So Earth's chief export was men. Skilled spacemen, technicians, and fighters streamed out from old Earth to many parts of the galaxy. And the mercenaries from Earth were among the toughest.
"My name's Morgan Chane," he said. "Meteor-prospector, operating out of Alto Two. I went too deep into the damned drift and my ship was holed. One fragment caught me in the side, and others hit my drive. I saw my power-chamber was going to blow, and I just managed to get into my suit and get out of there in time."
He added, "I needn't say that I'm glad you saw the flare and came along."
Dilullo nodded. "Well, I've only one more question for now. ..." He was turning away as he spoke. Then he suddenly whirled back around, his hand grabbing out the weapon at his belt.
Chane came out of the bunk like a flying shadow. His tigerish leap took him across the wide space between them at preternatural speed, and with his left hand he wrested away the weapon while his right hand cracked Dilullo's face. Dilullo went sprawling to the deck.
Chane aimed at him. "Is there any reason why I shouldn't use this on you?"
Dilullo fingered his bleeding lip and looked up and said, "No particular reason, except that there's no charge in it."
Chane smiled grimly. Then, as his fingers tightened on the butt of the weapon, his smile faded. There was no charge-magazine in it.
"That was a test," said Dilullo, getting stiffly to his feet. "When you were unconscious, and I fixed that healamp on you, I felt your musculature. I'd already heard that Varnan ships were raiding toward this cluster. I knew you weren't a Varnan ... you could shave off the fine fur and all that but you couldn't change the shape of your head. But all the same, you had the muscles of a Starwolf.
"Then," Dilullo said, "I remembered rumors I'd heard from the out-worlds, about an Earthman who raided with the Varnans and was one of them. I hadn't believed them, no one believed them, for the Varnans, from a heavy planet, have such strength and speed no Earthman could keep up with them. But you could, and right now you proved it. You're a Starwolf."
Chane said nothing. His eyes looked past the other man to the closed door.
"Do me the credit," said Dilullo, "of believing that I wouldn't come down here without first making sure you couldn't do what you're thinking of doing."
Chane looked into the colorless eyes, and believed.
"All right," he said. "So now?"
"I'm curious," said Dilullo, sitting down in a bunk. "About many things. About you, in particular." He waited.
Chane tossed him the useless weapon, and sat down. He thought for a moment, and Dilullo suggested mildly, "Just the truth."
"I thought I knew the truth, until now," Chane said. "I thought I was a Varnan. I was born on Varna ... my parents were missionaries from Earth who were going to reform the wicked Varnan ways. Of course the heavy gravitation soon killed them, and it nearly killed me, but it didn't, quite, and I grew up with the Varnans and thought I was one of them."
He could not keep the bitterness out of his voice. Dilullo, watching him narrowly, said nothing.
"Then the Varnans hit Shandor Five, and I was one of them when they did it. But there was a quarrel there about the loot, and when I struck Ssander he tried to kill me. I killed him instead, and the others turned on me. I barely got away alive."
He added, after a moment, "I can't go back to Varna now. 'Damned Earthpawn!' Ssander called me. Me, as Varnan as he was in everything but blood. But I can't go back." He sat silent, brooding.
Dilullo said, "You've plundered and robbed and you've doubtlessly killed, along with those you ran with. But do you have any remorse about that? No. The only thing you're sorry about is that they threw you out of the pack. By God, you're a true Starwolf!"
Chane made no answer to that. After a moment, Dilullo went on, "We—my men and I—have come here to Corvus Cluster because we've been hired to do a job. A rather dangerous job."
"So?"
Dilullo's eyes measured him. "As you say, you're a Varnan in everything but blood. You know every Starwolf trick there is, and that's a lot. I could use you on this job."
Chane smiled. "The offer is flattering.... No."
"Better think about it," said Dilullo. "And think of this—my men would kill you instantly if I told them you're a Starwolf."
Chane said, "And you'll tell them, unless I sign up with you?"
