For Love and Glory

XXXIV

At first the aircraft shone above the sea so much like a star that she felt something catch at her throat. Freydis was beautiful in the morning and evening skies of Asborg, but on Freydis itself there was never a glimpse of the sister planet, nor of anything in the heavens other than a vague sun-disc when clouds thinned to an overcast. Suddenly, sharply, a longing seized her for the cool green hills of home.

She thrust it away. Ridiculous. She’d had three months in them after her return from Jonna—when she wasn’t elsewhere boating or skiing or among the pleasures of the cities—and then barely as many weeks at New Halla and here. And right now she had a life to save.

If she could.

Recognizing the approaching object for what it was, she turned and trotted off the headland toward the landing strip. At her back, the ocean murmured against cliffs. It glimmered yellowish-green close in, darkened to purple farther out. A storm yonder hulked black and lightning-streaked, but overhead and eastward stretched silver-gray blankness. Before her rose forest, a wall of great boles, vines, brakes, foliage in hues of russet and umber, brilliant blossoms, shadowful depths. It dwarfed the clearing where the Susaian compound stood. The multitudinous smells of it lay heavy in the heat and damp.

Long, limber bodies were bounding from the huts. Glabrous hides sheened in a variety of colors; the New Hallan colonists were from many different ancestral regions, alike only in their faith and hopes. Several still clutched tools or instruments in their delicate hands. Excitement often spread with explosive speed through beings so directly perceptive of emotions. Not that it wasn’t justified. Lissa’s own eagerness had driven her onto the promontory to stare southwestward, once the curt acknowledgment came that help was on its way.

She reached the strip. It lay bare, soil baked bricklike. A hangar of wood and thatch gaped empty. The camp’s flyer had borne casualties away to medical care or eventual cremation, after leaving off the uninjured here. Impatient, she squinted up. “C’mon, move it,” she muttered. “What’re you dawdling for?” A drop of sweat got past her brows, into an eye. It stung. She spoke a picturesque oath.

Coppergold arrived and joined her. The botanist had thought to bring a translator. It rendered rustles, hisses, purrs into Anglay. “That is a cautious pilot, honored one.”

Lissa replied in her language, which the Susaian understood though unable to pronounce it intelligibly. “Well, I suppose this area is new to him, and he doesn’t want the airs to play some trick that catches him off guard. I’ve learned to fly warily myself.” She begrudged the admission, and knew that Coppergold felt that she did.

However, fairness compelled. She mustn’t lose her temper, her judgment, when she had Orichalc to save. The fact was that Freydis remained an abiding place of mysteries, and within some of them were deathtraps.

A whole planet, after all, she thought. (How often had she thought the same, here and elsewhere?) Not the global hell of jungle and swamp that most people imagined; no, as diverse as Asborg. But dear Asborg was well-nigh another Earth, renewed and again virginal. Humans soon made it theirs, and in its turn it claimed them for itself. Throughout the centuries that followed, few ever cared to set foot on Freydis, and none to make a home there. Occasional explorers: now and then a handful of scientists—until damned, destroying Venusberg Enterprises sprang up—scant wonder that most was still Mundus Incognitus, that she herself was more familiar with several planets parsecs away.

“Hs-s-s, he descends!” Coppergold exclaimed. She laid her blunt-snouted head on Lissa’s shoulder, an oddly mothering gesture. Glancing about, the human looked into big eyes that were not really onyx, being so warm. “Take heart, honored one. Our waiting time has been less than it seemed; observe your chrono. Surely Orichalc lives and you will find him soon enough.”

Could any human have been quite that sympathetic, in quite that way? “May it be, may it be,” Lissa half prayed. “For your sakes too, and mainly.”

Coppergold withdrew a few centimeters. “His loss would indeed strike a blow deep into us.” The trans failed to convey a gravity at which Lissa could well guess. “He is more than a symbol, the hero who won our new home for us. He has become a leader, in ways that I fear we cannot fully explain to your kind. Yet we, like you, would grieve most over the passing of a friend.”

Side by side, surrounded now by the rest, they gazed back aloft. The teardrop shape had ceased to hover and was bound slowly down. Landing gear made contact. Through the silence that followed, the nearby screech of a leatherwing and the distant roar of a deimosauroid sounded as insolently loud as the wild blossoms were gaudy.

Lissa advanced to meet the pilot. He slid a hatch aside and sprang to the ground. For a moment they stood motionless.

He was big, muscular, coverall open halfway down the front. The head was round, rugged-faced, blue-eyed, the brown hair less thick on it than on the bare chest. Amazement paralyzed her.

He grinned and offered a hand. “Greeting, milady Windholm,” he said. “I’ve waited a spell for this.”

