A World of Difference

IX

“They’re turning!” It was anything but the best news in the world, Reatur thought as he heard the messenger’s shout. That he had been expecting it did not make it any easier to take.

His males heard it, too. Some peered over the barricade of ice and snow on which they had been working frantically for the last few days. The Skarmer were not yet in sight. Reatur was glad the weather was staying right around the place where ice melted, so he and the males could work with both snow and water to create a sturdy barrier against the invaders. Had it been too hot to keep snow on the ground, they would have had to try to build the rampart of earth, which would have taken impossibly long.

The domain master poked an eyestalk over the barrier him self, turned another on Emmett beside him. “Soon we will see them,” Reatur said. “And then-”

The human jerked the places where his arms met his body in his kind’s gesture of uncertainty. “And then we do what we do,” he said. He had less of the Omalo tongue than the other humans.

“You will use your noiseweapon, too?” Reatur asked worriedly. It did not look like much; Emmett’s big hand almost swallowed it. But the human had demonstrated it once, with lots of Reatur’s warriors to see and hear. The roar, the flash had been much like the ones that worked such ruin on them at the edge of Ervis Gorge. “The males will be braver, knowing we can match the Skarmer.”

“Not match,” Emmett said sharply but quietly so the warriors close by would not hear. “Skarmer weapon shoot more, shoot farther.”

“Yes, I know that. You explained it before.” Reatur spoke as softly as the human. “But my males do not, so they will be braver. And the Skarmer do not, so they may take fright when you thunder at them.”

“Good plan,” Emmett agreed. That pleased Reatur; no matter how weird humans were, this one seemed to know a good deal about fighting. Now he was talking into the box that carried voices. Reatur wished he understood what Emmett was saying; he had only learned a few words of human speech. Now he had to ask, “Is all well, back beyond the castle?” “All well,” Emmett said. “They wait.”

“So do we,” Reatur said. Most times, he would sooner have acted than paused here to let the Skarmer descend on him. But if he attacked them in the open, he would be like a fat massi coming up to a male, too stupid to know it was about to be speared. The noiseweapon made that certain. Thus he waited, on ground of his own choosing.

His warriors’ babble changed tone. The eyestalk that was looking northwest over the barrier told him why. The males emerging from in back of some gentle high ground could only be the enemy.

Some of them stopped short when they saw the obstacle the Omalo had thrown up in their path. The Skarmer could not go around it: it stretched from one patch of woods to another. If they wanted to fight Reatur’s warriors, they would have to come straight at them.

More and more Skarmer came out. They began to deploy, forming into fighting clusters. The Omalo yelled abuse at them, though they did not understand the local tongue and were still too far away to hear much anyhow.

“Fralk has a funny way of arranging his warriors,” Reatur said, poking up another couple of eyestalks so he could take in the whole picture at once. “Why that gap in the center? More of his males should be there, to meet us where we are strongest. But there are only an eighteen or so.”

With one of the eyes that wasn’t looking out at the Skarmer army, the domain master saw Emmett looking over the rampart, too. The human had a gadget over his own eyes-not the noiseweapon, but something else. “Help me see farther,” Emmett explained, lowering the device. “I see human there in center.” Always deep and, to Reatur, fierce sounding, his voice was frighteningly grim now.

“A human.” After a moment’s thought, the domain master realized what that meant. “Oh. That is where the noiseweapon will be.”

“Yes.”

“And he doesn’t have his own males there so he won’t hit them with the stones or whatever it is that the noiseweapon spits.”

“Yes,” Emmett said again. He made his mouth twist into the shape humans used to show amusement. Now he had his weapon again. “We give Fralk new thing to think about, yes?”

“Yes.” The word felt good to Reatur. Fralk had been pulling him around by the eyestalks ever since the Skarmer forced their way out of Ervis Gorge. He had been reacting to what his enemy did. Let Fralk react for a change. “Go ahead, Emmett.”

The human aimed the noiseweapon over the rampart, made it roar. Having it go off next to Reatur was like taking up residence in the middle of a thunderstorm. The domain master did not care. “See how you like it coming your way, Fralk!” he yelled.

A flash, a boom-Fralk froze in horror. Turning four eyestalks toward Oleg, he screamed, “lbu told me they didn’t have rifles!” He was too shaken to bother with the human language.

Oleg followed the Skarmer speech. “Not a rifle,” he answered in the same language. He also followed Fralk, literally: a guard jerked him along by a cord tied around him between his arms and head.

“What do you mean, not a rifle?” Fralk shouted, still frantic. Flash, boom-another shot punctuated his words. With the couple of eyes that weren’t on the human, he saw his males begin to waver. They hadn’t expected the Omalo to have a weapon to match theirs.

“Not a rifle,” Oleg repeated. “That is pistor’-a human word Fralk hadn’t heard before, but one Oleg went on to explain-“like rifle, but not as good. Not shoot so far, not shoot so fast. Not hurt us where we are here.”

“Oh.” That made Fralk feel a little better, but not much. Flash, boom-his warriors were definitely having second thoughts now. They didn’t know the pistol was too far away for its bullets to reach them. Fralk thought furiously. “Can I kill whoever has the pistol from here?” he asked.

“Maybe,” Oleg said.

That was all Fralk needed to hear. He pointed his rifle in the direction from which the Omalo had shot, set the change lever to full automatic, and fired a long, satisfying burst. Ice splashed from the Omalo barrier.

“Do you think I got him?” he asked.

“Maybe,” Oleg said again, this time in his own language.

“As for what I think, nichevo. Soon enough you will know. If he does not shoot back, you got him. If he does, you did not.”

Flash, boom-Fralk cursed.

Emmet Bragg was having fun, only slightly hampered by the fact that, as Irv had reminded him a. couple of days before, he couldn’t afford to do anything stupid. Had only his own neck been on the line, he would have worried a lot less. But four other people were depending on him to get them back to Earth. With Frank dead, he didn’t even have a well trained backup.

So he threw himself flat on his belly the second the Kalashnikov started barking and stayed there till well after the burst was done. The wisdom might have been forced on him, but it was wisdom nonetheless: a couple of rounds punched through the barrier to wound Minervans behind it. One might have got him, and he not hit the deck when he did-the snow and ice it kicked out froze the back of his neck.

