Lord of Thunder Part 12

The other smiled, the stretch of facial muscles pulling the pattern lines on his cheeks into grotesque squares and angles.

"Sta.s.s-the nature boys can't fight sta.s.s!" His laugh was almost a giggle. Then he was entirely sober. "You thought you could trick me," he said dispa.s.sionately. "I know the war's over; I know you aren't here under orders. No-you're trying to orbit in on my landing pattern! I've life-life itself-right here." He loosed his hold on the orb with one hand and flung palm out in a florid gesture. "Everything a tech could want! And it's mine-to have forever." He giggled again, and that sound following the coolness of his words was an erratic break to frighten a man who had witnessed many crack-ups at Rehab.

"Forever!" Dean repeated. "That's it-why you're trying to planet in! You want it, too! Live forever with every power in your hand when you reach for it." The fingers of his outheld hand curled up to form a cup. "Only a tech got here first, and the tech knows what to do and how to do it. You're not the first to try to take over-but you're easy. I know just how to deal with your kind." He fingered the sphere, and Hosteen choked as the sta.s.s field squeezed in upon his throat.

"I could crush you flat, nature boy, just as flat as an insect under a boot sole. Only-that would be a stupid waste. My friends below-they like amus.e.m.e.nt. They'll have you to play with."

The stranger touched a circlet fitting in a tight band about his throat. Then he called aloud, and his shout was the twittering whistle of a Norbie.

Hosteen watched the tunnel entrance behind Dean. "Now!" He thought that order.

A flash of yellow out of the dark and the full force of Surra's weight struck true on Dean's shoulders. His whistle ended in a shriek as he fell. The sta.s.s sphere rolled out of his hand, but before the now free Hosteen could seize it, it hit against a rock and bowled over the rim of the ledge to vanish below.

"Do not kill!" Hosteen gave his command as man and cat rolled back and forth across the stone. He moved in on the melee, his limbs stiff, numb, almost as numb as his hand had been after his experience with the alien door lock.

Surra spat, squalled, broke her hold, pawing at her eyes. Dean, yammering still in the Norbie voice, made another throwing motion, and the cat retreated. He looked up at Hosteen, and his face was a devil's mask of open insane rage. With a last cry he headed for the tunnel as Hosteen tackled him. The Amerindian's cramped limbs brought him down too short-his fingers closed about a leg, but with a vicious kick Dean freed himself and vanished into the pa.s.sage, the pound of his boots sounding back as he ran.

Surra was still pawing at her eyes. Hosteen grasped a handful of loose hair and skin on her shoulders and pulled her to him. The Norbies Dean had summoned could not be far away. There was only one retreat from this ledge-back into the mountain after Dean. He hoped that some taboo would keep the natives from nosing after.

A head crowned with black horns rose into sight. The Norbie attacked in a scuttling rush, knife in hand. Then Hosteen was fighting for his life just within the pa.s.sage entrance. He forced heavy feet and hands into the tricks of unarmed combat that had been a part of his Commando training, rolling farther into the dark, his opponent following.

Pain scored a hot slash along Hosteen's side as the heart thrust the other had aimed missed. He pulled loose and brought down his hand on the native's neck just above the collar bone. As the Norbie fell back with a choking gasp, Hosteen pried the knife hilt out of his hand.

There was a whir in the air, and an arrow cut the frawn fabric of the torn shut at the Terran's shoulder. On his hands and knees, Hosteen scrambled back, hearing Surra's whining complaint as she went ahead. There was more than one archer taking aim now into the tunnel. He could see the arcs of their bows against the daylight. But the odd dark that blanketed the Sealed Cave workings was his protection. Keeping low, he escaped the arrows flying overhead, and none of the natives ventured in-he had been right about the taboo.

When he judged that a turn in the pa.s.sage cloaked him from feathered death, Hosteen paused, snapped on his torch, and called Surra to him. What Dean had done to the cat Hosteen did not know. Her eyes were watering and she was in distress, but Hosteen's simple tests confirmed the fact that her sight was not affected and that she was already beginning to recover.

