Freedom's Landing

by Anne McCaffrey

  Zainal shook his head, lightly gripping her on the arms, a tacit request for explanation.

  “I’m not sure I can explain the nuances,” she said, grinning up at him. Yellow eyes were much nicer than plain old blue. And she liked Zainal’s hands on her whereas Dick Aarens’ touch made her skin crawl.

  “Nu-an-ces?”

  She put her hand on his chest, felt the faint pulse of his heartbeat—Catteni had hearts after all. “I’ll explain later, Zainal. Right now, I’m so tired I can’t.”

  “Go,” and he turned her toward the corridor. But when he gave her a little push, she grabbed his hand.

  “You come, too. I don’t mean to have Aarens jump out at me.”

  “I like to come,” Zainal said and there was a decided glint in his eyes that made Kris wonder how she was going to dismiss this courtier. And, if she hadn’t been so tired, she might—just now—have considered…She shook her head. The timing was wrong. She was so tired.

  So, her hand tucked into his large one, they walked to her cave.

  “Sleep well, Kris.”

  “Don’t you just know I will,” she said fervently.

  To her utter surprise, he cupped her head briefly, tousling her hair before he let go. But he was off down the corridor before she could react.

  “Too damned tired even for a goodnight kiss,” she said ruefully and gratefully sank onto her bed of boughs.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, HER PATROL CONSISTED OF Zainal, Coo, Slav, and the Doyle brothers. Their main objective: to find and disable as many mechanicals as they could, starting with those at the abattoir. The optimum, according to Capstan, would be to dismantle the solar panels if they could do so. Smashing the panels or smearing them with mud were equally viable, so long as the mechanicals were disabled. The secondary aim was to continue the interrupted reconnaissance of their immediate vicinity. They started out better equipped than ever, with ropes braided of vines which didn’t burn the skin as the tough synthetic material of the blankets did. They each had slingshots, a pouch of suitable small rocks—that was one of the duties for the few youngsters in the camp—a flint-tipped lance, and bags of the new trail food. Kris had sampled it when Jay handed over the ration and it was definitely an improvement over the dry compressed Catteni bar as far as taste was concerned. Coo and Slav were given ration bars, Patti Sue doling them out with thoughtful care. The girl evidently had no trouble serving the alien males, though she never once looked at Zainal.

  “We don’t know if the pemmican supplies all your daily nutritional needs,” Jay said, “but you can hunt to augment protein.”

  The Doyle brothers made cheerful companions, asking questions of both Kris and Zainal. Kris wondered if they had been chosen because, being Irish, they seemed to get along with anyone.

  * * *

  THEY MADE GOOD TIME, ZAINAL SETTING A COURSE diagonally west of the patrol’s earlier trek, the one which had resulted in their capture. They found a hillock and made their evening camp on its crest…until the rain came. It wasn’t a soft rain: Kris figured that it was comparable to standing under the waterfall in her Barevian refuge. They huddled under an improvised tent made from their blankets, which gave them some protection from the driving force of the torrent. It rained hard for what Kris and the Doyles decided was probably an hour, though battered as they were, it seemed an endless period. Then, as abruptly as it started, it stopped.

  “Like someone turned the shower off,” Lenny said, peering out of the damp shelter. “And hey, not a cloud in the sky and it’s only the first moon. I’d recognize her anytime by her craters.”

  They shook the blankets out: the synthetic seemed to shed the water—the outside a trifle damp to the hand but the underside dry.

  “Amazing fabric,” Ninety said, crushing the edge of his blanket in his hand. “Give credit where it’s due. Those Catteni make good survival gear.”

  “Durable,” Kris agreed and looked over at Zainal, who was staring about the land below their retreat. “What d’you see?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That bothers you?”

  “Yes,” the Catteni said and then lowered himself to the ground. “You take this watch, Kris. Wake Slav. Slav, you wake Coo. Coo, wake Doyles. You wake me.” Feeling which was the dry side of his blanket, he then pulled it around him and pillowed his head on his arm. “I sleep, then think better.”

