“Yes! We’re here.”
“Let me talk to Mr. Steel, please.”
Mr. Tyrathect stepped nearer to the comm. “He is not here now, Ravna.”
“Who is this?”
Tyrathect’s laugh was a giggle; he had never heard any other kind. “I?” He made the Tinish chord that sounded like “Tyrathect” to Jefri. “Or do you mean a taken name, like Steel? I don’t know the exact word. You may call me
… Mr. Skinner.” Tyrathect laughed again. “For now, I can speak for Steel.”
“Jefri, are you all right?”
“Yes, yes. Listen to Mr. Skinner.” What a strange name.
The sounds from the comm became muffled. There was a male voice, arguing. Then Ravna was back, her voice kind of tight, like Mom when she was mad. “Jefri… what’s the volume of a ball ten centimeters across?”
Amdi had been fidgeting impatiently through the conversation. All through the last year he had been hearing stories of humans from Jefri, and dreaming what Ravna might really be like. Now he had a chance to show off. He jumped for the comm, and grinned at Jefri. “That’s easy, Ravna.” His voice was perfect Jefri—and completely fluent. “It’s 523.598 cubic centimeters… or do you want more digits?”
Muffled conversation. “…No, that’s fine. Okay, Mr. Skinner. We have pictures from our earlier pass and a general radio fix. Where exactly are you?”
“Under the castle dome at top of Starship Hill. It’s right at the coast by a—”
A man’s voice cut in. Pham? He had a funny accent. “I got it on the map. We still can’t see you direct. Too much haze.”
“That’s smoke,” said the Cloak. “The enemy is almost upon us from the south. We need your help immediately—” The singleton lowered its head from the commset. Its eyes closed and opened a couple of times. Thinking? “Hmm, yes. Without your help, we and Jefri and this ship are lost. Please land within the castle courtyard. You know we’ve specially reinforced it for your arrival. Once down we can use your weapons to—”
“No way,” the guy replied immediately. “Just separate the friendlies from the bad guys and let us take care of things.”
Tyrathect’s voice took on a wheedling tone, like a little kid complaining. He really has been studying us. “No, no, didn’t mean to be impolite. Certainly, do it your own way. About the enemy force: everyone close to the castle on the south side of the hill are enemy. A single pass with your ship’s… um, torch… would send them running.”
“I can’t fly that torch inside an atmosphere. Did your Pop really land with the main jet, Jefri? No agrav?”
“Yes, sir. All we had was the jet.”
“He was a lucky genius.”
Ravna: “Maybe we could just float across, a few thousand meters up. That might scare them away.”
Tyrathect began, “Yes, that might—”
The public doors on the north side of the dome slid open. Mr. Steel stood silhouetted against the daylight beyond. “Let me talk to them,” he said.
The goal of all their voyaging lay just twenty kilometers below OOB. They were so close, yet those twenty thousand meters might be as hard to bridge as the twenty thousand light-years they had come so far.
They floated on agrav directly over “Starship Hill'. OOB’s multispectral wasn’t working very well, but where smoke did not obscure, the ship’s optics could count the needles on the trees below. Ravna could see the forces of “Woodcarver” ranged across the slopes south of the castle. There were other troops, and apparently cannon, hidden in the forests that lined the fjord south of that. Given a little more time they would be able to locate them too. Time was the one thing they did not have.
Time and trust.
“Forty-eight hours, Pham. Then the fleet will be here, all around us.” Maybe, maybe godshatter could work a miracle; they’d never know stewing about it up here. Try: “You’ve got to trust somebody, Pham.”
Pham glared back at her, and for an instant she feared he might go completely to pieces. “You’d land in the middle of that castle? Medieval villains are just as smart as any you’ve seen in the Beyond, Rav. They could teach the Butterflies a thing or two. An arrow in the head will kill you as sure as an antimatter bomb.”
More fake memories? But Pham was right on this: She thought about the just-concluded conversation. The second pack—Steel—had been a bit too insistent. He had been good to Jefri, but he was clearly desperate. And she believed him when he said that a high fly-by wouldn’t scare the Woodcarvers off. They needed to come down near the ground with firepower. Just now, about all the firepower they had was Pham’s beam gun. “Okay, then! Do what you and Steel talked about. Fly the lander past Woodcarver’s lines, laser blast them.”
“God damn it, you know I can’t fly that. The landing boat is like nothing either of us know, and without the automation I—”
Softly: “Without the automation, you need Blueshell, Pham.” There was horror on Pham’s face. She reached out to him. He was silent for a long moment, not seeming to notice.
“Yeah.” His voice was low, strangled. Then: “Blueshell! Get up here.”
OOB’s lander had more than enough room for the Skroderider and Pham Nuwen. The craft had been built specifically for Rider use. With higher automation working, it would have been easy for Pham—for even a child -to fly. Now, the craft could not provide stable flight, and the “manual” controls were something that gave even Blueshell a hard time. Damn automation. Damn optimization. For most of his adult life Pham had lived in the Slowness. All those decades, he had managed spacecraft and weapons that could have reduced the feudal empire below to slag. Yet now, with equipment that should have been enormously more powerful, he couldn’t even fly a damn landing boat.
Across the crew compartment, Blueshell was at the pilot’s position. His fronds stretched across a web of supports and controls. He had turned off all display automation; only the main window was alive, a natural view from the boat’s bow camera. OOB floated some hundred meters ahead, drifting up and out of view as their craft slid backwards and down.
Blueshell’s fidgety nervousness—furtiveness, it seemed to Pham -had disappeared as he got into piloting the craft. His voder voice became terse and preoccupied, and the edges of his fronds writhed across the controls, an exercise that would have been impossible to Pham even if he had a lifetime of experience with the gear. “Thank you, Sir Pham… I’ll prove you can trust…” The nose lurched downwards and they were staring almost straight into the fjord-carven coastline twenty kilometers below. They fell free for half a minute while the rider’s fronds writhed on their supports. Hot piloting? No: “Sorry, sorry.” Acceleration, and Pham sank into his restraints under a grav load that wobbled between a tenth gee and an intolerable crush. The landscape rotated and they had a brief glimpse of OOB, now like a tiny moth above them.
“Is it necessary to kill, Sir Pham? Perhaps simply our appearance over the battle…”
Nuwen gritted his teeth. “Just get us down.” The Steel creature had been adamant that they fry the entire hillside. Despite all Pham’s suspicions, the pack might be right on that. They were up against a crew of murderers that had not hesitated to ambush a starship; the Woodcarvers needed a real demonstration.
Their boat fluttered down the kilometers. Steel’s fortifications were clearly visible even in the natural view: the rough polygon that guarded the refugee ship, the much larger structure that rambled across an island several kilometers westward. I wonder if this is how my Father’s castle looked to the Qeng Ho landers? Those walls were high and unsloping. Clearly the Tines had had no idea of gunpowder till Ravna had clued them to it.
The valley south of the castle was a blot of dark smoke smoothly streaming toward the sea. Even without data enhancement, he could see hot spots, fringes of orange edging the black.
“You’re at two thousand meters,” came Ravna’s voice. “Jefri says he can see you.”
“Patch me through to them.”
“I will try, Sir Pham.” Blueshell fiddled, his lack of attention spinning the boat through a complete loop. Pham had seen falling leaves with more control.
A child’s piping voice: “A-are you okay? Don’t crash!”
And then the Steel pack’s hybrid of Ravna and the kid: “South to go! South to go! Use fire gun. Burn them quick.”
