by George Olney
Settle down, she told herself. Now wasn't the time. Maybe she'd get an opening to do something if she just played along and bided her time. Right now, she had to play along. There wasn't a choice.
She also had to find a way out of this mess.
Sarena shivered with fear. She'd give anything to see Daddy again. Daddy and his big sword.
Chapter 11
Several days into the expedition, Justa was feeling far more comfortable than when the whole idea had first been presented to her. For one thing, Red showed himself to be a very competent traveler in rough country, not really surprising given his career. For another, he was an amiable companion that put her at ease with a huge stock of interesting tales that he loved to tell given any excuse whatsoever. Besides, she was coming to realize those stories all contained teaching points of one sort or another. In effect, this trip was one long advanced seminar on practical archeology with her as the sole student. The thought made her seriously consider going back and getting another academic degree once this bondage business was resolved.
Frankly, she was quite ready to get out of bondage altogether, since being bound to Grae wasn't turning out quite like she expected. She decided she was going to find a way to honorably unbind herself as soon as possible. She had a career to pursue. And, she thought with brutal honesty, a lot more study to do. Some of the things Red dropped in casual conversation were actually in-depth remarks on topics that she'd barely touched when she got her degree.
Of course, she sniffed, it wasn't like she'd had a whole lot of time to do much research, given her capture by slavers and everything.
About then, something pinged her wilderness alert consciousness. Intently studying the immediate area, she noticed the pug marks of a big catalot. The large pseudo-felines were mammalian, so they weren't shape changers, but they were just as deadly and aggressive as the rest of Lycanth's major wildlife. One of those could spell real trouble and they were also daytime hunters.
She reached for her spring rifle in its saddle scabbard, pulling it out so she could ride with the butt on her right thigh. Shooting a glance ahead of her, she focused on the big bolt pistol Red wore on his hip. The damn thing was bigger than Grae's military grade pistol, and half again the caliber. That was obviously the weapon of a tyro, way too big to be practical here in the Barrens. If nothing else, the gun's size and recoil would make it nearly impossible to handle in any kind of sudden attack by anyone or anything. She figured the catalot was her job if it decided they looked like lunch. Danger recognition was one of the reasons she was out here, after all. "Watch out," she said loudly. "There's a big predator around somewhere."
No apparent reaction from Red.
As they rode, Red did as he usually did, skirting close to an odd rock formation to see if it was natural or a relic from a forgotten civilization. As they passed by, a motion caught the corner of Justa's eye and she had her rifle up and already on target as the big cat sprung at them.
Her dart whacked it in the skull just above one eye in an instant kill, but it turned out she wasn't as good as she thought in reading trail sign. A bit out of practice.
There were two of them.
The second sprang. There was a loud CRACK, as a bolt from Red's pistol knocked the second attacker flipping end over end in the air, to land further back in the rocks. His pistol still in his hand, Red commented casually, "Nice little pussycat. Guess it was thinking about a meal or so. Us."
As he scanned the rocks, pistol ready, he asked, "Figure there're any more of them, Justa? You're my expert on Lycanth."
Justa shook her head in a slight daze. She had her rifle cocked and ready again, but she was slightly stunned from plain old surprise. She was prepared to swear Red's pistol was still in its holster when she shot the first one. Red's draw was every bit as lightning fast and accurate as Grae's, with a gun nearly half again the size. And Red absorbed the big pistol's recoil like it was nothing! "Uh, no. No there aren't. Mated pairs, like I guess these were, carve out a territory for themselves and keep it. We won't see any more around here."
Red grinned at her. "Interesting wildlife you have around here, girl. They were almost impossible to see until they jumped.
"Back home," he continued as he holstered his pistol with the smooth motion of an expert, "they'd just be a minor problem. The really big stuff is what you watch out for, one reason you need enough gun if you plan to go out into the bush."
Justa could only nod at his calm comments. One more time, she decided she really ought to start looking below the surface. Red could have handled both of them without turning a hair on his beard. This guy was a whole lot more capable than she first thought. Frenchy was right. Don't make assumptions about other people.
They left the rocks where they'd encountered what Red termed the "pussycats" and rode on for about an hour, Red still continually scanning rock formations along with various and sundry other landscape features. Justa wasn't all that surprised - well, a bit surprised - when he suddenly stopped his gort, staring.
"It's a tell," Red pronounced, pointing at a relatively small low mesa in the immediate distance.
Justa didn't argue. By now, she was aware she was escorting a true master in their joint field. A "tell" was a geological mound that occasionally formed over ancient ruins. Once Red pointed out the location, her own trained eye started picking out inconsistencies in the mesa's structure. That certainly wasn't a completely natural formation. Given Lycanth's stable and relatively dry climate, whatever ruins were under the mesa were probably in pretty good shape. On the other hand, they had to be ancient, given that Lycanth was known to Galactic society for a thousand or so years.
"Think we can get up to the top?" Red asked. "My GAD is only a small portable. It'll work best looking straight down." The Ground Anomaly Detector was a standard tool archeologists used to find buried artifacts.
