It wasn’t a fit life, but it was one he’d have to lead. Kinsolving settled down to listen to his mentor expound on how they would approach this new crime and the rewards to be reaped.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Barton Kinsolving did not fit into the ways of the prison planet. Life proved a cheap commodity when no one had anything more to look forward to than a lifetime of wandering the barren planet’s face. But Kinsolving refused to kill for sport, unlike his Sussonssan companion. The toad-like being thrilled to murder, whether it was dropping a heavy rock on another’s head or running him down and using those powerful hind legs to pummel him to death.
“You lack the proper attitude, Kinsolving,” the toad creature told him one day after they had been together for almost two planetary months. Kinsolving had learned what he could do and wouldn’t do, and had managed to survive. But as much as the Sussonssan called them a team, Kinsolving knew that it wasn’t true.
If the toad being needed something Kinsolving had and the human refused to hand it over, those powerful hind legs would kick out and the sharp talons on the toes would slice open Kinsolving’s belly. And the Sussonssan would feel not one whit of remorse.
Kinsolving knew why the creatures had been placed on this world even though he had never asked. Without any hint of conscience, the being would prove too much a menace for any civilized society. The only question that burned inside Kinsolving, and the one he didn’t dare ask, concerned the other aliens. If this Sussonssan maintained telepathic contact, were the others also as lacking in conscience? And what of their entire race?
The prisoners Kinsolving encountered in his wanderings tended to be of similar bent. It almost brought him to tears thinking that the Lorr considered him a worthy addition to this planet’s prison population.
“There are ways of getting what you want without killing,” Kinsolving told the toad creature. “I’m not above thievery to get what we need. I may not like it, but I’ll do it.”
He snorted and shivered a little in the cold. Theft had kept him alive for the first month. He had desperately needed clothing against the frigid nights. Without money or anything to trade, theft had been his only recourse. Occasional lean-tos constituted cities on this planet, and no one trusted another enough to “hire” help. Mostly, the prisoners lived nomadic existences, drifting from one place to another, any spot the equal of the last — or the next.
“But we kill for pleasure. Do you not get a thrill feeling your enemy dying on your talons?” The Sussonssan canted its head to one side and peered at Kinsolving. “Your talons are feeble weapons. Perhaps this explains your lack of enjoyment.”
“On my planet argument takes the place of killing.
“How dull.”
“Not really,” said Kinsolving. “If you beat an opponent in an argument, you’re likely to be able to do it again. We can win repeatedly. You can only kill an opponent once.”
“True,” mused the toad creature. “But your kind tends to confuse quantity and quality. It must be a wan reward to duel with words. A thousand victories cannot equal one rimmed with blood.”
“Are all your people like you?”
“All on this planet,” the Sussonssan answered without hesitation.
Kinsolving let the matter drop. They were engaged in trying to survive — again. The toad being had convinced him that they both needed knives before making the trek across the dusty plains and to the foothills of mountains Kinsolving saw struggling up into the cloud layer. Kinsolving hoped to scale those peaks, get above the omnipresent clouds and glimpse the stars. He had no reason to think he could figure out the planet’s location, but he had to try.
Kinsolving had to admit that seeing the night’s star field might not even help. He was no navigator or astronomer. The constellation might be entirely twisted from those he had grown up with as a youth on Earth. There had been few visible, thanks to the light pollution from the cities, but he had studied books. When he had been stationed on Deepdig he often lay alone outside his house to simply gaze at the stars. Those patterns had been slightly altered from the ones he’d learned, but not much. Deepdig was only a hundred light years from home.
But this prison world? Kinsolving had no way of knowing if what he’d see would mean anything to him. Trying, however, gave some imitation of purpose to his existence.
“This one’s weapons make for good use,” the Sussonssan said in its guttural tone. “See the knife on display? Such a fine working of a chain link into a double-edged blade.”
“On display? You mean stuck in his belt?”
“Same thing.”
