He trembled at the cost in time, the deadly delay. The Buro had been very close. He could not fail now! Not when success was so near.
But he knew well that a surface guide was a necessity for their journey. They were unversed in the myriad perils of the vast, dried-up ocean beds. Out there, in the winds of the equatorial dusts, the land changed shape frequently. Groundquakes and volcanism were just one aspect; others were the crustal pits, a unique geological aspect of Baraf, where the land gave way abruptly to holes several kilometers deep and wide, with sheer cliff walls.
Then there were the far-desert mutants. The Zun people and the Outer Hardscabbies. In the Boneyard sections of the trail there were a thousand other perils to beware of. There was no getting away from it, they had to have a guide.
They were about ten kilometers outside the fort when they became aware of a heavy, repetitive drumming sound coming from the west. It grew louder.
The Elchite driver, Aul, said, "Hardscabby wardrums, I think. They have found our handiwork."
The drum sounds were enormous, triumphing over the wind, electronically amplified, distorted noise, broadcast via groups of enormous speakerhorns that brayed into the wind.
"What will they do?" Jon asked.
"They will probably attack Fort Pinshon. It happens every so often. The mutants swarm in and sometimes they even capture one. They take everybody for meat, burn what's left, and depart."
"And within days new proprietors are installed on the sites, rebuilding furiously," Gesme added. "The forts are very profitable to operate."
"Why do they not take over the forts more permanently?" Jon wondered aloud.
"Few travelers would willingly risk the mutant forms of hospitality," said Aul with a grin. Gesme guffawed. Jon noticed the Bey's worried frown, however.
"If the fort is besieged, though, we will be trapped there. We have to go south immediately. Is there any other trail?"
"We need water, we're low on food as well," Aul said. "Superior Buro has most certainly divined our presence here by now."
"I found them filming departing expeditions," John said. "They had been to the hotel. They may have established a presence in the fort."
"We can't go there, then," Aul said.
"Look," Jon cried, "up ahead."
Down the trail from Fort Pinshon came another pair of mantids, at full speed, heading south. From the numerous nicks and pockmarks on roof and side panels, Jon recognized the leading machine as Braunt's.
As they came closer they slowed down. Figures climbed out and waved. Aul brought the mantid to a stop.
Braunt approached, braving the blinding light and wind.
Aul opened a window. The cab filled with dust and the sound of the wind moaning across the dunes.
Braunt brought bad news. "You won't want to get into Fort Pinshon. The laowon military are there. They're landing equipment directly from space. Whole place is in an uproar. We barely got out."
Braunt was joined by the trail guide Angle Umpuk. They clambered into the mantid, bringing more crystal grains that winked in polychromatic glory whenever the sunlight caught them.
"This is unprecedented. Laowon military, dropping straight from orbit! They came in by the hundred. Killed dozens in the outer yard. You've never seen anything like these cyborg shock troops of theirs." Umpuk recognized Jon. They shook hands.
"Braunt and I happened to be on the apron, exchanging engine components, when it started. That's how we got away."
"Hawkstone?" the Bey said, gripping Braunt's hand suddenly.
"He's with me. I was going to take him to Quism—he said he had money. Seemed a better idea than leaving him there for the mutants."
There was a short silence. Then the Bey said, "We are faced with a dilemma."
"Indeed we are," Angle Umpuk said. "I heard the drums start up. The Hardscabbies have gone on the trail of blood."
"They are coming up the trail from the south. To the north lies the fort and the laowon military. What lies on the east and west?"
"West of here is all Hardscabby territory. They'd track you easily. East their control fades out as you get into the continental interior. It's pretty empty, but it's also out of your way. Braunt said you were going south, deep south."
"Mr. Umpuk, are you offering your services as a guide?" the Bey inquired silkily.
"Looks like I don't have that much choice."
The Bey paused a moment. It seemed a heaven-sent opportunity. In the Book of Elchis, the Great Prophet was quoted frequently on the subject of seizing opportunities, on taking care so the deity would take care of one, and so on. If ever a time had come for marrying Elchis to the moment, this had to be it.
And yet he strained to perceive the webs of the Superior Buro. That feeling which had never left him that he worked within their machinations and was anticipated and guided all the way. It was impossible to believe in this fantasy. He, a mere schoolteacher, in late middle years, to defeat the laowon Imperiom! How had he gone so far? Escaped their nets so often? He had never believed it possible, not at the beginning, especially not after the events on Earth. In his heart the Bey had felt that their efforts were doomed. But somehow his people had overcome each trial in their path. This suggested to him that his passage had been prepared most carefully all the way by the Buro, which simply sought to find the man with half a head. If they could put Eblis Bey and Sehngrohn together, they would have both latitude and longitude for the position of the machine thirty years ago.
Yet if they knew of the machine, knew that it was there, why hadn't they scoured the planet months before, when they first got word through the treachery of the diktats on Earth?
Once again he came to that question mark that had lain over his mission since the beginning. The laowon had most certainly brainwiped the Diktat of Sumatra. Yet they had not discovered the secret. Did that mean the diktat committed suicide? Or had they killed him? A sudden heart attack? A stroke during the interrogation? It would be typical of Superior Buro arrogance. To put that weak old man through a harsh interrogation that killed him before they wrested the vital aspects of the secret from him.
