Orphan Star

by Alan Dean Foster

  “What made you think you’d ever have the opportunity?”

  “Something . . . that happened not so long ago,” he said cryptically. “Now it’s been forced on me anyway. I’ve been shoved into the one position I vowed I’d never hold.”

  “I don’t know what you’re rambling on about, Flinx,” she finally declared, “but either you ride the grizel or it tramples you.”

  Flinx looked up the corridor to where Moam and Bluebright had turned the corner. “I wonder who’s going to ride whom?”

  The answer came several days later. There had been no assault from below, as he’d guessed, although the two groundcars pranced daily right next to the walls of the mine structures, daring anyone to show a fuzzy head.

  Fluff woke them in the small office Flinx and Sylzenzuzex had chosen for sleeping quarters. “We have made a backtrap,” he told them brightly, “and we are going to catch the groundcars now.”

  “Backtrap . . . wait, what . . . ?” Flinx fought for awareness, rubbing frantically at his eyes still rich with sleep. Vaguely he seemed to recall Fluff or Softsmooth or someone telling him about a backtrap, but he couldn’t form a picture of it.

  “You can’t stop a groundcar with a . . .” he started to protest, but Fluff was already urging him to follow.

  “Hurry now, Flinx-friend,” he insisted, listening to something beyond the range of normal hearing, “is started.”

  He led them to the mill supervisor’s office, a curving transparent dome set in the southernmost end of the building.

  “There,” Fluff said, pointing.

  Flinx saw several of the ursinoids running on all fours over exposed, bare ground. They were racing for the upper slopes, near the place where the main shaft entered the mountain. Still well behind, Flinx could make out the two groundcars following.

  “What are they doing out there!” Flinx yelled, leaning against the transparent polyplexalloy. He looked helplessly at Fluff. “I told you no one was to go outside the buildings.”

  Fluff was unperturbed. “Is part of new game. Watch.”

  Unable to do anything else, Flinx turned his attention back to the incipient slaughter.

  Moving at tremendous speed, the three ursinoids passed the near end of the building, below Flinx’s present position. Fast as they were, though, they couldn’t outrun the groundcars. First one burst, then another jumped from the muzzles of the laser cannon. One hit just back of the trailing runner, impelling him to even greater speed. The other struck between the front-runners, leaving molten rock behind.

  The three runners, Flinx saw, would never make the open doorway at the upper end of the mill. The groundcars suddenly seemed to double their speed. When they fired again, they would be almost on top of the retreating Ujurrians.

  He visualized three more of the innocents he had interfered with turned to ash against the gray stone of the mountainside.

  At that point the ground vanished beneath the groundcars.

  There was a violent crash, the whine of protesting machinery, as the two vehicles were unable to compensate fast enough for the unexpected change in the surface. Still moving forward, both abruptly dipped downward and smashed at high speed into the far wall of the huge pit.

  Flinx and Sylzenzuzex gaped silently at the enormous rift which had unexpectedly appeared in the ground.

  “Backtrap,” Fluff noted with satisfaction. “I remembered what you tell us about how the little machines work, Flinx-friend.” Battered humans and AAnn—the latter’s surgical disguises now knocked all askew—were fighting to get control of themselves within the wreckage of the two cars.

  A mob of furry behemoths was pouring from the mine buildings toward the pits. Flinx could make out the narrow ledges of sold earth and rock that ran like a spiderweb across the rift. They formed safe pathways across which the three decoy runners had retreated. By the same token, they were far too narrow to provide adequate support for the groundcars. The surface against which their air jets pushed had been suddenly pulled away.

  Hundreds of thin saplings now lined the edges of the pit. These had been used to support the heavy cover of twigs, leaves, and earth, all carefully prepared to give the appearance of solid ground.

  New screams and the flash of blue hand beamers lit the pit as the ursinoids poured in. Flinx saw a three-hundred-kilo adolescent male pick up a squirming AAnn and treat its head like the stopper of a bottle. He turned away from the carnage, sick.

