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find another airwain," he grumbled.
"When next you tell Patjakamak how to order the universe, I suggest you take
that up with him,"
Ankowaljuu said. Waipaljkoon grunted and shut up.
The flight was as boring as the earlier one had been until that plane's engine
went out, Park reminded himself. He too hoped this leg of the trip would not
be so strenuously interrupted. He sat back and watched jungle go by below, now
dark green, now yellow-green. Again it reminded him of the sea with its
unending not-quite-sameness.
Then, suddenly, not long before Waipaljkoon expected them to reach Mavaka,
they saw a great cloud of smoke rising high into the air from below. The pilot
scowled, pursed his lips. "I've seen big fires before, aye, but seldom one
that size," he said.
"That's no fire!" Ankowaljuu said as they got closer. "That's a cursed battle,
is what that is!" He got the words out only an instant before they burst from
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Allister Park. He too had seen the flashes from exploding shells down there.
Men were too small to spot from several thousand feet, but goodwains and
machine-gun-carrying warwains were visible in clearings carved from the
jungle.
Waipaljkoon needed no urging to steer wide of the battlefield. As the airwain
was approaching from the southeast, he chose to fly more nearly due north,
saying, "We'll cross the line in a quieter place, then swing west to Mavaka."
That sounded good to Park, who had no desire to catch antiaircraft fire from
either side in a war not his own.
Unfortunately, though, airwains rushing up to the front to add their pinpricks
to the fighting spotted the intruder. Two peeled off to give the strange
aircraft a once-over. In a quavering voice, Eric Dunedin said, Generated by
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"They have the star and sickle moon on their tails."
Waipaljkoon turned west with everything his airwain had. That was not nearly
enough. The Emirate's fighters would have been sitting ducks for a
Messerschmitt or Spitfire, but they were like sharks against a fat ocean
sunfish compared to the slow, lumbering transport the Tawantiinsuujan was
flying.
One zipped past the airwain, so close that Park could see the pilot's
grinning, bearded face in the cockpit. The other came alongside, fired a burst
from its air-powered machine gun. That fighter's pilot made a come-with-me
gesture, then fired his gun again. What he meant was depressingly obvious.
"Slavery," Waipaljkoon groaned as he followed the fighter eastward. The other
one stayed on his tail, to make sure he didn't try anything tricky. "They'll
sell us into slavery if they don't kill us on the spot for following
Patjakamak. That's all we are to the stinking Muslims, fair game."
"They won't kill us, and they won't sell us either," Park said confidently.
"Remember, you're with Judge
Ib Scoglund of the International Court of the Continent of Skrelleland. If
they harm me, they have an international incident on their hands."
"Let's hope they bother to find that out," Ankowaljuu said. "Or that they
care."
"They'll find out," Park promised. He left the other half of Ankowaljuu's
worry alone; he didn't much want to think about that himself.
The fighter in front of them landed on a strip hacked out of the jungle.
Waipaljkoon followed it down.
Moors who had been standing around or working on other airwains came trotting
over at the sight of the unfamiliar craft bouncing to a stop.
"Some of them have pipes, Judge Scoglund," Dunedin said. He didn't mean the
kind from which tobacco was smoked.
"Of course they have pipes, Eric. They're warriors, for God's sake." Hoping he
sounded braver than he felt, Park unbuckled his safety harness. "I have to get
out first," he said. Shrugging, Waipaljkoon opened the door. Park ducked
through it and scrambled onto the wing.
The bearded fighter pilot was already out of his airwain and running toward
the craft he had forced down. "These are my captives!" he yelled, brandishing
a large knife. "They're mine to keep and sell as the pagan dogs they are!"
Park did not follow all of that, but he caught enough. He hoped the Moors
would be able to understand his self-taught Arabic Ketjwa, at least, he'd been
able to practice over the past weeks. "Not captives!"
he shouted at the top of his lungs. "Not pagans either!"
The pilot understood, all right. "What do you mean, you're not a captive?
You're here, lying fool, at our base, the Emirate's base, at Siimaranja. And
that's a Tawantiinsuujan airwain, so you're a filthy
Patjakamak-worshiping pagan!"
"I'm no Tawantiinsuujan," Park said. His fair skin, sandy hair, and light eyes
told the truth of that better than any words.
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