As he pounded grimly and undeviatingly along, Powers tried to keep his mind off his straining muscles and laboring breath by recasting the events of the past few cycles in his mind. Everything had happened quickly—too quickly.
While returning from a pirate scan near the outer Magellanics he and his teammate, Mazzechazz, had been beeped by a subdimensional probe, matching velocities with their two-man, deep-space Farover. The powered message capsule, actually a tiny ship keyed to a molecular frequency in their own vessel's construction, had been taken aboard, stored for return to base, its coded contents read.
The message had come through the subspace dimension from H.Q. on Sirius Prime. It seemed that no word had been received for three weeks, Universal time, from a new human colony on a Terra-type world called Origen VII.
The colony was one of the products of an influential religious body, the Methodist Revival Templars, a group originating on old Terra in the distant past, still with Terran headquarters, but powerful on other worlds also. The Templars were ancient Christian in their remote antecedents and gave their clergy a lot of authority. A strongly pacific—even pacifist—sect, they had a previous record of planting useful and healthy colonies on a number of worlds suitable for agriculture. They did not despise scientific technology but favored the simple life.
Although the colony was human, the native inhabitants of Origen VII were not, although they were classified as clearly mammalian. Pictures and data on the planet, its ecology, resources and all other pertinent matters were included in the message. The Templar colony had been supposed to report twice a (Universal) week, but via sub-space radio, not capsule. Mission for Powers and Mazzechazz: Go find out what was wrong and either report or take appropriate action. Coordinates were given. That was all.
THE SILENT colony on Origen VII proved easy enough to locate. Set in a valley at the base of a mountainous and rugged peninsula on the larger of the two northern continents, it could be picked up easily on a clear night by its blaze of light. No natural satellite circled the planet to give light and the glow of the settlement was very plain. Farover landed easily, flickering out of the black sky into a glare of flood lights at the edge of what quickly revealed itself as a brand-new, defensive perimeter.
Heavily armed men, their faces haggard with strain, had swarmed around the ship as soon as it touched down. On emergence, the two Survey agents were caught up in a babbling crowd of excited people, all talking at once and were rushed almost off their feet to the office of the colony's governor, who was also its chief priest. Behind them as they went, Powers noticed guards digging still more trenches and laying wire around the S. and C. ship, enclosing it in the zone of defense.
When all others but the six members of the governor's council had been excluded and a guard had been posted outside, the two agents were finally able to ask questions. At least, so they thought.
Governor Halk Tahira, Presbyter of the Faith, was a man of late middle age and, if Powers were any judge, late middling experience and intelligence as well. He had been ready to explode for days and waited no longer.
"Do you know what's been going on here?" he had shouted rhetorically. "This place was cleared, pronounced safe by all official sources. Safe and harmless! The natives were listed as 'primitive, semi-nomadic indigenes, mammalian type, humanoid in structure and intelligence and friendly to outside contacts!' Friendly! Humanoid! That's what the official report said. "Do you know what we call this place? Wolf World!"
He had raved on. And since Powers and Mazzechazz were learning something from his attitude they made no move to interrupt. Finally he ran down, more from lack of wind than emotion and the real questions started. Allowing for hysteria and shock, what had been allowed to happen seemed bad enough, in all truth. Someone, and it looked like Survey and Contact, which bore the responsibility for the first reports, had goofed, but good.
The natives of Origen VII were semi-nomadic all right—carnivores at various levels of Stone Age culture, who ate nothing but meat unless literally starving. Cannibalism was usually a matter of ritual but perfectly acceptable if the meat were an enemy warrior of one's own tribal group. The planet provided a variety of environments, all of them swarming with large and small game. Most of the big game animals and their attendant predators were highly dangerous themselves. You worked for your dinner.
At first friendly enough, the natives had swiftly become contemptuous on discovering that the humans were omnivores whose basic diet was vegetable, who did not eat each other and failed to see hand-to-hand combat as the only hobby for an idle moment.
The natives were erect, bipedal and possessed five digits on what a zoologist would style manus and pes or hand and foot. Opposable thumbs were present.
In general appearance and at a fast look the natives resembled nothing so much as human-sized, black dogs walking upright, although they wore harnesses of leather and made sophisticated bone and stone tools. They lived in palisaded villages, used fire and were quite as intelligent as any member race of the Syrian Combine.
Their economy was strictly primitive, however, and since they actually occupied a very small share of the planet's total surface, the Combine Xenological Bureau had given permission for a colony, subject to the usual safeguards. These, were designed to protect the natives, be it stated, and not the colony.
The Grawm, as the race styled itself, was anything but united. Primitives almost never are and the natives of Origen VII were no exception.
THE PARTICULAR body of Grawm who called themselves Arghor, was a widespread confederacy of ten tribes, numbering perhaps a bit less than ten thousand warriors. As part of their hunting grounds they owned the peninsula on which the human settlement had been placed. Sparked by anti-vegetarian disgust and apparently urged on by a powerful (and hitherto unsuspected) shamanic priesthood, they had attacked the colony in broad daylight a month earlier. Despising humans and unaware of what advanced technology possessed in the way of weapons, the Arghor warriors had relied on head-on charges.
