“Someone has found Zillabar?” He tried to hide his displeasure.
“No, sir. Even better than that! We’ve found a large cache of pfingle eggs in a warehouse at the northern StarPort. You will want to inspect them immediately, won’t you, sir?”
“Why, yes . . . I will. What a thoughtful gesture. Lead me to this bounty immediately—”
Tracking
Under cover of dawn, M’bele’s antigrav sled came out of the forest and onto the open plains below the northern slopes of Mount Whillma, a long-dormant volcano whose tinder cone reached high enough into the sky to wear a mantle of white snow all year round.
Sawyer Markham and Lee-1169 drove the airboat around the southern foothills of the volcano and finally headed up into a river-carved canyon toward a distinctive rocky bluff called the Devil’s Penis. From there, they abandoned the course of the river and struck out westward, rollercoastering over a series of jagged escarpments that thrust upward like knife blades. Finally, they dove down into the steepest of canyons and followed south along its narrow zigzag course until its red walls fell away to either side and it opened onto the empty marshlands on the northern edge of the Krislov Gulf.
Avoiding the open water—antigrav fields dissipate badly over large bodies of water—they turned west again until they came to the Devil’s Other Penis, striking upward from a rocky patch at the southernmost edge of a small blacktree tangle. From here, they headed northwest until they came to the Somewhere River, a great muddy sluice of water, wide, sluggish, and brown. They followed the river northward, up into the rolling plains of the Northern Wasteland. When they came to the shallow delta where Twisted River fed into Somewhere, they veered off in a northeastern direction and followed Twisted River all the way up into Twisted River Canyon at the base of the Great Stone Glacier, a black basaltic outcropping that stretched northward for several hundred kilometers.
The dark walls of Twisted River Canyon closed around them uncomfortably. Beneath them, the deep waters rushed and tumbled in a broken southward course, often with patches of rough-looking white water punctuating placid open stretches and fast-moving narrows. The skyboat wobbled and slid precariously above the coursing foam and Sawyer had a difficult time keeping it steady while he tried to follow the sharp twists and turns of the canyon. Twisted River Canyon enjoyed no small amount of fame for the haphazard way it wound itself downward through the Great Stone Glacier.
Up until this point, Sawyer and Lee had seen little sign of human habitation anywhere in their travels. Indeed, they had planned their course so as to deliberately avoid all settlements and the allied risk of calling attention to themselves. Now, however, as they came upward through the canyon, they began seeing small encampments here and there—scattered stone bungalows, desperate looking farms clutching at steep slopes, and once even a small fishing village. Some of the people glanced up at them. No one waved. Most turned away. Around here, skyboats often meant Dragons or Vampires. They could not expect a friendly reception if they landed—only distrust and skepticism.
At last they came to a place where the Twisted River widened into a dark lake brooding lake. Sawyer aimed the airboat high and accelerated ferociously across the lake, applying power until the levitators began whining and threatening to stall. The boat skipped and slid above the water like an ice cube on a hot metal surface. Lee screamed once in protest, but Sawyer ignored him and concentrated on steering the unruly boat with short vicious kicks of power. They coasted nervously toward the opposite side where a scattering of ruined buildings stood. The clone-brother swore quietly and glared at him until Sawyer brought the boat safely over land again. The difference in control became immediately obvious and both men relaxed—but only Sawyer grinned. Lee went silent and resentful.
Sawyer brought the airboat around and they circled the shattered compound for several moments. From the air, the settlement revealed little. Whatever destruction had happened here, the events had not occurred recently, but neither had they occurred in the distant past. The scorch-marks on the walls still looked fresh; the rubble of the fallen buildings had still not softened. But no bodies lay on the ground either.
“No TimeBinder lives here now,” said Sawyer. He brought the boat down in an easy descent, parking it gently in front of the ruined villa. He grunted in annoyance, then fished around behind himself for a portable scanning unit. Pulling it out, he powered it up with a dejected expression on his face. “I don’t expect to find anything here,” he said, and climbed down out of the skyboat. Lee followed him, carrying one of the cannons they had liberated from the Elite Dragon Guard.
