Читать книгу Lord of a Thousand Sun: Space Stories of Poul Anderson (Illustrated) - Poul Anderson - Страница 11

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The flagship-spaceboat slanted into the moon's atmosphere with a whoop and a holler, blazed across the ragged surface, and lowered outside the great dome of Ganymede City. The clumsy hulks behind her wallowed after at a more leisurely pace.

Lacking spacesuits, the amazons were faced with a certain problem of entry. Dyann hovered over the spaceport and opened her disintegrators full blast. The port disappeared in a sudden tornado of boiling rock and leaping blue fires. When she had sunk a fifty-foot pit, she went down into it, hung before the side of it facing the city, and narrowed the dis-beam to a drill. In moments she had cut a tunnel through to the lower levels of the city.

Air began streaming out, ghost-white with freezing water vapor, but it would take quite a few minutes for the pressure within to fall dangerously low. Meanwhile Dyann sailed blithely through her tunnel, disintegrated various walls and bulkheads to clear a landing space, and set down amid the ruins of the city's factory level.

"All out!" she cried. "Hai, Kathantuma!"

Ray buckled on his helmet with shaking fingers, drew his sword, and followed her out the airlock, more because of the press of bodies behind than from any desire for glory. In fact, he admitted to himself, he was scared witless. Only Urushkidan stayed behind—the lucky devil.

The rest of the barbarian fleet streamed in one by one, landing clumsily and discharging their clamorous hordes. When the clear area was filled, they landed on top of each other and the armored warriors jumped down in a flash of edged metal. After they were all in, Urushkidan projected a beam and melted the passageway shut against the escape of air and heat. Also, thought Ray sickly, against a quick retreat.

"Hoo, hah!" Dyann's sword shrieked in the air above the helmeted heads of her milling army. She started down the nearest corridor, running and bounding and whooping. The amazons were hard on her heels, and the racket of clashing armor and girlish voices was shattering.

Up a long staircase, five steps at a time, into the hall beyond that, spilling out over a broad plaza—

A machine gun raved and Ray saw three Centaurians tumble to the floor. As he dove for it himself, he looked across the square and into the muzzle of the thing where it sat in one of the branch corridors. There might be only a skeleton garrison left in the city but it had reacted with terrifying swiftness. Ray tried to dig through the metal floorplates.

The air was suddenly thick and whistling. A solid rain of spears and arrows loosed. It didn't leave much of the machine gun crew. One of the amazon officers—they had some notion of firearms—picked up the .50-caliber under one arm. When a squad of Jovian soldiers appeared down the hallway, she held it against her knee and used it tommy-gun style. It worked.

Ray was carried along by the tide. In this weird struggle, modern firearms weren't of decisive use. Boiling through the miles of gloomy hallways and narrow apartments, the fight was almost entirely hand-to-hand, and that was exactly what the Varannians loved.

Dyann vaulted over a row of bodies and hit a Jovian squad with all her mass and momentum. She trampled two men underfoot while her sword howled in a shearing arc around her. A Jovian grenadier hurled his pineapple in her direction. She snatched it out of the air and tossed it back. Wildly, he caught it and threw it again. Dyann laughed and pitched it once more—very shortly before it went off. Turning, she skewered one Jovian, kicked another in the belly, used her sword's guard as a knuckle-duster against a third, and cut down a fourth in almost the same motion. The squad broke up.

Ray saw an inviting door and scurried for it. There was a bed to hide under. Two Jovian soldiers came in at that moment, fleeing the barbarians.

Ray's helmet and cuirass were as good as a uniform, or he would have shouted "Hail, Wilder!" As it was, the nearest man lunged at him with a bayonet. Ray's sword clattered against the weapon, driving it briefly aside. The Jovian snarled and probed inward, but a bayonet is clumsy compared to a well-handled blade and Ray had done a little fencing. He beat the assault back and thrust under the fellow's guard.

The other man had been circling, trying to get in on the fun. Now he charged. Ray whirled to meet him and tripped on his scabbard. He clanged to the floor and the rushing Jovian tripped on him. Ray got on the man's back, pulled off his helmet, and beat his head against the floor.

Rising, he checked the two rifles. Empty—the Jovians must have used all their clips in an attempt to stem the Centaurian thrust, which explained their choice of cold steel against him. But they had full cartridge belts. Ray reloaded one of the guns and felt better.

Peering carefully out the door, he saw that the fight had moved somewhere else. He started back toward the ships, the safest place he could think of.

* * * * *

As he rounded a corner a tommy-gun blast nearly took his head off. He yelled, dropped to the floor just in time, and let the gun fall from his hands.

A hard boot slammed against his ribs. "Get up!"

He lurched to his feet and stared into the faces of a Jovian detachment, the black-clad elite guard of the dictator himself. Martin Wilder the Great huddled in their midst. Colonel Roshevsky-Feldkamp was at their head, in charge of Jupiter's home defense, Ray thought wildly, and tried to stretch his arms higher.

