However, though he’d become an experienced aircraft mechanic, he was not allowed to pilot the planes or chopper. The craft was too precious to risk in the training of pilots.
All this had given him a trust in himself he’d lacked before and had developed his body and its reactions to their fullest potential.
His normal duty was as an archer. Though six feet tall and weighing 187 pounds, he was considered too small and too light and not spectacular enough with the heavy weapons to serve as a front-line marine. Burton was not quite as tall and heavy as he was, but his mastery of the blade had made him captain. Little Nur was unexcelled at knife-fighting, but he couldn’t handle the big spear or axe or broadsword well enough. So he and Frigate went to the archery squad, where marksmanship was the criterion.
And so, when the Not For Hire and the Rex closed in for boarding, he and Nur were stationed in a room looking out on the hurricane deck. They shot all of their arrows through the window at the boarders from the Not For Hire and at those on the walkway. Then they abandoned their bows and sallied out among the second wave of boarders.
Frigate saw Kazz drop off the top of the paddlebox, an arrow in his knee. He fell into the water, came up, thrashed for a moment, and then went back under. Frigate had little time to watch him, so he did not know if the Neanderthal rose again.
During the melee, he received some slight wounds on his face, right arm, and left thigh. Then he was knocked down, and before he could get up, something struck him on the helmet. When he regained his senses, he became aware that he was surrounded by Clemens’ people. Whether all of his comrades had been killed or some had fled to another part of the Not For Hire, he didn’t know. Wisely, he played dead until the enemy had gone some other place.
While he had been unconscious, the Rex had sunk.
Standing on the deck and holding the railing to keep from falling over, he considered the situation. He could go back to playing dead or he could rejoin his fellows, who were still fighting, or he could dive overboard and swim like hell for the bank.
The first alternative was attractive, but he could never live with himself if he adopted that. Besides, he had to find out what had happened to those he loved. Maybe he could save them; his sudden appearance might make all the difference for his comrades in a desperate fight.
He turned and stooped to pick up a cutlass and almost fell forward. His head hurt, and he was dizzy. Never mind. He’d not count himself out as a casualty.
Somebody shot at him from a doorway about fifty feet away, toward the stem. The bullet whistled close to his head. He fell down as if he’d been hit. Like it or not, he had to play possum again.
Hearing someone running toward him, he reached out and grabbed the hilt of a cutlass. Was the runner an enemy coming to check on him? Or had one of his own mistaken him for an enemy? The lights were still on in some rooms, the illumination streaming through the window near him. He hadn’t been standing in it, but surely he’d been visible enough so that the shooter could distinguish the shape of his helmet. It must be a Clemensite.
He was in terror. What could he do with the cutlass when he was lying face down? The enemy wouldn’t be foolish enough to bend down over him to find out if he was dead. He’d either shoot him again or run a sword through him.
By then the person was on him. Frigate rolled over and slashed at the feet of the enemy, but he, no, she, was gone on past him and still running. She hadn’t been interested in whether he was just wounded or a corpse. She was hell-bent on getting some place else, though no one was apparently after her. And she’d not been aware that she had so barely escaped hamstringing.
Frigate watched her disappear into a corridor before he rose groaning. He checked his wounds, one of which was still flowing. He ripped a towel-kilt from a corpse and applied it to the wound. After it had been stanched, he wrapped another towel around his arm and tied it clumsily with one hand.
Just then the woman returned. Behind her were four men. Frigate ran staggering for the nearest doorway. Shouts arose behind him, and a .60-caliber pistol boomed. The bullet, plastic or wood, destroyed itself against the doorframe as he dived through it. He got up and staggered on, then saw a corpse beside which was a short barreled rifle. He picked it up and examined it by the single light overhead in the corridor. Its chamber held three brass casings with wooden bullets.
He turned and shot at the first person to come through the doorway behind him. He missed. The woman shot again. She missed. Frigate fired again. The bullet hit her, and she fell backward.
