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  “I was Raven’s woman,” Sylve hissed into her face. “But Raven has been gone too long, and he has gone soft. I am Radd’s woman now.”

  The green lips parted from vicious white teeth and she finished with a promise. “Radd will kill Raven. And when Raven is dead, I will cut out your lily-white guts, brown bitch, and I will make you eat them.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Strike Six Super-fighter and Strato-bomber, was a two-winged upper atmosphere flying machine capable of delivering nuclear bomb loads to the continent of Ghedda. It had been made obsolete by the new generation of long reach rockets and missiles, but it was still the highest development of its class. Its black glass, image-distorting outer hull made it almost invisible to the Gheddan sky-watch detection systems. Like a black ghost among black clouds, it silently approached the alien continent.

  Zela sat strapped in one of the three passenger seats between Jayna and Kananda, and her feelings were apprehensive. Like any pilot, she was never fully happy when someone else had the controls, but that was not the real cause of her concern. Neither had she been troubled by the nightmare winds that had tossed and shaken the aircraft like a pretend mouse in their mighty lion claws. She had expected a rough, rain-lashed crossing of the Great Storm Ocean, for there was no other kind. What bothered her most was the undue speed with which this mission had been rushed forward. They were half trained and they barely knew each other.

  She knew Kananda was courageous and intelligent, and as skilled with a sword as any man she had ever met, but he was a stranger on this planet, and he would find the godless ways of Ghedda even more strange. Jayna she did not know at all and did not fully trust. Jayna, she had decided, was both their strongest and their weakest link. They needed Jayna’s knowledge and experience, but the blue woman wore a dark, invisible shroud of fatalism. Jayna was only doing this to give her daughter a chance to live, but Zela suspected she saw no real purpose in their mission, and did not expect that she herself would survive.

  She glanced left and then right at her two companions. All of them were now wearing the rough Gheddan clothing of coarse woolen shirts and lace-up leather jerkins and leggings, but only Jayna seemed to be really comfortable in her alien disguise. Jayna’s eyes were closed and she was either asleep or pretending to be fully relaxed.

  Kananda was wide awake and returned her glance with a faint smile. The buffeting of the storm forces had left him a little airsick, but she knew that he would be fighting fit as soon as they were on the surface again. His new blue face still made her want to laugh. It was the result of the three day course of chemical skin pigmentation capsules they had both been obliged to swallow. Her own blue face, which looked back at her from every reflective surface, she did not find quite so amusing.

  We are three individuals, she reflected grimly. We each have different aims. We are not a team, and that is not good.

  The soft click as the flight deck door opened interrupted her thoughts and she looked up as the co-pilot approached.

  “We are on target and dead on time,” he announced cheerfully. “We shall begin our descent through the atmosphere in five minutes, Commander.”

  “Time to go,” Zela agreed.

  She unbuckled her seat harness and stood up. Jayna was as quickly on her feet, so she had not really been sleeping. Kananda fumbled only a second longer with the unfamiliar seat buckle.

  They followed the co-pilot back to the rear of the aircraft and down two decks into its bowels. Here they were in the bomb bay. There were large steel racks on either side, empty now but each capable of holding three of the city-destroying K500 nuclear bombs. A set of three overhead steel clamps had been designed to hold three more weapons ready to drop, but some of the clamps had been adapted to hold instead a small, disc-shaped craft. The shape suggested a flying machine, but the contours of the underside were the hull of a boat. It was in fact a skimmer, a craft designed for short range flying, but mainly for skimming just a few feet above the surface of either land or water on its own jet-created cushion of air.

  The co-pilot positioned a short ladder and Zela led the way on board, sliding back the cockpit hood and settling herself at the controls. Jayna and Kananda climbed in to take the two remaining seats behind her.

  “Take care of our baby,” the co-pilot said.

  Zela grinned. “Just make sure you bring mother back when we’re ready.”

