Orion Shall Rise (78 page)

He could improvise as the battle developed. At the very least, it would be fun to try. And at most, he might be reborn a world conqueror, for such an exploit in this life.

He laughed aloud, joyously. “We’ll do it!”

Tresa rose. “You will spare the city?” she whispered hoarsely.

“I never promised any such thing,” said Loklann. “Of course, the ship’s cargo will crowd out most of the stuff and people we might take otherwise. Unless, hm, unless we decide to sail the ship to Calforni, loaded, and meet it there with more rovers. Yes, why not?”

“You oathbreaker,” she said, with a hellful of scorn.

“I only promised not to sell you,” said Loklann. His gaze went up and down her. “And I won’t.”

He took a stride forward and gathered her to him. She fought, cursing; once she managed to draw Ruori’s knife from his belt, but his cuirass stopped the blade.

Finally he rose. She wept at his feet, her breast marked red by her father’s chain. He said more quietly, “No, I will not sell you, Tresa. I will keep you.”

“Blimp ho-o-o-!”

The lookout’s cry hung lonesome for a minute between wind and broad waters. Down under the mainmast, it seethed with crewmen running to their posts.

Ruori squinted eastward. The land was a streak under cumulus clouds, mountainous and blue-shadowed. It took him a while to find the enemy, in all that sky. At last the sun struck them. He lifted his binoculars. Two painted killer whales lazed his way, slanting down from a mile altitude.

He sighed. “Only two,” he said.

“That may be more than plenty for us,” said Atel Hamid. Sweat studded his forehead.

Ruori gave his mate a sharp look. “You’re not afraid of them, are you? I daresay that’s been one of their biggest assets, superstition.”

“Oh, no, Captain. I know the principle of buoyancy as well as you do. But those people are tough. And they’re not trying to storm us from a dock this time; they’re in their element.”

“So are we.” Ruori clapped the other man’s back. “Take over. Tanaroa knows what’s going to happen, but use your own judgment if I’m spitted.”

“I wish you’d let me go,” protested Atel. “I don’t like being safe here. It’s what can happen aloft that worries me.”

“You won’t be too safe for your liking.” Ruori forced a grin. “And somebody has to steer this tub home to hand in those lovely reports to the Geoethnic Research Endeavor.”

He swung down the ladder to the main deck and hurried to the mainmast shrouds. His crew yelled around him, weapons gleamed. The two big box kites quivered taut canvas, lashed to a bollard and waiting. Ruori wished there had been time to make more.

Even as it was, though, he had delayed longer than seemed wise, first heading far out to sea and then tacking slowly back, to make the enemy search for him while he prepared. (Or planned, for that matter. When he dismissed Tresa, his ideas had been little more than a conviction that he could fight.) Assuming they were lured after him at all, he had risked their losing patience and going back to the land. For an hour, now, he had dawdled under mainsail, genoa, and a couple of flying jibs, hoping the Sky People were lubbers enough not to find that suspiciously little canvas for this good weather.

But here they were, and here was an end to worry and remorse on a certain girl’s behalf. Such emotions were rare in an Islander; and to find himself focusing them thus on a single person, out of earth’s millions, had been horrible. Ruori swarmed up the ratlines, as if he fled something.

The blimps were still high, passing overhead on an upper-level breeze. Down here was almost a straight south wind. The aircraft, unable to steer really close-hauled, would descend when they were sea-level upwind of him. Regardless, estimated a cold part of Ruori, the
Dolphin
could avoid their clumsy rush.

But the
Dolphin
wasn’t going to.

The rigging was now knotted with armed sailors. Ruori pulled himself onto the mainmast crosstrees and sat down, casually swinging his legs. The ship heeled over in a flaw and he hung above greenish-blue, white-streaked immensity. He balanced, scarcely noticing, and asked Hiti: “Are you set?”

“Aye.” The big harpooner, his body a writhe of tattoos and muscles, nodded a shaven head. Lashed to the fid where he squatted was the ship’s catapult, cocked and loaded with one of the huge irons that could kill a sperm whale at a blow. A couple more lay alongside in their rack. Hiti’s two mates and four deckhands poised behind him, holding the smaller harpoons—mere six-foot shafts—that were launched from a boat by hand. The lines of all trailed down the mast to the bows.

“Aye, let ’em come now.” Hiti grinned over his whole round face. “Nan eat the world, but this’ll be something to make a dance about when we come home!”

