Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  Whatever happened, Colgrave told himself he could achieve his minimum goal any time he liked now. A single energy bolt through the Sigma File would ignite it explosively. And its destruction, getting it out of Ralan hands, had been as much as he reasonably could expect to accomplish in the situation.

  He glanced at the closed door to the sleep cabin again, at the door which should open on one of the Talada’s passages, and decided he didn’t feel reasonable.

  He took the Sigma File from the table, carried it over to the passage door and set it down against the wall. He’d expected to see the second guard come bouncing in through the door as soon as the commotion began in here. The fact that he hadn’t indicated either that he’d been sent away or that Ajoran’s suite was soundproofed. Probably the latter . . .

  Colgrave raised the gun, grasped the door handle with his left hand, turned it suddenly, hauled the door open.

  The second guard stood outside, but he wasn’t given time to do much more than bulge his eyes at Colgrave.

  Colgrave went quickly along the passage, the Sigma File in his left hand, the gun ready again in his right. Now that it was over he felt a little shaky. By the rules he should, in such circumstances, have been satisfied with his minimum goal and destroyed the file before he risked another encounter with an armed man. If he’d been killed just now, it would have been there intact for Rala to decode.

  But the other goals looked at least possible now, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to put a bolt through the file before it became clear that he’d done as much as he could.

  He moved more cautiously as he approached the corner of the passage. This was officer’s country, and his plans were based on a remembered general impression of the manner in which the Talada raiders were constructed. The passageway beyond the corner was three times the width of this one . . . it might be the main passage he was looking for.

  He glanced around the corner, drew back quickly. About thirty feet away in the other side of the passage was a wide doorspace, and two men in officer’s uniform had been walking in through it at the moment he looked. Colgrave took a long, slow breath. His next goal suddenly seemed not at all far away.

  He waited a few seconds, looked again. Now the passage was clear. Instantly he was around the corner, running down to the doorspace. As he stepped out before it, he saw his guess had been good. He was looking down a short flight of steps into the Talada’s control room.

  Looking and firing . . . The gun in his hand hissed like an angry cat, but several seconds passed before any of the half-dozen men down there realized he was around. By then two of them were dead. They had happened to be in the gun’s way. The drive control panels, the gun’s target, were shattering from end to end. Colgrave swung the gun toward a big communicator in a corner. At that moment, somebody discovered him.

  The man did the sensible thing. His hand darted out throwing one of the switches before him.

  A slab of battle-steel slid down across the doorspace, settling the control room away from the passage.

  Colgrave sprinted on down the passage. The emergency siren came on.

  The Talada howled monstrously like a wounded beast as it rolled and bucked. Suddenly he was in another passage, heard shouts ahead, turned back, stumbled around a corner, went scrambling breathlessly up a steep, narrow stairway.

  At its top, he saw ahead of him, like a wish-dream scene, the lit lock, two white-faced crewmen staggering on the heaving deck as they tried to lift a heavy boxed item into it.

  Colgrave came roaring toward them, wild-eyed, waving the gun. They looked around at him, turned and ran as he leaped past them into the lock.

  The man at the controls of the Talada’s lifeboat died before he realized somebody was running up behind him. Colgrave dropped the Sigma File, hauled the body out of the seat, slid into it . . .

  He was several minutes’ flight away from the disabled raider before he realized he was laughing like a lunatic.

  He was clear. And now the odds, shifting all the way over, were decidedly in his favor. The question was how long it would take them to repair the damage and come after him. With enough of a start, they couldn’t know which way he’d headed and the chance of being picked up before he got within range of the Earth patrols became negligible. But first there was the matter of getting the lifeboat fueled for the long run. It used iron, the standard medium; and he had, Colgrave calculated, enough for fifteen hours’ flight on hand.

  Which wasn’t too bad. It would have been nicer if he could have given the two crewmen time to dump another few boxes of ingots on board before he took off. But a scan of the stellar neighborhood showed two planets respectively seven and eight hours away indicating conditions which should allow a man to stay a short time without serious damage or discomfort. The lifeboat had the standard iron location and refining equipment on board. A few hours on either of those worlds; and he’d be ready.

  After dropping the body of the Ralan pilot into space, he decided the seven hour run gave him a slight advantage. Once the Talada got moving, it had speed enough to check over both worlds without losing a significant amount of time. They could figure out his fuel requirements as well as he. If they arrived before he was finished and gone, the raider’s scanning devices were almost certain to spot the lifeboat wherever he tried to hide it.

  The chances seemed very good that they simply wouldn’t get there soon enough. But the minimum goal remained a factor. Colgrave decided to cache the Sigma File in some easily identifiable spot as soon as he touched ground, take the boat to another section of the planet to do his mining, come back for the file when he was prepared to leave. It would cut the risk of being surprised with it to almost nothing . . .