  She closed and clicked the lock on the cockpit hood. The co-pilot gave her a thumbs-up sign from the other side of the steel-hard but glass-clear cowling, and then disappeared back toward the flight deck. Zela busied herself with clicking switches, lighting up the control panels and making her final checks that all was in order. When she tested the communicator, they heard the co-pilot’s voice again.

  “Starting descent, Commander, still dead on target, dead on time.”

  They felt the steep angle of the downward turn as the strato-bomber plunged down through the raging clouds. High or extremely low level flight was her safest position from detection, and the pilot wasted no time in getting from one to the other.

  The aircraft was flung from side to side and Kananda gripped tightly to the arms of his seat and fought to hold down his stomach. His ears felt as though they were going to explode inside his head, and like a gasping fish, he desperately practiced the deep gulping movements Zela had taught him. He was sweating when the strato-bomber at last leveled out a hundred feet above sea level.

  “Two minutes to drop,” the co-pilot’s voice said calmly. “We’re aimed dead centre into the mouth of the Black Swamp River.”

  “Check,” Zela answered. The red glowing contours and outlines of the landfall ahead showed clearly on her control screen. She started the skimmer’s engines and let them idle gently, vibrating the craft with a soft thrumming sound in its clamps.

  “One minute to drop,” the co-pilot announced.

  Jayna leaned forward in her seat. “Remember the waves could be as high as fifty feet. Don’t drop too low until we’re into the rivermouth.”

  “Maximum wave height below us is thirty feet.” Zela read the information from her view screen. She smiled to herself as she spoke. Jayna was afraid and she did want to live after all. She added calmly, “Don’t worry, I’ll remember.”

  “Count of ten,” the co-pilot said. “Good luck, Commander.”

  The numbers were flashing on her viewscreen. She knew the bomb bay doors were open beneath them, and as the red zero flashed, the clamps above were released and the skimmer was dropped into the night.

  Instantly Zela gunned power to the engines, but even so the skimmer was flung over twice before she had the forward thrust to straighten it out. Rain and wind hammered at the small craft, and she was sharply aware that immediately below them the surging wave crests would be leaping up to grab them from the night sky. Bracing herself and gritting her teeth, she fought to hold the tiny craft at the sixty foot line on her altimeter. Too low and they would crash into the sea, too high and she risked crashing into the underside of the Strato-bomber before it could rise up and turn away.

  There were thirty terrifying seconds before she could be sure that the Strato-bomber was clear, and then all she had to worry about was the red outline of the land mass rushing headlong toward her. She slowed the skimmer as much as she dared while they were still above the ocean, and then the red lines were flowing by on either side of her screen. Red smudges showed the locations of sandbars and islands and she wove the skimmer neatly between them, dropping her speed and height even lower now that they were safely within the river mouth.

  From behind her she heard Jayna sigh with relief, and then Kananda said with feeling. “Your flying chariots are truly wonderful things—but I think that in the future I would prefer to fight sabre-tooth tigers.”

  Dawn came in a blood red surge. The rain had stopped and Zela eased back the cowling to give them all some fresh air. Except that it was not really fresh. It reeked with the damp, muddy smells of the swamp all
around. Huge networks of tree roots lined both banks, and in the shadows beneath, dark, oily things lurked and slithered. They had penetrated thirty miles upstream before the river had narrowed and Zela had decided to let the skimmer hover motionless until daylight.

  Jayna hauled herself up to sit on the edge of the cockpit and scan the black river and sky all around. She trusted her own eyes more than Zela’s viewscreen.

  “I think we are safe,” she said at last. “If the Gheddan defences had picked up even a hint of our presence, then the sky would be thick with their patrol ships by now. They do not know we are here.”

  Kananda moved to climb up beside her but Jayna pressed a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Stay down,” she warned. “There are creatures in these waters that could rip your head off in an instant if you do not recognize the ripples of their approach.”