More males fell from bullets that had clipped them above the level of the rampart. Still, Bragg thought, most of the rounds from the burst had gone high. That was bad shooting, worse than he had expected from the Russian. Maybe it was because Lopatin was KGB and hadn’t got proper training.

“Isn’t that too bad for him?” Bragg muttered. He was just glad Sergei Tolmasov was on the far side of Jotun Canyon. Tolmasov, he was grimly certain, would not have used the AKT4 like an amateur.

Staying low, Bragg scrambled twenty yard to his right, jumped up for a quick shot over the barrier, then dove onto his stomach again. A short burst chewed up the ice and snow almost at once, followed a few seconds later by a long one.

“Changed clips again, did you? Good,” Bragg said, as if he were playing poker, not soldier, against the man with the rifle. “Now how many do you have left?” That was a question, all right. Lopatin, he thought, was shooting as though he had brought along a truckload.

This time, Bragg crawled a couple of hundred feet to his left, almost to the trees anchoring that end of the line. He popped up for three shots at Fralk’s right wing. They might even have done some damage; the Minervans there weren’t much more than a hundred yards away now, and they made a big target. Bragg didn’t stay up long enough to look, which was just as well-the answering fusillade came hard on the heels of his last shot.

Reloading while on his belly was not a skill he had practiced much since basic training days, but he managed. Still down there, he pulled out his radio and called his wife. “You all ready there?”

“Ready as we’ll ever be.” Louise’s voice emerged tinnily.

“Is that that damn gun I hear, Emmett? Watch yourself, now.”

He chuckled. “I intend to, hon. Love you. Next time I call, I’ll really need you. Out.”

He started making his way back toward the center of the line and quickly forgot about Louise. He did love her, as he had said, but he loved what he was doing more. He had loved Carleen, too, come to that, but he had figured out early on he was never going to make it to Minerva married to a historian of ancient Rome.

Crazy, the stuff that goes through your mind, he thought. Carleen hadn’t, certainly not since Athena touched down. He dismissed the memory of her once more as he got back to Reatur.

The domain master said, “Well done. They’re still coming, but with arms and eyestalks pulled in partway. They don’t like being on the wrong side of your human noiseweapons any more than my warriors do.”

Bragg jabbed a thumb at himself. “Not like, either,” he said. Reatur’s eyestalks wiggled. Bragg went on, “Now try to kill their human male with noiseweapon. Then we win-Skarmer lose courage when that male fall.”

“A human does not have their noiseweapon,” Reatur said. “It is the eldest of eldest of the Skarmer domain master, the male called Fralk.”

“Is it?” Bragg wondered what the hell Lopatin was playing at. Whatever it was, it explained the bad shooting from the other side. The mission commander shrugged. Maybe it made his job easier. “Try to kill Fralk, then.”

“I want to tell you no,” Reatur said. Bragg looked at him in surprise. The domain master explained, “I want to kill him myself. But you are right, Emmett. Slay him now, if you can.” Reatur was a soldier like none America had known since the War Between the States, Bragg thought-he took his fighting personally. The pilot readied himself. He wished he had been a cop: some work with the popup targets the police used would have come in handy now.

He bounced up and shot with a two hand grip, one round after another, aiming at the Kalashnikov. His attention focused so completely on the rifle that he had fired several times before he even noticed Oleg Lopatin a few paces away, and twice after that before he saw the rope around the Russian’s neck. So things weren’t all going Lopatin’s way, he thought. Well, tough luck, Oleg Borisovich-serves you right.

The hammer clicked. The pistol was empty again. Bragg hit the dirt to reload. A moment after he did, the Kalashnikov started chewing away at the barrier in front of him. “Shit,” he said. He was just glad Fralk couldn’t shoot for beans.

Reatur’s guess was a good one: Fralk did not care at all for being shot at. A bullet kicked up snow and dirt at his feet. Another two zipped past him, closer than he ever wanted to think about. And two more struck a male close by Fralk. He did not even scream before he fell.

“Get back out of range, you idiot, before you get killed and get me killed with you!” Oleg yelled.

Fralk needed a moment to understand the human, another to figure out that he made good sense. “Back!” Fralk called. Several males in his small band had not waited for the order. He would deal with them later. “How far can that cursed pistol shoot?” he asked Oleg when they had retreated a good way.

“This should be far enough,” the human said, adding, “unless the man with the pistol there gets very lucky.”

Fralk thought about retreating some more, but enough males around him understood human speech to make that look like cowardice. He fired several rounds in the direction from which the shots had come but doubted they would do much good. The human on the other side of that frozen wall seemed to have a knack for surviving.

“What I will do,” Fralk decided, “is stay here and use the rifle to help our warriors on the flanks. I can reach the whole field from this place, and the pistol cannot. That still leaves us with the advantage.”

“Khorosho, Fralk, ochen khorosho,” Oleg said. “You are beginning to understand how to use your firepower. If you have more range than your enemy, you set up where you can hurt him and he cannot hurt you.”

That made sense to Fralk, but he still felt peculiar standing off in the distance while his males and the Omalo first flung spears at each other and then began using those spears-and every other weapon on which they could lay their hands-at close quarters as the Skarmer tried to force their foes back from the barricade.

Several Omalo warriors stood very tall to thrust at Fralk’s warriors. He fired a short burst. One of the enemy males tumbled away from the barrier, the upper part of his body a chewed, bloody ruin. The other Omalo warriors flinched away. A couple of Skarmer started to climb over the frozen wall.

Fralk shifted his aim from one end of the line to the other, squeezed the trigger again. He was not sure he hit anyone this time, but the Omalo flinched anyhow. Skarmer males started trying to get over the barrier there, too.

“If they can make it to the far side in any numbers, we have them,” Fralk declared.

“Da,” Lopatin agreed. After the fighting was done, Fralk knew he would have to figure out what to do with the human, but now he valued his thoughts. Fralk felt pleased at regaining his equanimity: this was the first time since that other human had shot at him that he found himself able to plan for what would happen after the fighting was done.

Reatur flung a spear at one of the Skarmer scrambling over the rampart. It missed his target, but might have hit a warrior further on-the enemy was tightly packed at that part of the barrier. The domain master shouted and waved his arms when one of his males killed the Skarmer with an ax.

