The Great Hydration

CHAPTER TWELVE

Roncie didn’t hear them coming.

Like most hot deserts, Tenacity grew cold during the night. Roncie huddled in his tent, trying to sleep. A faint thrumming sound, like a rope vibrating in the wind, filtered through the camp. It was the sound made by the drilling rig, dipping down through the basaltic crust, its e-m beam constantly returning itself to the resonance frequencies of the rock crystals it met to pull them apart molecule by molecule. A mound, or giant snake, went winding out over the desert, made up of the dust and rubble being shuffled out of the hole.

The work was going well. The project was turning out to be an even easier job than had been anticipated. Castaneda’s men had been able to determine that only eight strategically placed shock tubes would be sufficient to realign the fracture plates. Three drilling rigs had been delivered by engineering so far, with another on the way. This camp, site A, had already drilled five kilometers down. When it reached its planned depth of ten kilometers the rig would be moved out to do the same elsewhere.

Roncie had managed to fall into a doze when a stealthy opening of the tent flap woke him up. Starlight showed through the opening, outlining an indistinct figure.

He sat up, thinking it was one of the survey team. “Swanson?”

Reaching out, he turned on the light, and only then discovered that the figure at the tent flap was a greenskinned humanoid. It had silvery slanting eyes, and a large headcrest. As was typical of its kind, the humanoid was naked except for bangles on the arms and a metal circlet at the neck. Roncie would have raised the alarm by yelling at the top of his voice, but for the fact that the dehydrate was pointing a weapon at him. It had a dull grey stock—or so it appeared in the lamplight—and a spring-loaded mechanism for shooting the helical blade which featured so prominently at the front end. Having seen the way such a blade could scythe the flesh from a man’s bones, Roncie froze.

Damn. He didn’t even have his DE beamer. He had given it to the other dehydrate, the one called Hrityu.

The desert dehydrate had not yet discharged the blade, which gave Roncie heart. He reasoned that verbal communication might well be an advantage. Slowly, with infinite caution, he allowed his fingers to search the bedside table until they touched the translator necklace.

Still moving slowly, with an attempt at apparent casualness, he draped it on him in time to hear the dehydrate speak.

“Greetings, Roncie of the Earthmen.”

Now he remembered encountering this form of humanoid before. He strove to recall the name.

“You are… Karvass? Of the Artaxa?”

The membranes on the other’s face underwent a peculiar writhing motion, possibly the equivalent of a nod. The tent flap admitted two more Artaxa who ranged themselves on either side of the first. They, too, carried flingers.

“You must come with us,” Karvass said. “Our tribal elders have much to ask you.”

Roncie sprang from his bed, standing in the insulated utility suit he used as sleeping wear because of the cold. “We are under the protection of the Tlixix—”

These words seemed to provoke the Artaxa, who took a step forward and used his free hand to seize Roncie by the arm. The Earthman was surprised at the wiry strength of his slim, smooth muscles. Karvass dragged him to the tent flap. At the same time another Artaxa was searching the tent. He opened the lid of the water cask and recoiled as the smell of water hit him. Hastily he closed the flask and threw it to the third Artaxa who caught it deftly.

Also on the bedside chest was Roncie’s uneaten supper and his breakfast for next morning, in the form of trays of sandwiches in transparent wrappers. The Artaxa poked the preparation with a forefinger.

“It is the tribesman’s food.”

He tucked the trays under his arm and turned to go.

With the guide rail of a flinger digging into his ribs, Roncie could not resist being ushered outside. The camp was in darkness. The desert, sulfur-coloured by day, became a powdery alum under the massed stars. It came to Roncie that the visitors from those stars had taken local politics too much for granted. Assured of the power of the Tlixix—as well as of their own superior armament—they had posted neither guards nor warning devices.

It was time to regain his nerve. Roncie cried out at the top of his voice.

“Swanson! Pettiford! Help me! I’m being kidnapped!”

Too bad, he was still wearing the translator. His voice rang out in both languages across the camp. The Artaxa quickened their pace, bundling him along. They turned as lights came on and heads poked out of tents further off. There were shouts of alarm.

Flingers clanged, flenching blades whirred. One tore through a tent covering, but the Artaxa were not aiming properly. Roncie was hustled into the desert and flung to the floor of a sandboat face down. In seconds the vehicle was in motion. With a slithering sound it mounted the nearby dune, putting the camp out of sight, then went coursing away.

Roncie groaned. There was no vehicle in the camp in which to make pursuit.

