At first Hermes was a blue star. It grew to a sapphire disk marbled with white weather, darkened where its single huge continent lay, elsewhere a shining of seas sun-brightened or moon-shimmery. Later it filled half the firmament and was no longer ahead but below.
Here was the danger point. Her crew had ridden Streak in on a hyperbolic orbit, entering the Maian System from well off its ecliptic plane, nuclear power plant shut down and life support apparatus running at minimum activity off electric capacitors. Thus if any radar from a guardian Baburite ship fingered her, she would most likely be taken for a meteoroid from interstellar space, a fairly common sort of object. But now, lest she burn in the atmosphere, Falkayn must briefly apply thrust to give her the precise velocity required.
Readouts glided before his eyes, data on air density and its gradient, gravity, altitude, planetary curvature, the boat's ever-changing vectors. A computation flashed forth: in thirty seconds, aerodynamic descent would be feasible, given the correct amount of deceleration, and would bring the speedster down at such-and-such a point. He must decide whether to take advantage of that opportunity or wait for the next. Then less negagrav force would be needed; but the hull would grow hotter and the place of landing would be different. Acting half on reason, half on trained instinct, he pressed the button which elected the immediate option.
With no internal field to compensate, deceleration crammed him forward into his safety web. Weight dragged on his body, darkness went tattered across his vision, thunder sounded through his skull. After minutes the drive cut off and he was flying free on a shallow slant. This high in the stratosphere, stars still shone in a heaven gone blue-black.
"Are you all right back there?" he croaked into the intercom.
"As all right as any other squashed tomato," Chee grumbled from the weapons control turret.
"Oh, I found the maneuver quite refreshing, after so long a time weightless," Adzel said in the engine compartment. "I can't wait to disembark and stretch my legs." Aboard Streak he had had no room for anything except isometric exercises and pushups. He must vacate the recreation chamber, the only one in which he could extend himself, whenever his shipmates wanted a workout—either that or risk becoming a backstop for a handball.
"You may get in more jogging than you really want," Chee said dourly, "if somebody's detector registered our power output."
"We were over the middle of the Corybantic Ocean," Falkayn reminded her. "The odds should favor us . . . . Whoops, here we start bouncing."
The boat struck the interface of stratosphere and troposphere at a small, calculated angle. Like a stone skimmed across water, she rebounded from the denser gas. Shock drummed through her structure. For a while she flew on, almost free, rising higher toward space, then curving downward to strike and leap again . . . again . . . again. Each pass was deeper in the atmosphere, at a lower speed. The sky outside turned blue by day, starry only as she rounded the night side. A wail of cloven air swelled to a hurricane roar. Land and sea began to fill more view than heaven did.
At last she was mere kilometers above the surface, acting now as a lifting body. Falkayn tapped a button to demand her geographical coordinates, computed from the continuous signals of navigation satellites. Eagerly he compared a map in his hands. He was over Greatland, bound for a setdown in the Thunderhead Mountains. Below him stretched the sunlit desert of the continental interior, red soil rising in fantastic wind-sculptured yardangs, scantily begrown with yerb, empty of man. If he hadn't been observed yet, he doubted he would be. So he could use the engine to bring the vessel quite near Hornbeck, ancestral home of the Falkayns.
Chee's voice was a swordcut across his hopes. "Yao leng! Two aircraft from northeast and southeast, converging on our track."
"You sure?" Falkayn almost shouted.
"Radar and . . . yes, by all doom and hell, neutrino emission, nuclear power plants. I don't think they're spaceable, but they're big, and you can bet they're well heeled."
Oh, no, oh, no, twisted in Falkayn. We were spotted. How? Well, the occupation force must be bigger and more dispersed than Eric realized, for whatever reason. After all, he was gone before it took over . . . . Somebody noted an energy burst high up, and queried a centrum which said it probably was nothing Baburite, and a widespread detector net got busy, and we were discovered, and the nearest military flyers were scrambled to check on us.
He shoved out the dismay in him and asked, "Any prospect of shooting them down when they come close?"
"Poor, I'd say," Chee replied.
Falkayn nodded. Streak wasn't Muddlin' Through. In atmosphere and a strong gravity field, she was much less agile than machines intended for such conditions. She had no forcefield generator capable of stopping a missile, and her unarmored sides were desperately vulnerable to rays. Before she could strike a first-class fighting aircraft, it would likeliest have blown her apart.
To attempt a return to space would be as senseless as to try combat here. Tracking devices already had a lock on her. Warcraft in orbit must already have been alerted.
