In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (24 page)

“They are not carrying their running lights. This is a severe violation of navigational regulations, for which a substantial fine may be levied.”

Jeremy laughed; so did a few of the crew within earshot, if a bit nervously. They’d taken the revelation of the Crown more calmly than he expected—it was, the equivalent of being present when someone pulled the Sword out of the Stone and proclaimed themselves Pendragon, after all. On the other hand, Martians
were
generally calmer than Terrans, and they had thoughts of pursuit and probable death to occupy their minds anyway.

After a moment, Sally got the joke as well. “Send them a summons to the Harbor Court in Zar-tu-Kan,” she said dryly.

The Martians all had their headdresses pulled tight; the two Terrans wore face masks and goggles, and Teyud her biological equivalent of binoculars. Jeremy could swear that he saw it shiver, despite the way it tapped warmth as well as blood from its bearer’s veins. The wind was like liquid nitrogen whenever it managed to worm its way into contact with his skin, despite the thermal long johns he wore underneath his Martian desert togs, and his fingers were a little numb in their astronaut-style gloves.

Plumes of fine dust shot up in rooster-shaped trails on either side of the
Traveler
’s wheels as they ran along the narrow crests of the west-tending dunes; the talc-fine sand floated silver and black in the light of stars and moons, falling with dreamlike, low-gravity slowness. When the landship had to dip into the hollow between two of the great sand hills, the long swoop downward made his feet feel as if they would come free of the deck. Then there was a gentle rising-elevator sensation as they bottomed out and coasted upward, the sail going limp and then filling with a crack as they came out of the wind-shadow of the last crest.

It would have been fun if black-hulled death weren’t following close behind, like surfing or abseiling down a rock face.

“They still there?” he said.

“Yes,” Teyud said. Her gaze was locked on their trail, monstrous behind the organic bulge of the binoculars. “Their heat plumes are clearly visible through this device. They are approximately one mile behind us, and a quarter-mile from each other. If the wind holds, interception will be in . . . twenty-two minutes; by that time they will have converged to hailing distance from each other.”

Baid tu-Or was beside the wheel. “They plan to come up on either side of us and board. I express intense hope that randomness and event move in ways favorable to your plan and your person, Supremacy.”

“I also,” Teyud said, dryly. Then her stance shifted to courteous-departure. “If I come into my own, rest assured that our association shall not be dismissed as insignificant. We shall yet play
atanj
in the Court of the Crimson Kings while the musicians serenade us.”

She turned to the two Terrans: They might not be used to the
desert, but their extra strength more than compensated. As did their gear.

“On my signal,” she said. “It has been an honor to journey in your company, Sally Yamashita.”

A smile at him, visible in the movement of hands and shoulders. “And from you, Jeremy, enlightenment and oneness.”

He nodded, wishing that didn’t sound so much like
goodbye
. Actually it was a Thoughtful Grace way of making sure the necessary was said, just in case.

But I’m not the result of a twenty-thousand-year eugenics program to produce the perfect warrior or ruler
, Jeremy thought.
I’m a nice, peaceful scholar and I’ve just met this great girl
. . .

The thoughts made his teeth bare themselves in a snarl behind his mask.
Damned
if he was going to die, not
now
. Not with the salt of her kisses on his lips. Not with the greatest mystery of all time just beyond his reach.

“Ten minutes,” Teyud said. She pointed ahead, marking a spot for Baid. “We shall disembark at that crest. Halt after the next.”

“As you instruct, Supremacy.”

The minutes ticked by. Sally spent them checking and rechecking her gear; Teyud swayed slightly, probably doing isometrics to keep limber. Jeremy concentrated on controlling his breathing, which had a distressing tendency to escalate to panic-inducing panting.

“Ten seconds,” Teyud said.

Baid pointed, and the two crewfolk beside the wheel spun it sharply. The
Traveler
cut left, swaying and then heeling over until the hull’s edge hit the stops on the outriggers there; the suspension squealed in protest as its tendons were stretched. The prow cut the crest of the dune with a shuddering thud, more felt through the feet than heard, and a huge V-shaped plume of dust shot skyward from either side of the landship’s bow, silver with the slightest touch of pink as it boiled upward to conceal the jeweled sky.