It was Dilullo's turn to smile. "Other people besides Varnans can be ruthless." He added, "Anyway, you haven't got anyplace to go, have you?"
"No," said Chane, and his face darkened. "No."
After a moment he asked, "What makes you think you could trust me?"
Dilullo stood up. "Trust a Starwolf? Do you think I'm crazy? I trust only the fact that you know you'll die if I tell about you."
Chane looked up at him. "Suppose something happened to you so you couldn't tell?"
"That," said Dilullo, "would be unfortunate ... for you. I'd see to it that, in that case, your little secret automatically became known."
There was a silence. Then Chane asked, "What's the job?"
"It's a risky job," said Dilullo, "and the more people who know about it ahead of time, the riskier it'll be. Just assume for now that you're going to gamble your neck and will very likely lose it."
"That wouldn't grieve you too much, would it?" Chane said.
Dilullo shrugged. "I'll tell you how it is, Chane. When a Starwolf gets killed, they declare a holiday on all decent worlds."
Chane smiled. "At least we understand each other."
III
The night sky dripped silver. The world called Kharal lay in the heart of the cluster, and the system to which it belonged was close to Corvus Nebula. That great cloud was a gigantic glowing sprawl across the heavens, with the burning glory of the cluster stars around it, so that soft light and deep black shadows lay always over the planet by night.
Chane stood in the shadow of the ship and looked across the small and quiet spaceport toward the lights of the city. Those reddish lights hung in a vast pyramid against the sky. A soft wind laden with spicy scents that had an acrid background blew toward him from that direction, and it brought him the sound of a distant buzz and hum.
Hours before, Dilullo and one other Merc had been taken secretly by a Kharali car to the city under cover of darkness.
"You'll stay here," Dilullo had told them. "I'm taking Bollard with me, and no one else, to talk to those who want to hire us."
Chane remembering that, smiled. The other Mercs were in the ship, gambling. And what was there to keep him here?
He walked toward the city, under the softly glowing sky. The spaceport was dark and quiet with nothing on it but two dumpy interstellar freighters and several armed Kharali planetary cruisers. No one passed him on the road except that once there was a whizzing roar as one of the three-wheeled Kharali cars sped by. These were a city-loving people, and even those who worked the mines that were this world's wealth returned to the cities at night. The arid, flat lands stretched away, still and silver under the nebula-sky.
There was a pulse of excitement in Chane. He had visited many strange worlds, but always as one of the Starwolves, and that meant that everywhere he had been a feared and hated enemy. But now, alone as he was, who would know that he was anything but an Earthman?
Kharal was an Earth-sized planet and Chane, used to the heavy gravitation of Varna, found himself moving with a soft vagueness. But he had adjusted to that by the time he reached the city.
It was a monolithic city, carved long ago from a mountain of black rock. Thus it was a city-mountain, with high-piled galleries and windows and terraces shining ruddy light, with alien gargoyles projecting out at every level, a mammoth hive of life towering up into the soft nebula sky. Chane looked up and up, and heard the sounds from it now as a dull, throbbing roar. He went through a great arched doorway in the base of the city-mountain. It had huge metal doors that could be closed for defense but they had not been closed for a long time and were so corroded
that the reliefs upon them which picture kings, warriors, dancers and strange beasts were vague and blurred.
Chane started up a broad stone ramp, ignoring the motoway that slid beside it. At once the bursting life and roar of the place were all around him: Men and not-men, the human Kharalis and the humanoid aborigines, voices high and light, voices guttural and throaty. They jostled under the ruddy lights, with the throng now and then giving way before a hairy humanoid who brought a lowing, hobbled and grotesque beast to market. Smells and smokes of strange foods from cookshops in the galleries, the bawl of peddlers offering their wares, and over all the haunting singsong of the Kharali multiple-flutes echoing and reechoing.