But Surra's ire was fully aroused, and she was determined to trail Dean-which agreed with Hosteen's desire. He wanted to catch up with the renegade tech. And with a knife now in his belt sheath and a better understanding of the man he hunted, the odds were no longer all in the other's favor, though reason told the Terran that a length of metal, well wrought and deadly as it was, was no defense against the bag of tricks the tech might have ready.

The dune cat padded on with confidence. She knew where she was going. Only that did not last. In a stretch of tunnel where there was no break in the wall, Surra stopped short, then circled slowly about, sniffing at the flooring, before, completely baffled, she vented her disappointment in a squall such as she would give upon missing an easy kill.

Hosteen beamed the torch at the floor, more than half expecting to see one of the spiral and dot inlays there. But there was no such path here, no band of bulbs on the wall to open one of those weird other-dimension doors. This was simply another secret of the pa.s.sages that Dean knew-to the bafflement of his enemies.

Could the tech come and go from any part of the caverns at his will? Or were there "stations" from which one could make such journeys? Hosteen wished now that he had investigated more closely the place into which he had dropped when he had used Dean's door on the platform.

There was nothing to do now but wander through the pa.s.sages in hope of finding such a door or return to the surface, where he did not doubt he would find the Norbies waiting. How had Surra come into the mountain-by another tunnel?

The Terran squatted down and called the cat to him. With his hand on her head, he strove to have her recall her entrance into the pa.s.sages.

Those very attributes that made her so effectively a part of the team worked against him now. Surra had been thoroughly aroused by Dean's counter to her attack. She had put out of mind everything but her desire to run him down. And now she was interested only in that and not in what seemed to her to be meaningless inquiries about the pa.s.sages. The patience Hosteen had always used in dealing with the team held, in spite of his wish for action.

Dean-free in these burrows to use the knowledge of the installations. And Logan- When Hosteen thought of Logan, it was like the burn of a blaster ray across his flesh. The one small hope the Terran clung to was the tube on the board that had lighted. Even if Logan had not arrived in the big hall, he might have escaped the death of the Dry day and be wandering elsewhere in this maze.

"Baku-Gorgol." Since Surra would not respond to Hosteen's first questions, he tried a more oblique approach. And now her concentration on Dean was shaken.

"High-up." As always the answers were not clear. Human mind groped to find a better touch with feline.

"Up-where?" the Beast Master urged.

There was a moment of withdrawal. Was Surra refusing, as she could do upon occasion? Then the cat's head moved under Hosteen's hand, and her muzzle raised as if drawing from the air some message he could not hope to read.

"That one is gone for now-but we shall hunt him," Hosteen promised. "But to so hunt, the team is needed. Where is Baku?"

That had made the right impression. Too long they had been tied together; they both needed the security of that relationship.

Surra made no answer but pulled out of his touch and started down the pa.s.sage with some of the same determination she had displayed in the trailing of Dean.

No man could ever have traced his way through the labyrinth where Surra now played guide. They went from pa.s.sage to pa.s.sage, bypa.s.sed caves and chambers where evidence of the aliens was present in installations, fittings, and objects whose purpose Hosteen could not grasp in a glance or two and which interested Surra not at all. However, the cat appeared to know just where she was going and why.

Their way had led down and up again so many times that Hosteen was bewildered, though he came to believe that they were no longer under the same mountain. Finally, Surra cut out on one of the worked runnels where the walls were black coated and came into a cleft of bare, untooled rock. Here man had to take cat's path on his hands and knees.

There was a last narrow crevice through which Hosteen crawled to light, air, and the fresh scent of growing things-a small valley into which the Big Dry had not ventured any more than it did into that of the native village. Hosteen sat down wearily to look about.

Now that he had a chance to study the vegetation, he saw a difference. This was a green-green world-not yellow-green, nor red-green, nor brown-green-as the vegetation of Arzor was elsewhere. And where had he ever seen foliage such as that of a small bush a hand's distance away?