Blowing out his cheeks in disgust, Sawyer explored the entire villa. Whoever had done this had known their business well. The attack had come from several directions simultaneously. Someone had snuck up on this place under cover of night, surrounded it, seized it quickly, searched it methodically and thoroughly, then blasted it when they didn’t find what they sought. At least . . . it looked that way to him.
The fact that no bodies lay anywhere in the compound could mean one of two things; the attackers had taken everyone prisoner—or the dwellers in this compound had already evacuated when the attack occurred. Sawyer hoped for the latter. He and Lee walked back to the antigrav sled glumly. They had found exactly what they had expected to find. Nothing.
“But we do know one thing,” Sawyer said. “The TimeBand survived. Three-Dollar can feel its presence somewhere on the planet. That means that somebody escaped.” He turned around slowly, surveying the surrounding terrain. “How did they do it?” he asked of no one in particular. “How did they do it?”
“How would you do it?” Lee asked.
“I don’t know—it would depend on where I most expected the attack to come from. But I wouldn’t do the obvious.”
Sawyer walked a little ways away from the ruin and climbed up onto a small hill to give himself a better vantage point. To the northeast, the land sloped upward steeply. To the northwest, Twisted River tumbled down out of the canyon. To the east lay a gentle downhill slope and a narrow inlet of water. He motioned to Lee and they both headed back to the skyboat.
A moment later, they lifted up into the air, swung the boat around and headed out toward the hidden neck of water. Almost immediately, he spotted it. “There,” said Sawyer. He brought the sled down on the rocky shore of the lake near a small deserted pier. No other structure stood nearby.
“You think they had a boat hidden here?” Lee asked.
“It certainly looks that way,” Sawyer said thoughtfully. He turned around slowly, then pointed at the hill behind them. “Look at that—” He began trudging up the slope toward a small opening cut into the rock. Lee followed quickly. Sawyer shone his light into the tunnel. It headed back in the direction of the ruined villa.
“A secret passage?” said Lee.
“If we can discover it this easily, it doesn’t seem like much of a secret, does it?” Sawyer asked. He headed back down the hill to the pier. “If you had a boat hidden here, where could you go with it? Into the lake? No. Anyone could see you on the lake. So you’d have to follow this inlet—but to where? It looks like a dead end to me.”
He clucked his tongue thoughtfully. A TimeBinder would not make stupid mistakes. A Dragon might assume that all humans lacked the intellectual range of Vampires—but neither would a Dragon realize that a TimeBinder had access to six thousand years of human memories. No, he couldn’t believe that the Dragons had caught the TimeBinder unaware.
He tried to imagine what he might have done in the same situation.
He tried to imagine himself a TimeBinder, tried to envision all the memories that he would have, as clearly as if he had experienced the events himself—tried to extrapolate the wisdom that such memories would comprise.
He couldn’t do it.
He couldn’t imagine what such a state of mind might feel like.
It bothered him.
He’d never thought about TimeBinders before. Perhaps he should have.
That thing that Three-Dollar had said—about naming Sawyer as his heir—those words still rattled around in his memory, like some annoying insect making scraping sounds in the dark.
Sawyer began to play with the idea, standing in it as a possibility.
If you had no weapon except the memories of six thousand years, you still had the advantage of knowledge. Indeed, it would change your whole way of thinking so dramatically, that . . . the way you thought would appear as something alien to everyone who didn’t think the same way—and that would mean everyone, because only thirteen TimeBands existed.
Sawyer realized it like a flash. The importance lay in the knowledge—in the ‘Band. The person of the ‘Binder has no relevance. A TimeBinder would choose death rather than allow the TimeBand to fall into the wrong hands. The answer seemed immediately obvious to him—the same answer would not occur to a squad of short-sighted Dragons ordered to bring back the ‘Binder.
The ‘Binder gives up his identity when he first puts on the TimeBand. He sacrifices his personal past in order to carry the cultural past. The TimeBand exists as the true TimeBinder. It speaks through the body of the person wearing it. Sawyer thought about that for a long moment. Putting on the TimeBand must produce an extraordinary transformation in the wearer. He becomes a different kind of human. If the identity of the individual disappears, then so would all his concerns about personal survival.
