by Brian Daley
"Pedal for your damn life, Ho!"
Whatever had been done to their power train, Floyt thought it had been alleviated, in some measure, by the train's respite while the airbike had been towed by grav-harness. Either that, or Floyt's fear and desperation had allowed him to tap hidden reservoirs of strength. He was up, getting the pedals spinning, pulling so hard that he bent the handlebars upward.
Slowly the prop began to pick up speed, though Alacrity held the dive and Thistle's wings threatened to snap off. Wind streamed through the holes they'd made in the fuselage, causing drag, widening them.
All at once, Inst was coming at them again. Alacrity regretted that the ambush hadn't worked. Still, it hadn't been a complete failure; the panel was smoking, and Inst's erractic flight indicated serious damage to it.
It was plain that he could no longer tow them. They waited for him to incinerate them, or burn the wings off. Instead, listing badly, he seized the end of the starboard wing and rocked it. Thistle wobbled and shuddered; the two heard the wing joints creak. Inst could quite easily rip it off.
They got the message. Alacrity let Inst put him into a bank-gentle, but sharp by airbike standards.
On the new course, Alacrity said, "Wherever he wants us to go, it won't be healthy." He dipped the canard, and the airbike went into what was for her a maximum dive. "Get ready to give it everything you've got, Ho."
"The cranksets are seizing up again, Alacrity."
Inst wavered closer, hollering, "Don't force me to hurt you, Fitzhugh!" He gave the wingtip an emphatic slap. Alacrity held the dive. Inst began pushing upward on the underside of the starboard wing. Alacrity rolled away left. The entire airframe groaned and vibrated.
As the breakabout had hoped, Inst came at them again, clumsily, in his damaged suit. The Alacrity pulled up, hitting the wing spoilers, air-braking to a full stall. Inst overshot. In an insane, almost slow-motion maneuver, Alacrity had the First Counselor below the fuselage. He hit the emergency landing switch.
The deployment surge blew apart the envelope along Thistle's underbelly. Adhesive landing ribbons sprang out in all directions, many of them hitting Inst, entangling him like a bug.
He flailed, trapping himself further. He could no longer manipulate his chest controls. His erratic movements yanked and pulled at the airbike; its airframe began to come apart.
Thinking, We should've let him take us, I guess, Alacrity fought to keep the ship on something like an even keel. There was no selecting a spot; they would come down where they would.
Epiphany spun at them. Inst's thrashings pulled them every which way. Floyt braced himself against his handlebars and watched the First Councillor's desperate expression until a snapping of exotic materials announced the tearing loose of the starboard wing.
Chapter 15
The Game's Afoot
Floyt yowled, and Alacrity offered his soul to the Infinite on very easy terms.
An instant later the breakabout realized they weren't quite falling and saw why. Inst was held fast to the starboard side of the undercarriage, providing just enough lift to keep Thistle from simply dropping like guano. As it was, they spiraled in.
For one mad, frozen instant, Floyt was looking into Inst's eyes through the fuselage. Dorraine's father was hollering into his commo headset, but in his face there was only surrender.
They bashed down on rocky ground, halfway up the side of the valley, the canard hitting first. Its pole snapped in two and was driven back, passing through the water blivet and out the top of the ship. Water showered over them as Thistle slammed down.
Inst impacted with a ghastly crump of metal, rock, flesh, and bone. He managed something halfway between a scream and a groan, cut short almost as soon as it began. The airbike bounced, jarring, the pedaling frame bending and buckling.
Thistle's nose hit as Inst's exoskeleton jarred up against the undercarriage, jolting Floyt and Alacrity from their saddles, slamming both riders forward. With the handlebars to hang on to, Floyt fared better than the breakabout. He felt his shoulders wrench and his left hip jolt against the handlebar as he narrowly missed dashing his crotch against its stem. His feet burst from toe clips and straps. He couldn't stop his face from grazing off Alacrity's lower back.
Alacrity broke the control stem off and bent his remaining shoulder brace, his feet leaving his pedals. His head bashed through the metalar before him, millimeters to the left of the slender hag-oak sapling that stopped the airbike.