But for every Skarmer who died, another-often more than one-did his best to climb over. “If they make it to this side in any numbers, we’re done for,” Reatur said.

“I know.” Emmett dodged a spear. His long legs made him extraordinarily nimble, Reatur thought.

Off in the distance, too far away for Emmett to strike back, Fralk’s noiseweapon began its deadly chatter once more. One Omalo male shrieked, then another, then another.

“They fight good,” Emmett said. “Sometimes-often- human warriors run away from noiseweapons, first time see, hear them. Your males brave, Reatur.”

The praise pleased the domain master. “Where would they run?” he asked. “If they lose here, they lose everything. They know it. But”-he let his deepest fear come out-“I doubt even they can hold against terror forever.”

“You right, I think.” Emmett took out his talkingbox, spoke urgently into it in his own language. He put it away, dipped his head to Reatur. “We do what we can.”

Irv stuffed the radio back into his pocket. “You heard the man,” he said. Louise Bragg nodded. So did Sarah. She had been limbering up every few minutes, ever since the battle started a few miles northwest. Now she started stretching in earnest.

“Let’s give it one last check,” Louise said to Irv.

“Good plan.” They walked over to Damselfly together and went over it strut by strut, wire by wire, joining by joining. They checked the thin plastic skin of wings, tail, and cabin to make sure it hadn’t developed any holes that could rip wide open in the air. They didn’t find anything. Irv started checking again.

“Are we good?” Sarah demanded. She was peeling off parka and long pants, hopping up and down to stay warm in the Minervan summer sun. “If we are, we don’t have time to waste.”

“We’re good,” Irv said reluctantly. He gave his wife a fierce hug. “Be careful. I love you.” Ending up in bed-or rather, on the floor-with Pat hadn’t done anything to change that. It just made him feel like a hypocritical bastard when he said that to Sarah.

“Love you, too,” she answered now. He wondered what she would say if she ever found out. He was full of scientific curiosity, but that was one thing he did not want to know.

He set the wide stepladder by Damselfly, helped Sarah climb in, then lowered the canopy. The sound of the hooks-and-eyes snapping it closed, shutting Sarah away from him, seemed dreadfully final. Shaking his head, he got down from the stepladder and carried it out of the way. Then he went over and took hold of a wingtip.

Louise had the other one. She also had her radio out. Irv took his out, too. “Testing,” he heard Louise say. “One, two, three, four…, how do you read Damselfly?”

“Read you five by five,” Sarah answered. Irv heard her both in the speaker and directly. “How do you read me?”

“Loud and clear. Break a leg, kiddo,” Louise said.

“Don’t tempt me,” Sarah started to pedal. “Let’s get the batteries good and charged.” A few minutes later, she said, “Okay-here we go.” She let the prop spin. Damselfly rolled forward. Irv and Louise ran with it, keeping the wing level.

“Airborne!” Irv shouted. Sarah took one hand off the control stick to wave, then gave all her concentration back to flying. Irv watched Damselfly slowly climb. “There goes the funniest looking warplane in the history of-two worlds,” he said.

“No arguments.” Louise was on the radio again, on a different frequency. “Emmett, are you there?” she called worriedly. “Come in.”

“I’m here,” he answered. “Busy, but still here.”

“Damselfly’s on its way now,” she told him.

“Not a minute too soon. Out.”

“Out.” Louise turned to Irv. “Now we can only wait.”

“The fun part,” he agreed. “I’d rather be doing something, doing anything, than just standing around here.”

“Me, too,” Louise said. “I hate it when something that’s important to me is out of my hands.”

“Sarah said the same thing when Emmett was landing Athena. It’s all in her hands now, though.” Irv made sure his radio was on Damselfly’s frequency. “How you doing there, honey? How does the plane handle with the changes we made in it?”

“Doing all right,” Sarah answered. “The extra weight isn’t bad, about what I’d have if I were pedaling in my parka. And I’m not getting enough extra drag even to notice-gaining altitude shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Good,” Irv said. “Out.” He wanted Sarah as high as possible above the slings and arrows, to say nothing of axes and spears-of outrageous fortune. To Louise, he said, “Now what? Head over toward Athena?”

She was gathering up Sarah’s discarded outer layers of clothing. “I think we’d better,” she said. “We’ve never all been away at once before, and we sure as hell don’t want to have to try to talk or fight our way through to the ship if-if Reatur loses.”

“No,” Irv said, although the odds of Emmett’s getting free if Reatur lost were slim, and without Emmett, getting back to the ship didn’t matter in the long run anyhow. Louise, of course, could figure that out for herself as well as he could and doubtless had.

They had only gone a couple of hundred yards when their radios crackled to life again. Ice that had nothing to do with the weather formed in Irv’s midsection as he lifted his set to his ear-only bad news would make Emmett call back so soon.

But Pat was on the radio, not Emmett. She was in Reatur’s castle, checking on Lamra. “Has Sarah taken off yet?” she asked.

“A few minutes ago,” Irv said. “Why?” He had a bad feeling he knew the answer before he asked the question.

He did. Pat said, “Because Lamra’s getting ready to drop those budlings now, and I don’t think she’s going to wait around.”

“Shit,” Irv said softly. He could still see Damselfly off in the distance. Sarah was banking into a long, slow, gentle turn, the only kind the ultra-ultralight could make. He could still call her back-and most likely throw away the battle and Emmett with it… and Lamra and her budlings, too, come to that, if Reatur’s males were beaten.

“What do we do?” Louise asked.

He kicked at frozen dirt, made his choice. “How are you at coping with gore?”

“I won’t lose my lunch, if that’s what you mean,” Louise answered at once. “You want me to help you try to save the Minervan?”

“That’s just what I want. Hang on to Sarah’s clothes. She’s got clamps and bandages in one of those pockets. Pat and I will coach you through as best we can. You’ve got to be quick and accurate twice. Each of us does, and if we are, we have a chance.” Irv wished he were as confident as he sounded. It hadn’t happened yet, not even once.

“I’m not the person you need,” Louise said.

“You’re the person I’ve got. Come on.” They ran for thecastle.

The world wheeled under Sarah as she began another slow, careful clockwise turn. The cold breeze coming in through the freshair tube helped take away the stink of the gunk sprayed all over the bottom of the cabin.

