Assignment: Avalon

Chapter Five: "With Allies Like These . . ."

Melodan stared after Rand. "Some welcome," she muttered. "Rifles, people dropping bombs on me, and now a threat of summary execution. Nice."

She still couldn't believe what she'd seen. Biplanes! Not just biplanes, but wood-and-fabric biplanes, like something out of Earth's ancient history, when humans first started to fly...a period that had always fascinated her, when the basic techniques of fighting in atmospheric aircraft were first established, techniques that persisted even with spaceplanes.

But even on Earth, the early planes' skins of fabric and frames of wood had soon given way to metal. Why had such an ancient mode of construction been resurrected here?

The boy, Vik, continued to watch her intently, rifle steadily aimed at her heart. Uncomfortable under his steady blue gaze, Melodan wrapped the blanket a bit more tightly around her shoulders. Her eyes wandered to where the four soldiers were stripping their dead comrade of his clothing. As they hosted his naked, blood-soaked body onto their shoulders, she swallowed and looked away, at the sky, at the ground, at anything except that—and her glance fell on Vik's weapon. "Why—it's not metal!" she blurted.

"Of course not," Vik said. "It's plastic and ceramic. Who would use metal for..." His voice trailed off as he looked past her at the metal hull of the lifeslip. "Are you really from space?"

"Where else?"

"Another province, maybe...except if another province had something like this, it wouldn't bother with the Battlefield; it would attack Skandar directly."

"Battlefield?"

Vik closed his mouth firmly. Melodan sighed. Everything I know about this planet is out of date, she thought. Who are these people? And who—she looked out over the plain, where the biplanes had disappeared—were they? "Skyforce," Rand had yelled as they'd attacked. She'd also heard him say something about "Groundforce." His own troops seemed to be rebels of some sort. But against whom? Who controlled this planet?

After being jumped by a Preceptorate ship at the dimspace nexus, she wouldn't have been surprised to find platoons of soldierserfs under skies aswarm with the Preceptorate's black Swordcraft. But biplanes—with propellers?

The four rebels brought the dead man right past her. Someone had staunched the gaping hole in his chest with his uniform shirt, presumably to keep him from dripping a trail of blood onto the rocks that would make it clear to anyone with half a brain that he hadn't been the original passenger of the lifeslip, but blood still seemed to cover every inch of his body, and blood stained the hands and uniforms of the Free Forcers carrying him. The woman holding his left leg gave Melodan a burning look of hatred as they passed, and Melodan closed her eyes and lowered her head.

Nothing was as it should have been. Avalon was not a quiet backwater. The Preceptorate, if not in actual control, was in the system. And through her stupidity, she'd so far lost her ship, barely survived a crash landing, and come within a hair of getting her head blown off in some local conflict she knew nothing about...and indirectly caused the death of a man she'd never even met, a man whose lifeless body was now being lowered into the compartment that should by rights, by her own stupidity, have been her coffin, not his.

She was in a tailspin, and the ground was coming up fast.

Rand returned, bearded face still as grim as death. He walked past her without so much as a glance, inspected the body that had taken Melodan's place, nodded sharply to the four Free Forcers who had placed it, and then returned to Melodan and glared down at her. "I'm Colonel Rand. I command the Free Forcers."

Melodan started to reply, but he cut her off.

"Not now. Later, I want answers. For now, this is all you have to know: whoever you are, wherever you're from, you're under my orders. Cause trouble, I'll have you bound and gagged—or shot. Understood?"