CHAPTER SIX
“Where are the balls, Jaf?” Wanliet asked as we trotted across the open square.
“Back in my room. Seemed safe enough. What in space is going on, Wanliet?” There was no doubt now, the shadow dirigible was pivoting to follow us, and now I could hear the murmur of its motors, even through their Mobahey muffling.
“But where?!”
“Oh, okay, follow me!” Now that I had a destination I broke into a full run, and hoped the old guy could keep up. I ducked under the overhanging earthen roof and we kept out of sight from the air all the way to the stables, where we entered from the back and passed on through to the rooms. As we turned the corridor to my room we saw Jedub and Lordano skulking from my room holding the treasure balls. The idiots were stealing them! Without even knowing what they were, just on general principal! Before I could hail them, much less kill them, Wanliet spoke up. “Good to see you boys are ahead of us! The bad guys are after us all, and the balls, so we’re gettin’ outta here. You two get some horses and head for the airstrip, and we’ll grab the rest of the gear and follow you!”
Being caught in the act the culprits were stunned and slightly ashamed at first, but they became very cooperative when they saw we seemed to be taken in by their ‘foresight’, and they skedaddled to the stable. Wanliet and I grabbed up my gear, and then as much of the two thieves’ gear as wouldn’t slow us too much, and we all hustled to the airstrip after pausing at the stable to load up and mount some stolen horses.
All the time I’d spent on a walking Mobahey horse had not prepared me for their gallop. To the familiar rocking and jittering my mount added a wild kind of pitching and yawing, like he was trying to buck me off, but didn’t have his heart in it. Only the terror and sheer exertion needed to stay aboard helped to quell the nausea that would surely have ensued. Also, I still hadn’t pissed and was feeling it was only a matter of time until something burst out of me after one of the rougher bounces.
Somehow the black dirigible didn’t locate us until long after we’d left the shelter of the town and had reached the edge of airfield, but then the craft spun toward us like a compass needle. We stumbled into a vacant dirigible, cast loose the lines and with a roar we were aloft. Because the ship hadn’t really been prepared for us (not to be too coy about it, we stole it), it didn’t have enough ballast and our ascent was more of a sustained lurch. Now, since I had nothing much to do beyond holding on and clamping my bladder, the booze mixed with the motion and I began to feel seriously ill. I chose this time to seek enlightenment of Wanliet, who was trying to control the airship’s gallop. A nice thing about dirigibles is that they allow you to chat while you’re racing away, because nothing really happens with too terribly much suddenness. Usually, anyway – just now I considered I might just hang on the open door and let whatever fly into the night, but the way we were bucking and wasn’t sure I wouldn’t end up airborne too.
With the urgency of a man who wants desperately to unload some bodily fluids I demanded, “Okay, here we are, here the balls are. Dammit, tell me, what the hell’s going on!? Who uses a black dirigible to pursue a man, after all? And what’s with the balls?!”
“Jaf, before you got involved I went to a lot of people, looking for backers. I tried to be careful about them, because what’s to keep somebody from making me disappear in the desert after we’d found what we came for?
“Still, no matter how careful are the earfuls you parcel out, you can’t control what happens with the information. Information wants to be known. I believe that somehow somebody guessed what and where these two balls were, and sold the information to some bad people. It’s time for the balls to be discovered, and I just hoped it wasn’t the bad guys who’d find them. It was a chance that was always out there.
“Now, Jaf, tell me about the man, this Mr. Stanley as you call him, who hired you, and told you about me.” Wanliet was nervous now, I could tell, as he was talking without rhymes – still a lot of nonsense, but at least no rhymes.
“Tallish, thin, pale, evil grin at odd times, sardonic smirk at others -- and one eye has a pupil that won’t contract. When the light’s right, or wrong, he looks really evil. The rest of the time he’s just sinister.”
Wanliet sat on the captain’s chair and buried his face in one hand, then, after his fingers pushed under his hat and combed through his long hair, he looked up at me. “Does the name ‘Basoolah’ mean anything to you?”
“Oh shit. Oh no. Oh shit. Oh no. Please don’t tell me that I’ve got the most relentless and vindictive man in the civilized universe thinking I’ve tried to cheat him!” My Mr. Stanley/Basoolah had claws and teeth – in fact, he was famous for them. In second fact, I could have left out the ‘civilized’ part of the universe – his methods were barbaric. You may wonder how it was I didn’t know what Basoolah looked like, hadn’t recognized him. Fact was, most who saw him didn’t live to tell.
W looked at me, pointedly mute.
“And don’t tell me that the only way off this planet is past him!” More silence. Then, “Jaf, have you ever heard of the Valkyries of Andromeda?”
