He was feeling the changes in delta-V now and he settled himself in one of the dual pilot’s chairs facing the computer interface. Jean smiled vacantly.
I have let that German witch doctor rearrange things inside my head. I should not have permitted that
. But now that it was done, one felt a glorious sense of pure freedom. There had been no real nightmares for several weeks. A dream or two. But no dream Amalie. No blood. For that, if for nothing else, he thought,
I should thank the Boche
.
He reset the drogue in the socket in his skull. Immediately perceptions sharpened as the computer LAN reinstated the virtual-reality program and enhanced it. Ahead and below lay Voertrekkerhoem and the designated landing ground. Radar showed storms on the continental plain, line after line of them. A storm cell had only recently passed over the landing site.
Young Damon’s presence suddenly came through the communications link powerfully.
“Can you handle the string?”
he asked firmly. Marq frowned. What was it that made the boy so hostile? There was
something
. He felt it. But it was hidden behind the mental curtain Dietr Krieg had erected in Jean Marq’s mind.
“I can fly the string down your pants, mon ami,”
Marq said affably.
“I was doing this when you were a smear on the sheets of your papa’s bed. If I make you nervous, unplug.”
Damon would never do such a thing when Duncan had ordered him to stand watch and monitor the descent of the cargo panniers.
Duncan and Anya had taken one of the small sleds, descending to some other mysterious destination with Han Soo’s frozen corpse. Why did that trouble him, Jean wondered.
What do I care about Anya Amaya?
He was the only member of
Glory
’s syndicate with whom she had not shared her body.
But that was his own choice. Long ago he had made it plain he wished to remain celibate. Still it lessened his pleasure to think of Duncan and Anya descending together. It was not--suitable.
“I am going to land this shuttle manually,”
he announced to Damon.
“The others can follow on program.”
Damon had no objection. Nor any sign of acrophobia, Marq thought. But then the reality they were both experiencing was virtual, computer-generated, not actual. It made a difference.
“I will follow you through on the controls,”
Damon said.
“If you wish to learn,”
Jean Marq said.
In the virtual world they shared, the virtual Jean Marq raised a virtual hand and smiled a virtual smile at a virtual Damon Ng.
“Ready to begin, boy,”
Jean Marq said.
“Nobody lives forever.”
Jean wondered how it was that thought had slipped by the mental curtain the Boche hog butcher had installed.
“Is that what you call Dietr? Hog butcher?”
“Mind, now, boy,”
Jean Marq said almost airily. “Faite attention!”
At eighty thousand meters the ceramic surfaces of the descent vehicle glowed red. Plasmas curled away from the entering shuttle in a spectacular show of colors and light. The shuttle train was crossing the ocean side of Voerster. Beneath the fiery trail lay only rainswept, empty ocean. The fire in the sky reflected from the tideless waves unseen. As the lead shuttle approached the terminator, the first real suggestions of air began to burn, oxygen exploding into a white streak of fire against the darkening sky.
The shuttle crossed the Sea of Storms in minutes, descending from seventy thousand meters to fifty thousand. Over the northern spur of land and lights of the Cape Colony the shuttle descended steeply to only ten thousand meters. Jean Marq instructed the computer to bank the string into a long turn to the south and Amity Bay. A series of deep, rolling sonic booms rocked the city of Joburg, bringing Voertrekkers and kaffirs into the streets.
Over the Grassersee, Jean took over from the computers and flew by wire. The lander had become a swiftly moving glider. The string crossed Sternberg at five thousand meters and leveled for Voertrekkerhoem’s landing field. Jean’s view of the land below was still a computer-generated wireframe sketch. The shuttle had no forward-looking windows, only a sloping carapace of red-hot ceramic. But in the virtual reality created by the computers, Jean Marq could see clearly the lights put on the field by the downworlders. Lanes for the string of cargo panniers. One lane lay near the complex wireframe image that was the way
Glory
’s computers saw Voertrekkerhoem.
Jean skillfully banked the shuttle and lined it up with the landing ground. He armed the drag parachutes.
At five hundred meters, he leveled the ceramic arrow and lowered the skids. To celebrate his skill, he pulled the drogue from his head and made the landing blind, on analog instruments. The way Duncan might do it, he thought. The way only a veteran Starman could.
