Trader's World (2 page)

"Stand still." Lucia raised her weapon and bathed Connery in low power thermal flux. There was a louder hum of fury for a couple of seconds, then the whole swarm rose into the air and buzzed off to the south end of the valley. "Now, stop the dance practice and get right inside before they come back."

Connery grunted, swore, and squeezed into the narrow doorway.

"Little tunnel here, goes back a couple of yards," he said after a few seconds. His voice was breathless through the radio. "Then opens up. Dirt walls, pile of hay on the floor—must be a bed. Some dried food around—rotten looking stuff, I wouldn't want to touch it. No sign of a fireplace, must do all their cooking outside. Batch of sharp knives hanging on the wall, and a spare warhead for that surface-to-air missile. And somewhere there has to be . . ." There was a long pause. "But there isn't. There's no sign of any other way out."

"Concealed, maybe? Look for a hidden tunnel."

"Lucia, there's just no space for it in here. Come on, see for yourself."

Lucia took a quick look around the quiet valley. Nothing stirred. After a few moments she hurried forward and went in through the little door.

The room was no more than ten feet square, with a ceiling too low for her to stand up. She looked around carefully, then went across and moved the pile of hay to one side. Behind it lay nothing but a faceless dirt wall. Small ventilation holes, each no more than three inches across, had been cut in the forward wall. She went across and put her eye to one, and found she was looking out onto the floor of the valley.

She walked across to another one and peered into it briefly. "It's just the sort of mud hole the Hivers would choose to live in. The floor rises so they can never be flooded out, and the airholes run downward. So it
must
be Hivers—but where are they?"

Connery shrugged and led the way outside. The pair stood for a minute or two, gazing all around them.

"You stay right here and cover me," Lucia said at last. "Don't argue about it. I know I'm overweight, but I'm still a smaller target than you. If you have to talk, use radio contact—and whisper." She moved faster and went ahead on the final slope.

The hornet sting was itching intolerably. Connery removed the gloves of his suit and scratched furiously at his sore neck. He watched in silence while Lucia walked the full length of the valley, turning to look around her every few paces. Finally she began to retrace her steps.

"Nothing?" Connery asked.

"Nothing." After a few more moments she went across to the little pond of the water catchment and stood staring at it. It was built into the side of the valley and stood with its clay and stone retaining wall waist high from the main valley floor. She walked slowly around its semicircle, staring at the base.

"This is the surprise," she said. "You've seen more Hiver communities than I have. How many of them have ponds like this to catch rainwater?"

"None of 'em. Every Hiver I've met has been too scared of being trapped underground by water. That's why they build the Hives the way they do, to make it impossible. Hell, most of 'em hate water so bad they won't even wash."

"Right. So the last thing that any Hiver would ever do is this." As Lucia spoke she was bending down by the foot of the catchment wall, pulling at a rectangular stone in the base.

"You'll empty the whole thing over you if you're not careful," Connery began; but as he was speaking, the big stone came free to reveal that it was no more than a facing lamina of thin rock. Lucia crouched down toward the dark hole that lay behind it. She was still at half-stoop when a small, mud-smeared figure sprang out, dived between her legs, and ran away madly around the catchment pond. "Grab him!"

It was a skinny, naked boy, moving as fast as a startled bird. Connery was already responding to Lucia's cry. He made a dive and grabbed the fleeing figure as it tried to swerve past him.

"I've got him. Ouch!" Connery had released his hold, and the boy was off and running again. He shook his hand violently. "The little bugger bit me on the thumb. Come on, let's get him!"

The youngster was heading right up the steep side of the valley. He ascended the slope at twice the speed that Connery could manage, but once on the flatter surface above he had no chance. Connery's long legs ate up the ground and caught him within fifty strides. There was a brief struggle, then Connery had lifted the boy off the ground and was holding him with one arm around his neck and the other pinioning his arms.

The captive went on fighting desperately. When Lucia Asparian caught up with them she found herself staring at a purpling, half-strangled face and a pair of terrified and angry eyes. She looked at the boy in silence for a few moments, then shook her head.