A great circle, she thought-surely this was the long way around to deliver a surprise to the Skarmer. It had a couple of advantages, though. For one thing, it gave her plenty of time in which to make Damselfly climb. She knew she had sugarcoated what she had told Irv. Even in dense Minervan air, the ultra-ultralight climbed like a fat man going up a tall ladder. It wasn’t any worse now than it had been before they fiddled with it, though, so she hadn’t really lied.

The route she was flying would also let her come up from behind the Skarmer, as far as the idea of behind meant anything when dealing with Minervans. This once, Emmett had argued- persuasively, worse luck, it just might. Males in a battle ought to have sense enough to keep all their eyestalks pointed in the direction from which danger came-toward Reatur’s warriors, in other words. They shouldn’t spot her till too late.

Ought to, shouldn’t, ought to, shouldn’t… “If you’re wrong, Emmett, I’ll never speak to you again.” Sarah panted.

That, she feared, was no joke. Her stomach did flipflops when she thought about what a burst of Kalashnikov fire would do to Damselfly-and to her.

Fighter pilots, she realized suddenly, earned every penny they got, and then some.

“Never seen this place so deserted,” Irv said, puffing. His footsteps and Louise’s echoed down the hallways of Reatur’s castle. On any other day, the noise of dozens of males would have drowned them out. Now he had only seen a couple, one barely full-grown and the other ancient.

“At the battle.” Louise, also getting her breath back, was short with words.

The usual racket pierced the doors of the mates’ chambers: mates were sheltered from worries about their fate. Or rather, Irv thought, they never got the chance to grow enough to understand what worrying about their fate meant. Maybe that would start to change today. Maybe.

The guard outside the doors widened himself as the humans came up. He was in his prime, standing by a post Reatur reckoned important enough to keep him out of the fighting. “What word?” he asked anxiously.

“I do not know,” Irv answered. “The battle still goes on.

Let us pass now, please.”

The male unbarred the doors, shut them again behind Irv and Louise. Mates rushed from everywhere at the boom of the falling bar, then drew back, disappointed, when they saw only humans, not Reatur.

“Pat?” Louise called.

“In here.” Irv shook his head when he noticed from which chamber the answer came. It was the one in which Biyal had died. He did not think of himself as superstitious, but he wished Lamra were somewhere else.

Lamra lifted an eyestalk when he and Louise came in. “Hello,” the mate said. “Pat told me I should not say goodbye, not yet.”

“No, not yet,” Irv said soberly. Soon, though, maybe, he thought and scowled at himself. He could hear the unease in his voice when he asked Pat, “How’s she doing?” “See for yourself. The skin is splitting.”

“So it is.” Irv stooped and switched to the Omalo language. “Lift the arm by me, please, Lamra.” Lamra did. The mate kept her fist closed, but Irv saw the graybrown of Minervan wood between her fingerclaws: the precious toy runnerpest, he supposed.

He smiled at that a little and waved Louise down beside him. “See?” he said, pointing at the growing vertical slit over the bud. Louise nodded. “In a few minutes, as the opening gets longer and wider, you’ll be able to see the whole budling, and how it’s hooked on to Lamra by its mouth. When it falls away- when it’s born, I mean-it’ll drop off. That’ll be that, unless we can clamp the vessel it was feeding from, and the ones for the other five, too. With two for each of us, we may have a chance.”

“We can’t afford any fumbling, though.” Pat sounded as if she was talking as much to herself as to Louise. “We’ve got to be right the first time.”

Louise got clamps, bandage packs, and rolls of tape out of Sarah’s parka. “I’ll do the best I can,” she said. She didn’t seem nervous; she sounded intrigued, like an engineer sizing up a new and challenging problem. Only fair, Irv thought-she was one.

“Let’s take our places,” he said. The budling’s wiggling feet were already pushing through the opening in Lamra’s skin. So, through the other slits, were those of its brothers and sisters. Irv slid over to Louise’s right; Pat was on her left.

“What about the six vessels around each central one?” Louise asked. “Shouldn’t we clamp those, too?”

“The bandages should take care of them,” Pat said. “They’re all small, compared to the one in the middle. That’s the one- the two, rather-you’ve got to worry about. When the budlings drop, they’ll go like a fire hydrant hit by a car.”

Irv grimaced. That was a more graphic simile than he wanted to think about. He switched to the Omalo tongue again. “How do you feel, Lamra?” The mate, after all, was no experimental animal, but a person, too, and a young person, at that. She had to be wondering, worrying about, what would happen next.

“It doesn’t hurt now,” Lamra said after a moment’s pause, perhaps for taking stock. “Will it hurt later, when you stop me from ending?”

“I don’t think so,” Irv said, as reassuringly as he could. Actually, he had no idea. He hoped he-and Lamra-would find out. He also hoped the mate was as confident as she sounded. When you stop me from ending… He knew that when was an if. If Lamra didn’t, more power to her, for as much time as she had.

They would soon know how long that would be. The arms and eyestalks of the budling in front of Irv were twitching now along with its legs; its mouth was tightly clamped round the big blood vessel that fed it.

“Any minute-“ Pat breathed. If she was going to add “now,” she never got the chance. Lamra’s budlings all let go at once. Blood gushed forth in a torrent that astonished Irv anew every time he saw it.

The clamps were on the ground between his feet. He seized the spurting vessel in front of him with one hand, snatched up a clamp, stuck it on. That flood slowed to a drip. He shifted leftward, grabbing for the second bleeder and the other clamp.

At almost the same instant, Pat shifted to her right. Just as he had, she had started on the blood vessel further away from Louise so she could deal with both of hers and be in position to help.

Irv fumbled with the second clamp, got it on at last. He looked toward Louise. “How you doing?” he asked. “Need a hand?” From the engineer’s other side, Pat was using nearly the same words to ask the same thing.

“I’m done, I think,” Louise answered. Like her colleagues- like the chamber-she was spattered and dripping with gore. She wiped the back of a hand across her face, which only made matters worse. With an engineer’s caution, she went on, “Check me, will you?”

Irv looked at one of the vessels she had repaired, Pat at the other. Irv gave a thumbsup a moment later; the clamp was on perhaps more securely than either of the ones he had done.

“This one’s fine, Louise,” Pat said. “Well done. I’m officially impressed.”