A series of terrifying booms, like the crash of thunder on doomsday, rolled across the Grassersee. The old leaded windows of Voertrekkerhoem rattled; some shattered and fell in shards to the stone floors. From where he stood surrounded by his Wache Guard of Honor, Ian Voerster could hear the shrieks of the women on the widows’ walks and the moans of terror from the house kaffirs. The ranks of the Wache wavered and stumbled. Even the shimmering blue-white arc-lamps that bathed the airship landing ground in cold, harsh light seemed to flicker as the sonic booms rolled across Voertrekkerhoem.
“Stand fast! Stand fast, damn you!”
The Voertrekker-Praesident’s voice could scarcely be heard over the rolling thunder from the east
Ian Voerster was the first to see the descending shuttles, falling like huge, gleaming spearpoints out of the night sky. The spacecraft were shadows on the emerging stars. Ian’s blood felt as though it were congealing in his veins. His limbs felt wooden, and his heart labored, as he raised a pair of binoculars.
Lightning raced through the thunderheads moving west The electric blue light flashed on the carapace of the leading lander. Clearly the tiling was made of some heat-resistant material because it glowed white at the leading edges, shading to ruddy red along the ugly, humped dorsal surface. In the field of the binoculars, the vehicle seemed aimed directly at The Voerster and his frightened troops.
It approached, or fell, at a stunning rate. One moment it had passed high above Amity Bay, in the next it was rushing low overhead with a crackling rumble of tortured, parted air. In train behind it came others, all alike, at intervals of perhaps a half kilometer. It was like watching a flight of giant assegai.
As the last sonic boom rolled and crashed across the Sea of Grass, the first shuttle struck the turf of the landing field with incredible violence. It ploughed into the field, turning a long, deep furrow that steamed and hissed with the red heat of the blade that had created it. A ribbon parachute, larger than any similar device ever stored aboard a Voertrekker dirigible, opened and slowed the shuttle to a stop. When movement ceased, the spacecraft lay sunk in the wet soil, surrounded by a fog of superheated water vapor.
The spaceship was far larger than Ian Voerster had thought it would be. Delta-shaped, it was fifty meters from tip to blunt tail, a half dozen meters from keel (now buried in the soil of Voerster) to the thick, darkly blind carapace of the dorsal surface.
The Voerster had only a moment to consider the lead lander before another roared over his head, and another and another, until the landing field of Voertrekkerhoem was littered with redhot, steaming, hissing spearpoints. There was a smell of burnt metal in the air and Ian Voerster could feel the sweat of fear rolling down his ribs. He took note of the fact that the vehicles were featureless, terrifyingly blind. They lay on the field amid their brightly colored ribbon-chutes, a legion of the most threateningly foreign devices Ian Voerster had ever seen.
The
Nepenthe
had rained no such storm of fearsome devices on Voerster. Ian remembered seeing that Goldenwing transiting the sky, and the descent of a small machine, large enough to carry a single man, that remained on the surface of the planet only long enough to deposit Black Clavius on the ground. Then it had risen, or so the witnesses claimed, silently into the sky to be gone. Clavius’ arrival on Voerster had been nothing like this terrifying visitation.
The Voerster glanced back at his house. It seemed smaller, less grand than it had only moments before. The women, servants, and kaffirs had all vanished. Only the Voertrekker-Praesident and his barely controllable Honor Guard remained on the landing field surveying a multitude of still-glowing sky machines with gleaming, mottled carapaces that looked to Ian Voerster as though they were made of porcelain or ceramic. What sort of people owned such machines as these? For the first time, Ian Voerster, his mouth dry with anxiety, thought to ask himself whether or not he had the means--and the courage--actually to do what he intended doing.
No man could live on Voerster without an intimate knowledge of fear. No man could rule Voerster without an equally intimate knowledge of how to control and use fear, Ian shouted an order to Leutnant Benno to advance the Honor Guard until it commanded the forepart of the first vehicle at the far end of the field. Benno barked commands at the Wache troopers and trotted down the long, smoking furrow to where the shuttle rested. The Voerster followed, aware that his boots and trouser-legs were being stained with hot mud as he slogged through the ploughed ground. The dirt reeked of burnt iron.