"Ballantyne!" The Jovian officer glared at him for a long moment. "So you are responsible."

"I had nothing to do with it, so help me I didn't," protested Ray between the clattering of his teeth.

"You brought these savages in, you and your damned faster-than-light engine. If it weren't for your hostage value, I'd shoot you now. As it is, I'll wait till later. March!"

They went carefully down the glutted hall-street. The Centaurians had been picking up souvenirs from every shop and apartment they passed. "Don't think this will accomplish anything," said Wilder pompously. "You may have driven us from our capital, but we have already called for help from the other cities—from the whole Jovian System. The fleet is on its way."

So the amazons had taken Ganymede City. And now they'd be too busy looting to think about counterattacks from outside. Ray groaned.

"We have to get out of here, sir," said Roshevsky-Feldkamp. "We don't want you to be caught in the fighting."

"No, no, that would never do," said Wilder quickly.

"There is a military airlock this way, with spacesuits. We can get out on the surface."

"I will strike a new medal," chattered the dictator. "The Defense of the Homeland Medal."

"And afterward we will take those ships." Roshevsky-Feldkamp's hard face lit with a terrible glee. "And then the stars are ours."

"Hoo-ah!"

The shout rang down the hallway. Ray saw a Centaurian band, staggering under armloads of assorted plunder, emerge from a side passage. The Jovians brought their rifles up.

Something like an atomic bomb hit the group from the rear. Dyann's war-cry shrieked above the sudden din. She hadn't been altogether a fool.

Ray was shoved back against the wall by the sudden whirlpool of struggling bodies. He ducked as a Varannian sword whistled overhead. Dyann was wading in among the Jovians, kicking, striking, hewing like a maniac. She split one enemy apart, pitched another into a third, turned around and chopped loose. Her warriors got to work at her side.

A panting Jovian backed up close to Ray, lifting his rifle anew to shoot down the bronze-haired girl. The Earthmen thoughtfully removed the soldier's pistol from its holster and shot him.

"My little hero!" cried Dyann happily. "I love you so much!" She beat down another man's gun and broke his head.

The fight ended. Most of the Jovians had simply been knocked galley-west and submitted in a stunned way to being bound and hoisted to Varannian shoulders. Ray had a glimpse of Martin Wilder the Great and Colonel Roshevsky-Feldkamp being dragged off by a squat and muscular amazon with a silly smirk on her sword-scarred face. They were destined for her harem, and he couldn't think of two people he'd rather have it happen to.

Only there were those Jovian ships—

Ray had no way, just then, of knowing that Urushkidan had prudently taken the spaceboat outside again and was using its long-range beams to disintegrate the fleet as it came down. He hummed an old Martian work song to himself as he did. There are times when even a philosopher must take measures.

* * * * *

Official banquets are notoriously dull affairs, and the present celebration was no different. That the Luna-based invaders had capitulated on hearing of the disaster at home, that a democratic government with U.N. membership had been set up for a permanently disarmed Jupiter, and that the stars were open to mankind, seemed to call forth only bigger and better platitudes.

Ray Ballantyne, drowsy with food and cocktails, nearly snowblind with white tablecloth, would have fallen asleep except for the fact that his shoes pinched him. So he listened with some surprise to the president of his alma mater telling what an outstanding student he had been. As a matter of fact, he recalled, he'd damn near been expelled.

Urushkidan, crammed into a Martian-designed tuxedo, smoked a thoughtful pipe at his right and made calculations on the tablecloth. Dyann Korlas, her shining hair braided around a stolen Jovian tiara, looked stunning in a low-cut evening gown on his left. The dagger at her waist was to set a new fashion on Earth, but there had been some confusion when she insisted on having Ormun the Terrible placed in front of her and grace said to the idol. Oh, well.

"—and this dauntless genius of science, whom his university is pleased to honor with a doctorate of law—"

She leaned over and whispered in his ear—it could only be heard for three yards around—"Ray, vat vill you do now?"

"I dunno," he murmured back. "I want to get a patent on that damn interstellar drive before Urushkidan does, but after that—well—"

"It vas a lot of fun vile it lasted, vasn't it?" Dyann's smile was wistful. "But I have been thinking, Ray. I am goin' back to Varann and carve me out a throne. You—vell, Ray, you are too fine and beautiful for such rough vork. You belon here, in the glamor and bright lights, not out vith a lot of coarse unruly vomen who might hurt you."

"You know," he said, "I think you've got something there."

"I vill alvays remember you," she said sentimentally. "Maybe some day ven ve are old, ve can meet again and bore the youth vith talk of our great days." She looked around. "If only ve could sneak out of here now and have a farevell party of our own—I know a bar—"

"Hmmm." Ray stroked his chin. "This calls for tactics. If we could sort of slump down in our chairs, as if we were tired—and Lord, I am!—and gradually sink out of sight, we could crawl under the table and through that door—"

As he crept from the hall, Ray heard Urushkidan, called on for a speech, begin the detailed exposition of his latest theory.