John Maddox Roberts - Spacer: Window of Mind (18 page)

"Not exactly," Kiril said. "Not for him, particularly. He just thought I'd be good breeding stock. For him, or Huerta, or maybe somebody else in the family. He plans to raise little Izquierdas like thoroughbreds, just as bad as him." She tried to shut her eyes tightly, but she could not stop the tears from pouring down her cheeks. "God, I'm so ashamed!"

"But why?" Michelle said gently. "Because you played along with him? It was the smartest thing you could have done. It allowed you to get to us first."

"No, not that. He was standing there, closer to me than that mere captain was, and I couldn't work up the guts to make a try for him. I was so scared I just couldn't do it. I could've stopped all of this with one stab if I hadn't been such a coward."

"It would've been foolish to try," Torwald said. "He must be surrounded by protective systems. He could have had you killed before you had your knife clear."

"That's not it!" she insisted. "I was afraid I'd fail and he
wouldn't
kill me!"

"Kiril," Nancy said, speaking for the first time, "nobody could be asked to face a thing like that."

Torwald knelt beside her and put a hand on her unhurt shoulder. "Kid, since this business started, you've showed more smarts, guts, nerve, and loyalty than I've ever encountered in one human being. You can space with me any day." The two women nodded.

"Okay," Torwald went on, "we've got to assess our situation. There were no emergency rations on the raider, and we left the ship in too big a hurry to take any. We can maybe go another day or two without food, then we'll start to weaken. Then I'll have to shoot something, because it's usually safer to eat alien animals than plants. It's a desperation move either way, though. We've got to make contact with somebody, but who?"

"Our choices are pretty limited," Michelle said. "The Satsuma people will kill us on Izquierda's orders. The navy might do the same. We could be hunted criminals by now, if they really think we started a war."

"That leaves the aliens," Torwald said. "That's not as bad a prospect as it sounds. They probably aren't dumb, and they look as if they've experienced wars before. If they regard themselves as being at war with us, what they need now more than anything else is intelligence. They'll want to keep us alive for any information we can give them."

"I think we should try to find the
Angel,"
Nancy said.

"I'd like to do that myself," Torwald said, "but we've no idea where she came down. I brought us down within hiking distance of the alien settlement, but we don't know how much control she had. She might not have been able to bring the
Angel
down on this continent. Even if she's within a few hundred square kilometers of this place, one little ship will be awfully hard to find in unknown terrain. The aliens will find her first. I say we risk making contact with the aliens. Right now they're the only ones with a definite reason for
not
shooting us on sight."

"I hate to say it," Michelle said, "but you're probably right. A slim chance is better than no chance at all."

"I'll go for it," Kiril said.

Nancy thought for a while. "I guess so. They may already have the
Angel
in custody. If she didn't—" She couldn't say it.

"There's a little stream a few yards from here," Michelle said. "I'm going to go wash up before we set out. Kiril, are you up to walking, now?"

"Sure, I'm fine," she said. "It was my arm he broke, not mv leg."

"Don't go alone," Torwald said. "Nancy, go with her. And don't drink the water."

"Who's the doctor here?" Michelle said. "I know enough not to drink untested water." The two women disappeared into the brush.

"Tor," Kiril said in a low voice, "will you promise me something?"

"What is it?" he asked suspiciously.

"Well, I wouldn't ask Michelle, because she's a doctor and she probably can't do it, and I don't know about Nancy. But you gotta promise me that you'll kill me before you'll let Izquierda take me alive!"

Torwald didn't turn a hair. "Sure, Kiril. You can count on me."

"Thanks, Tor." She could tell that he meant it, that he wasn't just humoring her. She felt much better.

