We got everything aboard – the items we had rescued from my study, the runestaff, all of it – and secured Medea in a pull-down cot in the aft of the speeder's crew bay. Then I got into the pilot's seat and, once I'd made sense of the control layout, got us airborne.
I edged up just above the treetops, running unlit. The moon was up and the night was clear, apart from a brown smudge against the stars away to the north. The smoke from my burning estate, I had no doubt. There was no sign of anything else in the air. Hugging the tips of the trees, I turned us south.
Once we were underway, I checked out the cockpit. It was clearly an ex-military flier, bought for the purpose in my opinion. Insignia mouldings had been chiselled off, service numbers erased with acid swabs. Apart from the basic controls, the cabin was provided with several socket racks where optional instrument modules could be bolted in. Only a vox-set had been fitted. There were gaps where an auspex, a terrain-reader and night vision displays might have gone, and also slots for a navigation cod-ifier and a remote fire control system that would have slaved the door weapon to the pilot and done away with the necessity of a separate gunner. Whoever had supplied the mercenaries with their vehicles had provided only the most basic package. An armed troop-lifter with an old model vox-caster comm. No automated systems. No clue to origin or source.
But it had decent power and range – over a thousand kilometres left in it before it would need a recharge. Something to get them in, lay down cover and get them out again.
The forest flickered by beneath us. The vox burbled intermittently, but I had no idea of the codes or cant they were using, and little desire to let anyone know the flier was still operational.
After a while, it shut off. 1 unplugged it, pulled it out of its rack and told Eleena to toss it overboard.
'Why?' she asked.
'I don't want to risk it having a tracker or transponder built into it.'
She nodded.
I tried to get our bearings manually, using the basic instrumentation, working to reconstruct a map of the area in my head. It was pretty much guesswork. Dorsay, the nearest main city, was perhaps a hour west of us now, but given the scale of the operation mounted against me, I felt going there would be like flying into a carnodon's den.
There were small fishing communities and harbour towns on the east side of the Insume headland, the closest now more than two hours away. Madua, a chapel town in the south-east, was in range. So was Entreve, a market city on the fringe of the wild woodland. So were the Atenate Mountains.