Poul Anderson: A Circus of Hells

Djana tensed anew. “I thought that’s what you’d figure on,” she said, winter bleak. “Nothing doing, lover. Too chancy.”

“What else—”

She had hardly begun to reply when he knew. The heart stumbled in him.

“I didn’t join you blind,” she said. “I studied the situation first, whatever I could learn, including the standard apparatus on these boats. They carry several couriers each. One of those can make it back to Irumclaw in a couple of weeks, with a message telling where we are and what we’re sitting on.”

“But,” he protested. “But. Listen, the assault on us wasn’t likely the last attempt. I wouldn’t guarantee we can hold out. We’d better leave here, duck into the hills—”

“Maybe. We’ll play that as it falls. However, I am not passing up the main chance for survival, which is to bring in a Navy ship.” Djana’s laugh was a yelp. “I can tell what you’re thinking,” she continued. “There I’ll be, along on your job. How many laws does that break? The authorities will check further. When they learn about your taking a bribe to do Ammon’s work for him in an official vessel—I suppose at a minimum the sentence’ll be life enslavement.”

“What about you?” he countered.

Her lids drooped. Her lips closed and curved. She moved her hips from side to side. “Me? I’m a victim of circumstances. I was afraid to object, with you wicked men coercing me…till I got this chance to do the right thing. I’m sure I can make your commandant see it that way and give me an executive pardon. Maybe even a reward. We’re good friends, really, Admiral Julius and me.”

“You won’t get through the wait here without my help,” Flandry said. “Certainly not if we’re attacked.”

“I might or might not,” she replied. Her expression thawed. “Nicky, darling, why must we fight? We’ll have time to work out a plan for you. A story or—or maybe you can hide somewhere with supplies, and I can come back later and get you, I swear I will—” She swayed in his direction. “I swear I want to. You’ve been wonderful. I won’t let you go.”

“Regardless,” he said, “you insist on sending a message.”

“Yes.”

“Can you launch a courier? What if I refuse?”

“Then I’ll stun you, and tie you, and torture you till you agree,” she said, turned altogether impersonal. “I know a lot about that.”

Abruptly it blazed from her: “You’ll never imagine how much I know! You’d die before I finished. Remember your boasting to me about the hardships you’ve met, a poor boy trying to get ahead in the service on nothing but ability? If you could’ve heard me laughing inside while I kissed you! I came up from slavery—in the Black Hole of Jihannath—what I’ve been through makes the worst they’ve thought of in Irumclaw Old Town look like a crèche game—I’m not going back to hell again—as God is my witness, I’m not!” She drew a shaking breath and damped the vizor once more into place. From a pocket she fetched a slip of paper. “This is the message,” she said.

Flandry balanced on the balls of his feet. He might be able to take her, if he acted fast and luck fell his way…he just might…And swiftly as a stab, he knew the risk was needless.

He gasped.

“What’s the matter?” Djana’s question wavered near hysteria.

He shook himself. “Nothing,” he said. “All right, you win, let’s ship your dispatch off.”

The couriers were near the main airlock. He walked in advance, before her steady gun muzzle, though she knew the location. For that matter, the odds were she could figure out how to activate them herself. She had been quick to learn the method of putting the boat on a homeward course—feed the destination coordinates to the autopilot, lock the manual controls, et cetera—when he met her request for precautionary instruction. These gadgets, four in number, were simpler yet.

Inside each torpedo shape—120 centimeters long, but light enough for a man to lift under Terran gravity—were packed the absolute minimum of hyperdrive and grav-drive machinery; sensors and navigational computer to guide it toward a preset goal; radio to beep when it neared; accumulators for power; and a tiny space for the payload, which could be a document, a tape, or whatever else would fit.

Ostentatiously obedient, Flandry opened one compartment and stepped aside while Djana laid in her letter and closed the shell. Irumclaw’s coordinates were stenciled on it for easy reference and she watched him turn the control knobs. He slid the courier forward on the launch rack. Pausing, he said: “I’d like to program this for a sixty-second delay, if you don’t mind.”

“Why?”

“So we can get back to the conn and watch it take off. To be sure it does, you know.”

“M-m-m—that makes sense.” Djana hefted the gun. “I’m keeping you covered till it’s outbound, understand.”

“Logical. Afterward, can we both be uncovered?”

“Be still!”

Flandry started the mechanism and returned forward with her. They stared out.

The view was of desolation. Jake lay close by the crater wall, which sloped steeply aloft until its rim stood fanged in heaven, three kilometers above. Its palisades reached so far that they vanished under the near horizon before their opposite side became visible. The darkling rock was streaked with white, that also covered the floor: carbon dioxide and ammonia snow. This was beginning to vaporize in Wayland’s sixteen-day time of sunlight; fogs boiled and mists steamed, exposing the bluish gleam of eternal water ice.

Overhead the sky was deep violet, almost black. Stars glittered wanly across most of it, for at this early hour Mimir’s fierce disc barely cleared the ringwall in that area where the latter went behind the curve of the world. Regin was half a dimness mottled with intricate cloud patterns, half a shining like burnished steel.

A whitter of wind came in through the hull.

Behind Flandry, Djana said with unexpected wistfulness: “When the courier’s gone, Nicky, will you hold me? Will you be good to me?”

He made no immediate reply. His shoulder and stomach muscles ached from tension.

The torpedo left its tube. For a moment it hovered, while the idiot pseudo-brain within recognized it was on a solid body and which way was up. It rose. Once above atmosphere, it would take sights on beacons such as Betelgeuse and lay a course to Irumclaw.

Except—yes! Djana wailed. Flandry whooped. The spark high above had struck. As one point of glitter, the joined machines staggered across the sky.

Flandry went to the viewscreen and set the magnification. The torpedo had nothing but a parchment-thin aluminum skin, soon ripped by the flyer’s beak while the flyer’s talons held tight. The courier had ample power to shake off its assailant, but not the acumen to do so. Besides, the stresses would have wrecked it anyway. It continued to rise, but didn’t get far before some critical circuit was broken. That killed it. The claws let go and it plummeted to destruction.

“I thought that’d happen,” Flandry murmured.

The flyer resumed its station. Presently three others joined it. “They must’ve sensed our messenger, or been called,” Flandry said. “No use trying to loft more, eh? We need their energy packs worse for other things.”

Djana, who had stood numbed, cast her gun aside and crumpled weeping into his arms. He stroked her hair and made soothing noises.

At last she pulled herself together, looked at him, and said, still gulping and hiccoughing: “You’re glad, aren’t you?”

“Well, I can’t say I’m sorry,” he admitted.

“Y-y-you’d rather be dead than—”

“Than a slave? Yes, cliché or not, ’fraid so.”