The Faded Sun Trilogy (43 page)

“No,” said Duncan. “No problem. We are going back to base now. Thank you.”

It did not work. The other younglings walked heavily about them, surrounding them, smiling with gaping
friendliness and at the same time blocking their way.

“Ah,” said Suth Horag-gi, dismounting from the sled. “You take pictures. Mri treasures?”

“Property of Stavros,” Duncan said in a clipped tone, and with the dispatch he had learned was humanity’s advantage over the slow-moving regul, he shouldered a youngling, broke the circle, and walked rapidly for the ramp of their own ship, disregarding a youngling that tried to head them off.

“Good fortune,” said that one with the proper youngling obsequiousness. “Good fortune you are back safe, kose Sten Duncan.”

“Yes, thank you for your concern. My regards to the reverence bai Hulagh.”

He spoke in the regul tongue, as the regul had spoken in the human. He shouldered the heavy, awkward youngling with brutal force that to a regul was hardly painful. The push flung it slightly off balance, and he passed it. Galey overtook him on the ramp, almost running. They boarded, found another youngling in the aircraft.

“Out,” Duncan ordered. “Please return to your own ship. We are about to go now.”

It looked doubtful, and finally, easing past them, performed the suck of air considered polite among regul, smiled that gaping smile and waddled with stately lack of haste down the ramp.

Duncan set the gear down on the flooring and hit the switch to lift the ramp the moment the youngling was clear, and Galey shut the door and spun the wheel to seal it.

Duncan found himself shaking. He thought that Galey was too.

“What did they want?” Galey asked, his voice a note too high.

“Check out the ship before we lift,” Duncan said. “Check out everything that could be sabotaged.” And Galey stripped off the breathing mask and the visor and swore softly, staring at him, then flung them aside and set to work, began examining the panels and their inner workings with great care.

There was nothing, in the most careful examination, wrong. “Wish we could find something,” Galey said, and Duncan agreed to that, fervently. The regul still waited outside.

Galey started the engines and slowly, testing out controls, turned the aircraft and hovered a few feet off the ground, running a course that vengefully dusted the regul craft, passing close enough to send the regul who were
outside scrambling and stumbling ponderously toward cover.

Senior officer, Duncan should have rebuked that. He did not. He settled into the cushion while the aircraft lifted, his jaw clenched, his hand gripping the cushion with such force that when he realized it, long after they were at altitude enough that they had options if something went wrong, his fingers were numb and there were deep impression in the cushion.

“Game of nerves,” he said to Galey. “Game of nerves—or whatever they were going to do, they didn’t have time.”

Galey looked at him. There were the patches of half a dozen worlds on Galey’s sleeve, young as he was. But Galey was scared, and it was a tale that would make the rounds of the regular military of
Saber
, this encounter with regul.

“This is Stavros’ business,” Duncan told him, for Galey’s sake, not for the regul, not even for Stavros. “The less noise made, the better. Take my example.”

His reputation was, he knew, widespread among the regulars: the SurTac who had lost his head, who had gone hysterical and accused a high-ranking ally of murder. Doubtless it would stay on his record forever, barring Stavros’ intervention, barring a promotion on Kesrith so high that the record could no longer harm him—and that was at present unlikely.

Galey seemed to understand him, and to be embarrassed by it. “Yes, sir,” he said quietly. “Yes, sir.”

The lights of Kesrith base came finally into view. They circled the area for the landing nearest
Flower
, and settled, signaling security with the emergency code. Duncan unstrapped and gathered the photographic equipment from its cushioned ride in the floor locker. Galey opened the hatch and lowered the ramp, and Duncan walked down into the escort of armed human security with a relief so great his knees were weak.

Across the field he saw another aircraft come in, close to the Nom side of the airfield, where the regul might be closest to their own authority.

A security agent tried to take the equipment from Duncan’s hand. “No,” he said sharply, and for once security deferred.

He lost Galey somewhere, missed him in the press and was sorry he had not given some courtesy to the regular who had done so competently; but
Flower
’s ramp was ahead, the open hatch aglow with lights in the surrounding night. He walked among the security men, into the ship, down the corridors, and to the science section.

