by Steve Perry
Chapter Twenty-Six
Stark's radio buzzed with queries, mostly from Karnaaj; he ignored the calls and continued his flight pattern. He worked a spiral away from where he had killed Sandoz and Chameleon, his sensors turned to full gain. The Juggernaut's equipment was sensitive enough to tell a man from a large animal, were the operator of the exoframe properly skilled, but Stark was not an expert. Several times he dropped from the skies, only to find himself covering schweinhunds or sand cats. The last time, in frustration, he flamed the animals into cinders.
He flew over the desert, radar and doppler tracking the sand, looking for his prey. He would find them, no doubt, and when he did, they would die. Except for Juete, of course. She would hurt, but that would be later, when he had her safely off-planet. It would be a long time before she forgot this incident, and he looked forward to making her beg for his forgiveness.
Below, a sand cat started at the sound of the Juggernaut and loped off across the trackless waste, its big feet throwing up small showers of dry sand as it ran. He didn't bother to fry this one. That had been a loss of control before, and he did not want to let that happen again. He wanted to be calm when he found the last escapees. Filled with righteous anger, but calm. So that he could savor it.
"The lava plain is just ahead."
"How long will we be on it?" Juete asked.
Scanner said, "Most of the way. Fingers of it run almost to the edge of the mining port. It won't be as fast to stay on the plain, but it'll be a lot safer."
Maro stared at the plumes of smoke ahead, and caught the scent of burning sulphur, that characteristic rotten-egg smell.
"A couple of the volcanoes are still active," Scanner continued. "Nothing explosive, but some pretty good lava flows, according to the Cage's computer. And there are fumaroles bubbling all over the plain, especially close to the new flows." Scanner chuckled.
"Something funny?" Maro asked.
The circuit-rider glanced at him, then back at the plain. "Well, I guess it depends on your sense of humor. There was a little historical note in the computer on the early exploration of this planet. Seems the world was largely settled by gentlemen of fortune—mostly Confed ex-military—and there used to be a race held each year on the plain. Lot of hell-bent heroes would crank up some of the old hydrogen-powered land cruisers and tear across the hardened lava, to see who could get to the other side first. The last year it was held, sixteen of the seventeen cars disappeared. Sank in pits or got covered by a new eruption, it was figured. The only guy to finish came in first—and last."
"I don't think that's particularly funny," Juete said.
"Like I said, it depends on your sense of humor."
The surface of the plain seemed to be mostly black and bubbly looking rock, and it was quickly apparent that running it on wheels would pound them into jelly. Scanner switched to the GE mode and the ride smoothed.
"People used to race across this," Maro said. "Amazing."
"I think they had shock absorbers."
The pillowlike formations made for slow going—the repellors did not allow the cart much altitude—and the path had to be picked out carefully to avoid the larger hummocks. Maro's amazement that somebody would do this for fun was tempered by respect for the langlaufers' skill at being able to do it at top speed.
After an hour on the plain, they came to their first major obstacle. Along a gully like path that had made for the easiest travel so far on the plain, they suddenly found themselves rounding a hill and facing a fifty-meter-wide pit of bubbling liquid rock. A blast of hot wind smote them, even though they were at least a hundred meters away.
Scanner touched a control and dropped back into wheel mode. He braked the cart to a halt.
"I knew this road was too good to be true," he said.
"Is that lava?" Juete asked.
"I would say so, yes. And we're going to have to turn back and find a way around it. I don't want to be cooked trying to cross it, thank you."
"You want me to drive for a while?" Maro asked.
"Not yet. When I get so tired I can't stay awake, then you can drive. Otherwise, I might as well do it myself."
They turned the car and began to retrace their path.
Stark flew his pattern, trying to stay calm, but growing irritated despite himself. Damn, where were they? If they had gone the same way as Sandoz and Chameleon, he would have found them hours ago. Therefore, the group had split up. Which way would they have gone?
