Fugitive of the Stars

CHAPTER IX

She led. The wicked pink beam lashed out from some orifice in the rim of the hull. The big cone shot aside and the beam flicked by and hit the one-man craft, burning viciously against its bull. Grav-shields crippled, it up-ended and plunged downward, but meanwhile the big cone got two shots in against the hull and canopy of the escaping craft. Horne heard them clearly like two cracks of an enormous whip. The one against the hull was glancing. The one against the canopy hit square. The plastic fused. The men beneath it took fire like torches. It looked like a cruel death and it was, but it was also very quick. The hull floated on, tilted drunkenly, a great cup holding flame and ash and bitter smoke.

Ewan said something under his breath, and Yso turned her head away, looking sick. But there was no time for mourning. The big cone had made a perpendicular leap straight up and was now high above them. The smaller one was down on the deck, almost brushing the long grass.

Ewan's hands moved fast on the controls. Horne felt himself pushed hard into the belt and then into the seat, his neck all but snapping as the cone skittered wildly in an attempt to break free. Twice he saw pink flashes in the air. Then something hit them a violent blow. They were all thrown forward and down. Horne's belt held him in his seat but his head just missed the corner of Yso's firing panel on its way down to hit his knees. When he got his breath partly back he saw that Ewan was lying on the control board and not sitting up. Their cone was spinning in a crazy spiral, going up and away to nowhere.

Yso mumbled something about, “They hit us.” She was dazed, but hanging on, trying to make sense. Horne unclipped his belt. The motion of the cone almost hurled him through the canopy but he clung to the back of Ewan's seat with all his strength and pulled himself over to where he could grasp Ewan's shoulder.

"Is he dead?” asked Yso.

"I don't think so. Banged his head—” Ewan was bleeding profusely from the nose. The controls were all slippery with it. Horne heaved Ewan out of the way and tried to remember which levers were which. He had flown these craft before, but not for quite a while. He pulled one and it was the right one and the spinning motion slowed.

"Make it fast,” said Yso flatly. “They're right after us."

It must have been the smaller flier's less lethal beam that had hit them glancingly from below. Now both it and the big one were closing in for the kill. Horne said, “Keep ‘em busy,” and began the business of getting the unconscious Ewan unbuckled and out of the operator's seat and himself into it.

Yso fired with the cold fury of desperation, lacing the sky with pink beams.

The Vellae cones danced up and out of the way and then came on again.

"Now,” said Horne, taking the controls in his hands, “I'm going to make a crash maneuver. Stand by."

"Standing by,” said Yso.

Their cone flopped and whirled groundward. It looked disabled, but Horne kept its motion so erratic and deceptively shifty that it was hard to hit. The little Vellae cone stayed off. The big one followed Horne down, impatiently waiting for a clear shot.

When he was about twenty feet off the ground, Horne said, “Here we go.” Their cone zoomed straight up at terrific speed. Horne could feel himself being flattened down into the seat while the air shrieked around the canopy. “Fire!” he shouted. “Damn it, fire!” The big cone was just above them, was level with them, was under them. Horne saw the faces of the men for one split-second, as they understood what had happened and what was about to happen. Then they disappeared in a blossom of pink fire and fell away fast, dwindling to a dark trailing smoke, and the clouds were getting close enough to touch.

Horne adjusted the grav-shields. The dizzy upward falling slowed gradually and stopped. They hung motionless under a great curved belly of red-gold cloud.

Yso said, “Did we do it? Are we still alive?"

Horne grunted. “I think so."

He shook his head to clear it and looked down. The wrecked cones, three of them, were sending up lazy ribbons of smoke from out of the tawny grass, far below. The one-man flier had pulled back to where it could run, if it wanted to. It mounted a lighter weapon than the big craft, but it was faster.

The communicator buzzed. Horne turned it on.

A voice said, “Horne?"

Horne stiffened. A great wave of heat passed over him and then he was as cold as a piece of steel.

"Ardric,” he said.

The one-man cone hung glittering in the distance, under the brilliant clouds.

"Oh, no,” said the voice from the communicator. “Ardric is dead. He died in the wreck of the Vega Queen, and his family put on mourning and cried."

Horne began to curse him in a voice that quivered. “You lousy, yellow-bellied—” He reached out suddenly and grasped the control levers. Their cone streaked toward the hovering flier.

