“I knew you would,” Honeywell answered. “Apart from that, it may be the most defensible position within walking distance. The walls create a natural perimeter, in the event of more attacks, we’ll have time to put up defenses, or hide.”
And it is still on the path Keeler thought. For some reason, that was important . “No life-forms inside?”
“I thoroughly reconnoitered the interior. It was abandoned by human life-forms a long time ago. Spiders, rats, insects, that’s about it.”
“Snakes?”
“Za, snakes too.”
Keeler rolled his eyes. “Well, I guess there would have to have snakes. Wouldn’t be very creepy without snakes, now, would it? Are they poisonous?”
“Nay, perfectly safe to eat.”
The interior of the courtyard was filled with old dead leaves and tree branches. Small piles of rubble filled the corners and were scattered randomly across the courtyard. Keeler ordered some of the technicians to begin digging a fire pit. He doubted this side of the planet ever got very cold, but a fire would be reassuring.
The walls were very high and put most of the space inside into shadow. More than the desolation and abandonment of the place, an aura of despair hung over it like a great dark cloud. The air itself seemed somehow dead, as though every living thing that entered would leave its soul behind.
“Do you recognize this place?” Keeler asked George Borrows Things.
“It had been long abandoned by the time of my previous activation.”
“Maybe it would put us in a better frame of mind if we imagined it was once something innocuous like a bordello, or the rustic country retreat of a whimsically eccentric university chancellor,” Keeler suggested, mostly for his own benefit.
Alkema and Honeywell were organizing the party. “Gather up all the firewood you can. Let’s try and find a fresh water source,” Alkema ordered.
“Set up a perimeter. Put a guard up on the high tower,” Honeywell barked.
“Clear spaces for us to sent up the temporary habitats.”
“Let’s see if we can reinforce these walls.”
“We will need find a clean, safe spot for Dallas,” said Medical Technician Bihari. Honeywell jerked his head toward the keep. “That’s as safe and clean as it gets.”
Keeler sat down on a large block at the side of the compound. “This place could be fixed up; a coat of paint, some tasteful curtains, wicker chairs, a few objets d’art.” A pause. “A ten iso-ton nucleon detonation.” He paused again. “Damn, I miss Redfire.”
Honeywell heard a warning sound chirp in his ear-piece. “Sir, I am reading a life-form within the perimeter.
Suddenly, there came a scream. Medical Technician Bihari came running from the keep in all-out terror. Too close behind her was a fast-moving blur that made a horrible screeching noise like dried bones and dirty glass tossed into a drink blender. The horror chased her into the courtyard, and she was trying to make it across when she stumbled and fell, having just enough time to roll on her back before the creature was upon her. It seemed less a creature, than a whirlwind of dust with angry red demon eyes and snapping jaws of needle-sharp teeth at its center. It had Dr. Bihari pinned down and was raising its head for the death blow.
There came a roar, like a wild animal. From the high tower, a figure leapt. It had the body of a man and the head of a lion. Its enormous jaws were now opened wide showing huge yellow fangs. He landed on the creature and the whirlwind stopped. One great paw was on the neck of a small brown creature that seemed part-human, part rat with leathery wings twitching against the dust. The lion-head reared back, snapped once at the creature’s throat, and ended its struggle.
Then, the lion turned to them, his ears flattened and its eyes flaring red. The party regarded the beast cautiously. Honeywell and Buttercup stepped out, defensively postured, swords ready. Keeler stepped into the courtyard as well. The Lionhead wore a tattered blue coat, shirt, and cape over his body, secured with gold buckles and leather bands. Although now faded, patched, and caked with mud, his costume still looked as though it might have been finery, a long time ago. He stared at Keeler, and seeing him unarmed, addressed him as the leader. “It won’t harm you now,” said the lionhead. “But you need to separate the head from the body, bury each in a separate place, with metal or wooden spikes through the heart and brain. That way, it can not come back to life.”
