The star fox, p.12
The Star Fox, page 12
“Who are you working for, Bragdon?” Heim fleered. “Alerion?”
“Mankind.” The answer was proud. “In case you’re interested, I’m not a xenologist, only a PCA officer on leave, and they’ll cashier me for this. It’s worth it, though. World Militants for Peace will see I get another job.”
“They engineered this, huh?” Koumanoudes snorted. “Yeh. They’ve got members in government too.”
Heim spoke to Jocelyn. “You never actually quit that gang, did you?”
“Please, please,” her whisper drifted down the wind.
“We may as well make ourselves comfortable,” Bragdon advised. “This gravity will wear us out if we don’t The other vessel probably won’t arrive for several hours, since we couldn’t make exact timing or location arrangements, or risk radio.” He gestured with his gun. “You sit before I do.”
Vadász was so near Heim that the captain alone heard the minstrel’s indrawn hiss and noticed how he stiffened. “Heigh-ho, Roger!” he murmured. “Hook the first moon by.”
“What’s that?” Bragdon challenged, for he saw his prisoners go taut.
“I would not translate in a lady’s presence,” Vadász snarled.
It thrilled through Heim. Spaceman’s slang. “Something’s about to happen. Take your chance when you see it.” The blackness and coldness departed him. His pulse slammed with preparation to fight.
“Are you skizzy, though?” Vadász continued. “We can’t stay here.”
“What d’you mean?” Bragdon demanded.
“Next to a river like this. Flash floods. We will get tumbled around, our suits torn open, we are dead unless we get on higher ground.”
“You lie!”
“No, no. Look at those mountains. Think. A dense atmosphere under strong gravity has a high density gradient, therefore a high temperature gradient. This is autumn. It gets cold enough at night, above snowline, to freeze ammonia. But the stuff liquefies again about noon, and pours down into the riverbeds. The gravity pulls it so fast that it goes fifty kilometers or better before it evaporates. Isn’t that true, Gregorios? You were the one who told me.”
“Sure,” Koumanoudes said. “That’s what the name Morh means. Floodwater.”
“If this is some trick—” Bragdon began.
It sure as blaze is, Heim’s thought leaped. There’s no such phenomenon. But the yarn sounds plausible to a newcomer—I hope—how 1 hope!
“I swear I’ll shoot on any suspicion,” Bragdon said.
Heim started to walk away from him. “Do, if you want,” he retorted. “That’s an easier way to die than in an ammonia flood. You can’t stop me trying to get on top of those bluffs.”
His back was tense against the firebeam. But only Jocelyn’s cry reached him: “Vie, no, don’t! What’s the harm?”
“I … guess none, except that it’s a difficult climb,” Bragdon conceded. “Okay. You people go first Jocelyn will cover me while I follow. If you feel like running away, once you’re over the crest, I don’t mind too much. You can’t get far before the flyer comes, and we’ll catch you then. Or if you find some hiding place, Staurn will kill you for me.”
Step by heavy step, Heim wound among the scattered rocks until he reached the nearest bank. It was bare gritty earth, mingled with stones, not high or steep but a daunting obstacle when this weight bore on him. He commenced trudging upward. The slope gave way under his boots, slid past in a hiss and a rattle, he lost his footing and went to hands and knees.
Fumbling erect, he proceeded cautiously. Before long he was half drowned in sweat, his heart raced and the air burned his throat. Through blurred eyes he saw Vadász and Koumanoudes toiling behind. Uthg-a-K’thaq made it with less trouble, down on his stomach, pushing with wide feet and scrabbling with powerful swimmer’s arms; but still the Naqsan’s breath was noisy across the wind.
Somehow they got to the top. Heim and his engineer gave the others a hand. They crouched on the brink and wheezed.
There was a stone under Heim’s glove. His fingers closed. As strength returned, he saw Bragdon halfway up. The Peaceman was taking his time, frequent lengthy rests, during which he stood gun in hand and glared at the privateers. Jocelyn waited below. Now and then sand or pebbles skittered around her, dislodged by Bragdon; but she didn’t try to dodge. Her suited form looked black in the lightning-blue sun-dazzle; her pistol reflected it moltenly.