Knowing that the Vampires intended to kill any wearer of the TimeBand, the TimeBinder would have realized that he must hide the ‘Band to keep it safe. Perhaps he had taken it off and sent it away. Then he could have put on a decoy TimeBand and gone willingly with the Dragons. This would have allowed the bearer of the real TimeBand an opportunity to escape. However long it would take the Vampires to realize that they did not have the real ‘Band; that same length of time would allow the carrier of the TimeBand to disappear almost anywhere on the planet.
Sawyer sucked at his teeth as he considered the idea. The more he thought about it, the more logical it seemed. The TimeBinder couldn’t hide. The TimeBand could. Something had definitely happened to the TimeBinder; they couldn’t know what; but the TimeBand had just as certainly taken a different course.
Sawyer turned to Lee. “Forget the boat dock. They put it here as a decoy. Whoever escaped did not go down river to the nearest settlement. If anyone escaped from here, they went over the mountain to StarPort. They went the hard way.”
Lee-1169 frowned and shook his head. He didn’t see it. Sawyer nodded at him. “Yes.”
“Why? Why do you think so?”
“Because I do. I’d do it under the same circumstances, and I have to assume that the TimeBinder has at least as much intelligence as I do.” He headed down the slope toward the waiting antigrav sled. “Come on. Let’s go to StarPort.”
Pfingle Eggs
Imagine:
A warehouse.
A high-security warehouse.
A self-destruct, high-security warehouse.
A self-destruct, high-security warehouse containing thirty-three metric tons of industrial grade pfingle eggs.
30-day pfingle eggs.
Rapidly incubating, 30-day pfingle eggs.
A warehouse full of pfingle eggs, sealed for inspection by the High Lord of the Elite Dragon Guards of the Regency of Terra in the Palethetic Cluster.
A self-destruct, high-security warehouse containing thirty-three metric tons of rapidly incubating, 30-day, industrial grade pfingle eggs that belonged to Star-Captain Neena Linn-Campbell, of the freebooter vessel, Lady MacBeth, pride and property of the Shakespeare Corporation, duly registered on forty-three worlds of the Palethetic Cluster.
A sealed warehouse of pfingle eggs, representing a potential gross income of five million caseys if delivered to the right market before hatching.8
If deliverable.
Star-Captain Neena Linn-Campbell arrived at the warehouse like a flaming Valkyrie. The bulk of the warehouse sat deep in the ground, cut from the rock and layered over with three meters of rehardened stone. Captain Campbell came striding angrily across the north side supervisory catwalk and into the office that overlooked the cavernous interior of the underground chamber. Half the crew of The Lady MacBeth came running after her, not certain whether they would have to join the fight or protect another poor innocent from the Captain’s wrath—
Captain Campbell slammed the doors of the office open and advanced furiously on Robin. The android woman stood in charge of cargo handling; only moments before she had sent an anguished call to Captain Campbell. Now, despite her training, she stood trembling with uncertainty—like something caught between two opposing forces of nature.
“What do you mean?” Neena Linn-Campbell demanded ferociously. “What do you mean—‘We have Dragons in the pfingles!’”
Helpless to speak, somehow Robin managed to point to the window of the office. Captain Campbell crossed to the window and looked down. “Oh my dear Lady of the Skies!”
Not just Dragons—but the Dragon Lord himself!
Down below, the huge green warrior lizard strode hungrily up and down the aisles, sniffing the cases, and leaving great wet puddles of drool in his wake. As Neena Linn-Campbell watched, the Dragon Lord pulled open a case of eggs and stuck his great snout deep into its interior. When he pulled his face out again, his mouth dripped with pieces of eggshell, yellow fluid, white ichor, and green gobbets of pfingle flesh.
