Fall of Angels (5 page)

  
Beyond the couch were their clothes . . . and the twin blades Ryba had brought down from the Winterlance and begun to wear. Nylan did not shake his head. She was doubtless correct in assuming that the blades would have to serve as a defense before long and in accustoming herself to their use. What weapon could he use? A blade probably, since Ryba could teach him, although the idea of an edged weapon bothered him. But where would they get blades?

  
Though he knew the basics of metallurgy, he'd never tried anything so primitive as smithing, and he had no idea if there were any metallic deposits nearby. Charcoal he could make, if he ever had the time, and he could devise some sort of bellows, but they would be useless without iron or copper. The landers held enough steel alloys, but a primitive smithy would be hard-pressed to reach temperatures high enough to melt or cast them.

  
He took a long, slow breath.

  
Ryba's eyes flickered, and then, as always, she was awake. "What are you thinking about?"

  
"Weapons, smithing, how to use the materials in the landers..." He shrugged, suddenly conscious of her nakedness next to him.

  
"That's not all you're thinking about," whispered Ryba.

  
Nylan could feel himself blushing.

  
"And after last night? Shame on you."

  
Nylan nibbled on her neck.

  
"Not now ... I can hear someone in the back."

  
"It's different in the morning. Besides, we've got a lot to do. The growing season is so short. We'll have to get those grow-paks figured out and started. They're really designed as deep-space hydroponic units, but there are instructions for conversion, and there's one planet or soil-based unit." The captain swung her feet onto the chill composite flooring of what had been the cockpit area.

  
Nylan swung his feet to the other side, aware of the warmth of her back against his and of the faint scent of evergreens and the whispering of the wind outside.

  
Ryba pulled on her shipsuit, as did Nylan. He followed her into the dawn, and toward the stream to wash up. Neither spoke.

  
As the day lightened, long before the sun had edged above the tree-fringed eastern horizon that lay beyond the drop-off, Nylan had whittled a small limb into shavings, then used one of the matches to light the cook fire. He looked down at the match, then shook his head. "Strikers, maybe."

  
"Strikers?" Ayrlyn broke off a handful of dried end branches from the dead tree limb that several marines had dragged nearly a kay the day before.

  
"Steel and flint.. . maybe I could cut some pieces from the lander and bend them into an arc, attach the stone. Haven't seen any flint, though."

  
"You are planning for the long haul, aren't you?" Ayrlyn fed more of the tinder into the small flickering flames, flames duller than her flaming hair.

  
"Not so long. Three boxes of matches might last a local year if we used only one a day. We don't exactly have a chemical-processing industry here." Nylan picked up a plastic bucket, checking the scrapes on the gray material, then began to walk toward the stream.

  
"Does he sleep?" Saryn limped toward the fire that Ayrlyn fed, leaning heavily on the rough staff that allowed her to avoid putting too much weight on the hardened foam cast around her broken right leg.

  
"Neither he nor the captain seem to need much." Ayrlyn yawned.

  
"Where's the captain?"

  
"In number two with Merrin, sorting through the grow-paks," answered the engineer, returning with a full bucket of water. "She wants to get started on laying out fields and planting."

  
"We've been down less than an eight-day, and she wants us to be field hands?" asked Saryn.

  
"What about Gerlich? Where's he gone?" inquired Ayrlyn.

  
"He's got the one bow and the arrows-out hunting. He claims there's something like a wild boar out there." Nylan gave a short laugh.

  
Saryn shook her head.

  
The captain and the junior officer emerged from the shell of lander two and walked toward the fire. Mertin ducked to avoid the line of smoke that seemed almost to seek his face.

  
From lander four emerged Fierral. The red-haired marine commander and the two ships' officers converged on the fire, stopping well back.

  
"Why the fire?" asked Fierral. "We've still got firm cells."

  
"Cooking. We're saving the cells for things we can't duplicate locally," answered Ryba.

  
"Such as?"

  
Two more marines eased up toward the fire.

  
"Powering the combat laser, if we need to." Ryba adjusted the makeshift hairband to keep the short and thick black hair totally away from her face.

  
Nylan emptied half the water into the kettle and swung it out over the fire on the makeshift crane. He frowned as he set aside the bucket.

  
"You don't approve, Ser Engineer?"

  
"I hope we can avoid that. The combat laser gobbles power. The more power we can use for constructive purposes the better."

  
"I take it you have some ideas?"

  
Nylan stood. "I've been studying the geology. There's something that looks like black marble, except it's not. It's tougher, but it's not as hard as granite, and I hope it cuts more easily-with a laser."

  
"Houses?" asked Saryn.

  
The silver-haired man shook his head. "A tower, something like that. It makes more sense. That's what I staked out-good solid footings there."

  
"How long 'fore we start building something, ser?" asked one of the younger marines standing behind Ayrlyn.

  
"That's not the first priority," snapped Ryba. "The lander shells are fine for now. What we need to get in the ground is food. We also need to survey the forest and the meadow here to see what's likely to be edible, while we still have the analyzer and some power."

  
Nylan nodded.

  
"And... we'll still need timber of some sort to roof, floor, and brace the engineer's tower."

  
"We might not need planks except for flooring and bracing," Nylan volunteered. "There's a dark gray slate that splits into sheets pretty easily."

  
"Good ... I think."

  
"What's in the emergency grow-paks?" Saryn leaned back on the flat stone, stretching out the leg with the cast.

  
"Maize, although I don't know about whether the stream will supply enough water ... potatoes that ought to do well in a cold climate, some high-protein beans."

