Star Soldiers (10 page)

And on hearing of the other need Crawfur unhooked one of the pockets of his own belt and contributed to the cause a Ciranian "sunstone" which drew light from a muffled lamp to make a warm pool of fire in the donor's hand.

"Might as well take this. My neck's worth more than that. Don't hesitate to ask—we all know what we may be up against. Tal, Kankon, Ponay." He roused his assistants and explained.

When Kana left the group he had the packet of sugar, the sunstone, a chain of Terran gold about a foot long, a ring made in the form of a Zacathan water snake, and a tiny orb of crystal in which swam a weird replica of a Poltorian lobster fish. He returned to his own place half an hour later the breast of his tunic bulging with glittering treasure, rings on every finger and arm bands braceleting his arms. The loot was sorted out under a lamp. This and this and this were eye-catching "come-on" pieces to be displayed as a lure. But this and that and that should be reserved as personal gifts to win the favor of chieftains or war leaders. He made up three packets according to their future use and put them away before he curled up and tried to sleep. Without the bright rim of the lamps about the campsite the heavy dark of the Fronnian night walled them in—they might be within a giant box trap, the lid slammed down upon them.

Kana could see those icy sparks of light which were the stars—suns which warmed strange worlds. And somewhere, overshadowed by the brilliance of so many others, Sol had its place, while around its yellow glory wound in their orbits the worlds he knew best.

Green earth. Out here there were other green worlds, as well as blue, red, white, violet, yellow—but none of them wore just the same tint of green as that which covered Terra's hills. Terra—man's home. Mankind had come late into space, and had been pushed to one side of the game Central Control managed. But there were many worlds where native life had never reached intelligence. What if man had been allowed to spread to those—to colonize? What if the very ancient legends of his race were true and there had been earlier trips into deep space from which the voyagers had never returned? Were there worlds where once Terran colonies had taken root? Where he could find his own distant kin free of the Central Control yoke, men who had won the stars by their own efforts?

He drifted into sleep thinking of that. But then he was crouched in a Fronnian thicket, a bloody knife in his hand—

"—up!" Kana rolled over. The dawn was gray and above him Bogate, rifle slung over his shoulder, marching supplies in place, stood, his thumbs hooked in his waist belt, his helmet gleaming in the growing light.

Kana rolled his own kit together hurriedly. The AL packets he crowded into the front of his tunic where he could reach them easily.

"Moving out now?"

"Shortly. Draw your rations and fall in."

Hansu and a picked party equipped with ropes were already busy at the rim of the canyon. Three men had worked their way, ledge by ledge, to the sliver of beach far below. There they took turns, one roped to another, wading and swimming out into the flood, wedging native lances and driftwood between the boulders, trying to make a barrier which might save a man, swept from his feet, from being washed away. It was plain that Hansu was determined to get them across the river.

The pioneers below had fought their way less than half the distance across when Kana, together with Bogate's scouts, started down. They fastened rifles, packs, and other supplies into waterproof coverings which were lowered on a makeshift platform faster than they climbed. Kana was dangling on a rope between two ledges when a shout which was half scream tore at his ears and nerves. He did not turn his head—he dared not. A moment later the rope a few feet to his right, taut seconds before with the weight of the scout who had crawled over the rim beside him, slapped the rock loosely—that weight gone.

Even when his boots rested on the next ledge Kana did not look down. He rested, spread-eagled against the wall, his fingers gritting on the rock, the sweat dripping from his chin.

Three ledges more and he reached the shingle. The men who had preceded him were still gazing downstream, a bewildered horror in their eyes. But there was no time to mourn as there had been none to save. Bogate slid down the last length of rope and was shouting orders:

"Get your gear, you Lothurian leaf eaters! We cross over and then we go up—and we do it in space time!"

They did it—if not in space time—with the loss of another man, sucked under by the current and smashed against a rock, then by some freak of the flood flung contemptuously back at them limp and broken. But roped, sometimes thrown off their feet and carried downstream, fighting from one boulder to the next, they got across. Another of their company, nursing an arm snapped like a twig during his final two-foot fight for the shore, remained there to watch the guide ropes they had left for those following.

