Bridgehead (24 page)

Sara Jean Layberg was holding her husband's hand. Gardner noticed neither of them were speaking. They were close enough to the pillared windings that it would have been difficult for either to be heard over the summoning vibration. Mike looked at the couple and licked his lips. He began to walk toward Mustafa and the faculty members.

It was more comfortable to think about the people who had been snatched away.

*   *   *

Deeper into the forested belt, the trees grew taller. Their barrellike trunks splitting into two, four, even a dozen slimmer stalks from a common base, each individual stalk the thickness of Eisley's thighs. Where they crisscrossed from adjacent clumps, the boles not only spread dense curtains of foliage but also barricaded routes of escape.

Sue and Charles had started out running; now they ducked and clambered their way through an obstacle course. The screech of weapons behind them was a reminder of why they fled. It was impossible to tell what the beams' target was meant to be this time.

A score of hand-sized creatures flushed so suddenly that Eisley could not tell whether they had leaped or flown from the ground cover. They chittered glassily. Sue cried out and flung the jacket she carried toward the leaves which flapped behind the covey.

Charles Eisley, shifting direction to snatch up her heavy jacket again, staggered and banged into one of the trees instead of making a smooth maneuver of it as he had intended. He was almost blown already, though they had run less than two hundred yards. “Dear God,” he whispered.

Schlicter was gone through another stand of trunks growing like fingers from a palm. She paused and swung herself back to where she could see her gasping lover with the jacket in his hand. “Leave it, Charles, Jesus!” she cried. “It's too heavy to fuck with now.”

The diplomat swallowed and began to stumble onward again, the jacket of studded black leather swinging from his hand. “Can't, they'll find it,” he said in a voice intelligible mostly from context. “Don't let 'em know we're here.”

“Oh, Charles, they wouldn't
be
here if they didn't know, would they?” the woman said, but she reached out to help Eisley through the immediate tangle. He continued to grip her jacket.

The watercourse Eisley had expected was a stream twenty feet wide and shallow enough to show bottom all the way across. At its gravelly margin, the short-trunked trees made space for plants like giant dandelions whose stems oozed amber sap when Schlicter trod them down. She paused and threw a glance at Eisley.

“We've got to,” the diplomat said. The open water gleamed like a killing ground in the brilliant sunlight. The current cast dazzling highlights where larger stones broke the surface. Touching his mistress's wrist with his free hand, Eisley splashed into the stream. Sue ran with him. From the hollow in which it laired during the daytime leaped a carnivore the size of a pickup truck.

The beast was four-footed, like the grazers on the hillside above. There could be no doubt regarding its own diet, however. Its forepaws crossed its hind legs in midstride. As the forelegs extended, claws the length of Schlicter's fingers sprang out of their sheaths in all twelve front toes. The jaws were as long as a crocodile's. They were raggedly armed with curving black teeth. The withers bulged with a muscular hump. Tensed, the muscles would rip the foreclaws through bones orders of magnitude heavier than those of the two humans.

Eisley slung the jacket as an instinctive follow-through of the motion by which he had turned toward the attack. Though the predator did not give tongue, the crash of its tons leaping to slaughter was as obtrusive as a safe hitting the pavement. “Go!” Eisley shouted as Sue seemed to pause in the gout of spray.

The couple's brief hesitation short of the creek edge gave them the reserve of strength they needed to dash across the water. The current was strong enough to have swept its channel silt free. It was not, however, the sort of torrent that rolled all the pebbles away from the polished domes of quarter-ton boulders. The stream-bed footing was good. The drag of the few inches of water on the fugitives' feet was lost in the panic of the moment.

Now in direct sunlight, the predator's rufous scales glared like iron from the forge; while the creature lay in wait, shadows had made its hide resemble dull patterns of earth and leaf mold. The eyes were set close beneath a brow ridge. Their view to the sides was limited, but they provided a sharp, range-determining view for a predator which killed in a quick lunge from cover—good enough to permit the clawed forelegs to scissor together on the flying jacket.

