Milieu, which enabled almost instantaneous acceleration or deceleration in apparent defiance of gravity-inertia. The odds seemed good that the exotics had tapped the key forces of the universe in much the same “cablecar” fashion as the engineers of the Milieu. Richard and Martha had warily opened one of the sixteen power-modules of what they hoped was the flux-tap generator, using the flyer’s own tools. They found to their relief that the liquid within was water. No matter that the thingummies generating the rho-field reticula were concentric spheres within spheres instead of the stacked crystalline blades of the analogous Milieu device; the principle, and the basic operation, had to be the same. When the generator was fueled with good old aqua pura, this exotic bird would very likely go.