Up the cliff they crept from handhold to handhold, shaking with effort, their fingers slippery with sweat, their hearts and lungs laboring. Salt stung in their eyes and the rawness of their hands, but they climbed.

Kana concentrated on the foot of earth immediately before his eyes, and then on the next higher and the next. This had gone on for hours—would go on and on without end.

Then a hand closed about the wrist he had extended for a fresh hold. He was lifted with a yank which brought him sliding on his face across the lip of the wall to lie panting in tearing gasps, too bone weary to reach for the canteen of water his mouth and throat craved.

He sat up as Bogate came along. There was a coil of rope about his waist—that must be knotted to other lengths, the whole dropped to form a ladder for the Horde.

Kana drank and was able to scramble to his feet when their rifles and packs were hoisted. Nor was he the last to fall in as Bogate gave the signal to move on—into the dark future of the mountains.

As they left the river the rest of the scouts fanned out. Only Kana continued with Bogate. He was a supernumerary in this operation, his duties beginning if and when they found traces of intelligent life. To his surprise, instead of ignoring his presence entirely, Bogate waited for him to catch up, asking:

"Just what do we look for?"

"Hansu thinks we may find Cos—they're a pygmy race supposed to inhabit these mountains—hate the Llor and are highly dangerous—use poison darts and build mantraps."

Bogate's reply to the sketchy information was a grunt. The wind was rising in gusts which whistled eerily between the heights, propelling the migrating puff-balls—circular masses of spiky vines which traveled so until they found water where they could root for a season. Of a sickly, bleached, yellow-green, they were armed with six-inch thorns and the Terrans granted them the right of way. This was the start of the Fronnian windy season. And to fight across the ranges during that period was to front dangers no Llor would willingly face.

A weird moaning rose to a shriek among the rocks far above them as the wind was forced through crevices and cracks. But for the most part the scouts were sheltered from the full blast by the ridges.

Here the soil was a mixture of gravel and clay, liberally salted with the rocky debris of slides. Each side canyon or gully had to be blazed with a fluorescent brand so that the Horde would keep to the main trail. They detoured around boulders taller than a man until Kana began to wonder why such a large number of landslides should occur in the length of a single dried watercourse. Suddenly the answer to that lay before his eyes and it was grim.

Sun flashes reflected from something half buried in the soil. He knelt to scrape away the earth. A Llor sword protruded from under a rock. And its haft was still encircled by the finger bones of a skeleton hand!

"Smashed flat—like a bug!" was Bogate's comment. The veteran's eyes narrowed as he looked along the way they had come and then on up the slit at the dusky shapes of the mountains. He had been too well trained by warfare on half a hundred planets not to mistake clues.

"Rolled rocks and caught 'em. Neat. This Cos work?"

"Might be," Kana assented. "But it was a long time ago—" He was interrupted by a shout which sent Bogate sprinting ahead.

The narrow canyon they had chosen to follow widened out into an arena—an arena where a deadly game had once been played and lost. Bones brittle with years carpeted the arid floor. And Llor skulls, very human looking, mingled with the narrow, fanged ones of guen, were easy to identify in the general litter, but not one skeleton was unbroken or entire. Kana picked up a rib, the bone light in his fingers. He had been right—those deep indentations could only be the marks of crushing molars. First there had been a killing and then—a feasting! He pitched the bone away.

Keeping aloof from the mass of ghastly relics the Terrans walked around the wall of the valley. There were no weapons in that gray waste, no remains of Llor war harness. Even the trappings of the guen were missing. The dead had been stripped completely. And since they lay unburied, the massacre must have gone unavenged.

"How long ago, d'you think?" Bogate's throaty bellow was subdued.

"Maybe ten years, maybe a hundred," Kana returned. "You'd have to know Fronnian climate to be sure."

"They got caught bunched," Bogate observed. "Larsen," he snapped at the nearest scout, "climb up and use the lenses—cover us from above from now on. I'll take point on the other wall. The rest of you—go slow. Soong, report back on the speecher. We haven't seen nothin' livin' so far. But we don't want
our
fellas caught like this!"

