Orphan Star

by Foster, Alan Dean;

  "Is understood," Fluff grunted. "Part of game not to damage buildings' insides. Will tell family. Not to worry."

  "Not to worry," Flinx mimicked, thinking of the alert and armed personnel awaiting them at the base of the mountain. Thinking also of the two atmosphere- piercing laser cannon set to swivel freely in the small tower.

  Fluff led them downward, down through the several floors of mill and mine, down to the single storage level below ground. Down past rooms and chambers and corridors walled with patiently waiting, snoozing, playful Ujurrians. Down to where the lowest floor itself had been ripped up. There they halted.

  Moam was waiting for them, and Bluebright and Softsmooth and a dimly glimpsed flickering something that might have been Maybeso, or might have been an illusion caused by a trick of the faint overhead lighting.

  Instead of stopping before a solid ferrocrete barrier, they found three enormous tunnels leading off into total darkness. Light from the room penetrated those down-sloping shafts only slightly, but Flinx thought he could detect additional branch tunnels breaking off from the three principal ones further on.

  "Surprise, yes?" Fluff asked expectantly.

  "Yes," was all a bewildered Flinx could reply.

  "Each tunnel," the ursinoid continued, "come up under one part of several metal caves below, in quiet place where cold minds are not,"

  "You can tell where the floors aren't guarded?" Sylzenzuzex murmured in amazement.

  "Can sense." Moam explained. "Is easy."

  "Is good idea, Flinx-friend?" a worried Fluff wondered. "Is okay part of game, or try something else?"

  "No, is okay part of game. Fluff," Flinx admitted finally. He turned to face the endless sea of great-eyed animals. "Pay attention, now."

  A massive stirring and roiling shivered through the massed bodies.

  "Those who break into the power station must shut everything off. Push every little knob and switch to the-"

  "Know what means off," Bluebright told him confidently.

  "I probably should leave you alone, you've managed fine without my help," Flinx muttered. "Still, it's important. This will darken everything except for the tower housing the two big cannon. They'll be independently powered, as will the shuttlecraft hangar beneath the landing strip. Those of you who get into the cannon tower will have to-"

  "Am sorry, Flinx-friend," a doleful Fluff interrupted. "Cannot do."

  "Why not?"

  "Floors not like this," the ursinoid explained, eyes glowing in the indirect lighting. He indicated the broken ferrocrete lying around. "Are thick metal. Cannot dig through."

  Flinx's spirits sank. "Then this whole attack will have to be called off until we can think of something that will eliminate that tower. They can destroy all of us, even if they have to melt the entire remaining installation to do so. If Rudenuaman were to slip away and reach the tower, I don't think she'd hesitate to give the order. At that point she'd have nothing further to lose."

  "Not mean to make yon worry, Flinx-friend," comforted Bluebright.

  "Nothing to worry about," Moam added.

  "Have something else to take care of tower," explained Fluff.

  220

  "But you ..." Flmx stopped himself, went on quietly, "no, if you say you do, then yon must."

  "What about the three who got themselves killed?" Sylzenzuzex whispered. "They thought they had something too. This time there are many more lives at stake."

  Flinx shook his head slowly. "Ay, Bee, and Cee were playing by different rules, Syl, It's time for us to trust our lives to these. They've risked theirs often enough on our say-so. But just in case ..."

  He turned to Fluff. "There is one thing I must do even if this fails and we all end up dead. I want to come up through the floor of the big living house, Fluff. There is something in there that I need the use of."

  "In this tunnel," Fluff told him, indicating the shaft at far left. "Are ready, then?"

  Flinx nodded. The huge Ujurrian turned and shouted mental instructions. They were accompanied by a nonverbal emotional command.

  A soft, threatening rumble responded ... a hair-curling sound as dozens, hundreds of massive shapes bestirred themselves in long lines reaching back into the far places of the mine.

  Then they were moving down the tunnels. Flinx and Sylzenzuzex bugged close to Fluff, each with a hand tight in his fur. Sylzenzuzex's night vision was far better than Flinx's, but the tunnel was too black even for her acute senses.

