Michael Flynn - Up Jim River

It spread confusion, and that was enough. But the edge of the bowl was now lined with spearmen, who began to hurl their weapons. Paulie cleaved one spear as he had the arrow in the Roaring Gorge, and Teddy matched the feat. Billy actually seized one out of the air and threw it back, though being on the low ground, he did not quite reach the astonished spearman on the rim. Donovan called to Paulie, who faded toward the ladder.

Then an Oorah on the rim put a pipe to his mouth and huffed.

A dart embedded itself in Teddy’s midriff. He looked down at it and said, “That can’t be good.”

It was not much of a dart, and by itself would have meant little damage. “Poison,” he called to the others. Then, “Paralytic. Hurry!”

Sacrifices who tried to run were better handled by paralyzing them than braining them with obsidian clubs. The poison would leave them alive for the holocaust.

Teddy looked around, saw Donovan and Paulie on the ladder and Billy scrambling onto the lowest rung. He said nothing about waiting one’s turn, but only gauged what time would be needed. The harper was helping Sofwari into the airlock. She looked up and their gazes met.

Teddy waved at her, then he bent and plucked Goodhandlingblade from the ground and sped after the retreating priest and his bodyguards. “Teodorq sunna Nagarajan of World!” he cried, waving the sword over his head and shooting left-handed at the spearmen on the rim. A second paralytic dart tagged him, but the adrenaline was flowing. “Teodorq Nagarajan of World! Remember me!”

The acolytes guarding the priests turned with their short-swords and bucklers, but Teddy dispatched them easily, for the battle-fury was on him. An upswipe to knock a buckler aside, then thrust , and one down; he converted his extraction into a backhand cut that severed the carotid artery of a second man. Two. Spin on the ball of the foot and hack the arm of the man trying to sneak around his left. Three. The others broke, and Teddy found his legs too heavy to chase them. The priest stood unmoving, facing him with no more than a hemlock sprig. Magic, he recognized, even powerful magic, though hemlock had no meaning on the plains of World. He sang his deathsong at the top of his lungs. Were three enough for an honor guard? He had not paused to count the men he had shot with his nine. Where was it now? Dropped when the clip ran out. His most precious treasure, left now as an offering for a god who was only some ancient broken machine, and not the true god at all.

A blowgun man toppled from the terrace. Teddy saw Billy in the mouth of the airlock, aiming with a two-handed grip on his dazer. Another shot, but the dazer did not have the range. “Run!” Billy called. “Run, you ignorant savage!”

But he could not make it back; nor could they reach him in the time remaining. Too many blowguns. Teddy saluted with his sword, converted smoothly into a swinging arc, and the priest’s head leapt from his shoulders in a fountain of blood.

Then his body was a block of wood, devoid of all feeling. He fell face-first onto the obsidian ground.

But he gripped his sword the proper way around, a last defiance. Being utterly numb by then, he never felt it slide in.

Kid O’Daevs reversed the gravity grid and the mesa fell away behind them. The pilot threw in a sharp lateral vector to get off the bull’s-eye, and none too soon, for the pile of offerings on the viewscreen burst into a great ball of flame. Superheated air wavered and grew purple, rose like a geyser, and the wind rushed in from the sides, buffeting the lander and calling up long-disused curses from her pilot.

Méarana did not watch. She sat buckled in her seat and wept.

Watershanks, she had hardly known; but Teddy had been with her for a long time and she had come to regard him as a shrewd and faithful retainer, with more bottom to him than she had at first perceived. And it was just possible that, had he not drawn all attention to himself with his wild charge, the paralytic darts would have dropped them off the ladder like so many senseless mannequins.

Her first impulse was to order the lander to go back and destroy the village. Teddy believed that a dying warrior required an escort of his slain to enter the mead hall, and why should the Oorah’s religion be honored and not Teddy’s?

But the lander was not a warship, and could do nothing but circle the village and scare everyone. Beside, how could she plead mercy for the hard and vengeance-minded children of the Roaring Gorge and not for the uncomprehending children of the Oorah Mesa?

And so she blamed Donovan. The lander had come down in the night. Could they not have made their way to it? So what if the night was unlit and the way out uncertain? So what if there were no place for the lander on the steep and forested slopes of the mesa? Or that Debly might have gotten separated from them while climbing down those slopes and, lacking a beacon, never-ever be found?

So in the end, she blamed herself. She had brought Teddy to this place, where he could die fighting savages. And it did not matter that he had taken a terrible pleasure in the dying.

As Blankets and Beads closed on the mysterious object, its size and scope unfolded. It was the largest vessel they had ever seen. Indeed, it was difficult to think of it as a vessel at all. It seemed more a work of nature. A dozen Gladiola arks could have nestled comfortably on its landing decks.

Yet it had been molded and shaped by human hands, carved and pithed and tunneled; shaven and smoothed and polished. Tubes flared; sensor rings glittered; pods that must have been alfven engines squatted symmetrically along a hull on which, scoured to ghostliness by long centuries of radiation, was blazoned the sunburst of the Commonwealth.

“That ain’t a ship,” Maggie B. commented. “That there is a world.”

“What would it have carried?” her First Officer wondered.

“Anything,” said Donovan, “and everything. Colonists in cold sleep, embryos or seeds of every species; fusion power; nanomachines to remake the chemistry of whole worlds; artificial intelligences and automatons to orchestrate and oversee the whole process. Libraries of libraries. That —is an old Commonwealth terraforming ark.”

“Nanomachines,” said Captain Barnes skeptically. “Artificial intelligences. Fairly tales.”

“Giant ships,” Donovan replied, indicating the ark.

“It’s big and impressive,” she agreed. “But I’ll believe in a nanomachine when I see one.”

“An ark explains the Oorah legend,” Donovan said. “The god fertilizing a world made receptive. Méarana, remember Thistlewaite’s Cautionary Books? The ‘yin on ground’ is…”

“The ‘Vagina of the World.’”

“And ‘yang from sky’ is…”

“I get the picture. So the Oorahs are descended from the crew sent down to prepare the receptors.”

“One of the crews. There must have been others. But something went wrong.”

Ad-Din pointed to the viewscreen. “Maybe that.” He tapped the screen twice and that section magnified.

The sensor ring was melted. Scopes and arrays had sagged, and bent. The hull itself was scorched and broken. Launch tubes and hatches were melted shut. A battle? A brush with the berm of a Krasnikov tube? Stringers of glassine metal ran aft as if in the wind. Whatever had happened had happened under acceleration.

“Looks like a wreck, all right,” said Maggie B.

“Looks like salvage ,” her Number One said. “A Commonwealth ship? Even the wreckage is valuable beyond measure.”

Maggie chuckled. “Do you want to put that under tow? We’ll have to mine it in place.”