Strider's Galaxy (44 page)

She said something more. To him it sounded like "Sheeeeeeaaagroooolllla."

"Strider," he said again to encourage her. He wondered what sort of bastardization his voice was making of her name.

The bot didn't respond either. Of course, it was somewhere out of the line of sight. Qitanefermeartha almost certainly didn't have much of an ionosphere. Segrill could try contacting the Helgiolath or the Bredai directly, but they were still busy finishing off the planet's defenders and would have other things on their minds than listening out for communications from the surface.

Nothing for it but to change the line of sight.

Segrill barked a general instruction to his personnel that they were to stay exactly where they were and then rapidly powered up his own fighter, cursing the fact that his spacesuited hands were so clumsy on the switches and buttons because he hadn't taken the time to reoxygenate the craft's interior.

The whole fighter seemed to screech as he cut in the upthrusters at twice the boost level he'd ever tried before. For a moment he thought the craft might actually shake itself to pieces. For a moment he thought the boost might actually shake
him
to pieces. He
forced
himself not to pass out as the light on the altimeter glowed red, then orange.

That should be enough—the bot could have got only so far in this time.

Off with the upthrusters. Slam on the downthrusters.

Shit! He hadn't belted himself in.

Again consciousness became something to be groped for as his helmet hammered against the cockpit's ceiling. Then he dropped like a stone, landing belly downwards spreadeagled across the control panel.

Keep a cool head,
he told himself as reality ebbed and flowed.

Yes, but
where
am I keeping it right at the moment? Somewhere in Heaven's Ancestor, it feels like.

He threw himself off the console and scanned it rapidly through blurring eyes to ensure his fall hadn't done anything bizarre. Hit the wrong switch and you might be half a parsec away—or heading straight for the nearest disrupting warcruiser.

No. The worst that had happened was that the heating had been turned up.

Ship's radio on to broad-band. Get moving.

He had difficulty speaking. When he first tried to say the bot's name he discovered that there was a more particular pain mixed up in his general bodily agonies. If he hadn't broken his jaw he'd done something very like it. He moved his mouth experimentally.
Attempted
to move his mouth.

Other races had gods. He wished that the Trok did, so that he could call upon a few of them now.

No, his jaw wasn't broken. He wasn't going to
allow
it to be broken. He must just have jarred it numb when he'd crashed against the top of the cockpit.

Jaw,
he thought,
if you've gone and broken yourself, after this is all over I'm going to break you again.

He'd lost a few teeth. They'd grow back soon, but at the moment the bits were floating around disconcertingly between his eyes and his visor.

He made another attempt.

"Pinocchio."

The bot came on-line instantly. "Segrill."

"Cannot speak Strider," said the Trok laboriously, keeping the words down to a minimum and hoping the Image would be able to make sense of what he was saying.

And then Ten Per Cent Extra Free was in his mind.

THERE IS NO NEED FOR YOU TO TALK. JUST
THINK
AT ME. PINOCCHIO WILL HEAR EVERYTHING THAT I HEAR.

Segrill obeyed, swiftly explaining what was very likely about to happen and his madcap scheme for trying to prevent it.

YOU ARE CORRECT. THERE IS NO REAL ALTERNATIVE. I WILL CONVEY ALL THIS TO CAPTAIN LEONIE STRIDER.

#

"That's insane!" yelped Strider out loud before she could stop herself. The rest of the party stopped and turned to look at her—all except Polyaggle, who continued trudging towards the Trok fleet. The fighter that had rocketed skyward a short while earlier was now returning more sedately to the ground.

"Nothing," Strider said. She hoped she sounded adequately reassuring. "I'm just fixing something up with Ten Per Cent Extra Free."

She tongued off her suit radio.

"What do you think our chances are?"

BETTER THAN IF YOU STAY WHERE YOU ARE. THAT IS TO SAY, CONSIDERABLY BETTER THAN ZERO. SEGRILL IS PERFECTLY CORRECT. IT WAS VERY STUPID OF ALL OF US NOT TO HAVE THOUGHT OF THIS BEFORE, BUT IT WAS PARTICULARLY STUPID OF
ME
. I PRESENT MY APOLOGIES.

