It snapped around quicksilver-fast, and still wasn’t quick enough. Something fast and black brushed across it and leapt away, out of range, gone.
The elegant intruder’s suit was slashed wide along the left side. It lifted a weapon like an old-fashioned chemical rocket motor. Violet-white flame lashed after the attacker. It must have missed. The elegant one bounded after, holding its suit almost closed with one hand, firing with the other. A ghost-trail of ice crystals followed it.
Bram said, “That was Anne.”
“Which?”
“Anne was the killer, Louis. They’re both vampire protectors, but I remember how Anne moves.”
“How do we warn Acolyte?”
“We cannot.”
Louis caught himself grinding his teeth. Acolyte was nowhere: a signal, a point, an energy quantum moving at lightspeed toward where one protector had killed another and was ready for more.
“Your Teela was too trusting,” Bram said. “She made a vampire into a protector, and that one must have changed others of his species before Teela killed him. But Anne and I are of another species than theirs.”
“Signal,” the Hindmost said as his other tongue licked out. Now they had two windows placed on the maglev transport track.
Acolyte had arrived; had sprayed a webeye on … Louis couldn’t tell. On something above his head. There was no sign of another intruder. The Kzin posed with the probe just behind him. It looked half melted and somewhat battered, and it was blocking the track.
Any protector would have to remove that blockage.
Acolyte, get out!
The track receded into infinity. It looked to be around two hundred feet across, and geometrically straight.
Acolyte was turning slowly, taking it all in. He sprayed another webeye, then stepped back to the probe and was gone.
The Hindmost said, “He flicked out.”
“Well, where is he?”
“Do you assume I want fusion plasma spraying through my cabin?”
“Where’s the link? Where did you flick him?” The Hindmost didn’t answer, and Louis knew. “Mons Olympus, you freemother?”
He lunged toward the stepping disk, stopped himself, and scrambled onto the stack of cargo plates instead. He led a line through the handholds, then around his tool belt: a poor man’s crash web. “Chmeee will have my ears and guts!” He set the cargo plates aloft and eased them onto the stepping disk.
Flick, and the sky was half stars, half black. Silver fractal filigree under his feet and stars showing through that.
Marvelous.
He looked up and down the maglev track. It was peaceful as hell. Nothing moved at all.
Silver lace. Where had he seen this kind of fractal pattern? He’d expected the maglev track to be a solid trough, but you could see stars through the mesh.
Hah! It was the Pinwheel, the old orbital tether they still used to transfer bulk cargos between Earth and the moon and Belt. The fractal distributed the stresses better. But never mind that—
“Bram, Hindmost, the maglev track is lacework. Can you see it? If I had the sprayer, I’d put a webeye on it right now. Look through the lace and see whatever tries to hide in the Ringworld’s shadow.”
They’d hear that in five and a half minutes. Hot Needle of Inquiry was that far away at lightspeed.
An ink blot pulled itself over the edge and walked toward Louis … a bulk like a sack of potatoes painted black, with a flared bell held negligently in one hand.
Louis touched the lift throttle.
The cargo plates didn’t move. There was a maglev track under him, but it wasn’t giving him enough lift.
“I’m looking at an ARM weapon,” Louis said. They’d hear him and know the rest: ARMs must have landed on a spaceport ledge and found protectors there.
How do you activate stepping disks when you can’t step off first? I’ll be dead when they hear all this. Should have brought an orchestra—or a recording of the command.
The protector-killer examined Louis Wu with a proprietary air. It—Anne—She was a slender shape in an inflated suit designed for something a little taller—recessed eyes peeped over the chin readouts—and much wider—
Flick, he was upside down and falling through red light.
It was red rock all around him and below his head, and hundreds of feet of smooth lava running down, down. The cargo plates surged upward, and Louis hung head-down over red rocks. He could feel the ropes slipping, in the moment before the plates’ inherent stability turned him upright.
Louis’s brain and belly and inner ears were whirling. Moments passed before his eyes could focus.
No Martians were there to watch.
He was hovering alongside a glassy-smooth stretch of lava that dropped almost straight for … futz … a thousand feet before it eased toward horizontal like a ski jump. Louis could see a splash of orange at the bottom: Acolyte in his translucent suit. He might even have survived such a fall … or not.
Louis decided he needn’t fear Martians.
This time the Martians had mounted their stepping disk upside down at the top of the highest cliff they could find. Then the flame that destroyed the Hindmost’s refueling probe had flooded through the stepping disk. Any Martians watching the trap must have been crisped. The cliff side had melted and flowed, forming a slide.
Louis landed the cargo plates, loosed the lines, and jumped down.
Acolyte lay at an angle on hot red rock.
Louis got a shoulder under the Kzin. Not enough, and he pulled to roll the Kzin over him. Acolyte was an inert mass. Louis could feel broken ribs shifting.
He could have used Martian gravity about now.
He tightened his abdominal muscles, knees and back, grunt and lift. Lift! A nearly grown male Kzin, pressure suit and all, rose just high enough to roll onto the cargo plate.
Louis crawled aboard. Tied the Kzin down. Took the cargo plates up. He used the little thruster to put him just under the stepping disk. Lifted until his shoulders touched.
Flick, they were upside down in Needle with the cargo plates on top of them.
Bram did the rest: rolled the cargo plates off, opened all the sealstrips that held the Kzin’s suit together, and pulled him out. The Kzin’s eyes blinked, focused, found Louis. Otherwise he seemed unable to move.
Bram eased Louis out of his suit, stretched him out next to Acolyte, and examined him. That hurt. “You’ve torn some muscles and tendons,” he said. “You need the ’doc, but the Kzin needs it more.”
“He goes first,” Louis said. If Acolyte died, what would he say to Chmeee?
Bram lifted the Kzin with no apparent effort, rolled him into the ’doc and closed it. An odd notion: had Bram been waiting for permission?
Not so odd. Louis was starting to hurt in earnest now, and it wouldn’t do to let Bram know. Louis was a hominid and Acolyte wasn’t, and a protector might need a breeder’s permission to heal an alien first.
Bram picked him up and set him on the cargo plates in one smooth motion. Pain flashed through him, blocking his breath, turning his scream to a squeak. Bram hooked up leads and tubes from Teela’s portable ’doc. He said, “Many of the reservoirs here need filling, Hindmost. Can your larger ’doc make medicines?”
“The kitchen has a pharmacy menu.”
The port and starboard walls glowed with orange heat.
In another window he saw a black, baggy shape roll over the rim of the maglev rail. Then nothing, only a silver path receding to infinity.
The pain was receding. Louis knew he wouldn’t be lucid much longer.
He felt lean and knobby arms around him. Hard fingertips probed him here and there. A rib felt distant pain, then eased. His back cracked, and again lower down, and a hip joint, and his right knee.