by David Drake
The face of the bluff looked almost right. The join was invisible save for slight differences in lichen cover. The stone beneath Guibert's fingertips felt several degrees cooler than the material that closed the meters-wide hole in the outcrop.
"You didn't calibrate for the Carbon 14/16 ratio for Sawick's atmosphere!" Hairball cried in an access of hope. "That's why the date figure you got for the wood is so low!"
"Teach your grandmother to suck eggs!" Dayly snapped, seriously offended by the slur on his competence within his specialty. "Besides, it wasn't wood. It was carbonized bone. Human bone with ninety percent assurance."
"Come here, Dayly," Guibert said. "We've got what's either a plug or a door. If it's a door, I want you to open it." If it didn't open, maybe the barge could push the block out of the way.
"Piece of cake!" the data specialist said. He trotted over, rummaging in his case for another tool.
"I don't understand!" Hairball moaned. From the Mromrosi's tone, he did understand—but he really didn't like the implications of what he understood.
"Company coming," Wenzil called.
Guibert heard the sound too, the throb of rotors though the engines driving them were inaudible. He couldn't tell direction or distance through the forest.
"I guess I'll start with eight seventy-three and switch to—"
The barge exploded like a cone of thermite, flinging sparks in all directions. The quality of Sawicki energy weapons hadn't degraded during the past fifty-seven years.
An aircar with vertical fans front and rear sailed through the trees on the other side of the blazing barge, ten meters above the ground. The Sawicki crew was focused on the damage they'd done with their bow-mounted weapon.
Dayly was busy with the bluff face, but Guibert and Karge aimed their stunners. They were, of course, far slower than the weapons specialist.
Wenzil swept her beam across the aircar. The Sawicki crew began to laugh uncontrollably. The vehicle flipped and disappeared into the trees doing cartwheels.
"Awful!" Wenzil cried as she lowered her stunner to reprogram the keypad. "Try six-six-one!"
"Got it!" Dayly said. "It's a door!"
Three Sawickis ran out of the trees carrying thick tubes pointed forward from alongside their hips. They and the Harriers saw each other at the same time.
Guibert and Karge fired before the aliens could swing their bulky weapons to bear. The Sawickis hopped about, giggling. One of them triggered his weapon into a tree. A cubic meter of wood vanished in dazzling pyrotechnics. The trunk lifted skyward, then spiked straight down into the soil. Branches tangled with those of neighboring trees kept the bole upright.
Wenzil fired, using her new stunner setting. The Sawickis went limp and fell, their faces smiling beatifically.
"Not good enough!" the weapons specialist said. "Try five-four-nine!"
"Leave the damned setting!" Karge said. "It's fine the way it is!"
"Into the cave!" Guibert said. "It'll cover our flanks!"
"Modifying stunner settings to permanently impair the personhood of native races is forbidden by—" Hairball said.
Another aircar slid through the forest, banking between a pair of the larger trees. The Sawicki gunner fired a wrist-thick hose of stripped ions while the vehicle's bow was still a tad high. The face of the bluff shattered. A chunk of limestone the size of a grapefruit dropped onto Hairball.
The rock remained balanced for a moment. The ensemble looked like a golf ball on a furry orange tee.
The Mromrosi fell over. Guibert and Karge had ducked from the ravening burst. Wenzil didn't, so she beat the men to the new target.
Sawickis jumped in all directions from the air-car, shrieking and tearing at themselves as though they'd been dipped in acid. Neither the gunshield nor the vehicle's hull appeared to have offered any protection against the stunner's effect. The car described a half loop, then slammed into the ground under the thrust of its inverted rotors.
"That's the ticket!" Wenzil cried. "Five-four-nine!"
Guibert holstered his stunner to pick up Hairball. Karge was bending to do the same. To both men's surprise, the Mromrosi got to its tiny feet unaided. Little beggar must be boneheaded in pure fact!
"Come on!" Guibert said, grabbing a handful of orange hair while Karge gripped the Mromrosi from the other side. They ran into the cave, dragging the alien along.