“Now!”
the Thoughtful Grace barked.

They vaulted over the rail into the dust cloud. With the tilt of the landship, the distance to the surface was only ten feet. They landed, let their legs work as springs to cushion the impact, then dashed into position, to flatten and lie still, spaced twenty yards
apart. Dust fell down around them, covering the black over-robes they wore for concealment and protection.

“They will veer sharply to follow,” Teyud said conversationally—the enemy would still be too far away to hear. “Three minutes.”

She was right almost to the second; they could hear the heavy whirring hum of the bearings, the
ssssssss
of the woven-fiber wheels riding over the sand, the creak of hulls, and the sharp commands of the helmsmen to the deck crews as they adjusted sails to catch every breath of the wind.

And just like she said, they’ve closed in to take the
Traveler
on either side. Maybe we can take them both out
—

“Attack!”
Teyud shouted.

The word seemed to kick him somewhere in the stem at the back of his brain without passing through his ears or mind, and he found himself reacting with an efficiency no amount of practice could have produced. A huge prow rose over the dune above him, the long bowsprit first, below it the fanged horror of the figurehead. The great arch of the forward axle spread out to either side; the black hull suspended above it had a rime of frost that gave off a low glitter like the dust of stars. It was an immense thing, more than twice the size of the
Intrepid Traveler
, looming like a black cliff in the Martian night.

They were each to strike at the closest enemy landship. Jeremy whipped up the grapnel, whirled it around his head once, and let fly with all his strength. It flew upward and struck on the forward mast of the landship with a glutinous splat, gripping frantically with all eight tentacles. The long cord paid out behind it, and then the satchel charge was ripped out of his hand, pulling the fuse cord free as it did. A low hiss added itself to the screams and shouts; he leapt skyward, over the swift menace of the second axle and out in an astonishing leap that must have carried him forty feet.

Teyud had waited an instant longer; her grapnel struck the railing three-quarters of the way along the rushing length of the ship. She dodged a wheel taller than she was and raced past him; he followed with a bounding run that would have done credit to a kangaroo on Earth.

Behind them—a huge
crack!
And then another.

The harsh hot orange-white flash of the plastique exploding lit the desert ahead of him like a bolt of lightning; he risked a glance
over his shoulder. That cost him his balance and his leap turned into a sprawl, landing him on his back with a bruising force that sent the air out of his lungs in an agonizing whoop and put the iron-salt taste of blood into his mouth. The sight was worth it: the great black hull pitching as the foremast snapped and dropped, and the second explosion ripping the third axle’s connection loose from the hull.

The other outriggers tried to compensate and couldn’t, as the great mass of the landship careened down the slope of the dune, over further and further . . . and then past the tipping point, the bowsprit digging in, the whole three-hundred-ton bulk flipping forward and breaking up at the same time. The massive inertia of the mass tried to decelerate from thirty miles an hour to zero, plank and beam and bodies and bits of equipment spinning up against the sky. Then fire flickered in the wreckage.

Crack!

Teyud’s hand gripped his harness with bruising strength and hauled him erect. They ran on toward the other landship, to the figure of the other Terran where it lay motionless. Sally’s grapnel had landed on one of the outriggers and the cord wound tight around it before the charge exploded. The single-crystal growth was immensely strong, but fifteen pounds of plastique was as much explosive as a six-inch howitzer shell carried. The spar of the axle shattered like glass under a hammer, and the wheel went bounding free to disappear into the night.

The results weren’t as spectacular as the other landship’s destruction. The vessel heeled sharply as the broken tip of the axle dug in, and the next two came loose with a scream as the hull scraped ground; blood fountained in a huge black spray as the suspension broke and ripped open its wrist-thick arteries. Then the landship pinwheeled in a huge cloud of dust, rigging thrumming and snapping in turn, masts swaying like whips and cracking under the strain.

