A World of Difference (43 page)

Fralk fired again. His band was less than a hundred meters from the Omalo barricade. Any second now, Lopatin expected the American back of the barrier to prove Fralk wrong and with
a little luck fill him full of holes. Lopatin would have saved a few rounds for another good chance at taking out the Kalashnikov, and he was sure anyone smart enough to make it onto
Athena
’s crew would also be smart enough to do the same.

Maybe, he thought with a sudden savage grin, the American would fill his kennel-master full of holes.
There
was a revenge that might be no dream.

One of the other high-ranking Minervans in Fralk’s group let out a startled squeal—he sounded amazingly like a housewife spotting a rat. “A monster in the sky!” he shrieked. “Look! Three arms away from the battle—it’s coming straight at us!”

Eyestalks writhed. Lopatin’s head whipped around. He had never seen
Damselfly
before, but he knew what it was. The Skarmer did not. That first scream was quickly echoed by many more.

Lopatin’s keeper had two eyes on the human, two on the battle, and two on the new flying horror. That left none to pay attention to the small green-brown bush by his feet. One of those feet brushed it. The keeper jerked, went limp. The rope slipped from his fingerclaws.

“A pestilence!” one of the other males shouted. “Nogdar just stepped on a stunbush! Grab that rope, somebody!”

Too late. Lopatin was free.

A spear, wildly flung, whizzed past
Damselfly
. Sarah did her best to ignore it; she couldn’t do anything about it, anyway. Fortunately, most of the Minervans seemed too scared of the ultra-ultralight to think of trying to bring it down.

There was her target, dead ahead. She leaned down again, this time with a Swiss army knife in her hand.

Seeing the monster fly hissing toward him, Fralk wanted to void where he stood. He needed an instant to remember he was still holding the rifle. A rifle had chewed the krong to bloody rags. Anything that could kill a krong ought to be able to take out a sky-monster, he thought.

The cursed rifle was on the wrong side of his body to shoot at the thing! Fast as he could, he passed it from arm to arm.

Oleg Lopatin looked at
Damselfly
, looked at Fralk, and discovered, as so many had before him, one of the great flaws of international socialism: when faced with a choice between their own kind and an ideology, most people chose their own kind.

Lopatin did not pause to reason that out. He just yelled and jumped on Fralk.

The Swiss army knife cut the string that ran through the handle of the gallon jug filled with wood alcohol, naphtha, and butane.
Damselfly
seemed to leap higher in the air as the weight it had never been designed to carry dropped away.

The Kalashnikov bellowed, right under Sarah. She screamed, expecting to die in the next second. No bullets ripped through her.
Damselfly
did not tumble in ruins to the ground.

She couldn’t even look back. She didn’t have a rear-view mirror. All she could do was pedal and pray.

Then Emmett Bragg’s hoarse voice came yelling out of the radio: “You can play in my league any day, darlin’! One extra large Molotov cocktail, right on target. Smoked ’em
both!
” He let go with a rebel yell that was almost too much for the little speaker.

“Both?” Sarah panted. She flew over Reatur’s barricade, onto the side his males held. As her fear-induced adrenaline rush began to fade, she realized how tired she was.

“The Minervan and the Russian, too.”

“Oh. Oh, Jesus. Didn’t I see him fighting with the Minervan, trying to keep him from shooting me down?” If she had dumped hellfire on somebody trying to save her … She wanted to be sick.

But Bragg said coldly, “Well, what if you did? Hadn’t been for Lopatin, that Minervan never would have had a rifle in the first place. And if he didn’t, a lot of people—Frank maybe, a lot of Reatur’s males for sure—would still be alive. Besides, nothin’ you can do about it now, anyhow.”

“You’re right,” she conceded, still wishing he had not told her.

“Look, if it makes you feel any better, we can turn the KGB bastard into a hero when we talk to
Tsiolkovsky
. Best part is, I guess it’s even true.”

“Yeah.” It
did
make her feel better, less guilty. I’d never make a soldier, she thought. But then, she had never wanted to be a soldier. “Okay. I’m heading back for
Athena.
”

“Good. We should have somebody minding the store. Now to win this battle—that’s the point of the exercise, after all. Out.”