Apologies from an Image? This was something Strider had thought she would never hear.

"It's OK," she said casually. "Just don't do it again, huh?"

She wondered how she was going to persuade her personnel to go through with this—persuading
herself
was going to be no easy task. They must have reasoned it out by now that this was likely to be a suicide mission all along, but there were better ways and worse ways to go. Being flash-fried seemed one of the better ways: one moment you were there and the next you weren't. No pain, no hassle—no funeral expenses. Dropping from a great height on to an airless planet struck Strider as being one of the worse ways.

"What does Pinocchio think about it?"

He is in total agreement with me.

There was something vaguely chilling in the way that Ten Per Cent Extra Free said this, but Strider didn't have time to think about it.

"All right. We'll do this. Can you hook me in with Polyaggle as well?"

Certainly.

Diplomacy,
thought Strider,
has always been my strongest suit—followed closely by tact, of course. I will handle this like the masterful politician I might have become had the romantic lure of starside—the glorious mysteries of the Universe—not been so great. I will cajole my people into accepting my point of view. I will use sweet reason and . . . aw, fuck it.

Drawing a lazgun from her belt, she tongued her suit radio to the general frequency.

"Look, you bastards," she said, "here's what's going to happen. Anyone who objects"—she waved the lazgun—"is going to be breathing vacuum about one split second from now. Got that?"

#

"You pilot this damned thing damned carefully now," said Strider.

There was no reply. Ten Per Cent Extra Free had returned to more urgent duties with Pinocchio, promising her that he and the bot would give her people another half-hour to get clear. If the Trok pilot directly beneath her had heard what she had said at all it was obviously just gabble to him.

A Trok fighter is designed to carry a crew of between one and four Trok, who between them probably mass no more than a quarter of a kilogram, plus their personal equipment, food, essential supplies and so forth—perhaps another couple of kilograms. This is, in terms of the fighters' capabilities, the unimportant part of their payload. What they are designed to lift is an extra ton of weaponry, including at least two ballistics that are rather larger and heavier than the fighter itself. The fighters on Qitanefermeartha no longer had to carry ballistics—they'd used them all to devastating effect against the Autarchy's warcruisers.

Trok fighters come in various shapes and sizes, but most of them have the approximate form of a domed lozenge some three meters long and some two meters wide. The only way a human being would be able to get inside one would be by transforming herself or himself into toothpaste. But the craft is easily capable of lifting and transporting the mass of a human being.

The rocketry is concentrated at what would be the corners if the fighter had been a rectangle rather than a lozenge. There are upthrusters there, and downthrusters; forward and retro-rockets. It doesn't really matter in this instance what the purpose of each of these rockets is in moving the spacecraft around: if you're in the direct line of fire of one of them you're very soon going to be toast. So attaching a belt-rope to the bottom of a Trok fighter and hoping to tag along behind is a very bad idea indeed, because sooner or later some part of your body is going to get burnt off. This would be painful. If you were lucky—or unlucky, depending on your personal tolerance of pain—the flare would fuse your spacesuit to the cauterized stump of your limb, so you might just survive.

Until the next time you flailed into the path of one of the rockets.

But there is one safe (
Safe? Hah!
thought Strider) way for a human being to be transported by a Trok fighter. Using your belt-rope, tie yourself tightly to the top of it, arms straight ahead and legs straight behind, tidily out of reach of all of the rocketry.

It's not pretty. It's not elegant. But it just might work.

Just might.

Strider had positioned herself so that she could see over the leading edge of the fighter to which Segrill had allocated her. If she and the Trok craft were going to end up screaming towards the surface of Qitanefermeartha at several hundred kilometers per hour she at least wanted to be able to watch—more accurately, she didn't want to spend the entire duration of the flight assuming this was exactly what was happening. As she fastened herself down she noticed that most of the rest of her party had chosen the same option—some of them, like Strauss-Giolitto, were tall enough to have very little alternative. Strider, her arms wrapped carefully around the front of the little vessel, was currently looking at one of her own footprints in the dust, only half a meter away. In every sense, Polyaggle was the odd one out. Possessing no belt-rope, she seemed quite unconcerned—although it was difficult to tell—by the fact that she was perched in a sort of upright squatting position atop the fighter she had selected, firmly gripping items of its superstructure. The pilot of that particular craft had a tricky task ahead.