Boaz waited, white-smocked, anxious. He did not deliver the gear to her directly, for it was heavy, but laid it on a counter.

There was nothing for him to do with it thereafter. He had completed his task for the human powers of Kesrith, and sold what the mri counted most valuable in all the world. The knowledge of it, like that of the ovoid that rested here behind voice-locked doors, was in human hands and not in those of regul, and that was, within the circumstances, the best that he could do.

The majority of
Flower
personnel were in for the night after the initial excitement of receiving the records. The labs were shut down again, the skeleton night crew on duty. The ship had a different quality by night, a ghostly hush but for the whisper of machinery and ventilation, far different from the frenetic activity in its narrow corridors by day.

Duncan found the prospect of a bed, a quiet night in his own safe quarters, a bath (even the chemical scrub allowable under rationing) utterly, utterly attractive, after a three-hour debriefing. It was 0100 by the local clock, which was the time on which he lived.

The lateness of the hour did not stop him from descending to the medical section and pausing in Niun’s room. There was neither day nor night for the mri, who lay, slack and deteriorating despite the therapy applied to his limbs, in the influence of sedation. Luiz had promised to consider a lessening of sedation; Duncan had argued heatedly with Luiz on this point.

There was no response now when he spoke to the mri. He touched Niun’s shoulder, shook at him gently, hating to feel how thin the mri was becoming.

Tension returned to the muscles. The mri drew a deeper breath, moved against the restraints that stayed on him constantly, and his golden eyes opened, half-covered by the membrane. The membrane withdrew, but not entirely. The fixation of the eyes was wild and confused.

“Niun,” Duncan whispered, then aloud: “Niun!”

The struggle continued, and yet the mri seemed only slightly aware of his presence, despite the grip of his hand. It was another thing, something inward, that occupied Niun, and the wide, golden eyes were dilated,
terrified.

“Niun, stop it. It’s Duncan. It’s Duncan with you. Be still and look at me.”

“Duncan?” The mri was suddenly without strength, chest heaving from exertion, as if he had run from some impossibly far place. “The dusei are lost.”

Such raving was pitiable. Niun was a man of keen mind, of quick reflexes. He looked utterly confused now. Duncan held his arm, and knowing the mri’s pride, drew a corner of the sheet across the mri’s lower face, a concealment behind which the mri would feel more secure.

Slowly, slowly, the sense came back to that alien gaze. “Let me go, Duncan.”

“I can’t,” he said miserably. “I can’t, Niun.”

The eyes began to lose their focus again, to slip aside. The muscles in the arm began to loosen. “Melein,” Niun said.

“She is all right.” Duncan clenched his hand until surely it hurt, trying to hold him to hear that. But the mri was back in his own dream. His breathing was rapid. His head turned from side to side in delirium.

And finally he grew quiet again.

Duncan withdrew his hand from Niun’s arm and left, walking slowly at first, then more rapidly. The episode distressed him in the strangeness of it; but Niun was fighting the sedation, was coming out of it more and more strongly, had known him, spoken to him. Perhaps it was alien metabolism, perhaps, the thought occurred to him, Luiz had adjusted the level of sedation, more reasonable than he had shown himself in argument on the subject.

He went to the main lock, to the guard post that watched the coming and going of all that entered and left the ship. He signed the log and handed the stylus back.

“Hard session, sir?” the night guard asked, sympathy, not inquisitiveness. Tereci knew him.

“Somewhat, somewhat,” he said, blinked at Tereci from eyes he knew were red, felt of his chin, that was rough. “Message for Luiz when he wakes: I want to talk with him at the earliest.”

“Recorded, sir,” said Tereci, scratching it into the message sheet.

Duncan started through the lock, expecting it to open for him under Tereci’s hand. It did.

“Sir,” Tereci said. “You’re not armed. Regulations.”

Duncan swore, exhausted, remembering the standing order for personnel out at night. “Can you check me out sidearms?”

“Sign again,” Tereci said, opened a locker and gave him a pistol, waiting while he put his name to another form. “I’m sorry,” Tereci said. “But we’ve had some action around here at night. Regulations aside, it’s better to carry something.”