  Whatever he had feared at least kept them all alert on their separate watches. Maybe, Kris thought as she woke Slav to take his turn, that was what Zainal had had in mind: sneaky so-and-so.

  They were all awake before the sun came up, still not yet adjusted to the longer days and nights. They had saved enough dry droppings to make a fire to heat water from a nearby stream in their cups, adding the dried herbs that became a fragant tea to sip while eating their pemmican. There were worse ways to break a fast.

  When they came to the next ridge, Zainal climbed to the highest point and surveyed the distances before pointing to their right.

  “Hills,” he said cryptically.

  “Can the mechanicals have built into every hillside?” Kris asked, half running to keep up with his long stride as he marched downhill again.

  “We see,” Zainal said, grinning at her, his yellow eyes twinkling.

  They made the new destination by noontime, striding along the crest of that hill complex until they came to the bare rock and another silent, but full, garage.

  “D’you think they take a lunch break and oil and grease themselves?” Lenny asked as they all looked down at the closed doors of the anonymous facility. “Another granary?” He gestured toward nearby fields, straw brown and shorn of whatever crops they might have sprouted.

  “We look.”

  “And smear?” Ninety asked, mopping his perspiring forehead, for the last several klicks had included considerable climbing. “I could moisten a hill or two with the sweat I’ve raised.”

  The storage barns were empty, not so much as a grain of whatever they had held.

  “That was one busy mother of a ship,” Lenny said, “if it cleared this, too.”

  “Long time,” Zainal said, showing dust on the finger he had drawn across the floor.

  “Oh? Cutting back the farmers’ subsidies here, too, huh?” Ninety asked facetiously.

  Zainal gestured for the patrol to check out each building of the fifteen in this complex. The last one was the garage where the mechanicals were standing in motionless lines. They didn’t look dusty, but just as Ninety started to enter the building, Zainal held up his arm and then pointed to the long rectangles on the eastern overhang of the garage.

  “Sun power.”

  “Yeah,” Ninety said, gulping. “D’you think they’d registered us as thieves?”

  “Doubt it,” Lenny said. “What’ve they got to guard against on this planet? They don’t even know we’re here. And dangerous!”

  Zainal chuckled. “We are. To them.” Then he gestured to Ninety, made a cup of his two hands, and waited. Ninety, shrugging at the thought of his not inconsiderable bulk being hoisted by the Catteni, put his foot in the hand and climbed to Zainal’s shoulders where he was now high enough to examine the panels.

  “Hey,” he said after a moment’s scrutiny, “I think they come off.” He grabbed one, rocking a bit on Zainal’s shoulders, but the Catteni compensated easily and Ninety undipped the panel from brackets. “Easy to install, replacements in stock, no waiting, no problem!”

  He handed each of the four panels down, then examined the links to wherever the power was collected. “Wish I’d seen the specs of the solar-power stuff they were bringing into Dublin before we left.”

  “You weren’t taken in Ireland?” Kris asked, somehow having assumed that they had.

  “Naw, we were working on a construction site in Detroit. Pay wasn’t great but better’n getting only fifty quid a week on the dole.”

  Then he jumped neatly down from Zainal’s shoulders and joined his brother, Slav, and Coo,
who were peering suspiciously at the units. Zainal seemed to be waiting, his attention on the unmoving machines.

  “How much power would these things store up?” Ninety asked him. “Do we have to wait until dark? We wouldn’t be able to see then.”

  “Maybe they’re on standby anyhow,” Lenny suggested. “They’re not armed er anything.”

  “Darts,” Zainal said and peered into the garage to see if he could locate the little aerial menaces.

  “I don’t see anything set in the frame,” Lenny said, running a hand down the side of the opening. “No sign of security devices. Not as if I’d recognize any if I saw ’em. There has to be some…”

  Coo broke the thoughtful silence by walking right in and straight to the back of the dim garage. Turning around, he raised his long, spider-fingered hands in a “so there” gesture.

  “Okay,” said Ninety, brushing his hands together. “Let’s see if we can’t disable these fecking mechanicals.”