A thunderbolt swooped down on black wings from the sky! Baku settled on the ground and came toward the Beast Master, her wings half spread, uttering a series of piercing cries. And the warmth of her greeting was part of their belonging.

But when her clamor was echoed by a sharp whistle from the bushes, Hosteen tensed, his hand going to his knife. That Norbie signal had come to mean danger.

Surra stretched out in a patch of open sunlight, blinking her eyes, giving no alarm. As Hosteen got to his feet, Gorgol came into the open. The young Norbie showed some damage. A poultice of crushed leaves was tied in a netting of gra.s.s stems about his left forearm, and there was a purple bruise mottling that side of his face, swelling the flesh until he could see only through a slit of eye. The threads knotting his yoris-tooth breastplate together had broken, and a section was missing.

"Storm!" he signed, and then put out his hand, drawing finger tips lightly down the Terran's arm as if he needed the a.s.surance of touch to accept the other's appearance.

Baku had taken to the air, then settled down again on Hosteen's shoulder. And he braced himself under her weight as she dipped her head to put that beak, which could be such a lethal weapon, against his cheek in quick caress.

"Where are we?" Hosteen glanced at the mountain crests reared to the sky about the pocket of earth that held them. He did not recognize any of them, could not have told in which direction their tunnel wandering had brought them.

"In the mountains," Gorgol signed, an explanation that did not explain at all. "We ran far before the fires."

"We?"

Gorgol turned his head and pursed his lips for another whistle. For a moment Hosteen hoped Logan had found his way here too. But the man coming out of a screen of lacy fronds was a stranger.

Rags of green uniform still slung to a lath-thin body, a body displaying dark bruises such as Gorgol bore. Only it was a human body, and there were no horns, only a mop of brown hair on the head.

"So-Zolti was right," the stranger said in a voice that shook a little. "There was help here all along-we could have made it out-home."

Then he was on the ground as if his long legs had folded bonelessly under him, his face buried in his scratched and earth-streaked hands, his sharp shoulder blades shaking with harsh, tearing sobs he could not control.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

"Who is this one?" Hosteen asked Gorgol.

"I do not know, for he has not the finger talk," the native signed in return. "We came together on the mountain, and he led me on a path through the flames. I think that he is one who has run in fear for long and long, and yet still will fight-truly a warrior."

Hosteen signaled with a twitch of shoulder, and Baku took off for a perch on a nearby rock. The Terran sat down beside the stranger and laid his hand gently on the bowed back.

"Who are you, friend?" He used the Galactic basic of the Service, but he was not greatly surprised when broken words came in Terran.

"Najar, Mikki Najar, Reconnaissance scout-500th Landing force." Landing force."

His voice had steadied. Now he dropped his hands and turned his head to face Hosteen directly, a puzzled expression on his features as he continued to study the Amerindian.

"Hosteen Storm, Beast Master," Hosteen identified himself and then added, "The war is over, you know."

Najar nodded slowly. "I know. But this is a holdout planet, isn't it? That's why you're here-or is that wrong, too?"

"This is Arzor, a frontier settlement world. We had an Xik holdout pocket, yes, but cleaned it up months ago. And it was only one shipload of Xiks. Most of them blew themselves up when they tried to take off. I'm not here as a solider-this is my home now."

There were bitter lines about Najar's mouth. "Just some more of Dean's lies. You're Terran, aren't you?"

Hosteen nodded and then added, "Arzoran now. I've taken up land in the plans-"

"And this is a Confederacy settlement planet not an Xik world?"

"Yes."

"For how long?"

"Over two hundred Terran years anyway-second and third generations from First Ship families are holding lands now. You came in on the LB?"

