He, Kree Lorin, was a soldier! His father had fought in those last devastating wars. He himself had been trained to the rifle and grenade. And in anticipation of yet other battles and revolts, he had been made to study the tongue of the Lurga Empire, the structure of spaceships, the rudiments of that vast complexity which was military and mechanical science in the year of Defeat Thirty-nine.
Once Earth had had its fleets to scourge the blackness of outer space. Once Earth had been a proud mistress of great empire, not a vassal planet led willfully into decay by the conquerors. He, Kree Lorin, had been brought up a soldier against the day of revolt—
The sultry gloom gagged him and he moaned. There was a stir at his left and he choked off the sound, for it was deeply bred into him never to show weakness.
“You are Kree Lorin,” said a dim blur which was a face beside him. There was a jarring note of amusement in the tone.
Kree looked fixedly at the white blur, and gradually traced its features. He felt no recognition clearly, but only that he should know this girl.
“Kree Lorin,” she said, “in the hold of a slaver!” It was nearly laughter.
He hitched himself up on his elbow and stared at her, and gradually the mists in his mind cleared away. He knew her now. The peasant girl of Palmerton. The peasant girl he had seized off the dusty road, lifting her saddle-high to attempt a kiss upon her lovely mouth. His own cheek stung for an instant in memory.
Yes, this was she, Dana of Palmerton, whom he had afterward tried to bring to Falcon’s Nest by bribing her slut of a mother. Dana of Palmerton, who would rather live in a corncrib a free woman than a pampered slavey in mighty Falcon’s Nest!
“They got you, too?” he muttered, feeling that it was a stupid remark.
“Me. I was made for a slave. But Kree Lorin, the young hawk of Falcon’s Nest—” She laughed.
He wanted to strike her, but the thought of the effort robbed him of what strength he had, and he sank down to the slippery filth of the metal deck.
Evidently she was but lightly chained, for she moved to his side. With rough but efficient hands she turned him over and untangled his irons. She tore a strip from her dress and dampened it in her water cup to bathe away the blood and grime which lay so thickly on him.
She worked silently, taking other strips from her clothing for bandages. There was a detached disdain in her which roughened his nerves; but the coolness she brought his hurts made him bear her attitude in silence.
When she had finished she did not move away, but remained there, looking at him, and he turned his face from her to become even more conscious of her regard.
There was a shock in the ship, and Kree felt his weight double, then treble. There was a vibrating roar which grew in volume and crescendo, and then faded slowly. His weight did not lessen, and for the first time he knew the sensation of flight. He felt a little afraid, and turned back to find that Dana’s eyes were still on him. He wanted to give her some sharp rebuke, but somehow everything had changed.
He, Kree Lorin of Falcon’s Nest, had been accustomed to obedience from the people of the province. Just how or why he had never bothered to reason. He had not questioned his right until now that he was robbed of it. She, Dana of Palmerton, had a better command of the situation than he. She was therefore higher, somehow, than he. She, suddenly, was the superior being.
Puzzled, he looked at her for a long while. And then, because the increased weight made him ache anew, he began to slowly lose his hold on clarity and relapse back into a fog of half-felt pain.
He muttered without belief, “I am Kree Lorin. Kree Lorin of Falcon’s Nest.” But the name sounded very far away and meaningless.
Hours blended and blurred and stretched themselves into a dismal chain of aching monotony wherein commingled the stench of the ship, the whimpering of the cargo, and all the gloomy suffering of silent men who knew that so many others had gone this way, never to return, and that the end of the voyage would only begin a more degrading phase.
Air was too precious to be changed. Water was too scarce to be wasted. And capsule food, a thing to which these people were not used, accelerated their enfeeblement. Such stress pressed down their perceptions, and they might have been a week in space or a year for all they could recall. At first they had sometimes talked, sometimes there had been an attempt at song. But now no talk and certainly no song could be found in them.