Dayly's electronic manipulations had pivoted away a huge disk of rock-patterned plastic. The data specialist had gone ahead with a handlight; Wenzil would provide a rear guard that no slug was likely to dent.
"My faculties have been seriously disarrayed!" Hairball said. "Nothing I observe would be of the slightest evidentiary purpose in an EPFC hearing."
"Come on, run!" Guibert gasped. The Sawickis' energy weapons had forged burnt air and burnt rock into an anvil-hard stench that choked him.
"Particularly my prohibition on setting five forty-nine should be ignored!" Hairball said.
There was a crash of rending metal behind them. The amount of light coming through the cave mouth dimmed. "Wee-ha!" Wenzil called. She must have brought down another Sawicki vehicle, blocking the cave's entrance for at least the time being.
The tunnel's entrance. The sides were glass-smooth, line-straight, and perfectly round in cross-section. The Sawickis lived underground, all right, but they sure weren't limited to natural caves.
"There's something blocking the way!" Dayly warned.
The far edge of the handlight beam picked out bulk and motion. Guibert dropped the Mromrosi und fumbled for his stunner again. Were they Sawickis or—
The relays of Wenzil s stunner went tickticktick. Her motto was, "If it moves, you shoot."
A pair of Sawickis in the tunnel ahead screamed like damned souls and began running up the curving rock walls. Each time they overbalanced and crashed down, they rose and repeated the attempt.
The object almost filling the tunnel was OC McBrien's missing cutter. The Sawickis had dragged the vessel deep enough that the mantle of living rock would conceal the cutter from even the most sensitive Magnicate instruments.
The speed with which the Sawickis had excavated such an immense tunnel was amazing. Guibert wondered what they did with the tailings; though with a whole forested planet to work with, the slugs wouldn't have much difficulty in disposing of a few kilotonnes of rock without coming to the notice of orbital sensors.
Hairball was moving normally now. Karge scooped up an energy weapon dropped by the howling Sawickis. "Here," he said, offering it to Wenzil.
"Are you kidding?" the weapons specialist said. "Listen to those screams from up the tunnel ahead of us. I must be getting klicks of range on this setting!"
"Help!" called a human voice. "Help," this time by a chorus of many voices.
The cutter pointed nose-first down the tunnel.
Guibert got out his handlight and squeezed by the vessel. It was a tight fit but possible. "Dayly," he called over his shoulder. "Open us a hatch, will you?"
"Piece of cake!"
The Sawickis had bored an alcove into the side of the tunnel just ahead of where they left the cutter. The opening was barred. The tiny red bulb on the metal grill was the only light the ten humans inside the cell had seen for at least a week.
The eight teenagers wearing filthy but extremely expensive clothing were in reasonable shape. They reached out through the bars, babbling demands that Guibert release them.
The other two humans were indeterminate as to age and even sex. They clutched half-carven mushroom caps to their pale chests as though the objects were talismans against the terrors of change.
Their workmanship was intricate and strikingly beautiful.
"Got the cutter open, sir!"
"Then come unlock these bars," Guibert ordered. "We found the lads too."
"The Sawickis aren't really autochthons!" cried a girl with the same cold perfection of visage as OC McBrien. "The planet's called Novy Evgeny! It was settled by one of the first colo
ny ships from Earth. The Sawickis came less than a hundred years ago and enslaved them!"
"Fifty-seven years," Guibert said grimly, remembering the scrap of bone.
"Hold the light for me," Dayly ordered with the assurance of a workman thinking only of his task. Guibert obediently illuminated the featureless lockplate as the data specialist attached a suction probe.
"The slaves do all the work," Megan McBrien said. Her fellows had quieted now that freedom was in sight. "The Sawickis don't do a thing, not even clean up for themselves. That's why the Big Grotto's so filthy. They can't have human slaves there, of course."
"Piece of cake," the data specialist murmured. Tumblers clicked; the lock sprang open.
It probably was that easy a task for Dayly. If asked, he would have said that his equipment had done all the work. Which it had. As soon as Dayly had told it what to do.
"Let's get aboard," Guibert said. "I don't want to spend any longer in this place than I have to."