Vadász knelt between Heim and Koumanoudes. He squeezed their hands. No other signal or explanation was needed.
Heim threw his stone. An instant later, their own missiles whizzed from his men. Accelerated at nineteen hundred centimeters per second per second, the rocks flew as if catapulted. He didn’t know whose hit Bragdon. He saw the man lurch and fall. Then he and his folk were on their way down again.
Leap—slide—run—skip—keep your feet in the little avalanche you make—charge in your weight like a knight at full gallop!
Jocelyn had not been struck. He saw her stumble back, slow and awkward, and bounded past the collision of Bragdon and Koumanoudes. Dust boiled from his boot-soles. Twice he nearly fell. It could have snapped his neck at the speed he now had. Somehow he recovered balance and raged on ahead.
Down to the valley floor! He must tumble or run, f aster than man had ever run before. His body was a machine gone wild, he fought to steer it and slow it but the momentum was overwhelming. Each footfall slammed through muscle and bone to rattle his teeth. The blood brawled in his ears. Jocelyn had shot once while he plunged. The slug whanged wide. He saw the gun slew around to take closer aim. No chance for fear or hope. He had nothing but velocity. Yet it was too great for common sense to perceive. In her panic and her anguish she hesitated before shooting anew. The time was a fractional second. A man attacking her on Earth would have taken the bullet point blank. Heim crashed by before she could squeeze trigger. His fist shot out. He did not snatch the gun. His blow tore it from her grasp and spun it meters away.
On flat terrain he braked himself to a normal run, a jog, a halt. He wheeled. Jocelyn had been knocked down by his mere brush against her. She was still struggling to regain her feet. Through his own deep gasps, he heard her weep. He plodded to retrieve the pistol.
When he had it, he looked for the others. Uthg-a-K’thaq slumped on his feet in the rubble under the bluff. Two men stood half crouched nearby. One held the laser. A third sprawled unmoving between them, suit rent and blackened.
Heim steadied one shaking hand with the other and took aim. “Endre!” he called, hoarse and in horror.
“We have him,” rang back the voice of the armed man. It sank till the wind nearly overrode it. “But Gregorios is done.”
Slowly, Heim dragged his way thither. He could not see through the Greek’s sooted faceplate. In a dull fashion he was glad of that. The laser beam had slashed open fabric and body, after which gases mixed and exploded. Blood was streaked round about, garish scarlet.
A gruesome keening lifted from the Naqsan. “Gwurru shka ektrush, is this war? We do not thus at home. Rahata, rahata.”
“Bragdon must have recovered himself and shot as Gregorios jumped him,” Vadász said drearily. “The impact jarred his gun loose. I got it and came back here, where they both had rolled. C.E. held him pinned meanwhile.”
Heim stared long at the Peaceman. Finally, mechanically, he asked, “Any serious injuries?”
“No,” Bragdon replied in the same monotone. “At least, no bones broken. I’ve a headache.” He stumbled off, lowered himself to the ground, and lay there with an arm across his faceplate.
“I thought we could get away with this,” Vadász said, eyes fixed on the dead man.
“We did,” Heim answered. “Wars have casualties.” He clapped the minstrel’s shoulder and walked toward Jocelyn. Sweat, runneling down his body, squelched in his boots. He felt a tightness in chest and gullet as if he were about to cry, but he wasn’t able.
“You all right, Joss?” he asked. She backed away. “I won’t hurt you,” he said.
“But I shot at you!” Her voice was as a frightened child’s.
“That’s in the game.” He laid his arms around her and drew the helmet against his breast. She sobbed for minutes. He waited it out from a vague sense of duty. Not that he hated her; there was a strange ashy vacuum where she had been in him. His emotions were engaged with the man who had died, his thoughts with what must be done.
At last he could leave her, seated and silent. He went on to the wrecked flyer. Fragments and cargo were scattered from hell to breakfast. He found an unharmed entrenching tool and several machetes and carried them back. “Start digging, Bragdon,” he said. “What?” The man jerked where he lay. “We’re not going to leave Greg Koumanoudes unburied. It’ll have to be a shallow grave, but—Get busy. Somebody will spell you when you’re tired.”
