Moments later, the Don was galloping toward the skimmer, dragging Zachary by a rope tied around the ankles. ‘I hate this!’ Zachary was shouting, ‘I really hate all this horse warrior stuff!’ And then, as they neared the forcefield, the Don turned his steed, and let go of the rope, allowing Zachary to slide up close to the forcefield. The Don reined in, shouted ‘This is the one you’re looking for!’ and galloped away as two Slarn marines ran from the skimmer toward the section of the forcefield beyond which Zachary was lying, shouting after the Don, ‘Why do people work for you! Why does anyone in his right mind work for you?’ One of the Slarn marines used his Slarnstaff to open a hole in the forcefield while the other used his to create a tractor beam to drag Zachary inside. Behind them, Ulf had regained consciousness, saw the gap and rolled to his feet and ran at it, only to slam into the forcefield as it closed and fall writhing and shouting again before lapsing into merciful unconsciousness.
The Don cantered back over the ridge and slid down from his horse and dropped to the grass alongside Meg. ‘Now I’ve got them where I want them,’ he said, flashing her a piratical smile.
Meg frowned and asked, ‘I keep wondering, Don, why everything you do has to be so … wonderfully excessive?’
‘You’ve noticed that I’m wonderful,’ he replied. ‘That’s a very good start to a successful marriage.’
‘Oh puh-leeze,’ she said and then, ‘they’re taking Zachary into their skimmer thing.’
‘So far so good,’ said the Don. ‘Now take some horses, get the others, we need everyone we can muster for the attack.’
In the holding area between the forcefield and the skimmer, Ulf regained consciousness in time to see his old comrade Zachary being dragged inside. ‘Hi Zach!’
‘Hi Ulf,’ Zachary answered in a tone more resigned than pleased.
‘There is much honor to be won inside their devil-house!’ called Ulf by way of encouragement.
‘That’s exactly what I was afraid of all right,’ replied Zachary, and then the hatch closed on him.
When they brought Zachary into the interrogation room, Maze was still on the couch, and whatever passed for an ethical system in Zachary was outraged. ‘You’re torturing children now? Are you okay, Maze?’
‘Yabbie-people got in my head,’ she replied with a hard smile, ‘so I got in theirs.’
Zachary turned on the Slarn. ‘You let her go, you hear me! Let her go or I’ll pull your Galaxy down around your pointy ears!’
If he was expecting some response, he did not get one. One of the Slarn marines took Maze from the room and the other two pushed Zachary down on the couch, where he suddenly found himself constrained by invisible bonds. ‘I suggest we discuss this like civilized yabbie-people,’ Zachary started to say, but then the green light came on, and the Slarn became very interested in something on Zachary’s forehead. Invisible before, the green light revealed tattooed Slarn script, together with something that looked like a bar code. ‘What’s the matter?’ Zachary asked, ‘what’s so interesting about my forehead?’
Without answering, the Slarn moved to a communications console and began urgently pressing buttons.
On the bridge of the starship, Zoe, Harold and Marlowe were staring at the image of Zachary on the screen. ‘Guinevere? Why’s the green light showing that mark on Zachary’s forehead?’
‘‘tis the number they know him by. They know now that he was aforetimes their slave. All prisoners of the Slarn must have them.’
‘We’ve got them as well? ‘ Zoe was genuinely appalled. In answer, Guinevere flooded the bridge with the same green light the Slarn were employing in the skimmer. Instantly, tattoos similar to Zachary’s were visible on both Zoe’s and Harold’s foreheads. ‘You’ve got one,’ Zoe said to Harold, ‘have I got one?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it looks kind of cool.’
‘My mother said I couldn’t have a tattoo till I was 18 and then not on my forehead!’ Zoe wailed.
Harold was thinking fast. ‘ID tatts. They’d say where Zachary was captured and what ship he was on?’
‘And much else beside,’ Guinevere replied.
‘They’ll connect him to you?’ said Zoe.
But ‘Hist!’ said Guinevere, ‘those in the starship above have told them to put him to the question.’
The Slarn interrogator turned to Zachary. ‘We are about to ask you questions. Silence or false answers will result in pain. Your name is?’
