Then he heard the disturbance from the camp. The guards were already shouting about his disappearance. Within seconds something was crashing through the brush, coming toward him. His heart jumped into his throat. Frozen where he stood, he looked in the direction of the noise. When he saw the beam of a guard’s flashlight swinging back and forth, he began moving as if in slow motion.
Colt looked around for cover, but the sweep of the flashlight showed that most of the plants were too sparse to hide him. He had to find a way to get over the edge of the cliff. Getting down on his stomach, he began feeling over the rim for a handhold. The light from the guard’s flashlight swept near him, and he closed his eyes to keep it from blinding him. He found a root sticking out of the cliff’s surface. Gripping it, he pulled at it with all his strength. It felt strong and anchored. The light swept by again. He eased over the edge of the cliff, disturbing a noisy cascade of dirt and rocks, and found himself hanging away from the face of the cliff. The root held, but he was sure the noise had been heard. Hooking his right arm through the loop of the root, he felt under the overhang with his free hand until he found another root. After checking its strength, he carefully transferred his weight to the new root. When he released the first root, the second one started to move. A small shower of dirt and rock fell away. The noise seemed deafening. He could see the guard’s light swing in his direction along the top of the cliff. He tried to flatten himself against the cliff face and hold still, but the strain on his arm rapidly drained his strength. He slowly reached his other hand toward the root he was holding. The movement set off another cascade of dirt and rocks. He frantically searched for another handhold. Then he heard the root crack. At that moment the guard peered over the edge, blinding him with the flashlight. “Here, grab my hand, that root’s about to let go.”
The guard’s words were prophetic, because the root broke loose at that moment. Colt grabbed for the face of the cliff but caught nothing but air. For a second he fell free. Then he struck an outcropping. The blow stunned him and threw him away from the face of the cliff into a tree branch. As he tumbled through the thickening growth, smaller branches whipped him and larger branches clubbed at him. The cable attached to his restraints snagged on a limb, nearly ripping his arms and legs from their sockets. When the branches ended, his back slammed into the ground and a shower of lights flashed before his eyes.
He had landed on a steep talus slope, scattering small pieces of shale. The fall through the tree had slowed his descent, and the angle of the slope warded off most of the force of the fall, reducing the impact but in his dazed condition he couldn’t control his path. He bounced clear of the surface and began tumbling and sliding down the slope. For a moment he seemed to be slowing down. Then he slammed into the tree. Intense pain, then blackness claimed him.
Interlude
Quan jerked as the door to McKillip’s outer office opened unexpectedly. “What the … ,” he barked as he turned to look. McKillip followed his gaze.
Dubrovich stood in the door, his face mottled with dark red splotches and his teeth clinched in unmistakable fury. McKillip stood up. “Welcome back, Mr. Dubrovich. You seem upset.”
“You’re damn right I’m upset! I didn’t volunteer for a suicide mission, you bastards.”
McKillip looked genuinely confused. “A suicide mission?” she repeated. “What do you mean? Please come in and tell us what happened.”
“You know damned well what happened. You don’t need a debriefing.” He began walking toward her, fists clenched.
Quan subtly moved forward to intercept him, but McKillip continued to look puzzled, and Dubrovich stopped short. He asked, “You mean you really don’t know?” He looked at his hands and unclenched his fists.
“You’re the first person to report back after the mission,” McKillip responded. “What happened?”
“The son of a bitch who sabotaged the drive motors on the shuttle took out both of them. We were almost killed. That pompous ass Dixon said it was planned that way.”
McKillip showed her shock. “That’s not possible. The plan was for the shuttle to have to return to Woomera when it lost one drive.”
She glanced questioningly at Quan who shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don’t know where Dixon got his information, but that’s wrong.”
“The hell it is. I heard the engineer say that both busses were melted by acid. That couldn’t have been a mistake.”