Kinsolving had to admit that their intended victim did fine work. A humanoid lacking hair and a nose, the greenish-skinned being went about his work with an air of indifference that Kinsolving had come to associate with all those who had been on-planet longer than a few years. What mattered when escape was impossible, when even striking out at your captors proved beyond your abilities?
Kinsolving had been on this world only two months and this lethargy threatened to possess him.
“Now. We go. You wait and watch. There is much we do not like about this theft,” the Sussonssan said.
“What? I don’t see anything wrong.” Kinsolving spoke to thin air. The toad creature hopped away, tiny hands waving in the air. The humanoid looked up, his tiny eyes showing no true intelligence; the Sussonssan struck. Heavily muscled legs powered its talons forward to rip and rake.
But the toad being had been right in its caution. The humanoid moved with a speed that belied its bulky frame. The taloned foot missed its target by centimeters. By the time the Sussonssan had recovered for another attack, the humanoid had drawn the knife they coveted and held it in a three-fingered, huge-thumbed hand. The humanoid’s muscles bulged and he began sucking in noisy gusts of air, as if he had already run a long race. The hairless dome of the humanoid’s head began to sprout thick, throbbing veins as the greenish pallor vanished and was replaced by a bright pink as the oxygen level required for fighting rose within the humanoid’s body.
Kinsolving hesitated, then launched into the attack. Between the two of them, they could steal the humanoid’s knife no matter how strong or agile the pinkly glowing being proved. Kinsolving didn’t like this, but resources were scarce. Without a weapon on the journey to the mountains, Kinsolving wasn’t sure he could make it. The toad creature had shown him several small predators that abounded on the plains. Without more than a sharpened stick, Kinsolving had no chance against their ripping fangs.
He came in low, thinking to tackle the humanoid. Inhuman joints thwarted him. Kinsolving grabbed and found the humanoid lifting one foot and rotating ninety degrees on the planted leg. Like the Lorr, this humanoid had enhanced mobility because of differently hinged knees. Kinsolving rolled free and stared. He couldn’t tell for certain, but it seemed that the alien had a universal joint instead of a more human knee. The humanoid swung about, knife flashing in search of a berth in Kinsolving’s back. Only the Sussonssan’s quicker reflexes saved Kinsolving. The powerful toad leg swept out and countered the slash.
Blood spurted and momentarily blinded Kinsolving. He hastily wiped it from his eyes, worrying that it was his own. It wasn’t. By the time his vision cleared, he saw two bodies on the ground. The man dropped to examine the toad creature.
The humanoid’s knife had severed a throat artery, killing almost instantly. But one taloned foot had raked along the humanoid’s leg and up into the belly. Kinsolving thought a renal artery had been cut. He held down his rising gorge at the sight of so much blood. A shaky hand picked up the fallen knife.
Two lives had been snuffed out for this.
“The stars had better be there,” he said softly. “Dammit, they’d better be!”
Crude knife clutched in his hand, Kinsolving rose and stared at the two corpses. The Sussonssan’s fellow beings would know of its death; telepathic contact might be traumatic, but they knew. Kinsolving looked around for a soft spot in the g
round to dig two graves and found only thin, rocky soil. The sound of approaching animals convinced him that doing what he considered a decent thing wasn’t possible. The scavengers on this world were savage. A single man with only a knife stood little chance against a hungry pack.
Kinsolving abandoned the two to the pack of roving carrion eaters and ran as if his life depended on it — and it did. Seldom did the scavenger pack find enough to eat; they weren’t above stalking prey and worrying it to death.
Into the night Kinsolving ran until exhaustion overcame him. He found a rough-barked tree and crawled onto the lower limbs, finding the vertex of two branches where he could lean back and try to relax. The Sussonssan had chided him often about his affinity for trees. The toad creature had claimed it came from racial memory, that only inferior beasts evolved from the arboreal. Truly superior ones, such as itself, rose from the primordial slime.