Voris Shapadin walked through this cargo hold once, a scented rag held up to his nostrils, and berated the guard for not perceiving that at least eight here were dying, would die before the voyage was over, and so should not be permitted to exhaust stores.
After Voris Shapadin had gone, four guards in masks came and removed the victims, striking one who was so tenacious of life even in the face of slavery that he complained wildly and even sought to fight as he was borne away.
Kree Lorin lay still and watched with half-lidded eyes. He was too deadened by suffering to be much affected. He found himself faintly wishing that that had been meted to him. And so he was slightly amazed that the girl Dana should throw a pannikin at one of the guards who dragged at the protesting one.
She had paid little attention to Kree Lorin, as though she found him too despicable for notice. Dimly he understood that there is no state lower than that of one who has fallen from a height.
From Falcon’s Nest the Lorins had foraged out to extract a sort of tax or tribute from the peasantry on the slight excuse that the presence of an armed body prevented an incursion by the people beyond the river. A rough sort of court was occasionally held whereat peasants could find justice of a sort. But though out of fear the Lorins were respected, no soldier was liked. “Soldier” was a word of contempt, had become so within the memory of these people when the legions and fleets of Earth had been battered into rubble. And now from Falcon’s Nest had come forth a son as a slave, despised and bludgeoned and defeated by his captors, and even lower now, had dropped any prestige Kree Lorin might have had.
Kree Lorin knew this. He knew a great many things out of books, out of the forest paths. He knew how easily men died. He himself had seen men die through the sights of his rifle. But for the first time he knew how easily he himself could die. Unlike these peasants he had known no filth, little suffering beyond the rigors of the chase. And he felt that that which was he had been defiled and smashed. Had he had the slightest hope he would also have found defiance. But he had no hope and he was ill. And it was no wonder, he thought vaguely, that she despised him.
They were gone, the guards and the eight who had been condemned. Voris Shapadin came back and flashed a light down the rows of prisoners while his sailors executed a swift search. A knife had been found upon a dying man and two knives were brought from concealment by this second inspection.
Voris Shapadin did not flatter Kree Lorin with any particular attention. In fact, he seemed to have forgotten that anything unusual had happened in the capture of this man. The sailors stirred Kree Lorin up and made a perfunctory examination of his ragged clothing, and the light in the commander’s hand passed on to fix Dana in a dull yellow glow.
The sailors grinned as they started to search her and she struck viciously, and the crack of her hand on the leathery jaw made Voris Shapadin chuckle.
“Leave her,” he said. And the sailors passed to the next.
Kree Lorin lay where he was and thought fitfully about Dana. The light had shown her to him again after this endless period of darkness, and the startling blue of her angry eyes had recalled him to the fact that he had spent many weeks thinking about her back on Earth, and that he had tried very hard to somehow win her.
What might have been an hour, what might have been a day later, he awoke from a troubled dream and looked around him in the gloom. The odor of filth and death, the whimper of a captive, bit into him sharply.
It was a startling thing to him, a thing which was incredible and defied explanation.
He raised himself on his elbow and looked
down the long tunnel of the cargo hold and the three blue bulbs, and felt the peculiarly weightless sensation of flight.
Suddenly it seemed to Kree Lorin that a nightmare had turned real, for he had absolutely no explanation of his whereabouts, no memory of having arrived there, no idea of where he was going. He felt of the bandages which had swathed his head and pulled them off, wondering how he had been hurt.
The sensations which stirred in him lasted for perhaps a minute, and then, as one looks through a shadowy window, he recalled what had occurred. But why was all that so dull and all this so sharp?
Had he gone through an illness? Was he just now recovering from a fever of wounds?
What was different about his state today?
And then he knew. And knew why things were so sharp. And knew with an awful dread. For the chains of the bulkhead next to him were hanging empty.
He looked at the man on his right and prodded him. “What has happened to the woman who was chained here?”
Disinterestedly the slave grunted, “They came for her a while ago.”