Torwald helped her stand, and after a wave of dizziness, she didn't feel too bad. They went down to the stream, which wound among rocks at the bottom of a little valley. She studied it with interest, because she had never seen one before. She was used to gutters, sewers, faucets, and even the Supernova's bathtub, but she had never seen water running freely on the ground. She decided that she liked the sound it made. Gingerly she knelt and splashed water on her face, obeying Michelle's warning to keep her mouth and eyes shut as she did. She thought she saw something swimming in the water, but it was small and indistinct. The water made her feel much better, although she knew she was going to be thirsty pretty soon.

"Let me check your arm," Michelle said. Kiril's forearm was encased in a plastic splint, part of the raider's med kit. It had a loop to go around her neck for a sling. Michelle poked at the arm, frowning with concentration, but not with concern. The swelling had gone down somewhat. The splint itched and was uncomfortable, but not unbearably so. "It looks good," Michelle reported when her examination was over. "You can travel."

"I won't slow you down," Kiril said.

"Then let's get moving," Torwald said. He looked at his wrist chrono, which had a built-in compass. "We came down directly north of the alien settlement. This planet has a radical angle of declination, but I've adjusted for that. As long as we don't get killed in some violent fashion, I should be able to bring us out right on target. It's not far enough for us to starve along the way. Everybody ready? Let's go." He stepped across the little stream, followed by Nancy, then Kiril. Michelle came last.

"Keep your eyes open," Torwald said, "and remember that little bugs can kill you as dead as big carnivores. Plants can be predators, too. And watch your step, I've been places where animals used pit traps. We'll steer clear of overhead branches where we can. On Chronus there's a critter called a reatador. It looks like a big spider and sits up in the branches of tall trees. It catches animals or people on the ground by throwing a noose around them and hauling them in."

"You're doing wonders for my nerves, Tor," Kiril said. "Back in Civis Astra all I had to worry about was my fellow humans."

"Don't worry," Torwald assured her. "You'll never encounter anything anywhere that's
that
dangerous."

The woods were fairly open, with trees regularly-spaced but not so orderly that they looked as if they had been planted. The trees mostly had smooth, green trunks, but Michelle told Kiril that trees on Earth mostly had thick bark that, was brown or gray. Most of the vegetation was green, but it was a different green than on the plants she had seen in hydroponics. Once in a while they saw small animals, but they never got a good look at them. The animals were shy and darted away as soon as they saw the humans.

"These things we're seeing don't act very dangerous," Kiril said hopefully.

"They wouldn't be skittish like that if they weren't afraid of attack," Torwald said. "There are predators around here someplace. But don't worry, me and my little beamer here will protect us." Kiril thought she could hear a disgusted snort from Michelle.

They managed to cover a few kilometers before darkness forced a halt. Kiril was relieved when they did stop. Despite her promise not to slow them down, she was far from being in top condition. Besides, she had found that a lifetime of dealing with streets, alleys, and rooftops had ill-prepared her for this kind of cross-country travel. It was not only tiring, but bewildering, and it left her in a state of confusion. She had never learned to get her bearings from things like landmarks or the sun. For ail she knew, they were going in circles, and that was undoubtedly what she would have been doing had she been alone. Torwald had experience in the wilds of a great many worlds, and the other two women were not inexperienced at this kind of travel. Kiril didn't like to feel incompetent at anything.

She knew, though, that she was a quick learner, and that should she live long enough, she could be as good as Torwald. She listened closely to everything he said, even when he seemed to be bragging or just rambling on to hear himself talk. She had discovered that he seldom spoke idly.

"We'll have to do without a fire," Torwald said. "We have no idea what kind of sensors are trained on this area. We don't want to be spotted by the navy or Izquierda, and I'd prefer to make contact with the aliens on our own terms."

"The navy and the Satsuma ship may not be up there, you know," said Nancy. "They may be gone. If a war has really started, they may have fled back to Earth. Or the aliens may have destroyed them."

"I don't know," Torwald said uncomfortably, "ships the size of the TFCS and the Supernova—surely if they'd blown, we'd have seen some kind of aerial display. They were in a low orbit."