At a snail's pace they progressed to the far end of the valley of death, threading the narrow opening there as if they feared any second to hear the roar of an avalanche. But Kana, taking notice of the barren countryside, thought that the Cos would not ordinarily inhabit that section. The slaughter behind them might be the sign of some war—if Cos
had
caused that havoc. The tooth marks on the rib continued to haunt him. Some primitive peoples ate enemy dead, believing that the virtue of a brave foe could be so absorbed by his slayer. But surely those scars on the bone had never been left by the molars of a humanoid race!

There were other meat eaters in plenty on Fronn. The ttsor, large felines, the hork, a bird or highly evolved insect (the record-pak had not been certain) a smaller species of which was tamed and used by the nobles of the land for hunting, much as the ancient lords of his own world had once flown their falcons for sport. Then there were the deeter, whose exact nature was uncertain for they were nocturnal and dug pits to trap their prey. But those mysterious creatures inhabited the swamp jungles of the southern continent. Which left—the byll! But he had thought that those highly dangerous, huge, flightless birds were only to be found on the plains where their speed in the chase earned them their food. More dangerous than the ttsor—who did not willingly attack—the bylls were twelve feet of bone, muscle, wicked temper, and vicious appetite.

This mountain country was bare of vegetation except for a few clumps of knife-edged grass, withered and sear from the long dryness of the calm season. On the plains this grass was ruthlessly burnt off by the Llor, but in these mountain gullies it flourished in ragged patches to slash the skin of the unwary.

The scouts took hourly breaks, ate ration tablets, drank sparingly from their canteens and pushed on. The country about them looked as rugged as a lunar landscape in their own system, lacking all life. It was when the dried stream bed
they followed branched into two that Bogate called a halt. Both of the new canyons looked equally promising, though one angled south and the other north. The Terrans, shivering a little in the bite of the wind from the snow peaks, were undecided.

Bogate consulted his watch and then compared its reading with the length of the shadows beyond the rocks.

"Quarter of an hour. We split—return here at the end of that time. You"—he indicated four of the scouts— "come with me. Larsen, you take the rest south."

Kana scrambled up the wall of the northern fork, lenses slung around his neck. Zapan Bogate was in the lead and had gained on his companions. The man immediately below Kana was having heavy going. Slides blocked his assigned route and he had to make frequent detours.

It was by sheer chance that Kana caught that flicker of movement behind Wu Soong. A rock shadow bulged oddly. He swung his rifle and shouted a warning. Soong threw himself flat behind a rock and so saved his life. For the ugly death which had been stalking him struck—empty air.

Kana fired, hoping to hit some vital spot in that darting red body. But the thing moved with unholy speed, its long scaly neck twisting with reptilian sinuosity. He was almost certain he had hit it at least twice but its frenzied darts at the rock where Soong had gone to earth did not slow. No longer silent, it shrieked its furious rage with a siren blast which tore their ears.

A burst of white fire enveloped the byll. When that cleared the giant bird lay on the ground, headless but still struggling to move its shattered legs.

"Bogate," Kana shouted down, "those things sometimes hunt in packs—"

"Yeah? Fire the recall, Harv," he ordered one of the awe-stricken men. "That ought to bring Larsen. We'll stick together. If there's any more of them, stalkin' us in crowds, we're gonna be ready for 'em. And not all scattered out so close to dark."

Soong made a wide circle around the body of the byll to join the others as Bogate gave Kana an order.

"You keep an eye out—cover us back to the forks."

From then on they investigated every shadow, every crevice in the canyon walls. It was with a sigh of relief Kana saw them back to the fork where Larsen and his men waited. Bogate put them all to work at once, rolling up good-sized boulders, erecting a breastwork which should stop any byll's charge.

"Those things hunt at night?" he wanted to know.

"I don't know. By rights that one shouldn't have been back here in the mountains at all. They're meat eaters and their regular territory is the central plains."