  “Why is Flinx-friend troubled?” Fluff wanted to know. ‘We play game with their rules now. Is fair, is not?”

  “Ride the grizel,” Sylzenzuzex warned him in High Thranx.

  By the head, not the tail, something echoed inside him. He forced himself to turn back and watch the end of the brief fight.

  As soon as it became clear to the observers down below what had happened, a red beam the thickness of a man’s body reached upward from a small tower at the base’s far end. It passed unbroken through several sections of forest, cutting down trees like a lineal scythe and leaving the stumps smoking, until it impinged on the mountainside to the left of the pit. A flare of intense light was followed by a dull explosion.

  “Get everyone back inside, Fluff,” Flinx yelled. But an order wasn’t necessary. Their work concluded, the ursinoids who had assaulted the pit were already running, dodging, scampering playfully back into the mine.

  Flinx thought he saw movement far below as the top of the tower started to swivel toward him, but apparently calmer heads prevailed. The mills itself was still out of bounds for destructive weaponry. Rudenuaman had no reason yet to raze the mountainside, to turn the complex mine and mill into a larger duplicate of the small slag-lined crater which now bubbled and smoked where the heavy laser had struck. Much as she might regret the loss of the two groundcars and their crews, she was not yet desperate.

  So no avenging light came to destroy the building. The simple natives were to be permitted their one useless victory. Undoubtedly, Flinx thought with irony, Rudenuaman would attribute the brilliant tactic to him, never imagining that the huge dull beasts of burden had conceived and executed the rout entirely by themselves.

  “I wonder,” he said to Sylzenzuzex over a meal of nuts and berries and captured packaged food, “if there’s any point to continuing this. I’ve never really felt as if I were in control of things. Maybe . . . maybe it would be better to run back to the caves. I can still teach from there—we both can—and we have a lot of life left in us.”

  “You’re still in control, Flinx,” Sylzenzuzex told him. She tapped one truhand against the table in a pattern few human ears would have recognized. “The Ujurrians want you to be. But you go ahead, Flinx. You tell them all,” and she waved a hand to take in the whole mine, “that they should go back to their caves and resume their original game. You tell them that. But they won’t forget what they’ve learned. They never forget.”

  “O’Morion knows how much knowledge they’ve acquired from this mine already,” Flinx mumbled, picking at his food.

  “They’ll go back to digging their cave pattern, but they’ll retain that knowledge,” she went on. “You’ll leave them with the game rules Rudenuaman’s butchers have set. If they ever do show any initiative of their own, after we’ve gone . . .” She made a thranx shrug. “Don’t blame yourself for what’s happened. The Ujurrians are no angels.” Whistling thranx laughter forced her to pause a moment. “You can’t play both God and the Devil to them, Flinx. You didn’t introduce these beings to killing, but we’d better make certain we don’t teach them to enjoy it.”

  “Moping and moaning about your own mistakes isn’t going to help us or them. You’ve put your truleg in your masticatory orifice. You can pull it out or suffocate on it, but you can’t ignore it.” She downed a handful of sweet red-orange berries the size of walnuts.

  “We not enjoy killing,” a voice boomed. They both jumped. The Ujurrians moved with a stealth and quietness that was startling in creatures so massive. Fluff stood in the doorway
on four legs, filling it completely.

  “Why not?” Sylzenzuzex asked. “Why shouldn’t we worry about it?”

  “No fun,” explained Fluff concisely, dismissing the entire idea as something too absurd to be worthy of discussion. “Kill meat when necessary. Kill cold minds when necessary. Unless,” and beacon-eyes shone on the room’s other occupant, “Flinx say otherwise.”

  Flinx shook his head slowly. “Never, Fluff.”

  “I think you say that. Is time to finish this part of game.” He gestured with a paw. “You come too?”

  “I don’t know what you have planned this time, Fluff, but yes,” Flinx concurred, “we come too.”

  “Fun,” the giant Ujurrian thundered, in a fashion indicating something less than general amusement was about to ensue.