  IV

  How many hours had passed since then? Clawing his way up through the boulders and shrubbery, slipping in loose soil, Colgrave glanced back for a moment at the sun. It was noticeably lower in the sky again, appeared to be dropping almost visibly toward the horizon. But that told him nothing. He remembered the landing now; it had been daylight and he had come down to hide the Sigma File . . . had hidden it, his memory corrected him suddenly. And then, for the next six or ten or fourteen hours, he appeared to have simply waited around here, in some mental fog, for the Talada to come riding its fiery braking jets down from the sky.

  The raider might arrive at any moment. Unless . . . Colgrave blocked off the rest of that thought. The slope had begun to level off as he approached the top; he covered the last stretch in a rush, lungs sobbing for breath. He clambered on hastily through a jagged crack in the back of the ridge. For an instant, he saw the shallow dip of the valley beyond.

  He dropped flat immediately. They were already here.

  It was a shock but one he realized he had half expected. After a few seconds, he crept up to the shelter of a rock from where he could look into the valley without exposing himself.

  The Talada had set down about a hundred yards back of the lifeboat, perhaps no more than half an hour ago. The smaller vessel’s lock stood open; a man came climbing out of it, followed by two others. The last of the three closed the lock and they started back toward the raider, from which other men were emerging. Ajoran had ordered the lifeboat searched first, to make sure the Sigma File wasn’t concealed on it. Without that delay they should have caught him while he was still climbing up the slope . . . the group coming out of the Talada now was a hunting party; most of them had quick-firing rifles slung across their backs.

  They lined up beside the ship while a wedge-shaped device was maneuvered out of the lock. It remained floating a little above the ground near the head of the line, about twenty feet long, perhaps a dozen feet across at its point of greatest width. Colgrave had seen such devices before.

  It was a man-tracker, a type used regularly in Ralan expeditions against settlements on other planets. Its power unit and instruments were packed into the narrow tip; most of its space was simply a container, enclosed and filled with the same kind of numbing liquid
preservative as that in the prisoner vats in the Talada ships. It could be set either to hunt down specific individuals or any and all human beings within its range, and to either kill them as they were overtaken or pick them up with its grapplers and deposit them unharmed in the container. They could use it to follow him now; the clothing he had left on the ship would give it all the indications it needed to recognize and follow his trail.

  Before men had come out behind the machine, including one in a spacesuit. Colonel Ajoran apparently was assigning almost the entire complement of the Talada to the search for Colgrave and the Sigma File.

  Colgrave decided he’d seen enough. If he had been observed on the hillside as the Talada was descending, they would have gone after him immediately. Instead, they would now follow their man-tracker over the ridge and down to the swamp where the herds of native animals were feeding. It gave him a little time.

  He crawled backward a dozen feet into the narrow crevasse, rose and retraced his way through it to the other side of the ridge. Beyond the plain, the sun was almost touching the horizon. The gray forest into which the aggressive biped had retreated began a few hundred yards to his right. He’d have better shelter there than among the tumbled rocks of the ridge.

  He went loping toward it, keeping below the crest-line. His eyes shifted once toward the swamp. One great tree stood there, towering a good hundred feet above the vegetation about it. The Sigma File was wedged deep among the giant’s root, a few feet below the water. He’d seen the tree from the air, put the lifeboat down in the little valley, hurried down to the swamp on foot. Twenty minutes later, the file was buried and he’d started wading back out of the swamp. What had happened between that moment and die one when he found himself sitting on the hillside he still didn’t know . . .

  He reached the forest, came back among the trees over the top of the ridge until he saw the valley again. During the few minutes that had passed, the ridge’s evening shadow had spread across half the lower ground. It had seemed possible that when they realized how close it was to nightfall here, the hunt for him would be put off till morning. But Ajoran evidently wanted no delay. The man in the spacesuit still stood near the open lock of the ship, but the search party was coming across the valley behind their tracking machine. They headed for a point of the open ridge about a quarter-mile away from Colgrave. They’d have lights to continue on through the night if necessary.

  The chase plan was simple but effective. If the man-tracker hadn’t flushed him into view before morning, the Talada could take the lifeboat aboard, move after the search party and put down again. They could work on in relays throughout the following day, half of them resting at a time on the ship, until he was run down.

  The Sigma File was safest where he’d left it. The tracker’s scent perceptors were acute enough to follow his trail through the stagnant swamp, getting signs from the vegetation he’d brushed against or grasped in passing, even from lingering traces in the water itself. And it might very well detect the file beneath the surface. But—ironically, considering Ajoran’s purpose—the discovery would be meaningless to the machine except as another indication that the man it was pursuing had been there. It would simply move on after him.

  The worst thing he could attempt at the moment would be to get down to the swamp ahead of the searchers and destroy the file. He would almost certainly be sighted on the open slopes below the forest; and either the tracker or the man in the spacesuit could be overhead instants later.

  Colgrave’s gaze shifted back to the spacesuited figure. He would have to watch out for that one. His immediate role presumably was to act as liaison man between the ship and the hunters, supplementing the communicator reports Ajoran would be getting on the progress of the search. But he was armed with a rifle; and if Colgrave was seen, he could spatter the area around the fugitive with stun-gas pellets while remaining beyond range of a hand weapon. He had floated back up to the Talada’s lock for a moment, was now heading out to the ridge, drifting about fifty feet above the ground.