“You told me what to do, and I did it.” Louise seemed surprised anyone would make much of simple competence. “Shall we get the bandage packs on now?”

“Yeah, we’d better.” Irv started to walk over to pick up bandages and tape, but almost tripped on one of the newIy hatched budlings. All six of them were scrambling around like so many little wild animals-which, Irv supposed, in essence they were. Their squawks were calliope whistle shrill. “When we’re done, we’ll have to catch these critters,” he said.

He was taping the first gauze-soaked sweat sock into place when he suddenly realized Lamra had neither said anything nor moved in some time. He could not afford to think about that, not until the other bandage was on. Then, with the emergency work done as well as could be, he took a step back-a careful step, so as not to step on a budling-to see how the mate was doing.

“Lamra?” he asked. She did not answer. All the eyes Irv could see were closed, and her eyestalks hung down against her body. So did her arms. They were not as limp, he thought, as those of the eloc mates he had failed to save. But the toy runnerpest had fallen in the blood between her feet.

“Lamra?” he asked again. Still no reply.

“Now what.’?” Louise asked.

Irv shook his head, baffled, fearful, but still hopeful. “Now we wait…”

“Progress at last!” Fralk shouted. At the eastern end of the fight, the Skarmer warriors had finally forced Reatur’s males back from the barrier. But the Omalo, curse their stubborn ways, would not flee. They fought on, holding a line against Fralk’s warriors. Progress it was, but not enough.

And from where he was, Fralk could not help make it more. His males stood between him and the enemy. He could not use the rifle, not without doing the Skarmer more harm than the Omalo.

“We shall advance,” he declared. “From a position nearer the barricade, I will be able to pour a flood of bullets into the foe. They will surely break then, and our gallant males will be able to surround them.”

“We advance!” the males with him shouted. They shook their spears and axes. Most of them, Fralk guessed, had resented being kept out of the fighting. “The pistol-“ Oleg said.

“Shut up, coward! Come on,” his keeper growled, understanding the word the human had used before. He tugged on the rope. Oleg stumbled forward.

“Do not worry about the pistol, Oleg Borisovich,” Fralk said in the human speech. “It has not boomed for a long time now. Surely the human who has it is out of bullets.” He waited for Oleg’s reply. Oleg only made the gesture humans used for a shrug. Fralk shrugged, too. “Toward the fighting!” he cried grandly, playing to the pride of the warriors with him.

“Toward the fighting!” they yelled back, and toward the fighting they went.

“He’s in among that little bunch near the center… There!

He just fired a burst. See the muzzle flashes?”

“I see them, Emmett.” Sarah wondered how Emmett’s voice could come so calmly through the radio. The battlefield ahead looked like 200proof chaos, nothing else but. Down there, she knew she would have been scared shitless-she was scared plenty up here. But Emmett seemed in his element.

He had read the Minervans well, too. So far none of the Skarmer had spotted her, though she was less than half a mile behind their army, flying straight down its line of march. A minute to target, maybe a minute and a half. Time to get ready.

Her left thumb clicked the POWER switch to ON. She would need all the help she could get from the batteries, because her pedaling was going to have to suffer now.

She reached down, peeled up a square of mylar that was only taped in place. Cold wind blew into her face. She pulled a butane lighter from the waistband of her shorts and flicked the little metal lever till it caught. She lowered the flame toward the wick on the gallon bottle that hung just behind her front wheel. The wind blew it out.

She swore, flicked the lever again, and then glanced up to see if the Minervans had spotted her yet. Damn, they had! She would never get to make another pass. The lighter lit. Thanking God for the fire retardant chemicals that were stinking up the cabin, she made the flame Bunsen burner big.

The wick was not soaked with fire retardants-very much the opposite. This time, it caught.

“Move, curse you, you worthless traitor,” snarled the Minervan who had hold of Oleg Lopatin’s leash. Lopatin had no choice but to move. He glared at the warrior. If only I had you back in Lefortovo Prison, he thought longingly, you would learn just what an amateur at torment you are. The KGB man knew how futile such dreams of revenge were. But they helped keep him going, anyhow.

Fralk fired again. His band was less than a hundred meters from the Omalo barricade. Any second now, Lopatin expected the American back of the barrier to prove Fralk wrong and with a little luck fill him full of holes. Lopatin would have saved a few rounds for another good chance at taking out the Kalashnikov, and he was sure anyone smart enough to make it onto Athena’s crew would also be smart enough to do the same.

Maybe, he thought with a sudden savage grin, the American would fill his kennelmaster full of holes. There was a revenge that might be no dream.

One of the other high-ranking Minervans in Fralk’s group let out a startled squeal-he sounded amazingly like a housewife spotting a rat. “A monster in the sky!” he shrieked. “Look! Three arms away from the battlemit’s coming straight at us!”

Eyestalks writhed. Lopatin’s head whipped around. He had never seen Damselfly before, but he knew what it was. The Skarmer did not. That first scream was quickly echoed by many more.

Lopatin’s keeper had two eyes on the human, two on the battle, and two on the new flying horror. That left none to pay attention to the small green-brown bush by his feet. One of those feet brushed it. The keeper jerked, went limp. The rope slipped from his fingerclaws.

“A pestilence!” one of the other males shouted. “Nogdar just stepped on a stunbush! Grab that rope, somebody!”

Too late. Lopatin was free.

A spear, wildly flung, whizzed past Damselfly. Sarah did her best to ignore it; she couldn’t do anything about it, anyway. Fortunately, most of the Minervans seemed too scared of the ultra-ultralight to think of trying to bring it down.

There was her target, dead ahead. She leaned down again, this time with a Swiss army knife in her hand.

Seeing the monster fly hissing toward him, Fralk wanted to void where he stood. He needed an instant to remember he was still holding the rifle. A rifle had chewed the krong to bloodyrags. Anything that could kill a krong ought to be able to take out a skymonster, he thought.

The cursed rifle was on the wrong side of his body to shoot at the thing! Fast as he could, he passed it from arm to arm.

Oleg Lopatin looked at Damselfly, looked at Fralk, and discovered, as so many had before him, one of the great flaws of international socialism: when faced with a choice between their own kind and an ideology, most people chose their own kind.

Lopatin did not pause to reason that out. He just yelled and jumped on Fralk.