At tremendous cost to themselves, the "Wolves" had penetrated to the governor's quarters, destroying the subspace radio shack en route and by mere chance. When they were finally driven out, ninety-two men, twenty-two women and eleven children were dead or missing. Merely wounded in one degree or another were two hundred and ten more. An estimated, thousand Arghor, all fighting males, had been killed, mostly by close-range laser fire.
Now the colony had been placed under a loose but effective siege. At first individual Arghor warriors tried to kill Templar sentries at night, for both weapons and prestige. A jury-rigged radar network had quickly put a stop to this practice. It was now safe to move around the colony perimeter, but that was all. No hunting was possible except by airboat and the boats had to land and retrieve anything killed at once. The seven existing airboats could hardly feed the eight hundred people who remained in any case, and the emergency food stocks were already half gone. The speed-growth crops on which the colony had relied for the coming season were totally destroyed, the fields stamped flat by the enraged Arghor. All in all, Powers had reflected, a fairly messy situation.
He was not unaware of the psychic damage either. Peaceful people, who hated violence, had been forced to kill and had seen loved ones killed as well. This was as much a tragedy as the purely physical aspects of what had happened.
He had interrupted the fuming governor at this point in the story and inquired what that ecclesiastic official thought ought to be done.
"Ought to be done?" spluttered Presbyter Tahira angrily. Powers decided Tahira was a standard Mark I bureaucrat—overweight, confused and helpless in an emergency.
"We should get a battleship, Marines, heavy lasers, clear this end of the peninsula," the governor had suggested, his voice rising. Other members of the council had joined in. "Paralysis beams—null rays—grabbers—rover bombs—"
The babble had slowly died away as it became apparent that Powers and Mazzechazz were simply sitting, saying nothing,
waiting. Finally the room was silent again.
"NOW REVEREND Presbyter," Powers had said. "I'll tell you what we're actually going to do. You Templars, despite your religion and its training, all seem to have forgotten the Combine Charter. This is not your world, unless the intelligent inhabitants want you. This they no longer do. Whose fault your coming here was originally means nothing, understand me, nothing." He had stared coldly at the council and no eyes had met his. The Lyran had waited quietly. This was human business.
Powers then continued. "My partner and I will try to fix up this mess. Peaceably. You people can defend yourselves if attacked and that is absolutely all. I am assuming military command of this post. Does anyone oppose my authority for so doing?" Again there was silence. No one had wished to go on record as opposing Survey and Contact Field Agents. The reputation of the Corps insured that. In addition, the reminder of their religion and its teachings was making them deeply ashamed.
Reinstalling the governor as commandant, but this time as his deputy, Powers had filed a sub-space report of the situation to Prime base from the ship's radio. After ordering an emergency supply ship to leave at once and outlining his procedures and ideas as part of the report, Powers had not waited for an answer. The two S. and C. specialists had decided to head for the main Arghor encampment that very night and start the ball rolling. He and Mazzechazz had taken one of the colony's airboats and landed on the rim of the plateau about a mile from the blaze of fires marking the main Arghor camp.
Several canyons and gorges ran up from the end of the peninsula and the human settlement's location to the top of the massif. The Arghor apparently were based in a whole series of camps, in the mountains and sent their warriors down to attack the off-worlders in rotation.
At any rate, with less than one more Universal period left of the local, or four-day, night, Powers and Mazzechazz decided to try a sneak survey of the main enemy position. They landed, seemingly undetected. Only the cry of some distant bird thing and the hum of insects had broken the velvet darkness.
As the airboat touched down gently on the grass of the plateau a local mammoth-sized herbivore had burst, trumpeting loudly, out of an adjacent clump of brush and trampled heavily on and over the rear or engine part of the machine before galloping ponderously into the surrounding gloom. In no more than five seconds, before they had even left the airboat, the two agents had been robbed of ninety percent their mobility.
Badly shaken around and battered though they were, yet no real bodily injury had occurred. Feeling more or less safe, both from the distance to the enemy camp and the presence of the hulking brute which had smashed their aircraft, Powers and the Lyran had started to examine the damage to the little vessel. They later agreed that one of them should have manned the combat radar, but by the time the hide lassos had dropped neatly out of the black night and over their shoulders it had been a bit late to worry about it.
Caught by an alert Arghor hunting party, which had chanced to be downwind of their landing, Terran and Lyran had been dragged before the hastily summoned Assembly of Chiefs, stripped and sentenced, all in one operation. As dawn came up they had gone down into the canyon.
Chapter Two
THE TWO runners rounded a sharp bend in the gorge—and both abruptly halted, looking at each other as the topography sank in. This was the first sharp corner they had found since starting.
"Do you think we can do better?" hissed Mazzechazz. "We have perhaps five minutes before it comes."
"This looks quite possible," said Powers absently. In front of him were two hugh, steep-sided rocks, giant boulders over twenty feet high, which almost blocked the whole canyon. The last flash flood must have failed to move them farther down the canyon floor. A narrow gap between the rocks—only about six feet wide—constituted the sole pathway to whatever lay beyond.
