Mutiny (6 page)

The day got older quickly. Cole was kept under heavy guard, given some foul-smelling food that his captors seemed to relish, and questioned interminably. He answered every question freely and willingly, never once telling the truth, but creating such a cohesive fabric of lies that it would take the Bortellites a few days to check them all out.

By midafternoon he had pretty much decided that Christine Mboya had either misunderstood his hint or—more likely—had totally missed it. If there had been no attack by now, there probably wasn't going to be one, and that meant if he was to escape and get back to the
Teddy R
he was going to have to do it on his own.

He knew Pinocchio would be home to hundreds, probably thousands, of men and women who would help him if he could make it that far. The trick was getting from here to there; getting all the way back to the ship was something he couldn't even bother considering yet.

All right
, he told himself.
Think it through. They haven't laid a finger on me. That could mean they're waiting for a master inquisitor; but more likely it means they're afraid of harming the goods before they deliver me to their superiors; after all, I'm a hell of a trophy. Still, I can't just make a break for it; they may want me alive, but they'll shoot me down before they'll let me get away.

He looked around.
Okay, then—can I get my hands on a weapon? That means disarming a guard. Which one—the closest, the smallest, or the best-armed? The closest, I suppose. I can do it fastest. But there's a couple of hundred of them. One weapon won't do me much good. All right, so a weapon is out. What about their helmets? Is there a single oxygen source on the ship I can disable? No, I can't see any—but that means they've got a limited supply of breathable air. I don't care how much they compress it, those packs their helmets are tied into can't hold more than a day's worth—and they've been here more than two-thirds of a day already. That means a ship or a shuttle, something with an air supply, is due to land here in the next few hours.

And
that
gives me a time frame. Whatever I do, I have to do in the next two or three hours, tops—and I probably have to do it without getting my hands on a weapon.

He stood up and stretched. The sun was starting to get lower in the sky. It had to be soon. The mountain terrain was so rocky and uneven that he could break a leg—or his neck—racing across it in the darkness.

And then it dawned on him: as hard a time as he would have racing down the mountain, the Bortellites would be considerably more at risk. If he fell, he'd get a bruise. If he fell the wrong way, he might break something—but if a Bortellite fell, he could crack his helmet, and that would be fatal, for if the Bortellites could breathe Rapunzel's air, they wouldn't be wearing helmets in the first place.

So all he needed was a head start. They didn't dare negotiate the landscape as recklessly as he could. The trick was getting that start.

There
had
to be a way. If there was a problem that was incapable of solution, he hadn't come across it yet. Sometimes it just required a new perspective, a different way of looking at things.

And suddenly he knew.

It wasn't a matter of looking at things, but rather of things they
couldn't
look at. The key was the Bortellites' huge eyes. That implied a world with a small or distant sun, a world where they needed those enormous pupils to function. That was why they were working at night. He'd assumed they felt a need for secrecy, but he realized lie was wrong. They'd already infiltrated Rapunzel, and they had the best weapons. There was no need for secrecy. They were working at night because they were more comfortable in the darkness.

So he'd been looking at it all wrong. They could negotiate the mountains in the darkness. But what they
couldn't
do was fire with any accuracy at a moving target that was running toward the setting sun!

Cole figured that he had about half an hour before the sun was at exactly the right position. He decided to make use of the time, studying each Bortellite as he came or went, trying to see what surfaces and angles they avoided, which ones they were most comfortable on. Steep slopes didn't seem to bother them. They dug those hooflike feet into the ground and leaned forward as they walked. But if there was any rubble on the paths, any loose rocks, anything that could cause them to stumble, they avoided it. If they came to a sharp turn, they looked first before they took a step. They didn't seem to be aware they were doing it, but it helped Cole plan his escape route. Steep didn't matter; twists and turns and obstructions did.

Let me check one last thing, just to make sure I'm not committing suicide here.
He slowly adjusted his position until there was a guard between him and the setting sun. He looked at the star through the glass of the Bortellite's helmet. It wasn't polarized, which meant they would be every bit as blind looking into the low-hanging sun as he hoped.

He had about three minutes left.
Is there anything I've overlooked, any way to distract them during the first ten or twenty seconds?

I wonder
. . . , he thought.
Your shoulders are rigid, and your arms are joined very differently from mine. I'll bet you couldn't scratch an itch on your back if your life depended on it.

His hand snaked down to his pocket. They'd taken his weapons, of course. He felt around. Had they left him anything? Then his fingers came into contact with three coins. He closed his hand around them, withdrew it carefully, then stood still, waiting for the sun to drop just the tiniest bit lower.

When it did, he whipped his hand around his back and threw the coins. One of them clicked off a helmet forty feet away. Another bounced off a Bortellite's wrist. Both Bortellites emitted little exclamations of surprise. Cole didn't turn to look, but his guards did. Since their bodies weren't capable of allowing them to throw something behind their backs, they never considered that Cole might have been the cause of the exclamations. They turned to see what had happened, and as they did so Cole took off, straight toward the sun.

The maneuver only bought him about three seconds, but that was better than nothing. Pulse fire tore up the ground around him, but their eyes hadn't adjusted yet. At this angle the sun bothered his eyes; it had to be excruciating to them. He dove over a slight rise as a laser beam barely missed him, then began racing down the rockiest slope in a zigzag pattern.