“Regul?” he asked, alarmed at that news, which he had not read in the reports. Regul was all that immediately occurred to him, and had he not been so tired, he would not have been so impolitic.

“Animals. Prowling the limits of the guard beams. They never get inside them, but I wouldn’t go out there unarmed. You want an escort, sir? I could get one of the night security—”

“No need,” he said wearily. “No need.” He had come in from the open, and though armed, he had never thought in terms of weapons. He had walked the land in company with mri. He regarded no warnings of these men that were bound to the safety of
Flower
and the Nom, who had never seen the land they had come to occupy.

They could stand in the midst of Sil’athen and never see it, men of Galey’s breed—solid men, decent.

Unwondering.

He belted on the gun, a heavy weight, an offense to a weary back, and smiled a tired thanks at Tereci, went out into the chill, acrid air. A geyser had blown out irreverently close to
Flower.
The steam made the air moist and clouded. He inhaled it deeply not minding the flavor of it, found it grateful to walk the track by himself, in silence, without Galey. His head ached. He had not realized it before this. He took his time, and found nothing but pleasure in the night, under the larger of Kesrith’s moons, with the air chill and the stars glittering, and far, far across the flats, lights illumined the geysers that spouted almost constantly. The land had become a boiling and impassable barrier, guarding the approaches to the ruins of the mri towers, that only the most intrepid of Boaz’ researchers had scanned from the air.

Steel rang under his boots, the gratings that made firm the surface of the causeway. It was the only sound. He stopped, only to have complete silence for a moment, and scanned the whole of the horizon, the glittering waters of
the Alkaline Sea, the lights of the city, the steaming geysers, the ridges beyond
Flower.

Rock scuffed, rattled. The sound seized his heart and held it constricted. He heard it again, spun toward the sound, saw a shadow shamble four-footed down a ridge.

It hit the guard beams and shied back, whuffing in alarm. Then it reared up against the sky, twice the height of a tall man, a great, long-clawed beast.

The dusei are lost
, Niun had said.

Duncan stood still, heart pounding. He reckoned the danger posed by these great omnivores, these natives of Kesrith. Venom-clawed and powerful enough to rip a man to shreds. This one tried the beam again, again, disliking the sensation, but single-minded in its attempt.

A second beast showed on the crest of the slope, coming down-hill.
Flower
’s spotlights came on, adding to confusion, her hatch open, men pouring out.

“Stop!” Duncan shouted. “No farther! Don’t shoot!”

The dus tried the beam again, heaved his bulk forward, and this time energies of the defense system played along his great sides, useless. He broke through, reared up and screamed, a moaning, hollow cry that echoed off the walls of Kesrith’s Nom.

A rifle beam cut the dark.

“Stop shooting!” Duncan shouted.

The second beast broke through, a sparkle of light against its sides, a stench of singed fur. They huddled together, the two invaders, backed rump to rump, and kept shifting nervously.

Niun’s beasts.

Duncan saw them head for the ramp, toward the open door, where the men were—saw shots fired. The beasts shied off.

“No!” he cried, and the beasts backed, turned and came toward him, snuffling the air. Back at the hatchway, men shouted at him. They could not fire; he was too close to the beasts. Lights played on them, blinding. The dusei, locked into their inquisitive obstinacy, paid no heed. They came, long-clawed feet turned in, claws rattling
on the mesh, heads lowered, ursine monsters—slope-shouldered, almost comic in their distracted manner.

The larger dus nosed at him, sniffed noisily from its pug nose. Duncan stood still, heart pounding so that the blood raced in his veins. The beast nudged him, nothing gentle, and he did not fall; it nosed his hand, investigated it with the mobile center of the lip.

And they circled one before him and then the other, shifting position in a strange ballet, constantly between him and the men with the rifles, uttering low, moaning cries. He took his life in pawn and moved, found that they moved with him. He stopped and they stopped.

They were surely Niun’s beasts, that had come a long, hard journey from Sil’athen—far longer a trek for them than for men’s machines. And with uncanny accuracy they had found Niun, across a hundred miles of desert, and singled out the place that confined him.