  “I don’t want any of the buildings down there damaged, if it can be avoided,” Flinx instructed the ursinoid as he led him and Sylzenzuzex down corridors and stairways. “They’re filled with knowledge—game rules. Mechanical training manuals, records, certainly a complete geology library. If we’re going to be marooned on this world for the rest of our lives, Fluff, I’m going to need every scrap of that material in order to teach you properly.”

  “Is understood,” Fluff grunted. “Part of game not to damage buildings’ insides. Will tell family. Not to worry.”

  “Not to worry,” Flinx mimicked, thinking of the alert and armed personnel awaiting them at the base of the mountain. Thinking also of the two atmosphere-piercing laser cannon set to swivel freely in the small tower.

  Fluff led them downward, down through the several floors of mill and mine, down to the single storage level below ground. Down past rooms and chambers and corridors walled with patiently waiting, snoozing, playful Ujurrians. Down to where the lowest floor itself had been ripped up. There they halted.

  Moam was waiting for them, and Bluebright and Softsmooth and a dimly glimpsed flickering something that might have been Maybeso, or might have been an illusion caused by a trick of the faint overhead lighting.

  Instead of stopping before a solid ferrocrete barrier, they found three enormous tunnels leading off into total darkness. Light from the room penetrated those down-sloping shafts only slightly, but Flinx thought he could detect additional branch tunnels breaking off from the three principal ones further on.

  “Surprise, yes?” Fluff asked expectantly.

  “Yes,” was all a bewildered Flinx could reply.

  “Each tunnel,” the ursinoid continued, “come up under one part of several metal caves below, in quiet place where cold minds are not.”

  “You can tell where the floors aren’t guarded?” Sylzenzuzex murmured in amazement.

  “Can sense,” Moam explained. “Is easy.”

  “Is good idea, Flinx-friend?” a worried Fluff wondered. “Is okay part of game, or try something else?”

  “No, is okay part of game, Fluff,” Flinx admitted finally. He turned to face the endless sea of great-eyed animals. “Pay attention, now.”

  A massive stirring and roiling shivered through the massed bodies.

  “Those who break into the power station must shut everything off. Push every little knob and switch to the—”

  “Know what means off,” Bluebright told him confidently.

  “I probably should leave you alone, you’ve managed fine without my help,” Flinx muttered. “Still, it’s important. This will darken everything except for the tower housing the two big cannon. They’ll be independently powered, as will the shuttlecraft hangar beneath the landing strip. Those of you who get into the cannon tower will have to—”

  “Am sorry, Flinx-friend,” a doleful Fluff interrupted. “Cannot do.”

  “Why not?”

  “Floors not like this,” the ursinoid explained, eyes glowing in the indirect lighting. He indicated the broken ferrocrete lying around. “Are thick metal. Cannot dig through.”

  Flinx’s spirits sank. “Then this whole attack will have to be called off until we can think of something that will eliminate that tower. They can destroy all of us, even if they have to melt the entire remaining installation to do so. If Rudenuaman were to slip away and reach the tower, I don’t think she’d hesitate to give the order. At that point she’d have nothing further to lose.”

  “Not mean to make you worry, Flinx-friend,” comforted Bluebright.

  “Nothing to worry about,” Moam added.

  “Have something else to take care of tower,” explained Fluff.

  “But you . . .” Flinx stopped himself, went on quietly, “no, if you say you do, then you must.”

  “What about the three who got themselves killed?” Sylzenzuzex whispered. “They thought they had something too. This time there are many more lives at stake.”

  Flinx shook his head slowly. “Ay, Bee, and Cee were playing by different rules, Syl. It’s time for us to trust our lives to these. They’ve risked theirs often enough on our say-so. But just in case . . .”

  He turned to Fluff. “There is one thing I must do even if this fails and we all end up dead. I want to come up through the floor of the big living house, Fluff. There is something in there that I need the use of.”

  “In this tunnel,” Fluff told him, indicating the shaft at far left. “Are ready, then?”

  Flinx nodded. The huge Ujurrian turned and shouted mental instructions. They were accompanied by a nonverbal emotional command.