The Swiss army knife cut the string that ran through the handle of the gallon jug filled with wood alcohol, naphtha, and butane. Damselfly seemed to leap higher in the air as the weight it had never been designed to carry dropped away.

The Kalashnikov bellowed, right under Sarah. She screamed, expecting to die in the next second. No bullets ripped through her. Damselfly did not tumble in ruins to the ground.

She couldn’t even look back. She didn’t have a rearview mirror. All she could do was pedal and pray.

Then Emmett Bragg’s hoarse voice came yelling out of the radio: “You can play in my league any day, darlin’! One extra large Molotov cocktail, right on target. Smoked ‘em both!” He let go with a rebel yell that was almost too much for the little speaker.

“Both?” Sarah panted. She flew over Reatur’s barricade, onto the side his males held. As her fear-induced adrenaline rush began to fade, she realized how tired she was. “The Minervan and the Russian, too.”

“Oh. Oh, Jesus. Didn’t I see him fighting with the Minervan, trying to keep him from shooting me down?” If she had dumped hellfire on somebody trying to save her… She wanted to be sick.

But Bragg said coldly, “Well, what if you did? Hadn’t been for Lopatin, that Minervan never would have had a rifle in the first place. And if he didn’t, a lot of people-Frank maybe, a lot of Reatur’s males for sure-would still be alive. Besides, nothin’ you can do about it now, anyhow.”

“You’re right,” she conceded, still wishing he had not told her.

“Look, if it makes you feel any better, we can turn the KGB bastard into a hero when we talk to Tsiolkovsky. Best part is, I guess it’s even true.”

“Yeah.” It did make her feel better, less guilty. I’d never make a soldier, she thought. But then, she had never wanted to be a soldier. “Okay. I’m heading back for Athena.”

“Good. We should have somebody minding the store. Now to win this battle-that’s the point of the exercise, after all. Out.”

“Out.” Sarah pedaled on.

Reatur stared in mixed awe and dread at the flames consuming his foe. His watersmiths used fire, of course, to melt ice and pour it into molds for tools. Hot water could bore through walls or, dropped from above, scald attackers. But to turn fire itself into a weapon for war-the domain master shuddered.

He tried to imagine how humans fought among themselves. Imagining a battlefield full of noiseweapons and fire falling out of the sky made him shudder all over again.

Only for a moment, though. He had his own battle to worry about, and enormous opportunity looking fight at him. “Come on!” he shouted to the males around him. “Their whole center depended on the noiseweapon. Now that it’s gone, nothing’s left there. We can split their whole army in half”

He scrambled over the barricade. Yelling, his warriors followed. He heard a long series of roars from a noiseweapon, back where the Skarmer had forced his males to give ground. A pause, another long string of blasts. Emmett could shoot as he would now, without having to fear the enemy’s more powerful weapon. Then came the sweetest sound Reatur had heard on the battlefield: his warriors cheering, going over to the attack.

“That way!” he called. “We’ll cut off the Skarmer retreat.” He hurried east, his males rushing with him in their eagerness to close with the enemy. Suddenly he stopped. He divided the warband with him in two, pointed to the larger group. “You’ll come with me.” To the others, he said, “You go west instead. Maybe we’ll be able to surround each half of their army.” That hope made his males shout louder than ever.

As the domain master ran toward the much-battered rampart, his eyestalks started twitching of their own accord. He had never expected to be fighting from the north side of the barrier! Here he was, though, reaching across with a spear to thrust at the Skarmer on the other side.

The foe was frantic now, caught between the males they had pushed back and the barrier from which they had pushed them. Some started climbing over it, this time in the opposite direction from before. The arrival of Reatur and his warriors put an end to that.

“Surrender!” the domain master shouted in trade talk. “We will not slay any male who throws down his weapons and widens himself before us!” He waited to see if the Skarmer would yield.

They didn’t, not fight away. But after a couple of desperate attacks failed to dislodge Reatur and his warriors, Skarmer males began casting aside axes and spears and widening themselves. When the first few who did so were not harmed, more and more followed their lead.

Reatur began telling off warriors to take charge of prisoners. Clamor to the west made him turn a couple of eyestalks that way. He cursed-the Skarmer there had broken out to the north, through his hastily dispatched containment force. Were they to swing back on his males now…

They did not. Instead, they streamed back the way they had come, all thought of fight forgotten. The western half of the Omalo army pursued. Reatur spotted Enoph close by. “Take charge of the captives. Let our males loot as they will, but they are not to injure the Skarmer unless they try to escape.”

“It will be as you say,” Enoph promised-and what Enoph promised, the domain master knew, he would deliver. “But where are you going, clanfather?” the reliable male asked.

Reatur was already hurrying north. “To join the chase. I want to rid my domain of the Skarmer once and for all.”

The western half of the Skarmer army, though beaten, was still a force large enough to disrupt his lands. And whoever led it now that Fralk was dead knew his business-knew it better, perhaps, than Hogram’s eldest of eldest ever had. The invaders fought a series of stubborn rear guard actions to keep Reatur’s warriors away from their main body.

“Curse them!” the domain master shouted as his males finally broke through the third such delaying warband. “They’ll escape, scatter, and cause us untold grief.”

“Worse yet,” one of his warriors said gloomily, pointing ahead to a defile. “A rearguard there will hold us off till sunset, and they’ll be able to reform on the far side at their leisure.”

“You’re right,” Reatur said, and cursed again. Another battle to fight, then, he thought bleakly. Even winning would cost him the lives of males the domain could not afford to lose.

But instead of racing through the defile, the Skarmer piled up at its southern end. They milled about in confusion. A male, all his arms outstretched to show he carried no weapons, advanced from their ranks toward Reatur and his oncoming warriors. “Will you spare us if we yield?” he shouted in trade talk.

The domain master was flabbergasted but did his best not to show it. “Aye, we will,” he answered. “You have my vow on it.”

“Good enough,” the Skarmer said. He spoke to his males in their own language. They began throwing down their spears and knives and axes. The Skarmer widened himself to Reatur. “We would’ve gotten away if you hadn’t somehow posted warriors in there to block our path. That was well done-I never saw them leave the battle, and I don’t miss much. Juksal, I’m called.” Juksal suddenly seemed to think of something. “Did you use tricks from the funny creatures to get them here?” “The funny creatures?” Reatur asked.

