Legacy (5 page)

"Yeah," Sarnac agreed moodily. Picking up a pine cone's functional equivalent, he pitched it onto the fire, where it flared and crackled like a living world in the flames of modern space war. "Piss on this world. Piss on a race that's begun to look up at night and wonder what the little lights are! Piss on all that. Gotta move on to more important things."

"Hey, Bob," Frank said, frowning, "I know how you feel. But it's as Admiral Entallador said. Our first priority has got to be the war, at least for now. If we're to make any use of worlds like this, or do anything for races like the Danuans, we have to survive."

"Oh, yeah, I understand all that." Sarnac flashed his piratical smile. "Hey, I come from a long line of people who understood their duty. Did I ever tell you that my family used to have a tradition of supplying naval aviators for the old United States? They even kept doing it in the twenty-first century, when the United States had stopped being worth doing it for."

Frank's frown intensified, but as usual his good nature triumphed—with the help of the flask Sarnac passed across to him. (Strictly non-regulation, of course; Sarnac was legendary for his ability to get booze aboard ship, and for his generosity with it.) Frank passed it back and he took another swig of the rum that tasted of the islands. Thank God Jamaica had missed all the fallout!

Natalya, who didn't drink, wore a puzzled look. "Naval aviators?"

"Right. Wet navy, flying hydrocarbon-burning aircraft off the decks of surface ships—and even coming back and landing there. God, the guts they must have had back then!" He remembered being taken, as a child, to tour the ruins at Pensacola. "Later they went into the Space Force. One of them was slated to go to the asteroids on the Mars Project, before . . ."

He trailed off, and for a time the silence was broken only by the nocturnal fauna of Danu. None of them spoke aloud the enigma that haunted their era. The fire began to die, but that couldn't account for the sudden chill.

Finally, Natalya got lithely to her feet. She could have done it under Danu's 0.87 G pull even without her enhancements. A few generations under Martian gravity hadn't robbed the human body of as much of Earth's evolutionary heritage as had once been thought. "Well, if we're to take advantage of whatever time we have here, we'd better get an early start tomorrow. I'm going to turn in."

Danu's almost Earth- and Mars-like rotation period of 22.9 hours was another of its sterling qualities. They hadn't had to make the wrenching adjustments in sleeping patterns for which their training had prepared them. The two men responded with drowsy good-nights, and soon followed her to the sleeping tents.

The obnoxious siren-like wail inside his head brought Sarnac instantly awake.

The dystopian fiction of the Totalitarian Era had been full of the nightmare potentialities of implant communicators—utter loss of personal privacy, and absolute control by the threat of unendurable, inescapable ultrasonic whistles at the touch of Big Brother's finger to a button. The image had been taken to heart, and now that such devices were actually possible, a rigid code of written and unwritten laws mandated that they be designed to be completely under the control of the individual in whom they were implanted—who alone could activate them. The military was an exception. But even Fleet's special override was used only in the most dire of emergencies. Sarnac hadn't heard the siren since training.

He sprang from his bunk, his fingers almost unconsciously making the movements that caused his nervous system to summon up the current time from his implanted chronometer. Predawn awakening always induced depression and Sarnac had a feeling that it was going to get worse. He stumbled from his tent and ran for the shuttle (whose communicator had activated the emergency signal). Frank and Natalya joined him there just as he raised
Durendal
's communications officer.

"Emergency!" Lieutenant Papandreou wasn't given to panic, but he seemed close to it now. "Get off the planet and rendezvous with the squadron immediately. Our orbital elements are being downloaded to the shuttle's computer now."

"Wait a minute, Theo! Talk to me! What the hell's going on?"

"A Korvaash force is approaching this planet. We need to pick you up before we can leave orbit."

"Korvaash!"
Frank exploded. "You mean they've emerged from one of Lugh's other displacement points?" Sarnac knew what Frank was thinking; the odds against themselves and the Korvaasha stumbling onto this system at the same time were—well, "astronomical" was too small a word.

"Negative. There's been no displacement point emergence. They were
already here
!" Papandreou's effort at self-control was nearly visible. "They've been here all along. They're approaching from somewhere in the outer system, maybe one of the gas giants."

