The Night Face and Other Stories by Poul Anderson

Author:Poul Anderson [Anderson, Poul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi Collection
Publisher: Gregg Press
Published: 1978-04-23T23:00:00+00:00

II

He had gone through a wedding ceremony with her, once they were in space, at Dagny’s insistence. “Who else will the poor child have for a protector but you, the rest of her life? Surely you won’t turn her loose on any random planet. At the same time, she is aristocratic born . It’d humiliate her to become a plain concubine.”

“M-m-m . . . but the heirship problem—”

“I like her myself, what little I’ve seen of her; and the Kuli barons always had an honorable name. I don’t think she’ll raise boys who’ll try to steal house rule from my sons.”

As usual, Dagny was no doubt right.

Anxious to swap findings with her, Tom hurried. The passage reached empty and echoing; air from the ventilators blew loud and chilled him; the stylized murals of gods and sea beasts had changed from bold to pathetic—now that only three people crewed this ship. But they were lucky to be alive—would not have been so, save for the primitive loyalty of his personal guardsmen, who died in their tracks while he ran through the burning city in search of Dagny—when the Pretender’s nonhuman mercenaries broke down the last defenses. He found his chief wife standing by the ship with a Mark IV thunderbolter, awaiting his return. She would not have left without him. Yasmin huddled at her feet. They managed to loose a few missiles as they lifted. But otherwise there was nothing to do but hope to fight another day. The damage that Firedrake sustained in running the enemy space fleet had made escape touch and go. The resulting absence of exterior force-fields and much interior homeostasis made the damage worse as they traveled. Either they found the wherewithal for repair here, or they stayed here.

Tom said to Yasmin while he strode: “We couldn’t’ve picked up their radio so far out s we did, less’n they’d had quite a lot, both talk and radar. That means they had a pretty broad industrial base. You don’t destroy that by scrubbin’ cities. Too many crossroads machine shops and so forth; too much skill spread through the population. I’d be surprised if this planet’s not on the way back up.”

“But why haven’t they rebuilt any cities?”

“Maybe they haven’t gotten that far yet. Been less’n ten years, you know. Or, course, they might’ve got knocked clear down to savagery. I’ve seen places where it happened. We ll find out.”

Walking beside the girl, Roan Tom did not look especially noteworthy, certainly not like the rover and trader chieftain whose name was already in the ballads of a dozen planets. He was of medium height, though so broad in shoulders and chest as to look stocky. From his father, he had the long head, wide face, high cheekbones, snub nose and beardlessness of the Lochlanna. But his mother, a freedwoman said to be of Hermetain stock, had given him dark-red hair, which was now thinning, and star-blue eyes. Only the right of those remained; a patch covered where the left had been.

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