  Something large splashed in one of the dank caverns under the tree roots and Kananda decided to obey. He sank back in his seat while Jayna cast a quick look at the smooth waters around them, and then made another searching scan of the skies before joining him. Zela moved the hood to three-quarters closed.

  “We move on,” Zela decided. “The island where you said we can lie up cannot be much further.”

  Jayna leaned forward over her shoulder, her gaze shifting between the river ahead and the viewscreen. “We must be close,” she agreed. “Go slowly.”

  Zela gave the throttle a fractional turn and the skimmer nosed forward. Black as its name, the water flowed beneath them. Black mud and slime coated the passing tangles of tree roots, and even where there were leaves on the upper branches they were the darkest possible shade of green. The Black Swamp was a drowned landscape where nothing lived that could not swim and survive in its murky depths.

  Jayna had tilted her head and was again searching the skies. Kananda searched also but saw nothing.

  “You think there could still be Gheddan skyships?”

  “Perhaps.” Jayna shrugged. “It would be bad luck to be spotted by a random patrol.”

  “Why would they patrol such a dead place as this?”

  “Because the swamp is on the edge of the Great Gar Desert, and that is where the Gheddans have buried most of their missile pits, and sited their major Strato-Bomber bases. The Great Black Swamp forms a natural barrier to keep any casual visitors well away, but they do not trust it completely. There are occasional random patrols along the river.”

  “And the City of Swords, which we must reach, is on the far side of this Great Gar Desert?”

  Jayna grinned. “We’re going the pretty way. Deep up-river through the swamp, and then we have a four-day hike through mountains and forest to get to the upper reaches of the Great Steel River. That in turn takes us down to the coast again, and the City of Swords. That’s where Zela and I become bear-dancers, except that this time we haven’t got a bear.”

  “Tell me about this bear,” Kananda invited.

  “Tujo was a dancing tree bear. They look fierce, but they are vegetarian, and for a Gheddan creature, they are easily tamed. They can be taught to do a shuffle-like dance as long as you hold up their front paws and help them to keep balance. I danced with Tujo to entertain in the drink dens. It was our cover and our reason to keep moving around.”

  Jayna became silent, staring into space, or at a memory, and Kananda was sensitive enough to say no more. They knew that Jayna’s husband, Blane, and the dancing bear had both been killed, although Jayna had not yet revealed the full details. Much of her grief was still private.

  “Up ahead,” Zela said a few minutes later. “That mud island—is that it?”

  Jayna leaned forward again, stared hard for a few seconds, and then nodded.

  “Blane and I have stopped there twice before going up-river. There’s room to push the skimmer almost out of sight under those trees. We rely on the camouflage nets to do the rest. We hide up today and then move on at night. By tomorrow we should be well inland and safe from the Gar Desert patrols.”

  Zela turned the nose of the skimmer and eased up onto the grey mud beach. As they drew closer, she saw that the mud bank did continue under the overhanging green-black branches and the tree roots were well buried. She could see no snags that could damage the craft and pushed as far as she was able under the scraping branches. Finally she allowed the craft to settle onto the mud and cut the engines.

  They waited a few moments to be sure that the skimmer was not going to sink too deep into the mud, and then Zela reached for the hood control to open it fully. Jayna’s hand on her wrist restrained her.

  “There may be snakes,” Jayna warned. “Some of them live in the tree branches. With most of them, their venom is fatal.”

  Zela located the flashlight that was part of the cockpit equipment and shone its beam up into the darkness. They saw more dripping leaves, and more black slime, more tangles of branches. Zela moved the light slowly to and fro for several minutes but there was nothing else to alarm them. Finally she opened the cockpit hood fully and pushed her way through the evil tangles to get out.

  She dropped into the sucking mud on one side of the skimmer and Kananda wriggled free to drop down lightly on the opposite side. Jayna stayed in the rear seat, hauling out the packed camouflage net and passing its lead ropes down to her companions. The net of thick black rope rolled out smoothly as Zela and Kananda dragged it back over the steel grey hull of the skimmer. They came out from under the trees in which the craft was half buried and arranged the netting carefully over the exposed section of the hull.

