Poul Anderson: A Circus of Hells

They attacked. They could do no real harm directly. Their hammering and scraping resounded wild in the hull. But however frail by the standards of a real ship, a Comet was built to resist heavier bufferings.

They did, though, rock it. Wheeling and soaring, they darkened vision. More terribly, they interfered with radar, sonic beams, every probing of every instrument. Suddenly, except for glimpses when they flashed aside, Flandry was piloting blind. The wind sent his craft reeling.

He stabbed forth flame out of the single spitgun in the nose. A flyer exploded in smoke and fragments. Another, wing sheared across, spun downward to destruction. The rest were too many, too quickly reacting. “We’ve got to get out of here!” he heard himself yell, and crammed on power. Shock smashed through him. Metal shrieked. The world whirled in the screens. For an instant, he saw what had happened. Without sight or sensors, in the turbulence of the air, he had descended further than he knew. His spurt of acceleration was not vertical. It had side-swiped a mountaintop.

No time for fear. He became the boat. Two thrust cones remained, not enough to escape with but maybe enough to set down on and not spatter. He ignored the flock and fought for control of the drunkenly unbalanced grav drive. If he made a straight tail-first backdown, the force would fend off the opposition; he’d have an uncluttered scan aft, which he could project onto one of the pilot board screens and use for an eyeballed landing. That was if he could hold her upright. If not, well, it had been fun living. The noise lessened to wind-whistle, engine stutter, drumbeat of beaks. Through it he was faintly astonished to hear Djana. He shot her a glance. Her eyes were closed, her hands laid palm to palm, and from her lips poured ancient words, over and over. “Hail Mary, full of grace—”

Her? And he’d thought he’d gotten to know her!

They landed skull-rattlingly hard. Weakened members in the boat gave way with screeches and thumps. But they landed.

At once Flandry bent himself entirely to the spitgun. Locked onto target after target, the beam flashed blue among the attackers that wheeled overhead. A winged thing slanted downward and struck behind the rim of the crater where he had settled. A couple of others took severe damage and limped off. The remainder escorted them. In a few minutes the last was gone from sight.

No—wait—high above, out of range, a hovering spark in murky heaven? Flandry focused a viewscreen and turned up the magnification. “Uh-huh.” He nodded. “One of our playmates has stayed behind to keep a beady eye on us.”

“O-o-o-oh-h-h,” Djana whimpered.

“Pull yourself together,” he snapped. “You know how. Insert Part A in Slot B, bolt to Section C, et cetera. In case nobody’s told you, we have a problem.”

Mainly he was concerned with studying the indicators on the board while he unharnessed. Some air had been lost, and replenished from the reserve tanks, but there was no further leakage. Evidently the hull had cracked, not too badly for self-sealing but enough to make him doubt the feasibility of returning to space without repairs. Inboard damage must be worse, for the grav field was off—he moved under Wayland’s half a terrestrial g with a bounding ease that roused no enthusiasm in him—and, oh-oh indeed, the nuclear generator was dead. Light, heat, air and water cycles, everything was running off the accumulators.

“Keep watch,” he told Djana. “If you see anything peculiar, feel free to holler.”

He went aft, past the chaos of galley and head, the more solidly battened-down instrument and life-support centers, to the engine room. An hour’s inspection confirmed neither his rosiest hopes nor his sharpest fears. It was possible to fix Jake, and probably wouldn’t take long: if and only if shipyard facilities were brought to bear.

“So what else is new?” he said and returned forward.

Djana had been busy. She stood in the conn with all the small arms aboard on a seat behind her—the issue blaster and needler, his private Merseian war knife—except for the stun pistol she had brought herself. That was bolstered on her flank. She rested a hand on its ivory butt.

“What the deuce?” Flandry exclaimed. “I might even ask. What the trey?”

He started toward her. She drew the gun. “Halt,” she said. Her soprano had gone flat.

He obeyed. She could drop him as he attacked, in this space where there was no room to dodge, and secure him before he regained consciousness. Of course, he could perhaps work free of any knots she was able to tie, but—He swallowed his dismay and studied her. The panic was gone, unless it dwelt behind that whitened skin and drew those lips into disfiguring straight lines.

“What’s wrong?” he asked slowly. “My intentions are no more shocking than usual.”

“Maybe nothing’s wrong, Nicky.” She attempted a smile. “I’ve got to be careful. You understand that, don’t you? You’re an Imperial officer and I’m riding Leon Ammon’s rocket. Maybe we can keep on working together. And maybe not. What’s happened here?”

He collected his wits. “Int’resting question,” he said. “If you think this is a trap for you—well, really, my sweet, you know quite well no functional trap is that elaborate. I’m every bit as baffled as you…and worried, if that’s any consolation. I want nothing at the moment but to get back with hide entire to vintage wine, gourmet food, good conversation, good music, good books, good tobacco, a variety of charming ladies, and everything else that civilization is about.”

He was ninety-nine percent honest. The remaining one percent involved pocketing the rest of his million. Though not exclusively…

The girl didn’t relax. “Well, can we?”

He told her what the condition of the boat was.

She nodded. Wings of amber-colored hair moved softly past delicate high cheekbones. “I thought that was more or less it,” she said. “What do you figure to do?”

Flandry shifted stance and scratched the back of his neck. “Another interesting question. We can’t survive indefinitely, you realize. Considering the outside temperature and other factors, I’d say that if we throttle all systems down to a minimum—and if we don’t have to fire the spitgun again—we have accumulator energy for three months. Food for longer, yes. But when the thermometer drops to minus a hundred, even steak sandwiches can only alleviate; they cannot cure.”

She stamped a foot. “Will you stop trying to be funny!”

Why, I thought I was succeeding , Flandry wanted to say, and incidentally, that motion of yours had fascinating effects in these snug-fitting pullovers we’re wearing. Do it again?

Djana overcame her anger. “We need help,” she said.

“No point in trying to radio for it,” Flandry said. “Air this thin supports too little ionosphere to send waves far past the horizon. Especially when the sun, however bright, is so distant. We might be able to bounce signals off Regin or another moon, except that that’d require aiming and monitoring gear Jake doesn’t carry.”

She stared at him in frank surprise. “Radio?”

“To the main computer at the mining centrum. It was originally a top-level machine, you know, complete with awareness—whatever it may have suffered since. And it commanded repair and maintenance equipment as well. If we could raise it and get a positive response, we should have the appropriate robots here in a few hours, and be off on the rest of my circuit in a few days.”

Flandry smiled lopsidedly. “I wish now I had given it a call from orbit,” he went on. “But with the skewball things we saw—we’ve lost that option. We shall simply have to march there in person and see what can be done.”