The three had discussed this, and every other contingency they could think of, during their voyage. "Okay," Falkayn said. "Where'll they meet us, Chee?"
"In about another five hundred kilometers, if everybody keeps his present vector," the Cynthian told him.
"Give thanks for so much luck. We'll be well over the Thunderheads, a section of them that I knew as a boy. I'll land us short of our destination, and we'll bolt into the woods. Maybe we can shake pursuit. You two, leave your posts right away; no further point in your staying on watch. Chee, collect our supplemental rations." They could all eat most of the native life, but it lacked certain vitamins and trace minerals. "Adzel, get the traveling gear." A bundle of that had been prepared in advance, including impellers on which they could fly if they did elude enemy search. "Stand by at the personnel lock, but buckle onto stanchions. I'll be slamming on brakes quite soon."
Trailing a sonic boom that shivered the ground below, Streak continued her long descent. The mountains reared ghost-blue over the worldrim, then starkly gray and tawny, then beneath the speedster, rock, crags, talus slopes, eternal snows. Peaks raked at her as she crossed their divide. The eastern heights were gentler, falling in long curves toward the Apollo Valley, beyond which lay the Arcadian Hills, the coastal plain, Starfall, and the Auroral Ocean. In the moister air of this side, clouds drifted, alpine meadows glimmered autumnally pale, the lower slopes lay mantled in forest.
Here we go! Falkayn cut in the drive afresh. With a surge of force, the spaceboat shuddered to a virtual halt, tipped to a vertical position, sank, struck. Her landing jacks bit into topsoil, found solidity, adjusted themselves to hold her steady. By then Falkayn was out of his seat. A dose of equilibrol had compensated his organs of balance for the time under zero gee. He swung himself down a companion, dashed along a corridor, found the airlock open and sped over the gangway after his partners.
They gave him the lead. He pelted across the glade where he had settled, toward the trees that walled it. The bare sky bore death. Between the trunks, shrubs and withes grew thick, stiffly resistant. Old skill came back to him and he parted them with economical movements of arms and shins. Adzel must follow more cautiously, lest he leave a trampled trail; but each of his strides was longer than the man's. Chee traveled easily from branch to branch.
Falkayn guessed they had gone three kilometers when a whistling sounded overhead. Glancing up, he saw one of the vehicles as it moved toward Streak. The lean shape belonged to an Avelan, produced for human-occupied planets after the Shenna scare made them arm to some degree, as formidable a war machine as he had feared. The insigne painted upon it was the linked figure eights of united Babur. It and its like had surely been bought through dummies years ago, and put in care of human mercenaries.
Relief fountained in Falkayn when it passed out of sight. It had not spied them.
"Let me take a look," Chee called. Adzel tossed her a pair of binoculars adjustable to her eyes, and she swarmed aloft.
Falkayn felt glad of the halt. He wasn't yet tired. On a clear track he could still run his thirty klicks without breathing unduly hard. But this was a chance to let his senses range around, to become part of the world instead of its being a set of obstacles.
Late afternoon light speared among boles and boughs from a blue in which small clouds wandered. The trees hereabouts were mainly stonebark, now leafless, and rainroof, whose canopies were gone yellow but would provide cover if he picked his way with forethought. The forest floor was less overgrown in this area of summer shade than it had been around his landing spot. Its new-fallen cover scrunched beneath his feet, sending up a rich, damp odor. Ornithoids flitted among bare twigs and buzzbugs danced in the sunbeams like dustmotes. A sudden powerful sense of—not homecoming—longing gripped Falkayn. Was this his country yet, or had he roamed away from it for overly many years?
No time to mope about that. Chee scampered back down. "I saw our bandit descend, and the other's hovering above, evidently at the boat," she reported. "They'll soon find nobody's minding that store."
"We had best move fast," Adzel proposed.
"No," Falkayn decided. "Not till we know how thorough they're going to be. Let's get tucked away while we can, especially you, old bulligator."
Chee returned to her post while Adzel squeezed into a thicket. Falkayn used his blaster to slash bushes and boughs, which he laid across the Wodenite's protruding tail. He himself could more readily hide—
The Cynthian zipped to the ground and across it. "School's out," she snapped. "They're coming on impellers, four men flying a search spiral. What d'you bet they've got a sniffer?"
Falkayn stiffened. Short of a cave, there would be no concealment from an instrument sensitive to the gases of breath and perspiration. Wild animals might cause delays with false alarms, but hardly enough to do the hunted any real good.