The creature lay still on the ground, its throat ripped out. It had a head like a weasel, albeit with a much larger jaw and much larger, pointed ears. It seemed to have three pairs of wings, and as many arms and legs. The wings looked tough and leathery, not unlike those of the high guardsmen. Each appendage was tipped with four long-clawed digits.
“What was that?”Keeler asked. The boy had wrapped himself around Keeler’s legs and was hiding his head in Keeler’s back.
“Ghoulfiend Dervish,” answered the Lion in a voice so deep and resonant it threatened to shake the stones loose from the walls. “Vampires like to keep them as pets. Sometimes they run away, or are abandoned. They like old rotting places and fresh blood.”
“I thought you said there were no life signs in the structure?” Alkema asked Honeywell.
“There weren’t when I scanned it.”
“It wasn’t alive until it smelled blood,” the lion explained. “There must be someone in your party with a bleeding injury.”
“Are there any more of them?” Keeler asked.
“Not in daylight. I think your woman requires remedial attention.” He turned away from Keeler and approached the Marines, fearlessly, almost imperiously. “And what do I have here?
You have the embodiments of slaves, but your costume is unfamiliar to me.” He reached toward Honeywell. “Is that armor?”
Honeywell brandished his sword. “Stay back.”
The lion-man seemed unimpressed. “I could kill with a swat of my hand, but a demonstration on one of your subordinates might be more effective.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Keeler said, interposing himself. “We know you can kill, and we thank you for doing that. I am Captain William Keeler, of the ... of the … oh, yeah, the Pathfinder Ship Pegasus. I am the leader of these people.”
“A ship? Then, you come from a maritime prefecture.”
“Neg, actually, we come from another planet.”
The lion-man did not look impressed.
“Realize, there are several thousand more of us in orbit of this planet. We are just… an advance scouting party.”
“Then your army is vast.”
“It is large enough and very well-armed. We have already withstood several attacks.”
The Lion head nodded. “Of course, you have.”
“Is this your castle then?” Keeler asked him.
“It is not. It is merely the only habitation available to a caitiff who betrayed his lands.” The Lion bowed slightly. “I present to you, the former Lord Paperlung.”
“The former?”
“Before my prefecture was invaded and my lands taken, I was Lord of Lands not far from here. I ought to be dead, but I was young when the invaders came. My parents hid me away, and I saw them murdered before my eyes.”
“How awful,” said Alkema.
“It is disgraceful. I ought to have had the bravery to fight and die for my lands, but I ran. I have been living as a wretch, ever since.”
Keeler stepped forward. The boy, demonstrating that his mental faculties were not utterly degraded, let go of his leg and cleaved to Marine Honeywell instead.
“In all this confusion, I have neglected to thank you for saving my medical technician. Thank you.” Keeler offered his hand. The lionhead regarded it curiously, then took it in his own, which was part human, part lion’s paw, covered with thick tawny fur.
“When I saw your party approaching, I assumed you were a party of slaves, en route to the Far Side. I was...” he trailed off.
“You were what?” Keeler prompted.
The lionhead le
t his gaze fall to the dirt and debris at the commander’s feet, and spoke as though expressing an even graver humiliation than his desertion. “I was debating whether to eat you, or ask if I could join you.”
Keeler heard the Marines positioning their grips on their weapons. “I hope this means you’ve decided on the latter.”
“That depends on whether I believe you have the strength to make it to the Far Side.”
“What is the ‘Far Side?’”
Paperlung snorted. “One hears rumors of a place, on the Farside of our world. It is said life is hard there, darknesses are longer and colder, food is hard to come by. It is difficult to reach, but once there, a man controls his own destiny again. It is said that the villages there will engage a nobleman as a lord protector. I might build a house, engage in commerce.” He raised his head and met Keeler’s eyes. “A modest objective, admittedly.”
“Not at all,” Keeler assured him, finally giving back his paw. “Actually, it sounds pretty appealing right just now.”
Skinner was bending over Bihari, who had a nasty gash in her neck and was bleeding profusely. “Look what the color of this planet’s light does to human blood. Have you ever seen a more incredible shade of vermilion?”
