Freedom's Landing (2 page)

KRISTIN BJORNSEN WONDERED IF SUMMER ON THE
planet Barevi could possibly be the
only
season. There had been remarkably little variation in temperature in the nine months since she'd arrived there. She'd been four months in what appeared to be the single, sprawling city of the planet during her enslavement and now had racked up five months of comparative freedom—albeit a parlous hand-to-mouth survival—in this jungle, after her escape from the city in the flitter she'd stolen.

Her sleeveless one-piece tunic was made of an indestructible material, but it wouldn't suit cold weather. The scooped neckline was indecently low and the skirt ended midway down her long thighs. It was closely modeled, in fact, after the miniskirted sheath she'd been wearing to class that spring morning when the Catteni ships had descended on Denver, one of fifty cities across the world that had been used as object lessons by the conquerors. One moment she was on her way to the college campus; the next, she was one of thousands of astonished and terrified Denverites being driven by forcewhips up the ramp of a spaceship that made the
Queen Elizabeth
look like a tub toy. Once past the black maw of the ship, Kris, with all the others, swiftly succumbed to the odorless gas. When she and her fellow prisoners had awakened, they were in the slave compounds of Barevi, waiting to be sold.

Kris aimed the avocado-sized pit of the gorupear she had just eaten at the central stalk of a nearby thicket of the purple-branched thornbushes. The bush instantly rained tiny darts in all directions. Kris laughed. She had bet it would take less than five minutes for the young bush to rearm itself. And it had. The larger ones took longer to position new missiles. She'd had reason to find out.

Absently she reached above her head for another gorupear. Nothing from good old Terra rivaled them for taste. She bit appreciatively into the firm reddish flesh of the fruit, and its succulent juices dribbled down her chin onto her tanned breasts. Tugging at the strap of her slip-tight tunic, she brushed the juice away. The outfit was great for tanning, but when winter comes? And should she concentrate on gathering nuts and drying gorupears on the rocks by the river for the cold season? She wrinkled her nose at the half-eaten pear. They were mighty tasty but a steady diet of them left her hungering for other basic dietary requirements. By watching the creatures of the jungle, she'd been able to guess what might be edible for her. Remembering her survival course gave her the clue to superficial testing on her skin. She'd had two violent reactions to stuff the ground animals seemed to devour in quantity but the avians had guided her to other comestibles. Her term in the food preparation unit of her “master” had given her other commodities to look for—though few of those grew wild in this jungle. Still, there were little yellow-scaled fish from the river that had provided her with both protein and exercise.

A low-pitched buzz attracted her attention. She got to her feet, balanced carefully on the high limb of the tree. Parting the branches, she peered up at the cloudless sky. Two of the umpteen moons that circled Barevi were visible in the west. Below them, dots that gave off sparkles of reflected sunlight were swooping and diving.

The boys have called another hunt
, she mused to herself and, still smiling, leaned against the tree trunk to take advantage of her grandstand seat. The jungle had quite a few really big, really savage creatures which she had managed to
avoid, making like a jungle heroine and taking to the trees and vines. By dint of hard work and sweat, she had used the useful tools from the kit on the flitter to tie vines to trees that led to and from her favorite food-browsing spots and to the river. Her escape routes were all aerial.

Before she had taken absence without leave from her “situation,” Kris had done her homework on more than what was edible on Barevi. She had picked up a good bit of the lingua Barevi, a polyglot language, made up from the words of six or seven of the languages spoken by the slaves and used by the “masters” to convey orders to their minions. She had gleaned some information about those who had invaded Earth, the Catteni. They were not, for one thing, indigenous to this world but came from a much heavier planet nearer galactic center. They were one of the mercenary-explorer races employed by a vast federation. They had only recently colonized Barevi, using it as a clearinghouse for spoils acquired looting unsuspecting non-federation planets, and a rest-and-relaxation center for their great ships' crews. After years of the free fall of space and lighter-gravity planets, Catteni found it difficult to return to their heavy, depressing home world. During her brief enslavement, Kris had heard the Catteni boast of dying everywhere in the galaxy except Catten. The way they “played,” Kris thought to herself, was rough enough to insure that they died young as well as far from Catten.