Meteorlike specks of light whirled before Floyt. The Earther felt warm, sticky blood on his face, and he heard himself groaning and panting raggedly. The breakabout sounded even worse. Wiping at the blood, Floyt hissed then sobbed in pain and realized dazedly that his nose was broken. He looked down to see that Thistle's ruin—and one of his feet—rested on the torn remains of Inst and his demolished grav-harness.
Floyt turned his eyes away and, insulated from nausea by shock, got out, "How badly … are you hurt, Alacrity?"
The breakabout was trying weakly to extricate himself, to little effect. "I think … I think I broke a rib or two." He grimaced. "And it feels like my leg's bleeding. You hurting anywhere?"
"Everywhere. Don't move."
Floyt managed to hunch forward and did his best to check his companion. Alacrity swore through clenched teeth as Floyt probed gently. The breakabout was resting on a jumble of wreckage, including the control stem and the bentback hag-oak sapling.
"I think you're right," the Terran told him. "I don't think you should be moved."
"But I … hate the view here, Hobart."
"Stop talking. Somebody's bound to come looking for us."
"Ho, we're kilometers off the racecourse, remember?"
"Yes, but Inst was using his headset before the crash. There might be aid any time now."
Alacrity stopped panting and said urgently, "Get Inst's gun. Hurry!"
"But Alacrity—"
"I said get it! Inst was headed someplace in particular. That means he had somebody waiting for him, and that's who he was calling. Now will you get his blaster?"
"It's no good, Alacrity. I saw him drop it after you snared him. I guess he was going to try to burn himself free, but he lost his grip on it when Thistle yanked him around."
"Then we really can't stay here." Alacrity began to stir weakly. "Besides Inst's little helpers, there'll be things around here sniffing after the blood. And we're a lot lower on the food chain than we were a little while ago."
In the end, Floyt simply tore away most of what was left of the airframe. It came away easily, but the task was still difficult for Floyt in his woozy condition. He got a shoulder under Alacrity's good side, his right, and did his best to move him delicately. Alacrity yipped with pain anyway. To make things even worse, they were compelled to step on Inst to get clear of the wreckage.
Floyt set Alacrity down and went back to check the jellied corpse of their attacker. Floyt had never seen a human being in anything like this condition. It looked unreal, something phonied up for a museum exhibit. There wasn't much of Inst left intact except that awful, staring face. The exo-skeleton was in pieces, the commo headset destroyed. Floyt had to pause twice in his search to retch.
The instruments mounted on Thistle's control stem had been reduced to chaff, and the medikit had virtually exploded on impact, but the Earther scavenged some tension bandages, an irrigation cannister, and a coagulant aerosol. There was also a packet of styrettes of various kinds; for an instant he recalled the fight in the corridor on Earth, a lifetime ago.
He sat for a moment, numbly wiping from his hands what he could of the blood. Alacrity groaned, "I just can't figure this out. I mean, Inst! Why?"
Floyt barely heard him at first. He could only think of how much wild country lay around them. He was wrestling sluggishly with the many unknowns bearing on their death or survival. How quickly would it be realized that Inst and Thistle were missing? How large a search would be mounted, and with what vehicles? What could the two
expect in the way of weather, predators, complications from their injuries, and exposure?
And Inst's hypothetical cohorts were another factor entirely.
But gradually Alacrity's question penetrated. Inst. Something about him had set Floyt to thinking back at Frostpile. He shook his head, finding it difficult to string two thoughts together.
Alacrity hummed loudly, briefly, in pain. Then he nose-sang, "Ning-a-ning! Nice flying, Alacrity! (A shame about the landing!) A-ning!"
Floyt snorted laughter and blood. "Let me see—isn't one of the first survival rules to stay with the downed aircraft?"
"Varies with the circumstances. In this case, there's not much aircraft to stay with."
"So what do we do, Alacrity?"
"Crash dieting combined with a program of rigorous exercise: walking."