“Is it better to be a fallen angel or a devil risen from the muck?” Kinsolving mused. Was there any difference if both ended up in the same place, enduring the same conditions? He had no answer for this or any other problem plaguing him. The distant sound of the noisily dining scavenger pack in his ears, he eventually fell into a light, troubled sleep.
Barton Kinsolving kept away from other prisoners during the next month as he hiked toward the mountain range. The Sussonssan hadn’t been a friend, but it had been someone to talk with, to keep from going crazy with loneliness and frustration. The passage of time helped Kinsolving come to grips with the isolation. He even came to prefer it. The others on this world were deadly criminals, locked away here and forgotten so that they would be unable to perpetrate future crimes on their societies. Kinsolving had given up hoping to find others like himself, others wrongly accused and sentenced. Trusting no one else — daring to trust no one else — had its drawbacks, but it also had benefits.
The meager food he gleaned from the soil kept him alive, adequately if not well. For two it would have been starvation or worse. Always sleeping with one eye open to trouble from a travelling companion didn’t appeal to him.
Kinsolving stopped and cocked his head to one side, listening. The scavenger packs he had to avoid. He wasn’t strong or quick enough to fight them. The smaller predators he might deal with using the stolen knife that had cost the toad creature his life.
“Meat,” he said aloud, his mouth watering at the thought. “The predators taste like shit but are better than nothing.” He had found little except for tubers to be roasted and swallowed as quickly as possible. But meat? Was that the meaning of the sound he heard?
Kinsolving dropped to his knee and allowed the high grass to partially hide him. Slowly scanning a full three-hundred-sixty degrees, he frowned. The sound grew louder, and he couldn’t identify it. When it rose to a shrill whine, he clamped hands over ears in a vain attempt to block it out.
Seconds after Kinsolving thought the sound would kill him, he saw the lead gray clouds part and a starship come through, standing upright on its emergency rockets. Whoever was inside had to have incredible trouble to land a spacegoing vessel on a planet. Kinsolving knew that the emergency rockets were intended for a simple sit-down and nothing more. Any repairs that needed doing would have to be to the main engines or the ship would be permanently grounded.
Then the lethargy that had fallen on him evaporated and the fact hit him that escape lay at hand.
Even before the rockets had cut off and the high-pitched whine had died, Kinsolving was up and running for the ship. He recognized the lines, even from a kilometer away. He ran toward the most modern and powerful Earth-built speedster available for private use. Why they had landed on the prison world didn’t matter to him. That they had and were probably human did.
He could talk his way off this world! And if that failed, Kinsolving’s strong fingers brushed lightly over the knife slid through his belt. That knife had been responsible for two intelligent beings’ deaths. Another wouldn’t matter.
Not if it meant his freedom!
He reached the scorched area around the ship’s base and slowed, cautiously picking his way through burning clumps of grass. A smooth whirring noise drew his attention upward to the emergency hatch. Someone stood there, waving to him.
“Hello!” he called. “Can you lower a line to let me into the ship?”
“There are natives!” came a delightful squeal. “I don’t even know where I crashed. Oh, this is wonderful!”
“A line,” he pleaded. “Or do you have a small elevator?”
“You seem very human. I didn’t think there’d be many aliens who looked exactly like me.” A giggle. “Well, you’re not exactly like me. You’re a man.”
Kinsolving walked back a few paces and peered up at the hatch, squinting into the sunlight reflecting off the highly polished silver hull. “I’m from Earth.”
“What a coincidence. So am I,” came the voice. For the first time, Kinsolving saw more than the waving hand. A woman leaned far out and peered down at him. He frowned. The distance obscured her features but something appeared wrong. The general shape was right, but the details seemed … different. Kinsolving hadn’t been away from human society long enough to forget what a woman looked like.
But it didn’t matter to him if this one had a highly contagious case of Buck-Babb’s sarcoma. She was human; she was a way off this prison world.
“I need to get into your ship!” he called again. “Please!”
“Can you fix shift engines?” she yelled. “The main drive went out. I have no idea how to even begin fixing them.”