The first few laden Trok fighters were already gingerly lifting off, gaining good altitude before darting off towards the pole—northern or southern, Strider didn't know. As more and more people secured themselves, assisted by busily moving Trok, lift-offs became more frequent. Through Ten Per Cent Extra Free, Strider had told Segrill that she wanted to be last: it was her duty as captain to take the greatest risk. He had pointed out acidly that the people taking the greatest risk were in fact the pilots of the fighters who were
not
carrying burdens, because they would be the
very
last to leave.

She could feel the fighter beneath her powering up. Ahead of her she could see Polyaggle being cautiously lifted into the sky—how much strength could there be in those gloved claws? Strider abruptly suspected that the answer was: quite a lot. Her own pilot was using equal skill, cutting in his upthrusters very gradually so as to minimize the chance of her being affected by splashback. The noise inside her suit, transmitted via the frame of the fighter, was almost literally deafening; she raised her helmet slightly in the hope of cutting down the din, but the manoeuvre didn't seem to make much difference.

Slowly the footprint she had been watching—had become almost fond of—began to recede from her, and then it was erased entirely as the upthrusters threw the dust into turmoil.
I am never, ever going to travel this way again,
she told herself.

There was a spurt of altitude. As Segrill had warned all of them most forcefully, she looked neither to right nor to left in case a close-up glimpse of the upthrusters blinded her. On second thoughts, she closed her eyes and used her tongue to blacken out her visor: time enough to look at the scenery once the upthrusters had cut out. "Above all else, keep absolutely still," Segrill had said. Strider reckoned she could have given a marble statue close competition.

There was a lessening and a change in the nature of the racket filling her head. At the same time the pressure on her belly eased. Her pilot had switched off the upthrusters. She prepared herself for the inevitable backwards drag as the main rockets came on, and sure enough it came. She felt her belt-rope cutting into the underside of her buttocks, her groin, her shoulderblades . . . too many pains in too many parts of the body to be counted. It was half a minute before she plucked up the courage to clear her visor.

When she did so, she was entranced.

They were travelling only about ten kilometers up, at a guess—high enough to clear all but the highest of Qitanefermeartha's sharp mountains. A crater-strewn landscape was rapidly unfolding beneath her. Most of its variations in color were created purely by shadows, but it was fascinating nevertheless. Whatever had happened during the planet's geological and meteorological past, various forces had conspired to produced every possible shape and form of pockmark, impact ray, lava spread and sinuous rille. She was reminded of the way the surface of Mars had looked before humans had got around to starting to terraform that planet, but all of this was on a smaller scale: it was a finely detailed miniature rather than a portrait that covered half the wall. She wished she could tell the pilot to go down a bit lower—although that would have meant she could make out less of the surface, because now they really were picking up speed.

Earlier she had promised herself should would never do this again. Now she wondered if she wasn't in at the birth of a great new leisure industry.

The chronometer display at the upper right of her visor told her that by this time Pinocchio and Ten Per Cent Extra Free must have launched the programmed shuttle. With luck the bot would for some while now have been legging it away from the city of Qitanefermeartha as fast as he could. Assuming the Helgiolath cruisers didn't start bombarding the city for another hour, he should be safely distant.

She tongued her suit radio to the general frequency. The static was abominable.

"Has anyone else survived this so far?" she said.

There was a confusion of voices.

"Quiet!" she shouted.

After a few moments the babble died down.

"I thought I might have been the only one," she said into the comparative quiet. "I guess we won't be able to count ourselves until we get to wherever it is the Trok are taking us. But, if you can all attain what is politely called radio silence, I want to check on one person."