“I’ll kill that slime-eating, flatulent, pig-faced, toad-sucking, egg-stealing, scum-bucket, wart on the ass-end of the Regency’s lowest garbage—”
Gito and Shariba-Jen exchanged glances with Ota; they readied themselves to grab the Captain if she made even half a move toward the door. The Dragon Lord had already killed and eaten a score of StarPort officials and at least half that many freebooter Star-Captains.
But Captain Campbell had passed beyond rage. Her swearing petered out in a futile, ineffective stream. Helpless, she stared down in horror at the terrible scene below.
Standing in the aisle, the Dragon Lord grunted in happy satisfaction. He chewed at length. He swallowed loudly. He grinned with delight. He opened his mouth, revealing three rows of gigantic teeth. He tilted his huge head back and roared in delicious glee. “I love ripe pfingle eggs!” he screamed. The warehouse shook with the force of his cry. The echoes ricocheted around and around, rattling windows and causing the floors to bounce uncomfortably.
Ota, the Lix-class bioform first officer shuddered and looked to her clipboard. “I estimate that every egg he eats costs us 6.5 caseys; 3.5 for the egg, 3 more in overhead.” She flinched in response as the Dragon Lord sank his head eagerly into the case of eggs again, as if she could hear the money disappearing down his sucking gullet.
“I like these eggs!” The Dragon Lord shouted to his aides, “These will please the troops. Oh, yes—these will make me very popular among the ones who have survived.” His aides began dancing in the aisles, whooping and shouting happily. Several of them even bravely sniffed the containers themselves, leaving their own puddles of drool on the floor.
“Maybe we could bill the Regency . . . ?” Ota offered.
“We’d have a tough time collecting,” Robin opined.
“We wouldn’t have to present the collection warrant here. . . .” Gito suggested.
Captain Campbell scratched her left eyelid thoughtfully. Still staring at the horror below, she held out her hand sideways. “Give me the clipboard. I’ll do it.”
Ota surrendered the manifest unhappily. Captain Campbell swallowed hard and stepped over to the drop-tube. “Don’t anybody do anything stupid,” she cautioned. “Let me do it.” She stepped into the tube and dropped gently out of sight.
As she stepped out onto the floor of the warehouse, Captain Campbell finally began to realize the true size of the Dragon Lord. He stood five meters high, and his tail massed more than some of his aides. He shone with ebony armor and several of his claws stretched longer than her arms. She watched as he ripped open
another case, shoved his great snout eagerly into it and began crunching ecstatically through the eggs—wrapping, padding and all, he obviously didn’t care.
Star-Captain Campbell then did one of the bravest things she’d ever done in her life. She held out the clipboard to the Lord of all Moktar Dragons and asked politely, “Please initial this, your excellency.” She had to ask three times before the monster noticed her. At last, however, he blinked and swung his great head around to look at her in surprise. She repeated her request and held the clipboard out to him. Around them, she noticed, the other Dragons—all sizes—had stopped to watch this transaction.
The Dragon Lord reached down slowly and took the clipboard from her. He brought it up to his eyes and gazed at it for a long moment without reaction. At last, puzzled, he asked, “This requisition seems to authorize payment for these eggs. Who authorized it?”
“I believe you did, or perhaps someone in your offices, my lord.” Star-Captain Campbell bowed.
The Dragon Lord shook his head. “No, I would have remembered such an authorization. For one thing—” He frowned. “You have quote a price three times higher than the Regency will pay. Ten caseys per egg? The Dragons never pay that much. We pay ten caseys per crate. Yes, I believe your adjutant or whatever you call it must have made a mistake in the price here. Let’s correct that and I’ll happily sign for this cargo.”
“Umm . . . no, I don’t think so, my lord. That price might apply on any of the worlds where pfingle-swarms mate naturally; but here, where pfingle-eggs exist only as an imported commodity, certain ancillary costs will drive the price up enormously. I apologize for the inconvenience of course, but I couldn’t possibly accept less than . . . oh, say, nine caseys per egg.”
The Dragon Lord crunched the tiny clipboard in his gigantic claw, allowing the pieces of plastic and metal to rain down on Captain Campbell. “No, I don’t think so,” he said bluntly.
A Covenant of Justice Page 17