The flier darted out of reach with mocking ease, and he heard sound of Ardric's laughter.

"Try again, Horne,” he said.

A kind of blindness came upon Horne, so that he could see only the small cone with its glittering canopy and nothing else in the world. He hunched over the controls and tried again.

The little cone skipped and darted and whirled as swiftly as a sunbeam and he pursued it, tantalizingly just too slow, maddeningly burdened with the extra size and armament of his craft. But he would not give up.

Yso had reached and shut off the communicator. She was talking to him but he would not listen.

In the narrow space of the cockpit floor, Ewan stirred and groaned and got to his knees.

Horne barely heard them. He said to Yso, “Ready now. I'll get him on the next pass."

I'll get him, he thought. I'll burn him out of the sky.

He started to shove the control levers for another pass and Ewan knocked his hands away and tried to push him out of the seat. Ewan had been talking to Yso and had heard her better than Horne did.

"Are you crazy, Horne? He's just playing with you, waiting for more of his men to come. We've got to—"

Horne pushed him away. “Let me alone. I'll kill him."

Ewan swore. He hit Horne alongside the head. The blow stung Horne but it neither dazed him nor shocked him to his senses. It merely made him turn around and knock Ewan back into the cockpit with the same casual anger he would have applied to a wasp or a bee. Then he returned to the business of Ardric.

Yso screamed at him, shaking his shoulder. “Look there to the north, Horne! There, there!"

She was so insistent and shrill that he took his eyes away, from Ardric's flier for a second. And in the north he saw a flight of five cones, coming fast.

Horne shivered and ran his hands over his face, like a man waking from sleep.

He sent the flier racing away.

The communicator made its signal and he opened it again. Ardric's voice said, “It won't do you any good to run. We have the best fliers on Skereth. But I suppose you won't make it easy for us."

Horne did not answer. He did not have any words in him. He shut off the communicator. The cone fled through the brassy sky, above the yellow-tawny plain.

Ewan sat up, holding his injured face. “Head east as much as you can,” he said. “There are mountains there. We might be able to lose them."

Horne angled east. The jet unit roared wide open, but the Vellae cones crept slowly, steadily closer. Here nothing depended on the skill of the pilot. It was a simple and unarguable matter of mechanical superiority.

A heavy shadow on the eastern horizon grew high and thick and became a mountain range.

Horne measured the distance to the mountains, and then he watched the Vellae cones for a while, estimating the rate at which they were overtaking him. He computed mentally, and he didn't like the results.

"We aren't going to make it, are we?” Yso said.

Horne shook his head. “It doesn't look too good. If we only had a storm or even a low cloud to hide in."

But the storms were too far away and the clouds were all too high for the unpressurized, low-altitude cones.

Ewan said, “Let me back there."

Horne surrendered the controls without argument. It was Ewan's flier. Maybe he could do something more with it.

He did a little more. He nursed just a fraction of extra speed out of it. The mountains rushed at them. The Vellae cones continued to overhaul them, but not as fast.

There were lower clouds now, over the crests of the mountain peaks. “If only I can get into one,” Ewan said. “I'll try dropping down in a valley somewhere beyond the ridge and hope they go over us."

"Wouldn't it be better Yso started to say, and Ewan cut her short.

"You're about out of fuel. So that doesn't give us much choice."

A minute later he said, “Keep an eye out for peaks. Here we go."

The cone plunged into a mass of cloud and the whole world was lost beyond the thick dark mist.

Almost at once Ewan slowed his forward speed and shifted off on a sharp tangent. Horne and the girl sat tensely, straining their eyes for solid shadows in the mist. The Vellae cones had disappeared, along with everything else. Ewan jockeyed the flier through a broad gap of which both sides were invisible, between the peaks and crossed the backbone of the range. Then he began to drop with dangerous swiftness, looking for a place to come down.

There wasn't any.

Where the trailing cloud-mass thinned there were only sheer cliffs and sharp ridges, rockfalls and chasms that seemed to have no bottom. On this inhospitable mountain face there were not even any trees.

The jet coughed twice and died.

Momentum carried them a little farther, floating on anti-grav alone now and battered helplessly by every wind, blowing fiercely through the passes and around the slopes.

Horne said, “We might as well go down ourselves as get knocked down."

"Either way,” said Ewan, “we won't like it."

