For Love of Mother-Not (23 page)

She examined it closely through the binoculars. “Lights on in there, too,” she murmured. “Could be meant to pass as some kind of observation tower, or even a restaurant.”

“Seems awfully small at the top for an eating room,” he commented.

Searchlights probed the darkness between the buildings as the rest of the internal lights winked out. Another hour’s wait in the damp, chilly bushes confirmed Lauren’s suspicions about the mysterious tower. “There are six conical objects spaced around the roof,” she told Flinx, pointing with a gloved hand. “At first, I thought they were searchlights, but not one of them has shown a light. What the devil could they be?”

Flinx had spotted them, too. “I think I recognize them now. Those are sparksound projectors.”

She looked at him in surprise. “What’s that? And how can you be sure that’s what they are?”

He favored her with a wan smile. “I’ve had to avoid them before this. Each cone projects a wide, flat beam of high-intensity sound. Immobile objects don’t register on the sensors, so it can be used to blanket a large area that includes buildings.” He studied the tower intently.

“Just guessing from the angles at which the projectors are set, I’d say that their effective range stops about fifty meters out from the longhouses.”

“That’s not good,” she muttered, trying to make out the invisible barrier though she knew that was impossible.

“It’s worse than you think,” he told her, “because the computer which monitors the beams is usually programmed automatically to disregard anything that doesn’t conform to human proportions. The interruption of the sonic field by anything even faintly human will generate a graphic display on a viewscreen. Any guard watching the screen will be able to tell what’s entered the protected area and decide on that basis whether or not to sound further alarm.” He added apologetically, “Rich people are very fond of this system.”

“When we didn’t see a regular fence, I was afraid of something like this. Isn’t there any way to circumvent it, Flinx? You said you’ve avoided such things in the past.”

He nodded. “I’ve avoided them because there’s no way to break the system. Not from the outside, anyway. I suppose we might be able to tunnel beneath it.”

“How deep into the ground would the sound penetrate?”

“That’s a problem,” he replied. “Depends entirely on the power being fed to the projectors and the frequencies being generated. Maybe only a meter, or maybe a dozen. We could tunnel inside the camp and strike it without knowing we’d done so until we came up into a circle of guns. Even if we made it, we’d have another problem, because the beams probably cover the entire camp. We’d almost have to come up inside one of the buildings.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she murmured, “because we don’t have any tunneling equipment handy. I’m going to hazard a guess that if they have the surface monitored so intently, the sky in the immediate vicinity will be even more carefully covered.”

“I’d bet on that, too.” Flinx gestured toward the tower. “Of course, we could just run the skimmer in on them. There aren’t that many buildings. Maybe we could find Mother Mastiff and get her out before they could react.”

Lauren continued to study the complex. “There’s nothing more expensive than a temporary facility fixed up to look permanent. I’d guess this setup supports between thirty and a hundred people. They’re not going to make this kind of effort
to detect intruders without being damn ready to repel them as well. Remember, there are only two of us.”

“Three,” Flinx corrected her. A pleased hiss sounded from the vicinity of his shoulder.

“Surprise is worth a lot,” Lauren went on. “Maybe ten, but no more than that. We won’t do your mother any good as corpses. Keep in mind that no one else knows we’re here. If we go down, so do her chances.”

“I know the odds aren’t good,” he said irritably, “but we’ve got to do something.”

“And do something we will. You remember that partially deforested section we flew over earlier today?”

Flinx thought a moment, then nodded.

“That was a trail line.”

“Trail line for what?”

“For equalization,” she told him. “For evening out the odds. For a better weapon than this.” She patted the sling of the dart rifle. “Better even than that snake riding your shoulder. I don’t share your confidence in it.”

“You haven’t seen Pip in action,” he reminded her. “What kind of weapon are you talking about?”

She stood and brushed bark and dirt from her coveralls. “You’ll see,” she assured him, “but we have to be damn careful.” She gazed toward the camp below. “I wish I could think of a better way, but I can’t. They’re sure to have guards posted in addition to monitoring the detection system you described. We don’t even know which building your mother is in. If we’re going to risk everything on one blind charge, it ought to be one hell of a charge.

