*
The bitter rain and treacherous winds lasted all through the rest of the day and into the long night. Hesperus lapped at the rain feverishly, easing his thirst. He was hungry, too, but the occasional whiff of charred flesh that leaked from Geird’s body made him retch, and helped keep the pangs at bay. He heard no further sounds of conflict, just the lonely whistle of the wind as it battered at the rocks.
The morning dawned clear and cold, and Hesperus took stock of his situation. Shuddering, he searched Geird for anything useful, but she had nothing. He scanned around the gully, seeking some way out, but it was useless. He’d have to take to the air again.
Carefully, he examined the wings. On close inspection they were rather more sophisticated than he had first thought. The wing-straps could be pulled to curve and shape the wings themselves, and Hesperus began to see how an operator might generate forward thrust. He also spotted a mechanism which, with a quick, deft twist, would lock the two wings outspread, without the need for the pilot to hold them there.
The gully offered little room for experimentation. He cinched every buckle he could find, lengthened the arm-straps so he could reach them without too much of a stretch, and practiced flicking the wings in and out of lock until he was confident he could repeat the manoeuvre in flight. Then, screwing up his courage, and with one last desperate entreaty to Mandingo, he shuffled to the lip of the cliff, swallowed hard, spread his arms, and jumped off.
Immediately a surge of rising air, running up the cliff-face, pushed him skywards. He flapped and floundered, trying to concentrate. Leaning into the wind and trusting to the wings’ construction, he managed to gain some forward motion. One flap; two; three; glide; one; two; three; glide. Hesperus worked into a rhythm and didn’t seem to be falling. He learned to watch the ground beneath him, discovering upward thermals above patches of vegetation and areas of bare, sun-heated rock. He learned that crags and pinnacles were patrolled by invisible currents which could swirl him sideways, threatening to send him tumbling from the air.
Hours passed, and Hesperus came to realise that, although Teen might be a tiny world – he could see the curvature of the planet – to a lonely individual crawling over its surface, it was vast. Each mountain looked like every other, each canyon and valley seemed both strange and familiar. He was lost.
A sparkle at the horizon caught his attention. Could it be the ocean? They had flown in over the ocean. Was it even the same one? How far had Geird’s forces brought him? He swore, scrabbling at his memory for some idea of the planet’s geography. Well, one direction was better than none at all. Hesperus raised his aching arms again and pushed off towards the distant sea.
He crept forwards, the jumbled terrain rolling slowly beneath him. Suddenly a flash of movement caught Hesperus’s eye. There, in the canyon below, four tiny running figures. Behind them, leaping, bounding, came twenty or thirty more, gleaming like dots of silver in laser-reflective battle armour. Glittering bolts of energy spat from them. Rocks shattered, bushes and scrub grass smoked and burned, and two of the fleeing shapes burst into tumbling broken balls of flame. Hesperus couldn’t hear anything: the noise of gunfire, the screams, none of that reached up to him. With a frantic burst of speed the remaining two runners dived against the canyon walls and vanished. Their pursuers loped onwards, fanning out into a crescent and closing in remorselessly.
The cliff twitched, bulged, then bellied outwards. A huge slab of rock detached itself and fell inexorably downward. The enormous block slid into the canyon, raising a gigantic plume of dust. The boom of the explosion, and the grinding rumble of the collapsing cliff, thudded into Hesperus with almost physical force. The dust-cloud soared higher, threatening to engulf him. Desperately, Hesperus thrashed the air, hauling himself away from the ruin and fury.
Dear life, he thought. Even with his Poets, Tulka’s going to find it hard to break the Farmers’ Army. These mountains must be riddled with tunnels, traps and mines. Geird’s horribly mutilated face swam up in his memory: the way she clung on to her life, the way she clung on to her rage. And riddled with this planet’s own brand of demented warriors, too, he thought. Still, those battle-armoured Poets must have come from somewhere down the canyon. Tulka had sent most of the cargo canisters away from the mountains, away from the Dubious Profit. Maybe, somewhere between here and where the Poets came from, was the valley and the landing site. And maybe, just maybe, the Dubious Profit would still be there.
Hesperus curved through the air, following the canyon, scanning the horizon and watching for movement on the ground. If anything down there saw him …
There! The fractured rock gave way to a broad bowl-shaped depression. Surely, surely this was the right one. Yes! Over there, near the valley side: in all her decrepit glory, looking like an immense, exhausted sow, lay the Dubious Profit .
Hesperus cried when he saw her, tears streaming from his eyes. The best, the finest ship in all the eight sectors, she was there still, waiting for him.
Unfortunately she was not alone. Vehicles, tents and huts were scattered across the valley bottom. Groups of men jogged here and there, and dotted amongst them Hesperus could see the gleaming blobs of Poets, ominously still.
Quickly, Hesperus pulled in his arms and dropped, gliding down on wingtips only, sideslipping through the air towards the edge of the valley where the Dubious Profit lay. He skimmed behind a clutch of tall trees, then cupped his wings to slow his progress. His forward speed was too great, though, and he couldn’t keep his arms held out: the force of the air rushing past thrust them painfully behind his back. The ground ran up towards him. Desperately, he stuck out his feet, skidded once, twice, then flipped over, bounced, rolled, and came to rest upside-down in a thorny and unyielding bush.
Groaning, he fumbled with the straps, freeing first his legs and then his chest, finally sliding out of his wings and folding into a heap on the ground. He lay, panting, gingerly wiggling his toes, his fingers, his ears, and carefully flexing his legs and arms. Despite the pain everything seemed to be in working order. He ached all over, and the muscles across his back and shoulders burned ferociously. One knee throbbed where he had banged it in the landing; his mouth was dry, he was ravenously hungry, and his nose still itched and stung. But he was alive, he was breathing, and he was only a few hundred metres from his ship. There was a small army camped around it, true, but on the plus side only some of the alien berserkers he had brought to this planet seemed to be in residence.
Hesperus sat up stiffly, wincing and rocking his head from side to side. Maybe he could just walk out there: after all, he was the captain of the Dubious Profit, and had – with no little inconvenience to himself – delivered a very valuable cargo for Colonel Tulka. Tulka might be happy to see him; he might even pay him.
H’m. How likely was that? If the delivery had gone smoothly, then Tulka probably would have paid. It would have been easier, more … professional. Hesperus had committed a breach of Co-operative law, landing without authorisation on the planet, so he would have kept his mouth shut – and after all, he’d only been delivering farming equipment.
Now, though, Hesperus knew the cargo’s true nature. Transporting Celabiler Poets was a catastrophically serious crime, and Tulka was just as guilty – even more so, in fact – as Hesperus. Tulka had obviously built up a chain of offworld connections to pull this off, to ship the Poets from Celabile to Qudira where the switch took place. He’d used his real name, too: maybe to get some diplomatic immunity, maybe just because the Teen government couldn’t afford a false identity good enough to get past Co-operative scrutiny. Either way, what Hesperus knew put Tulka and his entire operation in jeopardy. Walking out to the ship would be to walk out to his death.
Hesperus rolled over and crawled through the undergrowth to peer through the trees. The Dubious Profit, hideous and beautiful, squatted near a low cliff. There were soldiers around her, and a pile of what looked like engine parts. Had they stripped her? No: her engine manifol
ds still bulged from her broad stern. To pull out the engine they would have to dismantle the manifolds, too.
He scanned around the valley, searching for options. Well, he thought, it’s as good an idea as any other, and not as crazy as some. What choice do I have? He wriggled back through the bushes to rescue his wings.