Frigate fired his last shot, dropped the rifle, turned, and ran. A bullet struck his cuirass over the right shoulder. He was hurled forward, fell, got up, and ran on. His shoulder and arm felt numb. Reaching the end of the corridor, he ran on, leaped over the railing, and dived headfirst into The River.
He almost drowned before he could get out of the cuirass since he was handicapped by his partially paralyzed arm. When he rose to the surface, blowing and gasping, he saw that the Not For Hire had drifted out of his reach. There were little combats going on here and there, pistols firing, the ringing of blades on blades, shouting, screaming. The group that had chased him was outlined by the dim corridor light. They were standing by the railing but seemed to have lost interest in him. He was glad about that. After a moment, they ran toward the nearest fight.
Frigate supposed that if his arm regained its full use and if he swam hard enough, he might be able to catch up with the Not For Hire. If there were lines trailing in the water from the boat, he might be able to climb back up and rejoin the fray. He doubted that he could do it. Though the cold water had revived him, he felt weak.
“Fuck it!” he said, and he began to dogpaddle toward the nearest bank. It was a long long way off, though, and he would have drowned if a Virolander longboat hadn’t picked him up. Seeing it approaching under the light of the torches held by its occupants, he yelled at them until they heard him and paddled swiftly to him. They got him into a towel-suit and gave him hot coffee. He felt a little better then.
The Virolanders pulled out of the water a woman’s corpse and then a man, a naked Mongolian. His glossy black wet hair fell to his hips. He seemed to be about five feet nine inches tall and his body was broad-shouldered and slim-waisted. After wrapping himself in a big towel, he sat by Frigate and then leaned down to look closely at him. The bright torches illuminated his large glowing green eyes.
The Mongolian spoke in Esperanto in a loud shrill voice.
“You are from the Rex?”
“No,” Frigate said weakly but clearly. “I was just out taking a swim.”
The man smiled. His face was lean and angular, strong-looking, and handsome even by Caucasian standards. Frigate could imagine that he would look very fierce, though, when he was fighting. Like a young Fu Manchu in a fury.
“When we get to shore, we can continue the fight,” the man said.
“You’re crazy,” Frigate said.
The man laughed loudly and long. When he’d finished, he said, “You’re right. Why should we continue? Your boat is sunk; you’ve been defeated. But my boat may sink soon. So who is to say who won? It was a good battle, though, the best I’ve ever been in, and I’ve fought in hundreds of battles and hundreds of duels. I killed twelve of your people today, perhaps more. Why should I kill more? I am tired of killing. Besides, the Virolanders would not allow us to keep on fighting.”
“That makes sense,” Frigate said. “By the way, what is your name?”
“I call myself Tai-Peng. That means Great Phoenix in the language of the Middle Kingdom. I was a great poet and a great drinker, and a great swordsman and a great lover of women. My best friend was Tu Fu.”
“Don’t forget to add a great modesty of your talents,” Frigate said.
Tai-Peng laughed uproariously.
“I have never claimed to be that, though I suppose I could be if I wanted to.”
Frigate closed his eyes. When he opened them, he said, “Were you born
in the far west of China and were you an infant when Empress Wu was forced to abdicate by her son, Chung-tsung? Did you serve The Brilliant Emperor, Ming Huang, and were you one of The Six Idlers of the Bamboo Stream and later one of The Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup? And were you drowned while drunkenly trying to kiss the moonlight reflection of your face in water?”
The man looked surprised, then he laughed shrilly, and he said, “What if I were?”
“Then you’d be the great poet of the T’ang dynasty, Li Po, also called Li T’ai-Po.”
“That man died long long ago,” Tai-Peng said.
Which was true. But there was no one of this world who hadn’t died long ago, at least, as far as Frigate knew.
He closed his eyes again. The only sound was the dipping of paddles and an occasional short and murmured dialog between two paddlers. The din of battle had departed.