Quan frowned. “I see what you mean. That pretty well had to be deliberate, but it certainly wasn’t supposed to happen.” He glanced at McKillip and then turned back to Dubrovich. “Look, George, I can’t blame you for being upset. I would be too. Let me run down what happened and why and get back to you.”
Dubrovich growled, “Someone had better pay for this!”
McKillip cut off Quan before he could respond. “We’ll get to the bottom of this and make sure that whoever was responsible is properly punished. You have my word. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.”
When Dubrovich had gone, McKillip glared at Quan. “We’re losing control, Richard. Find out what idiot gave the order for this and bring him to me, preferably alive. I want to personally ream him a new one,” she ordered. “And tell Dixon he’d better learn how to keep his mouth shut.”
In the hall outside McKillip’s office, Quan called the private number. “Close one,” he said, “And Dubrovich is no longer an asset.”
Chapter 13
Something was sniffing at his face. At first he ignored it, but then he became aware of warm, fetid breath. Alarmed, he extended his vision to something hovering in the blackness in front of him. Two glowing, slitted red eyes glared at him inches from his face. A huge mouth opened. His heart jumped, and he shut his eyes again, trying to block the terror coursing through him. A gabble of sound came to him – voices, several voices. He realized his head was spinning. As the spinning slowed and stopped, he noticed through closed eyelids that it was daylight. The second thing he noticed was pain. Every part of his body hurt. The babble of strange sounding noises continued. He tried to open his eyes, but only the right one would cooperate. What he saw made him close it immediately. When he reopened it, a creature was still leaning over him, peering with wide-spread, bulging black eyes. He squeezed his one good eye shut and opened it again . . . a giant frog?
Along with the bulging black eyes, the creature’s large flat head contained a wide mouth that appeared to split the head in half. Two spindly arms ended in three-fingered hands with opposable thumbs. Smooth, pale green, hairless skin covered its body, and Colt could see no discernible neck. The frog-like creature wore clothes made of drab cloth and carried some kind of a knife in a scabbard on its belt. The shaft of a metal tipped spear rested in the middle of Colt’s chest. He couldn't tell anything from the creature’s expression, but it was clearly examining him. He also noticed that when he had opened his eye the voices stopped.
The creature with the spear prodded him and made some kind of sound that seemed a cross between a howl and a trill. For no reason that he could discern he decided the sound did not seem hostile. Was it some kind of question? He tried to say something, but it came out as a violent and painful cough. He tasted blood and felt a wave of darkness sweep over his working eye.
As his coughing subsided he heard another voice quickly approaching from the distance. He got the impression it was somehow saying, “Get out of my way!” The small group of the creatures surrounding him separated to reveal an even shorter creature with darker, wrinkled skin. This creature wore clothes made of bright feathers. “Oh, great, the local witch doctor,” Colt wheezed and started coughing again.
The dark skinned being knelt over him with something in its hand. The shock, when Colt understood that the “witch doctor” was holding a med-scanner, caused another round of coughing. The “doctor” signaled to one of the others, croaking and shrilling as if giving an order. The other creature turned and trotted off. It returned moments later with a knapsack. The dar
k skinned doctor pulled an unfamiliar looking laser scalpel from the bag and made quick work of the locks on Colt’s restraints. He found his hands and feet free, and for the first time he became aware that the restraints had been holding him in a twisted position. The leather straps of the restraints had shredded the skin around his wrists and ankles. With the restraints gone allowing his body to relax, a wave of pain swept over him and his joints screamed. His stomach knotted, and despite how he hurt he rolled onto his side and retched.
When he could control his nausea, he rolled onto his back again. Then he reached up to touch his left eye, relieved to find that only a cake of dried blood was keeping him from opening it. Pressure on the cake caused a red spot to move around in the blackness that was all he could see with that eye. With luck it hadn't been damaged too much. Then he almost doubled over with another coughing spasm.