They both squinted at Halidome, calculating direction. The Terran was surprised to see that it was still early morning. Floyt began to clean himself up as best he could with the medical supplies. He wiped the blood from his face and stopped the bleeding of his swollen and swelling nose. Even the light pressure of the irrigation spray and coagulant mist made his eyes tear. Then he cleaned and closed Alacrity's injury.
"Nice break you've got there," Alacrity commented admiringly. "You're going to have a real bump in your graph."
"It's like trying to see around the back of a hoverbus. Shall I bandage your ribs?"
"They don't bind cracked ribs anymore, Ho. What's the Earthservice teach you people?"
"The wisdom of traveling by ground conveyance. Uh, what about Inst's body? Should we bury it, do you think?"
"For all we know, on Agora they save their corpses under bell jars. You feel like digging a grave with your hands? Or collecting rocks for a cairn? Or just bundling his leftovers along with us? … Didn't think so."
"But how are we going to prove what happened?"
Alacrity considered that. "Nice catch. We'll just have to do it some other way." They heard a distant sound, something between a predatory scream and a siren.
"Because," Alacrity went on, "if we wait around much longer, we'll end up with two one-way tickets on the Alimentary Local."
The Terran assisted the wincing breakabout to his feet. Small, six-winged flyers were already circling overhead. After a few steps, Alacrity said, "It's not too bad. I think I can make it." He squinted off in their intended direction.
Floyt felt a bit woozy. Alacrity was swaying a little. There was no way for them to know if they had infections, concussions, or internal injuries, and little or nothing they could do about them anyway. Floyt carefully set the tip of a styrette to his shoulder and gave himself an intramuscular injection of stimulant. Alacrity made no objection when the Terran did the same for him.
"We'll have to travel downwind as much as we can," the younger man said. "We can try to have a tree within running distance, but we'd better steer clear of heavy undergrowth except in a real emergency."
He sighed. They knew only the barest minimum about Epiphany's wildlife. It looked like an easy day for getting killed. Thistle's frame was useless, so Floyt laboriously broke two branches off a fallen supplejack tree for use as staffs and weapons.
Alacrity pointed toward where he thought Frostpile was. "Helluva slog. I wish we had something tougher than cycling shoes." He thought longingly of his ranger boots. "Have you done much hiking?"
"A bit. Would you care to hear a marching song?"
"I don't know if I'm up to it."
"How about a trudging song?" As they started, he began through his inflated, livid mask of a face:
"Oh, I've got a mule and her name is Sal,
Fifteen years on the Erie Canal … "
He was soon too short of breath to sing. They hadn't gone very far before the predator appeared.
They'd begun by walking fifty paces, then resting. Both felt better, if a little drifty, as they began moving and the injections took hold. They increased the quota to one hundred paces.
Floyt spied a patch of spore bulbs like those he'd seen some of the gillies using to check wind direction. He tugged one free and punched a small hole in it. As the pair slowly descended toward the stream running through the valley, he occasionally squirted a smoky stream of spores into the air, watching its drift.
At first they intended to ford the tributary and walk the easier bank back to the river and the race course, but even from a distance they could see that the green, silty water crashed and foamed off the rocks in its watercourse, rushing headlong, practically a river in its own right.
They halted on the slope, searching for a spot to cross. "The shape we're in, that stuff'll knock us over as soon as we're in above our arches," Alacrity said as he surveyed the many spots where green water became white. "And it doesn't look like it gets any better downstream."
"Well, upstream's the wrong direction altogether, Alacrity. And at least if we stay on this side and follow the—"
He was cut off short as a hair-raising scream resounded from the ridge above them. They looked upslope as something slinked from the undergrowth and reached the airbike wreckage in one fluid motion. Floyt's fleeting impression was of a mottled blur of flailing, whipping tentacles, slender, muscular legs and body, and wide jaws—three of them—surrounding a circular mouth with a long, curling, bifurcated tongue and rows of spiky teeth.
The creature seized Inst's remains at once, flinging aside a few scraps of Thistle. It fed loudly, gnawing and lapping, snapping and crushing bones and sucking the marrow, its tentacles stuffing its mouth with incredible speed.
