Starfist: Blood Contact (15 page)

"You might've killed him!" Lowboy shouted.

Cameron whirled on the others. "Yes," he grated, "and I'll kill you, Lowboy, if you don't get out of my way. You bastard, don't think I don't know you'd put a knife into me if you had the guts." He paused.

"Okay. We're going. Remember this, Lowboy, the rest of you too." He was addressing those who were going to stay behind. "If we find anything useful and if we make it back here, we all share in it. The four of us are risking our asses to keep all of us alive, and if anybody forgets that, I will personally kill him." He slung the blaster and clambered up the barricade without looking back. The other three followed him.

"I guess he's right," a skinny pirate named Mouse said. Lowboy whirled and smashed his fist into the man's face.

Aquarius Station was situated about thirty kilometers north of the pirates' cave, on a large, lush island in the marsh that covered most of the land in equatorial Waygone. To get there they had to negotiate an extensive swamp that began at the base of the mountain and continued northward unbroken for hundreds of kilometers. When they had crossed the morass the year before, they'd been fleeing in terror from the things that had caught them at Aquarius Station. They'd been in better physical shape then; the trek would be far more difficult now. But Cameron knew land navigation, and he was sure he could guide them through the swamp to Aquarius. The whole time they were gone, from when they left the cave to their return, they would be vulnerable to those things. Crossing the swamp was the time of greatest danger, but they were desperate. Almost a full year had passed since their disastrous raid. They had to do something.

The first day's travel through the swamp was terrible, slogging through the mud and floating vegetation.

Except for Cameron, none of them had experienced such physical exhaustion before. And they were constantly fearful that those things might suddenly appear and kill them all. After the first kilometer they were breathing in wheezing gasps and the air burned their lungs; every few meters they had to stop, to rest. Every step was contested by the clinging, viscous mud, and when they wrenched their legs out of the stuff to take the next step, noxious fumes assailed their noses and burned their throats. Soon their sense of smell became accustomed to the fetid swamp gas, but quicksand was a constant hazard, although by far not the worst. Unidentified creatures scraped and slithered against their legs as they waded through the slime, and at every moment they all expected the real terrors to lunge up at them from the mud. The heat and humidity were enervating, and in their weakened physical condition the four pirates succeeded in covering only a few kilometers after struggling all day long.

They remembered none of those things being quite so bad the first time through the swamp, but back then molten lava wouldn't have stopped them since they were all too terrified to take much notice of the stink, heat, and muck. Around dusk that first day they stumbled upon a hummock of grass big enough to hold all of them. It floated tranquilly in a large, shallow, scum-crusted lake, but they were too tired to object when Cameron declared it would be their campsite for the night. Exhausted, they climbed up onto it and collapsed. Fortunately, they had brought a lot of water with them from the caves—but little to eat.

The darkness soon grew impenetrable. All around them things thrashed and splashed in the shallow water, and the hissing and screeching of creatures hunting and dying in the forest on the fringes of the lake, not to mention flying creatures of all sizes that swooped upon them out of the darkness, constantly interrupted the fitful naps they were able to snatch. At dawn they were still exhausted.

Before it was fully light enough to see well, an elongated creature about a meter long and as big around as a man's thigh slithered out of the mud onto the hummock, evidently as surprised to find the humans there as they were to see it. Maya buried her knife in its head.

"Let's eat it," Labaya whispered, and they fell to the task with their knives. Inside the carcass they found soft white flesh, which they ate raw. It was somewhat slimy, but they felt refreshed by the meal.

"This ain't half bad," Minerva said. During their exile the pirates had eaten a wide variety of the local fauna with no ill effects, but until that morning they always had cooked the meat thoroughly.

Hunger sated, they watched the sun come up.

"This might be a right nice place," Maya said, resting her head against Labaya's chest, "if it wasn't for those...well, you know." She shuddered and nodded vaguely toward the sea, only a few kilometers from where they rested.