  
"Get the potatoes in first," suggested Nylan.

  
"Potatoes?" asked Mertin, stepping up beside Ryba.

  
"They grow just about anywhere, and we could exist on them with only a few supplements. The ground seems all right." The engineer poured the rest of the water from the bucket into the pot. "They keep better than some of the other plants, although you could dry and grind the maize into a flour, I think."

  
"Seems?" asked Saryn.

  
Nylan shrugged. "It might take generations to determine if all the trace elements are there, but I'd bet they are."

  
Ryba looked at him.

  
"If it's not perfectly planoformed, it's a natural duplicate of a hot humanoid world. It feels right."

  
"Are we going to rely on feel?"

  
"We'd better figure out something to rely on besides high technology that won't be around much longer."

 
 
"Feel.. ." Ryba frowned. "Let's finish eating and get to work on those fields. The growing season can't be very long here. Once we get everything we can planted, then we'll worry about game and timber and longer-range priorities."

  
Fierral nodded, stiffly, like the marine force leader she remained.

  
Saryn straightened on the rock where she sat and winced.

  
Nylan glanced uphill across the starflower-strewn grass and bushes-and rocks-to the staked outline of the foundations of what he hoped would be a tower... if they could get to it. If the locals didn't show up in force first... If... He clamped his lips together, ignoring the sidelong look from Ryba.

VIII

THE EARLY-MORNING sun glared out of the blue-green sky and bathed the sloping meadow, and the figures who toiled there, glinting off the few exposed metal sections of the lander shells and off the small spring that fed the stream.

  
Ryba stood above it all, on the top of the rocky ledges above the dampness of the meadows in the wind that blew steadily from the northwest. With her stood Fierral and two marines. All four looked to the northeast, down the rocky ridge line.

  
"There ... you can see them, at the base of the ridge there. It's almost as good as a road." Fierral pointed. "They're pretty clearly headed here. And there are a lot of them."

  
"I'd expected a little more time before anyone found us. I wonder how they knew." Ryba frowned, then shrugged. "I suppose that's not the issue now,"

  
"What do you want us to do?" asked the blue-eyed force leader.

  
"Act innocent. Keep the sentries in place and use the mirrors to signal me when they get close. Position the rifles there in the rocks where you can sweep them if you have to. Try not to use them until you really have to. I'd rather save the ammunition. Make sure the rest of the marines have their sidearms with them. We only have the pair of rifles?"

  
"Just the two," Fierral affirmed.

  
"Give one to each of your best snipers-besides you- and put one where you are and the other on the far end of that downhill clump of rocks."

  
"Not a bad cross fire." The force leader nodded.

  
"Then set up the rest of the marines where they can take cover quickly if they have to. They might have archers or something."

  
"I didn't see anything like that through the glasses," Fierral said slowly. "You don't think they're peaceful?"

  
"With more than fifty horses in a primitive culture? That's the equivalent of a half-dozen mirror towers." Ryba snorted. "No ... they're not peaceful, but we'll pretend they are, and I'm betting they'll be trying for the same impression, too."

  
Fierral raised her eyebrows, just as flaming red as her hair, but said nothing and waited for Ryba to explain.

  
"It's simple. The way the approach runs here, you have to come up the ridge, and that's exposed. Nylan was right. It's a good spot for a tower-or a castle. The rocks behind there are too sharp to bring horses through, and too steep. So"-Ryba shrugged again-"without modern weapons, it would be hard to take. But first we have to survive to build it. Anyway, they'll pretend to come in peace, unless we attack first, just to get close, and they think we'll be drawn in."

  
"Men," laughed Fierral.

  
"They may be transparent, squad leader, but they're still dangerous." Ryba turned. "The engineer will be doing the prep work for his tower, and I'll keep a handful busy with the ditching. We might as well do something while we're waiting. It will be a while. They'll walk the horses up here so that they're fresh for the battle they're pretending they don't want. Try not to kill the horses. We'll need them."

  
"Besides you, who can ride?" asked Fierral.

  
"You'll all have to learn, sooner or later. This way, we won't have to buy mounts."

  
The other two marines looked from the hard face of their squad leader to the harder face of the captain.

IX

"LORD NESSIL, THE ang-the strangers are just over the rise, not more than twenty rods beyond the tips of the gray rocks." The armsman in brown leathers keeps his voice low and looks up to the hatchet-faced man in the heavy purple cloak. Blotches of moisture have soaked through the armsman's leather trousers, and green smears attest to his crawling through underbrush and grass.

  
Lord Nessil brushes back a long lock of silver and black hair, then smiles. "Are they as attractive as the screeing glass shows?"

  
"Pardoning Your Grace, but I wasn't looking at them that way." The armsman's eyes flicker to his right as another trooper leads his horse back to him. "They don't seem bothered by the chill. They wear light garments, like they were in Lydiar in midsummer, but I wasn't looking beyond the clothes, more for blades, and only the black-haired wench bears one. A pair she has."

  
"A pair of what?" asks Nessil.

  
Lettar looks down at the grass.

  
"For that, Lettar, you shall have one to enjoy." Nessil laughs softly. "Women warriors, and only one has a blade. I shall enjoy this." He turns toward the wizard in white. "What do your arts show, Wizard?"

  
"There are less than a score that I can scree there, eighteen in all, and but three men. They bear some strange devices that radiate some small measure of order, and others that bear some measure of chaos. They have set up a spindly windmill that will be ripped apart in the first good wind." Hissl inclines his head.

  
"What would you have us do, Wizard?"