“If we do,” said Ruori. He touched the boat ax thrust into his loincloth. Like a curtain, the blinding day seemed to veil a picture from home, where combers broke white under the moon, longfires flared on a beach and dancers were merry, and palm trees cast shadows for couples who stole away. He wondered how a Meycan calde’s daughter might like it … if her throat had not been cut.

“There’s a sadness on you, Captain,” said Hiti.

“Men are going to die,” said Ruori.

“What of it?” Small kindly eyes studied him. “They’ll die willing, if they must, for the sake of the song that’ll be made. You’ve another trouble than death.”

“Let me be!”

The harpooner looked hurt, but withdrew into silence. Wind streamed and the ocean glittered.

The aircraft steered close. They would approach one on each side. Ruori unslung the megaphone at his shoulder. Atel Hamid held the
Dolphin
steady on a broad reach.

Now Ruori could see a grinning god at the prow of the starboard airship. It would pass just above the topmasts, a little to windward … Arrows went impulsively toward it from the yardarms, without effect, but no one was excited enough to waste a rifle cartridge. Hiti swiveled his catapult. “Wait,” said Ruori. “We’d better see what they do.”

Helmeted heads appeared over the blimp’s gallery rail. A man stepped up—another, another, at intervals; they whirled triple-clawed iron grapnels and let go. Ruori saw one strike the foremast, rebound, hit a jib. … The line to the blimp tautened and sang but did not break; it was of leather. … The jib ripped, canvas thundered, struck a sailor in the belly and knocked him from his yard. … The man recovered to straighten out and hit the water in a clean dive. Lesu grant he lived. … The grapnel bumped along, caught the gaff of the fore-and-aft mainsail, wood groaned. … The ship trembled as line after line snapped tight.

She leaned far over, dragged by leverage. Her sails banged. No danger of capsizing—yet—but a mast could be pulled loose. And now, over the gallery rail and seizing a rope between hands and knees, the pirates came. Whooping like boys, they slid down to the grapnels and clutched after any rigging that came to hand.

One of them sprang monkeylike onto the mainmast gaff, below the crosstrees. A harpooner’s mate cursed, hurled his weapon, and skewered the invader. “Belay that!” roared Hiti. “We need those irons!”

Ruori scanned the situation. The leeward blimp was still maneuvering in around its mate, which was being blown to port. He put the megaphone to his mouth and a solar-battery amplifier cried for him. “Hear this! Hear this! Burn that second enemy now, before he grapples! Cut the lines to the first one and repel all boarders!”

“Shall I fire?” called Hiti. “I’ll never have a better target.”

“Aye.”

The harpooner triggered his catapult. It unwound with a thunder noise. Barbed steel smote the engaged gondola low in a side, tore through, and ended on the far side of interior planking.

“Wind ’er up!” bawled Hiti. His own gorilla hands were already on a crank lever. Somehow two men found space to help him.

Ruori slipped down the futtock shrouds and jumped to the gaff. Another pirate had landed there and a third was just arriving, two more aslide behind him. The man on the spar balanced barefooted, as good as any sailor, and drew a sword. Ruori dropped as the blade whistled, caught a mainsail grommet one-handed, and hung there, striking with his boat ax at the grapnel line. The pirate crouched and stabbed at him. Ruori thought of Tresa, smashed his hatchet into the man’s face, and flipped him off, down to the deck. He cut again. The leather was tough, but his blade was keen. The line parted and whipped away. The gaff swung free, almost yanking Ruori’s fingers loose. The second Sky Man toppled, hit a cabin below and spattered. The men on the line slid to its end. One of them could not stop; the sea took him. The other was smashed against the masthead as he pendulumed.

Ruori pulled himself back astride the gaff and sat there awhile, heaving air into lungs that burned. The fight ramped around him, on shrouds and spars and down on the decks. The second blimp edged closer.

Astern, raised by the speed of a ship moving into the wind, a box kite lifted. Atel sang a command and the helmsman put the rudder over. Even with the drag on her, the
Dolphin
responded well; a profound science of fluid mechanics had gone into her design. Being soaked in whale oil, the kite clung to the gas bag for a time—long enough for “messengers” of burning paper to whirl up its string. It burst into flame.

The blimp sheered off, the kite fell away, its small gunpowder load exploded harmlessly. Atel swore and gave further orders. The
Dolphin
tacked. The second kite, already aloft and afire, hit target. It detonated.