Papandreou stopped and looked to the side, as if he was being addressed from beyond the visual pickup. Then his image dissolved momentarily into snow, and was replaced with the Black Irish features of Commodore Shannon. Sarnac felt his spine move involuntarily into a seated position of attention.

"My order is not subject to discussion, Lieutenant Sarnac," she clipped. "Get your team off that planet and rendezvous with
Durendal
."

Sarnac drew a deep breath. "Sir, with all respect, we'd just be passengers in a space battle. You don't need to wait for us before breaking out of orbit to engage them. If you win, you can come back and pick us up later. Otherwise . . . well, when the Korvaasha land here, they can't kill us any deader than we'd be aboard
Durendal
."

He could almost smell his companions' desire to be somewhere else—anywhere else—as Shannon's glare began to build. Then, incredibly, she smiled slightly. "Your reputation as an insubordinate smart-mouth is not exaggerated, Lieutenant. The fact is, we're not going to engage them if we can avoid it. That force is too strong for us to do so with any realistic hope of success. We're going to head straight for our displacement point of entry. Unfortunately, they've clearly anticipated that, and their course will probably enable them to intercept us before we can get there. But we're going to make every effort to escape. And," she continued, glare back at full force, "I will
not
abandon any of my people. Raise ship
now
, Mister!"

"Aye aye, sir." Even Sarnac knew the subject was closed. "Signing off." He cut the connection and turned to the others. "All right, boys and girls. You heard the lady. Suit up and strap in."

"But the lab equipment . . ." Natalya wailed.

"Forget it!" Sarnac was already commencing the prelaunch checklist. "Likewise any personal stuff. We lift off in exactly one minute." He turned the process over to the computer and then sought his own light-duty vac suit in the locker just aft of the cramped passenger compartment.

Little more than the stipulated minute passed before the shuttle rose into the alien night on grav repulsion, landing gear retracting into her belly. Sarnac swung her out past the beach and over the darkened sea on gravs, not wanting to ignite the fusion drive before getting well away from the Danuans he had met.
What
, he wondered,
will they make of our unannounced departure?
And this overpowered little military craft could make it to a fairly respectable altitude before being too high above the surface to maintain stability while reacting against the local gravity.

"Bob!" Natalya suddenly cut into his thoughts from the sensor station. Her voice got his full attention, for it was controlled in the same way Papandreou's had been. Too controlled. "Bogies—two bogies—at four o'clock high. Range about two hundred klicks, and closing fast."

Sarnac whipped his acceleration couch around to face her, feeling the bottom fall out of the universe of common sense. "Natasha," he said slowly, "did I understand you to say 'bogies'?" Unbidden came a lunatic image of Neolithic Danuans rigging a glider of vegetable-fiber fabric stretched over a wood frame, and rising in pursuit.

"Affirmative, sir," she replied, armoring herself in formality. "Performance parameters are consistent with the Korvaash Talon-6 fighter-configured shuttle."

Sarnac was saved from blithering only because Frank found his tongue and started doing it first. "But . . . but the Korvaasha are still coming in from the outer system . . . God knows how far out they are . . . they can't be."

"It looks like they are!" Sarnac snapped. "Prepare for acceleration! Frank, get all weapon systems on-line." His hands swept over the controls, going to lift-only with the gravs and bringing the shuttle around into an eastward course. He also dropped to a lower altitude; to continue to try to make orbit would be to invite interception. Then he activated the fusion drive. The shuttle sprang ahead, pressing them into their deeply padded couches, leaving a roar of sonic boom and a wake of boiling seawater behind.

" 'Tasha, raise
Durendal
and report our status." The orbiting battlecruiser was now below the horizon, but Shannon, applying standard procedure, had deployed a necklace of relay comsats around the planet.

As the sun broke over the eastern horizon—Lugh of the Shining Spear, sun god of a small island on a world that suddenly seemed very far away—the continental coastline seemed to Sarnac to zoom insanely toward him. In an instant, they were feet-dry, fleeing eastward over forest rather than sea.

