“Uh...” Eric started, then said the first thing that popped into his mind: “I’d like to order a pizza, please, extra-large with—”
Dulane lifted a finger. “I knew you would show yourselves eventually. You have no place here, starmen! You will burn!"
He touched something in front of him and the holograms vanished.
“Sorry,” Kadelius squeaked.
They stood outside the operations building until Selva returned.
“I set the infrasound to activate on a one-hour delay,” she said. “If we ever need to come back here I can go in and disable it again. Let’s get moving.”
The three sailors they’d left with the boats were waiting by the shore, along with Two-Tooth, Cobb, and Wotoc’s squires. They returned to the Argo and put the Whispering Isle below the horizon by the time night fell.
“I told you that place is cursed,” Vonlal said as the men sat down for a meal. “I only hope you didn’t bring any of it back with you.”
Eric saw Kadelius slurping stew from a wooden bowl, he went over and took a seat on the crate beside him, munching on a pack of saltine crackers. “Want one?” He titled it towards him.
“Sure.” Kadelius popped a cracker in his mouth. His eyes went wide. “Such flavor!” He took another. “And the salt! Only fine meat has such salt! Are all starman foods like this?”
“To some degree, I suppose. You won’t find dead bugs or mouse droppings.”
When do you suppose we’ll get food like that?”
Eric sighed. “I don’t know. It’ll take a while, to get your societies ready.”
“But why aren’t we ready now?”
“You need time to adapt, is the thinking. We can’t just start introducing advanced technologies willy-nilly, because they’d probably be used to perpetrate worse evils than already exist. So we have to hold off for now, even if that means letting bad things happen that we could otherwise stop.”
“That sounds like something the Keepers would say.”
“I don’t agree with it, but,” he paused. “I can’t think of anything better. Do you remember when you first found out about starmen?”
“Before I met you?” Kadelius asked. “I’d seen the signs in the sky like everyone else, the moving stars and wisps of white flame.”
“Fusion torches, on spacecraft,” Eric explained.
“Then travelers and gryphon-riders came from the northeast with news men from other worlds had made landfall outside Arztillus—this was before Dulane declared the Panarchy.”
“Right. I believe the thinking was to make contact with the largest center of civilization first. Unfortunately, maybe we were part of the reason behind that. He saw our power, and felt threatened.”
“Is that so?”
“It could easily be. The number one driver of social change is technological change, and eventually we’ll be introducing a lot of new things at a far faster pace than humans first invented them. Your elites might not like that. It could see them thrown out of power.”
“And replaced with what? Starman viceroys?”
“No, of course not. We wouldn’t want to rule you as tyrants, we like to think ourselves more enlightened than that. The hope is you can adopt government structures like ours, where everyone votes for their leaders and no one’s basic needs go unmet. And one day, join our Stellar Compact on an equal footing and fly spaceships of your own.”
Kadelius took another slurp of stew. “I hope I’m alive to see that.”
“Me too.”
Eric was awoken by shouting above decks, and stumbled from his hammock to find Kadelius already up.
“What’s going on?” Eric asked.
“I think they’ve sighted something.”
Sure enough, when Eric climbed from the hold he saw a line of dirty yellow lights on the horizon.
“Maybe it’s someone who made it down from orbit, in a shuttle or an escape pod.”
“I doubt it.” Selva stared through her binoculars, then lowered them. “It’s ships! Arztillan ships!”
Vonlal barked out orders. “Hard a’port! Raise every scrap of sail! Put your backs into it! Get the weapons on deck!”
Eric rushed below and came up with two crossbows, then fetched his binoculars. As the ships drew closer they resolved into triremes, with inward-sloping prows and three rows of oars. Lanterns shone on their decks, and Eric could see people milling about.
“There must be an island nearby, those sorts of ships wouldn’t want to sail far from land,” Temerin said. “Selva?”
She consulted a tablet. “With the satellites down I only have our position through celestial navigation and dead reckoning, which puts us here. There’s an island over there, but the fleet will cut us off before we can reach it.”
“I thought this thing could outrun any native ships,” said Rachel.
“Under sail, yes,” Temerin confirmed. “But they’re running before the wind, with oars out. They’ve caught us in a bind, I didn’t expect a fleet.”
Selva said, “There was one further north, making to join with Arztillan forces near the Freeholds. They must’ve turned south after the satellites went down.”
The Argo’s sails caught wind, the ship heeled as it turned and built up speed.
“If we can swing around them we should be able to escape,” Temerin told Vonlal. “This ship can tack closer to the wind than anything in their fleet, they’d have to use oar-power to overcome us.”
“Aye, but the wind is feeble tonight.”
Eric kept looking back, the Arztillans kept gaining. As their ships drew closer, he began to hear the steady beats of drums making time for the oarsmen. It was either maintain course and wait to be caught in the midst of the fleet, or turn and try to swing past.
Vonlal chose the latter.
Timbers creaked, the ship heeled and Eric grabbed a railing. Vonlal swung it around hard to starboard and his men adjusted the sails. The deck was tilted at a good twenty-degree angle away from the Arztillan fleet, Eric had trouble seeing what they were doing. A trio of galleys broke from the main formation to intercept them. Too fast—they would not escape.
Then a man on one deck raised an object in his hands, like an oversized oil lamp, and shoved down a plunger. A jet of yellow-hot flame spewed forth, arcing out with dazzlingly bright light. It fell to the sea, burning as a firey slick.
Temerin swore in Russian. “Greek fire!”