Bragdon rose, centimeter by centimeter. “What have you done?” he cried.
“I didn’t kill that man. You did, with your insane attempt to—to what? Do you think you can stand off our flyer?”
“No,” Heim said. “I don’t plan to be here when it arrives.”
“But—but—but—”
“You left your motor running.” Heim gave him the tool and continued on to Vadász. Uthg-a-K’thaq bestirred himself and came to help, scooping dirt with his hands.
“Did you think of anything beyond getting control?” Heim asked the Magyar.
“No,” said Vadász. “A dim idea of—I knew not what, except that my forefathers never quit without a fight.”
“Sit down and let’s look at the poopsheets.” Every suit had a pocket loaded with charts and other local information. There wasn’t much about Staurn. Heim unfolded the map of this region. It fluttered and crackled in the wind. He spread it across his knees. “Greg would have known what these symbols mean. But look—” His finger traced the outlines. “Those mountains are the Kimreth boundary and this is the River Morh; we know that. Now, see, Mount Lochan is marked as the highest in the northern sierra. In fact, no other peak stands that much bigger than its neighbors. So yonder old volcano has to be Lochan. Then we’re about here.”
“Yes.” A certain life returned to Vadisz’s speech. “And here is the Hurst of Wenilwain on Lochan’s northern slope. About a hundred airline kilometers hence, would you not say? I doubt we can survive that big a walk. But if we can get moderately near, someone flying on patrol or on a hunt ought to spy us.”
“And Wenilwain knows us. Uh-huh.” Heim shook his head. “It’s a long chance to take, I admit. What are these areas marked between us and him? The Walking Forest; the Slaughter Machines; Thundersmoke.”
“Let me try—” Vadász riffled through the pitifully thin handbook. “No entry. But then, this is a stat of a map annotated by Gregorios and Charles, on the basis of what they learned while dealing with the natives. They must have planned to pass the information on when they got home. It’s a common practice.”
“I know. And Greg’s dead. Well, we’ll find out.”
“What of those?” Vadász pointed at Bragdon painfully digging, Jocelyn huddled by herself.
“They’ll have to come along, I’m afraid. For one thing, it’ll puzzle and delay their, friends, not to find anybody here, and so give us time to find cover. For another thing, we’ll need every hand we can get, especially when we hit the foothills.”
“Wait!” Vadász slapped the ground. His voice Weakened. “Gunnar, we cannot do it. We have air recyclers, but nothing for water except a day’s worth in these canteens. That isn’t even allowing for what we will need to reconstitute powdered food. And you know that ten kilometers a day, afoot, will be fantastic progress.”
Heim actually noticed himself smiling, lopsidedly. “Haven’t you ever met that trick? We won’t be far from native water at any time; notice these streams on the map. So we fill our canteens, put the laser pistol at wide beam and low intensity, and boil out the ammonia.”
“Spending the capacitor charges,” Vadász objected. “That leaves only your slugthrower for defense.”
“Shucks, Endre, local tigers are no problem. We’re as unsavory to them as they’d be to us. Our biggest enemy is the gravity drag; our second biggest the short food and medicine supply; our third, maybe, bad weather if we hit any.”
“M-m-m … as you say. I would still like to know precisely what the Slaughter Machines are. But—yes, of course, we will try.” The minstrel got up almost bouncily. “In fact, you have made me feel so much better that I think I can take my turn at digging.”
They had not much time to spare, enough barely to scrape a little earth over the fallen man and hear Vadász sing the Paternoster. Then they departed.
V
Four Staurnian days? Five? Heim wasn’t sure. The nightmare had gone on too long.
At first they made good time. The ground rolled quite gently upward, decked with sparse forest that hid them from aerial searchers without hindering their feet. They were all in trim physical shape. And their survival gear, awkward though it seemed, was a miracle of lightness and compactness.
Yet between it and the gravity, each was carrying a burden equal to more than his own Earth weight. “Good time” meant an average of hardly over one kilometer per hour.
