John Dalmas - Return to Fanglith

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2024-12-23 0 0 488.97KB 287 页 5.9玖币

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I scrambled out of the scrub onto the open, moonlit

crest and straightened, gasping for breath. Then I

heard hooves and turned. A rider had been coming

along the crest in my direction and, seeing me, had

spurred his horse into galloping attack. Ignoring his

lance, he drew his sword, leaning sideways to strike.

My hand seemed to move in slow motion - drawing my

stunner, raising it, pointing, thumbing. His horse

nose-dived, hitting the ground so heavily I swear I

could feel it through my feet. The Saracen hurtled

over its head in a billow of robe, moonlight flashing

on sword. I zapped him too, as he skidded. He stopped

not ten feet from me.

He was dead of course. On high intensity at such

close range, I'd really curdled his synapses. I took

his shield; I'd need one when daylight came.

PART ONE

ESCAPE FROM EVDASH

ONE

I wasn't actually undernourished, but we'd been on

tight rations, and more or less hungry, for

fifty-seven days. Which is something you can get used

to, but not what I think of as ideal. In space you

can't stop off at a friendly nearby restaurant or

food store. The nearest planets are likely to be

parsecs* away, and have a couple of Imperial frigates

flying sentry around them, with chase craft ready for

launch. We'd had more than enough of those.

Now Fanglith lay beautifully blue and white,

primitive and savage, only 40,000 miles off our

starboard window with, so far no sign of a picket

ship on our instruments. Which were good ones, as

you'd expect on a stolen naval patrol scout.

I wasn't sure what we could hope to accomplish there;

we had no plans. But just then, food was what I was

mainly interested in.

"I never expected to see this place again," I said,

more to myself than to Deneen or Bubba or Tarel. We'd

been lucky to get away alive the first time. But

sometimes fate-whatever "fate" is-hits you when

you're least prepared. And when it does, it can be

with three or four punches, one after another.

We'd been 646 parsecs* from Fanglith, on a wilderness

trek in the Snowy Range Preserve, when the first

punch hit. Bubba was the first to notice. At that

point, all that the rest of us noticed was Bubba. His

big wolf's head raised, alert, attention fixed,

looking off west.

*A parsec equals 3.258 light-years.

Deneen, my sister, put down the seared hind leg of a

burrow pig. "What is it, Bubba?" she asked.

He didn't make a sound; didn't look at her. His

attention was all on what he heard, or maybe what he

was receiving telepathically.

Then the rest of us began to hear it, too. It was so

low-pitched, it was as if we felt it before we heard

it-a deep bass thrumming, barely audible. Yet somehow

it seemed very loud-loud but far away. Uncle Piet and

Bubba got to their feet, the rest of us a half second

behind, and we all trotted through the trees to the

edge of the cliff a hundred feet away. From there we

could see southward across the foothills, toward the

Valrith Plain.

"So it's happened," Piet said softly, as if talking

to himself.

What we'd heard was a Federation battleship. Make

that an Imperial battleship-things had changed. I

stood there in my moccasins, staring. It must have

been more than a quarter mile long, cruising across

the clear morning sky two miles or so above the

foothills, and maybe three miles south. It answered a

question we'd been talking about a few days earlier.

"Let's go home," Piet said.

It took us very little time to break camp and leave,

all without conversation. We had almost nothing to

carry-no sleeping bags, no cooking gear, no tent.

Each of us, except Bubba of course, carried a small

blanket, a heavy belt knife, a spark wheel for

starting fires, a tinder box, a sharpening stone, a

self-made backpack, woven at Piet's instructions from

the inner bark of a tree, and a water bag made the

previous butchering season from the boiled-out gut of

a fatbuck. We were being as primitive as we knew

how-or as Piet knew how.

I doused the fire with a minimum of water-it was a

small one-then stirred the coals, wet ashes, and dirt

with a stick to make sure it was out. Tarel wrapped

what was left of the burrow pig in its flayed-off

pelt and stashed it in his pack. Jenoor untied the

cords we used to set up shelters, and put them in

hers. Like the packs, the cords were inner bark, cut

into thin strips. They'd be hard to replace if we

lost them, because it was late summer now, and the

bark wouldn't strip off the trees anymore.

