"Can't you feel it?" she asked. Stray wisps of her hair were standing up. Little sparks danced around Axel's fingers when he wiped them on his trousers. "They hit her with a lightning bolt."
"Well they're about to fire another one," he said. "We'd better get out of here—" He was interrupted by a flash and bang! of thunder. He ducked instinctively, though it had come down at least a few hundred meters away.
"There!" Calandria pointed. Warm orange light was breaking from somewhere around the curve of the egg. A hatch had opened.
They clambered over the smoking debris, and rounded the ship in time to see a small figure step daintily out of the hatch, arms out for balance.
"Hello!" shouted Marya Mounce. "Is anybody there?"
The woman revealed by the glow of the ship's lights was not the brave rescuer Axel had hoped for. Marya Mounce was tiny, with pale skin and broad hips. Before seeing her face he noticed the frizz of her dun-coloured hair, which was held back by an iridescent clip. She was dressed in a blouse that swirled like oil, and a black skirt. It was evidently some inner system fashion, spoiled by the kakhi bandoliers slung over her shoulders.
What made his heart sink, though, was the sight of her feet.
Mounce had succumbed to a fashion sweeping the inner worlds, and had her Achilles tendons shortened. Her toes, the balls of her feet and calf muscles were augmented, so she stood en pointe at all times. All she wore on her feet were metallic toe-slips. He doubted she could run, much less climb over the broken trees strewn about this new clearing.
"There you are!" she shouted as Axel and Calandria fell over one last log. "See, we survived! You—you are May and Chan, aren't you?"
"Who else would be crazy enough to be here?" he said. "Are you alone?"
"Yes, it's just me." Mounce turned and waved vaguely at the ship. "I was doing a demographic survey, it involved some close orbits, so that's why I got caught in the—"
"You can tell us later," said Calandria in her most diplomatic voice. "The swans are coming." She pointed.
"Ah. Yes." Mounce's looked disappointed, but not frightened.
The sky was full of arcing incandescent lines. They stretched in a spiral all the way to the zenith, like ladders to heaven. Axel had seen the Heaven hooks when they came to destroy the Boros estate, and those too had been skyhooks of a sort, but nothing like this. Where the Heaven hooks had been cold metal and carbon-fibre, the swans seemed bodiless, creatures made of light alone.
From his scant reading on the subject, Axel knew the swans were nanotech, like most of the Winds. They were constituted from long microscopic whisker-like fibres. These could manipulate magnetic fields, and in their natural environment in orbit they meshed together in their trillions to form tethers hundreds of kilometers long. They drew power from the planetary magnetic field, and projected it by the gigawatt to where ever it was needed.
They could fly apart in an instant and recombine in new forms, he knew. Some of these forms could apparently reach down through the atmosphere itself, maybe even touch down on the surface of Ventus.
Calandria took Mounce by the shoulders. "Do you have any survival supplies?"
"Y-yes, it's a institute policy to carry some."
"Where are they?" Calandria vaulted into the ship. "We need stealth gauze. Have you got any?"
"I don't—" began Mounce. The voice of the ship interrupted her. Axel couldn't hear what it said over the roar of a nearby fire.
With a curse he hauled himself in the hatch after Calandria. She was rooting in a suit locker near the lock.
For a second Axel just let himself drink in the sight of the clean white floors, padded couches and trailing wall ivy decorating the ship. The Pan Hellenia represented civilization, with all the amenities—flush toilets, air beds, hot showers and sonic cleansers, VR, fine cuisine...
"Axel, help me!" He sighed, and turned away from it all.
Calandria was throwing things indiscriminately into a survival bag. Axel spotted a first-aid kit, diagnostic equipment, some emergency rations, a flashlight—
"Aha!" He pounced on the laser pistol. "Now I feel whole again."
"Forget that—help me with this." She was struggling to unclip a heavy box from the wall.
"What's that? Cal, it's way too heavy—"
"Nanotech customization kit. It'll save our lives, believe me."
"Okay." He helped her wrestle it down and into the bag.