Then the land canted and they were on the slopes of Kimreth’s foothills. Worse, their bodies. were beginning to show cumulative effects of stress. This was nothing so simple as exhaustion. Without a sealtent, they could never take off their airsuits. The recyclers handled volatile by-products of metabolism; but slowly, slowly, the fractional percent that escaped chemical treatment built up. Stench and itch were endurable, somewhat, for a while. Too much aldehyde, kettone, organic acid, would not be.
And high gravity has a more subtle, more deadly effect than overworking the heart. It throws the delicate body-fluid balance—evolved through a billion years on one smaller planet—out of kilter. Plasma seeps through cell walls. Blood pools in the extremities, ankles swell while the brain starves. On Staurn this does not happen fast. But it happens.
Without the drugs in their medikits, gravanol, kinesthan, assorted stimulants and analgesics, the travelers would not have traveled three days. When the drugs gave out (and they were getting low) there would be perhaps one day in which to go on, before a man lay down to die.
Is it worth it? gibbered through the querning in Heim’s skull. Why didn’t we go back home? I can’t remember now. His thought fluttered away again. Every remnant of attention must go to the Sisyphus task of picking up one foot, advancing it, putting it down, picking up the other foot, advancing it … Meanwhile a death-heavy weight dragged at his right side. Oh, yes, Jocelyn, he recalled from a remote past. The rest of us have to take turns helping her along.
She stumbled. Both of them came near falling. “Gotta rest,” her air-warped voice wavered.
“You rested … till ten minutes ago … Come!” He jerked brutally on the improvised harness which joined them.
They reeled on for another five hundred seconds. “Time,” Vadász called at the end. They lowered themselves down on their backs and breathed.
Eventually Heim rose to his knees. His vision had cleared and his head throbbed a bit less. He could even know, in a detached way, that the scenery was magnificent.
Eastward the hills up which he was laboring swooped in long curves and dales toward the illimitable hazy plain. The gentled light of an evening sun turned their colors—tawny and orange, with red splashes to mark stands of forest—into a smoldering richness. Not far away a brook twisted bright among boulders, until it foamed over in a series of cataracts whose noise was like bells through the still air. A swarm of insectoidal creatures, emerald bodies and rainbow wings, hovered above the pools it made.
Westward the mountains loomed dark and wild against the sun, which was near their ridge. Yet it tinged Lochan’s snowcone, a shape as pure as Fuji’s, with unearthly greens and blues under a violet heaven. The crags threw their shadows far down the sides, dusking whatever was ahead on Heim’s route. But he saw that, a kilometer hence, a wood grew. His field glasses showed it apparently thick with underbrush. But it was too far to go around—he couldn’t see the northern or southern end—while it was probably not very wide.
Vadász had also been looking in that direction. “I think best we call this a day,” he said.
“It’s early yet,” Heim objected.
“But the sun will soon go below that high horizon. And we are exhausted, and tomorrow we shall have to cut our way through yonder stuff. A good rest is a good investment for us, Gunnar.”
Hell, we’ve been sleeping nine hours out of the eighteen! Heim glanced at the others. Their suits had become as familiar to him as the seldom seen faces. Jocelyn was already unconscious. Uthg-a-K’thaq seemed to flow bonelessly across the place where he lay. Vadász and Bragdon sat tailor style, but their backs were bent. And every nerve in Heim carried waves of weariness. “All right,” he said.
He hadn’t much appetite, but forced himself to mix a little powder with water and squeeze the mess through his chowlock. When that was done, he stretched himself as well as his backpack allowed. Some time had passed before he realized that he wasn’t sleepy. Exhausted, yes; aching and throbbing; but not sleepy. He didn’t know whether to blame overtiredness or the itch in undepilated face and unwashed skin. Lord, Lord, what I’d give for a bath, clean sheets to lie between, clean air to breathe! He braked that thought. There was danger enough without adding an extra psychological hazard.
Pushing himself to a seated position, he watched the light die on Mount Lochan. The sky darkened toward night, a few stars trembled, the little crescent of the outer moon stood steely near the zenith.
“You too?”
; Heim shifted so he could see through his faceplate who had joined him. Bragdon. Reflexively, his hand dropped to his pistol.
Bragdon laughed without humor. “Relax. You’ve committed us too thoroughly.”
After a moment: “Damn you.”