He shooed Dayly, then the released prisoners, on ahead of him. The pair who'd been born on Sawick wouldn't go until Megan put an arm around the shoulders of each and guided them forward.
"The Sawickis put Ethan and Nicole in with us to teach us mushroom carving," she explained. They were going to keep us here for the rest of our lives."
The cutter was crowded with fifteen aboard, but Wenzil kept the non-essential personnel squeezed to the back of the cabin. Guibert dropped into the command seat.
"We can't back out of here," Karge said, his tone halfway between warning and question.
"Too true," Guibert agreed. "Wenzil! Did you program this boat's stunners to your pet setting?"
"Is the Pope a symbol of Patriarchal Domination?" the weapons specialist replied.
Ship-mounted stunners were identical to the hand weapons in all respects but size. If Wenzil thought she was getting kilometers of slug-abatement with a hand stunner, what would three hundred times the power do?
Something that should have been done at least fifty-seven years earlier.
Guibert triggered the bow stunners in a long burst, then keyed directions into the cutter's artificial intelligence. There was no way a human would be able to control the ship with the precision necessary to run through a maze of rock-walled tunnels.
"Hang on!" he warned. He engaged the AI.
Backblast from the jets rubbed the cutter along the roof with a short, nerve-rending squeal as they lifted, but in seconds they'd outrun their own shockwaves. The main screen combined sonics and low-light imagery to project a view of the route ahead. Guibert found it wasn't something he cared to observe at the present speed.
He touched a control. The navigation unit projected a hologram of the tunnel complex, a huge ant farm stretching for scores of kilometers beneath the ground. Rock walls made a perfect medium for echo-ranging. The cutter's sorting system converted the returns into a detailed map.
Someone put a hand on Guibert's armrest.
Wenzil had allowed Megan to worm forward once the cutter was under weigh.
"The Eugeners froze their population and used only appropriate technology," the girl said bitterly. "Five hundred years after they landed, they still lived in a single village. Except for the pigs getting loose, the planet was almost perfectly natural! How could the Sawickis enslave such innocent, harmless people?"
"The Sawickis . . ." Guibert said. Half of him was ashamed to be right. "The slugs play by the same rules as the rest of the universe, I'm afraid."
The cutter changed vector. On the main screen, hundreds of humans gawped from among the bulbous fruit of a mushroom farm. The Sawickis visible were rolling and clawing themselves with mad violence.
Another tunnel mouth loomed before the vessel. Guibert gave it a pulse with the big stunners.
"Hey, Wenzil?" he said. "How long before the stunner effect wears off on the slugs?"
"Darned if I know," Wenzil replied. "Five forty-nine's about a thirty-minute dose on Hagersfield Avians, if that's any help."
Hairball made a throat-clearing chirp. "Setting five-four-nine would erode the nerve sheathes of the, ah, interloping non-autochthons," he said. "The effect should be irreversible."
"No fooling?" Wenzil said.
Guibert triggered the weapons twice more for good measure.
"Of course," the Mromrosi added primly, "I am completely unable to observe or synthesize rationally because of my injury."
Something smashed against the cutter's bow. Guibert hoped it wasn't human. The slugs seemed to confine their slaves to fixed locations. Anyway, the object wasn't solid enough to be a problem to the armored hull.
Karge glanced over from the duplicate console. "You know," he said, "it doesn't look to me like there's an opening anywhere in the complex big enough to fit the cutter through."
"We'll make it," Guibert said.
The cutter yawed 30°. Guibert lay on the stunner switch.
"That's good," the ethnologist continued conversationally. "I've got a date for tomorrow night with a tech from Medical Team Five, and I'd really hate to miss it."
"Not the big blond!" Wenzil interjected. She sounded as incensed as Guibert had ever heard her on a subject that didn't affect her specialty.
"No, no," Karge said. "You're thinking of Boxall, and he's far too butch for me. Besides, I don't think he'd be interested. I mean Quilici, the little sweetheart who doesn't look old enough to shave."
The ethnologist shook his head angrily. "A date with Quilici's not something I want to miss because that fudge-packer McBrien can't keep his own house in order.
