Alan Foster - The Icerigger Trilogy

Hellespont du Kane looked at him squarely. “There is no need to play irony, Mr. Fortune. I know what you think of me.

“Just a second, now, du Kane,” said Ethan, turning from the rail. He’d been caught badly off-balance. “What makes you think—”

“Never mind, never mind.” The financier waved a hand negligently. “It does not matter. Some of us, Mr. Fortune, are not born to the comradely, easygoing, instant-intimate manner. I have friends, but they are relationships based on mutual respect and, in some cases, mutual fear. I should like to be more… more…”

“Human?” supplied Ethan, and instantly regretted it. Du Kane looked his age, then. The glance he gave Ethan was almost—almost but not quite—pitiable.

“I would not venture to express it quite so strongly, Mr. Fortune, but we cannot help the way we are, can we?”

“I don’t know, Hellespont.” He clutched a strand of the rigging to steady himself in the rising wind. Sailors were beginning to string safety lines across the deck. “Is that a question or a declaration?”

Ethan stood at the stern. Ta-hoding manned one side of the huge wheel and his helmsman the other. “It will take two of us to manage her—for the first hour, at least,” he’d explained. All but a few of the top sails had been taken in. The raft skimmed smoothly toward the northwest. Ta-hoding was trying to make as much distance that way before the front struck and forced him to swing south with the wind.

By now the stygian nimbus blotted out most of the northern sky. Lightning crackled like a mad composer’s composition on three sides of the ship.

“Soon,” moaned Ta-hoding. “Soon. I can smell it coming.”

“Hold fast, friends,” warned Hunnar. “The first moments are the worst. Tis a live thing.” He moved off forward to double-check the safety lines.

“According to the captain,” said September, having to shout to make himself heard over the wind, “it’s kind of like an atmospheric tidal bore. You know what a tidal bore is?”

No one did. Before the big man had a chance to explain, the Rifs struck.

Ethan was prepared for anything, and that’s exactly what happened. He was knocked free of the rail and blown several meters across the deck before he rolled up against the feet of a sailor. The tran iceman was hugging one of the safety lines like a mistress. Somehow he maintained his hold, reached down a massive hairy paw, and grabbed Ethan by the scruff of his jacket. Ethan practically climbed his leg until he could get a grip of his own on the line.

The concussion from that first hammer-like gust had gifted him with a bruised cheek and a cut lip—worse than he’d suffered in the gutorrbyn assault. Slowly, carefully, he dragged his way back toward the rail.

Somehow, Ta-hoding and his helmsman were holding the ship on course. Hunnar had suggested lashing the wheel, and it had been a surprise when the captain refused.

“A rope has no brains, noble sir, and the Rifs is an angry great cub. You cannot trust it with a lashed wheel.” But he’d agreed to have the two alien airfoils locked in position.

The Slanderscree suddenly tilted and Ethan made a dive for the rail. Up and over the wind heeled the flying raft, until she was hurtling along on her port runners alone. Than Ta-hoding slammed the wheel over; she turned south, and crunched back to the horizontal with a violent crash. But she continued to run easily and nothing appeared to have broken or buckled.

September pulled himself up to where Ethan clung. “Held her heading a little long, there. Got plenty of guts, our fat captain. You okay?”

Ethan carefully extended a gloved hand and moved another step closer. “One of these days I’m going to tell you I’m dying, just for the hell of it,” he shouted back.

The wind flailed at them, intent on smashing the unyielding raft to kindling. Now that they were in the storm proper and moving with it, the raft ran easier. Fury pushed them but the initial insanity was gone south.

“How fast do you reckon we’re going, young feller?” Ethan didn’t have the damndest idea, but a barely audible voice from behind him apparently did.

“I should estimate the initial front at well over 150 kph. Now I perceive we are riding a wind of slightly more than a hundred. Invigorating, is it not?”

Moving hand over hand on the safety lines, Hellespont du Kane pulled himself to where Ta-hoding and his helmsman fought with the wheel.

“Old man or not,” began September, blatantly disregarding the fact that he was no swaddling babe himself, “I’m going to put a fist in that smug puss one of these days.”

“I don’t think it’s smugness so much,” replied Ethan, wondering that the aged industrialist was still on deck at all. “It’s just that whether it’s a million credits or the proper setting of silver at the table that’s in question, du Kane is very matter-of-fact about things.”

“Probably react to a fist in the snoot that way, too,” the big man grunted.

Ethan blinked beneath his goggles. The ice was gray under the streaking storm clouds, which raced the ship like an endless herd of galloping hippos. Lightning threw geysers of ice-chips when it struck the ice.

Several times the iron rods at the tips of the three masts drew million-volt white scimitars, but without damage to the raft. If you ignored the pain in your arms from gripping the rail, or the way your goggles dug circles around your eyes, why then, Ethan admitted, it had a wild and wonderful kind of beauty.

In fact, it was magnificent.

“I’m going below for something warm. Coming, young feller?”

“I’ll… I’ll be along in a minute,” Ethan murmured. Lightning jumped in a gargantuan triple arc from one tiny island to another. “You go on.”

September grunted, then paused, swaying in the gale. “Did you ever hear of the Analava System?”

A part of Ethan’s mind managed to drag itself away from the meteorological asylum. “Sure, vaguely. Weren’t those the two planets in the Vandy sector that went to war despite intervention of a Commonwealth peace team and a Church edict… oh, some twenty years ago?”

“Twenty-two. I told you I was wanted. Well, you want to know what I’m wanted for? I think, young feller-me-lad, I may just tell you.”

That drew Ethan’s attention away from the howling weather. September faced him broadside, clinging to the railing with one hand and a safety line with another, fighting the wind.

“Hundred twenty million people died in that war. Lasted a whole week. There are one or two people who think I’m responsible for it. That’s why they want me.” Then he turned, put both hands on the safety line, and started to make his way to the nearest hatch.

Ethan was too shocked to try and keep him from going, too stunned to frame any questions. The Analava War was one of the great horrors of modern times, a blot on the history of the Commonwealth, a running sore on the record of mature homo sapiens, and a throwback to the Dark Ages. His personal recollections of it were of the faintest—he’d been only eight or nine at the time. Details he’d learned later, in maturation. But the shock and terror it had on the adults around him were memories he retained from childhood.

September was crazy, of course. No one man could possibly be held responsible for the deaths of 120 million human beings.

Lightning cut and ripped at the gray ice. He looked out and saw none of it.

A giant hand picked him up and threw him out of his bunk. He didn’t think the joke was a bit funny and said so at length as he flailed angrily at his blankets in the dark room. Sleep evaporated from his curtained brain as he untangled himself and absorbed several facts at once.