The element of surprise had given him a fifteen-second head start, but now they were chasing him down the slope. He couldn't continue running straight into the setting sun; the terrain wouldn't allow it. He saw a rocky outcropping about thirty yards ahead. If he could make it there, he could change direction before they saw him do it; that might help him extend his lead by another few seconds.

He heard the thud of a body falling and chanced a quick look back. The Bortellite closest to him had slipped on a patch of gravel, and the one immediately behind him had fallen over him. The terrain was such that no Bortellite was going to risk jumping over both bodies, so they began altering course and running around them, and that bought him still more time to add to his margin.

He reached the outcropping, took a hard left, and ran past a number of caves. The rocky ground was too hard to show any footprints; that meant some of his pursuers were going to have to inspect each cave, just to make sure he hadn't ducked into one of them.

There was a forest coming up on his right, and his first urge was to head for it and hide among the trees, but he realized that all they would have to do would be to train their laser pistols on the trees and both he and the forest would go up in smoke.

He knew he had to do something soon. When the sun dipped just a little lower, he'd lose his advantage. He'd still be able to negotiate the rocky surface better than they would, but their eyes would adjust to the dark far better than his, and their fire would become that much more accurate.

He couldn't just keep running. No matter how fast and surefooted he was, he couldn't outrace an energy pulse or a laser beam. He glanced up the mountain. Could a good loud yell start a landslide? He doubted it—and if it could, he'd be caught in it, too.

He looked at the forest again.
What's the point? They'll just set it on fire.

And then:
Wait a minute! I've been looking at it all wrong! It won't be a furnace—it'll be the biggest damned lightbulb on the planet!

He veered for the trees and was less than ten yards into them when the first laser beam hit a huge old tree, which erupted into flame. He kept going, never slowing his pace.
They can't shoot around or over me, not with laser pistols. They've got to burn 'em one at a time until the fire spreads and- takes on a life of its own. All I have to do is keep ahead of them and hope the forest doesn't go on for miles.

The ground leveled out and he increased his speed. He could hear the wood and leaves crackling behind him, could smell the acrid scent of burning wood, but he didn't look back. After he'd gone a quarter of a mile the heat became oppressive, and he sensed that the fire would soon surround him.

He thought he saw a clearing a little way ahead, and he forced his legs to carry him across that final stretch of ground. When he arrived he saw that it wasn't a clearing but rather a mountain stream wending its way through the forest. With burning branches falling all around him he didn't have time to see if it was more than a few inches deep; he simply plunged into it and hoped the current was strong enough to carry him down the mountain before falling trees blocked his way.

The water was cold, but not icy. It was about four feet deep, and he tried to stay beneath the surface except when he needed to take breaths of air. Rocks tore gouges in his legs and belly, but he didn't dare to swim on the surface until he felt he'd put almost a mile between himself and his pursuers. They weren't going to swim in a stream that had hidden rocks, not with those helmets, and they weren't going to make any progress through the blazing inferno they'd created. They'd have to walk around it, and they had no way of knowing that he hadn't been caught in the conflagration. They'd keep looking, of course, but with a decreasing sense of urgency. He was out of visual range by now; unless one of them lucked out and spotted him with a sensor, he was probably safe for the time being—and the chase had begun so suddenly that he didn't think any of them had had the presence of mind to grab a sensor before racing after him.

Which didn't mean he could stop or even slow down. He rode the stream another mile, then climbed onto the shore and began walking alongside it. When the area became more open, he turned away from the stream and began descending along rockier ground.

The sun finally set, and he had to proceed more carefully, fully aware that the advantage was now all with the Bortellites. His legs began cramping. He ignored the pain as long as he could, but finally he had to stop. He counted to two hundred, then got up and began walking, a bit more slowly this time.

He looked up the mountain, hoping for a sign that would let him know how close they were and how vigorously they were pursuing him, but they used no lights and there was simply no way to know. He was reasonably sure that they'd circle the forest and, finding no sign that he had emerged on the far side, would assume he'd been caught in the fire. Then one of them would spot the stream and suggest he'd used it to escape the blaze. They'd send a few soldiers down the stream to be on the safe side, but if he could keep going for two more hours he was in the clear, because they weren't going to get too far away from where their shuttle would land. He may have been running low on energy, but they were running low on their oxygen mixture.

Suddenly he heard a shuffling sound on the path below him.

How the hell did they get past me? I thought I had at least a mile on them.

The sound repeated, and then he saw the silhouette of a large four-legged animal. It sniffed the air, caught his scent, and bolted in the opposite direction while Cole breathed a sign of relief.

He continued walking for another fifteen minutes, and then he saw a shuttle of alien design approaching the mountain. It hovered near the spot where he'd been held all day, then began descending, and he lost sight of it.

He felt pretty confident that any Bortellites that were still following him would be returning to the mountaintop now to replenish their air supply. They'd tell the shuttle about him, and he could expect the ship to start searching the mountainside. He considered altering his course, staying at this altitude for a few miles, and then descending again, but he rejected the notion; the shuttle could cover much more ground than he could. He'd be better off trying to get off the mountain than elude the craft while still on it.

He saw another stream in the distance and approached it. This one was broader than the last one and flowing more rapidly. When he got there he took a step into the water, then another, and realized that this stream was almost six feet deep down the middle of the groove it had worn into the mountain. He stretched out and let it begin carrying him down the mountain, hoping he didn't hit too many submerged rocks. He rode the stream almost to the foot of the mountain and stopped only when it reached a huge mud-and-wood dam that had been constructed by some local animal.