His Majesty's Starship (22 page)

Julia’s aide sounded, startling her. It was a connection with the rest of the world, the tiresome and tedious world of humans and the Royal Space Fleet and the rest of it that she had almost forgotten.

“Julia Coyne,” she said.

“Three hours, Jules.” Adrian Nichol sounded irritatingly cheerful that he was about to come down and take her back to that world. She checked the time: yes, it was shortly before seven in the evening, Capital time. Later than that in the highlands, being further east. “I’m on my way down now.”

*

Adrian could see the highlands clearly from his position in
Sharman
, five miles up. They were on the Roving’s dark side but they were this side of the planet’s curve and they stood out clearly on radar.
Sharman
had mapped out the contours on the first journey and now a red trace on the display showed the optimum course for him to take to pick up his passengers. The autopilot had already picked up on it.

A fiery streak blazed past the viewports and erupted into a fireball a mile ahead of him. Adrian yelped and hauled at the stick to avoid the explosion, and something large and dark flashed over
Sharman
. Radar showed nothing but by the light of the Roving’s big moon he caught the shape of a landing boat circling around him. He thought he caught a glimpse of circular insignia on the wings, before he was dazzled by the flare of the intruder’s exhausts.

“Pull up and return to orbit,” said a voice in his earphones. A human voice, as far as he could tell. And the design of the boat that he had glimpsed was human too.

“Who are you?” Adrian shouted.

“Irrelevant. Pull up and return to orbit.”

“I- I have to pick up two crew-”

“We’ll do that.” The voice was toneless. “Pull up and return to orbit. We are armed-” As if to prove the point, another missile flew past. “-and we can enforce our orders.”

“I-” Adrian swallowed. He glanced up, picturing the attractive emptiness of orbit, then ahead into the dark, picturing his two friends waiting for him. “I understand,” he said. “Complying.” He pulled at the stick slightly and
Sharman
’s nose tilted up. He swallowed; then at the same time cut all power to the main engines and fired the forward thrusters. He lurched forward in his seat and the straps tightened around him as
Sharman
stopped dead in the air, then plummeted. As the nose came down he fired the main engines again at full power, and the boat accelerated at full thrust towards the mountains below.

There was a bellow in his earphones before he broke contact, but he ignored it. Whoever was behind him was armed, but they didn’t know the terrain. They didn’t have a map of the highlands already programmed into their flight computers, and that would surely give him the advantage.

He tried to open a comms channel: he was being jammed. So, he would just have to get there first.

*

Julia and Peter continued talking to Leaf Ruby, with Arm Wild interpreting, as they made their way back to the landing site. Leaf Ruby could not ask enough questions and though it confessed that the music played through Julia’s aide left it cold, it insisted that it be provided with an audio copy and the score of several pieces so that it could study the notation and see how it worked. It hoped it could visit Earth one day and witness some musical performances.

They were in the tree tunnel that led to the landing ground, and Arm Wild broke step and looked back at Peter. “Disregard them, Peter Kirton. They are just animals.”

Four diminutive creatures were gathered at the foot of a tree and Peter had paused next to them to watch. They looked so similar to Arm Wild and the others that Julia thought they must be young Rusties; they were certainly more like the real thing than the carvings back on the pridehall. Arm Wild’s comment intrigued her: did Rusties only gain intelligence with adulthood? No, he had already said ... She looked at them more closely. Maybe they were slightly different from Rustie babies, though the distinction wasn’t obvious. One of them, the largest, was standing on its hind legs, straining to reach what looked like some fruit overhead while the others looked on.

Peter picked the fruit and held it down to them. “Here you are, big fella,” he said. The little creature took it in its mouth – no graspers, Julia noticed – and its friends gathered round, each taking a bite from the fruit. The one holding it gulped down the remainder. With Peter now identified in their minds as a source of food they clustered round him, then froze with their ears pricked up.

Julia heard it too. The sound of boat engines, come to steal her from this wonderful place. The small creatures fled into the bushes.

Peter came over to them. “Just animals?” he said. “I’d thought they might be children.”