"Follow me," Justa told him and started off. She could see a good route up, over to the right of the mesa, but really wasn't surprised he couldn't. This was her world, not his, and she knew what gorts could do. She was the designated Native Guide and actually glad to do a little native guiding. The guy had just been too damn good so far!
Once on top, Red dug his GAD out of a saddle bag, switched it on, and began a spiral search pattern, looking intently at the little device's screen. Justa knew this was just a preliminary scan to see if anything was down there. The real scan was going to take a few days. She'd better start looking for a good campsite somewhere close. She began visually searching the nearby land for vegetation that would indicate water. There certainly wasn't any on the mesa top.
"Yup!" Red's loud comment stopped her search and captured her attention.
"Find something?"
Red looked back at her. "Sure did. Lovely little collection of ruins down there. Stuff scattered all over the place, too. Couple of pieces real near the top, but damned if I could figure out how they got there. Don't see any evidence of geologic activity, even though it's been a good while. Lycanth's supposed to be pretty stable geologically, anyway."
Justa knew the strangely simple answer to that, and one peculiar to the Barrens. "Togu. They're mammals and a kind of burrowing rat. They're at the bottom of the food chain with the athul on top."
Red thought for a moment. "Athul. I read about them. A biological class that's unique to Lycanth. Nocturnal shape changers."
Justa nodded. "They have a strange cartilage structure. We found out that sunlight suppresses some of their hormones. Once the hormones activate, the cartilage shifts and hardens so they can fly. Their whole nature changes and they become vicious predators. The Lee'thal are the most developed and intelligent members of the family, but athul come in all sizes. You kill any one you find if it's bigger than a foot or so in size, or it'll try to kill you at night.
"We don't bother the lee'thal in their daytime form, because they're peaceful village dwellers and don't even know what they do at night. Besides, you don't kill intelligent beings wi
thout a reason. Their nighttime form is enough of a reason, but we've learned to deal with it. Lee'thal are one reason every human dwelling is sunken or buried in the Mandate and we travel with protective screens." She gave him a wolfish grin. "On the other hand, lee'thal have learned not to bother us too often, too."
"Like I said, you've got some interesting fauna on Lycanth, Justa," Red said with his own grin.
"Anyhow," Justa continued with a little shrug, "when togu dig, they push rocks and anything else that gets in their way up to the top of their burrow, then away so it won't betray their tunnel. You can find things on the surface that ought to be fifty or so feet down."
Red looked disgusted. "Well, that'll mess up the strata. After thousands of years of rat burrows, no wonder things are way to hell and gone above where they ought to be. At least it'll make it easy to get to a few of the artifacts." He paused, staring at his screen. "In fact..."
Red headed decisively back to the pack gorts and unlashed a long handled shovel. "There's something I can get to in a couple of minutes. Let's just see what it is."
Justa got off her gort and watched for a moment as Red, swiftly but very carefully, dug a hole about two feet deep, piling the dirt for later sifting. "Gotcha," he announced. He reached into the hole and carefully pulled out something small enough to hold in the palm of his hand. He walked over to show Justa.
"Know what these are?" he said as he opened his hand and showed her two small bits of metal in his palm.
Justa gave both pieces a quick study. One was a silvery color and the other might well be gold. Both were unusually shaped, but obviously artificial to her trained eye. She shook her head. She'd never seen anything like them. Red stirred the silvery one with a large, blunt, but carefully gentle finger. "This one's definitely Poluthrefus jewelry. I've never seen anything like the other one," he said. "Might also be jewelry, but I don't see any attachment point."
He looked at her with a grin. "Time to stop wandering, young lady. I think we've just found what we were looking for."
Justa turned back to her gort. "In that case, I'm going to check out a possible water site I saw not too far from the base of the tell. We need a place to camp."
#####
Small isolated stations were common in the Barrens, and generally looked exactly like this one, a large main building mostly underground except for the roof, with a variety of outbuildings similarly dug in below ground level and all connected by underground walkways. To those familiar with the "Western" of Frenchy's home world, the collection of buildings currently under discussion would have been called a "ranch". On Lycanth, this sort of conglomeration of structures was termed a "station". Ergo, this was a station. It also just happened to be in Yellowknife territory, although such things were generally a little ambiguous.
The owner, through several cutouts, of this particular (and unregistered, thus somewhat illegal) station was currently in residence with five of his men. It was Baltan, who, at the moment, was becoming increasingly unhappy.
"Boss," said Joktar, the man responsible for keeping up communications among his snatch teams, "I can't get contact with anybody but Loris and his boys. They're following what looks like a prospector and his boundwoman. He says there's no way he can do a traditional taking on her. Wants permission to just do a grab. He says there aren't any other prospects out there. Right now, women outside the Holds in our area are either being guarded too heavily or they're in large enough groups that they'd probably win any fight and it's not worth the risk."
After a string of vulgar language, Baltan settled down. He told himself yet again that getting mad wasn't going to help business. He had a very lucrative contract from Alesos, but filling it was turning out to be a real problem. The attitude of the Tribes was changing, going from resigned anger to preventive action and that was cutting his procurement severely. Not only was he now bringing in fewer women, he was losing teams. Replacing men was expensive, not to mention the loss of experienced crews. He had to do something, but he wasn't sure what. He needed to think. Meanwhile...
