containers in which the pieces normally traveled. Even now the borrowed air car was only marginally flyable with four people aboard and the minimum additional weight.
'So,' said Orloff cheerfully. 'You didn't bring your old fool deKyper to watch? I thought she'd want to say good-bye to her precious pillar.'
'She wanted to stay home and check some values Rovald here has calculated for Alphane books,' Nessler lied. His smile looked as bright and natural as sunrise. You had to know him as well as Mincio did to notice the vein throbbing at the side of his neck. 'That would be a wonderful thing, wouldn't it, if we could actually decode their records?'
'Books are all well and good,' Orloff said dismissively. He gestured toward the pylon in its wrapper of countergrav rings. 'But this,
Beresford had the tent up. It was of Manticoran manufacture, a marvel of compactness and simplicity. It would sleep four and even hold a portion of their personal property if necessary. Some of the lodgings Nessler's party had found on the tour were rudimentary, but this was the first time they'd actually used the tent.
Crewmen had unloaded the laser they'd stripped from the cruiser's defensive armament. Under Kotzwinkle's shrill commands they were manhandling it the ten meters from the cutter to the edge of the pit where it could point at the rock on which the pylon rested.
The weapon didn't have a proper ground carriage: it lay in the bed of an agricultural cart purchased from a nearby latifundium. Mincio supposed that was all right since a laser wouldn't recoil, but both Nessler and Rovald had warned her not to get near the power cable which connected the weapon to the cutter's MHD generator. Neither of them thought the wrist-thick cable would hold up to the current for long.
A Melungeon servant huddled for a moment with Beresford. The officers paid no attention; those who'd gotten bored with watching the preparations were playing a half-hearted game of snap. It wouldn't have mattered if they'd all been staring at the servants. Even knowing what to expect, Mincio couldn't tell when Beresford passed the reprogrammed deck of cards back to the Melungeon.
'I wonder, Lord Orloff,' Nessler said loudly enough to be heard by most of the officers. 'Might I borrow a pistol from one of your men to do a little target shooting? At one time I used to be pretty good.'
'Sure, use mine,' Orloff said, pulling a gleaming weapon from the holster on his belt. It was a little thing, almost hidden in Orloff's hand, a symbol rather than a serious weapon which would weigh the wearer down uncomfortably.
'But say,' he added. 'Don't shoot more than a dozen or so of my dogs of crewmen, will you? We still need to get the pillar aboard!'
Orloff doubled over with the enthusiasm of his laughter. Nessler chuckled also as he examined the borrowed pistol.
He turned and brought the weapon up. It
'What are you trying to hit?' Orloff asked genially. Several other officers walked over, some of them drawing their own sidearms in the apparent intention of joining in.
Nessler fired again. There was no flash or smoke from the muzzle so Mincio supposed the weapon used electromagnetic rather than chemical propulsion. A second geyser of dirt sprayed from the same bit of ground.
'Seems to group nicely,' Nessler said. 'If it was mine, I'd adjust the sights; but so long as it groups, I don't mind holding off.'
He fired a third time: a fist-sized rock, half a meter from the original point of impact, sprang into the air. He hit the rock twice more before it disintegrated as it bounced across the landscape.
'You meant to do that?' a Melungeon officer said in amazement.
'Of course,' said Nessler. He picked up a pebble with his left hand. Mincio noticed that despite Nessler's seeming nonchalance he never let the muzzle waver from the stretch of empty landscape toward which he'd been shooting. 'Watch this.'
He tossed the pebble skyward. It disintegrated at the top of its arc. The
'Hit
Nessler's body swung onto the new target, the pistol an extension of his straight right arm. The pebble was a rotating reflection forty meters from Nessler when it vanished in a spark and a spray of white dust.
'Yes, very nice,' Nessler said as he turned to the astounded Melungeons. He offered the pistol, its muzzle in the air, to Orloff between thumb and forefinger. 'Haven't done any shooting in a very long time. Haven't dared to, really.'
'Where did you learn to shoot like that?' Orloff said. Though he closed his hand over the pistol, he seemed completely unaware of what he held.
'Well, it wasn't my first love,' Nessler said airily. 'But after a while people refused to fight me with swords so I had to learn to shoot. I was a terror at school, I'm afraid. How many did I kill in duels, Mincio? It must have been near twenty, wasn't it?'
'More than that,' Mincio said, shaking her head sadly. 'It was quite a scandal.'
Nessler nodded. 'Yes,' he agreed, 'I was on the verge of being sent down. My sainted mother on her deathbed made me swear never to fight another duel. I've kept that oath thus far. But I must say, when I hold a weapon in my hand again it makes me wonder if a little hellfire for a broken oath would really be so bad.'
He gave the Melungeons a bright smile. Orloff rubbed his mustache with his fist, trying to process the unexpected information.
'We're ready!' Kotzwinkle called from beside the laser. A crewman murmured a protest, his head abjectly lowered. 'We're ready, I say!' the officer roared.
Everyone moved toward the edge of the pit. Orloff had his arm around Nessler's shoulders. He fumbled the pistol into its holster with his free hand.
'The best thing I could say about the master's mother,' Beresford whispered into Mincio's ear, 'is that after she ran off with the undergardener ten years ago she never troubled the family again. And Sir Hakon never fought a duel in his life.'
'He never had to fight,' Mincio whispered back. 'He made sure that everyone at school knew he was as deadly a marksman as ever walked the Quad. He gave trick-shooting demonstrations to entertain the bloods. Nobody would have thought of calling him out.'
She nodded toward Nessler, listening to their host's expansive boasting. 'And he's just done the same thing again, Beresford.'
The big laser was aimed at bare granite beside the pylon's crystal shaft. Some of the Melungeon crewmen were directly across the pit, itself less than thirty meters in radius.
'I wonder if we should be standing so close?' Mincio observed aloud. Everyone ignored her, though she noticed Nessler was covering his eyes with his left forearm. She did the same.
Kotzwinkle signalled a crewman, who switched on the cutter's MHD generator. Its roar overwhelmed any chance for further conversation.
The laser's oscillator whined up into the reaches of inaudibility. When the weapon fired, the sound of the beam heating the air was lost in the crash of granite shattered by asymmetric heating.
Bedrock exploded into secondary projectiles ranging in size from sand to head-sized rocks. Most of them flew into the side of the pit, but crewmen on the other side were down and the stone that howled past Mincio's ear could have knocked her silly if not worse.
At the same time as the bedrock disintegrated, a varicolored short circuit blew out the side of the laser. The cable had proved more durable than the weapon it fed. Kotzwinkle fell shrieking into the pit with his tunic afire. His roll down the gritty slope smothered the flames.
Mincio lowered her protective arm; Nessler had done the same. Everybody was shouting, mostly in delight and wonder. The fireworks had been the most entertainment the Melungeons, officers and spacers alike, had seen in a long time.
The pylon wavered, then started to tilt. The rock to one side of the crystal was broken into fragments but the granite shelf on the other side remained whole; the base was partly supported, partly free.
