The Navigator of Rhada by Robert Cham Gilman Page A

arm. “Nav Kynan. Look there--at the edge of the landing ground!”
    Kynan had already seen, with sinking heart, the half company of warmen who stood watching the vessel make ready to lift into the night.
    That they had come to prevent anyone’s taking Janessa aboard the Lyri starship was beyond argument. They were making no effort to delay the departure of the craft. It would have been blasphemous--and impossible, in any case. No force the modern world knew could force entry into a manned starship. But the detachment, some forty men, stood between the watchers and the ship.
    Kynan said to Baltus, “Stay here. When I signal to you --come at a gallop.”
    Janessa protested, “What are you going to do, Kynan? There are too many of them.”
    “I’ve no intention of fighting my own people,” he said. “But we must reach that ship.” He urged his mount forward, and the silver mare’s teeth gleamed in the light reflected from the starship. She was making battle sounds and setting Baltus’s charger and old Skua to dancing eagerly.
    The Navigator rode out of the town shadows at a trot and into the brightness pulsating across the wet grass of the open field. Kynan watched the transparent flank of the control room and prayed to the Star that Brother Evart would be able to see what was happening below him. Everything depended on that. But Evart was such a deliberate man that he might well devote his entire attention to matters within the ship. If this happened, they were lost.
    Kynan told the mare to canter now, and she did. He could see the warmen turning to watch him. They had been told to expect more than a single rider, and they were possibly perplexed. He most fervently hoped so.
    “You there!” the Rhad officer called. “Is that you, Nav Kynan?”
    Kynan did not reply. Instead, he slanted away from the group, angling toward the immense overhanging bulk of the starship’s prow.
    “Nav Kynan!” the officer called again, mounting his charger. “Stop! We have orders not to harm you--!”
    Kynan wheeled the silver mare, at the same moment taking his pistol from its holster. He could look up into the starship’s control room, and he cursed Brother Evart with theological precision. The under-priest was paying not the slightest attention to the action developing directly under him on the ground. Kynan could almost hear the intent Navigators beginning to chant the power sequence preparatory to actually lifting the massive vessel from the surface.
    The rain stung his face, and he hoped with all his heart that his primitive flintlock had been dried enough by the heat of his body to fire now, when it was needed. The warmen were wheeling and spreading to cut him off.
    Kynan raised the clumsy weapon and pulled the trigger. He breathed a prayer of thanksgiving as the pistol fired, spitting sparks and wadding, over the heads of his pursuers. The heavy ball struck the polarized hull of the starship and whined away into the darkness. For a moment the soldiers gaped at the sacrilege. The starships were the holiest things in the known universe. They were the very key to men’s survival as a star-voyaging race. To fire a weapon at one, even though it could do the ship no conceivable harm, was a breathtaking sin. And that a Navigator should do it was almost unthinkable.
    It was almost so for Kynan himself. With the discharged weapon still in his hand, he muttered an Ave Stella and promised himself severe penance. It would be difficult to fin d something suitable. He had never committed so unholy an act before. But the situation was desperate, and desperate measures were called for.
    He looked up and saw that the sound of the ball striking the hull of the ship had attracted Brother Evart’s attention. But Evart was so stolid and unimaginative a man that he merely remained at the control console, staring at the scene below in leaden amazement.
    Kynan whirled the silver mare about in an agony of frustration. He shouted furiously at