‘Han Solo.’
‘Occupation?’
‘Surfboard mechanic.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘Buckingham Palace, New Jersey.’
One of the Slarn turned to the interrogator. ‘Is this machine working? His answers don’t make sense but there’s no pain registration.’
‘I think we may have a sociopath. He doesn’t understand the difference between truth and falsehood.’
Zachary was affronted. ‘Watch your language.’
‘Give me manual control,’ the interrogator said and to Zachary’s ears that did not sound good. ‘Year of birth, standard Earth reckoning.’
‘I’m 29 years old.’
‘Year of birth!’
‘Whatever it was 29 years ago!’
The interrogator leaned in until his helmet was only inches from Zachary’s sweating face. He could feel the cold of the metal, and it was echoed in the cold of the translated voice. ‘Listen you gringy little slartzblum, we know you were picked up in the big raid on this planet 90 standard Earth years back. The ship you were on disappeared after being ambushed by pirates. You ought to be dead and gone to stardust, but you’re not, so that ship survived and we want to know where it is!’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘What I’m talking about gritzblain is it’s all tattooed on your forehead! So stop wasting our time and tell us where the ship is!’
Suddenly Zachary looked shifty. Very shifty. Incredibly shifty. An outhouse rat at the top of its form should have looked so shifty. And he said the same famous words that all criminals say when they’re just about to betray every friend they ever had and make a deal. ‘Look, you’ve got to protect me, right?’
Zoe, watching the shiftiest looking person on the planet, was appalled. ‘Oh no! He’s going to tell them! He’s going to sell us all out!’
‘People around here,’ said shifty Zachary, ‘are very superstitious. And if they ever find out that I’m from Beyond The Sky, which is what they call it, they’ll think I’m a witch and they’ll burn me at the stake. Understand?’
‘We understand,’ said the interrogator, in the same soothing tones all police use to criminals who are about to rat out their best friends and accomplices, ‘we’re your friends. The only ones you’ve got.’
Zachary’s eyes moistened with false emotion. ‘I know you are, which is why I’m trusting you with this. There is no ship.’ And then he screamed as the pain surged through him. After a while, still panting, he said, ‘I thought that thing didn’t work on me.’
‘We’re now on manual,’ said the interrogator, ‘and I thought you were lying to me.’
‘Please. I wasn’t lying. I hate pain. I’d tell you where my own mother was. And I’m telling you there is no ship.’
‘All right. There is no ship. Ninety years ago you were picked up here on Earth, put on the ship piloted by Navigator First Class Guinevere, and 43 light years out the ship was ambushed. How did you get back? Walk?’
‘I don’t know all this technical stuff, I’m just a simple surfboard mechanic. But you’re right. I was picked up on Earth and put in this space ship thing. Next I know is I’m in a tiny little space ship. Only a bit bigger than this bed.’
‘Survival pod.’
‘If that’s what they’re called? Yeah.’
‘You want us to believe that you made it all the way home in a survival pod?’
‘I’m here aren’t I? Isn’t that the proof?’
‘Here’s my theory,” s
aid the interrogator, ‘The ship was captured by Ursoid pirates. You’re now working for them and they dropped you in here to spy on us.’
‘No. In the survival pod or whatever you call it, there was a woman’s voice giving instructions and she spoke a weird kind of English. Very old fashioned. She said she’d been hit bad and was trying to send us all home.’ Zachary’s face went from a mask of shiftiness to a mask of sorrow. ‘I guess I’m the only one who made it.’
The Slarn exchanged looks. ‘It’s just possible,’ said the interrogator. ‘And the escape pod coming in through the ionosphere could have triggered the alarm system?’
On the bridge of the starship, Harold and Zoe were applauding, and even Guinevere was smiling. ‘Zachary is the most vile mountebank and liar is he not?’ she said.
But in the skimmer, the interrogator was back on the attack. ‘What happened to the pod?’
‘It blew up after I landed.’
‘And how did you get the staff?’
‘Who said I did?’ Then, seeing the interrogator’s hand move to the controls, ‘It was in the pod! One of your people must’ve left it there! The pod landed, I grabbed it, thought it might come in handy, I got out of the pod and then the pod thing blew up on me!’