“Children?” Arm Wild exclaimed. He made a rumbling in his throat, which could have been laughter or swearing but either way was not translated. “Conceivably I should not be surprised: it is said that one of our contact teams on Earth had the same misunderstanding about chimpanzees and humans.”

They looked at the bushes where the small creatures had gone.

“You’re descended from them?” Peter said.

“No, and you are not descended from chimpanzees,” Arm Wild said, “but there is a close relationship. Come.”

The landing boat making the noise was approaching fast. Very fast.

- 17 -

21 May 2149

Sharman
was fast and nippy, while the enemy had missiles. If those missiles were heat-seeking then the advantage, Adrian thought as the boat charged towards the ground, was probably with the enemy.

Then his fingers brushed the gold wings on his uniform. Gold wings. He was proud of those: they weren’t just handed out at random.

He had already planned his entry into the highlands – a pass that loomed dead ahead, according to radar. He had no idea if the attackers were behind him; radar still showed nothing and
Sharman
wasn’t designed to combat stealth tech. He thought for a moment of the state-of-the-art detection equipment back on the old
Australasia
, purpose-built to pinpoint scuttlers in the depths of space ... but there was no point in wishing.

He lurched
Sharman
from side to side, still keeping the same heading; he was probably flying faster than the others, and was most likely making better speed than a missile could, but there was no harm in doing a bit of extra shaking off.

Then he was into the pass, hurtling through at 200 feet with the shockwave of the boat’s passing echoing off the rocky walls. Bad luck if he caused an avalanche and it fell on someone, but he hadn’t started this.

A missile hit the side of the pass behind him and he increased speed a notch, then banked as hard as he could into a side valley. G-forces pushed him into his seat but he had done worse racing flyers like this back on Mars, through the canyons that skirted the Tharsis plateau. That was where he had got his gold wings. He came out of the turn and whooped with glee.

It was easy, really. The computer had the course to the pick-up point plotted, and with every turn he took it recalculated. The difficult bit was in deciding when to override the computer, which lacked a facility for being informed it was under attack. Adrian made a mental note to get Peter to upgrade the navigation AI one day.

Now the computer was telling him to turn between two peaks, but looking ahead he could see that course would take him over a flat plateau where he would be a sitting duck for the attackers. He ignored it and turned instead into a blind valley that ended in a gentle, saddle-backed ridge. He could dart over the ridge and still not rise higher than the valley sides. Radar was picking out the ridge’s lines for him and he pulled gently back on the stick to clear it-

The big moon came out again and Adrian yelled.

“Aaagh!” He hauled on the stick and increased throttle, and
Sharman
almost stood on its tail as it raced skywards. The radar was showing the stone that surrounded him and Adrian had put the slight fuzziness of the echo down to a poor display rather than the suddenly visible trees on the ground that added at least another hundred feet to the contours. If he had kept his previous course he would have cleared the ridge itself but smashed in a glorious, blazing mess right through the trees that ran along it.

In a moment he was well above the skyline and burning fuel brightly. He cut the burn and put the nose down but already in the moonlight he could see the sleek, triangular shapes of his attackers turning towards him. Two of them – he hadn’t realised.

He checked the display: only twenty miles to go.

“Sod it,” he muttered, and dived back into a valley. Julia and Peter had been going to some Rustie concert. There would be witnesses, influential ones. No one would dare attack him there. He just had to be the first to arrive ...

*

The boat was directly overhead: they could see its running lights and a dim, delta-winged outline behind them. It had shot over the treeline and circled round in a fast bend that must have crushed the pilot into his seat. It landed on full retro, facing them, and the lights on the leading edge of the wings shone straight into their eyes. They raised hands to ward off the glare.

“Cut it out, Ade,” Julia muttered. “Come on, Pete, Arm Wild. And thank you again, Leaf Ruby.”

“It says it awaits your next meeting with eagerness,” Arm Wild said as they walked forward.