"Fangster!" Alacrity yelled. "Must've smelled all the carrion from the hunt." Usually the creatures kept to the high mountains. "Reef said those things are always hungry. We've got to get out of here. What's left of Inst sure isn't going to keep it busy for long."
The fangster was holding up an unidentifiable part of the First Councillor with some of its whiplashing tentacles, spreading and slitting it with others in a gruesome parody of dissection, stripping away flesh with its jaws and tongue. It was gorging on every available morsel.
No tree worthy of the name was within reach, so they started to stumble downslope and downstream, trying to get to open ground. Soon the fangster was making occasional screams again.
"Sounds like he's getting ready for the main course," Alacrity grunted. The pain in his side kept him in an agonized crouch as he trotted. The two descended to the tumbling stream at breakneck pace, barely saving themselves, time after time, with their staffs. They dislodged stones and soil and raised dust, slipping and skidding, risking a fall or a fractured ankle. They were lashed and scraped by undergrowth.
The fangster's cries were much nearer as they broke through to a bank of stones in all colors, most of them rounded and smooth. But no boulder was big enough to offer refuge. The water crashed and slammed against the rocks, throwing up a constant drizzle.
"There's no way we'll outrun it," Alacrity admitted. "We'll have to try to drive it off, and hope that Inst took the edge off its appetite." He squatted, laying his staff aside, and palmed a rock, weighing it in his hand.
Floyt doubted their ability to deal with a fangster using sticks and stones at the best of times, much less in their current condition. "What about fording?"
Alacrity gazed at the roiling water again. "We'd get knocked over and get our brains mashed. Maybe as a last resort."
"No, look." Floyt quickly selected a disc of rock. He lifted it with a grunt, offering it to the breakabout. "Take it! It'll help you keep your footing!"
Alacrity was about to object when the fangster's hunting cry changed his mind. He dropped the throwing rock and hollered in agony as Floyt made the transfer. The breakabout tried to bear as much of the ballast's weight as possible with his left arm, on his uninjured side. Still, it was a moment-to-moment battle not to give in to the torment and drop his burden.
Floyt had seized a blocky stone. Now they eased into the water, trying to steady one another as much as they co
uld. It was paralyzingly cold, a snow-fed stream.
Their cycling shoes gave them only marginal purchase on the sluiced rocks of the streambed, and the rushing current hit their upper bodies like an avalanche. Clutching their weights, buffeted and pounded, they struggled in deeper, and deeper still, wondering if they'd freeze before they made it across.
Alacrity took a misstep and nearly went under. The Earther, trying to keep one eye on his companion, was nearly drawn into a whirlpool, then turned his ankle, but managed to hobble on. Alacrity somehow contrived to hang on to his boulder with the arm on his good side and use the other to pull Floyt through, though the torment of it brought a shriek from him.
Swirling at waist level, the water kept them tilting and wavering, fighting desperately for balance, warring for each step. They heard a snarling wail behind them—the fangster at the bank. They didn't dare turn to look. A denizen of the peaks, the thing had struck Alacrity as being almost spindly. He hoped that meant it had no stomach for a swift, cold bath.
Floyt stepped into another hole and went under, floundering and dropping his ballast. Alacrity released his own and lurched for the Earther. They were spun like leaves, and both expected to be pounded to shreds. But fickle waters spun and bucked them toward the far bank, and Floyt was able to grab a large rock sticking above the foam. Alacrity felt his feet touch bottom. In moments they were dragging one another onto dry land.
They collapsed, blue-lipped, exhausted, and shivering uncontrollably, teeth chattering. On the far side of the stream the fangster scuttled back and forth, watching them with eyes like green flames, whining and spitting at them, the quills of its tail standing out stiffly. Nevertheless, it made no effort to test the water temperature.
"However in creation did you think of using ballast?" Alacrity asked when he could talk again.
"I read about it. In Skagway Scanlon, King of the Klondike."
"Penny dreadful?"
"Dime novel." Floyt considered the raging, frustrated fangster. "In Skagway's case it was a Kodiak bear, of course."