"What about Renal's crew? Last you told me, they had two women and were heading back to make a delivery."
Joktar shook his head. "Nothing since. I don't know why."
Baltan snarled, "I'll bet they walked into someone that wasn't happy with them, maybe someone else's snatch team working the same area." Only outlaws like themselves would actually interfere with four men and their boundwomen. Tribesmen would leave them alone, no matter how much they wanted a fight. Custom forbade it.
Baltan took a deep breath and returned to Loris and his request. "Okay, once we can move that girl to Alesos, there'll be enough cash to let us get another team together. Looks like we need more teams.
"Tell Loris to go ahead and grab the girl. At least there's some money waiting there."
#####
Loris and his four men pulled their gorts up in a rough line on top of a ridge some distance from the mesa. Time to do a final check of their target.
Loris drew distance lenses from his saddle bag and scanned the two people on the mesa's top. The prospector was digging nearly in the center of the mesa - and sifting the dirt for some reason - while the girl was off a bit, at a tent where the trail head hit the mesa's top. She was wearing coveralls and apparently wasn't in bondage to the prospector. That would make her capture easier than he first thought, since all they had to do was take possession of her and let Custom do its work.
Loris and his gang were typical tribesmen, dressed in the male version of tribal leathers, meaning open vests over bare chests, leather pants and boots with heavy belts, knives, etc. To an observer that wasn't tribal, they also looked like typical tribesmen in that they were big muscular types with long hair in a variety of styles, to include mustaches and beards or lack thereof, and had other such identifying features. To a tribal observer, though, these guys were outlaws in that they all lacked any form of tribal markings. The tribal observer would take appropriate action on noticing that point.
Loris wasn't concerned about hostility from tribal observers. There weren't any around. What did concern him was taking the girl. "Chez, you go around the mesa and work your way up the other side. Take out the prospector. Haso, you get up the trail and try to grab the girl. The rest of us will wait here and cover both of you if there's any trouble."
Both men grinned before riding off. There wasn't going to be any trouble.
Since both Red and Justa were very experienced in rough country and Red had bossed too many digs to count, they fell into a very old system adapted to current circumstances. They had a base camp on the lower slope of the mesa near a small spring. However, to avoid having to continually go up and down the mesa in the course of the day, they'd set up a small advance camp right at the trail head on the mesa's top containing supplies, a tent, a rest area, and facilities for preliminary study of various uncovered artifacts. Outside the advance camp tent, Justa was currently occupied assembling small tools - little brushes, tiny picks, and the like - into a pack she was going to take over to the actual dig. They were just about at the point where the dig was going to get serious. In previous days, she and Red had laid out the dig's grid and both had carefully used shovels to get close to the level where Red's GAD said artifacts started appearing – just as carefully sifting the dirt while they did it - but this was only a preliminary effort to identify a good location. If what Red expected turned up, they were going back and recruit a crew to seriously begin to disassemble the mesa.
Justa was puttering around when she began to get an uneasy feeling, like she was being watched. Being tribal, she took a feeling like that very seriously, especially in the Barrens. Trouble was always out there, somewhere, and it might just have found them. Every line of her body showed elaborate unconcern as she casually turned her head, apparently to locate another tool, and scanned what she could see of the surrounding area. She spotted the five guys on the ridgeline almost immediately. Her next scan showed two of them headed her way
. Better alert Red.
She strolled easily up to where dirt was flying from Red's shovel into the automatic sifter and commented in a normal speaking voice, "Red, there's five guys watching us from a ridge about four hundred yards off. I don't like the way they look."
"Hnmpf. Well, keep an eye on them and let me know if there's a problem. Another couple of feet and I ought to be down to the initial artifact layer. Get me the small tools and I want you down here with me. Two sets of eyes will be needed."
Justa snorted and turned back to the advance camp. Honestly, Red was an innocent babe out here. Not for the first time (and conveniently forgetting a dead catalot) she mentally applauded the wisdom of having her guiding this overgrown lost child. She felt sure trouble was coming and all that man could think about was artifacts to prove his theory about an early spacefaring civilization!
A return to the advance camp, another utterly casual scan, and Justa started fuming about more than Red. She couldn't find the two that were headed for the mesa when last seen. Elaborately casual, she turned back to Red and yelled, "Watch out! I think two of them are headed for us."
Still just as casually, she turned and walked into the little tent where she was sure she couldn't be seen by possible bad guys. She got her spring rifle then dropped to the ground and began a steady crawl to the trail head, looking for a spot where she could see who was coming, but be protected from return fire. She slithered to a group of medium sized rocks on the left side of the trail, then slowly edged her spring rifle into a gap between two of them and settled into position.
It wasn't long before small noises announced a man carefully working his way up the trail, moving from cover to cover. Needless to say, that wasn't the way an honest traveler approached someone else's camp in the Barrens. Probable trouble. Justa took a good sight picture and waited patiently.