Ammonite Planets (Omnibus): Ammonite Galaxy #1-3 (62 page)

“I think you were too generous to give them a thousand years. You should have told them to go now!”

Speckles of colour ran through Arcan. “It is only a thousand years,” he said, “it didn’t seem worth discussing!”

ON KWAIDE THE weather was getting worse. The cold season was well established now, and that meant that the days were shorter, and the nights so cold that only the heat of the chimneys melted the ice on the roofs, which refroze before it could drip down to the floor, causing curious sculptures on top of each shack.

Grace and Diva arrived back in a shuttle pod, having been deposited on the orbital station by Arcan. They left the pod at the spaceport, next to the other three that were on the ground, and then walked to the base camp. That took them some time – Diva was still limited in the movements of her leg, although she was now able to be completely self-sufficient.

They told Six and Cimma exactly what had happened at the meeting, and how Arcan had agreed not to transport anybody directly to the surface of Kwaide. “… which is why we had to come down in a pod,” finished Diva.

“That is great news!” Six jumped up, and began to pace the room, thinking. “It means that the Elders can no longer depend upon the Sellites to get them out of trouble. Fantastic!” Then his face fell. “Though the Sellites get to stay on Valhai for a thousand years. That is not so good!”

“I think Arcan put that time on it so that they wouldn’t all move over to the Sacras planets, invading us,” said Diva. “This way they will probably put things off for hundreds of years – and they might even have changed by then.”

“Some hope!” said Six. “They will be worse than ever, I expect. Not that any of us will be around to see it.”

“You should have seen Mandalon 50 stand up, Six,” Grace told him. “He is only ten, and yet he made all those agreements as if he had been bargaining for years!”

“What happened to my old favourite, Atheron?”

Diva pulled a face. “Nothing, of course. Our old inquisitor wriggled out of it as usual, saying he had been badly advised, and only doing his best in a position for which he had not been modified genetically. Grace listened in to some of the Sellite chit-chat, and Atheron was playing the victim so well that they were apparently sorry for him!”

“He would!” Six gave a snort. “What a poser!”

“At least he has been forced to go back to running only the teaching house,” said Grace. “And Mandalon 50 is outside his reach now, because since he has taken on the presidency at such a young age, he will be tutored non-virtually at his own skyrise.”

“I bet he turns out like his father, in the end,” asserted Six.

Grace shook her head. “I don’t think so. He did really well at the meeting, stood up for what he believed was right for Sell, and seemed to grasp the most important points. His father was determined not to change anything. Anyway, they have convoked the Second Valhai Votation, which will take place soon. Mandalon 50 has decreed that all 50’s can attend without a trustee, providing they are at least 6 years old. That means that the old school will be pretty effectively shut out. There are only about twenty 50’s who are over university age.”

“Was Arcan happy with the deal?”

“Relieved, I think. He just wants to be left in peace and quiet, and this treaty will give him that. He has only to run the orthotubes for another ten years, and then the Sellites will be self-sufficient. It is a good solution.”

“But he can’t transport us to Kwaide.”

“No, but the space station is pretty close. We have left our orthogel bracelets up there, too. The refugees don’t have Arcan, but the Elders don’t have the Sellites, either. It seems fair.”

“Maybe,” said Six, “but didn’t the Elders realize that they have no way to export the rexelene?”

“I guess they did,” Diva told him, “but they didn’t have much choice. Atheron told them that they couldn’t have any more ships – it takes them three months to get here and there to get back, remember. Plus, they used up all the armament on their last visit. The Elders had to realize then that since New Kwaide has two space traders they were at a great disadvantage.”

“Then they will try to take back the space traders,” said Six slowly. “I hadn’t thought of that! We have to protect the spaceport and the shuttle pods! That is the only way they can get up to the orbital station. And you are right – for the next few years whoever has the orbital station has the possibility of trade with Coriolis and the ability to survive!”

He and Diva looked at each other, and comprehension dawned on both faces at the same time. Six leapt to his feet, and Diva staggered to hers – the bad leg was still slowing her down.

“We need to get there NOW!” Six set up a shout, and dashed to the door, telling anyone he met to pass the word, to arm and to get to the spaceport FAST.

Cimma was in the front of the wave of refugees which surged down towards the spaceport. She was waving her Xianthan knife like old times, and looking intensely pleased to have some possible action in the near future. Six had to stop her sternly, and ask her to stay in the base camp. They needed somebody with decision-taking experience there. While he spoke, Grace studied her mother. She was still the same – slightly crazy and very single-minded. But she seemed to have grown in stature here on Kwaide. She seemed, Grace thought, almost happy. It was a strange moment of recognition. Grace smiled and got told off for it by Six.

“I can’t see anything remotely funny in the situation,” he snapped. “Boy, you have a strange sense of humour!”

“I was thinking about something else!” she told him.

“Well, don’t!”

“Sorry, sir! No, sir!”

Six gave a sheepish smile. “I’m sorry, too. I might be a bit overwrought.”

“Shouldn’t we wait for Diva?”

He shook his head. “No time,” he explained. “If the Elders get hold of the spaceships they can get up to the orbital platform, and if they get hold of that, then they can control all of the imports and exports for the whole planet. At least until we can build some shuttles and pods of our own. And that makes whoever controls the space platform the virtual rulers of Kwaide.”