“Out.” Sarah pedaled on.

*   *   *

Reatur stared in mixed awe and dread at the flames consuming his foe. His watersmiths used fire, of course, to melt ice and pour it into molds for tools. Hot water could bore through walls or, dropped from above, scald attackers. But to turn fire itself into a weapon for war—the domain-master shuddered.

He tried to imagine how humans fought among themselves. Imagining a battlefield full of noise-weapons and fire falling out of the sky made him shudder all over again.

Only for a moment, though. He had his own battle to worry about, and enormous opportunity looking right at him. “Come on!” he shouted to the males around him. “Their whole center depended on the noise-weapon. Now that it’s gone, nothing’s left there. We can split their whole army in half!”

He scrambled over the barricade. Yelling, his warriors followed. He heard a long series of roars from a noise-weapon, back where the Skarmer had forced his males to give ground. A pause, another long string of blasts. Emmett could shoot as he would now, without having to fear the enemy’s more powerful weapon. Then came the sweetest sound Reatur had heard on the battlefield: his warriors cheering, going over to the attack.

“That way!” he called. “We’ll cut off the Skarmer retreat.” He hurried east, his males rushing with him in their eagerness to close with the enemy. Suddenly he stopped. He divided the warband with him in two, pointed to the larger group. “You’ll come with me.” To the others, he said, “You go west instead. Maybe we’ll be able to surround each half of their army.” That hope made his males shout louder than ever.

As the domain-master ran toward the much-battered rampart, his eyestalks started twitching of their own accord. He had never expected to be fighting from the
north
side of the barrier! Here he was, though, reaching across with a spear to thrust at the Skarmer on the other side.

The foe was frantic now, caught between the males they had pushed back and the barrier from which they had pushed them. Some started climbing over it, this time in the opposite direction from before. The arrival of Reatur and his warriors put an end to that.

“Surrender!” the domain-master shouted in trade talk. “We will not slay any male who throws down his weapons and widens himself before us!” He waited to see if the Skarmer would yield.

They didn’t, not right away. But after a couple of desperate attacks failed to dislodge Reatur and his warriors, Skarmer males began casting aside axes and spears and widening themselves.
When the first few who did so were not harmed, more and more followed their lead.

Reatur began telling off warriors to take charge of prisoners. Clamor to the west made him turn a couple of eyestalks that way. He cursed—the Skarmer there had broken out to the north, through his hastily dispatched containment force. Were they to swing back on his males now …

They did not. Instead, they streamed back the way they had come, all thought of fight forgotten. The western half of the Omalo army pursued. Reatur spotted Enoph close by. “Take charge of the captives. Let our males loot as they will, but they are not to injure the Skarmer unless they try to escape.”

“It will be as you say,” Enoph promised—and what Enoph promised, the domain-master knew, he would deliver. “But where are you going, clanfather?” the reliable male asked.

Reatur was already hurrying north. “To join the chase. I want to rid my domain of the Skarmer once and for all.”

The western half of the Skarmer army, though beaten, was still a force large enough to disrupt his lands. And whoever led it now that Fralk was dead knew his business—knew it better, perhaps, than Hogram’s eldest of eldest ever had. The invaders fought a series of stubborn rearguard actions to keep Reatur’s warriors away from their main body.

“Curse them!” the domain-master shouted as his males finally broke through the third such delaying warband. “They’ll escape, scatter, and cause us untold grief.”

“Worse yet,” one of his warriors said gloomily, pointing ahead to a defile. “A rearguard there will hold us off till sunset, and they’ll be able to re-form on the far side at their leisure.”

“You’re right,” Reatur said, and cursed again. Another battle to fight, then, he thought bleakly. Even winning would cost him the lives of males the domain could not afford to lose.

But instead of racing through the defile, the Skarmer piled up at its southern end. They milled about in confusion. A male, all his arms outstretched to show he carried no weapons, advanced from their ranks toward Reatur and his oncoming warriors. “Will you spare us if we yield?” he shouted in trade talk.

The domain-master was flabbergasted but did his best not to show it. “Aye, we will,” he answered. “You have my vow on it.”