"Right now I don't give a damn," Labaya said. He had been a stocky, heavily muscled man before they were stranded, but Dugas Labaya had been reduced by starvation to a scarecrow. The women's hair was long and matted, and all of them were covered with bruises and lacerations. Minerva absently scratched an insect bite on her shin that had bled profusely before clotting but was bleeding again. She hardly noticed. Neither man had cut their hair or beard in weeks.

Cameron laughed. "Look at us," he said. "Don't we really look like pirates now!" The others did look and then started laughing. He stuck his nose under his armpit and sniffed. "Shit! We smell worse than this goddamn swamp!" he added, and they all laughed even harder.

"Shhh! Let's keep it down," Cameron cautioned suddenly, remembering. "Don't let's make any more noise than necessary."

"Well, so far, so good," Labaya said.

"Georgie, why don't we just stay here the rest of the day? Relax?" Minerva suggested.

Cameron thought about that briefly. He was feeling better after the meal, and would have welcomed a rest. But he rejected the idea. "Look, we'll hole up for a few days when we reach Aquarius, but staying here is dangerous. Besides, it'll get hotter than blazes once the sun's really up. We need to get across this damn swamp and into the Aquarius." He gestured up the waterway, deeper into the swamp.

Automatically the others glanced in that direction, just in time to see something very big break the surface of the water, then submerge in a swirl of mud and green slime.

"Jesus God!" Minerva whispered. They all froze. The creature did not surface again, but a huge ripple marked its progress under the scum. Fortunately, it was heading away from them.

"Damn thing was fifteen meters long," Labaya whispered in awe, "and that was just the part I could see!"

Cameron swallowed. "Well, whatever it was, it wasn't one of them."

"Hell, George, we don't know what they are, so how do we know this thing ain't just a—a—a variety of some sort?"

"Look," Cameron answered, standing up, "it isn't one of them. We slogged through this soup all day yesterday and nothing came after us. We can't stay here. Let's get going again."

It took four more days to cross the swamp. At dusk on the fifth day Labaya, who had warily climbed a cycad-like tree to get their bearings—if he could see, he could be seen—spotted the large and badly overgrown island that had held the scientific colony known as Aquarius Station.

"It's no more than a klick dead ahead," he reported. He grinned at Cameron. "You guided us dead on, Georgie. How the hell'd you do it?"

"I had some experience, Duggy," he answered shortly. "Did you see any sign of life?" The four of them were crouched in a tight circle under the fronds in the diminishing daylight, heads close together, afraid to talk in a voice above a whisper. It was at Aquarius Station they'd been attacked, and none relished the thought that in a little while they would be walking among the remains of their late friends, if the encroaching vegetation and the swamp's animal life had left anything recognizably human behind after all this time. Cameron hoped the intervening year had given nature ample time to dispose of—what was left.

"We've got to be careful. I'll take the point," Cameron said. "The rest of you follow me at five-meter intervals. Walk slow and careful. Labaya, you take the rear. All of you keep your eyes on the person in front. If I stop, you all stop. I'll give you simple hand signals and you pass them on. We'll be on dry ground soon, no water swishing around, so let's do this in the proper militar-y-uh, cautious manner. No talking until we get in there and establish a defensive perim—er, make sure there's no danger. Okay?"

The others nodded. During the preceding days they had come to respect Cameron's judgment and guts.

And he'd taken them that far without incident; they were confident they'd make it. They were also sure that nobody else in the band of survivors could have done it.

But they were not so confident Aquarius Station was unoccupied.

Carefully, Cameron parted the fronds in front of him. To his left was the main administration building.

Behind that was the bungalow complex where the scientists had lived. Various outbuildings lay scattered randomly about the cleared space. None of the pirates knew what they housed, since their brief visit the year before had been unexpectedly interrupted. During that time plants and vines had reclaimed much of what the scientists had taken from the wild, but the place was not yet so overgrown they couldn't easily get around. Several swamp buggies and airfoils were rusting on a parking stand just beyond the forest fringe. About a hundred meters straight ahead was the landing pad for suborbital vehicles. Long dark shadows stretched across the compound. The sky opposite the setting sun was already aglitter with stars.

