Heritage of Flight (18 page)

"Is its beacon working?” Rafe asked.

Ben Yehuda made fractional adjustments to his instruments. “The pod didn't land stable,” he thought aloud, “but those things are built to last. See that dish ... some beacons still have external components ... and I'm afraid this one's function—"

Light raved out from Rafe's blaster; ozone abraded their eyes and throats. “Not now it isn't,” he said.

"Talk about announcing ‘company coming,'” ben Yehuda observed. He had drawn his own weapon.

"The hatch ... it's heard us,” Lohr whispered, his voice cracking up an octave.

The hatch grated aside, then stopped halfway.

"That spar's blocking it,” Rafe said. “Good. We can pick our moment to let him out.” But what were they waiting for? They might as well get it over with. He sighed, aimed, and vaporized the spar. The hatch cracked open somewhat farther, but not widely enough to free the survivor.

He had a macabre fantasy of prying out whatever occupant was in there ... in whatever shape the crash had left him. Or she; but Rafe preferred to think of the Secess’ as male, not as a pilot like Pauli. As an enemy male. A war criminal. Maybe they should just seal up the pod and let the man die.

"Now what?” asked Lohr.

"Might be safer if we waited, let him wear himself down—"

The grating intensified, then was replaced first by pounding, then a long, long silence.

I don't want to have to go in there after him: that's certain to be a trick. Why'd I get stuck with leading this team anyhow?

"Ki-YAI!"

The roar made them all shout. Blaster fire lanced out wildly as the metal hatch buckled.

One bolt caught a dead tree leaning at an angle above the craft that had toppled it. Now it showered sparks and blazing twigs onto the man who half jumped, half tumbled from the pod. He started to fall, the practiced, graceful roll of someone long drilled in combat techniques, and brought up short with a gasp.

Blood-colored light and caked blood stained pale hair and paler skin. The Secess’ was tall, Rafe thought, probably a head taller than he. With muscles in proportion. Damn. He raised his blaster.

"Get him!” Lohr shouted.

The boy's shout brought the man's head up.

One hand on the rock he'd fallen against, the Secess’ pilot levered himself up. His eyes were wild and they didn't track. Concussion, maybe. He stared up into the night, squinting against the violent light of the blaster fire and the paler light of the two moons.

"Now, while he's off-balance,” Rafe hissed. “Move in. Lohr, you and Ari stay back."

Rafe stepped out into the circle of fierce light, prepared for anything but the look of incredulous, almost agonized joy on his enemy's face.

"Braethra!” he shouted, or something that sounded like it, and started forward exuberantly, his arms outstretched. Then he stumbled, toppling to his knees.

Rafe forced himself into the firelight. God, the man was fast. Even injured, he was faster than Rafe wanted to tangle with. He raised his blaster, bringing it into the other man's line of sight.

"Braethra?” The word was an accented whisper, pained and disappointed now. Abruptly he gasped, his hands clutching his temples. “Wyn, Fee, Hal. Kane! Ash?"

As ben Yehuda came up behind him, the pilot tried to whirl, to face two ways simultaneously. He screamed once in loss, confusion, and rejection before he collapsed again, his face in the dust. In that instant, they leapt forward and snapped binders on him. Then they rolled him over.

"Let's get some light on the subject,” Rafe ordered. The face, even with the blood, the bruises, and a terrible emptiness about it ... but that face was familiar. Add years to the severely-boned features, thin the hair somewhat, and he'd seen it in texts and recorded lectures.

"Halgerd of Freki,” he nodded. “Maybe forty years age difference ... but this man could be his twin brother..."

"He's not breathing.” Lohr's voice was shaky. Rafe scanned, and shook the man, then tilted back his head.

"Ari, help me with CPR.” He gestured with his chin at Lohr. Like the rest of them, Lohr knew how to restart a man's heart. Pauli had seen to that once they realized what stobors’ electrostatic fields could do to you. But
this
one ... they needed information too badly to trust this man to Lohr's shaky sense of justice. Rafe started breathing for the downed pilot, paused, then breathed again. Ari's hands worked on the man's chest. His young face was earnest with concentration.