"He was the only one in there?" Connery asked.

She nodded. "He was. I took a good look. I'm not sure what we should do next, but I think we can go back to the Surveyor now. Daddy-O wanted us to find an anomaly. I guess we've got one."

CHAPTER 2

The boy was undersized, emaciated, and feral, with black hair shoulder length at the back and chopped crudely short over his ears and forehead. His age could have been anywhere between ten and sixteen years. Connery waited, inspecting his injured thumb and glowering at the boy, while Lucia went on a cautious walk through the growing crops.

She took her time, systematically exploring every row of vegetation. A thorough search of the valley revealed no sign of other people. Connery kept one eye on her progress, and one on the boy. All his attempts to ask questions were totally ignored. Finally he abandoned the effort.

Lucia Asparian rejoined Connery and they began to head back to the airship. "Do you think he understands
anything
you've been saying to him?" Lucia asked. She had switched from the less-familiar Hiver dialect to standard Trader.

Connery still held the youth in a tight grip. His thumb had stopped bleeding from the bite, but he was not risking another one. He looked at his captive's angry profile and skin-and-bone rib cage. "I don't know. Could be he's playing dumb and looking for another chance to run for it. Or he could be a true wild boy, somebody who's never been exposed to language before; but if he is, then where the devil did he learn to launch that missile? Here now—" Connery tightened his grip further, but his voice took on its first trace of sympathy. At the sight of the aircar as they breasted the slope, the youth had groaned in dismay and was struggling to free himself. "Take it easy, young fellow, we won't eat you."

He had to drag the boy the rest of the way to the ship, and began to lift him bodily into the cabin. He grimaced as his face came close to the lad's dark head. It was alive with lice, crawling through the mud-spattered and matted hair.

"Lucia, give me a hand here. We can't question him in this condition. He needs cleaning, and he needs clothes—and I'd guess he's long overdue for a decent meal. I'm going to dump him into the cleanser and let it wash him, but he'll probably be scared of it and fight like a demon. I think we ought to put him right out."

"Agreed. And as soon as he wakes up, maybe we'll find out a bit more about him." Lucia climbed into the vehicle ahead of Connery. She administered the painless spray injection while the boy was being lifted in. He had no time to struggle. Within a few seconds he was lying unconscious on the cabin floor. While Connery strapped their find into the automatic cleansing unit, she prepared the on-board interrogation system.

The cleansing unit opened two minutes later to show the boy soaped, rinsed, and disinfected from head to toe. His stick-thin limbs showed the sores and ulcers of severe malnutrition.

Lucia was ready for him. She picked up the unconscious body, wrapped a warm towel around him, and laid him gently on a bunk. While she strapped him down and attached the terminals and headset that put them into three-way communication with Daddy-O, Lyle Connery sat frowning on the other bunk.

"We're ready to go home," he said, "but what are we going to do with
him
? We can't put him back in the valley, living like that. You saw the food supply—he must have been scraping along close to starvation. Can we drop him off at one of the Hives?"-

"If we can find out where he came from originally. Maybe he was abandoned, or maybe others will be coming back to the valley any time now. He'll be awake in a minute or two. I'll see what I can find. Why don't you get some food ready while I'm doing it? I think he's more scared of you."

She remained quietly by the boy's side. He was alert and struggling as soon as his dark eyes opened. Lucia Asparian smiled at him, kept her voice soft, and said in Hiver local dialect, "Don't be afraid, we are not going to hurt you. What is your name?"

He looked terrified, rolled his eyes sideways to try to follow the line of the terminals attached to his temples and throat, and clenched his teeth tight.

Daddy-O's interrogation circuits back in the Azores caught the prisoner's brain patterns and the subvocalized word, and provided the local inputs to Lucia Asparian.
"His name is Mikal,"
said the voice in her headset. There was a fraction of a second delay while the information passed through the Chipponese satellite relays, then Daddy-O added,
"A high level of fear beyond what can be explained by his surroundings. I think he is disturbed by direct input. He understands Hiver, and it will be better if we restrict ourselves to that as his signal from you. But I will tap his visual and emotional codes, so that you can see his responses. He will be unaware of that operation."