We were ready for the trail in about two minutes,

maybe three. No one needed to ask what next. We'd go

down to Piet's floater and fly home, hopefully to mom

and dad and Lady and the pups. After that. . . . We'd

see.

The Snowy Range is beautiful, but hiking out, I

didn't pay much attention to aesthetics. The country

was rugged and mostly forest, there was no

established trail where we were, and we were

hurrying. When my attention wasn't on picking the

route-I was the pathfinder that day-I had things on

my mind. All of us did, I guess.

We'd been three weeks in the Snowy Range on a

survival-training trek-part of the training Piet was

giving us. Piet isn't really our uncle; he's more of

an "honorary" uncle. He'd worked with our parents

back when dad and mom had been members of the

underground on Morn Gebleu, the executive planet of

the Federation. Dad and mom had taken Deneen and me

away from Morn Gebleu when we were little, to bring

us up on Evdash, a world that was safer and a lot

more democratic-an old colony world, well outside

Federation boundaries.

They'd started training us seriously for the

resistance after we'd come back from our crazy,

unintentional- adventure, I guess you could call

it-on the forgotten prison planet, Fanglith.

Piet had come to stay with us about a year later.

He'd been a lot of places and done a lot of things,

and became another trainer. One of the places he'd

been-he'd hidden out there a couple of years-was a

world where the intelligent species was a two-legged

felid type with a primitive hunting/fishing culture.

He'd learned things there about living in wilderness

conditions that the known human worlds had lost long

before, and he'd been teaching us the basics. By

Bubba's standards, our wilderness skills were still

pretty poor, of course. Espwolves had been pack

hunters before their planet banged heads with a

comet. Only a few dozen of them got evacuated with

the human colonists there. Bubba had been pretty much

grown already-old enough to have learned the skills

of an adult wolf.

Espwolves are more than just telepathic. They're

intelligent, with mental processes a lot like

humans'. You kind of half forget that sometimes,

because they look so much like any large canid

species, and because they don't say much.

That's right-some of them can talk. Bubba had taught

himself to speak Evdashian, more or less. By

combining telepathy with intelligence, he'd analyzed

words and speech patterns, and their meanings. Then

he'd substituted certain sounds he could make for the

human speech sounds he couldn't.

His approximation of Evdashian wasn't easy for him,

though, so he wasn't much for small talk.

Because he belonged to a telepathic species, his

brain probably didn't even have a speech center, and

his mouth and throat weren't built for talking. His

grammar was adequate, but rough-anything to keep it

brief-and he usually avoided words that were hard for

him, but with practice you could understand him. Our

family had no trouble at all.

Anyway, a month earlier, the news had come that the

Federation had declared itself "The Glondis Empire."

That wouldn't make a lot of difference on Federation

planets. Since the Glondis Party had taken over the

Federation government, a few years before I was born,

they'd run it more and more as a Party dictatorship.

But the declaration of empire would make a big

difference to us. Our parents and Piet talked a lot

about politics in front of us and to us; it was part

of our continuing education. And they'd agreed that

if it was now formally calling itself an empire, then

the Party must feel about ready to start taking over

the outlying independent planets. It would be just a

matter of time before they got to us.

Evdash had been colonized by refugees the last time

the central worlds had been an empire, four centuries

ago. Most of the so-called colony worlds had been

settled by refugees at one time or another. The

central worlds have a tendency to go imperial now and

then, and an empire usually became a dictatorship

after a while, if it wasn't one to start with.

Our way out of the wilderness was mostly downhill-

about four thousand feet downhill-but that didn't

mean it was fast or easy. We hiked through old forest

with lots of blown-down timber to pick your way over

or around, arid down ravines littered with boulders

and fallen trees. Toward noon a thunderstorm came

through, booming and banging, and we stopped to wait

it out in a thick dense glaru grove that would keep

us dry if it didn't rain too long.

As we crouched there, Deneen looked at Piet. "The

Empire didn't wait long, did it?" she asked.