Rafe nodded at David ben Yehuda, who started cautiously toward the pod. “I've got some time before you need me. Lohr, help me clear this debris away. I want to get in there, see if there's any information—” Or a functioning transmitter, Rafe thought, though Dave kept quiet on that subject.

As their enemy's chest began to rise and fall shallowly, Rafe sat back on his heels, breathing hard. Red and orange lights, like the swirls on wings, danced before his eyes.

"That ought to do it,” he muttered, and threw a blanket over the Secess'. They'd have to move him...

"Get him!” As the man spasmed in violent convulsions, Rafe launched himself forward. The Secess’ back arched, and his heels drummed on the rocky ground. Then he went alarmingly, bonelessly limp. Rafe was ready with an injection.

"Damn,” he said. “I wish Pryor—” then his jaw set as the pilot started struggling again. One hand tore free of the binders and cracked against a rock. Though the man cried out in pain, he scraped his wrist hard against stone until blood spurted from a severed artery.

Binding him again while keeping him from bleeding to death was a messy five minutes’ work. Afterward, Rafe sat back on his heels, hoping for a chance to rest. Why had the man deliberately slashed his wrist?

"Not again, dammit!” Rafe grunted as the man stopped breathing. He dived forward, tearing open the man's stained flightsuit and slapping an injection patch over his heart. How much adrenaline could it take before it gave out permanently? The pilot jolted and gasped, his eyes and lips snapping open briefly.

"What's that?"

Rafe bent over him, trying to get him to repeat his words.

Rapid footsteps brought him around on his knees, hand grabbing for his weapon.

"Steady, steady, it's not an attack,” said ben Yehuda “At least not yet."

"That bad?” asked Ari.

"I dismantled a working transmitter. Then Lohr here nosing around as usual, found this—” Lohr displayed what looked like any other of the miscellaneous batches of hardware that David generally lugged around. “Single burst distress beacon. Omnidirectional ... and fused upon transmission."

"How's he doing?"

"He's alive, for now. Essentially he's just ‘died’ four times, but I caught him. His heart's incredibly strong, or I couldn't have pulled him back. But we've got to get him to Pryor soon.”
For more reasons than one
. Ari saw the man shiver, and threw another blanket over him.

"Need ... to die. Let me—"

"So he knows our language.”
That means we don't dare talk more than we absolutely have to.
“You'll be cared for,” Rafe told him.

"Where?” Awareness kindled in the man's pale eyes. He glanced around, shook his head, and winced. An incongruous expression of panic and bereavement shadowed his bruised face still further.
"Braethra.
Where are they?"

"Looks like you're the only survivor. What's your name?” His voice went tense on the last words.

"You couldn't kill me quickly, then have done, could you?"

"What the hell does he think we are?” Ari snapped. “Butchers like on Wolf IV or Marduk?” The pilot's head jerked at the names of the blighted worlds. Let the civs suspect he'd been at either, and Pauli'd have a lynch mob to deal with along with a war criminal.

"Quiet, cub,” his father ordered.

"We don't do that, mister,” Rafe snapped. “Our commanding officer's got some questions to ask you, so we're taking you in. Meanwhile, you can start by telling us your name."

The Secessionist officer closed his eyes.

Ari laid a finger on his unbandaged wrist. He's wearing some sort of insignia. Here, I got it.” He placed a thin metal band on Rafe's palm. “Like a wrist ID. Numbers, some funny-looking symbol, and ‘Thorn'? Is that your name? What's the rest of it?"

The man turned his face away and refused to speak.

Hours later, he still kept silent, clamping his lips against water, ignoring his surroundings. Trying to die again, Rafe thought. What would make him want to die, and make him try so many times? He'd had a set of bad shocks, but there was no organic reason for him to die, not as far as Rafe could see. Rafe's medic friends called such conditions fascinomas—they were more figments of the imagination than clinical states; and he'd heard of one such ... if only he could remember its name! Maybe the man could travel; or maybe he'd die on the trip back. One thing, though, was certain.