"Uh, guys?" Mounce stood in the entrance, framed nicely by a vision of burning forest. "We'd better get going. The swans are here."
Calandria leapt past her, carrying two metal cases. Axel had never seen Calandria like this. It made him more than a little uneasy—as if his own vivid imagination was underselling the danger they were in.
"Hell!" Caught in her urgency, Axel swung the survival bag onto his shoulder and, staggering under the load, followed. Mounce accompanied him, her hands fluttering as she visibly tried to find a way to help.
A strange twilight glow pervaded the shattered clearing. Calandria had dumped both cases on the ground and was frantically rooting through one of them when Axel and Mounce caught up to her. Drifts of wood smoke stung Axel's eyes and the roar and heat of nearby flames made his head spin. Sparks of static electricity were flying everywhere, and Mounce's clean hair puffed out around her head like a dandelion.
Suddenly Calandria cried out, and collapsed. She curled into a ball on the smoking ground, hands clutching her head.
Axel felt it too—a ringing pain his head. It was centered on the left side, just above his ear. Mounce cursed in some foreign language and pulled off her crescent-shaped hair clip.
"What's happening?" she shouted over an impossible roar of sound. The sound of the fire was drowned out by the approach of the swans. It wasn't a single sound, but many, like a thousand strings. The swans sang a single unison chord as they reached to touch ground.
Lightning arced from the top of the starship. "Our implants!" shouted Axel. "We've all got hardware in our skulls. It's shorting out from all this power! Calandria's got more than either of us—she's augmented in a dozen ways." She lay insensible now, twitching next to the golden gauze she had half-pulled from the case.
"We've got to get her out of here!" He grabbed Calandria's arm, hoisting her into a fireman's carry. "Bring the stuff!"
Marya threw the cases into the survival bag and bent to haul it after her. Axel didn't look back to see how she was doing; it took all his concentration just to navigate the splintered branches and gouged earth around the ship. Finally he reached untouched forest and toppled into a thorn bush with Calandria on top of him. The singing pain in his head continued, but not as strongly as it had right next to the ship.
Marya Mounce struggled her way across the obstacles, the huge bulging sack getting caught on every jutting spar. She seemed determined, her mouth set in a grim line.
She had nearly made it to the trees when a rain of white light pattered into the loam right behind her. The ground sizzled and smoked under it.
"Run!" Axel waved frantically at her. "Forget the sack! Just run!" He knew she couldn't hear him over the chorus of the swans.
The rain intensified. It was like a funnel somewhere overhead was pouring down liquid light. Where it landed, the light coalesced, pulsing. The rain stopped abruptly, and started up again farther around the clearing.
The glow it had left behind flashed brightly once, and stood up.
Axel's voice died. He was glad Marya seemed oblivious to the thing behind her, because it would have paralyzed him were he in her place. It looked like a man, but was entirely made of liquid light. Long electric streamers flew from its fingertips and head. As another such being grew behind it, the first began to pirouette this way and that, like a dancer, obviously looking for something.
Marya landed heavily next to Axel. The survival bag spilled open. "Damn," she said meekly. Then she grinned crookedly at him. "Made it!"
Calandria pushed herself onto her elbows. "Steath
gauze," she croaked. "Where'zit?"
Axel grabbed the golden filigree she had been trying to unwind earlier. He pushed himself to his knees and flipped it open, letting it drape over all three of them, as Marya hauled the survival bag in under it.
The creature that had built itself behind Marya turned and looked in their direction. Axel forgot to breathe. He felt the other two freeze too, ancient instinct kicking in to save them from a superior predator. Slowly, deliberately, the thing stalked toward them.
"Oh, shit." Axel fingered the laser pistol. It felt hot under his hand; he wondered if it was shorting out too. It looked like he would find out in a second, when he had to use it.
The thing's head snapped to the left. It paused, chin up as though sniffing the air. Then it stepped over a log and headed away. The gauze had worked.
Axel blew out his held breath. Of course the stealth gauze worked—it was designed to fool the senses of the Winds. At times like this, though, he found it hard to remember that the technology of the Winds, including the swans, was a thousand years older than his own.