If the diktat had died before giving up all he knew, then the laowon knew no more than the Diktats of Los Angeles could have given them—and they had only a few scraps. Nothing substantial, just what they had squeezed from the poor men and women who were at the disastrous meeting where the secret was first brought to Earth. Thus the laowon were still following him and, somehow, this quixotic adventure by a frail old teacher retained a chance of succeeding.
Now here was a guide. Could he be Superior Buro? The possibility existed, yet there was no choice. Swallowing his misgivings, he turned to Umpuk. "What would you suggest we do right now, then?"
"Go to the ziggurat machines, climb the farthest, and wait for the Hardscabbies to go by. They will attack the fort. While they do that we will run south and hope they miss us."
"Won't the laowon just obliterate them?" said Jon.
"Possibly, but you shouldn't underestimate the Hardscabbies. They will employ many tricks, they will have pops and snaps. If the laowon underestimate them, they may be in for a nasty surprise."
Eblis Bey nodded and committed himself. If he was wrong he would have to move against this Umpuk very quickly. Extra vigilance was required, as if he wasn't tired enough already! The thought brought him an image of the temple schoolroom in L.A., with his students in rapt attention to his historical expositions. It faded into an image of a woman, Aleya, his lovely long-dead wife, the only woman he had ever loved. He tried to blot out the rest of it, the last moments inside the machine. He shivered involuntarily as he recalled her scream. Eblis Bey shook his head to clear the nightmare and headed for the mantids.
The expedition turned and moved off the trail and across the dunes on an angle south and east. Umpuk led them in his dark-green mantid, threading through the machine park toward a distant line of pyramidal structures, which slowly resolved into two-hundred-meter-high circu
lar ziggurats. They might easily have been the tips of gigantic screws thrust from the depths of the landmass.
They cruised onto the ramplike surface and began to climb. The ramp was ten meters wide at the base but narrowed to less than three after two turns and finally came down to two meters, too narrow for the turtle, which had to stop before reaching the flat circular summit.
The mantids reached the top and parked. Jon got out and took binoculars to examine the Oolite trail, which ran past, seven kilometers distant. The fort was out of sight, lost in the dust twenty kilometers north.
Jon scanned the southern part of the trail. The dust obscured everything, however. He was about to give up in disgust when he saw the first black specks charging up the trail.
He called to the Bey, who left the shelter of the mantid and joined him. The wind was fierce at that elevation.
They watched as a pack of forty or more black vehicles rolled up the trail toward Fort Pinshon. Jon noticed that the big balloon tires kicked up relatively little dust; from a distance it would be hard to tell their trail from the normal dust clouds of the belt.
The Hardscabbies went north to punish the normals in the fort and to take fresh meat for the larders. The drum sounds died away with them after a while. Atop the ziggurat they waited, uneasy, with frequent glances northward.
An hour went by and the winds died down. The dust lessened and an ominous hush settled in the north. Midafternoon came and went and abruptly very bright flashes of light sparked from the region of the fort. Soon afterward, appallingly loud explosions cracked across the land.
Angle Umpuk joined them.
More very bright flashes, followed by terrifyingly loud blasts seemed to rock the planet.
"If those are nuclear weapons, do you think we should move?"
"Those are heavy snaps. Must be consuming the entire node with each shot."
"Snaps?" Jon's forehead furrowed.
"Another fragment of the ancient race. Very useful for jewelry, microsurgery. They can cut as finely as our best lasers, but they require no external energy source and, even better, they can cut the interior of something without cutting through it."
"That sounds very useful; they must be very valuable."
"At another setting they explode with considerable force."
More thunder whammed down from the north.
"Will there be anything left of the fort?"
"Oh, yes," Umpuk chuckled. "They'll just toss those big eternite plates around and they'll fall down in another configuration. The old fort will never be the same, that's what they say. This will be the third time in memory that Pinshon's pile of plates was tossed around by the Hardscabbies. Blood Head will definitely be sung of for a long, long time by the tribes of the belt."
"If there's anything left of them when the laowon military are through with them," Jon added a grim note.
"I think it's time we got moving," the Bey said. "While the mutants battle the laowon behind us."
They turned the mantids and followed the turtle, which had to back down part of the way, to the desert surface once more.
Angle Umpuk led them south and east, staying ten or twenty kilometers east of the Oolite trail.
Behind them were a few more flashes of bright light and great cracking blasts echoed through the machines.
Then there was silence but for the moaning of the wind in the latter part of the long afternoon.
When darkness began to fall they were almost two hundred kilometers south and on the fringes of the Inland trail, which curved around the Mock Mountains and down into the first of the Great Boneyards.
Angle Umpuk halted, the other machines slowed and idled. Umpuk came across to their mantid and climbed in.
"We have to choose our course now. Do we head east and go round the mountain and down into the Boneyards or west and take our chances on the Old Oolite?"
"The Oolite ought to be the faster route south," the Bey said.
"Indeed it is."