It was a statement more than a question. A few

evenings earlier, around the cook fire, Jenoor had

asked Piet how long he thought it would be before the

Empire took over Evdash, He'd said probably within

two or three years.

"You don't suppose there's been much fighting, do

you?" Jenoor asked, looking at me.

I looked at Piet. He was leaving it to me. "I doubt

it," I told her. "A few skirmishes, maybe. Fly a

million-ton monster like that over the largest cities

on Evdash, and ideas about defending the planet

evaporate in a hurry. That battleship has got more

firepower all by itself than the whole Evdashian

navy. I'm just glad it's down here in the atmosphere

and not out a few hundred miles bombarding the

surface."

The rain had begun-fat drops in myriads assaulting

the leaves above, overlaying the swish of

wind-ruffled treetops with sibilant rustling;

intermittent rolls of thunder drowned them all.

Occasional shattered droplets touched my face with

mist, and the air smelled of ozone.

"Tell us what you're thinking about, Deneen," Piet

said.

I turned to look at her. She was frowning, more grim

than thoughtful.

"I wonder how long they've been here. They could have

taken over two weeks ago, or longer, and where we've

been, we wouldn't have known it." She turned to me.

"And if it's been that long, we won't find mom and

dad at home. They'll have taken off somewhere to

avoid the political police."

That was obvious. I just hadn't looked at it yet. It

was also food for thought. Whether we found our

parents or not, the question was where we'd go. There

was probably an Imperial flotilla guarding the planet

to keep people from leaving. And the Empire would be

developing an informer network, of course; they'd

already had a spy network. So if we tried to lie low,

we'd probably be uncovered sooner or later.

Of course, the Imperials might have just arrived, and

our parents might still be safe at home. Dad knew the

ropes on this world better than just about anyone-

probably better than Piet. He'd operated as a

business consultant here on two continents, and had a

lot of underground contacts, too. He had resources I

didn't know existed.

The rain lasted just long enough for Tarel to get out

the burrow pig and pass it around for a few bites

each. Then, not even wet, I led off again. By

mid-afternoon, landmarks told me we weren't too far

from Piet's floater. Bubba assured us there was no

one near it-that was just one advantage of having an

espwolf-and in a quarter hour we were there.

Six of us, with our gear, didn't leave a lot of room

in the floater's boxy body. Piet raised her above the

trees and started for home. The first thing Deneen

did was turn the radio on. The programming was not

the usual. For a few minutes, all we got was

Federation, now Imperial, patriotic music, no matter

what station we tuned to. Then some guy speaking

Standard came on and gave a brief news rundown-mostly

stuff on changes in laws and regulations.

That told us how the Empire figured to run things-

they weren't even broadcasting in Evdashian. The

languages were enough alike that people on Evdash

could pretty much understand Standard, and I would

have bet that the Empire had declared a law against

speaking our own language.

When Deneen and Bubba and I, and our parents, had

gotten back from Fanglith more than two years

earlier, we'd resettled on the northern continent.

Federation spies had found our previous home. Dad

fixed up an old farmhouse, and about a year later

Tarel and Jenoor had come to live with us. Their

parents had joined the resistance on a Federation

planet named Tris Gebleu, and had them smuggled to

Evdash, where they'd been placed with us. They were

twins Deneen's age-sixteen. Soon after, Piet came to

live with us. Add Lady and the two pups, and you get

a pretty full house.

Half an hour in the floater brought us close to home,

but Piet didn't simply land in the yard and punch the

hooter. He flew past about half a mile north at 3,000

feet, while Bubba scanned the place telepathically.

Someone was home all right, he said-two someones-but

they weren't our parents. They were two human males,

playing cards while they waited for their detector to

buzz.

My gut knotted. Had mom and dad escaped or been

hauled away? If they had been arrested, chances were

that Lady and the pups would be hanging around

nearby, living in the forest. But if they'd escaped,

they'd probably all have left together.

Telepathically, Bubba found no sign of Lady or the

pups around, so my guts relaxed a little.

Where we lived, the country was three-quarters woods.