Alkema handed him a wound sealer. “Will she be all right?”
“Shock. Blood loss. A simple herculon collar would have prevented this injury. The medical technician landing gear might benefit from a redesign.” He pressed the sealer into the wound and released a swarm of nanobot epidermal knitters.
He took a transfusion cuff from his bag and attached it over Bihari’s arm. “Mr. Alkema, may I borrow 120 milliliters of your blood.”
“Za, of course,” he offered his arm and Skinner slipped the cuff over it, up to the back of his forearm.
Keeler turned his attention back to Lord Paperlung. “You will have to forgive us for our armed response. Most of the creatures on this planet have tried to kill us.”
“I have lived in this wilderness for eighteen cycles. You do not need to tell me.”
“We are trying to reach the Temple of the Z’batsu in Chiban Prefecture.”
“Chiban,” the lionhead growled. “You do not want to go there. They will kill you.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Did the Scion Altama send you?”
“Za, he did.”
Lord Paperlung grunted. “Altama is up to his games again. He knows that the Chiban will have you killed, and he believes your vast and powerful army will then destroy Chiban Prefecture, leaving him as the most powerful of the High Scions.”
Keeler snapped his fingers. “I knew there was something I didn’t like about that guy.”
“Altama is ruthless and shrewd, although not especially inventive.”
“We are primarily interested in the Temple of Z’batsu. We think it might be an artifact from the original colonists of these planet.”
Lord Paperlung shook his head.
“What? Was that a lie as well?”
“No, there is a Temple of the Z’batsu in Chiban, but it has been sealed forever, from beyond time. No one may enter it.”
“Captain, we have incoming…” a Marine guard yelled from the WatchTower. Keeler hastened to the watchtower. Everything and Alkema, accustomed to Eden’s weak gravity, simply made the wall in a single leap.
Far off to the horizon, a swarm of black dots was approaching. They telescoped their vision, and saw a veritable Army of High Guardsmen approaching from the north.
“You didn’t do anything stupid like, ha-ha, sending the Shrieks back to Pegasus?” Alkema asked.
“I honestly don’t know,” Keeler answered. “Even if our little friends are still tracking us, there’s going to be a massacre..” He sounded casual and detached, as though he were appraising a situation someone else was in.
“Not for us,” Alkema muttered.
“I count three hundred and twenty,” said the Marine Guard.
Alkema scanned the skies, looking for Shrieks. Four shrieks, each having to take out eighty high guardsmen. It could be done.
“I have never seen such a large deployment of guardsmen,” said Paperlung. “There are tunnels beneath the keep. We may be able to hide in them, escape into the hills.”
Keeler stood still for a moment, then shook his head slightly. “Neg, I think not. We have injured people, and we don’t know that we can survive a long night in this planet’s wilderness. Lord Paperlung, you may hide if you wish. We will make our stand here.”
Lord Paperlung’s lower lip quivered as the approaching guardsmen brought to mind a day, long since passed, when guardsmen had swarmed the battlements of Paperlung Castle. The estate guard had tried to hold them off and fell one by one. He should have stood and fought then, perhaps now was his chance.
Before he could finish the thought, he fainted dead away at Keeler’s feet. The captain looked down at him for a moment, then whispered to Honeywell, “Quite a day.”
“I’m hoping tomorrow will be better,” Honeywell answered. “And either way, I am hoping I’ll be around to see it.”
The high guardsmen circled the ruins. The circle grew thicker and wider as more forces joined it. They became so many that the sky actually darkened. Then, one of the Guardsmen broke formation, and set himself down a short distance away on the rampart. The lead high guardsmen was a handsome man with skin as black as creosote. Sunlight gleamed off him like the surface of polished obsidian. His voice rang. “Do I have the honor of addressing the illustrious Captain William Randolph Keeler, shipmaster of the vessel that passes between the stars, brave leader of the Alpha landing team, hero of Meridian, wise and robust sage of the galaxy?”