“Trade talk doesn’t have a word for them. You know-the ones with two arms and two legs.”

“Oh. Our name for them is ‘humans.’ No, no human tricks,” Reatur said, wondering just where the warriors-his warriors had sprung from. Only one thing occurred to him. He walked toward the defile. Some of his males came with him, in case the Skarmer decided to unsurrender. “Ternat?” he called.

“Yes,” came the reply, and the warriors with the domain master started to cheer. “How do we stand, clanfather?”

“Well. Very well now, eldest, very well. The other half of the Skarmer army has already yielded to us.” That brought answering cheers from Ternat and his warband. Reatur went on, “How fare you, eldest?”

“Also well. I have many, many massi with me, and Dordal as a captive, too.”

“Do you?” Reatur said when the clamor among his males subsided enough to let him be heard. “Do you? Then, eldest, it is very well indeed.” He thought about that, decided it was too small a thing to say. “Eldest, it is as well as I could have hoped.”

As soon as Damselfly touched down by Athena, Sarah knew she had made a mistake. If she didn’t want to damage the ultra-ultralight, she would need help getting out, and it looked as though Irv, Louise, and the stepladder were still over on the other side of Reatur’s castle.

She reached for the radio switch, then dropped her hand. All she wanted to do was sit and shake for a minute. Flying across Jotun Canyon had been tougher physically but had not left her drained and limp the way this bombing run had: terror was harder to take than exhaustion.

Cold started seeping into her bones as she rested. If she did too much of that, she knew, she would stiffen up and be sore for days. Her hand moved toward the radio again.

Something hissed through the couple of inches of snow outside. Sarah turned to see what it was; she had never heard any Minervan creature make a noise like that. It wasn’t any Minervan creature, as it turned out: it was Emmett Bragg, speeding up on his bicycle.

He slid to a smooth stop, waved. “Need a hand getting out of that contraption, don’t you?”

“Yes, but doesn’t Reatur still need you back at the fight?” “Nope.” He got off the bike. “For one thing, I’m out of ammo, so I’m less use to him now than one of his own warriors who really knows what to do with a spear. For another, he was moppin’ up when I left. With you takin’ out the Kalashnikov, the Skarmer didn’t have anything in the middle, and Reatur broke ‘em in two and defeated ‘am in detail.”

“All right.” As usual, Sarah thought, Emmett had a good mason for everything he did. She laughed a little-he wasn’t eight feet tall, though. “What are you going to get me out with? The stepladder’s a couple of miles from here.”

“I’ll manage.” He climbed up the chain ladder to the airlock and disappeared into Athena. When he emerged a minute later, he was carrying a large, square plastic-mesh box. He set it down by Damselfly and then climbed on top. “This ought to do the job.”

“I think you’re right.” Sarah unlatched the ultra-ultralight’s canopy and swung it open. She stood up on the pedals and reached out for Emmett. He more than half lifted her out of Damselfly’s cabin. The box made a crunching noise under the weight of the two of them. They jumped off it. Sarah stumbled.

Emmett steadied her with an arm around her shoulder.

“Let’s get you inside,” he said. “Wearing that skimpy getup, you’re gonna be a lump of ice in a couple of minutes.” They walked over to Athena. He didn’t take his arm away. She started to shrug him off, changed her mind. He was warm.

She sighed in relief when he shut the inner airlock door after them. “Till I got to Minerva, I never knew how wonderful the words ‘room temperature’ could be,” she said.

“You know it.” Emmett grinned a lopsided grin. “Of course, they take on a whole other meaning when the walls of the room are made of ice.” He turned serious again. “You did a hell of a job there, Sarah, a hell of a job.”

“Thanks,” she said, most soberly. “I don’t quite know how I did it, but I guess I did. Right now I’m just so glad to be back here in one piece that I can hardly think about anything else.”

“Glad to be alive. I know what you mean-do I ever.” The grin got wider. Suddenly Emmett let another yell rip free. “Hot damn, gift, we did it!” he shouted.

He hugged her, tight enough to make the breath hiss from her lungs. Her arms went around his back. The solid feel of him against her was a welcome affirmation that she was alive. He tilted her face up and kissed her.

She was kissing him back before she wondered whether she ought to be. “Mmm,” he said, back deep in his throat, without letting up on the kiss. Then his mouth slid to her neck; his teeth gently worried the lobe of her ear.

She closed her eyes and let her head 1oll back. “Nice,” she purred. Perhaps because of her brush with death, every sensation, the touch of his tongue against the soft skin under the angle of her jaw, his warm breath on her cheek, seemed deliciously magnified.

His hands were on her hips, planted there as if without the slightest doubt they belonged. “Come on,” he urged, nodding back toward the cubicles.

She did not hesitate. She had known for months that he wanted her and occasionally wondered how she would react if he ever did anything about it. Then the question had been academic, and easy to answer with a no. Now… “Why not?” she said, feeling almost drunk on excitement.

His hand guided her into Pat’s cubicle. It was the one farthest forward, but afterward she wondered if he had chosen it because it held nothing that belonged to Irv or Louise and could set off guilt.

That was afterward. During, she only wanted him to go on. She stood while he quickly undressed her, then did the same for him. They embraced again. He steered her to the foam mattress and lowered himself onto her.

Low comedy briefly ousted desire. “Wait!’ She wriggled frantically. “Get up for a second!”

“What the-“ Frowning, Emmett took some weight on his elbows.

That sufficed. Sarah reached under herself and threw aside whatever it was she had been lying on. Her arms went around his neck and pulled him back to her. “Now!” she said.

Had she not already known he was a test pilot, she might have guessed it by the way he took her. He flew her as if she were some new plane, she thought before all thought vanished, trying this, trying that, seeing how she responded, what the limits of her performance were. Gasping, she doubted she had any limits.

He laughed when, at the end, she tried to sink her teeth into his shoulder. “Easy there. Shouldn’t leave marks,” he said, mind still in full control even as his body quivered and drove deep into hers.

That brought her back to herself faster than she wanted to return and brought her also to the beginning of anger. She suddenly suspected-no, she knew-the flying itself was more important to him than the plane he flew. Being just another test vehicle on which he could prove his expertise grated.