  He jumped to the flange of the nearest big farm machine and, finding toeholds, climbed high enough to reach the canted solar panel surfaces. “And these come off with a twist of the wrist, too,” he said, after yanking first one, then the next panel out of their brackets. There were seven in all. Having done that, he looked down at Zainal.

  “Okay, boss man, whaddawe do next?”

  Zainal stepped up on the flange and then on tiptoe to look into the opening left by the removal of the panels. Kris held her breath, hoping nothing would turn on and knock him out, or off. She couldn’t remember, from her brief glimpses of them, what sections of the machinery lit up when in use.

  Zainal began tugging at a section which came away in his hands. He grunted, handed this down to Kris, and he and Ninety began dismantling the exterior sheets. Even Slav looked pleased as he, Coo, and Lenny handled the pieces.

  “Simple,” Zainal remarked after a good look at the innards. “This”—and he touched a cube the length of his spread hand—“is the power collector.” He pulled it loose.

  “Hmmm, a regular pop-tool,” Ninety said, grinning. “Handy dandy mechano set.”

  “Well, if other machines had to service it, it might as well be easy to disassemble,” Lenny said, changing his voice on the last word to sound more like Short Circuit Number Five.

  The wires and connectors plugged into the power cube also came away easily, and Zainal, with yet another grunt, removed the cube.

  “Could we use that back at the camp?” Kris asked.

  “For what?” Ninety said with a snort. “We haven’t anything to power up.”

  “We could if we had power…and maybe some of the engineer types could rearrange all those parts into something useful for us.”

  “For what?” Ninety asked.

  “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you like technology?” Lenny wanted to know, dismissing his brother’s attitude.

  “Mitford will want,” Zainal said. “We bring on later back to camp.” He looked around again, his eyes narrowed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “No dart thing.”

  Coo suddenly pointed up, chattering in the way of Deski laughter. Craning their necks, they finally saw the aerial unit, high up in the ceiling.

  “No wonder we didn’t see one in the slaughterhouse garage. We never looked up,” Kris said. “Well, now we know where it hangs out, we can get that one, too.

  “Already half-launched like that, isn’t it?” Lenny said. “That thing has to be programmed by a machine, doesn’t it? I mean, it can’t go off in here, can it?”

  “I hope not,” Ninety said.

  They had to do a circus act: Ninety on Zainal’s shoulders, with Coo on Ninety’s, to get enough height to reach the thing. In trying to remove it from the brackets that held it in place, the human ladder swayed alarmingly back and forth, with Lenny and Kris doing a dance around Zainal, ready to cushion any faller with their own bodies.

  Coo ended up swinging on the thing, to break it loose from its mooring. So it and he fell, Coo uttering amazing cackles as he plummeted, clutching the mechanism to his thin chest. Lenny and Kris smacked into each other as they reached out to catch his spider body. But they did break his fall even if Kris got clouted across the nose by one wing extension of the flying device. She saw stars but managed to hang on to the frail Deski body until they could ease him to the ground.

  When they separated, Kris gasped, for the wicked points of the anesthetic darts were visible along the leading edges of both wings, pointing right at her. She could so easily have been pricked. She sat down and then had to tip her head back to stem the nosebleed.

  The men were all for breaking up the evil device.

  “No way,” she said with muffled urgency because she only had her sleeve to use to stanch the blood on her face. “Let’s find out if there’s a reservoir or well of that anesthetic they use,” she said.

  “Why?” Lenny demanded. “I’m not a vindictive sort, but when I think about what happened to some bodies who got darted…”

  “I’m thinking of a medical use for the anesthesia, Lenny. It put us to sleep. And that could be useful.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  So they were even more careful as they disassembled the unit.

  Then they disabled all the other machines in the garage, making neat piles of the various components.

  “Don’t fancy lugging all this back,” Lenny said, eyeing the lot thoughtfully.

  “We get more people to carry. Aarens is strong,” Zainal said, grinning maliciously in Kris’ direction.