Keeler hesitated, then his answer came. “You left out Quoits Champion of 7282.”
Undeterred, the Lead High Guardsmen continued. “I am sent to offer you the full measure of the hospitality of His Magnificence, the noble High Scion of Chiban Prefecture. We bid you come with us, His resplendency awaits you in his second-best palace.”
Chapter Nineteen
Pegasus – The UnderDecks
In the bowels of the great ship, Trajan Lear pushed onward and upward. His stomach now called out constantly. He always felt on the verge of passing out. Sometimes, he would find himself at the end of a passageway, look behind to see unfamiliar space stretching behind him, and wonder if he had somehow lost consciousness but managed to keep walking. That terrified him. All he needed now was to pass out and let the man who had held him recapture him again, or worse, never to be found by anyone.
The gray-tiled passageway he had been following eventually opened into a kidney-shaped chamber with a concave ceiling. The chamber was dominated by a line of cylinders and cones connected to U-shaped piping and conduits leading above and below into other areas of the ship. ID plates identified them as redistribution nodes for water, power, heat, and atmosphere. He wandered amongst them briefly, like a child lost among branchless plastic tree-trunks, glowing with crepuscular blue light like a haunted forest.
“Pegasus,” he said weakly, trying once again. “This is Trajan Johannes Lear. Why won’t you acknowledge, Pegasus?”
It was an automatic gesture, and he had not really expected a response. None of the previous communication stations had responded either. However, at the moment he finished speaking, he spied a tiny light strobing across the chamber. He broke into a stumbling run. The light marked the location of a vertical transport shaft. He somehow knew the transport pod would not come for him regardless of how hard he pounded on the call-plate, but the interior of these shafts had maintenance ladders built into the sides. He poked his head inside and saw the rungs reaching upward and into darkness. He found not much courage was required to enter the shaft and mount the rungs. The voice inside him that warned about high-velocity transporters and his current invisibility to detection systems, the fact that the shaft could possibly stretch hundreds of meters beneath him, was small and annoying, not really worth listening to. A way up, a
fter all, was a way out. As he gripped the first set of rungs and began climbing upward, willing his mind to clarity, like the sky of a cloudless winter night. His brain did nothing more than process the necessary muscle commands for gripping the next rung and pulling himself upward. The shaft was cold, and at some level of his consciousness this thought registered, but was disregarded as irrelevant. His stomach nagged at him in its emptiness, but he forced its complaints to a place beneath him, focusing only on himself, the shaft, and the climb.
Pegasus - The UnderDecks
The man who called himself John Hunter sat cross-legged in the pale light of the empty cell. The expression on his face was one of reflection and meditation.
He had returned to find the boy gone. This had disappointed him greatly, and the walls of the cell had suffered for it when he flung every loose object in the room against them, including the restraining cuff he had procured at immense personal risk. When his anger had susbsided, he had sat down, gathered his thoughts. He knew the Centurions had not found the boy. They would have been here waiting for him. He had a fear that the Isolationists had seized the boy, but he would have known by now if that were the case. The boy had either freed himself, or been helped by a non-partisan interloper. His mind kept circling back to one primary lesson: He should have had somebody guard the kid. However, there was not a single person in all the UnderDecks he would have trusted with the task. This one fact symbolized the dilemma of his life in the UnderDecks more than any other thing.
While his mind was still on the subject of mistrust, he heard the woman coming in behind him. Her hands fell around his shoulders, as though she thought he was asleep, and he grabbed them, hard with one strike, and held them fast. “You let him go, didn’t you?”
She didn’t try to pull away from him, speaking soothingly had always been enough when she had upset him before. “Keeping him here was an invitation to chaos.”
“That is exactly why I brought him here.”
She sighed. “Some of us gave everything to be here. We know that there is a very, very thin margin of survival down here. We don’t want to be sent back. We aren’t going to risk our lives for you.”
Worlds Apart 02 Edenworld Page 27