"We've been asleep," Michelle pointed out. "And we don't know what kind of weapons the aliens might have. Maybe nothing so crude as big explosions. How could Izquierda be such a fool as to get us into a war with an enemy whose powers are completely unknown? Quite aside from the injustice of it, the sheer folly is beyond belief!" She sat on the ground, hugging her knees.

"Even the most superficial study of history," said Torwald in his most inimitably pedantic manner, "shows innumerable instances of precisely the same kind of folly. What is usually behind it is either fear, hysteria, or, more commonly, greed and a desire for power. 1 would say that Izquierda suffers from a double dose of the last two. I'll admit it's a little unusual to find all that evil rolled up in one man, but it's not unprecedented. Ordinarily it's more of a collective phenomenon." He crossed his arms and leaned back against a tree trunk. Immediately he sprang away with a bitten-off curse. "This thing's got some kind of acid in its sap!" He rubbed the back of his neck.

"So speaks our dauntless woodsman," Michelle said. "Come here, I have some alcohol swabs in this kit. Now we can all sit and watch to see if you break out in purple blotches." She dabbed at his neck with a swab. "You have a nice start on some inflammation, all right. If that was a contact poison, we may have some real trouble on our hands. I wish you'd follow your own advice for once."

"Do I have to think of everything? I have enough problems looking after you helpless women. Ouch!" She had poked the center of his inflamed neck with a sharp fingernail.

"We might as well get some sleep," Michelle said. "Tor, you take first watch. That burn on your neck would keep you awake anyway."

"You're all heart, Michelle," he said.

"I'll take the next watch," she went on. "Nancy, you take the third. Kiril needs sleep more than the rest of us, so wake up Tor when you're sleepy."

"I don't need to be babied," Kiril protested. She had lain down, exhausted, on a relatively soft patch of the grasslike growth. "I can stand my own watch," she mumbled, but she was already dropping off into sleep.

She woke feeling stiff. It was still dark. She sat up, suppressing a groan. Living aboard ship had made her soft, she decided. This ground was a lot softer than a doorway or a litter-covered basement floor, but it had left her feeling sore. Of course, back in Civis Astra she had never slept with a broken arm. Not that she'd lacked for savage batterings, though. She remembered one especially bad winter when she was twelve and got mixed up in somebody else's gang fight. A booted foot had cracked three of her ribs and she'd dragged herself to an itinerant healer-monk to have a gashed knee stitched. The following cold days and nights had been bad, indeed. All in all, she reflected, she had little cause for complaint about her changed situation. At least, for the first time in her life, she had somebody to share her misery.

"You awake?" came a whisper. It was Nancy.

"Yeah." She sidled over to where Nancy sat. "You been on watch long?"

"About an hour. No trouble so far. Just night-animal sounds. They can get pretty scary, though. There's something out there that screeches like a lost ghost about every fifteen minutes. I thought I'd had a heart attack when I first heard it."

"I must have been sound asleep," Kiril said. "I didn't hear a thing." They sat in silence for a few minutes, listening to the faint breeze stirring through the trees. Now and then they could hear animals moving stealthily through the foliage. There was a large moon rising over a range of hills to the east. It spilled a faint, bluish light into their small clearing. Once in a while they saw things with membranous wings flying between themselves and the source of the light.

"I've been on a lot of worlds," Nancy said at last, "but this is one of the prettiest. Most of them are either ugly or dangerous. If the aliens hadn't been here first, this would have been a prime world for colonizing."

Kiril wanted to keep her talking. "Do you think that's why the aliens are here? Are they that much like us?"

"We can't know yet, but I hope it's that way. It looks like our chances of survival are going to depend on communicating with them somehow. But how can we do that when
^v
all those scientists couldn't figure out their language?" Nancy slumped back disconsolately. "I wish we had Homer with us. He knows his way around. Mostly I wish we knew what happened to the
Angel.
If she crashed and they're all dead, I don't think I'll live through it, not again."