The motion was preternaturally swift. The beast rocked back on its haunches in the water. Its hind legs were relatively short, like those of a bear. Only as a carnival act could they alone have supported a creature weighing several tons. The foreclaws rent the jacket with a jerk to either side. Fluff from the quilted lining twisted in the air. The odors of cowhide and human body oils were unfamiliar but piquant to the predator. It stuffed both halves of the shredded garment into a mouth whose black-toothed jaws could have held either human as easily.

Sue and Charles had gained the far bank in the interval. As Eisley tried to duck out of sight around a slanting tree bole the way his mistress had done a step before, his foot slipped. He rang his head on the solid trunk, then flopped to the ground, stunned and visible. The predator's eyes focused as if its ridged snout were a gunsight turned toward Eisley.

The creature gathered its haunches beneath it, just as three of the egg-shaped Vrage utility vehicles squirmed out of the dense forest. The heavy vegetation was an obstacle to the humans and a maze for the Vrage cars. To the trucks with their loads of ready infantry, the belt of forest was an impassable barrier. The gunners had dismounted where the trees began to flare with multiple trunks. The Vrage weapons carved easily through the wood, but that alone was not enough to form a path. Armor-suited soldiers were now struggling to drag clear the fallen trees. Inattention had already fried one Vrage with the beam of a fellow who had meant only to section a tree trunk.

The lighter vehicles had penetrated the forest with varying degrees of success. The initial trio had been successful enough to burst straight in on an active carnivore.

One car slewed and stopped in midstream. Schlicter, staring in shock from the far edge, noted that the current rippled normally beneath the vehicle. The black windscreen hinged up. An alien like those on the truck beds aimed his weapon point-blank.

The magenta blur registered on the carnivore's peripheral vision. The beast did not leap. Instead, it slashed one foreleg sideways, the bite of its claws creating six instant jets of chlorine. The carnivore jerked the Vrage from its car as neatly as a thumb could lift an eyeball.

“Come on, get going,” Charles Eisley gasped. He slithered on his belly past the trunk on which he had laid open his scalp. Sue, transfixed by the battle on the water, was not sure whether the man was speaking to her or to himself.

Twenty feet from the carnivore, another Vrage lifted his viewscreen to shoot. He clamshelled the cover back as fragments of the first victim rained from the angry creature's mouth. The motion was a flag to call the beast whose jaws frothed in irritation from the halogen spray to which they had been subjected. The carnivore sprang in a flat arc, its clawed forelegs extended as they would have during an attack on one of the young grazers on its way to water. The Vrage might have had a chance if he had scuttled clear instead of clamping closed his vehicle. The car shattered like eggshell before a bullet when the predator struck it.

“Sue! Quick!” Eisley said.

“Jesus!” the woman gasped as she whirled back into the business of survival.

The two humans scrambled away from the creek, hidden again by the foliage. Eisley's shoes squelched angrily, but he had recovered his composure and much of his strength.

Behind them, the stream was a raving battleground for the great predator and the increasing number of aliens who slashed for its life. Unlike the herbivore on the hither slope, which itself had been a long time dying under the concentrated fire of a dozen guns, this brute combined the tenacity of its normal prey with bloodlust and agility. The beams that carved across it in microns-thin lines served only to madden it.

Dismounted soldiers stabbed and ran and cried for support from their fellows. The carnivore rushed like a dog tormented by gadflies from one splotch of armor to another. Sometimes a victim dodged; sometimes the beams of a victim and his fellows drove the beast in some less painful direction; and sometimes the jaws crunched on a tormenter. The claws and black teeth dripped with ichor as blood bubbled from the animal's own mortal wounds.

*   *   *

The interlacing tree trunks were an effective baffle for the high-frequency sound of the Vrage weapons. By the time the humans had run a hundred yards or so, the shrieks had muted to hissing; but that hissing had the emotional overlay of whips cutting toward flesh. The sound goaded Schlicter and Eisley onward. The carnivore they had flushed was a phantom from nightmare. The eight-limbed aliens were by contrast a part of continuing reality despite their strangeness.