“Yes, yes, I know how,” Kinsolving lied. His hopes for escape began to fade. Before he could fix the engines, the alien keepers in orbit would have homed in on the grounded ship. Would they lob an atomic and convert the entire area into radiant energy or would they simply laser the ship to ensure that it didn’t lift again?
Kinsolving had passed the point of mere survival. If he couldn’t escape, he’d prefer total destruction.
“Here’s a line. Can you use it?” A slender loading crane poked out from the hatch, a line attached. It lowered — too slowly for Kinsolving’s liking. But it finally reached him. He tied a double bowline in the end and slipped his arms through. He motioned to the woman to get him back to the ship’s hatch.
The trip up the side of the speedster dragged on for an eternity. Kinsolving rotated slowly in his sling, getting first a look at the barren plains he had crossed and then the ship’s hull. He preferred the stargoing ship to the prairie. One held hope, the other only death and evil memories.
“Hello,” the woman said when he reached the hatch. She reached out a dainty hand and helped him swing into the air lock. “My, aren’t you the barbarian? Are you some primitive warrior stalking his prey on this world?” She giggled.
Kinsolving stood and stared for a moment. The woman was beautiful, short blond hair intricately coiffured with platinum wire and pearls. But Kinsolving had seen more gorgeous women in his time; that wasn't the cause of his speechlessness. She smiled and her cheeks changed from a natural hue to a pastel green. A broader smile when she saw his reaction caused swirling colors to flow in a kaleidoscope over her face, turning her into something both alluring and frightening.
“Do you like the dye job? I got it done just before I left Earth.”
“Dye job? I don’t … ”
“It’s all the rage. The dyes are injected just below the skin. Oh, the needles hurt a teeny bit, but not much. As my mood changes, so does the color.”
“And physical movement changes the pattern,” Kinsolving guessed. The woman’s pout altered both color and design.
“I wanted to tell you that, but you already knew.”
“Sorry,” Kinsolving said, confused. “I’m — ” He paused for an instant. Should he lie or should he give his real name. Kinsolving decided that his infamy wouldn’t have reached Earth. He had been totally forgotten by now. He gave his real name.
“Charmed,” she said, curtsying.
“And I’m Lark Versalles. This is my ship. Do you like it?” The blonde struck a pose so that she turned and showed her profile to him. What had at first seemed a chaste blouse for a woman so daring in her facial makeup now changed. The sunlight struck the material and turned parts transparent.
“Do you like it?” she asked. “A little something I found on one of those alien planets. At one of their strange market places. I had the cloth made into a blouse. I have no idea what they intended it for. But the effect is stunning, don’t you agree?”
Her breasts appeared bare, then covered, then partially hidden. Kinsolving had to agree.
“You seem confused,” Lark Versalles said. “Are you ill?”
“Ill?” Kinsolving fought to regain his wits. He had expected only a staid captain and interminable argument about leaving the planet. He hadn’t believed anyone like Lark could exist starside of Earth’s upper classes.
“Sick. Possessed of demons. I don’t know. I can see if the medibot is working. I doubt it. Oh, nothing on this horrid ship works for me. Daddy bought it for me and said it was the latest in self-repairing and all that, but it just doesn’t work.”
“Work,” Kinsolving said. His plight came rushing back. They had to lift — soon. If they didn’t, he would be stranded forever on the prison world. “What went wrong? Stardrives don’t break down.”
“Well, Mr. Kinsolving, this one did.” Lark smiled almost shyly and moved closer, her hand resting lightly on his arm. “May I call you Barton?”
“Of course. But — ”
“I’ve never been this close to a criminal before. I mean, a dangerous one. Daddy is hardly what you’d call honest. And no one who works for him is, either. But they’re not dangerous, unless you have a company they want. Then they can be vicious with mergers and sinking fund debentures and all that.”
“How do you know I’m a convict?” he asked.
“Those dreadful aliens in orbit sent a warning. You are a criminal, aren’t you?”
The Stellar Death Plan (Masters of Space Book 1) Page 10