Hydrogen gushed out. Sudden flames wreathed the blimp. They seemed pale in the sun-dazzle. Smoke began to rise, as the plastic between gas cells disintegrated. The aircraft descended like a slow meteorite to the water.

Its companion vessel had no reasonable choice but to cast loose unsevered grapnels, abandoning the still outnumbered boarding party. The captain could not know that the
Dolphin
had only possessed two kites. A few vengeful catapult bolts spat from it. Then it was free, rapidly falling astern. The Maurai ship rocked toward an even keel.

The enemy might retreat or he might plan some fresh attack. Ruori did not intend that it should be either. He megaphoned: “Put about! Face that scum-gut!” and led a rush down the shrouds to a deck where combat still went on.

For Hiti’s gang had put three primary harpoons and half a dozen lesser ones into the gondola.

Their lines trailed in tightening catenaries from the blimp to the capstan in the bows. No fear now of undue strain. The
Dolphin
, like any Maurai craft, was meant to live off the sea as she traveled. She had dragged right whales alongside; a blimp was nothing in comparison. What counted was speed, before the pirates realized what was happening and found ways to cut loose.

“Tohiha, hioha, itoki, itoki!”
The old canoe chant rang forth as men tramped about the capstan. Ruori hit the deck, saw a Canyon man fighting a sailor, sword against club, and brained the fellow from behind as he would any other vermin. (Then he wondered, dimly shocked, what made him think thus about a human being.) The battle was rapidly concluded; the Sky Men faced hopeless odds. But half a dozen Federation people were badly hurt. Ruori had the few surviving pirates tossed into a lazaret, his own casualties taken below to anesthetics and antibiotics and cooing Doñitas. Then, quickly, he prepared his crew for the next phase.

The blimp had been drawn almost to the bowsprit. It was canted over so far that its catapults were useless. Pirates lined the gallery deck, howled and shook their weapons. They outnumbered the
Dolphin
crew by a factor of three or four. Ruori recognized one among them—the tall yellow-haired man who had fought him outside the palace; it was a somehow eerie feeling.

“Shall we burn them?” asked Atel.

Ruori grimaced. “I suppose we have to,” he said. “Try not to ignite the vessel itself. You know we want it.”

A walking beam moved up and down, driven by husky Islanders. Flame spurted from a ceramic nozzle. The smoke and stench and screams that followed, and the things to be seen when Ruori ordered cease fire, made the hardest veteran of corsair patrol look a bit ill. The Maurai were an unsentimental folk, but they did not like to inflict pain.

“Hose,” rasped Ruori. The streams of water that followed were like some kind of blessing. Wicker that had begun to burn hissed into charred quiescence.

The ship’s grapnels were flung. A couple of cabin boys darted past grown men to be first along the lines. They met no resistance on the gallery. The uninjured majority of pirates stood in a numb fashion, their armament at their feet, the fight kicked out of them. Jacob’s ladders followed the boys; the
Dolphin
crew swarmed aboard the blimp and started collecting prisoners.

A few Sky Men lurched from behind a door, weapons aloft. Ruori saw the tall fair man among them. The man drew Ruori’s dagger, left-handed, and ran toward him. His right arm seemed nearly useless. “A Canyon, a Canyon!” he called, the ghost of a war cry.

Ruori sidestepped the charge and put out a foot. The blond man tripped. As he fell, the hammer of Ruori’s ax clopped down, catching him on the neck. He crashed, tried to rise, shuddered, and lay twitching.

“I want my knife back.” Ruori squatted, undid the robber’s tooled leather belt, and began to hogtie him.

Dazed blue eyes looked up with a sort of pleading. “Are you not going to kill me?” mumbled the other in Spañol.

“Haristi, no,” said Ruori, surprised. “Why should I?”

He sprang erect. The last resistance had ended; the blimp was his. He opened the forward door, thinking the equivalent of a ship’s bridge must lie beyond it.

Then for a while he did not move at all, nor did he hear anything but the wind and his own blood.

It was Tresa who finally came to him. Her hands were held out before her, like a blind person’s, and her eyes looked through him. “You are here,” she said, flat and empty voiced.

“Doñita,” stammered Ruori. He caught her hands. “Doñita, had I known you were aboard, I would never have … have risked—”

“Why did you not burn and sink us, like that other vessel?” she asked. “Why must this return to the city?”