Felicity had no moons, but there was more than enough light to see by from the stars. The frigid grayness of the plain stretched away on all sides, silent and motionless except for the dark, moving mass coming up behind him.
Slowly, Jason sank to the ground, and lay there, frozen, while the moropes and their riders came near, the ground shivering with the rumble of their feet. They passed, no more than two hundred meters from where he lay, and he pressed
flat and watched the dark, silent silhouettes until they vanished out of sight to the south.
“Looking for me?” he asked himself, standing and brushing at the furs. “Or are they heading for the ship?”
This latter seemed the most obvious answer. The compactness of the group and their hurried pace indicated some specific destination. And why not? He had been brought from the ship along this route, so it was perfectly understandable that others should follow it as well. He considered going over to attempt to follow their trail, but did not think too highly of the idea. There could be a good bit of traffic, back and forth towards the ship, and he did not feel like being caught on the barbarian highway by daylight.
When he stood up the wind had a chance to get at him, and a fit of shivering shook him with a giant hand. He was as rested as he was ever going to be, so he might as well press on before he froze to death. Slinging the drinking skin and picking up the club, he began walking again in the correct direction, parallelling the raiders’ track.
Twice more, during that seemingly endless night, groups of raiders hurried by in the same direction, while Jason concealed himself against chance observation. Each time it was harder to get up and go on, but the cold ground was a good persuader. By the time the sky began to lighten in the east the 1.5 gravity had exacted its toll. It took an effort of will for Jason to put one foot in front of the other. His guiding constellation was on the horizon, fading in the spreading grayness of dawn, and he went on until it was gone.
It was time to stop. Only by promising himself that he would not walk after sunrise had he managed to keep going at all. He could guide himself easily enough by the sun during the day, but it would be too dangerous. A moving figure could easily be seen at great distances on these plains. And, since the ship was not yet in sight, there was a good deal more walking to be done. He would have to get some rest if he were to go on, and this was only possible during the day.
He half fell, half crawled into the next gully. There was a small overhanging ledge, on the northern side where the sun would strike all day, just the burrow for him. The ledge would keep the wind off him and shield him from sight from above. Pulling his legs up to his chest he tried to ignore the cold of the ground that struck through his furs and insulated clothing. While he was wondering if, chilled, uncomfortable, exhausted, stifling, he could possibly fall asleep, he fell asleep.
Some sound, some presence bothered him, and he opened one eye and peered out from under the edge of the hat. Two gray-furred animals, with skinny tails and long teeth, were surveying him with wide eyes from the other side of the gully. He said boo and they vanished. The sun felt almost warm now and the ground had either warmed up or his side was too numb to feel anything. He went to sleep again.
The next time he awoke the sun had dropped behind the gully wall and he was in shadow. He knew just what a slab of meat in a frozen food locker felt like. Moving took almost more effort than he cared to make, and he was afraid that if he struck his hands or feet against anything they would crack off. There was still some achadh left in the skin and he swilled it down, which brought on an extended coughing fit. When it was over he felt weaker, though a little bit more alive.
Once again he took his direction from the setting sun, and when the stars came out started on his way. Walking was much worse than it had been the preceding night. Exertion, his wounds, the lack of food and the heightened gravity exacted their toll. Within an hour he was tottering like an octogenarian and knew that he could not go on like this. He dropped to the ground, panting with exhaustion, and pressed the release that dropped the medikit into his hand.
“I’ve been saving you for the last round. And, if I am not mistaken, I have just heard the final bell ringing.”
Cackling feebly at this insipid witticism he adjusted the control dial for stimulants, normal strength. He pressed the actuator to the inside of his wrist and felt the sharp bite of the needles striking home.
It worked. Within sixty seconds he became aware that his fatigue was beginning to slip away, masked behind a curtain of drugs. When he stood he experienced a certain numbness in his limbs, but no tiredness at all.
“Onward!” he shouted, marking his guiding constellation as he slipped the medikit back into its holder.
The night was neither long nor short, it just passed in a pleasant haze. Under the stress of the drugs his mind worked well and he tried not to think of the physical toll they were exacting. A number of war parties passed, all coming from the direction of the ship, and he hid each time even though most of them were far distant. He wondered if some battle had been fought and if they might have been beaten. Each time he changed his course slightly to come closer to their line of march, so that there would be no chance of his getting lost.
Soon after three in the morning Jason found himself stumbling, and at one point actually trying to walk along on his knees. A full turn of the medikit control set it for stimulants, emergency strength. The injections worked and he went on again at the same regular pace.
It was almost dawn when he began to smell the first traces of some burnt odor—that grew stronger with each pace forward. When the sky began to gray in the east the smell was sharp in his nostrils, and he wondered what significance it might have. Unlike the previous morning, he did not stop but pressed on. This was the last day that he had and he must reach the ship before the stimulants wore off. It could not be too far ahead. He would just have to stay alert and chance walking during the day. He was much smaller than the moropes and their riders and, given any luck at all, he should be able to spot them first.
When he walked into the blackened area of grass he would not believe it. A fire perhaps, accidentally ignited. It had burnt in an exact, circular pattern.