"Dave, I want you to rig up some sort of recorder,” he ordered. “If he so much as burps in his sleep, I want to hear it."

If the pilot had survived a battle, that meant that Secess’ and Alliance still fought it out, that there were still survivors, still people capable of striding from star system to star system. Unfortunately, though, the transmitter Lohr had found meant that some of those survivors might come after this man, and find them too. Given what briefings had told Rafe about the Secess', he thought it was unlikely; but then, he'd never much trusted briefings. Why had there been a battle around here anyhow? Somehow, they'd have to get a coherent story out of this Thorn character.

Warmth against his side warned him that Lohr had crept closer. “Look at me,” Rafe warned him.

The boy's eyes were hot, and his face sullen with hard vindictiveness.

"Stop worrying that I'm going to turn ... what's that word you all use when you think I'm not listening ... feral? and kill the—” Lohr chose an epithet right out of the portside stews. “We need this bastard. But if he won't talk once we get him back home, I've got an idea. You just call me. Me and some of the littlests—we'll make him talk, all right."

12

Pauli rubbed the small of her back, then laced fingers over a belly she'd have sworn couldn't grow any bigger a month ago.
Kicking again, are you? You'd just better be a fighter
, she told the presence she was increasingly eager to see.

Lohr set a half-empty cup down on the table, and it jiggled from the tremor in his hands.

"What about Rafe and the others?” Pauli asked.

"They're on their way here,” he mumbled, rubbing his eyes. “They sent me on ahead.” For an instant, his eyes shone with a rage the whole colony had tried to ease. Then he grinned. “They didn't trust me, and I suppose"—he stretched and yawned—"they were right."

"Any idea when they'll get in? Can you remember anything else about the Secess’ pilot?” Pauli asked, as she'd asked every couple of minutes.

"No, I can't!” The boy's voice broke. When Pauli held out a hand, he buried his face in it, and curled up at her side.

"I've done all I can!” he whispered, and hid from the light, as he must have hidden many times before.
Have I made him remember darkness and how he'd failed at tasks no child should ever face?
Guilt entwined with her baby's kicking, and Pauli winced.

"Let me, Pauli,” Pryor said. “Lohr, think back. Just a little more, and you can sleep. Think back. Think back now, to when this Thorn came out of the pod. Describe it for us."

"What were those names he used?” Pauli interrupted, and Pryor pursed her lips.

"Strange ones. Wyn, Fee, Hal, Kane, Ash ... something like that. His wrist-ID said Thorn, too. And ‘gerd-something. Rafe said he looked like ‘gerd of someplace I didn't hear right. Only younger. I would have listened better, but they kept me too busy. Can I sleep now?"

"Get yourself some sleep now. And get
bathed
. Lohr, you've done a good job, a man's job, and we're all proud of you."

The boy stumbled from the dome. Painfully, Pauli rose and activated the comm. It hummed and crackled, hooting as she narrowed the frequency, boosted the gain to transmit into the mountains, and then, finally, hit the keys for cipher and direction scrambler.

"Yeager here. Report, please."

More humming, during which the medical officer settled in at Pauli's side.

"How are you doing?"

"Sick and tired of waiting,” Pauli snapped. She didn't know if she referred to her pregnancy or lag time while the evacuees decoded her transmission, or for Rafe to get back with his prisoner. She was as tired as Lohr of all of them.

"We copy you.”
Finally!
“Go ahead."

"Stay where you are for now."

A jumble of voices made Pauli grimace. “I know you hate it. But you're staying there."

More protests.

"I told you: stay. This isn't a debating society. Yeager, out."

Sighing, she shut down communications, walked over to another panel, untaped a stud, and examined it.

Scanners could pick up the screens set to repel stobor. But if she deactivated the shields, they'd have stobor in the fields devouring an entire spring's labor. She sighed again, and decided to hold off. More hurry up and wait, she thought with a grimace. The civs would already be mad enough at her order to stay in hiding up at the caves without her throwing away precious crops for a dubious gain in security. And, God, she didn't even want to think of how they'd react to the presence of an enemy fighter in their midst. She'd best postpone that little announcement for as long as possible.