Old, maybe. But not primitive. He sucked in a new breath, and tried to will his racing heart to slow.
Soon six humanoid forms walked the clearing. Everything they touched caught fire. They tossed downed trees aside, and sent beams of coherent light into the treetops, hunting high and low, but never noticing the three small forms huddled right on the edge of the clearing.
One entered the ship. Loud concussions sounded inside, and the lights went out. Then spiral tendrils of light drifted down from above, and gently but firmly gripped the sides of the ship. The five remaining humanoid forms reached out, and dissolved into the ropes of light. Then, with hardly a tremor, the swans pulled the Pan Hellenia out of the ground, and retreated into the sky with it in tow.
The stellar glow faded; the full-throated cry of the swans diminished; soon the clearing was lit only by ordinary fire. But over the smell of burning autumn leaves lay the sharp reek of ozone.
For a time the three lay where they had fallen, head to head, watching the spiral aurora recede into the zenith, until finally the stars came out one by one, like the timid crickets.
Marya Mounce sat up and brushed dirt off her sleeves. "Well," she said briskly. "Thank you both, very much, for rescuing me."
§
Hours later they paused, halfway around the lake under the eaves of an abandoned barn. Axel was unused to this level of activity, and he had begun to stagger badly. Calandria favoured her wounded arm, so she could only carry so much. Marya had managed to keep up amazingly well, considering her feet. Whatever augmentation had been done to support her shortened tendons had toughened the balls of her feet immensely, and she could indeed run if she needed to.
As Axel slumped down wearily, and Calandria moved slowly to gather old planks for a fire, he noticed that Marya was shivering violently—whole body shivers accompanied by wildly chattering teeth.
"Thermal wear," she muttered. "There must be some thermal wear here." She knelt down and began rummaging through the bag.
"Ah. Here we are." She pulled out a pair of silvery overalls and stood up. Axel expected her to walk away or at least turn around to remove her skirt, but she just pulled the overalls on—and the skirt vanished as she did, leaving nothing but a cloudy blackness that disappeared as she zipped up the overalls.
"What was that?" he said.
"What? What's what?" Marya peevishly squatted down, hugging herself.
"Your dress—it was holographic." He heard Calandria pause in the midst of prying a board off the old barn's door.
"Of-f c-course it-it is," Marya chattered. "It's a-a holo unitard. W-what do y-you expect me to w-wear? Cloth?"
Calandria sent Axel an eloquent look that said, you deal with this. She went back to prying at the door.
Axel wasn't actually that surprised. Holo unitards were increasingly common in the inner systems. They allowed unrestricted and unlimited costume changes for the wearer—but were only practical in climate-controlled environments.
"Well," he said, "you're on Ventus now."
"I know. Anyway, the holo's not supposed to be visible to the W-Winds."
"That's not the point," said Axel. "You'll freeze to death in that thing."
"Anyway, you'll have to get rid of it," said Calandria. "We can't take the chance that the Winds might see it."
"The ship had no cloth apparel in it. And I didn't get a chance to put the thermals on before we landed," muttered Marya. "Too busy falling out of the sky." She shuddered violently again.
She had a point there. "We'd better get this fire going," he said. Calandria dropped another load of scraps at his feet and he bent to whittle some kindling. Marya watched him avidly.
"Pretty ironic," said Calandria as she came to sit on the other side of Marya. She and Axel framed her; he could feel her shudders as he whittled. "A couple of hours ago we were nearly burned to death. Now we're freezing. Typical."
"There." Axel had his kindling. He built a little pyramid of small scraps over, leaving an opening, and began laying larger blocks above and around that. Satisfied, he brought out the lighter from the survival kit.
"I can earn my keep," said Marya. "Here, let me prove it." She reached for the lighter.
"Anybody can use a lighter, Marya."
"I want to do it the old-fashioned way. Do you have a flint and iron?"
"Yes… Have you spent time on Ventus, then?" asked Axel.