Logically, he figured, they would have headed toward the closest starport, that being northeast of the Granite Girdle where the old mine was. But such a path would put them on the desert, and Stark didn't think they were that stupid—not after how canny they had been so far.
Sure, they could wander around on the planet for a while, but they had to know that he could find them easily if he kicked in search modes on the spy sat system. No, they had to get off world fast, just as he would have to do were he to survive.
How? What was the best way?
The exoframe computer was bright, for what it was. Tactics and strategy were its strong points. He asked it.
"Computer, plot the three most likely routes for a land vehicle to travel from coordinates 56-69-074 east to 57-23-112 west."
The computer's mechanical voice said, "Define parameters of likely."
"Routes that would be the safest for a small guerrilla force seeking to escape detection from air, land and spysat search."
"Capabilities of land vehicle?"
"Three-person surface quadcycle with supplementary low-altitude repellors."
The air in front of Stark's faceplate lit with the heads-up display. Holographic maps shimmered in the air. The three images each had a different route of travel marked by a glowing blue line. The maps were numbered, with one being the most likely path and three being the least.
The line on the first map led across the gigantic lava fields to the north.
Of course. All the piezoelectrical static associated with volcanic activity and rock movement would play hell with sensor gear. It might be dangerous on the surface, but the only way they'd be spotted would be by direct visual, which gave them a big advantage.
As much as he hated them, Stark had to give them credit. So far, the escapees had moved very cleverly.
Not cleverly enough, however. They hadn't known about his Juggernaut. He had figured out which way they went, he was sure of it. They'd make the smart move. Only this time, he wouldn't be a step behind.
He checked his position. He was on the southern arm of his spiral, unfortunately, and it would take more than an hour to reach the plain. By then, it would be dark. But that didn't matter. He would put the Juggernaut down and rest. In the morning, he would have plenty of daylight in which to find them. It was only a matter of when.
He gave the computer the coordinates, turned, and roared across the twilight skies.
Juete's buttocks were sore from the hard seat in the cart, and she rubbed them as they stepped from the vehicle. Dain had been driving for the last two hours, and the dark had finally forced them to stop. They did not want to use the lights; besides, they were exhausted.
Scanner pulled the heat tabs on three cans, and the scent of the warming food wafted to her. It might be bland by the Cage's standards, but nothing had ever smelled quite so good to Juete.
"How far have we come?" Dain said.
Scanner took a bite of what looked to be a reddish bean paste, swallowed and said, "About two hundred and fifty kilometers."
Dain offered a canteen to Juete. She took it and drank. "Not too good," he said.
Scanner shrugged. "Best we can do, considering the terrain. Thirty klicks an hour means we can make it to the port by dark tomorrow. If…"
"If what?" Juete said.
"If the repellors hold up."
"You think they won't?" Dain asked.
Scanner swallowed another mouthful of bean paste. He pointed at the canteen, and Juete passed it to him. He drank. "
I don't know. They ran hot for the last couple of hours. We can drop to the ground, but given the topography, we'd be lucky to do ten klicks an hour."
Juete leaned back against the relatively smooth chunk of black stone. She was exhausted; so much had happened in the last few days. She hoped they would make it, hoped they would be able to escape from Omega, but if they didn't, if they were tracked down, she knew she was not going to return to the Cage and Stark's perverted sense of love. She would die first. And somehow, that did not seem as terrible as it once had been. The albino Exotics had a highly-supported sense of self-preservation—another legacy from their creators. One did not wish to lose such a valuable possession through suicide, after all. But there came a time when death was preferable to life, perhaps. Or, at least, a time when the quality of life might not be worth the struggle. Suicide, no. But fighting to preserve her freedom and others', even to death, yes.
That had been Raze's decision, after all. She could do no less.
Next to her, Dain slipped his arm over her shoulders, as if suddenly sensing her mood. She snuggled closer to him, looked at his face, then glanced over at Scanner. Dain would not mind, she knew, if she invited Scanner to huddle with them. It was the three of them against the world, after all, and what comfort they could take together, they should.