Lucia nodded. "Mikal," she said, and the boy's eyes bulged. "Mikal, do you have another name?"

The jaw clenched tighter for a moment, then there was an imperceptible shake of his head.

"He does not think of himself as having any other name,"
Daddy-O said.
"If he ever lived in the Hives, he left there before puberty. That is their time for caste naming. There is no strong associated visual signal for your question."

Lucia again tried to guess the age of the youth on the bunk. Certainly no less than ten, and probably no more than fifteen. "You live down there in the valley," she said. "Do other people live with you?"

There was another imperceptible shake of the head.

"They no longer live there,"
Daddy-O said.
"One moment. We have visuals."

A clear image of two people's faces appeared to Lucia, apparently hovering above the bunk. Daddy-O had a direct feed through her optic nerve. Both the people she was looking at were male. One of them was perhaps a couple of years older than Mikal, the other seemed to be in his late twenties.

"Your two friends in the valley," Lucia asked. "What happened to them, Mikal? Where are they now? Are they hiding from us?"

This time there was a gabble of Hiver words. "Why do you pretend you don't know? You took them, you
destroyed
them." And within a second came a sharp sequence of images: the side of the valley . . . six bulky figures with grotesquely enlarged and boxlike heads rushing down the steep slope . . . hand weapons at the ready. As they came closer Lucia saw that they wore protective Hive-armor. The "heads" were ribbed and padded helmets, with holes for eyes and mouth. As the scene ended, Mikal's two companions were seized and thrown to the ground.

"Destroyed them." Mikal shivered, and closed his eyes.

"Possible, but unlikely."
Daddy-O's electronic voice in her ears was as calm as ever.
"You know the customs of the larger Hives."

Lucia reached forward and took her captive by the hand. "Mikal, we are not Hivers. Open your eyes, and take a good look at me, and see for yourself. Did you ever see a Hive warrior who looked anything like us?"

The dark eyes opened. He stared hard at Lucia, and some of the fear drained from his expression. "No." His voice was perplexed. "Warriors cannot be women, and the man with you does not look right. But you have a machine that flies in the air—just like the one that took away Gregor and Pallast."

"There are many machines like ours, Mikal, in many places. We came from far away, beyond all the Hives." She was pleased at the change in him. At least he sounded rational now. "But how did you escape capture?"

"They didn't see me at first. I was up at the far end of the valley. I dropped down and hid in the corn until they were all gone." His voice was bitter with self-reproach. "I was afraid—too afraid to help."

Daddy-O provided another image: two struggling figures beaten to the ground, dragged back up the slope. The view of the scene was not clear, screened by tall stalks of ripe wheat.

"One full year, and they never came back," Mikal continued. "I am ashamed." He turned his head to one side, and would not look at her. There was a long silence while Lucia waited for visual signals from Daddy-O that never came.

"They never came back," she prompted at last. "But why do you say your friends were destroyed? The people who came here were warriors from a southern Hive—and they do not kill prisoners."

"Not killed dead. I did not mean that. We were not supposed to be killed dead. Destroyed. It was already planned for Gregor and me, if we had stayed one more month. To serve as Royal Suppliers to the Hive-Lord, and ensure his immortality. They were going to . . ."

This time the images from Daddy-O formed a long, kaleidoscopic thought sequence, a progression that flickered on through time and space but returned again and again to a single intolerable moment.

Lucia saw the inside of a Hive.

. . . narrow chambers and corridors, scarcely tall enough to stand in, burrowed deep into red sandstone . . .the central chamber, lit by the green glow of fluorescents, a group of women wearing the full cowl of Hive-Lord servants. Along one wall stood the rusting rows of ancient weapons, the anti-tank guns, radar units, power lasers, and flamethrowers. Opposite them sat the Royal Suppliers, huge, soft-skinned, smiling.

". . . a great honor, Gregor. You and Mikal have been called to the service of the King . . ."

. . . glowing red lamps, flickering red torches, the long wooden table in the central chamber, the ritual gold knife held ready . . .