"Yes." Najar's bitterness had reached his voice now. "Lafdale was a pilot, and he was a good one-got us down without smashing up. Then we walked out straight into a native attack. They didn't kill us-might have been better if they had-just herded us up the mountainside and put us in a cave. We lost Lafdale in an underground place full of water. He was pulled off a wharf there by something big-something we never really saw. Then"-Najar shook his head slowly from side to side-"it was a kind of nightmare. Roostave-he went missing; we never found him-that was in a cave full of broken walls. Dean kept urging us on. He was excited, said we were on to something big. And Zolti-he'd been a Hist-tech before the war-he said that this was a settled planet and we could find help if we could get back to the LB com. We never knew if signals we sent at landing had ever been picked up. But Dean talked him down, said he knew where we were-right in the territory where the Xik had holdouts all over-that the hostile att.i.tude of the natives proved we were in an Xik influence zone."

He paused and rubbed bis hand across his face. "The other two of us, Widders and I, we didn't know what to think. Dean and Zolti, they were the big brains. Both of them said we were in a place where there was something big from the old times. And Dean-we were all out of Rehab, you know." He glanced almost furtively at Hosteen.

"For all Terrans there was Rehab-afterwards," the Amerindian replied soberly.

"Well, Dean, he-somehow he didn't want to go back, back to the way he had had it before the war, I mean. He'd been pretty important in the Service, and he liked that. Maybe he was able to cover up in Rehab, but after we landed here, he was a different person, excited, alive. Then he just took over, ran us- He kept insisting it was our duty to learn all we could about this place, use it against the Xiks. And he swore Zolti was mistaken, that we had been off course of any settler planet when we dropped here.

"Then we found the place of the path." Again Najar stopped, and Hosteen thought he was trying to pick words to explain something he did not understand himself.

"You found this?" The Terran sketched with a finger tip in the dust the spiral and dot.

"Yes. You must have seen it too!"

"And followed it."

"Dean said it was a way out. I don't know how he knew that. He picked information out of the air-or so it seemed. One minute he'd be as puzzled as we were; then all at once he'd explain-and he'd be right! Funny though, he didn't want to try that path first. Zolti did-walked around and around-then he just wasn't there!

"Widders, he was out of his head a little by then. Kept saying over and over that things hid behind rocks to watch us. He threw stones into every shadow. When Zolti went like that, Widders started screaming. He ran around and around the coil, hit the center-and then was gone- "Dean took the same orbit. And I-well, I wasn't going to stay there alone. So I did it-ended up in a three cornered box."

"You saw the hall of the machines?" Hosteen asked.

"Yes. Dean was there. And he was crazy-wild, running up and down, patting them and talking to himself about how all this was the place he had been meant to find-that the voices in his head had told him and that now he held the whole world right in his hand. Listening to him was like being back in Rehab in the early days. I hid out and watched him. Then he ended up in a corner where there was a big hoop-got inside that and lay down on the floor, curled up as if he were asleep. There was a light and noise-I couldn't watch-something queer happened to your eyes when you tried to. So I went to hunt Widders and Zolti. Only, if they came that way, they were gone again. I didn't seem them-not then."

"But you did later?"

"Maybe-one. Only n.o.body could be sure-just bones that looked fresh." Najar's eyes closed, and Hosteen felt the shudder that shook his wasted body. "I didn't stay there to hunt. Somehow I found this valley outside-"

He looked around, grat.i.tude mirrored in his eyes.

"It was wonderful, after all those other places, to be out in the open with things-real things-growing, almost like home. And there was a way higher up to get out-down to where the natives were. I watched them. Then all at once more and more of them kept coming, and I guessed Dean was up to something. Thunder and lightning-not the normal kind-I tried to find out what was going on, mapped some of the ways in and out-"

"You didn't think of trying to contact Dean again?"

Najar's gaze dropped to his hands. "No-I didn't. You may think that's queer, Storm. But Dean, he'd been changing all the time since we landed here. And when I saw him so wild in that hall-well, I didn't want to have anything to do with him again. He was raving about being picked to rule a world-it was enough to make you think you were crazy, too. I didn't want any part of him."

Hosteen agreed. The man he had fronted at the tunnel mouth had been removed from human kind, unreachable unless a trained psycho-tech could find a channel to connect Dean again with the world.