Only when he recognized the rusted and destroyed forms of the mining machinery did he dare admit the truth.
“I’m here. Back at the same spot. This is where we landed.”
He staggered crazily in a circle, looking at the massive emptiness stretching away on all sides.
“This is it!” he shouted. “This is where the ship was, we put the Pugnacious down right here next to the original landing site. Only the ship isn’t here. They’ve left—gone without me . . .”
Despair froze him and his arms dropped to his sides as he stood there, tottering, his strength gone.
The ship, his friends, they were gone as well.
From close by came the rumble of heavy, running feet.
Over the hill rushed five moropes, their riders shouting with predatory glee as they lowered their lances for the kill.
VI
With conditioned reflex Jason swung up his arm, his hand crooked and ready for the fun—before he remembered that he had been disarmed.
“Then we’ll do this the old-fashioned way,” he shouted, swinging the iron club in a whistling circle. The odds were well against him, but before he went down they would know that they had been in a fight.
They came in a tight knot, each man trying to be first to the kill, jostling one another and leaning far forward with outstretched lances. Jason stood ready, legs wide, waiting for the last possible instant before he moved. The shrieking riders were at the edge of the burnt area.
A muffled explosion was followed instantly by a great, rolling cloud of vapor that hid the attackers from sight. Jason lowered his club and stepped back as a tendril of the cloud twisted towards him. Only one morope made it through the gray vapor, carried along by its momentum, skidding and collapsing with a ground-shaking thud. Its rider ca
tapulted towards Jason and even managed to crawl a short distance farther, his jaw working with silent hatred, before he, too, collapsed.
When a wisp of the thinned-out gas reached Jason he sniffed, then moved quickly away. Narcogas, it worked instantly and thoroughly on any oxygen-breathing animal, producing paralysis and unconsciousness for about five hours. After which the victim recovered completely, with nothing worse than the nasty side effect of a skull-splitting headache.
What had happened? The ship had certainly gone, and there was no one else in sight. Fatigue was winning out over the effects of the stimulants and his thinking was getting muzzy. He heard the growing rumble for some seconds before he recognized the source of the sound. It was the rocket launch from the Pugnacious. Blinking up into the clear brightness of the morning sky he saw the high contrail stretching a white line across the sky towards him, growing larger with each passing second. The launch was first a black dot, then a growing shape, finally a flame-spouting cylinder that touched down less than a hundred meters away. The lock spun open and Meta dropped to the ground, even before the shock absorbers had damped the landing impact.
“Are you all right?” she called, running swiftly to him, the questing muzzle of her gun looking for enemies on all sides.
“Never felt better,” he said, leaning on the club so he would not fall down. “What kept you? I thought you had all pulled out and forgotten about me.”
“You know we wouldn’t do that.” She ran her hands over his arms, his back, while she talked. As though looking for broken bones—or simply reassuring herself of his presence. “We could not stop them from taking you away, although we tried. Some of them died. An attack was launched on the ship at the same time.”
Jason could well understand the shock of battle and dogged resistance behind her matter-of-fact words. It must have been brutal.
“Come to the launch,” she said, putting his arm across her shoulders so she could bear part of his weight. He did not protest. “They must have been concealed on all sides and reinforcements kept arriving. They are very good fighters and do not ask for quarter, noi do they expect it. Kerk soon realized that there would be no end to the battle and that we could not help you by staying there. If you did succeed in escaping—which he was sure you would if you were still alive—it would have been impossible for you to reach the ship. Therefore, under cover of counterattacks, we placed a number of spyeyes and microphones, as well as planting a good store of land mines and remote controlled gas bombs. After that we left, and the ship has set up a base somewhere in the northern mountains. I dropped off at the foothills with the launch and have been waiting ever since. I came as soon as I could. Here, into the cabin.”
“You timed it very well, thank you. I can do that myself.”
He couldn’t, but he wouldn’t admit it, and made believe that he had climbed the ladder instead of being boosted in by a powerful push from her feminine right arm.
Jason staggered over and dropped into the copilot’s acceleration couch while Meta sealed the lock. Once it was closed the tension drained from her body as her gun whined back into its power holster. She hurried to his side, kneeling so she could look into his face.
“Take this filthy thing off,” she said, hurling the fur cap to the floor. She ran her fingers through his hair and touched her fingertips lightly to the bruises and frostbite marks on his face. “I thought you were dead, Jason, really I did. f never thought I would see you again.”
“Did that bother you so much?” He was exhausted, his strength stretched well beyond the breaking point so that waves of blackness threatened to obscure his vision. He fought them away. He felt that, at this moment, he was closer to Meta than he had ever been before.
“It did, it bothered me. I don’t know why.” She kissed him suddenly, hard, forgetting the condition of his cracked and battered lips. He did not complain.
“Perhaps you are just used to having me around,” he said, far more casually than he felt.
“No, it is not that. I have had men around before.”
Oh, thanks, he thought.