  If the Ujurrians' activities had been detected, Flinx reflected, they might never re-emerge into the light. They could be trapped and killed here with little effort.

  "One question," Sylzenzuzex asked.

  Flinx's mind was elsewhere when he responded: "What?"

  "How did they excavate these tunnels? The ground here is rock-laden and the tunnels seem quite extensive."

  "They've been digging tunnels for fourteen thousand years, Syl." Flinx found he was moving with more and more confidence as nothing appeared to deal death from above them. "I imagine they've become pretty good at it. ..."

  Teleen auz Rudenuaman panted desperately, nearly out of breath, as she limped along the floor. The sounds of heavy fighting sounded outside and below her.

  A massive brown shape appeared at the top of the stairwell which she had just exited. Turning, she fired her beamer in its direction. It disappeared, though she was unable to tell whether she'd hit it or not.

  She had been relaxing in her living quarters when the attack had come-not from the distant mine, but from under her feet. Simultaneously, hundreds of enormous, angry monsters had exploded out of the sub- levels of every building. Every building, that is, except for the cannon tower. She'd barely had time to give the order for those powerful weapons to swing around and beam every structure except the one she was in when they had been destroyed.

  A peculiar violet beam no thicker than her thumb had jumped the gap between the uppermost floor of the far-off mine and the tower's base. Where it had touched there was now only a deep horizontal scar in the earth. It had been so quick that she'd neither seen nor heard any explosion.

  One moment the tower had been there-three stories of armor housing the big guns-and the next she'd heard a loud hissing sound like a hot ember being dropped in water. When she turned to look, the tower was gone.

  Now there was no place to run to, nothing left to bargain with. Her badly outmatched personnel-human, thranx and AAnn alike-had been submerged by a brown avalanche.

  She'd tried to make for the underground shuttle hangar in hopes of hiding there until the Baron's return, but the lower floors of this building were also blocked by swarms of lemur-lensed behemoths. The ground outside was alive with them.

  It made no sense! There had been perhaps half a hundred of the slow-moving natives living in the immediate vicinity of the mine. Surveys had revealed a few hundred more inhabiting caves outside the vicinity.

  Now there were thousands of them, of all sizes, overrunning the installation-overrunning her thoughts. The crash of overturned furniture and shattered glass- alloy sounded below. There was no way out. She could only retreat upward.

  Limping to another stairwell, she started up to her apartment-office on the top floor. The battle was all but over when the cannon tower had been eliminated. Meevo confirmed that when he reported the power station taken. Those were the last words she heard from the reptilian engineer.

  With the station, the power to communications and the lifts had gone. It was hard for her to mount the stairwell, with her bad leg. Her jumpsuit was torn, the carefully applied makeup covering her facial scars badly smudged. She would meet death in her own quarters, unpanicked to the end, showing the true selfconfidence of a Rudenuaman.

  She slowed at the top of the stairs. Her quarters were at the far end of the hall but there was a light shining from inside the chamber nearest the stairwell. Moving cautiously, she slid the broken door a little further back, peered inside.

  The light was the kind th
at might come from a small appliance. There were many such self-powered devices on the base-but what would anyone be doing with one here and now, when he should have a beamer in his fist?

  Holding her own tightly, she tiptoed into the chamber.

  These quarters had' not been lived in since the demise of their former occupant. The light was coming from a far corner. It was generated by a portable viewer. A small, slight figure was hunched intently before it, oblivious to all else.

  She waited, and in a short while the figure leaned back with a sigh, reaching out to switch the machine off. Fury and despondency alternated in her thoughts, to be replaced at last by a cold, calm sense of resignation.

  "I ought to have guessed," she muttered.

  The figure jerked in surprise, spun about.

  "Why aren't you decently dead, like you're supposed to be?"

  Flinx hesitated, replied without the hint of a smile, "It wasn't destined to be part of the game."

  "You're joking with me ... even now. I should have killed you the same time I finished Challis. But no," she said bitterly, "I had to keep you around as an amusement."