Huge predators roamed the unspoiled plains and jungles of Barevi, and the Catteni considered it great sport to stand up to a rhinolike monster with only a single spear. That is, Kris remembered with a grim smile, when they weren't brawling among themselves over imagined slurs and insults. Two slaves, friends of hers, had been crushed under the massive bodies of Catteni during a free-for-all.

Since she had come to the valley, she had witnessed half a dozen encounters between the rhinos and the Catteni. Accustomed to a much heavier gravity than Barevi, the Catteni were able to execute incredible maneuvers as they softened their prey for the kill. The poor creatures had less chance
than Spanish bulls and, in all the hunts Kris had seen, only one man had been injured and that had been a slight graze.

As the flitters neared, she realized that they were not acting like a hunting party. For one thing, one dot was considerably ahead of the others. And by God, she saw the light flashes of the trailing flitters' forward guns firing at the “leader.”

Hunted and hunters were at the foot of her valley now. Suddenly black smoke erupted from the rear of the pursued flitter. It nosed upward. It hovered reluctantly, then dove, slantingly, to strike the tumble of boulders along the river's edge, not far from her hiding place.

Kris gasped as she saw a figure, half-leaping, half-staggering out of the badly smashed flitter. She could scarcely believe that even a Catteni could survive such a crash. Wide-eyed, she watched as he struggled to his feet, then reeled from boulder to boulder, to get away from the smoldering wreck.

With a stunningly brilliant flare, the craft exploded. Fragments whistled into the underbrush as far up the slope as her retreat, and the idiotic thornbushes she had recently triggered sprayed out their poison-tipped little darts.

The smoke of the burning flitter obscured her view now and Kris lost sight of the man. The other flitters had reached the wreck and were hovering over it, like so many angry King-Kongish bees, swooping, diving, trying to penetrate the smoke.

An afternoon breeze swirled the black clouds about and Kris caught glimpses of the man, lurching still further from the crash site. She saw him stumble and fall, after which he made no move to rise. Above, the bees buzzed angrily, circling the smoke and probably wondering if their prey had gone up in the explosion.

Catteni didn't hunt each other as a rule, she told herself, surprised to find that she was halfway down from her perch.
They fight like Irishmen, sure, but to chase a man so far from the city? What could he have done?

The crash had been too far away for Kris to distinguish the hunted man's features or build. He might just be an escaped
slave, like herself. If not Terran, he might be from one of the half-dozen other subjugated races that lived on Barevi. Someone who had had the guts to steal a flitter didn't deserve to die under Catteni forcewhips.

Kris made her way down the slope, careful to avoid the numerous thorn thickets that dominated these woods. She had once amused herself with the whimsy that the thorn were the gorupears' protectors, for the two plants invariably grew close together.

At the top of the sheer precipice above the falls of the river, she grabbed the vine she had attached there for speedy descent. Once on the riverbank she stuck to the dry flat rocks until she came to the stepping-stones that allowed her to cross the river below the wide pool made by the little falls. Down a gully, across another thornbush-filled clearing, and then she was directly above the spot where she had last seen the man.

Keeping close to the brown rocks so nearly the shade of her own tanned skin, she crossed the remaining distance. She all but tripped over him as the wind puffed black smoke down among the rocks.

“Catteni!” she cried, furious as she bent to examine the unconscious man and recognized the gray and yellow uniform despite its tattered and black-smeared condition.

With a disdainful foot under his shoulder, she tried to turn him over. And couldn't. The man might as well have been a boulder. She knelt and yanked his head around by the thick slate-gray hair which, in a Catteni, did not indicate age: they all had the same color hair. Maybe he was dead?

No such luck. He was breathing. A bruise mark on his temple showed one reason for his unconscious state. For a Catteni, he was almost good-looking. Most of them tended to have brutish, coarse features but this one had a straight, almost patrician nose, even if there was a lot more of it than an elephant would want to claim, and he had a wide well-shaped mouth. The Catteni to whom she had been sold had had thick, blubbery lips and she'd known that Catteni were developing a sexual appetite for Terran women.

