The Mask of the Sun by Fred Saberhagen

Author:Fred Saberhagen [Saberhagen, Fred]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780812553093
Publisher: Ace
Published: 1979-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

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Chapter 10. The Royal Road

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Peru, 1533

The stud he slammed down produced not cataclysm, but instant engine power and quiet rotor movement overhead. With a series of soft noises, the hatch undocked from Mictlan and folded itself inboard. Mike let himself slump into the pilot's chair. The ship was going straight up, fast, in what was obviously a programmed takeoff sequence. Airborne over the geodesic shape of Mictlan, he could see that it was somewhat bigger than the Fort, and placed in a landscape generally similar to the Fort's setting, mainly upthrust and splintered arctic emptiness. The sun was low in the sky behind a rank of distant clouds.

Only when the craft had borne him a little higher did Mike realize that the enormous mountain upon whose slope hell perched was a volcano. First he saw the thin smoke-plume, reaching into the upper atmosphere, zigzagged at various levels by disagreeing air currents. With another gain in height there came into view the crater itself, a mile or more in width. Now Mictlan was shrunken to a mere wart on the mountain's side. Mike looked down into a different kind of hell, its fissures glowing vaguely even in daylight with their internal fires.

A thousand meters or so above the volcano's rim, the flyer came to a hovering halt. Now he was evidently going to have to take over the controls, or at least feed in some instructions. If the instrument panel before him was arranged at all like that of the Inca craft that he had learned to fly, then maybe this would get him a map to show his position

A screen on the panel sprang into colored life. In its center was the sharp green dot he had expected—that must represent the position of his flyer; and right next to the dot there appeared a round formation that was surely the volcano crater. But the coordinates and even the alphabet of the words marked on the map were alien and unreadable. Well, switching scales on the map should now be possible with this.

On the second try, he got it. The largest scale let him see in outline enough of South America to give him a rough idea of where he was. His green dot was up near the equator, hundreds of miles north of the region where he had been captured, and almost at the northern limits of the Inca empire.

Geography lessons absorbed at the Fort came into use. The towering cone below him was almost certainly Cotopaxi, near the city called Quito in the country known in most branches as Ecuador. In 1534 an expedition of Spaniards striking out from Peru into these northern provinces was to be pelted with ash by Cotopaxi, at a distance of a good many miles. But evidently the Tenocha had no fear of an eruption.

With a minor false start or two, Mike established himself in control of the flyer. He aimed it south and stepped on the gas, relaxing a little when he had the ominous egg of Mictlan well out of sight behind him.

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