A. Bertram Chandler - Firebrand

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FirebrandFirebrand

by A Bertram Chandler

FIRE BRAND! 1

FIRE BRAND!

By A. Bertram Chandler

2 FIRE BRAND! by A. Bertram Chandler

Pulse-Pounding Feature-Length Novelet of Vengeance on Venus!

Could this then be the notorious Firbrand, and the thing at her slim waist

the notorious, blood Weapon? This small dark woman with hair cropped almost like

a man's--could she have pirated the Terran spaceliner? But Fleming knew he'd

have his answers perhaps sooner than he wished. . . .

CHAPTER I

HE CAME slowly out the door of the trading post. He was mopping his brow

with a large, gaudily patterned hankerchief. It was hot inside the garish,

shoddy building, in spite of all the efforts of the air conditioning plant. It

was hotter outside. And the trader cursed softly, without enthusiasm, as a

matter of routine. He cursed the heat, the humidity, the perspiration that

dripped from the tip of his high-bridged nose, that ran in clammy rivulets down

his smooth, hairless body, that saturated the loin-cloth that was his only

clothing.

It was almost sunset.

The blur of light--hazy, diffuse--that was all that was ever seen of the

sun from Venus, hung low above the western horizon, turning the sullen yellow of

the sky to hot gold. Eastward, darkly ominous shadows were already creeping up

the eternal overcast. And there was a faint flicker of lightning, a low growl of

thunder, sensed rather than heard.

Inland from the post stretched the marshy plains, the lush, low jungle.

Distant, more than half shrouded by mists, were the unpretentious undulations of

the smooth hills. And to the north was the sea--like the sky above it, a dirty

yellow. Little tired wavelets collapsed in utter exhausttion upon the grey

beach, well below the line of oozing, gelatinous scum that was high water mark.

And there was a brief flurry of foam as something big and black broke surface,

threshed the water with tail and fins, then vanished.

The trader stood at the root of the jetty, stared out to the north-west.

Now and again he raised his hand absently, brushed away the little winged

insects that hovered in a dancing cloud around his close-cropped blond head. But

all his attention was given to the distant skyline. Vague it was,

3 and misty. And nothing solid broke the indeterminate union between sea

and sky. It seemed that nothing ever had broken it--that nothing ever would. But

the trading post, the jetty, were evidence that ships had sailed these seas. Had

sailed. . . . .

Already Aphrodite, the little freighter operated by the Venus Trading

Corporation, was a week overdue. Long since, the trader would have called Port

Lanning to make enquiries, but for the fact that among the cargo that Aphrodite

should have been bringing were spares to replace certain burned out components

of his radio.

He was worried. This had never happened before. Aphrodite, until now, had

always arrived with clockwork regularity. And the long talk, the drinking

session, with her skipper had been one of the few, welcome breaks in his

monotonous routine, one of the things that helped to keep him sane. And the

natives were talking, he knew. He had seen them looking out to sea, had heard

them muttering among themselves in their croaking, incomprehensible language.

And the drums had been beating in the low hills, had been rapping their

intelligence from peak to insignificant peak, from island to island.

He was a man alone--one lone alien among hostile myriads. His weapons

commanded respect but he knew that, if it came to a showdown, he could not hope

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to stand off assault, siege, indefinitely. He allowed himself a momentary

disloyalty to the Corporation, a dull resentment against their policy of

economy, retrenchment, that had reduced the staffs of the trading posts from two

or three to one. With two men to stand watch and watch the post would be

practically impregnable. With two men to man the launch the dangers of the

hazardous voyage to Port Lanning would be more than halved.

He was a man alone--and he almost felt that he was the last of his kind

upon this steaming world. There were times when he would have thought so save

for the fact that, once or twice in the last three days, he had heard the

drumming of rockets, the distant, whistling scream of jet-propelled aircraft,

above the clouds.

The sun went down, and the gold faded to yellow, to green, and the indigo

shadows crept across the sky, and the lightning was dazzlingly violet, running

down in rivers of vivid flame from the zenith. And where the little waves lapped

listlessly at the sand was a dim, pallid fire, and where the line of scum lay

along the high water mark was a brighter light, shining with the luminescence of

decay, of rottenness. And in the hills and in the jungle drum answered drum, the

staccato, coded melody drowned ever and again by the crashing thunder, fading

and swelliing as the rising, gusty wind veered and shifted.

The first rain began to fall.

For long moments the trader stood in the downpour grateful for the

refreshing, clearing coolness. And then his body shook with a slight chill, and

he remembered that his alarms were yet to be set and tested, and that he would

be a good target against the glow from the door of the post, and that his pale

body would stand out against the darkness in vivid relief with each lightning

flash.

4 Walking slowly, striving to ignore the uncomfortable feeling in his

shoulder blades as he walked to the open door, turned his back to the hostile

marsh and jungle, he went inside. And the door shut, and there was no longer any

light save that of the lightning and the phosphorescence of the sea; and the

post, shrouded in rain and darkness, its garish colours forgotten, loomed like a

fort.

It was a fort.

There was a brief rattle of fire from the cupola on the roof as the trader

tested his guns against the coming night.

And the drums, distant but insistent, answered.

THE TRADER pushed aside his plate, fumbled in the pouch at his belt for his

cigarettes. One more carton, he thought. I shall have to go easy .. And his

mind, as he brooded over this last deprivation, was that of a filially devoted

but unjustly punished child. I have always been a loyal servant of the

Corporation, he thought. The trite phrase pleased him, and he repeated it aloud.

And his memory, as he smoked the rationed cigarette, ran over the countless

instances in which he had proved his loyalty--petty economies, shrewd bargains,

frank and unashamed swindling.

He sighed, rose from the table. He carried the dirty plates, the debris of

his meal, into the little scullery. The debris of the last meal was still there,

and that of the meal before--but until it became offensive he would take no

steps to dispose of it. He returned to his living room, got out his Log and his

account books. And there he sat until the scratching of his pen was drowned by

the shrilling of the alarm.

His first action when he reached the cupola was to open the switch that put

the guns on automatic fire.

Had he not done so they would have blasted, in a very few seconds, the

figure that was staggering through the rain, over the short, sodden, grass-like

vegetation towards the post. The stranger, wavering like a white moth in the

beam of his searchlight, was indisputably human. Here was no scaly monstrosity,

no Disney frog trying to look like a man, no batrachien undecided whether to

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A. Bertram Chandler - Firebrand

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