The doctor-being moved the med-scanner over his chest and paused midway down his rib cage on the right side. It reached into the knapsack and pulled out some kind of flexible black tube with dual eyepieces. When it pulled up Colt’s shirt, he felt something cold on his side followed by a brief, sharp sting. Continuing to look in the eyepieces, the doctor maneuvered the tube and made occasional small sounds. In a moment Colt felt another stab of pain followed by another. Then it withdrew the tube and began using a microsuturer. That’s when Colt blacked out again.
He woke to a gentle swaying motion. Although he still hurt, he could open, and see, with both eyes now. Patches of blue sky flashed above him between branches. He gradually realized he was on a piece of heavy cloth stretched between two poles. One end was dragging on the ground, and some large hairless creature led by one of the frog-like beings was pulling it. A piece of fur covered him, but he still felt cold. He began shivering, which brought on the cough. He noticed this time that he didn’t taste any blood, and it didn’t hurt as much.
He began to take stock of his injuries, counting the number of places he hurt. When he passed ten, he decided it wasn’t worth the effort. In the process he realized that his right leg had been splinted and his chest tightly wrapped. He looked around to see if the doctor creature was nearby.
A small pale being walking beside the travois chirped shrilly when Colt began to move. The being leading the draft animal stopped the beast and echoed the chirp more loudly toward the head of the column. In a moment the doctor was again looking down at him. It said something that clearly had separated sounds, but Colt could make no sense of it. He tested his mouth and tongue at forming the sounds, but decided not to start another coughing spasm by using his vocal chords. On impulse he raised his right hand and gave a thumbs-up gesture. For a moment the doctor stared at him without changing its expression. Then it looked at its own hand, closed it into a kind of fist, and extended its thumb upward. It looked back at Colt. Without thinking, he nodded his head. It seemed to understand the gesture. It straightened up and said something to the driver. Almost immediately they were underway again.
The travois bounced along the narrow trail, causing occasional flashes of intense agony from his various injuries. Overhead the leaves of the canopy continued to become larger and closer together as the entourage progressed. Soon the leaves blocked out the sky altogether, leaving Colt with an uninterrupted expanse of green to watch. Boredom and fatigue took their toll, and despite the aches and jabs of sharp pain, he dozed off.
Seemingly only minutes later he awoke to a high pitched twittering. He opened his eyes to see two small versions of the beings looking down at him, from less than half a meter away. The green one chirped something in a voice noticeably higher in pitch than he had heard before. The brown one responded with what Colt immediately thought of as a giggle. Then both the beings disappeared from his field of view.
It dawned on him that he had been looking at children, surprisingly human-like in behavior despite their appearance. The presence of children meant they must be near their settlement. He strained to look around just as the procession turned a corner and broke into a clearing. Within the clearing he saw a village that seemed to consist of large mud-baked beehives. Under a canopy of branches and leaves the village would have been virtually invisible from the air or from orbit. Colt was struck by the odd contrast of the doctor’s high technology equipment and the primitive nature of the huts and dirt streets of the village. Then he saw the wires running between the huts and the gleam of an incandescent light. Something about the inconsistency started gnawing at him, but he reasoned it was just the strangeness of the situation.
They stopped in front of one of the huts where a pair of the beings emerged and walked up to the travois. They looked subtly different, but other than the fact that one was brown like one of the children and slightly larger than the other, Colt had a hard time telling them apart. The doctor spoke to them and mimicked the thumbs-up gesture. Then the three turned to Colt and all gave him the thumbs-up. He almost laughed. His head was clearing, and he realized they were telling him he was safe.
Four of the beings lifted him off the travois and carried him inside the hut. At the direction of the brown being they laid him on a pile of animal furs on a raised platform away from the door. The doctor checked the wrappings around his chest and around the splints on his leg. Its expression remained inscrutable, but Colt concluded from its gestures and voice that it seemed satisfied. It spoke for several minutes to the two beings who seemed to be his hosts, and the three of them then walked over to him. The doctor recited what might have been the names of the other two, and each of them responded to the specific sound.