As he reached the rear of the first shuttle he studied it carefully. He needed to know everything possible about these Starmen and their machines. Protected by a cowl of stained ceramic were six bell-shaped protuberances that appeared to be mounted on swivels. They were still in motion, and obviously superheated. The metal of which they were made radiated heat in waves that made the air shimmer.
Taking care not to get too near the craft, the Voertrekker-Praesident took up a position on the flank of the now somewhat dishevelled Honor Guard. Benno shouted an order. The Wache troopers, to a man white-faced with suspicion of this monstrous visitation from out there, assumed the formal guard position. It was a posture out of the Manual of Arms, with their weapons (heavy-gauge shotguns) at high-port. It struck Ian Voerster as faintly absurd to assume a position intended for crowd control of restless kaffirs. The huge, hot spearpoints resting in Voertrekkerhoem’s field were unlikely to be impressed.
For a long moment there was no sound but the creak of hot metal. Then a segment of the spearpoint’s ventral surface began to retract. Previously invisible creases appeared, widened. The entire segment sank into the craft, leaving a black hole.
Ian Voerster’s breath came hard. His throat was too dry to swallow his frothy saliva.
Have they come to kill us?
he wondered.
Are they truly men, or have they changed into something horrible, something more at home in the void of space than on firm ground?
After all, what did one really know? Black Clavius was a human being despite the grotesque receptacle in his wool, but that was no assurance that
all
Starmen were human.
Something appeared in the opening of the shuttle. A man.
Thank God
, Ian Voerster thought. Ian Voerster sucked in a deep breath of cold, wet air.
But for his obscenely revealing clothing--a single garment that clung like a second skin and displayed the genitalia in disgusting bas-relief--the man from the stars could have been a Voertrekker. He stood on the tortured soil, looking about with evidence of a huge curiosity.
The Starman spoke. The language was Afrikaans of a sort. Understandable, but absurdly accented and archaic.
“I am Jean Marq, mathematician and syndic of the Goldenwing,
Gloria Coelis
” he said.
A murmur ran through the ranks of the Honor Guard. The Starman looked at the troops and frowned. “The shuttles contain the cargo ordered by Alfried Voerster. I need men to help with the unloading.”
The Voertrekker-Praesident stepped forward and spoke in his most formal manner. “I am Ian Voerster, heir of Alfried Voerster and Head of State, Mynheer Marq. Say what you need and you shall have it.”
Another ripple of uncertainty ran through the nervous Wache
lumpen
. Perhaps, thought Ian Voerster, it would have been more practical to greet the Starman with ordinary Trekkerpolizei. But it was too late for that now. The Goldenwing had provided Voerster with a hostage, and when the moment came, the chocolate soldiers of the Wache would have to do.
But what weapons did the man in the skintight suit carry? It did not look as though he had any place to conceal anything in that vulgar getup.
The nearby shuttles began to open. The
lumpen
recoiled. From each machine a strange creature emerged, one a meter tall, with six jointed legs, four arms, and no head. The central torso was ringed with what appeared to be eyes.
One of the Wache had had enough. He uttered a cry and leveled his shotgun at the clacking horror. Before Benno could prevent it, the trooper fired. Buckshot clanged off the rounded flank of the thing, ricocheting off without visible effect.
The man called Marq’s expression betrayed his contempt. “It is only a machine, Voertrekker,” he said soothingly. “A machine intended to make unloading less burdensome.”
Ian Voerster flushed. He was not accustomed to being the object of strangers’ pitying scorn.
“Leutnant Benno! Take that man’s name.”
To Marq, Ian Voerster said, “The man will be punished. Is your device damaged?”
Marq’s eyes grew oddly veiled. “A syndicate and its belongings are not so easily damaged.” He gave a command. The robot produced a New Earth weapon called a beamer.
A voice issued from within the first shuttle:
“Jean Marq, remember what Duncan said about frightening or offending these people...”
A bolt of lightning blue light sprang from the beamer’s lens and struck the ground at the offending Wache’s feet. Blue-violet light whirled and left a smoking hole in the earth.