  "Are you sure that's the only reason?" he inquired, so gently that she was momentarily taken aback.

  "You play word games with me, too." She raised the muzzle of the beamer. "I only regret I haven't got time to kill you slowly. You haven't even left me that." She shrugged tiredly. "The price one pays for undersight, as my aunt would say, corruption be on her spirit. I am curious, though-how did you manage to tame and train these creatures?"

  Flinx looked at her pityingly. "You still don't understand anything, do you?"

  "Only," she replied, her finger tightening on the beamer's trigger, "that this comes several months too late."

  "Wait!" he shouted pleadingly, "if you'll give me one min-"

  The finger convulsed. At the same time someone doused her eyes with liquid fire. She screamed, and the beam passed just to the right of Flinx to obliterate the viewer nearby.

  "Don't rob!" he started to yell, rushing around the chair he'd been sitting in-already too late. At the moment of contact she'd dropped the beamer and begun rubbing instinctively at the awful pain in her face. She was on the floor now, rolling over and over.

  The distance between them was no longer great, but by the time he reached her she was unconscious and stiff. Thirty seconds later she was dead.

  "You never did take the time to listen, Teleen," he murmured, kneeling numbly by the doubled-over corpse. Nervously flicking his long tongue in and out, Pip settled softly on Flinx's shoulder, The minidrag was taut with anger.

  "Your life was too rushed. Mine's been too rushed, also."

  Something moved in the doorway. Looking up, Flinx saw a wheezing Sylzenzuzex standing there, favoring her splinted leghand. One truhand had a firm grip on a thranx-sized beamer.

  "I see you found her," she observed, her breath coming through the spicules of her b-thorax in long whistles. "Softsmooth tells me that the last bits of resistance are almost cleaned out." Her compound eyes regarded him questioningly as he looked back down at the body.

  "I didn't find her. She found me. But before I could make her listen, Pip intervened. I suppose he had to; she would have killed me." Unexpectedly, he glanced at her and smiled.

  "You should see yourself, Syl. You look like a throwback from Hivehom's pre-tranquility days. Like a warrior who has just concluded a successful brood'raid on a neighboring hive. A wonderful advertisement for the compassionate understanding of the Church."

  She didn't respond to the jibe. There was something in his voice.... "That's not like you, Flinx." She studied him as he turned back to stare at the corpse, trying to remember everything she knew of human emotion. It seemed to her that his interest in this woman, who for a few tarns of vackel had worked willingly with the sworn enemies of hurnanx kind, was abnormal.

  Sylzenzuzex was not her uncle's equal when it came to intuitive deduction, but neither was she stupid. "You know something more about this human female than you have said."

  "I must have known her before," he whispered, "though I don't remember her at all. According to the time intervals given on the tape that's not too surprising." He gestured limply at the chamber behind him. "This was Challis' apartment." His hand returned to indicate the corpse. For a moment his eyes seemed nearly as deep as Moam's. "This was my sister."

  Not until the following afternoon, after the bodies had been efficiently buried by the Ujurrians, did Sylzenzuzex insist on hearing about everything that had been recorded on the stolen tape.

  "I was an orphan, Syl, raised on Moth by a human woman named Mother Mastiff. The information I found said that I'd been born to a professional Lynx named Rud, in Allahabad on Terra. The records also said I was a second child, though they didn't give details. Those facts were to be found on the tape Challis stole, the tape I didn't read until last night.

  "My mother also had an elder sister. My mother's husband, who according to the tape was not my father, gave that elder sister a position in his commercial firm. After he died, under still unexplained circumstances, the sister took control of the company and built it into a considerable business empire,

  "It seems my mother and her sister were never the best of friends. Some of the details of what amounted to my mother's captivity, and that's what it reads like, are ..." He had to stop for a moment.