  Zela drew her knife and moved away to begin cutting some of the more distant branches to tuck into the netting and further distort the outline of the skimmer, and Kananda followed her example. They worked swiftly and steadily, both of them glad to be doing something active outside the close confines of the cramped cockpit.

  The faint splash from behind them gave only the minimum warning. It might have been the playful leap of a fish or just the gurgle of the current, but Zela knew instinctively that it was something more. She had been forcing her knife blade through a thick branch and the green wood had locked vice-like on the blade, tearing it from her grasp as she whirled round. She saw a black swamp lizard, twice the size of a man, hauling itself out of the river.

  The size of the creature was an initial shock, and then the long jaws opened to show a double row of fearsome teeth as it let out a roaring scream. Zela’s hand flashed to the hand lazer holstered at her hip, but the leather flap was buttoned and the creature was upon her with an impossible charge of speed. An eight-foot tongue lashed out from between the shrieking jaws and curled around her waist like a living whip. She was jerked forward with terrible force, and although she dug her heels desperately into the mud, there was no grip and she slid helplessly forward. Tiny red pupils in the huge black eyes blazed down at her and the great gulf of the fanged mouth opened wide.

  Zela screamed, and then a silver blade, swift as a streak of lightning, flashed past her eyes. She was suddenly released and fell backward onto the mud, half of the lizard’s tongue still wrapped around her waist. The severed end, now spurting blood, lashed wildly from the creature’s screaming mouth.

  Kananda stood over her, sword drawn and poised for the second cut, but then a long Gheddan dagger flew over his shoulder and buried itself to the hilt in the glittering pupil of one of the large black eyes. In agony now, the great lizard thrashed on the river’s edge, and Zela had time to draw her lazer.

  “No, Commander,” Jayna snapped.

  Zela turned and saw Jayna crouched on top of the skimmer from where she had deftly thrown her dagger.

  “A lazer flash could be seen from the air for many miles,” Jayna explained.

  Zela nodded, but kept the weapon ready in her hand.

  As they watched, the lizard reeled back into the river, sliding away from the island with its head still raised and screaming above the surface. Drawn by the scent of blood and the dying creature’s frantic struggles, something large
and equally fearsome came up from underneath it. Huge jaws burst out of the water to clamp on its neck in a thrashing curtain of rich red blood and foaming spray. A surging V wake of ripples marked the approach of a third underwater predator that hit with another roaring and splashing into the rolling combat of the first two reptiles.

  Kananda stood and stared. There were crocodiles on his native world, but nothing as gigantic and ferocious as the swamp leviathans that were now tearing the mortally wounded lizard to pieces. He gripped Zela’s shoulder hard and backed further up the small beach.

  “I think we should get back inside the skimmer,” Jayna advised. “It is our best protection.”

  She led the way and Kananda and Zela quickly followed. Zela was still shaken, but she slowly revised her first estimation of their chances. Perhaps they just might make a good team after all.

  Laurya lay wide awake in the soft, comfortable bed that she shared with Kyle in their home in the City of Singing Spires. They had just made love and she listened to his slow, regular breathing beside her. Kyle would sleep soundly now for several hours, and when she was sure she carefully closed her own eyes. She concentrated, letting her body follow its natural course to relax and follow Kyle into sleep, but at the same time keeping her mind awake. Her physical shape slipped away behind her, and she became spirit and mind, soaring free.

  Antar was waiting for her, hovering high above the silent city. The shape he wore was that of a handsome young man in a short white robe with a crown of fresh green leaves. We are all vain, she thought. We all choose to wear the most beautiful body we can remember from all of our past lives, and she wondered in what athletic prowess had he once excelled in order to wear the winner’s crown.

  “You are fortunate,” his thought came back at her. “Your present physical body is lovely enough.”