Her tongue unlocked. “You’re… Torben Hebo,” she whispered.

“Last time I looked, I was.”

“But, but we called Venusberg headquarters—asking for help—do you work for them? I had no idea.”

“Not for them,” he said. “I pretty much am Venusberg. I haven’t publicized it, but I am, as you’d’ve found out if you’d inquired. Me and my old partner Dzesi of Rikha. You remember her, don’t you?”

She could not have foreseen the disappointment, almost dismay that shocked through her. Nor did she quite understand. The hand she had reached toward his dropped to her side. “I can’t believe—If you’re the head of that thing, you’d come yourself?”

“That’s exactly how come I can take off on short notice, or do whatever else I jolly well please.”

“But why? Somebody who knows the search area, has the skills, that, that’s what we need.”

He scowled. She saw him curb the temper she recalled. “Look,” he growled, “Forholt Station is ours, a Venusberg base on this continent, right? I helped start it up, bossing the job in person. I’ve scrambled around in the environs. Also, just reminding you, I’ve kicked about in space for more hundreds of years and in more different places than anybody else you’ve ever met, lady.”

She swallowed. “Well, then, this is—good of you, C-captain Hebo.”

He unbent a little. “Too bad I couldn’t bring Dzesi along. She’s got a real nose for tracking. But she’s at company HQ on the far side of the planet, or rambling somewhere else and out of touch. Nobody knows much about the section we’ve got to ransack, but I can cope there as well as any other human and better than most.”

“It’s… lucky for us you happened to be when you were.”

Now he laughed. “Not by accident. When I heard you’d come home and were visiting on Freydis—news, in so tiny a population—of course I wanted to look you up. But word also was that you don’t like what Venusberg is doing. So I squatted me down at the station, where they can use some straightening out of their operations anyway, and watched for a chance. This was it.”

Somehow, that jolted her back to—if not hostility, then a certain coldness. “We can’t stand here gabbing,” she snapped. “A life is at stake. I have an outfit ready to go. Let me fetch it and we’ll be on our way. We haven’t too bloody much daylight left.”

An inward fraction of her wished flickeringly that matters were different. He had passed through her thoughts oftener during these years than she wanted to admit. And, yes, his treatment on Earth did seem to have taken at least the edges off the arrogance and crudity.

But he was still headlong and self-centered. He must be, or he’d not have been working toward the ruin of a world, merely to get rich.

If she was going to wish for the unreal, it should be that Freydis’s cloud cover didn’t blind landsats that would soon have found Orichalc on Asborg, or that the forest roof didn’t screen him from aerial search.

Hebo matched his stride to hers. Was he curious about this outpost? “I brought my own stuff, of course,” he said.

“Is it suitable for such an excursion?”

“I’ve spent more than four standard years on this world,” he answered, offended afresh. “What about you?”

She bridled in turn. “More than one fairly extensive and intensive expedition in the past. And I too have experience on several planets—including wilderness on Asborg. Some of it isn’t totally unlike what we’ll find today. We’ll take what I’ve packed. In flight I’ll inspect yours and rearrange it if need be.”

He clenched his fists and bit his lip. That was tactless, Lissa realized. Almost as tactless as he’s sometimes been toward me. But, oh, Orichalc—

Trying for peace, she blurted, “Have you any information about our wounded?”

“No,” said Hebo. “They hadn’t reached Forholt when I left.”

She had expected as much. Her group’s aircraft was capacious but slow, his the exact opposite. “I only know several Susaians and one human are hurt enough to require hospitalization, at least overnight,” he added, perhaps also wanting a truce. “How badly?”

“Uldor Enarsson worst. Not to the point of mortal danger. They gave him first aid in camp, and then I went along when our flyer picked them up and did some more for him on the way back here. But I’m afraid he’ll be out of action for weeks at best, and we may have to retire him from the project, return him to Asborg. Chaos take it!”

“A Windholm client, isn’t he?”

“Yes, though actually he’s been more on Freydis than off it for decades, independently surveying and researching.”

“I know. He did first-chop work before he… joined you.”

With an effort, she ignored that last. “My worry goes beyond a patron’s obligation. He was, is, a comrade—an equal, as far as I’m concerned. And close to indispensable. Without his information and skills, unless we can find a replacement, our progress will slow to a crawl.”

“Suitable for lizards, hey?” She glared. “Sorry, that was a bad joke, wasn’t it?” He didn’t sound overly apologetic. “But I do kind of resent the notion I’ve begun to hear about, that nobody but pure-hearted ecologists are fit to get the Susaians established. God damn it, that’s the business I’m in!”

“To get as rich as possible as fast as possible, and never mind what happens afterward,” burst from her.

“Do you expect me to work for nothing?”

They clamped silence upon themselves and stalked onward.