“The weapon I have in mind is a volatile one. It can cut both ways, but I’d rather chance a danger I’m familiar with. Let’s get back to the skimmer.”

She pivoted and headed back through the forest. Flinx rose to join her, forcing himself away from the lights of the camp, which gleamed like so many reptilian eyes in the night, until the trees swallowed them up.

They were halfway back to the little grove where they had parked the skimmer when the sensation swept through him.
As usual, it came as a complete surprise, but this time it was very different from his recent receptions. For one thing, no feeling of pain was attached to it, and for another, it did not come from the direction of the camp. It arose from an entirely new source. Oddly, it carried overtones of distress with it, though distress of a confusing kind.

It came from Lauren and was directed at him.

There was no love in it, no grand, heated follow-up to the casual kiss she had given him in the skimmer. Affection, yes, which was not what he had hoped for. Admiration, too, and something more. Something he had not expected from her: a great wave of concern for him, and to a lesser extent, of pity.

Flinx had become more adept at sorting out and identifying the emotions he received, and there was no mistaking those he was feeling now. That kiss, then, had not only carried no true love with it—it held even less than that. She felt sorry for him.

He tried to reject the feelings, not only from disappointment but out of embarrassment. This was worse than looking into someone’s mind. He was reading her heart, not her thoughts. Though he tried hard, he could not shut off the flow. He could no more stop the river of emotion than he could willingly turn it on.

He made certain he stayed a step or two behind her so she would not be able to see his face in the darkness, still soaking up the waves of concern and sympathy that poured from her, wishing they might be something else, something more.

They hesitated before approaching the skimmer, circling the landing area once. The quick search revealed that their hiding place had remained inviolate. Once aboard, Lauren took the craft up. She did not head toward the camp; instead, she turned south and began to retrace their course over the treetops. Very soon they encountered the long, open gash in the woods. Lauren hovered above it for several minutes as she studied the ground, then decisively headed west. Flinx kept to himself, trying to shut the memory of that emotional deluge out of his mind. Then, quite unexpectedly, the open space in the trees came to a dead end.

“Damn,” Lauren muttered. “Must have picked the wrong direction. I thought sure I read the surface right. Maybe it’s the other way.”

Flinx did not comment as she wheeled the skimmer around and headed southeast. When the pathway again ended in an unbroken wall of trees, she angrily wrenched the craft around a second time. This time when they encountered the forest wall, she slowed but continued westward, her gaze darting repeatedly from the darkened woods below to the skimmer’s instrumentation.

“Maybe if you were a little more specific, I could help you look,” he finally said, a touch of frustration in his voice.

“I told you. Weapons. Allies, actually. It comes to the same thing. No sign of them, though. They must have finished eating and entered semidormancy. That’s how they live; do nothing but eat for several days in a row, then lie down to sleep it off for a week. The trouble is that once they’ve finished an eating period, they’re apt to wander off in any direction until they find a sleep spot that pleases them. We haven’t got the time to search the whole forest for the herd.”

“Herd of what?” Flinx asked.

“Didn’t I tell you? Devilopes.”

Enlightenment came to Flinx. He had heard of Devilopes, even seen a small head or two mounted in large commercial buildings. But he had had no personal experience of them. Few citizens of Drallar did. There was not even one in the city zoo. As Flinx understood it, Devilopes were not zooable.

The Demichin Devilope was the dominant native life form on Moth. It was unusual for a herbivore to be the dominant life form, but excepting man, a fairly recent arrival, they had no natural enemies. They were comparatively scarce, as were the mounted heads Flinx had seen; the excessive cost of the taxidermy involved prevented all but the extremely wealthy from collecting Devilope.

The skimmer prowled the treetops, rising to clear occasional emergents topping ninety meters, dropping lower when the woods scaled more modest heights. Occasionally, Lauren would take them down to ground level, only to lift
skyward again in disappointment when the omens proved unhelpful. There was no sign of a Devilope herd.