The Mongolian, or, to be more specific, Chinese, was undoubtedly the great Li Po. But why was he traveling under a pseudonym? Well, of course, the ancient Chinese poets sometimes did that. But Frigate suspected that Tai-Peng or Li Po had done so because he was one of those drafted by the Ethical X. The Mysterious Stranger. If so, however, Tai-Peng was doing a poor job as an undercover agent. Though he’d taken a fake name, his ego was too huge for him to take a false background.
Frigate wondered why he was thinking about this man when he should be worrying about his friends and lover. And then he went to sleep.
iii
Burton strode to the nearest hatch.
“This way! Double file!”
The overhead lights in this passageway were on. The generators were still running despite the explosions. He walked swiftly down the passageway to the starboard side. There was no living person in sight, though there were what seemed to be eight corpses. A rocket had gone through the open hatch and exploded, blowing them apart, sticking gobs of flesh against the bulkheads and the overhead and the deck. A severed arm lay across the naked breast of a woman in grisly intimacy. A man’s eyes stared up at Burton from a trunkless head.
Burton felt that curious withdrawal, that dislocation, that lengthening of distance between himself and dead people which he’d always had. They couldn’t hurt Mm. He was too far away from them.
That was strange, he thought. Not the feeling of not quite being in the same world as the dead. The fact that it should come at just this time. He was too busy, too engaged in the violence to feel this sense of nonparticipation. That should come later, after the fury was over. But here it was, roosting like a black bird in his head for some reason he couldn’t explain.
Burton shook his head. Umslopogaas, now by his side, said, “What is it, Captain?”
“Nothing,” Burton said. He was disgusted with himself. After one hundred and twenty-nine years of often violent living, he should be rid of this neurotic feeling. But he still put off the full impact of horror by throwing up some sort of invisible barrier.
Umslopogaas seemed to be unaffected by the blood and the gobs of flesh which made the walking so slippery. He had grown up in a culture which expected him to be a warrior and which had inured him to grisly sights. Almost overconditioned him, as it were. He reveled in fighting to the death. And though he had been exposed for many years to the teachings of the Church of the Second Chance and of other religions, he had not a single doubt about the value of war. It was man’s greatest glory.
Burton put such thoughts out of his mind as he reached the ladder on the starboard side. He had chosen to go down the far side because there was little chance of encountering opposition here. Everybody would have rushed to the port side where all their foes were.
He went down the spiraling ladder to the next deck and then along the passageway toward the port side. A closed hatch confronted him. He tried the lever, and the hatch opened. He did not push it open yet. First, he told the Swazi to turn off the lights. That being done, he opened the hatch.
Light blazed through the opening. He stepped out slowly onto a gallery. This ran around the circumference of a great well, square in shape. It rose through the vessel, its lowest part a deck only a few inches from the bottom of the hull. The overhead was the bottom of the hurricane deck. The well was two decks high, and at the stern end towered the batacitor, an oblong structure covered with duraluminum. Ahead and behind it were the electric motors that drove the paddlewheels. These were motionless now. Near the fore part of the well was a two-deck high metal cylinder. This was the boiler which burned alcohol to heat water at high pressure for the showers and wash basins and to make steam for the steam machine guns.
Overhead were huge cranes.
There was not a person in the well, which was brightly lit. Evidently, the engineers had been called away to help in the fighting. There was no further need for their services here; the Not For Hire, its control cables gone, its backup control system also destroyed, was drifting. She would go where the current took her, would end up against a bank, mired in the shallows. That is, she would unless Clemens’ crew got rid of its enemies in time to jerrybuild a control system. It was Burton’s intention to make sure that they did not do that.
“If this boat is laid out like ours,” he said, “The stern powder room will be close to the power well on the main deck. Thorpe, you take seven men and go forward. When you find the forward powder room, send a man to tell me what you find in it. I’m taking the others to look for the stern powder room.”