Carefully, Colt spoke his own name, “Colt.” It came out hoarse and slurred, and the effort threatened to bring back the cough. Both beings tried to produce the same sounds. The green one said something that sounded roughly like “Cote.” Colt responded with a thumbs-up gesture rather than risk starting another coughing attack.
Over the next several hours the two beings took turns sitting beside Colt. Whatever treatment the doctor had given him seemed to be working. The pain was receding and his thinking was becoming less muddled. As his head continued to clear he took in more of his surroundings. The dome was a one room structure. One area seemed to be a kitchen. Another area seemed to be a sleeping area. The platform he was on surrounded an open hearth. The fire had long since gone cold, but half-burned logs lay on some kind of andiron. And the walls were covered with color. Murals showed scenes of open fields and mountains, of trees and flowers, and of a village and more of the beings.
While the beings sat with him both of them spoke frequently. As his thinking cleared, Colt decided they were trying to get him talking, perhaps to learn his language. In spite of the constant threat of another siege of agonizing cough, Colt stubbornly worked with them. He wanted to learn to speak as many of their words as they learned of his. He couldn’t tell for sure because of their non-human facial expressions and gestures, but Colt came to feel they appreciated his effort.
Some words seemed easy: water, for instance. Colt managed to gesture that he wanted a drink. Then he identified the contents of the ceramic mug they brought him as water. However, later, after a dinner consisting of a soup that he found surprisingly good to human taste buds, he discovered that the water in the washbasin was called something else, and the water that spilled on the floor was yet another sound. He wondered if any of his translations made sense at all.
The day’s events, the dinner, and the quiet after everything had been cleaned up hit Colt suddenly. He realized he had been running on adrenaline all day and the sudden relaxation left him groggy. He fell asleep while trying to figure out how he was going to find his crew and free them and wondering if there were other survivors.
When he awoke well after the sun came up the next day, he found that someone had covered him with blankets during the night. Before he opened his eyes, he catalogued how he felt. First, he didn’t hurt nearly as badly as he had the night before. Many of the pains had subsided completely. Even his chest and right leg felt bett
er, although his ribs still felt uncomfortable, and he felt inexplicably weak. Nothing like having a little witch-doctoring, he thought. Then he opened his eyes.
A being he had not seen before stared down at him. Smaller than the others, it was tan and its clothes had some vaguely human characteristic that Colt couldn’t place. Its expression changed when it realized Colt was awake. The being danced around excitedly as Colt worked himself up on an elbow. The being paused and looked directly at Colt. To his surprise it spoke to him in English, “My name Uujii. You name Cote?”
Colt tested his mouth and found that it wasn’t too dry. Carefully he said, “My name is Colt.”
Uujii turned and ran, chattering to the adults, who stood next to the entrance. Their conversation lasted only a few seconds. When it returned to Colt, Uujii said, “You Colt. This Olowan.” It gestured toward the green adult. Then, indicating the brown adult, it said, “This Ramaanii. Their home your home.”
Colt carefully pushed himself to a sitting position. “Please give Olowan and Ramaanii my thanks.”
Uujii made a sound, which Colt later learned to recognize as a giggle. It nattered briefly to the couple. Their expressions changed, leaving Colt convinced they were pleased but not certain why.
Up until then Colt’s thoughts had been jumbled by the trauma of the fall and a deep fatigue. Now as he awoke fully, questions came flooding in. These people were obviously the natives the governor general had reported. Why had it taken so long to find them? The technology he had seen wasn’t borrowed from the colonists, so there had to be some kind of manufacturing on the planet. How had the survey teams missed the plants and, for that matter, the power generators?
He listened intently for a moment. There wasn’t a sound to indicate a power source for the electricity. The village was embedded in dense tree growth which made wind or solar power unlikely. Several other possibilities popped into his mind, but they all suggested a higher level of technology than was visible. He rejected them one by one. Every one of them would have been detectable. He mentally scratched his head. He’d have to check into it as soon as he could get around.
Peacemaker: The Corona Rebellion 2564 AD Page 9