  “He’ll love you for that,” she said with a snort and a laugh.

  “Lugging’s about all that gobshite’s good for,” Ninety said as he regarded the piles dubiously. “But, hey, is it safe to just leave the stuff lying here?”

  Zainal shrugged. “No machine has power!”

  “That’s true enough,” Ninety said, still worried.

  “No power in the garage either,” Kris reminded him.

  “Suppose they have got some sort of security patrol that comes around checking to be sure they’re on duty er something?” Ninety wanted to know.

  After a moment, Zainal grinned. “That is what is wanted.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” and Ninety scratched his head. “So, shouldn’t we break all this up so it can’t put them all back together?”

  “We hide,” Zainal said decisively after a moment’s thought.

  They had to haul the panels and cubes quite a distance to find someplace that would be secure from an aerial or surface inspection and that task took the rest of the day. That night they camped inside the inoperative garage, safe from the torrential rains that once again pummeled the ground. The rocksquats they’d hunted—Kris had surprised herself by stunning one in her first attempt to hunt with a slingshot—were roasted over the fire they made. The patrol ate, watching the rain sheeting down.

  * * *

  IN THE COURSE OF THEIR SEVEN-DAY PATROL, FOR that was the time given them by Mitford for this tour, they found and rendered useless four more installations, including another empty abattoir. They camped there that night, more comfortably on fodder bedding, while outside the hour-long rain pelted down. It rained every evening, hard, for approximately an hour and they preferred to be undercover during such onslaughts.

  “This sort of rain can’t be natural,” Kris said the fourth night. “Not rain at night, when all the machines would be safely back in their garages.”

  “They got the farming so well organized here, I wouldn’t put it past ’em to organize the weather, too,” Ninety said. Then added thoughtfully: “Sure would be nice not to have the soccer games rained out.”

  “You would think of soccer,” his brother said with amiable asperity.

  “Then there’d have to be a central control facility somewhere on this planet,” Kris said, turning to Zainal. He nodded. “Only where? We aren’t going to be able to cover a great deal of distance on foot and we don’t even know which continent we’
re on. Do we?” she asked Zainal.

  He shook his head, sighing again and indicating his own frustration over insufficient data.

  “Well, if we keep on the way we’re going, disabling garages, we may meet our landlord soon. Maybe sooner than we’d like,” and unconsciously her hand went to the knife at her belt. “Comforting a knife may be, but it’s not really sufficient to combat the kind of technology we’ve seen.”

  “No intelligence on this planet,” Zainal said with a shrug.

  “D’you mean anything that comes after us would be a machine?” Kris wasn’t at all happy with that notion. “Or more flying darts?”

  “We were trapped in that place,” Zainal said, but he was obviously turning over the possibilities in his head and then gave a convulsive shrug. “We are careful. We keep watch.” He delivered a short series of guttural barks to the Deski, who was chewing a mouthful. Coo nodded and pointed to his ear flaps. Then, to Kris’ surprise, he held up one of his two opposal digits in the “gotcha” gesture.

  “They catch on quick, don’t they?” Lenny murmured as he beamed at the Deski and made the thumbs-up with both of his hands. Coo nodded enthusiastically but kept right on chewing.

  Kris, watching the Catteni’s face during this exchange, decided that he had also noted the alteration in the Deski. Though the alien kept up with the patrol, climbing was no longer as effortless for him and, to Kris, he seemed even more spidery and insubstantial than ever. And he was constantly trying out some new greenery, root, or the nutlike objects he found in the forested areas. Some of the vegetation sprouted sort of nuts, or fungi, on the trunks. Coo tried everything and, when the others chowed down on rocksquat, he ate slowly of his ration bars. Twice Zainal had evidently told him not to save the bars: there would be more back at the camp. At least that’s what Kris thought Zainal was telling him.

  On the morning of the sixth day, Slav pointed out their homeward direction. Kris was suitably awed by the confidence he displayed, since they’d done so much up-and downhill travel, so many detours around impassable rock faces, that she had no idea where the home camp was.