“I have had two children. I am twenty-three years old. While piloting our ship I have been to many planets. I used to think that I knew all there was to know, but now I do not believe so. You have taught me many new things. When that man, Mikah Samon, kidnapped you I found out something I did not know about myself. I had to find you. These are very un-Pyrran things to feel, since we are taught to always think of the city first, never of other people. Now I am very mixed up. Am I wrong?”
“No,” he said, fighting back the threat of overwhelming darkness. “Quite the opposite.” He pressed his cracked and dirt-grimed fingers to the resilient warmth of her arm. “I think you are more right than any of the trigger-happy butchers in your tribe.”
“You must tell me. Why do I feel this way?”
He tried to smile, but it hurt his face.
“Do you know what marriage is, Meta?”
“I have heard of it. A social custom on some planets. I do not know what it is.”
An alarm buzzed angrily on the control board and she turned at once to it.
“You still don’t know, and maybe it’s better that way. Maybe I’ll never tell you.” He smiled, his chin touched his chest and he fell instantly asleep.
“There are more of them coming,” Meta said, switching off the alarm and glancing into the viewscreen. There was no answer. When she saw what had happened she quickly tightened the traps to secure him in the couch, then began the takeoff procedure. She neither noticed—nor cared—if any attackers were under the jets when she blasted skywards.
The pressure of deceleration woke Jason as they dropped down for the landing. “Thirsty,” he said, smacking his dry lips together. “And hungry enough to eat one of those moropes raw.”
“Teca is on the way,” she told him, flipping off the switches as the launch grounded.
“If he is the same kind of sawbones his mentor, Brucco, is, he’ll put me under for recovery therapy and keep me unconscious for a week. No can do.” He turned his head, slowly, to look as the inner port opened. Teca, a brisk and authoritative young man, whose enthusiasm for medicine far exceeded his knowledge, climbed in.
“No can do,” Jason repeated. “No recovery therapy. Glucose drip, vitamin injections, artificial kidney, whatever you wish as long as I’m conscious.”
“That’s what I like about Pyrrans,” Jason said, as they carried him from the launch on a stretcher, the glucose drip bottle swinging next to his head. “They let you go to hell in your own way.”
Meta saw to it that it took a good while for the leaders of the expedition to gather. Jason, whose eyes had closed in the middle of a grumbled complaint, spent the time in a deep, restorative sleep. He woke up when the hum of conversation began to fill the wardroom.
“Meeting will come to order,” he said in what was intended to be a firm, commanding voice. It came out as a cracked whisper. He turned to Teca. “Before the meeting begins I would like some syrup for my throat and a shot to wake me up. Can you take care of that?”
“Of course I can,” Teca said, opening his kit. “But I think it unwise due to the strain already imposed on your system.” However he did not let his thoughts interfere with the swift execution of his duties.
“That’s better,” Jason said as the drugs once more wiped away the barrier of fatigue. He would pay for this—but later. The work must be done now.
“I’ve found out the answers to some of our questions,” he told them. “Not all, but enough for a beginning. I know now that unless some profound changes are made we are not going to be able to establish a mining settlement. And when I say profound I mean it. We are going to have to change the complete mores, taboos and cultural motivations of these people before we can get our mine into operation.”
“Impossible,” Kerk said.
“Perhaps. But it is better than the only other alternative—which is genocide. As things stand now we would have to
kill every one of those barbarians before we could be assured of establishing a settlement in peace.”
A depressed silence followed this statement. The Pyrrans knew what this meant since they were themselves the unwilling genocidal victims of their home planet.
“We will not consider genocide,” Kerk said, and the others unconsciously nodded their heads. “But your other alternative sounds too unreasonable . . .”
“Does it? You might recall that we are all here now because the mores, taboos and cultural motivations of your people have recently been turned upside down. What’s good enough for you is good enough for them. We bore from within, utilizing those two ancient techniques known as ‘divide and rule’ and ‘if you can’t lick ’em—join ’em!’ ”
“It would help us,” Rhes said, “if you explained what the mores exactly are that we are supposed to be disrupting.”
“Didn’t I tell you yet?” Jason searched his memory and realized that he hadn’t. In spite of the drugs he was not thinking as clearly as he should. “Then let me explain. I have recently had an involuntary indoctrination into how the locals live. Nastily, is one word for it. They are broken up into tribes and clans, all of whom seem to be perpetually at war with the others. Occasionally two or more of the tribes will join together to wipe out one of the others whom they all agree needs wiping out. This is always done under the leadership of a warlord, someone smart enough to make an alliance and strong enough to keep it working.
“Temuchin is the name of the chief who organized the tribes to destroy the John Company expedition. He is so good at his job that, instead of breaking up the alliance when the threat was over, he kept it going and has even added to it. The anti-city taboo appears to be one of the strongest they have, so that it was easy to get recruits. He has kept his army busy ever since, consolidating more and more area under his control. When we arrived it gave his recruiting an even bigger boost. Temuchin is our main problem. We can get nowhere as long as he is leading the tribes. The first thing we must do is to take away his reason for this holy war, and we can do that easily enough by leaving.”
Deathworld: The Complete Saga Page 36