The cone dropped, wobbling down the lower slopes like a loose bubble while the wind tried to turn it over and smash it on the rocks.

Horne said suddenly, “I've got an idea."

He told them his idea, rapidly. Ewan grunted. “A-hundred-to-one gamble. But we might as well play it."

The clouds were still thick and low overhead and there was no sign yet of the Vellae cones.

"Can you bring her down there?” Horne said to Ewan, pointing to a ledge of rock halfway up an otherwise sheer cliff. The ledge slanted and a long crack full of rubble ran from the low end of it, angling down across a less precipitous shoulder of the mountain. It looked as though it might offer both shelter and a way down.

Ewan said sourly, “Of course, landing there without jets will be easy.” He started to play with the grav-shields, tipping the cone around so that its own attraction-repulsion balance brought it nearer and nearer to the ledge.

Horne pulled off his shirt and arranged it over the back of his seat, so that from a distance it would look as though someone was still sitting there.

"You too, Yso,” he said.

She stared at him, and he shouted, “Would you rather be modest or alive?"

Turning away from him, she peeled off her shirt and stretched it over the seat back. Then she sat hunched up with her arms folded across her front.

Horne had other things to think about. He helped Ewan out of his shirt one arm at a time while the cone flopped and heaved and side-slipped toward the ledge. “There,” he said, “that may satisfy them if they don't come too close."

The ledge flew at them, tilted crazily.

"Be ready to jump,” said Ewan, “the instant we touch."

Horne put his hand on the canopy release.

The cone cracked down hard on the ledge against the cliff face. Horne sprung the canopy. He practically threw Yso out. The cone toppled, tottered, and began to lift. Ewan jumped and landed on all fours. He was screaming at Horne. Horne saw the ledge going away from him and flung himself frantically into the air. He hit far too near the edge for comfort. Ewan grabbed him and dragged him in. They crouched together panting on the rock and watched the cone drift off, tossed and battered by the wind. When it was within shoo range, it was impossible to tell that the three bright shirts showing through the canopy had no people in them.

"All right,” said, Horne. “Let's find cover."

They scuttled along the ledge and down into the crack, which was much bigger than it had looked from a distance and full of big boulders. They crawled in like three animals among the crevices and lay there, watching.

Their derelict cone drifted farther and farther away. Presently one of the Vellae cones dropped out of the overcast and spotted it. Apparently Ardric's force had split up for the search. The Vellae cone made one pass at the derelict and hit it squarely with a beam on the first try. It burst into flame and began a spiral plunge downward. The Vellae cone hit it again on the way down to make sure. It crashed out of sight into a maze of narrow rocky gorges. The Vellae cone rose up high and hovered.

Presently the rest of the force joined it. They watched for awhile until the last thin wisp of smoke had blown away. Then they lifted up and went whistling over the ridge toward Rillah.

Ewan said tightly, “It worked."

Horne looked bitterly after Ardric and muttered, “Some day, so help me…"

Then the two men and the girl pulled themselves out from under the rocks and began the long and dangerous climb down to whatever lay below.

By Earth reckoning the descent would have taken them about a day and a half. This being Skereth, the sky was still burning with the furious colors of sunset when they stood above the last slope and looked out over the most God-forsaken badland Horne had ever seen on any world.

Red and purple and yellow sky, above red and yellow, brown and purple and sandy rock. And the rock was cut and gouged and churned as though in incitation of the stormy clouds above it, then frozen by some gorgon breath into a permanent nightmare.

There was no place to go but on. Thirst and hunger were vital things with them now. There might be water in some of those crazy cracks and where there was water there might also be food.

They went on, stumbling and staggering, while the glaring colors turned somber and died out of the sky and were dimmed in the rocks beneath, and gradually everything was made to look softened and lovely in the long, long twilight.

They didn't find any water. They found fine dry sand at the bottom of a serpentine crevice, and they followed the sandy bed partly because it was easier walking and partly because they no longer had a very clear idea of what they were doing.

Instinct and reaction still functioned. Horne stopped suddenly, reaching for his stunner. It was oddly heavy in his hand and he had difficulty gripping it. Yso stopped too and went down on her knees and Ewan stumbled over her.

"Quiet,” mumbled Horne. “Listen."

In the twilight and the empty rock, somewhere near them, something moved, and it did not move like anything human.