This could be the end, after all our years of luck. The thought was strange. Aloud, idiotically, he asked, "How would they happen to have a sniffer?"
"Precaution against guerrillas, or maybe guerrillas already are active," Chee said. "Only one of the flyers seems to've carried any, though. Else they'd have two parties in motion."
"Could we take to the air ourselves?"
"Chu, no! Where've your wits gone? We'd be seen for sure, this close to them."
Adzel spoke from the coppice: "I'll register much the most strongly when they come in range. You two proceed. Let me stay and decoy them."
"Have your brains turned to oatmeal too?" Chee snorted.
"Listen, friends, it is impossible in any event for me to escape—"
Intelligence slammed back into Falkayn like sword into sheath. "Sunblaze!" he cried. "Turn that notion inside out. Adzel, you stay put. Chee, come along with me. Guide me on a course that'll make them scent us first."
Her ears lifted. "What have you in mind?"
"Hurry, move, you jittertongue!" Falkayn said. "I'll explain as we run."
He stood beneath a rainroof at the edge of a stand of stonebark, whose limbs and twigs traced a skeletal pattern across what he could see of the sky. It hummed above him, and his hunters glided into view, well clear of the treetops. They were human but didn't seem so, the impellers on their backs like thick, paired fins, the helmets on their heads like naked bone, metal agleam in the level light. Otherwise they wore unfamiliar gray uniforms, and three of them carried energy guns whose long barrels bespoke heavy destructive capacity. The leader, who flew lower than the rest, bore a box with scanners and intake valves on its front, meters on its rear: yes, a sniffer.
That man pointed. A bolt raved from the weapon of another, scything dazzlingly across limbs that fell off and crashed downward in bitter-smelling smoke. An amplified voice boomed in accented Anglic: "Come out in sight or we'll burn the ground you're on!"
Falkayn stepped forth, empty hands raised. He was beyond fear. But every sense was at its keenest pitch, he saw each separate fallen leaf under his boots, heard it rustle, felt it give beneath his tread, he knew how a breeze whispered the sweat away from his cheeks, he drank fragrances of growth and healthy decay, it felt impossible to him that Chee's presence did not shout a warning.
The soldiers paused. "That's right, hold where you are," the voice ordered. The four of them conferred. They would naturally be wary of any ambush. However, their instrument had told of just this single man . . . .
An arboreal animal clinging to a high branch didn't count. It was inconspicuous, its fur gray with black spots, its posture that of a creature frozen into terrified immobility. Chee had rolled in the humus below the dead leaves. And the men were not Hermetians, they knew nothing of the planet's wildlife. Perhaps none of them had even noticed her.
One remained high. His companions came down to take the prisoner. As they passed near the Cynthian, she whipped her blaster from under her belly and opened fire.
The first bolt struck the sniffer, slashed through the cover and in among the circuits. He who bore it screamed and let go. The shot trailed across him, searing shut the mortal wound it made. His body continued down on its impeller, brokenly dangling.
Her second ray missed. It only got her target on the leg. But that put him out of action. He fled straight up, his own shrieks horrible to hear.
The third blazed at Chee. She had already slipped behind the trunk and was on her way groundward, springing from bough to bough across meters of air. He slewed his gun about in search of Falkayn, but Falkayn was back under foliage. Hermetian and Cynthian snapped shots from what shelter they had. The soldier retreated. In blind fury, he and his unhurt companion sent flame after flame. Where those struck, wood burst and soil steamed. Hundreds of wings lifted in panic, till cries well-nigh drowned out the flat thunder.
It was useless. Slipping from cover to cover, Falkayn was out of that area within seconds. Chee had less trouble moving invisibly. When they rejoined Adzel, she went on high and glimpsed no hostiles, apart from the one aircraft at hover. The mercenaries must have helped their wounded mate back.
"And they'll be without a sniffer till somebody brings a replacement," Falkayn said. As he had not been afraid earlier, he was not exultant now; he merely knew what he must do, and momentum carried him headlong. "We've got to be far gone before then. We'll start off now, slowly and ultracautiously. Come nightfall, which thank God is soon, we'll move fast. I mean fast." To the Wodenite: "Never mind any more noble self-sacrifices, huh? You carry me, and Chee on my back, and we will have a good speed without needing rest stops." Yes, he thought, the old team is still working rather well, and pointed to a landmark glimpsed between trees, an unmistakable snowpeak. "Steer yonderward. That way are my people."