But before she could speak. Scanner said, "I'm going to sit in the cart for a while." He stood, stretched, and walked the ten meters to the cart.
Juete glanced at Dain.
He said softly, "He's going to link to the cart's computer. It isn't much, but he gets something from it."
She nodded. She could understand that.
After a while, without speaking further, she fell asleep against Dain.
Maro gently moved away from Juete, easing her head down onto the jacket he'd found at the camp. She slept hard, not stirring.
He climbed the boulderlike rock behind them. It was easy enough, the moons' light was bright, the sky clear. It was maybe twenty meters to the top, a soft incline, and from the pinnacle he could see kilometers in any direction.
Here and there, reddish-orange glows lit the sky. And twice in five minutes, bright discharges like lightning flared whitely. Such an eerie landscape, like something out of a prehistory holovid. He almost expected to see dinosaurs stalking across the hardened lava, or a herd of curl noses lumbering past. Below him, Juete slept, while Scanner communed with his electronic spirits. Maro felt very much alone on this alien plain. So far away from anywhere he ever thought he would be. He thought about the others who had trusted him to lead them to freedom. Four dead— five, counting Fish, who had never even managed to climb the walls. Sandoz, Chameleon, Berque and Raze. Raze most of all he was sorry about.
The sadness welled in him, filling his chest and throat, and it almost overcame him. No. Not tonight. Later, maybe, if they lived, later he would have time to mourn properly. For now, he needed to concentrate on staying alive. Otherwise there would be no one to pay respect to the others.
He climbed back down the rock and stretched out next to Juete. It was cold and hard, but sleep finally came.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Stark awoke, and for a moment did not know where he was. He felt panic close in until he remembered. The Juggernaut lay on its back, and the seat padding made it as comfortable as any other field cot he'd ever slept in, albeit somewhat limiting insofar as motion.
He touched a control and the repellors hummed as they lifted the suit to a standing position. He clicked the exit controls, waited until the hydraulics opened the clamshell doors and climbed out.
He looked about the landscape, bleak and desolate as a moon. He stretched, relieved himself, and jogged around a bit. The morning sun was only beginning to show over the horizon. He reentered the Juggernaut, sat in the control seat, and fastened the unit tight again. The water from the mouth tube was cold and clean, and the nutrient paste was warm, if somewhat tasteless. It was sustaining, however, and that was all he needed. He reconnected the penile catheter and powered up the flight mode. Even the computer could not say exactly how the fugitives would cover the ground, since detailed maps were not available, but that was unimportant. He would head northwest, zig-zagging. It would take a little longer to cover a fifteen-klick-wide swath, but in the end. he would catch them.
The Juggernaut lifted amid a spray of volcanic rock dust, a giant raptor on the prowl.
Juete had almost gotten used to the rhythm of the cart's swaying flight as it dodged rocks too high to hop. Scanner was driving again, and for a time, the plain was flat enough for nearly top speed. An hour after they started the ground ridged again, becoming more convoluted. She wondered how it had come to be formed that way. Were there some underlying rocks which had become encysted? Or did the cooling lava pile up on itself? It was not important that she know, but it did make her curious.
Next to her, Dain stared across the plain, not speaking. He seemed far away this morning, lost in his own thoughts.
In the middle of a particularly rough stretch of ground, Scanner stopped. "Got to rest the GE," he said. "It's overheating."
Juete looked around. The surface reminded her of a stormy ocean she'd once sailed over on another world; it was as if someone had frozen the wind-driven waves into stone. There were peaks and troughs and a thousand different shapes surrounding them.