Meanwhile, another series of sensations swept through Flinx’s active mind, and Pip stirred on his shoulder. He had continually tried to find Mother Mastiff’s emotions, without success. Instead, his attempts seemed to be attracting the feelings of everyone but his mother-not. He wondered anew at his heightened perception since he had acquired his pet; though it was likely, he reminded himself that here in the vastness of the northern forests where minds were few and scattered, it might be only natural that his receptivity improved.

These latest sensations carried a female signature. They were also new, not of Mother Mastiff or Lauren. Cool and calm, they were vague and hard to define: whoever they belonged to was a particularly unemotional individual. He felt fear, slight but unmistakable, coupled with a formidable resolution that was cold, implacable—so hard and unyielding that it frightened Flinx almost as much as Mother Mastiff’s own terror. Save for the slight overtones of fear, they might have been the emotions of a machine.

The feelings came from the camp where Mother Mastiff was being held. Flinx had little doubt that they belonged to one of those mysterious individuals who had abducted her. From the one brief, faint sensation he felt he could understand her fear. Then it was gone, having lasted less than a minute. Yet, in that time, Flinx had received a complete emotional picture of the person whose feelings he had latched onto. Never before had he encountered a mind so intent on a single purpose and so devoid of those usual emotional colorations that comprised common humanity. Pip hissed at the empty air as if ready to strike and defend its master.

“This isn’t working,” Lauren muttered, trying to see through the trees. “We’ll have to—” She paused, frowning at him. “Are you all right? You’ve got the most peculiar expression on your face.”

“I’m okay.” The coldness was at last fading from his mind; evidently he hadn’t been conscious of how completely it had
possessed him. Her query snapped him back to immediacy, and he could feel anew the warmth of the skimmer’s cabin, of his own body. Not for the first time did he find himself wondering if his unmanageable Talent might someday do him harm as well as good. “I was just thinking.”

“You do a lot of that,” she murmured. “Flinx, you’re the funniest man I’ve ever met.”

“You’re not laughing.”

“I didn’t mean funny ha ha.” She turned back to the controls. “I’m going to set us down. This skimmer really isn’t equipped for the kind of night-tracking we’re doing. Besides, I don’t know about you, but it’s late, and I’m worn out.”

Flinx was exhausted too, mentally as much as physically. So he did not object as Lauren selected a stand of trees and set the skimmer down in their midst.

“I don’t think we need to stand a watch,” she said. “We’re far enough from the camp so that no one’s going to stumble in on us. I haven’t seen any sign of aerial patrol.” She was at the rear of the skimmer now, fluffing out the sleeping bags they had brought from the lodge.

Flinx sat quietly watching her. He had known a few girls—young women—back in Drallar. Inhabitants of the marketplace, like himself, students in the harsh school of the moment. He could never get interested in any of them, though a few showed more than casual interest in him. They were not, well, not serious. About life, and other matters.

Mother Mastiff repeatedly chided him about his attitude. “There’s no reason for ye to be so standoffish, boy. You’re no older than them.” That was not true, of course, but he could not convince her of that.

Lauren was a citizen of another dimension entirely. She was an attractive, mature woman. A self-confident, thinking adult—which was how Flinx viewed himself, despite his age. She was already out of pants and shirt and slipping into the thin thermal cocoon of the sleeping bag.

“Well?” She blinked at him, pushed her hair away from her face. “Aren’t you going to bed? Don’t tell me you’re not tired.”

“I can hardly stand up,” he admitted. Discarding his own clothing, he slipped into the sleeping bag next to hers. Lying there listening to the rhythmic patter of rain against the canopy, he strained toward her with his mind, seeking a hint, a suggestion of the emotions he so desperately wanted her to feel. Maddeningly, he could sense nothing at all.

The warmth of the sleeping bag and the cabin enveloped him, and he was acutely aware of the faint musky smell of the woman barely an arm’s length away. He wanted to reach out to her; to touch that smooth, sun-darkened flesh; to caress the glistening ringlets of night that tumbled down the side of her head to cover cheek and neck and finally form a dark bulge against the bulwark of the sleeping bag. His hand trembled.