“But they don’t know how to fly any of the ships or pods. They don’t have any pilots,” pointed out Grace.

“They don’t at the moment,” agreed Six. “But I daresay they could remedy that fast enough. They could even pay some Coriolans to come over and fly for them while they brought some of their own sychophants up to speed. No, they won’t attack us anymore; they will head straight for the spaceport. I just hope we are not too late.” And he put on an extra spurt of energy.

“Oh Cian!” Grace attempted to catch up with him, together with the hundred or so Kwaidians who were flinging themselves down the path in his wake. Others were raising the alarm all over the camp.

“Who was up at the orbital station?” asked Six, over his shoulder.

“Ledin, and two others.”

“Get somebody to alert them.”

Grace stopped to brief one of the refugees to turn back with a message for Cimma. By the time she had finished Six was out of sight. She bent over for a moment, struggling to get her breath and held her sides.

Diva, who was moving extremely quickly for somebody in her condition, came pounding up, her bad leg moving stiffly and causing a rolling gait. It hadn’t managed to slow her down very much at all. She was brandishing her famous dagger with its ornate teeth, and looking extremely fierce.

“If we lose the spaceport after all we have been through I shall be furious,” she gasped. “Come on, Grace, I don’t want to miss all the fun!”

“They can’t have got here all that quickly,” replied Grace. “They haven’t had time to organize an attack.”

Diva looked grim. “Let’s hope not!”

The two girls threw themselves along the path to the spaceport in the wake of the others. Neither had enough breath left to talk any more.

THE SCENE THAT met their eyes when they finally arrived was anything but positive. The whole spaceport had been taken over by the Elders, and the four space shuttles had been captured. That left only one more up on the orbital station, plus the two space traders which would probably be en route to Coriolis. Ledin would have a hard time defending the orbital platform against four space shuttles, particularly since nobody had much armament left, and so it would probably eventually come down to who had the superior numbers.

The forces were already squaring off. More Elders were pouring in from the south, and as word spread to the refugees they were grabbing their weapons and racing in from the north. Whoever won this battle would win the war, and there wasn’t a fighter on Kwaide who didn’t know it.

Diva gave a fierce cry, raised her knife, and was about to throw herself into the fray when a voice from nearby stopped her.

“No!”

She looked around. Six was standing slightly to the left, and with him were the other three pilots, together with all of the trainees. Six was sketching a rough plan of the spaceport with a stick in the earth. He made two lines stretching north and south for the runway, and then drew the spaceport approximately in the middle, and bisected by it. Four stones, two on each side of the runway, represented the ships, and then he drew in circles behind the ships to show the fuel tanks, and smaller circles, both to the north of the fuel tanks, to show the water storage compartments. The support buildings, one on either side of the runway, and both to the south were marked by rectangles.

“We have another job,” he said. “We have to penetrate to the ships and recover them. Once the ships take off then the rest will be over. There is no point in our getting killed on the battle front: they need us as pilots now. I’m sorry, Diva, but your bloodthirsty tendencies will just have to wait.”

Diva gave a low growl, and then reluctantly sheathed her dagger. She turned to Six. “How are we going to do it?”

Six gave a nod in the direction of the fighting. “That is the part I haven’t quite worked out yet,” admitted Six, “Don’t quibble, Diva.”

She gasped. “I like that! Quibble indeed! You are going to get us all killed, no-name!”

He tilted his head. “It is possible,” he admitted. “Grace, you are the one with all the ideas – would you mind working out the details?”

Grace gave him a look, and then exchanged glances with Diva. The Coriolan girl gave a shrug. “He is right, Grace. You are always the one with the ideas. You will come up with something – I know you will.” Diva looked around her for a reasonably comfortable hollow, folded herself elegantly onto the hard ground, and began to massage her bad leg, looking totally unconcerned.

Grace stared down at the makeshift figure drawn in the beaten earth and heaved a deep sigh. “No pressure,” she murmured to herself. “Take all the time you need, Grace.”

Six had turned away, and now began discussing tactics with the other refugees in the group. “That’s it, Grace,” he said over his shoulder. “All the time in the world. As long as it’s less than an hour. If we leave it much longer than that then we may have lost the war.”

“Thanks!”

AFTER TEN MINUTES Grace had come to the only possible conclusion: there
was
no easy way. She gave a sigh, and called the others together.

“The Elders have taken all of the spaceport and the installations, but if you look they are only about twenty metres past the two water storage tanks on either side, which are both situated on the northern side of the spaceport, one to the east, and one to the west.”

The others looked, and then nodded, curious.

“So IF,” she went on, “and it is a big if, our troops can force them back – even momentarily – to beyond the water tanks then some of us could get inside, and make our way through the water conduits underground to the fuel deposits.”

“Brilliant!” said Six, eyes flashing.

“The problem is,” went on Grace, “that then we would have to crawl through the overhead fuel feed lines to get into the ships. They are connected to all four shuttles still, because they were in the process of refueling. Unfortunately none of the ships are currently connected directly to the water tanks, so our only option would be the fuel lines. Once we get to the side of the ships we simply cut our way out of the fuel feeds, fight our way into the ships, close the doors, and take off!”