Hook saw Terifia lift her rifle. He saw the blank, ghoulish, hungry look on her face. She was not beautiful; but she had been nice-looking and when she smiled she improved a thousand percent. But, now, in this hectic moment of blood and terror, her face showed bone-taut, scraped, burning with killing fury.
Hook took the Krifarm Sharpshooter away from her. "What about that sea and that marvellous black sand?"
She turned drugged eyes to him.
"What the hell are you about, Hook? Give me my gun!"
Hook knew he was acting like an idiot. These Voydun were by nature prey. They lived down here on Voyden and the Curls from Stellopolis hunted them and exploited them and used them.
What difference was there at base between a multisystem conglomerate deciding a planet was no longer profitable and shutting down its enterprises there, and the Curlmen simply shooting these planetary inhabitants? In one case a planet would revert to a primitive living-style level, where probably many would starve before systems were redesigned. The econorgs wouldn't worry about that. They'd be taking their profits from another planet which for the moment was viable as a business locale. And in the other case the Curlmen were merely killing these people directly, with guns, instead of with the equally deadly weapons of interstellar economics.
The end results might be the same. But in Ryder Hook's eyes there were differences.
"This is not a game, Terifia. This is murder."
"Nonsense! Give that gun to me! By the Great Salvor, Hook! You'll be in trouble!"
"Since when have I been out of trouble?"
Felton was shooting away, picking his targets, gleeing. The others were shooting. Most were not very good shots, otherwise the whole group of running people below would have long-since been dead. Foylty took a shot at a woman and succeeded in blowing her head off, whereat he cursed and snapped the rifle up for a shot that would pay better dividends in the game he played.
Hook flew across and took the Krifarm away and threw it into the ferns.
Foylty looked at him as though he was mad.
Well — maybe he was.
He took out the Tonota and showed the muzzle to Foylty.
"You tell these people to stop shooting, Foylty, or I'll melt your guts down into slag."
Lars Cu-Foylty, the very important Curlman of Stellopolis, could not understand.
He tried to speak and Hook cuffed him around the cheek with his left hand.
"Shout, you bastard! Tell 'em to stop shooting. You've got to the count of three. One, two, th —"
"Stop!" screamed Foylty. "Stop shooting!"
They picked up his voice over their scarlet enjoyments. The shooting slackened and died. Felton, out in front, looked back. "You crazy, Foylty? I'm having fun!"
He shot down at a man and hit him in the leg. The explosive bullet tore the leg off high up the thigh.
Hook slid the Tonota away so fast Foylty didn't see it vanish. Hook's Zable-White lifted and, one-handed, he shot. Felton's leg vanished at the hip.
"Now stop shooting, you bastard gonil!"
The screams of sheer horror now came from a different source from the one from which they had racketted so recently.
"You'll —" gulped Foylty. He shook his head. "I don't know what you're trying to do. But you're a dead man!"
"Yes. Now shut up and do as you're told. Call out for a new matra. The hunt is over for the day." Foylty was clever enough not to argue. He called out over his radio and then Hook said: "And tell 'em to send down a medic team to look after these poor devils. They'll want whole blood as well as stellar plasma — and arm and leg buds for grafting. Tell 'em, Foylty, or I'll melt your backbone into ash."
Foylty relayed the message. He had to make himself unpleasant to his fellow Curlmen in star city before they understood the situation. The medical supplies and robot medics began to come down through the new matra block.
"Oh, Hook!" said Terifia. She floated near on her ag-pak, looking more disturbed even than she had immediately after the attack on her life. That she could place in context. "Hook! What are you interfering for?" She did not try to touch him. "I don't understand."
"Maybe I don't, either."
Hook knew with an unlovely self-morbidity that he'd been talking a lot lately, talking too much, and not getting into any action. Well, this was more like old times.
"The Curlmen must organise the Exper, Hook! You know that. Why are you interfering like this, stopping them? They'll have to re-do all this tomorrow."
A chill of despair? Flowing icily through Ryder Hook? Maybe.
He said: "I don't feel sorry for anyone in the whole damned galaxy, Terifia. I pity no-one. Justice comes to those who can pay. The more you pay the better the justice. I'm demanding payment now, with a gun; and these damned Curlmen are paying me — the payment is to get off the necks of these Voydun."
"That is quite out of the question," said Foylty. He had got over the impossible indignity of having a gun stuck in his guts by a madman. Now he was able to take charge of the situation once more. "The Exper has to go on. You have merely interrupted the programme. You are a nuisance, Hook, and will be dealt with back in Stellopolis."
"Hook!" said Terifia, and her face betrayed something more than Hook bargained for.
Hook said again that line he'd found interestingly useful before. He jammed the gun into Foylty's stomach.
"Tell me why I shouldn't kill you."
Lars Cu-Foylty gestured. His hand remained perfectly steady. He gestured negligently, in complete command.
"There are many reasons, Taynor Hook. You would die yourself, not necessarily immediately afterwards. If I am dead your protection is gone. You are a man who seems to object to killing, as witness your atavistic antics now, and whilst for the life of me I can't understand your stupidity, at least to kill me would be to deny what you seem set on doing. Are those enough reasons?"
"If I'm as stupid as you say I am, I don't need a reason to shoot your guts out past your backbone. Think of that."
Foylty flinched. But he came back with: "Hatred and violence against the Curlmen cannot move us."
You had to hand it to the curd; he knew what he was talking about.
The medics below were having some difficulty in sedating the wounded Voydun. The furred slobbery creatures would, with screams and shrieks, keep flailing away at the robots, trying to escape. But, after a time, they were all sedated and patched up, with instat-injects of blood, with plasma paks dripping into their veins, and those who had lost limbs having the buds of new growths grafted to the stumps. That left those who had had their heads blown off or their insides too badly mauled for surgery. Hook looked down and then back at Foylty.