“Good enough,” the Skarmer said. He spoke to his males in their own language. They began throwing down their spears and knives and axes. The Skarmer widened himself to Reatur. “We
would’ve gotten away if you hadn’t somehow posted warriors in there to block our path. That was well done—I never saw them leave the battle, and I don’t miss much. Juksal, I’m called.” Juksal suddenly seemed to think of something. “Did you use tricks from the funny creatures to get them here?”

“The funny creatures?” Reatur asked.

“Trade talk doesn’t have a word for them. You know—the ones with two arms and two legs.”

“Oh. Our name for them is ‘humans.’ No, no human tricks,” Reatur said, wondering just where the warriors—
his
warriors?—had sprung from. Only one thing occurred to him. He walked toward the defile. Some of his males came with him, in case the Skarmer decided to unsurrender. “Ternat?” he called.

“Yes,” came the reply, and the warriors with the domain-master started to cheer. “How do we stand, clanfather?”

“Well. Very well now, eldest, very well. The other half of the Skarmer army has already yielded to us.” That brought answering cheers from Ternat and his warband. Reatur went on, “How fare you, eldest?”

“Also well. I have many, many massi with me, and Dordal as a captive, too.”

“Do you?” Reatur said when the clamor among his males subsided enough to let him be heard. “
Do
you? Then, eldest, it is very well indeed.” He thought about that, decided it was too small a thing to say. “Eldest, it is as well as I could have hoped.”

As soon as
Damselfly
touched down by
Athena
, Sarah knew she had made a mistake. If she didn’t want to damage the ultra-ultralight, she would need help getting out, and it looked as though Irv, Louise, and the stepladder were still over on the other side of Reatur’s castle.

She reached for the radio switch, then dropped her hand. All she wanted to do was sit and shake for a minute. Flying across Jötun Canyon had been tougher physically but had not left her drained and limp the way this bombing run had: terror was harder to take than exhaustion.

Cold started seeping into her bones as she rested. If she did too much of that, she knew, she would stiffen up and be sore for days. Her hand moved toward the radio again.

Something hissed through the couple of inches of snow outside. Sarah turned to see what it was; she had never heard any Minervan creature make a noise like that. It wasn’t any Minervan
creature, as it turned out: it was Emmett Bragg, speeding up on his bicycle.

He slid to a smooth stop, waved. “Need a hand getting out of that contraption, don’t you?”

“Yes, but doesn’t Reatur still need you back at the fight?”

“Nope.” He got off the bike. “For one thing, I’m out of ammo, so I’m less use to him now than one of his own warriors who really knows what to do with a spear. For another, he was moppin’ up when I left. With you takin’ out the Kalashnikov, the Skarmer didn’t have anything in the middle, and Reatur broke ’em in two and defeated ’em in detail.”

“All right.” As usual, Sarah thought, Emmett had a good reason for everything he did. She laughed a little—he wasn’t eight feet tall, though. “What are you going to get me out with? The stepladder’s a couple of miles from here.”

“I’ll manage.” He climbed up the chain ladder to the airlock and disappeared into
Athena
. When he emerged a minute later, he was carrying a large, square plastic-mesh box. He set it down by
Damselfly
and then climbed on top. “This ought to do the job.”

“I think you’re right.” Sarah unlatched the ultra-ultralight’s canopy and swung it open. She stood up on the pedals and reached out for Emmett. He more than half lifted her out of
Damselfly
’s cabin. The box made a crunching noise under the weight of the two of them. They jumped off it. Sarah stumbled. Emmett steadied her with an arm around her shoulder.

“Let’s get you inside,” he said. “Wearing that skimpy getup, you’re gonna be a lump of ice in a couple of minutes.” They walked over to
Athena
. He didn’t take his arm away. She started to shrug him off, changed her mind. He was warm.

She sighed in relief when he shut the inner airlock door after them. “Till I got to Minerva, I never knew how wonderful the words ‘room temperature’ could be,” she said.

“You know it.” Emmett grinned a lopsided grin. “Of course, they take on a whole nother meaning when the walls of the room are made of ice.” He turned serious again. “You did a hell of a job there, Sarah, a hell of a job.”

“Thanks,” she said, most soberly. “I don’t quite know how I did it, but I guess I did. Right now I’m just so glad to be back here in one piece that I can hardly think about anything else.”