They had passed several more fumaroles, pits that exuded hot and stinking gases or bubbled with molten rock and mud. And yet, even among the solid rock and killing heat, she had seen plants. They were mostly small, stunted blobs of gray-green, some kind of lichen or moss anchored to the rocks at odd angles, usually in shaded spots. Even in the midst of such desolation, there was life. Some kind of a lesson there, wasn't there? The sun beat down, but it was cooler than the desert when they were away from the fumaroles. Juete wore a flat-brimmed hat Dain had found at the camp, and slathered herself every few minutes with sunblock. Even so, she felt her skin burning where it was exposed to the light.
After half an hour, Scanner restarted the cart and they moved on.
Maro trusted Scanner's driving more than he did his own. Scanner plugged into the cart's simple computer and controlled the vehicle directly, for the most part. But the concentration required for the interlink was hard on the man, and Maro offered to spell him every hour or so. Scanner looked drawn, tired, and he had lost probably five kilograms since the escape. They were all wearing thin, Maro knew. If they couldn't get to some kind of safety within another day or two, the stress would burn them out. The price paid for constant fight-or-flight was too much to continue for long.
"Dain?"
Maro turned to glance at Juete. Scanner was asleep in the back next to the beautiful albino. "Yeah?"
"Listen, no matter what happens, I want you to know I love you. I appreciate what you've done for us. For me."
"Thank you," he said.
He somehow felt better, even though nothing had changed. Win or lose, he had done what he'd had to do.
Back and forth Stark tacked, flying a Z-pattem that extended seven and a half klicks on either side of a straight line toward the mining port. He looked at the land below from an altitude of a hundred meters. The suit's sensors worked sometimes, and sometimes they did not. Once he had been nearly over a large fissure that had suddenly ground shut, and only his polarized faceplate had saved his eyes from the actinic flash of a giant spark as it leaped from the ground and floated up past him like ball lighting. His sensors had gone off the scale.
But, even though he could not track the escapees, there were very few places for them to hide. He would see them among all the ripples and valleys of the slag, sooner or later.
He worried for a time that they might have fallen into one of the steaming lava pits, but he somehow did not think that Fate would cheat him so.
Methodically he flew, back and forth, searching.
As the afternoon wore toward dusk, Scanner stopped the cart more and more frequently. Finally, an hour befor
e dark, with the shadows stretching over a landscape grown more and more mountainous, they halted.
"That's it," Scanner said wearily. "The GE gear is dead. If I had parts and tools, I might be able to fix it. But we've burned a rotor and there's no way we can continue on hover."
"It's okay," Dain said. "You pulled off a miracle getting us this far. We'll just have to do it the old-fashioned way, on the ground."
Scanner looked around. Juete was shocked at how thin and gaunt the man's face appeared. "We'll move like snails. There's hardly a centimeter of flat ground as far as I can see."
"We'll manage. We can always walk, if we have to."
"It's about forty kilometers, I figure," Scanner said.
"We crossed that much desert, didn't we?" Juete put in.
"Yeah. I guess."
"Should we stop, do you think?" Dain asked.
Scanner shrugged. "Might as well go until dark."
"Okay then. We roll."
Stark's anger could not be held back. Where were they? He had not missed them, he was sure of it! And yet, the spaceport lay only another fifty or sixty klicks ahead. Surely they couldn't have gotten that far yet? They had to be on the plains still. But darkness was coming and there was still no sign of them.
A yellow fog seemed to cover the ground ahead.
"Better avoid that," Scanner said to Maro, who was now driving. "Could be sulphur dioxide. Probably has a lot of carbon dioxide in it, too."
Maro turned and began to circle the gas cloud. They had been lucky; they had managed to travel another fifteen kilometers on a winding but fairly flat stretch. But darkness was making the driving treacherous, and now Maro decided to halt for the night. He pulled the cart to a stop in the shelter of a tall spire of rock. Almost there, he thought. We're almost there.
Stark cursed the darkness. And then, he saw something on his scopes.
He had gotten a number of ghosts and bad readings since he'd entered the lava fields, but this looked like the readings of three large, warm-blooded animals. He had seen nothing like this on the plains until now.