  "It's easy to see how a mind like Challis' would be attracted to details like that. My mother died soon after her husband. A number of unexplained incidents followed. No one could be certain, but it was theorized they might be attributable in some way to her male nephew. So ... I was disposed of. A small sale in so large a commercial concern," he added viciously. "It amused the elder sister, Rashalleila, to keep the girl niece around. The sister's name was Nuaman. The niece-my sister-was called Teleen, She became a mirror image of her aunt, took the company from her, and merged her mother's name with her aunt's. Symbospeeched it. Teleen of Rud and Nuaman ... Teleen auz Rudenuaman.

  "As for me-I was long forgotten by everyone. Challis' researchers were interested in the part about my causing some 'unexplained incidents,' as they were called. He never troubled to make any other connections from the information."

  They walked on in silence, past the long gouge in the earth where the cannon tower had stood. Fluff, Moam, Bluebright, and Softsmooth trailed behind. They came upon a small building set alongside the landing field. Earlier, one of the Ujurrians had discovered that it led down to the extensive shuttlecraft hangar. The hangar held complete repair and constrution facilities for shuttlecraft, as would be necessary on an isolated world like this. There was also an extensive machine shop and an enormous technical library on all aspects of Commonwealth KK ship maintenance. It would make a very useful branch of the Ujurrian school Flinx was planning to set up.

  "I didn't have time to ask last night. Fluff," Flinx: began, as they passed the end of the scar, "how did you manage that?"

  "Was fun," the big ursinoid responded brightly. "Was Moam's idea mostly. Also a young She named Mask. While others dug tunnels, they two read much that was in books at the mine."

  "Made some changes in cold minds' cave digger," Moam supplied.

  "The press drill," murmured Svizenzuzex, "they must have modified the press drill. But how?"

  "Change here, add this," explained Moam. "Was fun."

  "I wonder if modified is quite the word for turning a harmless tool into a completely new kind of weapon," Moam and Mask and their friends play with the library and machine shop below. But first we have some other modifications that have to be carried out in a hurry...."

  The big freighter came out of KK drive just inside the orbit of Ulru-Ujurr's second satellite, moving nearer on short bursts from its immensely powerful space- spanning engine. The freighter entered a low orbit around the vast blue-brown world, remaining directly above the only installation on its surface.

  "Honored One, there is no response," the disguised AAnn operating
the ship's communicator reported.

  "Try again," a deep voice commanded.

  The operator did so, finally looked up helplessly. "There is no response on any of the closed-signal frequencies. But there is something else-something very peculiar."

  "Explain," the Baron directed curtly. His mind was spinning.

  "There is evidence of all kinds of subatmospheric broadcasting, but none on any frequencies I can tap into. And none of it is directed at ns, despite my repeated calls."

  A man named Josephson, who was a very important executive in Rudenuaman Enterprises, moved next to the Baron. "What's going on down there? This isn't like Madam Rndenuaman."

  "It is not like many things," observed the Baron cautiously. He turned his attention to another of the control pod operatives. "What is the cloud cover like above the base?"

  "Clear and with little wind, sir," the atmospheric meteorologist reported quickly. "A typical Ujurrian autumn day."

  The Baron hissed softly. "Josephson-sir, come with me, please."

  "Where are we going?" the' confused executive wanted to know, even as he followed the Baron down the corridor leading to the far end of the command blister.

  "Here." The Baron hit a switch and the door slid back, "I require maximum resolution," he instructed the on-duty technician.

  "At once, Honored One," the disguised reptilian acknowledged as he hurried to make the necessary adjustments to the surface scope. Sitting down alongside the tech, the Baron punched the requisite coordinates into the scope computer himself.

  Then he remained motionless for several minutes, staring through the viewer. Eventually he moved aside, gestured that Josephson should take his place. The human did so, adjusting the focus slightly for his eyes. He gave a verbal and physical start.

  "What do you see?" the Baron inquired.

  "The base is gone, and there's something in its place."

  "Then I may not be mad," the Baron observed. "What do you see?"

  '"Well, the landing strip is still there, but something like a small city is climbing from the lakeshore up into the mountains. Knowing the terrain, I'd say several of the unfinished structures are a couple of hundred meters high." His voice faded with astonishment.