Walking through this opening and pacing it, Powers estimated its depth at about ten feet and the distance to the corner they had just rounded at double that.
"This is okay," he said. "We can relax, I think, unless what's coming is a lot tougher than it has any right to be. Should be quite killable on a Terranorm planet though."
"It comes now," said the Lyran and proceeded to crouch low at the downcanyon base of one of the great stones, the one to the right. His tail was coiled neatly about his ankles and his great eyes were covered by his long-fingered hands.
The man stepped out into the middle of the gap and waited. He finished very carefully removing the large stone, an oval green Cadmean fire eye, from the ring on his right third finger. As he looked upcanyon he hefted the stone in his right hand, keeping his thumb and index finger pressed on it. He could hear the rustling himself now—it was rapidly becoming louder and louder.
Powers poised for action.
Around the corner of the cliff appeared two immense whiplike antenna, a sickly blue in color. They were followed by a great, flat head surmounted by two monstrous pupilless eyes, also blue. From mighty mandibles at the front of the head drooled a foul-scented ichor as the creature paused to examine the puny-looking prey, which seemed to await it with such confidence. Six great, jointed legs, tipped with spiked claws, and then an armored, ten-foot body slowly followed the awful head around the corner. Powers and the beast were now no more than fifteen feet apart.
"Down!" shouted the Terran and hurled the three-quarter inch stone square, flat and low, at the nightmare head. Even as he released the tiny trigger pressed down underneath the stone, he was diving to the left for the shelter of the other great rock. He fell prone—face ground into the sand—behind it as the tiny Osmium wrecker bomb went into its nuclear cycle, exactly on target. The huge boulder actually shifted in its bed next to him and a blast of superheated air came over its top and around the sides. Powers, his eyes tightly shut, hugged the sand as the terrific heat of the almost soundless explosion eddied around his body and the sand swirled over his naked back and shoulders. His eardrums ached from the pressure of the blast.
"Get up, Bill," said Mazzechazz. "It worked."
POWERS scrambled to his feet, somewhat embarrassed by the fact that he had not yet realized it was safe to do so. He found the big Lyran standing in the gap between the two mammoth stones. The sand on which his clawed feet rested was now covered by a thin film of fused, black glass, a mute tribute to the tiny bomb's intense heat.
The two looked back up canyon but except for a scorched area,, fifty feet across, where sand and rock had flowed together, there was nothing to be seen.
"Superscorp seems to have bought it," acknowledged Powers. There was not a speck of matter to show that the giant arthropod had ever existed, so savage had been the instant furnace created by the nuclear Osmium.
"That's the second time that ring has saved my life," said Powers, turning away. "Give me a swallow of the water and let's go. If my bearings are right, we should make the base camp in three more hours, provided the Wolves don't pick us off first."
"They probably have the camp ringed by scouts," said Mazzechazz, passing over the canteen. "We know how good they are. Why not signal, use smoke or something and call down one of the three big airboats they have left?"
"The Arghor could reach us a lot quicker, I suspect."
They both glanced up at the rims of the gorge, far above against the white sky, but no sign of life or movement could be seen there. Some winged creatures circled higher still, probably the local analog of vultures. The oppressive heat of Origen, the great, blue sun, still lay all around them.
The man drank some lukewarm water and considered, while the Lyran waited. Of the two, Mazzechazz was the profounder thinker, the philosopher-logician, the chess player. He was also the memory bank, a living library of history and technology, spanning many races and worlds besides his own. But in a situation calling for lightning action, reflex moves and brutal cunning Homo sapiens had still not met a peer in the galaxy. Powers was the decision maker here by mutual consent. Just as he had cold-bloodedly risked annihilation for year
s by wearing a long-outlawed nuke ringstone, so he now ran the combat situation on a moment-to-moment basis.
In this case his decision stayed fixed. "We have a better chance trying it on foot," he decided aloud. "They won't be expecting us and I'm pretty sure the whole tribe back at the main camp thinks we're dead. We got caught good when the airboat was stomped—but I'm damned if I think any primitive can beat us at scouting when we really work at it."
Without another word they set off down the canyon again. They now possessed no weapon at all, save for their wits, but the prospect of meeting another ravening life form daunted neither of them. They were trained to do all they could and not worry about what could not be helped. Worrying, as opposed to forethought, clouded the mind. A clouded mind could mean bad reaction time and that got you killed. So, at a trot calculated to save energy, the two agents loped along, looking for the next obstacle.
TEN UNIVERSAL hours later Powers was as tired as he had ever been in his sometimes very active life. He and his partner were uncomfortably ensconced in a giant tree, about a half-mile from the fortified outer zone of the Templar settlement. To all appearances, as far as their getting to home base safely went, they might as well have been on the other side of the planet.
They had emerged earlier from the mouth of the canyon to find themselves in more or less dense forest, although moving in the right direction for ultimate safety. Realizing that they probably stood a good chance of being slaughtered on the ground by native predators, if not by the Arghor, they had taken to the towering trees and moved more or less easily along through them toward the base. Their alien odor probably helped keep what animals they saw at a distance.
The COMPLEAT Collected Short SFF Stories Page 11