And stopped. There was shouting ahead and figures, human figures, were running towards them out of the white glow of the lights. Strangers, carrying things in their hands that Julia’s brain slowly registered as automatic weapons.

“What the-” she said. Before they could react the men were surrounding them, their guns raised.

“Which one of you is Kirton?” the leading man said. They were wearing military helmets and uniforms.

“Uh, me ...” said Peter.

The leader nodded at a large, burly man who stepped up and grabbed Peter. Peter struggled but the man was bigger and stronger.

“Hey-”

“Move!” The man twisted Peter’s arm behind his back and a gun barrel was jammed into his spine. “Now!”

“Her too,” said the leader. None of the newcomers had paid the least attention to any of the Rusties. Julia hardly had time to take a breath before she had been caught up the same way and was being frogmarched back to the ship. The lights had dimmed and now she could see it wasn’t
Sharman
– it was larger, sleeker.

“Stop!” Arm Wild bellowed. Their abductors paused and looked back. “This is outrageous! How dare you? I shall register my strongest objection with your superiors. Put your guns down at once!”

“I’m sorry, Mr First Breed, but I have my orders,” the leader said. He was Indian: the badge on his breast in Standard and Hindi said his name was Rajan. “We have no quarrel with you.”

“These two are under my protection. Release them.”

“I regret, sir, I cannot.” Several of the Rusties were poised on their toes and for a moment, a wildly hopeful moment, Julia thought the Rusties were going to charge. They outnumbered the soldiers and surely the men wouldn’t be so stupid as to open fire on their hosts?

Rajan thought an attack was imminent too. “This is a human matter, sirs,” he said more loudly. “Please do not provoke my men.”

Arm Wild said something and the crowd of Rusties relaxed. So much for the great warrior race, Julia thought bitterly.

“We will not,” said Arm Wild. “Nevertheless, I demand to know who you are.”

“Major Rajan, Confederation Defence Force.”

“Your superiors will regret this incident, Major Rajan. They may be disqualified from the Convocation altogether.”

“I’m just obeying their orders, sir. I meant it when I said we have no quarrel- get your hand away from that!”

Julia’s hand had been inching towards her aide. Now she was looking directly down the barrel of a gun for the first time ever and she decided heroism wasn’t worth it. “They’ll hear about this back at the Dome, you know,” she said, and she was proud that her voice didn’t break.

Rajan grinned as though she had just promised him a good time. “They have troubles of their own. Now, for the last time, move.”

*

The coup was over quickly. At 19:00 coastal time, around sunset, landing boats from
Shivaji
and the North Chinese ship
Long March
came in from over the ocean and fell on Capital. The one landing boat of marines from the
Enterprise
, sitting patiently on the ground at the spaceport, suddenly found itself outnumbered and outgunned as three times its military force fell out of the sky around it. The rest of the attack fell on the Dome, the boats ploughing into the gardens and disgorging their contents while the delegates scurried around in a panic.

The marines at the Dome put up more of a defence as the attackers tried to gain entry; and the refrain, repeated over and over again, shouted by the troops on both sides and crackling over their comm units, was: “Don’t shoot the Rusties!”

*

Samad and Hannah threw themselves to the ground as a stray cluster of plasma blasts sliced through their cubicle. A haze of smoke filled the room and there was a smell of burning. They tried to make themselves even flatter on the floor as more blasts passed through the thin partitions.

“This place wasn’t designed as a fortress, was it?” Hannah muttered to herself as she picked singed bits of partition out of her hair and dusted them off Samad’s back

The fighting went on and all they could do was lie there and hope no blasts came through the floor too.

“Has anyone told the ships?” Hannah wondered out loud.

Samad looked at her as if she were mad. “The ships, love? They’ve got the best of it.”

“Dear, if they’re fighting down here you can bet the ships are involved too.” The battle seemed to have moved away from their own area of the Dome, though sporadic bursts of gunfire kept popping up here and there. A sharp smell of plasma propellant hung in the air and her ears still rang.

She climbed cautiously to her knees and groped for their aides on the table. Hers was intact, Samad’s shattered. He yelped when he saw it.