  It wasn’t a graceful operation.

  Maneuvering a suit designed for weightless service in space near the surface of a planet never was. But the fellow was handling himself fairly well, Colgrave thought. He came up to the ridge as the troop began filing across it, hovered above the line a few seconds, then swung to the left and moved off in a series of slow, awkward bounces above the hillside. He seemed to be holding something up to his helmet, and Colgrave guessed he was scanning the area with a pair of powerful glasses. After some minutes, he came back.

  Colgrave had crossed over to the other side of the ridge to follow the progress of the column. It had swung to the right as it started down, was angling straight toward the swamp along the route he had taken with the file. He watched, chewing his lip. If the man-tracker happened to cross his return trail on the way, he might be in trouble almost immediately . . .

  The man in the spacesuit drifted after the search party, passed above them some two hundred feet in the air, then remained suspended and almost unmoving. Colgrave glanced over at the horizon. The sun was nearly out of sight; its thin golden rim shrank and disappeared as he looked at it. Night should follow quickly here, but as yet he couldn’t see any advantage the darkness would bring him.

  The man in the spacesuit was coming back to the ridge. He hovered above it a moment, settled uncertainly toward the flat top of a boulder, made a stumbling landing and righted himself. He turned toward the plain and the swamp, lifting the object that seemed to be a pair of glasses to the front of his helmet again. Evidently he’d had enough of the suit’s airborne eccentricities for a while.

  Colgrave’s throat worked. The man was less than two hundred yards away . . .

  His eyes shifted toward a tuft of shrubs twenty feet beyond the edge of the forest growth.

  Some seconds later, he was there, studying the stretch of ground ahead. Other shrubs and rocks big enough to crouch behind . . . but they would give him no cover at all if for some reason the fellow decided to lift back into the air. The fading light wouldn’t help then. Those were space glasses he was using, part of the suit, designed to provide clear vision even when only the gleam of distant stars was there for them to absorb.

  But perhaps, Colgrave told himself, Spacesuit would not decide to lift back into the air. In any case, no other approach was possible. The far side of the ridge was controlled by the Talada‘s night-scanners, and they would be in use by now.

  He moved, waited, gathered himself and moved again. Spacesuit was directing most of his attention downhill, but now and then he turned for a look along the ridge in both directions. Perhaps, as the air darkened, the closeness of the forest was getting on his nerves. Native sounds were drifting up from the plain, guttural bellowing and long-drawn ululations. The meat eaters were coming awake. Presently there was a series of short, savage roars from the general direction of the swamp; and Colgrave guessed the search party had run into some big carnivore who had never heard about energy rifles. When the roaring stopped with a monstrous scream, he was sure of it.

  He had reduced the distance between them by almost half when the spacesuit soared jerkily up from the boulder. Colgrave had a very bad moment. But it lifted no more than a dozen feet, then descended again at a slant which carried it behind the boulder. The man had merely changed his position. And the new position he had selected took them out of each other’s sight.

  Colgrave was instantly on his feet, running forwards. Here the surface was rutted with weather fissures. He slipped into one of them, drawing out his gun, moved forward at a crouch. A moment later, he had reached the near side of the boulder which Spacesuit had stood.

  Where was he now? Colgrave listened, heard a burst of thin, crackling noises. They stopped for some seconds, came briefly again, stopped again. The suit communicator . . . the man must have taken off the helmet, or the sound wouldn’t have been audible. He couldn’t be far away.

  Colgrave went down on hands and knees, edged along
the side of the boulder to the right. From here he could see down the hillside. On the plain, the night was gathering; the boundaries between the open land and the swamp had blurred. But the bobbing string of tiny light beams down there, switching nervously this way and that, must already be moving through the marsh.

  The communicator noises came again, now from a point apparently no more than fifteen feet beyond the edge of the boulder ahead of Colgrave. It was as close as he could get. It was important that the man in the space suit should die instantly, which meant a head shot. Colgrave rose up, stepped out quietly around the boulder, gun pointed.

  The man stood faced half away, the helmet tipped back on his shoulders. In the last instant, as Colgrave squeezed down on the trigger, sighting along the barrel, the head turned and he saw with considerable surprise that it was Colonel Ajoran.

  Then the gun made its spiteful hissing sound.

  Ajoran’s head jerked slightly to the side and his eyes closed. The spacesuit held him upright for the second or two before he toppled. Colgrave already was there, reaching under the collar for one of the communicator’s leads. He found it, gave it a sharp twist, felt it snap.

  V

  In the Talada, the man watching the night-scanners saw Colonel Ajoran’s spacesuit appear above the ridge and start back to the ship. He informed the control room and the lock attendant.

  The outer lock door opened as the suit came up to it. Colgrave made a skidding landing inside His performance in the suit had been no improvement on Ajoran’s. He shut off the suit drive, clumped up to the inner door, left arm raised across the front of the helmet, hand fumbling with the oxygen hose. It would hide his face for a moment from whoever was on the other side of the door. His right hand rested on his gun.