Our house was near the edge of the farm clearing,

with a sod road going by it. Piet put down in the

woods about a mile away. Leaving the others with the

floater, Bubba and I took off at a trot, his esper

senses alert. When we got near the clearing, Bubba,

in his rough grunting version of human speech,

suggested I stay back. I knew it was good advice, but

I didn't like to leave everything to him, so we

continued together to the clearing's edge, creeping

on our bellies the last hundred feet, keeping to

cover, until I could see the house and our big shed.

The shed doors were open and the cutter was gone, but

the floater was still there.

That could mean that my parents had gotten away, or

it could mean that the police had impounded the

cutter. My guess was that they'd gotten away.

Otherwise the police, if they were smart, would have

left the cutter in the shed to fool us, maybe after

taking out the fuel slugs. They probably wouldn't

know our canid was an espwolf. There are lots of

different kinds of canids from the known worlds, and

espwolves are rare. As far as we knew, ours were the

only ones on the continent. Our friends thought Bubba

was just another big exotic canid with ordinary

abilities.

In a family like ours, you learn very young to keep

certain kinds of things a secret.

Bubba started crawling backward, and I did the same.

When we were out of sight of the house, he got up and

trotted off without saying anything. I knew where he

had to be going, and followed him. When we'd moved

here, dad had put a waterproof box in a huge old

hollow tree, where messages could be left in

emergencies like this.

It paid off: there was a package in the message box

and a medkit on top of it. I took them out, and Bubba

and I headed back to the others.

We opened the package at the floater. There wasn't a

lot in it-several data cubes and a message cube. One

by one we checked the cubes in the floater's

computer, the message cube first. It was dated seven

days earlier. An Imperial flotilla, standing off

Evdash, had demanded surrender, and a force of

fifth-column commandos, with the collusion of

traitors in the national police, had taken over

national police headquarters. With us not due back

for eight days, our parents had no choice but to

leave without us. "Well try to meet you later on

Lizard Island," mom had said, "and leave Evdash from

there." Try. Later. All in all not very reassuring.

And it didn't say where they were going or for how

long-probably for good reason.

The other cubes were a mixed lot: an astrogation

cube; a "miscellaneous" cube that included, among

other things, a learning program and a linguistic

analysis program-I'd had good use of both of them

before; a couple of library cubes; and a copy of the

family's planetary coordinates cube with everywhere

we'd ever flown on Evdash.

There was also one other: a copy of the old

contraband data cube we'd used to find Fanglith. When

I saw that one on the menu, I got goose bumps. I also

became aware that Deneen was looking at me. I

wondered if it affected her at all the same way.

She'd always been "Miss Objective Practicality."

An astrogation cube and the contraband data cube!

Huh! The knot returned to my gut. "Well," I said, "if

they don't meet us, it looks as if they expect us to

leave the planet on our own, somehow or other."

Although, how we could do that without a cutter . . .

"Let's sit here till dark," I suggested. "It'll be

safer traveling then. With the coordinates cube, we

won't have any trouble finding Lizard Island at

night."

I could feel part of my attention stuck on the

contraband data cube. On Fanglith, actually. And from

Deneen's expression, hers was too. "I'm not going to

be surprised if they don't get to Lizard Island for a

month or more," I went on. "Obviously, they've got

something to do first, or they'd have gone there

already, not 'later.' And they'll need to wait until

things quiet down, because a cutter's a lot more

conspicuous than a floater and a ton more likely to

attract trouble."

Of course, they might not get there at all.

The floater's main door was open, letting in the late

sun. I was sitting in front, with Deneen and Piet.

Tarel was in back, looking sober and saying nothing.

He was generally pretty quiet and serious. Beside

him, Jenoor was quiet, too. She wasn't generally

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Iscrambledoutofthescrubontotheopen,moonlitcrestandstraightened,gaspingforbreath.ThenIheardhoovesandturned.Ariderhadbeencomingalongthecrestinmydirectionand,seeingme,hadspurredhishorseintogallopingattack.Ignoringhislance,hedrewhissword,leaningsidewaystostrike.Myhandseemedtomoveinslowmotion-drawingmyst...

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John Dalmas - Return to Fanglith

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