Starfist: Hangfire (29 page)

Crouching as low as he could get, he pulled Katie into some nearby shrubs. They plowed through and out the other side into a quiet cul-de-sac.

Behind them someone was climbing the fence. Then all sound was drowned out in the torrential downpour. "Let's go!" Claypoole shouted into Katie's ear. They ran between two buildings and into the street. Water poured through the gutters like a fast mountain stream, and their feet made big splashes in the puddles. The rain was coming down so hard now the air was full of spray, which limited visibility almost as much as a thick fog. Breathing was difficult. Gasping heavily, they stumbled up the street.

A car roared down on them out of the roaring mist, its headlights flowing only dimly through the curtain of water. "Oh, hell," Claypoole muttered, and pulled out his pistol. The car almost ran the two down before the driver saw them and hit the brakes. The machine fishtailed and slid down the street sideways, its tires throwing up a bow wave as it came on, slewing to a complete stop only centimeters from where the fugitives stood frozen in their tracks.

"Get in here!" Grace screamed.

With the last of his strength, Claypoole shoved Katie in through the passenger's door and dived in behind her. Grace spun the wheel and gunned the engine as she turned the car around. They roared back up the street. She stopped before entering the main street to check traffic, and when she pressed the accelerator, the wheels spun helplessly on the rain-slick pavement. Something went Thwank! in the back of the car, and Grace put the car into four-wheel-drive. They shot out into traffic, narrowly missing an oncoming truck.

"They're everywhere!" Grace screamed. "I don't know how you made it!" A heavy object bounced off the right fender, slammed into the windshield and thudded over the roof. In the instant it was visible, Claypoole was horrified to see they'd hit someone. "Serves the dumb shit right!" Grace shouted. They were thrown left, then right, then left, as Grace took corners on two wheels. She reached a major road and mashed the accelerator to the floor, throwing her passengers back into their seats.

"You gotta slow down!" Claypoole screamed. "How can you see anything in this rain!"

"I know where I am!" Grace shouted over the roaring of the engine.

The rain stopped again. They were back on the main road leading into Center City. Grace braked suddenly and swerved down a side street. "We can't go through Center City, not at this hour! Besides, they'll have roadblocks up. Hang on!" Skillfully, Grace guided the cab down narrow streets, more like alleys. Waves of standing rainwater flew up from under their tires as they roared through the night. She pumped the brakes at last. "Get ready!" she shouted "This is Franklin Boulevard coming up. It's two kilometers from here to the river. I'm gonna make it as fast as this crate'll fly! If they've set up roadblocks, we'll have to run 'em!" She stopped just off the main road, revving her engine. Claypoole looked out the back window. Way behind them he could see the bouncing lights of another vehicle, coming on fast.

"Okay, Grace, go for it! We're being followed! How ya doing?" Katie nodded that she was all right.

Claypoole took her hand and kissed her. "Katie, I gotta ask you something. Will you—" His question broke off as Grace stepped hard on the accelerator and they shot out into the early evening traffic on Franklin Boulevard. One hundred, 110, 115, 120 kilometers per hour; the speedometer needle crept up and to the right.

"Pray the rain holds off!" Grace shouted, maneuvering around the slower vehicles in front of them.

"Here!" She handed Claypoole a large pistol she'd been carrying under her left armpit. "I'll drive, you shoot!" The gun was a much larger version of the one O'Mol had given him. Carefully, he eased back the slide just far enough to see if there was a round in the chamber. He was rewarded by the bright gleam of a brass cartridge. He checked for a safety. There was none, just a decocking lever. He made sure it was in the up position.

Behind them, but not that far away, another vehicle weaved in and out of the traffic. Behind that one, two more bobbed along at top speed.

Grace's cab boasted a sunroof over the passenger compartment. Claypoole opened it and stood up, bracing himself with his legs. He held the big pistol in both hands and used the roof to steady his aim. As soon as the lead vehicle appeared to be within range, he squeezed the trigger. The gun went off with such a flash, Claypoole was almost blinded, and the recoil flung both his arms upward. He held on to the pistol only because he was too surprised to release his grip. But that first bullet had a devastating effect as it smashed through the driver's side of the pursuer's windshield. The car abruptly swerved into the back of a slower vehicle, throwing it out of control too. As both spun around, other vehicles got involved, until several sat smoking and blocking the thoroughfare. By the time the other two following cars were through the mess, Grace was already several blocks ahead of them and pulling away rapidly.

