Barrington Bayley - Star Winds

King Lutheron dropped his eyelids, seeing the force of this. “But where can we escape to? Already the Kerek horde will be spreading out. They will pursue us, perhaps head us off. We will not get far.” He sighed. “Aghh… Better, perhaps, to go down fighting.”

Matello was silent. “I know a hiding place,” he said after a moment. “We are not far from where the Duke of Koss has his Aegis. There I have a secret underground camp. We can hide there, covering the Bucentaur or else destroying her, or setting her to sail crewless in space.” He hesitated. “Likely even the Duke of Koss will give his monarch shelter in these circumstances. Once in the Aegis we would be safe for all time.”

Briefly and without humor, King Lutheron laughed. “Koss? I think not! But for him, we might not even be in this mess.”

They all flinched as a sudden white glare lit up the circular glass screen. A fire-dart had found its mark on one of the Amanda ’s weapons turrets. The Kerek galleys had got close in to her, too, like jackals worrying a larger prey, and already fighting was taking place on her decks.

“We must decide now , liege-lord,” Matello urged. “Another few minutes and it may be too late.”

King Lutheron was despondent. “Very well,” he conceded wearily, “we shall slip away like cowards. Attend to it, Sir Goth.”

Pulling his cloak around him, he strode from the room. When he had gone, Matello rounded jerkily on the ship’s captain.

“All right!” he barked. “You heard him! Let’s get out of here!”

As had been the practice of the supply ships that visited the secret camp from time to time, the Bucentaur landed well beyond the Aegis’s visible horizon, putting down near to the screened tunnel entrance.

From the grounded ship streamed a procession of men and stores. Like ants, they vanished underground, following the miles-long tunnel to the subterranean barracks. It was going to be crowded, Matello admitted. Over a thousand people would be compressed into a space meant to accommodate a couple of hundred. But the access tunnel could be used, and if that was not enough, well then some people would just have to shift for themselves in the open for a while, until more excavations could be arranged.

King Lutheron paused a few yards inside the down-sloping passage to examine the circular walls. The rock and soil was held back by a framework of what at first he took to be metal. He reached out and touched it.

“Adamant,” Matello explained briefly. “Flammarion himself took a hand in constructing this place. I don’t think we could have done it unnoticed but for his help.”

“Why didn’t he line the walls with adamant altogether? Then we would have been invulnerable here.”

“That would make it a miniature aegis. Flammarion refuses to build aegises gratuitously—something to do with the guild he belongs to.”

They stood aside to allow the procession of refugees to stream past. Flammarion’s tank rolled past them on wheels, drawn by serfs, the alien invisible beneath the yellow powder.

Matello turned to the bearded officer who accompanied them. It was Captain Zhorga, the former Earthman who had made himself so useful lately.

“Take His Majesty to the camp and see that he is shown suitable quarters,” he instructed. “I have to see to the disposal of the Bucentaur . With your leave, liege-lord?…”

The king nodded. Matello bowed and left, making his way back up the tunnel into the open.

The planet’s blazing sun was low in the sky. The ship’s entire company had left her now, and he saw her captain, the last to disembark, stepping through a side portal.

There was nothing for Matello to do, but he felt an urge to watch his prize possession’s last few minutes of life under human direction. The ropes that were to trigger her departure had already been laid. While he watched, teams of men hauled on them, releasing the spring bollards that snapped out lengths of silk on the enormous yards.

It was a pity to waste her, Matello thought, but it was best to eradicate as many traces of their presence as possible.

Landing on uneven terrain had damaged her still further, but even so the huge vessel was more than equal to the last demand made on her. Her sails darkened the place where Matello stood as she first lumbered, then soared into the air, rapidly gaining height. Her direction had been set; she would make it into space with ease. With any luck she would also reach the destination intended for her, and fall into the raging, multicolored sun.

The great glass jar in the corner of Rachad’s room was over six feet tall. It was in fact a giant cucurbit he had taken from the laboratory with the help of one of Amschel’s assistants. It curved gracefully, the lamplight gleaming off its surf ace.

On the table, the four small jars still stood, but the four homunculi they had contained had reached the end of their natural life span now. The tiny corpses slumped against the glass bottoms, degenerating into slime which was clouding the water. In time, Amschel had assured Rachad, the water would become clear again, a simple mineral solution as before.

Filling the big cucurbit with a similar solution had taken him several hours. But that had been weeks ago. Rachad now sat on a chair in front of the vessel, thinking hard. Every evening at about this time he spent an hour at the exercise, holding an image in his mind and attempting to project it into the burgeoning mass. The work exhausted him, for he had never found it easy to think in a sustained way.

The huge homunculus was almost fully formed now, but the features were still indistinct. The next few days would tell if his efforts were to be rewarded with success or failure—would tell if, in the end, his creation would step forth and speak in a faint, drifting voice…

Rachad was beginning to daydream again. It always happened after a few minutes. He pulled his mind back on the job, focusing his mind’s eye on the necessary picture, thinking, thinking…

“And how close are they, would you say?” Baron Matello asked, his brow furrowed in a frown.

“No more than fifty miles, my lord!” the kneeling messenger answered unhesitatingly.

Matello grunted dourly. The news was bad.

With the Kerek’s famous knack of tracking human ships, he had been afraid that something like this would happen. The enemy, it seemed, had come upon this uninviting world only days after the landing of the Bucentaur . The serf kneeling before Matello and King Lutheron had ridden from the nearest mining town, which was in panic after hearing of the Kerek’s doings in other such towns around the planet.

It would not take the Kerek long to spot the Aegis. They would then attempt to besiege it, and the situation of those in the underground camp was therefore unenviable.

King Lutheron, sitting in a plush chair with what in the circumstances was a luxurious amount of space around him, spoke up. “Perhaps it is time we should seek Koss’s hospitality after all.”

“Perhaps,” Matello admitted grudgingly. Although he had been the first to offer this possibility to the King, the truth was that he hated the idea of going begging to the hated duke. He would rather have perished.

“Leave it for a while,” he said. “The Kerek have not discovered us yet. I still hope to be able to take the Aegis without our demeaning ourselves.”

He ignored the incredulous looks of the officers around him, the camp commander included, who until the interruption had been idly occupying themselves with all there was to do in such a place—cleaning and sharpening their weapons.