"I'm not ground survey staff." Marya stood over them both, still shaking but looking strangely determined. "But I am a cultural anthropologist. I've studied more societies than you've heard about. I know sixteen ways to start a fire. We should save your lighter for a real emergency."
Calandria exchanged another glance with Axel. Then she said, "Let her try."
"I don't want to be useless," said Marya as she took the flints from Axel. She began frantically whacking the flintstone with her iron. She hit her own fingers and dropped it. "Ow!" Before Axel could move she had snatched it up again and resumed, more carefully and also more accurately. A small spray of sparks flew into the shavings.
She bent forward to blow gently on the embers. To Axel's surprise, the tinder caught. She nursed it for a few minutes like a doting parent, while Calandria and Axel watched with bated breath.
Finally Marya sat back, triumphant, as the little fire began to burn on its own. "See! I did it!"
Both Axel and Calandria made approving noises. Maybe Marya wouldn't be as useless as her gaudy exterior threatened.
The anthropologist sat down cross-legged, and beamed at her accomplishment. Axel sighed. "Okay, Cal, let's look at your arm."
"Well," said Calandria as Axel poked and prodded, "What do we do next?"
Marya was beginning to warm up, and seemed to be regaining her poise as well. She said, "Obviously we need to get offworld as soon as possible. Something's happening—I've never seen the swans like this!"
Axel and Calandria exchanged a glance. Armiger. It could only be him.
"Listen," continued Marya. "I know Ventus like the back of my hand, even if I've never been here. We've had agents down here on and off for decades—people like Axel who've sent back reports, brought back books. I know the history. I know the geography, every city and hamlet on this continent. I speak six local languages, without the need for implant dictionaries. I've studied the religions twelve different ways." She leaned forward to warm her hands on the new fire. "I know I'm not the outdoorsy type, I think I can help you."
Calandria nodded. "Thank you. We need the help, right about now. One thing, though—you should get rid of that unitard. I know you say it's supposed to be invisible to the Winds, but do we know that for sure? I don't think we should take the chance."
"Yes, I agree," said Marya. She jerked a thumb at the sky. "Especially after seeing the swans close up—not something I want to do again, let me tell you!" She stood up and unself-consciously unzipped her coveralls.
; "Hang on," said Axel. "I disagree. Marya, I think you should keep your unitard."
"Why?" asked Calandria.
Axel grinned. "I've got an idea."
25
"Where is she?" Marya strained to see through the darkness. She and Axel were crouching in damp weeds, while Calandria snuck up on some horses in a nearby paddock.
"She's nearly there," whispered Axel. "Pipe down, or the dogs will hear you."
Marya started to sit back, remembered they were on a planet covered with foul dirt, and recovered her crouching position. She shook her head. Calandria May seemed to take it for granted that her ways were the best. She had insisted on being the one to steal these horses.
"As soon as they discover they're gone, there'll be a posse out after us," she said, for what felt like the tenth time.
"We'll be long gone by the time that happens," he repeated back. "Trust us."
"My plan was better."
"We've been over this. Your unitard wouldn't fit Calandria."
"So what? I-"
The dogs started barking. Marya Mounce cursed under her breath. Calandria had been approaching downwind and with almost supernatural quiet, but the damn animals had sensed her anyway. She wasn't even to the paddock gate yet.
Calandria raced up to the paddock gate and began unhooked the loop of rope that kept it shut. Horses nickered nervously in the darkness beyond.
Marya shook her head, scowling. She had come up with a plan that, ethnologically, should guarantee that they were not pursued when they took the horses. Calandria had rejected it. The woman seemed to think only in terms of skulduggery—or maybe she didn't want to admit that Marya's plan was better than hers.
Here came the dogs, three of them snarling through the grass straight at Calandria. Marya's breath caught in her throat as Calandria froze—but then there came a brilliant flash of light that dazzled Marya's eyes for a moment.
The laser pistol was set on flash mode. Marya heard yelping, and opened her eyes to see the dogs stopped, pawing at their snouts. Poor things. A moment earlier they had been all teeth and claws, but already Marya felt like stroking them.
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