“When?”
“A while ago. What does it matter?” He buried his head in the crook of his arm and muttered, “What does anything matter?”
Kree Lorin thought of the sailors who had searched her, of the grin of the commander. And then instantly stopped his thoughts.
He rattled his chains and yanked at them, and for a moment felt something give. But the hope was false, for a kink had turned straight, and there was no freeing the great rings in the bulkhead. He rattled his chains, and the noise added to his anger. He banged them loudly against the plates and then began to double the noise and yell.
Here and there a slave took it up. The din grew. Kree Lorin raved and the slaves bellowed and screamed, glad to break the silence of this place.
The din continued for several minutes before any result was achieved, and then the door at the end of the hold opened and a guard came in, a pool of light about his feet, his gun ready in hand.
“Stop!” cried the guard in Lurgese.
“Come and stop me!” roared Kree, for though his knowledge might not be perfect, he had been taught against some day of victory the tongue of the conqueror.
The guard called for support and then advanced down the center of the hold toward Kree. Two other guards followed him into the place.
“Your mothers were swine!” cried Kree. “Your children are dogs!”
The guard in the lead played his light upon the frenzied slave and noted the unnatural brilliance of eye and the grayness of the cheeks.
“Stop this noise!”
“Make me!” bellowed Kree. “I have the spacard! I know that I have it, and if I choose to die now instead of tomorrow— Shoot! You don’t dare shoot! Your brothers are goats and you dine on filth! Shoot me!”
The guard faltered and looked uneasily at his companions. For it was very weird to hear an Earthman screaming Lurgese. And it was nothing for jest—spacard—the thing which had swept more than one ship into aimless orbits in space.
The trio became conscious of their hand weapons, and Kree, watching, knew that he was close to being shot. But instead, one of the guards drew away and came back shortly with a small Lurgan in a gold cap which bore the insignia of medicine.
The small doctor was holding a kerchief to his nose. His footing was uncertain, and he appeared to be drunk.
“Spacard, is it?” he said, his voice muffled in the kerchief. “Bring him outside and we’ll know soon enough. Bah, what a pesthole!”
Kree, who had only wanted the guards within range of his swinging chain, had not hoped for this much. He subsided while a sailor put on a mask and approached him to unlock his irons from the ringbolts.
Making him walk at a safe distance before them and under their guns, they took him out into the passage and slammed the hold door. Even though the passage lights were not exceptionally bright, they were like dirks into Kree’s eyes.
Prodded ahead and bumping into the bulkheads, so unsteady had he become during the passage, Kree was forced into a small room which reeked of antiseptics and alcohol. He caught a glimpse of himself in an instrument cabinet door and was repelled by his own appearance. Haggard and unshaven, filthy and ragged, he little resembled the Kree Lorin who had gone forth to the hunt such an infinite time ago.
The doctor reeled into a chair and looked fixedly at the captive. “Spacard, is it?” he hiccuped. “Lie down on that table.”
Chains clanking, Kree stretched himself out on the cold metal. He knew that the sole reason for all this attention proceeded from the necessity of inoculating slaves and crew if it was proved that he did have spacard. A more vigilant doctor might have done the inoculation at the beginning of the voyage just for safety, but this was the Gaffgon, a derelict and slaver, not a transport or war vessel.
The sailors were afraid to approach Kree, but under the medico’s insistence began to buckle his ankles down.
To them, Kree had appeared wild without purpose and weaving from weakness. They only feared the germs which he might carry. They did not envision the danger of those confining chains which looped down from his wrists. Not until there was a rattle and swish and the dull crunch of inburst bone. A sailor went down.
A gun came up and the wielder’s face turned into a red spatter. The medico squealed and then fell, his hands plucking at his head in lessening strength. The third sailor would have run had he been between Kree and the door. He was not. His gun was smashed from his hand. The horror of the slave’s appearance and the death which had struck the others numbed the remaining man’s mind. He thought about his gun, but not soon enough. The chain caught him against the bulkhead, and for two or three seconds he stood there.