A sizzling crack jerked her head around in the direction of the wreck. The damned fools were shooting at the burning craft now. Kris looked down at the unconscious man, wondering what on earth he had done to provoke such vindictive thoroughness. They sure wanted him good and dead.

The barrage pulverized what was left of the flitter, leaving the fire no fuel. The wind, laden with coarse dust, blew an acrid stench from the wreckage. The man stirred and vainly tried to raise himself, only to sink back to the ground with a groan. Kris saw the flitters circling to land on the plateau below the wreck.

“Going to case the scene of the crime, huh?”

It was completely illogical, Kris told herself, to help a Catteni simply because there were others of his race out to get him. But…she backtracked his route, just in case he had left any marks for them to follow. She went as far as she could on the bare rock. Where dirt began, ash had settled in a thick layer, obliterating any tracks he might have made. After all, the Catteni might stumble on her if they did a thorough search, thinking their victim had escaped the crash.

He had got to his feet when she returned to him, dazed, heavy arms hanging by his sides as he tried to get his eyes to focus. She attempted to guide him but it was like trying to direct a mountain to move.

“Come on, Mahomet,” she urged softly. “Just walk like a nice little boy to the river and I'll duck you in. Cold water should bring you round.”

A sharp distant gabble of voices made her start nervously. God, those Catteni had got up that rock face in a hurry. She'd forgotten they could take prodigious leaps on this light-gravity planet.

“They're coming. Follow me,” she said in lingua Barevi.

He groaned again, shaking his head to clear his senses. He turned toward her, his great yellow eyes still dazed with shock. She would never get used to such butter-colored pupils with black irises.

“This way! Quickly!” She urgently tugged at him. If he didn't shake his tree-stump legs, she was going to leave him.
Good Samaritans on Barevi had better not get caught by Catteni.

She pulled at his arm and he seemed to make a decision. He lurched forward, one great hand grasping her shoulder in a viselike grip. They reached the riverbank, still ahead of the searchers. But Kris groaned as she realized that the barely conscious man would never be able to navigate the stepping-stones.

The shouts behind them indicated that the others were fanning out to search the rocks. Urgently she grabbed several fingers of his big hand, leading him to the base of the falls.

“If you can't float, it's just too damned bad,” she said grimly. She dropped his hand, stepped back, and leaping forward again, shouldered him into the water.

She dove in, right beside him, and when he continued to sink, she grabbed and caught him by the thick hair. Fortunately the water made even a solid Catteni manageable. Exerting all her strength and skill as a swimmer, she got his head above water and held it up with a chin lock.

By sheer good luck, they had surfaced in the space between the arc of the falls and the cliff, the curtain of water shielding them from view. As the Catteni began to struggle in her grasp, the five hunters leapt spectacularly into view in the clearing by the pool. Her “Mahomet” was instantly alert and, instead of struggling, began to tread water beside her.

The Catteni were arguing with each other now and each seemed to be issuing conflicting orders to the others.

Mahomet released himself from her chinhold, his yellow eyes never leaving the party on the bank. They watched, hands making as little movement as possible although the falls would conceal any ripples their motions made.

One Catteni, after a heated debate, crossed the wide pool in a fantastic—to Kris—standing leap. He and another began to move downstream, carefully examining both banks and casually surmounting upended barge-sized boulders with no effort. The other three went charging back the way they had come, still arguing.

After an endless interval, during which the icy water
chilled Kris to the bone, the refugee touched her shoulder and nodded toward the shore. But when she realized that he was going to head back the way they had come, she shook her head emphatically, pointing to the other side.

“Safe! That way,” she shouted at him over the noise of the falls. He frowned. “I've a flitter to hide in.” She jabbed her finger in the direction of her hidden vehicle. Stunned as she suddenly realized what she had just said, she stared at him. “Oh, God!”