"I'm pretty good at trailing"-Najar's ordinary flat tone now held a spark of pride-"being a Recon scout, and I got around so that the natives didn't suspect me. Of course, not many of them ever came far up the mountain, and when they did, they kept to paths. Then I saw a 'copter come over, and it was one of ours! That made Dean's story about an Xik world nonsense, and I thought maybe our boys had moved in and cleaned up.

"So I went down to signal it. There was a flash just after the 'copter set down, and that fire cut around the whole landing area. I couldn't get to it until afterwards-there was a dead man there, and all the rest burned up. And I'd been counting a lot on getting out-" Again he stared at his hands. "I was sick, straight through to my insides, sick enough to get at Dean. So I took to the mountain pa.s.sages, hoping to meet him. Got to the machine hall twice, only he was never there. You don't have any idea, Storm, about how big this digging really is-pa.s.sages running through the mountains and under them, all sorts of caverns and rooms. I've seen things-strictly unhealthy." Again shudders ran through him. "Sometimes I wondered if I weren't as crazy as Dean-else I wouldn't be seeing some of those things.

"But I never caught up with Dean-not until the night there was another fire along the mountain. And I saw this native here beating it ahead of the fire with a big cat and bird swooping along over them. Dean was watching them come upslope, and he was aiming a tube at them. I cut in and signaled the native into a gap, and the cat and bird came along. The gap led in here, then-"

"Then?" Hosteen asked.

"Then," Najar reiterated grimly, his features set, "one of those tame lightning bolts smashed down just as we were almost through it-sealed us in with a landslide and knocked us around some so we weren't much use for days afterwards. Lucky there's water in here and some fruit- The bird tried to get out, but the way it acted made you think there was some kind of lid up there over this whole place. Then one day the cat was gone, and we guessed she'd found a way out. We've been hunting for that ever since. Now you know it all-"

"Yes," Hosteen replied somewhat absently. One piece of Najar's story was enlightening-all of the survivors' party had left the spiral path in the valley at the same time, but apparently not all had landed at the same terminal in the big hall when that beyond-time-and-s.p.a.ce journey was completed. Logan-had Logan come out at some other point in the mountain maze? Hosteen turned upon Najar now with a sharpness born of renewed hope.

"There's a way out-do you think you could find your way back to the hall once you were in the tunnels again?"

"I don't know-I honestly don't know."

Hosteen signed to Gorgol across the castaway's hunched shoulders.

"There is no way across the heights?"

"We can look but we cannot go. Come and see for yourself," the Norbie responded.

They went on a rough scramble up the slope in which was the rock crevice of Surra's door. Then they walked a ledge, which ended in a vast pile of debris.

"The mountain fell-" Gorgol indicated the slip. "And from here one can look-"

Another tricky bit of climbing and they could indeed look-a prospect that was enough to leave one giddy. Down-down-a drop no length of rope on Arzor, Hosteen thought, could dangle to touch bottom. And beyond that crack in the earth, well within sight but as far removed from them as if it existed on another world, uplands sere and baked under that sun, which on their side was so abnormally gentle. A window on the outer world but no door.

Swiftly Hosteen signed the facts he had learned in his explorations and what Najar had told him. Gorgol watched the Terran's fingers with a growing expression of resolution.

"If Ukurti says that this is an ill thing," Gorgol's own hands replied, "then will Krotag and those who ride with Krotag listen, for Ukurti is one having wisdom, and always we have hearkened to bis drum. To say that one with a twisted mind is using things left by Those-who-have-Gone to make him great-that, too, one can believe. And this is true-if he is known to be one who steals from the past to give himself power, then will the tribes turn from him and listen no more to his drumming."

"But how may it be proved that he is such a one? And do we have the time?" Hosteen countered. "Already he drums raids for the plains. And once there is even one such foray, there will be war-war without truce between your people and mine. Always there have been those among my kind who have mistrusted yours."