He sprang up from the mattress and bounded down the passage. “What the hell?” she squawked, startled out of annoyance.

“Radio buzzer.” His words floated back to her. “I wonder how long it was on while we were busy here.” Then she heard the insistent signal, too, and started to giggle. He had paid some attention to her after all. She heard him pick up the mike. Then he called loudly, “Sarah, you’d better come. It’s about Lamra.”

She raced to the control room. Only when Emmett handed her the microphone did she realize that they were both still naked. She didn’t care. “What about Lamra?” she demanded.

“Hon?”

It was Irv. It would be Irv, she thought. Now she cared who she was standing with, and how. She felt herself go hot, then cold. But what Irv was calling about mattered more than anything, at least for the moment. “What about Lamra?”

Lamra looked at herself. How funny I look, was the first thought that went through her mind, well ahead of I’m alive and the surprise that accompanied it. Her budbulges, which had been so firm and full, were split open like ebster fruit and sagged clown almost onto her feet. Great strips of the sticky hide the humans used to hold things together clung to her skin. She supposed they were helping to hold her together.

She really was the most ridiculous creature imaginable. Four eyestalks quivered. The motion was less than she had though it would be. For some reason, they didn’t want to do what she told them to. But she was laughing.

“Lamra?” Three voices all at once, two sounding like people but oddly accented, the third deep and strange: humans.

She tried to talk. Her mouth didn’t seem to want to work, either. She tried again. “Where’s my runnerpest?” she demanded at last. The humans abruptly stopped paying attention to her. They yelled and screamed and, she saw when she managed to raise her eyestalks a little, jumped up and down.

“Where’s my runnerpest?” she repeated, louder this time.

One of the humans finally handed her the toy. It was bloody.

She squeezed it anyhow.

“How are you? How do you feel.?” the humans all asked over and over again once they got coherent enough to talk sensibly.

“Tired,” she answered. More thought produced, “Sore. Messy.” She was thinking just clearly enough to know she wasn’t thinking very clearly. “Hungry, too.”

“Sore where?” Pat sounded anxious. “Hurt bad?”

“I’m sore where-I guess where-you put those clamps”-she used the human word she had learned-“on me. No, Pat, I don’t hurt bad. When you put them on, I hardly felt it at all. I hardly felt anything at all. It was funny.” When she laughed this time, her eyestalks wiggled the way they should. “It was like being asleep and awake at the same time. Do you know what I mean?”

“No.” Pat made the up-and-down gesture humans used for a shrug. “Glad you are not hurt, though.”

Louise held up a couple of squirming, squalling… At first Lamra thought they were big runnerpests, but then she remembered seeing their like before sometimes, when Reatur would walk out after a mate had dropped. “Oh. The budlings,” she said.

“Yes. You want to see?”

“I suppose so.” Everything was interesting to Lamra, at least for a little while. But the budlings got boring fast. All they did was flail about and make noise. “That’s enough. You can put them down now.”

Irv spoke into his talkingbox. The box, to Lamra, was much more interesting than budlings. She had started out wondering how humans made themselves small enough to fit inside, for their voices surely came out of it. Later she realized they didn’t hide in there, but talked with each other at a distance. To her, that was more marvelous, not less.

Irv spoke into the talkingbox again. This time, nobody answered. Irv shook the box, broke it in half-Lamra hadn’t known it opened up-looked inside, made a human shrug, put the box back together. He held it to his mouth once more. He spoke louder now.

When nothing happened, Pat got out her talkingbox and offered it to Irv. But just then, noise came out of his: another rumbling human voice talking. Irv answered. Lamra knew only a handful of words of human speech but recognized her name and Sarah’s.

And sum enough, Sarah’s voice came from the talkingbox a moment later. She was talking about Lamra, too. Suddenly she started using words a person could understand. “Lamra, how are you? How do you feel?”

Lamra’s eyestalks wiggled. “You humans all ask the same questions,” she said when Irv held the talkingbox above her mouth.

“Never mind jokes!” Sarah said sharply. “Tell me fight now how you are!”

Lamra looked at herself again. “Ugly, I think. And the tape”-another human word she had picked up-“itches.”

“Not what I mean!” Sarah sounded the way humans sometimes did when Lamra couldn’t figure out what they wanted fast enough.

“Please don’t be angry.” Lamra wanted to pull in all her arms and eyestalks. “I think I’m all right, Sarah, except for the holes in me where the budlings were. Will they close up, or will I look like this from now on?”

“Not know, Lamra.” Not counting a tiny hiss, only silence came out of the talkingbox for a while. Then Sarah went on, “Sorry, Lamra, not mean to be angry at you. Angry at me.”

“Why would you be angry at yourself?” Sometimes humans made no sense at all to Lamra.

“Angry because I not there when your budlings come,” Sarah answered. “Want to be there to help you, but not can do.”

“Oh. Don’t worry, Sarah. It’s all fight,” Lamra said. “Irv and Pat and”-she had to think for a moment-“Louise helped me very well. What could you have done that they didn’t?”

Another silence, longer this time. Irv fiddled briefly with the talkingbox and then said, “Lamra, Sarah thought of the way we used to save you. She showed us what to do. We were lucky to do it fight without her here. If we make-had made-a mistake, she show us how to fix it.” His strange voice held the gentleness Reatur used when explaining something to a new mate who was hardly more than a hurling herself.

“Oh.” Lamra thought about the tone Irv had used, about his words, and decided she had been silly. “Sarah?” she said. Irv put the talkingbox above her mouth again. “I’m sorry, Sarah; I wish you’d been here, too. You must have been doing something important, or you would have been.”

Still more silence. Then: “Not as important as you, Lamra; not as important as you. But did Reatur ever talk to you about Skarmer males on this side of Ervis Gorge?”

“Yes, Sarah.” Lamra squeezed the toy runnerpest again.

“He beat them. I helped him beat them.”

“That is important, Sarah,” Lamra said. “If Reatur hadn’t beaten them, then what happened with me wouldn’t matter much, would it?”

“No, not much,” Sarah said. “But still, curse it, Lamra, I wish I there with you instead!”

“All right, Sarah,” Lamra said, thinking once more that even when humans used people’s words, they didn’t always make sense with them. Trying to figure out what they meant was fun, though, and now, she realized, she would have more time to do it. She liked that.