The humans of Kharal were very tall and slender people, none of them under seven feet. They looked down, with contempt in their pale blue faces, at Chane. The women turned away from him as though they had seen something defiling, and the men made remarks and laughed mockingly. A young boy, gawky in his rather soiled robe, followed close behind Chane to show that even he was inches taller than the Earthman, and the mocking titters were redoubled. Other boys took up the game, and as he went upward he acquired a jeering retinue.
Chane ignored them, climbing to still other levels, and after a little time they tired of him and went away.
He thought, This would be a dangerous city to loot. You could easily get trapped in these galleries,
And then he remembered that he was not a Varnan any longer, that he would not again raid with the Star-wolves.
He stopped at a stall and bought a cup of stinging, almost acid, intoxicant. The Kharali who served him, when he had finished, took the cup and ostentatiously scrubbed it. There were more titters.
Chane remembered what Dilullo had told them about the Kharalis before they landed.
They were truly human, of course, like the peoples of many star-worlds. That had been a big surprise for the first explorers from Earth after they perfected the stardrive ... the fact of so many human-peopled worlds. It had turned out that Earthmen hadn't been the first, that many systems had been seeded by a star-traveling human stock so remote in the past that only vague traditions of them lingered. But this human stock had been altered in different ways by ages of evolutionary pressure, and the Kharalis were the result here.
"They consider other humans as much beneath them as their own aborigines," Dilullo had said. "They're utterly insular, and dislike all strangers. Be polite."
So Chane was polite. He ignored the mocking looks and the contemptuous remarks, even though a few of the latter, uttered by Kharalis who spoke galacto, the lingua-franca of the galaxy, were perfectly understandable. He drank again, and studiously avoided looking at Kharali women; and went on climbing the ramps and stairways, stopping here and there to peer at some odd sight. When the Varnans went on a plundering raid, they had little time for sightseeing, and Chane was enjoying a new experience.
He came into a wide gallery whose one whole side was open to the nebula sky. Under the ruddy lights, there was a small crowd of Kharalis, gathered around something Chane could not see, and there was laughter from them and now and then a strange hissing sound. He worked his way, without shoving or jostling, through the ring to see what it was they watched.
Several of the humanoids were here, hairy creatures with too many arms and mild, stupid eyes. Some of them carried leather ropes curiously looped at the ends. Two of them had such ropes tied to the legs of a winged beast that was between them. It was a semi-reptilian creature half as big as a man, its body scaled and wattled, its fanged beak striking the air in brainless fury. When it made a lunge in one direction, the rope on its other leg pulled it back. When that happened, the creature's wattles turned bright red and it hissed furiously.
The tall Kharalis found it amusing. They laughed each time the wattles crimsoned, each time the wild hissing began. Chane had seen beast-baiting on many worlds, and thought it childish. He turned to make his way out of the ring. Something whispered, and a loop wrapped itself around each of his arms. He swung around. Two Kharali men had taken trapping-ropes from the humanoids, and had used the clever cast-and-loop to fasten onto Chane. A burst of malicious laughter went up.
Chane stood still, and put a smile on his face. He looked around the circle of mirthful, mocking blue faces.
"All right," he said in galacto. "I understand. To you, an Earthman is a strange beast. Now let me go."
But they were not going to let him go that easily. The rope on his left arm tugged, pulling him sharply. As he reacted to keep his balance, the rope on his right arm pulled so that he staggered.
The laughter was very loud now, drowning out the distant flutes. The wattled beast was forgotten.
"Look," said Chane. "You've had your little joke."
He was keeping down his anger, he had already disobeyed orders by being here and there was no use in making it worse.
His arms suddenly flew up to horizontal, grotesquely . pointing in each direction, as both Kharalis pulled simultaneously. One of the humanoids came and capered in front of Chane, pointing at him and then at the wattled beast. It was a joke that even his simple brain could understand and his merriment triggered new bursts of laughter from the blue men.
They rocked with it, looking at the humanoid and then at Chane.
Chane turned his head and looked at the Kharali who held the rope on his right arm. He asked softly, "Will you let me go now?"