Thorpe, an archer and a 20th-century Amerind, said, “Yes, sir,” and called out the names of seven men. Umslopogaas was one of them. The Swazi looked as if he were going to protest. Burton was his comrade-in-arms, and he wanted to be close by his side. Burton saw no reason to override Thorpe’s choice. He said to the others, “Come on!” and started down the gallery toward the stern. His goal was a closed hatch around the corner of the gallery. Before he got there, he heard a faint noise. Gunfire a long way off. And then, on the portside gallery, halfway along the well, a hatch suddenly opened. Through it came loud noises: pistols firing and people yelling.
A man ran through the hatch. He held a Mark IV in one hand and a cutlass in the other. His body was grimed with gunpowder, and his face was streaked with mixed blood and powder. Behind him came others, all men from the Rex, all in retreat.
Other hatches opened, not only on this deck but above. Men and women poured through them. And then their pursuers were entering or trying to do so. Some of his fellows were making a stand at the door, either firing their pistols or thrusting or hacking with their cutlasses. The well became a bedlam.
Burton’s men had halted. They looked as if they wanted to plunge into the fight.
Burton shouted, “Come on! It’s more important that we blow up the boat!”
Reluctantly, the eight followed him through the hatch into the next compartment. This was a very large one, an armory. Its bulkheads held racks of rifles, pistols, longbows, crossbows, cutlasses, sabers, epees, axes, maces, shields, helmets, cuirasses, chainmail shirts and skirts, and three complete suits of armor.
In the far bulkhead was a large hatch. Burton ran to it, seized the lever, and depressed it. The hatch failed to open. But there were several entrances to the powder room. At least, he presumed there were. He turned and went through the port hatch. It led to another passageway. He found the light switch. He ran down it until he got to the hatch opening onto the walkway. Here he stopped, pulled the hatch open, and looked cautiously out. There might be enemies out there now. But there was not, as far as he could determine, anyone. The only illumination along it was from the blazing fires on the bank and from the fire on the flight deck. But it was enough.
He went along the walkway with the others behind him until he came to the next hatch. This was obviously designed to admit a large body of men and bulky material, such as rockets. It was also locked. There were no ports for him to look inside. Even if there had been, he could see nothing inside without a flashlight.
“It’s damn funny,” he said to Thorpe. “Why
would they lock the magazine in the midst of battle?”
“I suppose that the captain thought there might not be any use for it at the moment. His boat was about to engage ours at close range and then his men would board us.”
“That doesn’t seem likely,” Burton said. “You men look around for a machine gun.”
He went with two men toward the stem while Thorpe took the rest in the other direction.
Corpses and weapons were scattered along this walkway. There were also sections of the bulkheads and even of the deck which had been destroyed. He had to jump across a four-foot gap at one place. Beyond it was an overturned and twisted rocket battery, a wrecked assemblage of tubes. Here the bulkhead curved deeply in to make a recess for the battery and the men who handled it. A rocket or rockets from the Rex had struck directly here, disintegrating the railing, tearing the battery from its attachment to the swivel equipment, dispersing the crew into various parts, and blasting out a hatch and a large part of the bulkhead surrounding it. Probably, the battery tubes had been empty at the moment; more rockets were being brought up, and these had also been touched off.
Burton looked inside the compartment. The fires illumined the interior dimly, but he could make out the racks of silvery missies, their cone-shaped noses turned toward him. There were about fifty empty racks and twenty filled. He was in luck. This was a magazine for a permanent battery, and the explosion that had ruined the battery had made it impossible for the hatch to be locked.
It took several minutes, two men carrying a rocket, to lay the twenty missiles on the walkway. These were one hundred and twenty pounders of which twenty-five pounds was warhead. But the explosive force was usually greater than that in the warhead, since there would be much fuel left if the rocket had a short distance to cover.
Riverworld Short Stories Page 12