But it didn’t flip, and someone on it had the time to trigger a weapon, one that fired with a hollow
shoonk . . . shoonk . . . shoonk
. That showed impressive reflexes and even more impressive determination.

Barely visible black dots soared in their direction and landed around Sally, bursting with subdued
ptack
sounds.

“Fungus grenades!” Teyud shouted.

When he didn’t stop, she tackled him and threw herself across
his body, drawing her dart pistol and firing at the wrecked landship. Sally’s body convulsed as he watched, then settled to a steady twitching that wasn’t like any motion he’d ever seen a human body make.

He tried to rise and go to her. Teyud slapped the pistol back into its holster and swung him around westward.

“Sally!” he cried. “We have to—”

“She is dead. A spore must have hit moist tissue.”

“She’s still moving!”

“That is the fungus consuming her body mass, rapidly. When it bursts and sporulates, everything within a thousand square feet will die—everyone on that ship, too, unless they flee rapidly.
Now! Go!
”

The last was an astonishing husky roar of command. Again, it somehow seemed to bypass the horror-frozen surface of his mind. They turned and ran; after a moment he seized Teyud and slung her over his shoulder. It barely slowed his fifteen-foot bounds, up the other side of the dune and down into the hollow below where the
Traveler
waited.

He was barely conscious of reaching the deck, or of much else, until suddenly they were under sail once more, heading westward into night, with a band of purple across the sky behind. Teyud held him to her breast as he wept.

“She was my friend,” he said at last. “She was trying to protect me . . .”

“She did her duty,” Teyud said softly.

A drop of moisture fell on his face. He looked up, startled into alertness; Martians didn’t weep. She had not; instead she had nicked her cheek with her dagger, and a single drop of blood fell before the tiny wound clotted.

“I too shed the water of my life for her, Jeremy. We were not friends, but we worked and fought together. I am grieved.”

“We must reduce speed,” Baid tu-Or said, after she climbed back aboard from a perilous trip down one of the outriggers. “Left-three and right-two are definitely overheating. Dust has penetrated the sealing of the bearing-races. Ideally they should be removed and rebuilt, but we are some distance from a graving dock.”

They were on a stretch of what the Martians called
twom
—what the Tuareg of the Sahara knew as
reg
, a flat, gravelly plain of rocks stuck in a matrix of sand and dust. The plumes from under the wheels were lower here, and flew ahead of them with the brisk, cool noonday wind; the sound of the woven-wire wheels on the rock had a grating, crunching undertone, and occasionally a stone would split with a crack and ricochet off the planks of the hull.

With full robes and the head cloth drawn across the face the
twom
was almost comfortable, except for the dryness. Here and there in the shadow of a rock was a miniature atmosphere plant, the size of a golf ball when unfurled. Nothing else showed signs of life, and even the sky was empty of it.

“This is an unfortunate randomness,” Teyud said—which was awfully close to whining for her.

Baid shrugged elaborately. “It is an old ship more suited to routine voyages, and we have stressed it to ten-tenths of capacity, Supremacy,” she said.

“What is the probability of failure within the next fifteen hundred miles at current speed?”

“It approaches unity.”

“And at reduced speed?”

“As closely as I can calculate . . . even odds. Erosion rates increase geometrically with the speed of revolutions. But they might fail at any time.”

“Reduce speed, then. Our dice have given us a low number in this Maintenance Round.”

Forty-eight hours after the brief battle, Jeremy felt the cold numbness begin to lift a little.

I wonder how professionals manage it
, he thought.
Sally . . . she wasn’t my favorite person in all the world, and I didn’t know her that long, but she was someone I knew, and now she’s gone. Just . . . snuffed out, so many millions of miles from home
.

Then,
Dead is dead, it doesn’t matter where
, he told himself.

He flogged his mind back into alertness as the sail rattled down and the
Traveler
swayed upright again. Teyud unfastened the button of her headdress and pulled it back until it lay like a hood on the shoulders of her robe.

“Do you . . . feel something?” Jeremy asked quietly.