The forested core of the valley was as flat as the bowl of a spoon. The slight rise in the ground did not increase the difficulty of escape. In fact, when the slope sharpened abruptly, the wider spacing of the trees made it easier to move. The sunlight had not been a problem to the humans under the canopy of black leaves. Where the tree trunks became short, individual pots instead of starbursts of respectable height, it was possible to see the sky again. The sun was lower than its brilliance suggested. Twenty minutes should find it behind the hills from which the valley debouched.

Beneath a stubby tree of the last fringe, the two fugitives caught their breath and took stock. Both of them were panting. Eisley was surprised to see that Sue's face was as red as it got during particularly strenuous bouts of lovemaking. The incongruity made it possible for him to smile.

“We wait half an hour and it'll be dark,” Schlicter said, nodding up the grassy slope.

“I think we better keep moving,” Charles replied after he had cleared the phlegm from his throat. “They must have some way of tracking us besides sight. I think we ought to keep moving, hope they lose us in all the other stuff.”

Massive herbivores were grazing placidly on this side of the valley, just as they had been on the other. Perhaps at nightfall they would troop down to water; the predator there had been built for victims that big. The fear that the grazers had engendered when Eisley first saw them now seemed to him to have been ridiculous. The beasts were potentially dangerous, just as urban traffic was dangerous. That was innocent in comparison to what had happened down at the creek.

Charles turned to face back the way they had come, his shoulder braced against the tree's horny bark and his legs splayed out like those of a corpse. It was impossible to see anything but the immediate treetops. He had thought that they could perhaps spot a surveillance post on the crest over which the vehicles had come. They would have to climb higher to do that … which meant being exposed against the grassy slope for at least some distance. Eisley could not tell whether there was still fighting going on at the watercourse, or if instead he was just hearing the breeze.

“Right,” he said. He rolled to his belly again, then levered himself to a kneeling posture. “I'll slip out a little ways to check the lay of the—”

Schlicter started to get up also.

Eisley laid his hand firmly across the woman's buttocks and pinned her to the ground again. “Goddamn it, Sue,” he said. “If there's one of us, there's half the chance of being spotted. Right?”

“Well, why don't I—” Schlicter began.

“Dammit!” the man repeated. “It's my idea to go on, yours to stay. Will you for God's sake let me go look things over without a stupid argument?”

Sue dropped her eyes and nodded. “Be careful,” she said, looking away from her lover.

Eisley began to crawl toward one of the patches of brush. At this level, the grass tickled his cheeks. The blades could cut, in fact. Sweat which the sun drew from his face stung fiercely. When the diplomat dragged himself behind the clump, he mopped his face with his handkerchief before he even bothered to scan the farther hillside.

The brush grew in waist-high knots. The stems squirmed together like those of an ancient wisteria vine. It made a comfortable screen through which Eisley peered intently. The grassy slope was almost a mile away, but the magenta color of the aliens and their vehicles should have been obvious against a dun background. There did not seem to be an outpost. The group which had penetrated the valley's forested bottom was blindfolded by the vegetation that screened it from Eisley. It seemed to him that the best course for the two of them was to make a break for the next ridge.

He stood up. “I think—” he called to Sue, lost in a shadow fifty feet away.

A rank of vehicles swept over the crest toward which Eisley had intended to flee.

The ten vehicles in the middle of the line were stretched over a half-mile front. They were light cars like those which had originally pursued the fugitives into the forest. If the diplomat had not been erect and fully exposed to the view of this new party, he might have thought it worthwhile to try hiding from them in the grass.

At either end of the search chain was a tank that dwarfed the trucks of the earlier party as thoroughly as those trucks dwarfed the individual vehicles they accompanied. There were no eight-limbed soldiers on the back of these tanks with hand weapons. Charles Eisley had done enough reporting of military vehicles in his career to recognize tanks, even reddish-purple tanks with yard-diameter disks instead of proper turrets on their flat decks.

Eisley's mouth was open to shout as he turned from his mistress. He was not sure what the words would have been. The aliens forestalled him with a sound like plates of the planetary crust rubbing.