In my churning gut arose a small island of hope that Basoolah would end the terror soon. I’d heard the expression before about being hounded by the Valkyries of Andromeda, but never had I lived the headlong flight from tireless pursuit that the phrase implied. My gut was boiling so fiercely that my greatest hope was that I would die soon, without too much more terror, that my agony would be brief. Whether he caught me now or later, Basoolah would see to it that the rest of my life would be filled with pain and panic. At least if he shot us down the painful, terrible part of my existence would at least be brief. Somehow, despite our bouncing and jouncing around, just then seemed the time to work my way into the little closeted head on the airship. I figured that if I was going to be dying soon I didn’t want to do it in my own stink.
But like a Mobahey rat-mole, life wants to live, so up we soared as my guts threatened to plop into the toilet, above Basoolah’s craft, and now that we’d reached cruising altitude Wanliet aimed us at the spaceport with the muffled engines wide open. When left the head and my eyes stopped rolling in my skull I looked back and saw that the black dirigible had stopped gaining on us; when I looked down I saw also that we hadn’t moved away from the airfield. There it was, directly below us, the wind roaring past the cabin, but we seemed to be hovering. “There’s a headwind up here, we have to fly as fast as we can to stay in one place!” Wanliet turned away from the controls and shouted over the noise.
“What choices do we have?” I bellowed. “Ahead is where our ship is, and it’s only twenty klicks to the spaceport. You don’t know a shortcut, do you?” I asked sarcastically. “Or maybe we could dump some more ballast!” I eyed Lordano and Jedub.
“You can’t blame them for trying to steal the treasure, even if they don’t know why it’s valuable. You’d’a done the same thing. In fact, you were doing the same thing! Think about flying for now, okay Jaf? We’re nose into the wind; any turns and we’re likely to go backwards.” Speaking of backward, I looked back and saw a wondrous sight – Basoolah’s dirigible was on fire! But wait – it was also getting closer, quickly! What the …
“W, do these things have rocket engines?”
“Don’t be stupid, Jaf. Some have jets, but for emergencies only.”
“I think this qualifies!” Spying a shielded switch I flipped up the cover and pressed the red button; I guessed it was either jets or self-destruct, and right then either was okay. The floor lurched forward and I tumbled back on my ass, cursing, but we were moving now, I knew.
“Jaf, do you suppose it’s calmer on the down low? Basoolah’s above us now, and he’s having a slow go of it, so I think we’d have to skim the ground to have a chance, use the ground effects, but then any little downdraft will pancake us. I don’t like it. And there’s not a cloud we could ride, no place to hide.”
I scanned the heavens above and saw Wanliet was right. “Clouds not only
in heaven are being,” offered Lordano, arms still wrapping a ball. I looked where he pointed with his chin and saw the smear on the horizon, moving in swiftly. “Can we use that, Wanliet? Looks like a dust storm of some kind on our flank! At least the wind won’t be coming from straight ahead!”
“That, Jaf, is the kind of wind that skins dirigibles, if you’re not lucky. That’s also why I don’t like dirigibles in the desert!” But down we dove anyway, moving sideways to get around the front, as the black torpedo maneuvered behind us. It was all very strange – it was like space, because it was three-dimensional, and slow like a dream, and split-second reflexes counted for nothing compared to guts and gusts and the tactics of luck.
Wanliet’s ploy worked, because eventually we got around the dust and Basoolah didn’t, at least as far as we could tell just then, and after a long nerve-wracking stretch during which we kept losing altitude we made it to the spaceport, skimming so low at the end we were actually skidding the gondola off dunetops. Out we tumbled and scampered to my spaceship. I glanced back at our dirigible and saw the silvery skin was now blotchy and blackened from the scouring of the sandstorm, exactly as Wanliet had warned. I shuddered as I thought how close we’d come to catastrophe.
But we weren’t clear yet. We all hopped in my ship, got in and lashed down everything as I fired up the pumps and began the warmup cycle. While we were doing that Basoolah showed up, a rooster-tail of dust rising behind his ship as it slewed to a slow-motion stop, and then his crew sprinted from the gondola to his ship, which was black of course.
This was going to be close. I feared that, just as his dirigible seemed faster than ours, so his space ship would be too. Basoolah could well afford the bestest and fastest. And I knew I couldn’t outrun blasters in any case. Our wormhole jump was going to have to be rushed a bit, or a lot, more like.
The gantry laid us on the rails and the moment the engines were hot enough to avoid stalling I had the magrails shoot us up. Once I could overcome the gees I got my hands on the controls and while maneuvering us through the moons with one hand I was entering our jump parameters with the other. Hell, if I hadn’t had my boots on my toes would have been busy too.
Just as we cleared the first moons the ship shuddered as an explosion rocked us, throwing Lordano and Jedub together, and where the balls touched I saw a spark or a glow. In the aft viewscreen I saw the outline of a black ship, its glowing exhausts silhouetting a slowly-swelling pursuing shadow. Another blast would be coming any moment, and this one likely wouldn’t miss. I had no choice. Ready or not, here we jumped.