The Women-Stealers of Thrayx Part 6

She felt the burn of rising color in her cheeks and turned quickly away from him.

"You don't get it yet, do you d.u.c.h.ess?" his heavy voice was saying behind her. "It's never occurred to you that there are other places to be beside with your own flock; that there are other men among whom to seek your fortune if the ones you were born among didn't offer the opportunities you expected. What are we among the stars at all for if it's not to find our destinies anywhere we think they might lie?

What's this Big Freedom for, if not to use to some kind of advantage?

And me, I'm sick of being a Warrant under worn out s.p.a.ce-neurotics like Mason! And I don't want to end up being one, either!"

Judith held her lips tight against the thing that surged hotly inside her. There would have to be a way to stop this man. And if there weren't--How the pampered friends whom she'd left so proudly to choose this calling would laugh at her, would say "_that was what the hot-headed little rebel deserved ... she had it coming if she couldn't act like a lady_." And they _were_ wrong!

But this man was hideously twisting all the things she had thought were good and right, worth hoping and striving for. All the priceless things that had stood for more than the soft, idle and pointlessly shallow existence to which she'd been born.

"But I guess you wouldn't get it," Cain was saying. "Born with a silver shovel in your mouth, you don't have to worry about sweating out your pile! Quit any time and there it all is after your little adventure, still waiting for you to come home to! Maybe they'll even want you to write a book! But me--my father wasn't a lucky g-prospector."

A proximity alarm clanged, and Cain quickly turned his attention to the control banks. He jacked out the auto control and took over manually. And within seconds the pursuit was hovering over the great whale-like back of the Thrayxite craft, and then was drawn slowly to it as its powerful magnetics reached out, ensnared it. Then Cain cut the pursuit's drive, and they both waited.

The airlock opened, and the two women stepped through. There were weapons in their hands.

"I want to see your commander," Cain barked.

"I am the commander of this complement," the taller of the two said in an almost unaccented English. "You will consider yourselves my captives. Daleb...."

"What? Not all _women_." There was a curious look on Cain's face; thoughts were racing behind the thin blades of his eyes.

"You are prisoners of the matriarchy of Thrayx," the officer called Daleb said. "If you do not resist, you shall be unharmed."

"All right, come off that alien-meets-alien stuff," Cain said as though the two briefly-uniformed women before him held toys rather than weapons in their hands. "I didn't just tag after you at a billion times the speed of light to get thrown into one of your dungeons! I've got some information I think you can use. And--" and the curious look was again on his face, "--there are some--shall we say--services, I think I can profitably perform for you."

"Profitably, Earthman? Profitable to whom?"

"To both of us. To me--that's why I'm here--and to you."

Judith's face was white. Perhaps this was some clever trick of Cain's.

She could have been wrong.

"Tell me this information you have, Earthman."

"Let's d.i.c.ker about price, first, Goldylocks!" He stood there, confident, defiant, great muscles bunched beneath the fabric of his tunic.

"You, Earthman, are hardly in bargaining position!" Only the woman's mouth moved; her eyes bored straight into Cain's like fine diamond drills.

"Chuck me," Cain said with a grin, "and you chuck the best chance you've ever had to take your Ihelian friends to the cleaners. What information I have concerning Ihelian plans is one thing." Judith caught her breath. She knew Cain was lying now. Even Lance had learned little of the Ihelian strategy, above Kriijorl's attempt to enlist Earthwomen for Ihelian breeding colonies. It was all, she realized suddenly, a colossal bluff, from which Cain planned to play his cards as he went along! And now he had found a wedge of some sort, some new bargaining point. There was still that curious look on his face, that careless grin at his lips. "But what service I can render you," he was continuing, "is quite another! Ladies, how good are your teleprobe gadgets against an Ihelian screen? A big blank, aren't they? But I still think you'd give those cute shirts of yours to find out what's going on inside the thick skulls of our Ihelian friends."

A puzzled look flickered across the Thrayxite commander's face, yet she remained immobile, and her weapon held steady.

"First of all, bright eyes," Cain said swiftly, "may you be the first to know that they're all men! _All men_, get it?" There was a soft gasp from Daleb, and the commander's eyes flickered, widened almost imperceptibly. "And better yet, I'm a pal of Kriijorl, their commander who picked us up just inside the Rim that time you followed us into Earth. So think it over. It ought to be worth a fancy little pile to you, ladies, since women agents would be kind of conspicuous in an all-male civilization!"