"I think we'll make it!" she screamed. Claypoole, his torso sticking out through the sunroof, couldn't hear her, but it didn't make any difference. With that monster pistol in his hands, he wasn't afraid of anyone.

Another car roared out from a side street not more than fifteen meters behind them! Bullets smacked into Grace's cab and whizzed by Claypoole's head. Instinctively, he ducked back inside. The rear window had been shot out in the fusillade. Katie, crouched down on the floor, screamed, "Get down!

They're shooting!"

The new car managed to pull up alongside them, and a hail of bullets smashed through the right side of the cab. Claypoole covered Katie with his own body. Then the rain came down in sheets again, and the other car slammed at full speed into the back of a tour bus that had slowed down because of the sudden reduction in visibility.

"Anybody hit?" Claypoole asked. Nobody said anything.

Grace sped ahead of the wreck and flew into a wall of water as thick as smoke. They could feel a concussion behind them although they couldn't see the wreck through the rain. "Fuel cells must've ignited!" Grace shouted. So much for keeping the tourists untroubled by "internal disciplinary matters" on Havanagas, Claypoole thought. He pressed a button and the sunroof closed. The floor of the passenger compartment was ankle deep in rainwater.

Suddenly, they stopped. "We're here!" Grace shouted. "Get out and down to the river! Quick, gimme my gun back!" She took the pistol and slid out of the driver's door. Claypoole dragged Katie out the passenger's side. Grace leaned over the hood of her cab and leveled the pistol in the direction they had just come. "Run to the boat! I'll cover you!"

The rain stopped again. In the silence, his voice sounded loud "You don't have to," Claypoole shouted.

"We have plenty of firepower! Come on, Grace, don't stay here!" She half turned and pointed at her side. Claypoole was horrified to see a large stain spreading there. She'd been hit.

Claypoole dragged Katie down a flight of stairs to the water's edge and they ran along the dock.

Behind them they could hear the deep-throated roar of Grace's pistol. Other shots answered it.

"Come on! Come on!" Pasquin shouted. Already O'Mol was at the helm, revving the hydrofoil's engines. Dean rushed to help Katie aboard as little flashes of light winked at them from the street.

Pasquin opened up with his blaster. The shooting ceased abruptly. Pasquin fired several more bursts.

Something exploded above them. In the orange glow of the fire, Pasquin could make out figures clambering down the stairs from the street level. He flamed them with two quick shots.

O'Mol guided the hydrofoil out into midstream and then opened up the engines to full throttle. Pasquin and Dean, joined now by Claypoole with his blaster, sent bolts into the docks as they receded behind them. Things began exploding back there.

"Hey, lighten up!" O'Mol shouted. "I may own that property someday!"

"We are ‘lightening up’!" Dean screamed, and fired another burst back at the docks. A boat in its slip began to burn.

"Hoohaa! If you, absolutely, positively must have it destroyed overnight," Pasquin shouted.

Claypoole was silent, thinking about Grace. It started raining again, and it rained all the way to the islands.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The maps of the priests and bureaucrats called it Sacred Spring Five. The farmers, husbandmen, and tradesmen who lived there called it Hole in the Mud. The spring after which the village was named burbled out of the rock near the base of a cliff at the foot of the mountains. The water was sweet where it left the rock, but the land it flowed into was a shallow, flat-bottomed bowl, the remnant of an ancient impact crater, and it had poor drainage. The spring that gave the village its name, and several other springs, poured more water into the bowl than could conveniently drain away. The ground was sodden.

The central area of the bowl, a broad ring around the badly eroded central peak, was covered with sluggish water ideal for growing rice without dikes or terraces. The rest of the ten-kilometer-wide bowl was too wet for growing other crops.