"Begging your pardon, madam," he added to the girl kneeling between the consoles.
"Hang on," Guibert warned again. As the bow rotated, he fired the stunners for a last time.
The cutter shot up a sloping shaft and into the huge natural cavity of the Big Grotto. Guibert locked out the autopilot and chopped the main throttles. The bow tilted slightly. The vessel quivered, then began to rise on the thrust of the attitude jets alone.
Tourists stared at the sudden apparition from the tunnel hidden at the back of the grotto. Some of the humans were screaming; but not, Guibert was sure, as loudly as the intermingled Sawickis whose sensory nerves were shorting out.
"Sir?" Dayly called in concern as the caverns roof swelled in the top portion of the screen.
"It's okay," Guibert said, hoping that he was correct. "The ceiling's too thin to be rock. The slugs roofed over a sinkhole to provide a big enough setting for the tourists when the Magnicate arrived."
The cutter crunched against the grotto's roof. It would be plastic, like the tunnel door, and the gaps the Sawickis left to provide minimal light for human visitors would weaken the structure still further.
It had to be plastic.
Guibert slid the main throttles up to their stops. The drive engines boomed, lifting the cutter through the structural plastic with a violent shudder. Bits of rock erupted to either side of the vessel like confetti at a triumphal parade.
Guibert reengaged the autopilot. "Next stop, the Night-Blooming Cereus," he said. His team and the freed prisoners, even the pair of locals, cheered wildly.
"Hey, Hairball?" Karge said. "Do you suppose with the evidence we're bringing back, the Grands'll be able to act without a full Fairness Court hearing?"
"Since my confusion and lack of evidentiary value won't be realized until I have a physical examination in a week or more," the Mromrosi said, "I rather think my recommendations for immediate action will carry some weight, yes."
He made the squealing noise of Mromrosi laughter before he added, "They may well accept my statement that stunner setting five-four-nine is peculiarly suitable to the personhood of the Sawickis, also."
* * *
1 Author's Note: Poul Anderson is in no way responsible for this work; however, certain plot elements are a direct result of my reading his excellent Planet of No Return (aka Question and Answer) thirty-odd years ago.—DAD
Down Among The Dead Men<
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Gordon R. Dickson & Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Forty years after Of War and Codes and Honor
1
Code-crossed orders hand-carried from the Fleet Commodore arrived at Semper Rigel late into the Earth Standard night, and were not sent by zap and delivered by Bunter in the usual way but instead were carried by a young Group Leader fresh from The Hub of the Magnicate Alliance who wore the badges of the Petit Harriers with the self-conscious pride of a first assignment.
Line Commander Gilyard Fayrborn growled at his Bunter when it came to wake him, then stirred his hands through his putty-colored hair as the start of his waking ritual. He felt disoriented on the huge ship and wished he were back on his Glavus-class skimmer Yamapunkt, with its complement of forty-six Petit Harriers instead of this behemoth of a craft needing thousands to keep it going. Or better yet, a Grand Harrier Bombard with a complement of one-hundred-fifty-six men. He stared at his Bunter as his eyes came reluctantly into focus. He was in no mood for surprises, particularly those originating with the Fleet Commodore. "What is this all about?"
"I don't know, sir. The messenger has the information you seek; I was not given any." The Bunter was already setting out his fatigues and preparing his boots, working with its usual four-armed efficiency. Diplomatically, it prompted him. "It is urgent, sir."
Fayrborn considered giving orders to modify the basic program of the Bunters so that they would not disrupt sleep; his Communications Leader had offered to do it, but Fayrborn thought it was too much trouble. "Can't one of the others do it? One of the Group Line Chiefs? They could report to me later," Fayrborn mumbled, feeling his precious rest slip away from him.
"You were the one requested, sir," said his Bunter. Being a machine, it implied no judgment in its tone; a human might have shown disapproval or worry.
Fayrborn let out his breath in a combination of a sigh and a yawn, stretching and looking at the time-patch on the ceiling of his quarters. "What kind of hour is this for messages? Are any of the others in the Group being summoned or am I the only one?"