"I'm unable to raise
Durendal
," Natalya reported. Sarnac was not surprised—if fighters could be down here, so could other things able to take out a comsat. "And," she added, "bogies still closing."

"I see they are," Sarnac muttered, most of his attention on flying the shuttle. Natalya had the details, but the gross tactical situation appeared on a small simulation for the pilot. They were indeed closing; those were high-performance combat craft. And it was too much to hope that the Korvaasha would approach from six o'clock, allowing him to use the fusion drive as a short-range plasma cannon. However, like every Fleet craft in wartime, they carried some defensive armament. And the fact that the opposition was approaching gave them a range advantage.

"Launch at will, Frank."

"Roger," Frank called out from the weapons station. He waited until the hostiles had crept up within range of the aft-facing launchers, taking finicky care with his targeting solution. He called out "Missiles away!" and they felt a slight lurch as a brace of deadly little rockets dropped away and howled toward the approaching fighters—only to vanish in sunlike fireballs, detonated by the bogies' antimissile lasers. The Talon-6s—identification was now positive, according to the computer—flashed through the afterglow of the blasts, wobbling slightly from the turbulence. It gave Sarnac an idea.

"Frank," he called, breaking the other's string of curses. "On my command, launch two more missiles. And both of you stand by for a rough ride." They knew what
that
could mean with Sarnac at the controls. Then he yelled "Launch!" and cut the grav-repulsors that were providing their lift.

The shuttle's stubby wings and horizontal stabilizers were never intended to serve alone as lifting surfaces at low altitude. But nobody—not even Sarnac—was crazy enough to try what he had in mind on gravs. As the hostiles were momentarily blinded by the flare of exploding missiles, he went to full throttle with the fusion drive and, relying on sheer forward velocity to keep them in the air, he turned the shuttle over in a quick barrel roll.

In the forward viewport the universe seemed to rotate, the forest horizon swinging up and displacing the sky. Fighting the G-forces for consciousness, he heard a strangled "Holy shit!" from Frank and a stream of Russian—better for both praying and cursing than either Mandarin or Standard International English—from Natalya.

Then they were level again, at little more than treetop altitude, and he engaged the gravs. The terrain below was getting more hilly as they roared further inland, and he didn't want to rely on the airfoils as he brought the shuttle around onto the new course he hoped would lose their pursuers, who hopefully wouldn't realize what had happened until it was too late.

"Bob," Natalya began.

"Yeah, I see them." Two silvery gleams high in the royal blue sky, sweeping around onto an intercept vector. The Talon-6 was large for a single-seat fighter—anything designed for Korvaasha had to be large—and not too maneuverable. But it was overpowered—even by military standards—and it carried a large weapon load, including the missiles that were beginning to appear on his tactical readout.

Their one antimissile laser lashed out under computer control—human reflexes were far too slow—and missiles flowered in blossoms of flame as Sarnac tried evasive action. But there were too many missiles.

He felt a slender hand squeeze his left shoulder. "It was a good try, Bob," Natalya said calmly.

"Damn' straight," Frank added, as a missile slid through their defenses. Sarnac flung the shuttle sideways with a lateral manipulation of Danu's gravity, just as the proximity fuse activated. That last split-second maneuver probably saved their lives.

The deep-blue sky turned sun-colored, and only automatic viewport polarization preserved their eyesight.
Good thing our antirad shots are up to date
, Sarnac thought, in a small, calm corner of his mind, knowing that they wouldn't live long enough to worry about radiation sickness. Then an ogre's fist of superheated air smote the shuttle, sending it staggering across the sky.

Their enclosing couches kept them from being flung about the cabin to their deaths. But Sarnac was half-stunned as he fought to right the shuttle and restore grav repulsion to halt the sickening dropping sensation. A glance at the board told him that the fusion drive was a lost cause. The severed fuel feeds were the least of it.

"Natasha's hurt!" Frank called out through clouds of acrid smoke and the crackle of savaged electronics.

"I am not . . . not seriously," the Martian snapped. And, as if needing to prove it, she reported in a ragged voice. "Communications are dead. So are some of the sensors, but we've still got basic radar."