The village itself, forty-odd structures not counting fowl houses, was built on pilings along the northeastern edge of the rice waters. Its "streets" were simple walkways of board that rested on top of the mud. It was important that the streets be easy to move. The ground was soft and soggy to such a great depth that the pilings on which the houses and commercial buildings were erected regularly sank and new pilings had to be placed for the houses and shops to be moved onto. No matter what the maps of the priests and bureaucrats said, Sacred Spring Five did not have a stable layout.

The people wore simple garb cut from cloth woven in mills in other parts of Kingdom. Their shoes were from the hides of kine raised in yet other regions. They kept their shoes in closets or chests where the constantly wet ground would not bring mildew and rot to them, and they wore the shoes only on those rare occasions when they left the village.

Early in its history, on orders from the priestly hierarchy, the farmers had valiantly attempted to raise sheep, but the wet ground rotted the sheeps' feet. Swine might have thrived in the bog of Sacred Spring Five, but too many of Kingdom's founders saw swine as unclean, so there were no swine to raise.

Instead, the husbandmen of Hole in the Mud raised ducks and geese. The ducks and geese required constant vigilance to keep them from eating the growing rice, which made it important to have a gaggle of goose-boys. The goose-boys, despite all strictures to the contrary, found ways to turn their herding into play rather than allow it to be the drudgery it would have been. The ducks and geese of Sacred Spring Five were known for their high-strung natures and the piquant flavor of their meat.

So it happened that it was a ten-year-old-goose-boy named Heronymous Blessed, delightedly engaged in stalking a duck that was stealing rice on the western side of the central peak, who was the first resident of Hole in the Mud to see the unexpected visitors.

Young Heronymous Blessed jumped when he heard a noise, a crack as if the sword of the Archangel Raphael had rent the air. Terrified, he looked toward the sound, expecting to see the Archangel himself coming to discipline a goose-boy for not obeying the strictures. Even the determined duck broke off its stalking of the rice to fly from this danger, but its clipped wings prevented it from rising into the air, and all it could do was plash along the water, crying waack and futilely beating its useless wings.

Heronymous saw the Archangel's chariot speeding through the air and quailed. He wanted to duck dawn, to hide behind something, but the grouse was too low to the ground and the ferns too thin to offer concealment. Wide-eyed, he watched the chariot as it slowed to touch land. The chariot was huge. If it hadn't been that of an Archangel, he would have thought it could not possibly land without sinking without a trace below the surface of the fen. It was only when it was close enough for him to see the chariot's immense size that Heronymous realized the chariot wasn't coming directly toward him; it was coming down more than half a kilometer to his south.

He dared to release the breath he hadn't realized he was holding and sucked in another. Perhaps one of the other goose-boys had drawn the Archangel's wrath. He offered up a quick prayer and vowed, should he be spared, to follow the strictures in the future.

The chariot did not sink into the fen. Instead it opened its front and four smaller chariots sped out of it and raced toward Hole in the Mud. The chariot immediately levitated and flew off from whence it came.

"No!" Heronymous shrilled. He sobbed as he ran toward his home, convinced that vengeful Yahweh was sending Archangels or even Dominions to punish his family for his transgressions.

Fortunately for him, he ran around the rice paddy rather than through it. By the time he came in sight of the village of Sacred Spring Five, its buildings were just charred and shattered fragments floating on top of the mud. All that remained of its people were pitted bones that steamed where bits of flesh exposed to the air still bubbled. The chariots were gone. Much later Heronymous learned that, once the destruction of the village was complete, the chariots had zigzagged back across the rice paddies seeking out and killing what farmers and goose-boys they could find before their shuttle returned to whisk them away.

It took the rest of that day for Heronymous Blessed and the three other goose-boys who were the only survivors of the attack to come out of hiding and find each other. It was another day before the frightened boys could accept that they truly were the only survivors. They settled down to wait for an adult to come to their succor.

Nearly a hundred bishops, ayatollahs, chief rabbis, and metropolitans gathered in the sanctuary of Mount Temple in the heart of Haven. It was the only holy place on all of Kingdom revered by all the denominations that had settled the world—its site marked the landing place of the first starship's colonists. When there was a problem that affected all, the spiritual leaders had to meet in a place none considered a Palace of Shaitan.