They would have to move before total dark descended; their only source of light was the sun.

But they required food, clothing, and weapons immediately. If they could satisfy those needs, Cameron felt he could salvage the station's transmitter, maybe contact the rescue party. It'd been almost a year since the attack. The Confederation must have dispatched a rescue mission already! But food first.

Then clothing. Then weapons. Those things could be killed with plasma weapons, spectacularly killed.

There had to be weapons of some sort locked away in one of the buildings. He'd killed several of those things himself during the attack.

Cameron thought for a moment. He signaled for Minerva. "Bring the others," he whispered. She nodded and beckoned to Maya, who was almost hidden in the shadows; she in turn gestured Labaya to join them.

"I say we spend the night right here," Cameron whispered.

"I don't think I can make it another night," Maya almost sobbed. Cameron shivered. The clammy night dampness of the forest was already beginning to enfold them. It would be more comfortable inside one of the buildings. Cameron looked back across the compound. It was so dark now he could only just make out the administration building's outline. Well...

"Georgie, let's try to make it inside one of the buildings. It'll be a little warmer and drier inside. The place looks dead. At least maybe we can get some rest until morning."

Cameron did not think the things were around, and if they did come, the buildings would give them some protection. "Follow me," he said. "Put your hand, on my shoulder," he told Minerva. "We'll keep contact that way, so nobody gets separated in the dark and makes a lot of noise stumbling around."

When Minerva put her hand on Cameron's shoulder he felt that she was shaking.

They had quickly gathered the scientists and technicians together in the largest room in the admin building, those the pirates hadn't killed immediately.

"Why bother getting them together?" Rhys had asked. "We're just going to kill them anyway. What difference does it make if we kill them where we find them or kill them in a group?"

But Scanlon wanted to find out where the things they wanted were. If the pirates went around randomly killing the scientists, he wouldn't get that information and they'd have to spend more time in their pillaging.

"Yi-i-i! " someone screamed from outside. A man stumbled through the door. Cameron couldn't tell who it was because the flesh was bubbling off the bones beneath the right side of the man's face and down across his mouth, leaving his tongue flopping about in a lipless, cheekless maw, the white bones of his skull above the jawbone entirely exposed. As the pirates and scientists watched, transfixed, the flesh continued to dissolve off the man's head. The brain still lived, his heart and lungs still worked, but his features simply evaporated before their eyes! As he staggered blindly into the room, his eyeballs liquefied in their sockets. He was screaming, but as his tongue, larynx, and trachea liquefied, he could only emit a wheezing, blubbering gurgle. With each breath a hideous bubble of bright red blood spurted out his windpipe. Finally he crashed to the floor, where he lay wracked with spasms as his lungs and internal organs turned to sickly ooze. Blood spurted from his dissolving jugular as his heart labored to supply his brain, but that organ suddenly ran out of his skull as a putrid yellowish mess that mixed obscenely with the bodily fluids spreading out beneath him. With a final convulsive spasm, he was still.

The pirates stood there as if frozen by a violent arctic blast. But the spell was broken by a fusillade of blaster bolts being fired outside and more horrible screams. Scanlon took a step toward the door just as an inhuman giant rushed through. Scanlon fired automatically and the thing flashed into vapor. The brilliance of the flash blinded Cameron, and the wave of heat that washed over him made him briefly think he was going to be consumed by flames. But the heat passed as suddenly as it hit, and his vision cleared quickly.

"We have to get out of here!" Scanlon screamed, his voice breaking. They bolted for a door on the far side of the room. Cameron was saved because the panicky Scanlon went through without checking what was on the other side.

Cameron awoke with a start. It had been a dream. All was quiet save for the buzzing and hissing of fliers outside beginning the search for food. He blinked, then wiped the perspiration off his forehead. The others lay like heaps of rags, still sound asleep. It was morning, and outside, the black night had turned a dull gray. Silently he cursed himself. He'd been on guard the last hours of the night and had fallen asleep, like a damned boot.