‘And you lost the staff how?’
‘I’d hooked up with the people who live in the forest to get salt from a place on the coast. Halfway back we ran into trouble with some barbarians, they call themselves Sullivans. I was running for my life and I dropped it.’ Zachary was feeling very pleased with himself. It was as seamless a set of lies as he had ever told. Now for the finishing touch. ‘Listen, ah … I’d be very happy to work for you guys. Anything you want done, anyone you want eliminated, I could listen to what people are saying and report back to you?’ Silence. ‘I work very cheap?’
The interrogator turned off the green light. ‘Even for a primitive, you’re despicable,’ it said.
‘That’s okay for you to say but you’ve got job security. A little guy like me, he’s got to hustle to make ends meet. ‘
‘Get this piece of slime out of here.’
As the other two marines escorted Zachary to the door, he was still talking. ‘I play guitar, I sing a little, do stand up comedy, weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs …’
‘Get him the hell out before I vomit!’
69: ESCAPE INTO DANGER
Two Slarn marines emerged from the skimmer and pushed Zachary out to join the other prisoners. He looked around. The two Forester People were brooding about whatever Forester People brood about when they have been confined, the Sullivan Himself was off near the force field sulking, and Ulf and Maze were playing a complicated game using the knuckle bones of sheep. Zachary strolled over just in time to witness Maze win her tenth game straight. Ulf turned an aggrieved look at Zachary. ‘She always knows how many bones I’m hiding,’ he said.
‘She’s reading your mind, Ulf,’ Zachary informed him, ‘try to think about something else.’
‘Think about two things at once?’ A million years of male evolution dedicated to single-mindedly wielding sharp weapons, climbing out of trenches and fox holes and charging enemy positions had put the concept of multi-tasking beyond Ulf’s comprehension.
‘No, Ulf,’ said Zachary, ‘you think of one thing at once, but not the bones.’
‘But the game is called Guess Bones.’
‘You teaching him to cheat,’ said Maze, glowering at Zachary.
‘Some people would say mind-reading is cheating,’ Zachary replied, and then to Ulf he said, ‘You know how on the first day of the month, the moment you wake up you have to think of white rabbits to get a lucky month?’
‘I never heard this.’
‘That’s why you’ve never had a lucky month.’
Ulf saw the flaw in Zachary’s advice. ‘There are no white rabbits.’
‘Well there used to be.’
‘A white rabbit,’ said Ulf with unassailable logic, ‘would be a sitting target for the next bowman who came along. It would be eaten. So no white rabbits.’ Maze nudged him and pointed to the forcefield. Ulf’s mind was telling him that he could see a large white rabbit sitting just outside.
Zachary knew exactly what Maze was up to. ‘Stop messing with his head while I’m trying to educate him!’
Ulf turned back, puzzled. ‘There was a white rabbit there a moment ago but now it’s gone.’
‘We play again now?’
‘No, we don’t play again now,’ said Zachary. ‘Are you okay? They shine the green light on you, ask you questions?’
‘They want me to go back to village and have many babies.’
‘Yeah, I just bet they do. Breed up a few more witches.’
‘Yabbie-people don’t know I too young to have babies! Yabbie-people stupid!’
‘Not stupid, just bad to the bone.’ Zachary could see the logic in the Slarn wanting Maze to have babies with the Talent, but the idea did not pass the yuck test in his book. In his book, just because they were not human did not mean that they had to be inhuman. He now turned to Ulf. ‘I’ve got a message for you from the Don. He’s very angry with the Slarn and he’s going to get us out of here.’
‘Perhaps there’ll be battle. A chance to die with honor.’
‘No, I don’t think there’s going to be any chance of that,’ Zachary said, and added under his breath, ‘if I have anything to do with it.’
‘We’ll die together my friend!’ And, overcome with emotion at the thought, Ulf wrapped his arms around Zachary. It was, Zachary thought, like being hugged by a bear who bathed in compost pits.
‘You want another game or not?’ said Maze.