"But the laowon military will surely be racing down it after us," Jon interjected.
"That is something we must consider." The Bey looked solemn; he pointed westward. "What lies beyond the Oolite and the Hardscabbies?"
"If you head south and west?"
"Exactly."
"A thousand kilometers of dust and then the continental shelf and the ocean bed."
"What if we went that way?"
"The ocean bed is always hard terrain. In the North Ocean there are other hazards."
"Such as?"
"Upwind of the remaining oceans there are frequent hurricanes, sometimes with snow and hail the size of a man's head. Some early expeditions were crushed by the force of what they encountered. Of course, making your way over crevasse country in such weather is even more taxing."
The Bey thought it over. "What of the Boneyards then? That's the way I traveled before."
"You have been south before?" Angle Umpuk's eyes widened.
"Yes."
"And you wish to return there?"
"We must."
"Nobody ever wants to go back. Not even the craziest archeologists." Umpuk rubbed his chin. "I have been as far as the northern fringe of the crustal pit zones. You have seen them?"
The Bey nodded. "Yes, quite astonishing."
Umpuk agreed, "That would describe it." He gulped. "You have gone further?" A note of genuine awe was audible in his voice.
"Yes."
"And that is where you want me to take you?"
"Exactly."
"Good grief!"
"We seek the great equatorial machines."
"The legends—but you must know the risks."
The Bey swallowed. "Yes, I have seen it, I have seen the—"
"The jelly-that-is-flesh, the flesh-that-is-steel," Angle breathed.
"You know the mutants' tales then."
Umpuk nodded. "Among the guides there are many grim tales of old Baraf, but none to match that. They say the equatorial Zun people sacrifice to the horror."
"How ghastly."
"I had a friend once who went south with some archeologists, he was leading them to the equator. He never came back. I often wonder if that was his fate."
"Pray that he met a cleaner death," the Bey said with a strange passion in his voice. They fell silent. Eblis Bey brushed brilliant dust from his trousers.
"Anyway, enough of this. What of the Boneyards? Can we take that trail far enough south to be able to get past the laowon on the Oolite?"
"The trail sweeps two hundred kilometers inland, up the ancient estuaries. Then it passes through the first fossil beds, then through the ancient city sites, and then across the limb of Bolgol's Continent to the southern coast where it meets the Oolite again. It's shorter but it's a rougher ride. The interior is mountainous and volcanic. Which is why most treasure groups go by the Oolite trail around the continental margin to the south coast Boneyards."
"What are the risks in the Boneyards?"
Angle sighed. "Well, there are many bandits' holes to be avoided. Plus there's the outer Hardscabbies and the farther south you go the more Zun people. Attacks by the Zun have inexplicable results and tragic consequences."
Eblis Bey considered the alternatives. His instincts told him the Superior Buro would go down the Oolite trail first. If his party made good time perhaps they could get into the Boneyards before the Buro caught up. Once in that maze they would have a good chance of losing any pursuers. And they could buy relatively safe shelter at one of the numerous holes.
"We go by the Boneyards, all the way to the Guillotine Stone," he announced. They nodded their agreement and returned to the hovercraft. The engines kicked into life and they rode south.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Melissa Baltitude was amazed to be still alive. It felt as if she had gone through enough perils for several deaths by then.
On reflection, her interrogation and programming aboard the battlejumper had been child's play compared to the rest. She gasped ag
ain at the pain from her shoulder; she had surely broken some bones. Somehow it hurt far more than she had ever believed it could. To try to push the pain away she reran the memories.
First had come the active battle descent, with the laowon shock troops dumped into insertion orbits at high speed by the military battlejumpers. They had strapped her, her Buro minder, Claath, and a cyborg shock trooper into a descent pod and dropped them with the rest of the shock battalion. Claath had warned her it would be tough, but not even Claath was really ready for it.
The laowon military dropped hard, and of course the cyborg troopers were built to take it, but for ordinary mortals it was an intense experience. The shocks emptied her lungs, her stomach, and finally her bowels.
When they were floating down the last few thousand feet the wind caught their parachutes and tore at the patterns, but the chutes minimized the dispersal and kept them in the drop line to within one hundred meters of Fort Pinshon.
Despite the heavy goggles, the sky had seemed to burn with the solar fire and the ground sparkled like some monstrous jewel chest, whenever the dust cleared long enough for it to reflect light.
Then she'd been swallowed up in the dust and deposited on the surface by the chute, which of course was programmed to deliver cyborg fighters. Fortunately young human women who keep fit are remarkably flexible creatures. Melissa survived, and even brought off a good roll to minimize the impact.
Nevertheless she lay on the ground afterward like a dead thing, every scrap of strength wrung out of her.
Then Claath had come out of the dust and dragged her to her feet. She'd followed him into a low entranceway beneath what appeared to be a lopsided pile of huge plates, stacked randomly.
Inside she found herself in a big dim space stinking of death. The hall had recently been the scene of a fierce little battle. The "tame" mutants had risen at the entrance of the laowon and their shock troops. They had shaken out weapons, for a half minute they had confronted each other. Then a drunken mutant fired accidentally and the cyborgs had swarmed upon them.
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