  A soft, threatening rumble responded . . . a hair-curling sound as dozens, hundreds of massive shapes bestirred themselves in long lines reaching back into the far places of the mine.

  Then they were moving down the tunnels. Flinx and Sylzenzuzex hugged close to Fluff, each with a hand tight in his fur. Sylzenzuzex’s night vision was far better than Flinx’s, but the tunnel was too black even for her acute senses.

  If the Ujurrians’ activities had been detected, Flinx reflected, they might never re-emerge into the light. They could be trapped and killed here with little effort.

  “One question,” Sylzenzuzex asked.

  Flinx’s mind was elsewhere when he responded: “What?”

  “How did they excavate these tunnels? The ground here is rock-laden and the tunnels seem quite extensive.”

  “They’ve been digging tunnels for fourteen thousand years, Syl.” Flinx found he was moving with more and more confidence as nothing appeared to deal death from above them. “I imagine they’ve become pretty good at it. . . .”

  Teleen auz Rudenuaman panted desperately, nearly out of breath, as she limped along the floor. The sounds of heavy fighting sounded outside and below her.

  A massive brown shape appeared at the top of the stairwell which she had just exited. Turning, she fired her beamer in its direction. It disappeared, though she was unable to tell whether she’d hit it or not.

  She had been relaxing in her living quarters when the attack had come—not from the distant mine, but from under her feet. Simultaneously, hundreds of enormous, angry monsters had exploded out of the sub-levels of every building. Every building, that is, except for the cannon tower. She’d barely had time to give the order for those powerful weapons to swing around and beam every structure except the one she was in when they had been destroyed.

  A peculiar violet beam no thicker than her thumb had jumped the gap between the uppermost floor of the far-off mine and the tower’s base. Where it had touched there was now only a deep horizontal scar in the earth. It had been so quick that she’d neither seen nor heard any explosion.

  One moment the tower had been there—three stories of armor housing the big guns—and the next she’d heard a loud hissing sound like a hot ember being dropped in water. When she turned to look, the tower was gone.

  Now there was no place to run to, nothing left to bargain with. Her badly outmatched personnel—human, thranx and AAnn alike—had been submerged by a brown avalanche.

  She’d tried to make for the underground shuttle hangar in hopes of hiding there until the Baron’s return, but
the lower floors of this building were also blocked by swarms of lemur-lensed behemoths. The ground outside was alive with them.

  It made no sense! There had been perhaps half a hundred of the slow-moving natives living in the immediate vicinity of the mine. Surveys had revealed a few hundred more inhabiting caves outside the vicinity.

  Now there were thousands of them, of all, sizes, overrunning the installation—overrunning her thoughts. The crash of overturned furniture and shattered glass-alloy sounded below. There was no way out. She could only retreat upward.

  Limping to another stairwell, she started up to her apartment-office on the top floor. The battle was all but over when the cannon tower had been eliminated. Meevo confirmed that when he reported the power station taken. Those were the last words she heard from the reptilian engineer.

  With the station, the power to communications and the lifts had gone. It was hard for her to mount the stairwell, with her bad leg. Her jumpsuit was torn, the carefully applied makeup covering her facial scars badly smudged. She would meet death in her own quarters, unpanicked to the end, showing the true self-confidence of a Rudenuaman.

  She slowed at the top of the stairs. Her quarters were at the far end of the hall, but there was a light shining from inside the chamber nearest the stairwell. Moving cautiously, she slid the broken door a little further back, peered inside.

  The light was the kind that might come from a small appliance. There were many such self-powered devices on the base—but what would anyone be doing with one here and now, when he should have a beamer in his fist?

  Holding her own tightly, she tiptoed into the chamber.

  These quarters had not been lived in since the demise of their former occupant. The light was coming from a far corner. It was generated by a portable viewer. A small, slight figure was hunched intently before it, oblivious to all else.

  She waited, and in a short while the figure leaned back with a sigh, reaching out to switch the machine off. Fury and despondency alternated in her thoughts, to be replaced at last by a cold, calm sense of resignation.