He could only hope that O’Rourke would take the matter seriously enough to track him down and mount a rescue, or at the very least persuade the Tlixix to do so.

But there was no guarantee of that.

Hrityu had left his wheeled vehicle in the underground camp. He travelled now in a much larger Artaxa sandboat, holding thirty warriors.

Forty similar vehicles were ranged on either side in a wide echelon, sandscrews propelling them at top speed. Raising his head above the side of the boat, Hrityu was filled with excitement at the sight of the task force.

True, it bothered him a little that his new allies, the Artaxa, were green like the Crome, and not blue like the Analane. Colour was a special bonding in battle. When the fighting got furious would the Artaxa remember who were their friends and who their foe?

He hoped so. They were, after all, a light green, not the deep green of the Crome.

The great rolling dunes were left behind. They came among isolated hills between which blew a wind that rippled the yellow sand in complicated patterns. Here, too, were the first of the standing stones that marked the margins of Analane tribal territory. It alarmed Hrityu to see one of these tumbled on its side.

Before long the echelon of sandboats swept past a food mountain, on whose rocky side grew the blue-green mould necessary to Analane existence. Again he was alarmed. No Analane were to be seen. The mould crop was being left ungathered.

Worse, in the distance he saw lifeless bodies, relics of a recent fight.

The sandboats slowed to avoid the boulders which strewed the terrain hereabouts. Topping a rise, the riders beheld a great saucer-shaped depression.

It was the main camp of the Analane, and at present it was the scene of what could well have been their last battle.

There had clearly been a great slaughter, and the Analane were never numerous. The females and young were gathered at the centre of the amphitheatre. The surviving male warriors were arranged around them in a star formation. A horde of green Crome, a few black Gamintes among them, surrounded the star and mounted charge after charge, shrieking war-cries. Flenching blades flashed. Gobbets of flesh, sliced from the bone, flew in all directions as warriors fell and died on both sides.

Steadily the numbers of the Analane were diminishing.

Hrityu hugged to his chest the weapon given him by the ‘Earthman’. The sight of his tribe being exterminated filled him with a greater rage than any he had known before.

He set the weapon’s ring to full intensity. Better to leave one Crome dead than injure ten who might rise again!

The sandboats came to a halt poised over the lip of the depression. Twelve hundred warriors climbed out. The spectacle of the battle had aroused them. The Artaxa marshal raised his flinger and uttered a loud ululating cry, to be answered by a throbbing, “Hoohoohoohoo…”

The task force rushed shrieking down the slope.

Karl Krabbe took the news of Roncie Northrop’s abduction with mild annoyance.

The report had come from O’Rourke. “A dehydrate raiding party, it seems.”

Krabbe and Bouche were still in the great hydrorium, in an apartment given them by the Tlixix. ‘Apartment’ was perhaps the wrong word. The walls were made of a light metal glistening with condensation. Furnishings consisted of boulders from the artificial seashore to use as chairs. They smelled of seaweed.

The partners agreed it would be good to get back to the Enterprise.

“Have you been able to keep track of him?”

Testily, O’Rourke replied, “May I remind you, sir, that Northrop is of doubtful loyalty? That he has already tried to abscond once? Maybe we shouldn’t worry too much about him.”

“Please be in less of a hurry to divest us of useful personnel, O’Rourke,” Krabbe drawled. “They’re hard to come by out here. See if you can find him.”

“Yes, sir.” O’Rourke’s voice was grumpy. “Though the trail will be cold by now. He was taken an hour ago. And the interferometric telescope isn’t tuned to infrared, so we won’t be able to start looking till the region rotates into daylight. Even then we would have to move the ship to do a proper job.”

He ended the last on an interrogative note, as if encouraging Krabbe to tell him not to bother. After a pause, he added, “I take it this effort should not be allowed to delay the main activity in any way?”

“Well, of course, the project is the main thing.” Krabbe yawned, resignedly aware that he had given O’Rourke the excuse he sought to do little or nothing to help Northrop. He was feeling tired. “You’d better tell Castaneda what’s happened.”

After O’Rourke had signed off he turned to Bouche, who was toying with his supper. “Why do you think those pesky desert-dwelling Barsoomians made off with our bondman? I thought the Tlixix had them well under control.”

Bouche shrugged. “Maybe they want to see if he’s any good to eat.”

He conveyed a morsel of reddish crustacean flesh to his mouth. He did not appear to relish it.

For some perverse reason, he had got the Enterprise to send down a whole crateful of lobster thermidor.