Kree was panting, but sustained by a fire of victory which physical exertion could not quench. There was raw hate in him, and he did not let the man who began to struggle on the floor come farther than one elbow before he crushed him down again.
They were dead, all of them. The white walls of the examination room were brightened. Kree took their keys and freed his wrists of the iron. He took their guns and girded them about his waist.
He entertained no great hopes, for such a ship would be forever on guard, but he made no incautious moves, for there was bred into him with the soldier the caution of the hunter. From the flagon on the wall he took a long drink, and the water was like life flowing through him. From the surgeon’s cabinet he took a hidden store of condensed food. From a less marked sailor he took a jacket and a cap he picked up from under the table. He added a razor and soap to his loot and then stepped to the door.
The companionway was clear. He fumbled with the latch as he closed it, but his hands shook a little and he had no patience with the combination. Afraid that he would be found there if he stayed longer, he had to abandon his effort to lock the door, no matter the danger of premature discovery to which the contents of that room might lead.
The long passageway was naked and without side corridors. He came to its end and saw a ladder leading up. At the top of it stood a sailor, facing the other way and leaning against the supporting chains which held the hatch open.
Kree went up, cat-footed. The butt of a pistol fell once and then twice. He tried to haul the body out of sight behind the hatch, but it was too large and one boot protruded. He did not dare linger there, and again was forced to leave a mark of his way behind.
This was a boat deck, and the spaceboats were in the bulges which jutted into the ship to preserve its streamline. Kree had had no practice with anything like these, and he had groaned, as a boy, over the insistence of old Colonel Stauckner that such things should be known. He had yawned then. Now he apprehensively studied the air lock and tried to recall the theory. Perhaps if he opened that thing while not in a spacesuit he would be ballooned into a thing of horror. He peered through the cloudy pane and saw the hooded spaceboat’s interior. This was a thing he had to chance now, not afterward. He opened the lock. There was a swirl of
air around him which eddied into quietness. The stale interior of the Gaffgon made the musty air of the spaceboat a welcome thing. He entered and shut the lock and scanned the gloom around him.
He was thankful that the Gaffgon was nearly as old as the texts from which Colonel Stauckner had attempted to give him a broad education. But even more than the texts, his own sense of logic helped him. In Lurgese most of the panel was named. To launch, it was evident that one closed the spaceboat’s lock, reached through and threw the catch on the confining door and then blasted the small vessel against the door and out into space. It seemed simple enough. He hoped that he could do it. He was afraid he would not remember the outer catch and threw it now with some qualms. Nothing happened. He felt better.
Now that he knew where he was going and what he would do, he turned back to the lock, opened it and peered up and down the Gaffgon’s upper passage. It was empty.
Dodging from bulge to bulge, he made his way forward. He nearly blundered into a sleeping compartment and then into another slave hold before he located the ladder which must lead up to the bridge.
Momentarily expecting to be stopped, he went up. Just as his eyes came on a level with the upper deck a gong began to clang, answered in deafening alarm by other gongs throughout the ship. Some one of his traces had been discovered!
He scrambled into a niche behind the hatch cover and crouched there, trying to decide which door before him was Voris Shapadin’s, and in that moment his answer came to him. The commander dashed from his cabin, buckling a gun about his waist. From the dimness, Kree saw that Shapadin’s mouth was torn and bleeding, and that his shirt collar had been ripped. There was frustrated anger in the man which drove him now to seek revenge upon whomever should fall in his pathway.
He whirled as he started down and cried to the officer of the watch, visible through the bridge door, “Post a guard over that hellcat! Which hold is it?”
“No. 3, sir,” said the officer. “A sailor found the medico dead with the No. 3 guards!”
“Send men to me down there!” roared Shapadin and leaped out of sight.
The Scifi & Fantasy Collection Page 27