Meanwhile, in the clearing outside the starship, four saddled but riderless horses stood cropping grass. A moment later, Meg, Zoe, Harold and Marlowe ran from the starship, mounted and rode away.
As they rode through the forest, Harold vowed that if he survived the day he would never, ever throw his leg over a horse again. The pain. The agony. But Zoe was in her element. She had come to realize that high adventure on horseback was what she had been born for!
Hidden from the Slarn skimmer by the ridge, the Don and his warriors waited by their horses and then Meg, Marlowe, Zoe and Harold rode from the forest toward them. The Don turned to his men. ‘Check blades and mount.’ The warriors’ hands went to their sword hilts, loosening their blades in their scabbards, then they mounted, crossed themselves, and as the starship party drew abreast of them, the Don led the charge, up and over the ridge and then down the further slope toward the Slarn skimmer. As the body of horse swept forward, gathering pace, as the Trolls chanted the ancient cavalry slogan “Walk, Trot, Canter and die!” Marlowe was easing back, letting the others pass him.
Inside the skimmer, the Slarn marines were watching a screen as the cavalry charge developed, and now they grabbed their Slarnstaffs from the rack and ran outside to repel the attack.
All of the captives were now on their feet, watching the charging cavalry approach, and Zachary was horrified. He could see it happening in his mind’s eye, the horses crashing into the forcefield, throwing their riders, breaking limbs, screaming in pain. Some old memory from school floated into his mind: the French general witnessing the Charge of the Light Brigade and saying ‘it is magnificent but it is not war.’ And now he knew he had to act or not be able to live with himself thereafter.
He looked at Ulf, and they both knew what that look entailed, and as one they charged toward the three Slarn marines who had formed a line, Slarnstaffs at the ready, to defend the skimmer from attack. So intent were they on the cavalry charge that they did not notice two lunatics charging at them from behind. Zachary brought one down in a classic rugby tackle, and Ulf, his giant arms wide, nailed the other two. The five of them fell into a desperate struggling pile, and then the Sullivan Himself and Maze and the two Forester men joined in.
And still the horses galloped toward the forcefield.
Zachary emerged from the strugglin
g ruck with a Slarnstaff, but as he pointed it at the forcefield, trying to work out which control would open it, a Slarn marine reared up from the ground and tackled him. The Slarnstaff fired as Zachary fell, and he must have said “white rabbits” on the first day of that month, because by some cosmic accident, against all odds, the forcefield dissolved where the Slarnstaff beam hit it and the horses streamed through into what had been the prisoner enclosure.
The ruck of wrestling figures broke up as the horses came through and now as the Sullivan Himself ran through the gap in the forcefield to freedom, the Slarn marines were on their feet again, Slarnstaffs in hand. The Don was leaning out of his saddle, slashing with his sword, and the eyes of his warhorse were bulging with excitement as a Slarn marine fell to the Don’s blade and then he rode on, and the other two Slarn marines fell beneath his steed’s hooves. As Troll warriors dismounted to disarm them, the two unwounded Slarn marines slapped controls on their right wrists, and dematerialized, leaving the wounded Slarn marine lying on the turf.
Zoe and the Don slid from their horses and approached the fallen enemy, and the Don raised his sword, about to deliver a death thrust through the joint between helmet and breastplate, when Zoe flung herself down across the prostrate figure. ‘No!’ she cried, ‘it’s wounded!’ The Don shrugged. ‘If you want it, it’s yours,’ and strolled on to where Troll warriors were unsuccessfully trying to hack their way into the skimmer, joined now by Marlowe, who, having taken no part in the attack, was now unobtrusively rejoining the victors.
Zoe was crouching over the wounded Slarn marine as Harold, Meg and Zachary came over to her. Blood, red blood, was trickling through a hole in its armor, and Zoe was attempting to remove the helmet. Harold dropped to one knee, examined the helmet, and located a sliding catch fastening helmet to breastplate. Undoing it, they removed the helmet and all gasped at what they saw. The marine was not only human but a young and beautiful woman. Her cropped hair glistened in the sun, and a line of blood ran from one corner of her mouth. There was a deadly pallor in her cheeks, and like some alien Joan of Arc, displaced in time, she lay dying on the grass before them.
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