The answer was a sharp and painful tug on his right arm. The Kharali looked at him with a malicious smile.
Chane moved with all the speed and strength that his Varna-grown muscles gave him on this slighter world. He leaped toward the Kharali on his right, and the surging strength of that lunge pulled the man with the left rope off his feet.
Chane dived in close to the tall, startled Kharali and thrust his arms under the man's arms, reaching upward. His hands curved out to grab the front of the Kharali's arms, near the shoulders. He put all his strength into a levering, surging embrace. There was a dull double crack, like the sound of wet sticks breaking, and Chane stepped back.
The Kharali stood, his face a mask of horror. His long, slender arms hung limp, both of them broken near the shoulders.
For a moment, the Kharalis stared silently. It was as though they could not believe it, as though a despised cur dog had suddenly become a tiger and pounced.
Chane used the moment to slide between them across the gallery to a narrow stair. Then a raging chorus went up behind him. He started running then, going up the stairs, taking three steps at a time.
He was laughing as he ran. He would not soon forget the Kharali bully, and how his face had changed from malice to open-mouthed horror.
The stair came up into a dark corridor in the rock. His eyes picked out another stairway angling off and he took it. The whole city-mountain was a labyrinth of passages.
He emerged into a broad, red-lit bazaar that seemed to run away forever and was crowded with the tall people chaffering at stalls. Behind a stall that was festooned with statuettes of blasphemously hideous little snake-armed idols, Chane spotted a narrow stair that led downward. He slid through the crowd toward it, as blue faces looked down at him in surprise.
Going up was no good; he could only get out of this place by reaching the base of the city-mountain. He had been in worse places than this, and he was not greatly worried.
The narrow stair he followed downward suddenly opened into a big room in the rock. The glowing pink lights here showed it was a little amphitheater, with robed Kharalis sitting all around its edge, looking down at a small central stage.
Three nearly-naked Kharali girls were dancing on the stage to the wailing of multiple-flutes. They danced amid glittering points of steel, six-inch pointed blades that bristled from the floor, set about fifteen inches apart. The slender blue bodies leaped and whirled, and the bare feet came down close to the cruel blades and leaped up again, and as they danced the girls threw back their long black hair and laughed.
Chane st
ared, fascinated. He felt an admiration that was almost love for these three girls who could laugh as they danced with danger.
Then he heard the echo of distant gongs, and a scrabble of feet coming down the stair behind them. He started to run again as his pursuers came out of the stair.
He had not thought that someone with a weapon might have joined them. Not until he heard the stungun buzzing behind him.
IV
Dilullo sat in the big, shadowy stone hall high in the city-mountain, and felt his frustration and anger increase.
He had been sitting here for hours, and the oligarchs who ruled Kharal had not yet come. There was nobody across the table except Odenjaa, the Kharali who had contacted him at Achernar weeks ago, and who had this night brought them from the ship up into the city by secret ways.
"Soon," said Odenjaa. "Very soon the lords of Kharal will be here."
"You said that two hours ago," said Dilullo.
He was getting tired of this. The chair he sat in was damnably uncomfortable, for it had been made for taller men to sit in, and Dilullo's legs dangled like a child's.
He was pretty sure they were keeping him waiting purposely, but there was nothing he could do but compose his face and look unperturbed. Bollard, sitting nearby, looked quite unbothered, but then fat Bollard, the toughest of the Mercs, had a moon face that rarely showed anything.
The lights around the room threw a ruddy glow that hurt his eyes, but the black rock walls remained dark and brooding. Through the open window came chill night air, and with it came the whispered flutes and voices of all the levels in the vast warren beneath.
Suddenly, Dilullo felt sick of strange worlds. He had seen too many of them in a career that had gone on too long. A Merc was old at forty. What the devil was he doing out here in Corvus Cluster, anyway?
He thought sourly, "Quit being sorry for yourself. You're here because you like to make a lot of money and this is the only way you can do it."
Starwolf (Omnibus) Page 2