"You expect us to believe this fantasy? Do you expect us to accept your proposal on the basis of nothing more than words? And the technique you describe. It has never been used, never even considered as a legitimate method of battle!"

Cain laughed easily. "Then maybe you better consider it if you want to come out on top! And as to the rest of it, if I was part of some counter-plot against you do you think I'd've gone to the trouble of bringing along some security?" And Judith felt something freeze inside her as he threw a careless glance in her direction. "There she is--Sergeant Judith Kent. Your hostage for this little operation! If I misbehave, she should make a pretty good bargaining point with Ihelos.

From all I gather, they've got Earth sore enough at them as it is!"

There was an instant's silence, and then the commander said, "You have not proven your statement that our enemy is a male enemy."

"What do you think they wanted women for on Earth after you blasted that planetoid of theirs? A quilting party or something? Add it up."

The quiet in the small control bubble was electric. Judith watched the Thrayxites' faces as they weighed the incredible thing that Cain had said.

"I haven't got all eternity!" Cain snapped. "You think you can afford not to believe me?"

"Very well. Our Book has never mentioned this technique of spying, and therefore there can be no rule against it. As for the rest--that could be immaterial. You could be of value to us. Outline your plan."

"That's better, girls. Only take it just a little slower. We both know what we are, but let's haggle for awhile about the price, shall we?"

V

Judith shivered, partly from an uncontrollable terror and partly from the pre-dawn dampness creeping from the thick jungle surrounding the small clearing which held one of the breeder planetoid's many secluded colonies. The camp and the tangled growth which bounded it was her prison; a place in which there was freedom, yet where none were free.

To walk or to run or to hide--but where? And so it was with the rest--the hard-muscled, obviously drug-clouded males who had never known any other world than this; who never questioned from whence came the periodic groups of Thrayxite women for them to fertilize; who only glared dully at her, dimly understanding that she was to be, although captive here, left to herself and unmolested. Yet despite her status as hostage and Earthwoman, she was afraid.

The brute of a camp leader, Bruhlla.... Not drugged like the rest.

There was more to his sidelong glances than curiosity and vague resentment. Too often, she could sense his eyes upon her. And she wondered at the increasing frequency of his visits to the camp's well guarded mentacom installation.

She had lost count of night and days under the white sun of Thrayx and its ringed host. There had been two, perhaps, or three. Three days in which Roger Cain had been doing what? Was he with Kriijorl and Lance posing as their friend, their fellow captive, listening to their plans against their Thrayxite captors ... remembering? Or would they be freed, if indeed they still lived, in order that Cain could, with them, learn even more of Ihelian stratagems on a far greater scale?

And the Earth girls--she had heard the cries of some, the desperate curses of others.

Bruhlla, ent.i.tled to use of the mentacom for daily contact reports with Thrayx as he was, was the only other alien being on the planetoid who could converse with her. He had lost little time in probing her to learn her tongue. And he had already hinted at the fate of the women from her planet. In other camps on the planetoid, held in small isolated groups, unmolested, Bruhlla had said. But prisoners, as was she.

Somehow, the Ihelians would have to know.

For there was no Earth to which to turn now.

The shiver again shook her slender body, and her tattered uniform did little to shield her from the damp cold.

"Still one apart from the rest of us, are you?" The growl of Bruhlla's voice behind her startled her, and she turned quickly to face the loose grimace of derision on his thick lips.

"I am to be left to myself," she said with what a.s.surance she could muster. "That is your order."

"I know my order, little one! No need to tell Bruhlla his orders! But perhaps you will grow colder; perhaps you will grow hungry."

"You couldn't--"

"I have no order about feeding you, little one!"

Somehow she found the strength to voice her defiance. For she could still think. And thought, Lance had once told her, was the ultimate strength....

"You lie! There was such an order! But if you wish to bring the wrath of your masters down upon your ugly head." She watched his unkempt face, fanned the sudden puzzlement she saw growing in his red, s.a.d.i.s.tic eyes. If his intelligence were blurred enough by the self-made drug of his l.u.s.t. "I myself heard such an order; and if you can prove me mistaken you may do with me what you will!" _G.o.d, would he stop to realize that she understood not a word of the Thrayxite tongue?_

"Quickly proven, my little one! Quickly enough proven! And then if what you say is untrue...." He left the sentence mercifully unfinished, and turned toward the st.u.r.dily-built cubicle that housed the colony's mentacom.