think she’ll raise boys who’ll try to steal house rule from my sons.”
As usual, Dagny was no doubt right.
Anxious to swap findings with her, Tom hurried. The passage reached empty and echoing; air from the ventilators blew loud and chilled him; the stylized murals of gods and sea beasts had changed from bold to patheticnow that only three people crewed this ship. But they were lucky to be alive—would not have been so, save for the primitive loyalty of his personal guardsmen, who died in their tracks while he ran through the burning city in search of Dagny—when the Pretender’s nonhuman mercenaries broke down the last defenses. He found his chief wife standing by the ship with a Mark IV thunderbolter, awaiting his return. She would not have left without him. Yasmin huddled at her feet. They managed to loose a few missiles as they lifted. But otherwise there was nothing to do but hope to fight another day. The damage that Firedrake sustained in running the enemy space fleet had made escape touch and go. The resulting absence of exterior force-fields and much interior homeostasis made the damage worse as they traveled. Either they found the wherewithal for repair here, or they stayed here.
Tom said to Yasmin while he strode: “We couldn’t’ve picked up their radio so far out’s we did, less’n they’d had quite a lot, both talk and radar. That means they had a pretty broad industrial base. You don’t destroy that by scrubbin’ cities. Too many crossroads machine shops and so forth; too much skill spread through the population. I’d be surprised if this planet’s not on the way back up.”
“But why haven’t they rebuilt any cities?”
“Maybe they haven’t gotten that far yet. Been less’n ten years, you know. Or, ’course, they might’ve got knocked clear down to savagery. I’ve seen places where it happened. We’ll find out.”
Walking beside the girl, Roan Tom did not look especially note-worthy, certainly not like the rover and trader chieftain whose name was already in the ballads of a dozen planets. He was of medium height, though so broad in shoulders and chest as to look stocky. From his father, he had the long head, wide face, high cheekbones, snub nose and beardlessness of the Lochlanna. But his mother, a freedwoman said to be of Hermetian stock,, had given him dark-red hair, which was now thinning, and star-blue eyes. Only the right of those remained; a patch covered where the left had been. (Some day, somewhere, he’d find someone with the knowledge and facilities to grow him a new one!) He walked with the rolling gait of a Krakener, whose planet is mostly ocean, and bore the intertwining tattoos of his adopted people on most of his hide. A blaster and knife hung at his waist.
Dagny was in the detector shack. Viewscreens might be malfunctioning, along with a lot else, but such instruments as the radionic, spectroscopic, magnetic and sonic were not integrated with ship circuitry. They had kept their accuracy, and she was expert—not educated, but rule-of-thumb expert—in their use.
“Well; there,” she said, looking around the console at which she sat. “What’d you see?”
Tom repeated in more detail what he had told Yasmin. Since Dagny spoke no Pelevah and only a little pidgin Anglic, while Yasmin had no Eylan, these two of his wives communicated with difficulty. Maybe that was why they got along so well. “And how ‘bout you?” he finished.
“I caught a flash of radiocast. Seemed like two stations communicating from either end of a continental-size area.”
“Still, somebody is able to chat a bit,” Torn said. “Hopeful.” He lounged against the doorframe. “Anyone spot us, d’ you think?”
Dagny grinned. “What do you think?”
His lips responded. A positive answer would have had them in action at once, he to the bridge, she to the main fire control turret. They couldn’t be sure they had not been noticed—by optical system, quickly brushing radar or maser, gadget responsive to the neutrino emission of their prciton converter, several other possible ways—but it was unlikely.
“Any further indications?” Tom asked. “Atomic powerplants?”
“I don’t know.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know what the readings mean that I get, particle flux, magnetic variations and the rest. This is such a confoundedly queer sun and planet. I’ve never seen anything like them. Have you?”
“No.”
They regarded each other for a moment that grew very quiet. Dagny, Od’s-daughter in the House of Brenning, was a big woman, a few years his senior. Her shoulder-length yellow mane was fading a bit, and her hazel eyes were burdened with those contact lenses that were the best help anyone on Kraken knew how to give. But her frame was still strong and erect, her hands still clever and murderously quick. It had been natural for an impoverished noble family to make alliance with an energetic young immigrant who had a goodly following and a spaceship. But in time, voyages together, childbirths and child-rearings, the marriage of convenience had become one of affection.
“Well… s’pose we better go on down,” Tom said. “Sooner we get patched, sooner we can start back. And we’d better not be gone from home too long.”
Dagny nodded. Yasmin saw the grimness that touched them and said, “What is wrong, my… my husband?”
Tom hadn’t the heart to explain how turbulent matters were on Kraken also. She’d learn that soon enough, if they lived. He said merely, “There’s some kind o’ civilization goin’ yet around here. But it may exist only as traces o’ veneer. The signs are hard to figure. This is a rogue planet, you see.”
“Rogue?” Yasmin was bemused. “But that is a loose planet—sunless—isn’t it?”
“You mean a bandit planet. A rogue’s one that don’t fit in with its usual type, got a skrewball orbit or composition or whatever. Like this’n.”
“Oh. Yes, I know.”
“What?” He caught her shoulder, not noticing how she winced at so hard a grip. “You’ve heard o’ this system before?”
“No… please… no, my people never came to this side of the Nebula either, with what few ships we had. But I studied some astro-physics and planetography at Anusliirvan University.”
“Huh?” He let her go and gaped. “Science? Real, Imperial-era science, not engineerin’ tricks?” She nodded breathlessly. “But I thought—you said—you’d studied classics.”
“Is not scientific knowledge one of the classic arts? We had a very complete collection of tapes in the Royal Library.” Forlornness came upon her. “Gone, now, into smoke.”
“Never mind. Can you explain how come this globe is as it is?”
“Well, I… well, no. I don’t believe I could. I would need more information. Mass, and chemical data, and—And even then, I would probably not be able. I am not one of the ancient experts.”
“Hardly anybody is,” Tom sighed. “All right. Let’s get us a snack, and then to our stations for planetfall.”
Descent was tricky. Sensor-computer-autopilot linkups could no longer be trusted. Tom had to bring Firedrake in on manual controls. His few instruments were of limited use, when he couldn’t get precise data by which to recalibrate them for local conditions. With no view-screens working properly, he had no magnification, infra-red and ultra-violet presentations, any of the conventional aids. He depended on an emergency periscope, on Dagny’s radar readings called via intercom and on the trained reflexes of a lifetime.
Yasmin sat beside him. There was nothing she could do elsewhere, and he wanted to be able to assist her in her inexperience if they must bail out. The spacesuit and gravity impellers surrounded her with an awkward bulk that made the visage in the helmet look like a child’s. Neither one of them had closed a faceplate. Her voice came small through the gathering throb of power: “Is it so difficult, to land? I mean, I used to watch ships do it, and even if we are partly crippled—we could travel between the stars. What can an aircar do that we can’t?”
“Hyperdrive’s not the same thing as kinetic velocity, and most particular not the same as aerodynamic speed,” Tom grunted. “To start with, I know the theory o’ sublight physics.”
“Yon do?” She was frankly astounded.
“Enough of it, anyhow. I can read and write, too.” His hands played over the board. Vibration grew in the deck, the bulkheads, his bones. A thin shrilling was heard, the first cloven atmosphere. “A spaceship’s a sort o’ big and clumsy object, once out o’ her native habitat;” he said absently. “Got quite a moment of inertia, f’r instance. Means a sudden, hard wind can turn her top over tip and she don’t right easy. When you got a lot o’ sensitive