"You murdered fifteen of them, Foylty. You and your hunters. The others have to be given a chance of life."
"You can't use that gun, Hook, and you can't keep awake for very many more revolutions of star city. I think we'll be back to carrying on with our perfectly proper Exper work soon."
"What you do with your faked melodramas for sick minds in Exper don't concern me. I just have this abjection to your slaughtering these people for your amusement."
"You refer to the Exper you were privileged to attend?"
"Yes. Go back to the studio and shoot some more of those. You don't need real people —"
Foylty chuckled with a bright good humour that all Hook's gun had no power to quell.
"You are a fool, Hook! We have to do these programmes. What you experienced was not a dramatic representation. It was real. It was really happening. It didn't go as well as I'd hoped. What we have done here today, before you fouled us up, will give a great deal of pleasure in future Expers. We use real people, Hook, to give us our Exper fun!"
"You mean to fly there and tell me you kill so as to enjoy the feelings of death coupled in with killing — "
"I shot a man just now. When the Exper is through with processing I can relive this period and not only shoot the gonil, I can be in his mind and experience
myself being shot. Believe me, Hook, there is no sweeter experience in all the galaxy."
Hook could see that.
He slashed the Tonota Eighty around Foylty's face, left him drifting senseless on his ag-pak, and took off for the matra block.
The hunting rifles began to sigh after him at once, and a shell burst in a bright flash on the silicon portal. He left Terifia to find her own way back. He had an appointment with a star cutter — not his own damaged one but the first one he could liberate — and then it would be deep space for him.
Terifia's wail screamed after him.
"Hook! Wait for me!"
He turned in that weaving jinking erratic path over the jagged forest, shouted back. "Keep clear of me, Terifia! You're likely to get yourself killed!"
The new matra block had been set up in that cleared area of ferns, and his crazy flight for it circled over the forest and then bent inwards, like a boomerang. A medic robot trying to get out of the way was struck by a bullet and tumbled end over end, spraying wiring and transistors and blood paks and plastic boxes of bud-grafts. Hook ducked down beyond the mess. If anyone brought an energy gun into the play, now —it would no longer be play.
A thick half-drugged voice bellowed over the din.
"Don't kill him!" Hook recognised Felton's hate-filled voice. The man yelled more orders, waving his arms, for he was strapped to a para-med skeleton so as to keep the leg-bud nicely grafting. "Burn the matra! Hurry! Stop him getting away!"
Hook backpedalled furiously.
Despite Felton's ferocious orders the power-gun that crisped the matra block would have taken him into the blast as well. He felt the roar of displaced atoms coruscating about his ears. He was spun helplessly up into the air on the outskirts of the fireball, feeling the heat crisping the hairs on his body, scorching intolerably through his closed eyelids. The safety-suit gave him perhaps seventy percent protection.
At the top of the parabola he opened his eyes and looked down, everything tinged with luminous water-reflections of red and violet from his streaming eyes.
Like gathering barracuda, like closing jaws, like — oh, like any outriders of doom, the hunters closed in. The matra had been fused into slag. There was no way back to star city for Hook. The power gun in the grip of one of Felton's guards would vapourise him the split second Felton gave the order. They would shoot his arms and legs off first, no doubt, as a little fun, and no doubt couple that experience into the Exper so that they might appreciate it all again later, sitting comfortably in their loungers in star city.
If Terifia tried to intervene they'd do the same for her.
If anyone questioned the Curlmen the old hoary tale of a hunting accident would more than satisfy the Bolan, her son, Bunji Cater.
Hook stared down through streaming eyes at the scene, irradiated by violets and emeralds of sparkling prismatic colours, with the glittering crimson sparkling erratically at the sides of his vision. He shook his head. The smoke gusted in little breeze, and he could smell the flat charred stink of burned ferns and greenery.
In the next second or so Ryder Hook would become just another expendable artifact for use in the Exper game.
CHAPTER TEN
Two ideas occurred to Ryder Hook.
The second was dependent on the first, and was to do with what he had planned for the futures of himself, the Curlmen and Stellopolis. That neat second idea had no value whatsoever, of course, if the first idea did not work. The first idea was to get himself extricated from this ludicrous situation. Ryder Hook did not like people shooting at him. The Tonota in his hand almost — almost spat a destructive blaze of fire — and then he eased off the trigger.
To slay these idiotic Curlmen now might be a justifiable process; it was not one Ryder Hook cared to follow.
Bullets cracked about him.
He cranked up the ag-pak to full power, put his head down, and dived headlong into the greasy crest of the smoke streaming from the fireball.
Smoke stung his eyes; but the eye-piece came down with a click. He ought to have done that earlier. He winged on in the cover of the smoke, and now bullets gave way to the cracking detonations of powerguns searching for him. He went furiously down the smoke column. Twice he almost broke through and the brightening light and thinning smoke warned him and he curved back. The brilliance of the energy-gun discharges smashed through the smoke, savage enough to illuminate his dark-green safety-suit and to make the polariser work overtime across his eyepiece. He hit the ground heavily, finding it hard and charred black, smooth as glass. He kept the ag-pak power full on and thrust with his feet and so, very much like a balanced free-diver, went careering over the ground until, with a pop, he burst from the smoke.
A single long dive took him into the nearest clump of ferns, brilliant and green and wet under the sun.
He didn't stop.
One thing about an energy-gun — if you didn't see your target before you fired you knew damn well you wouldn't see it afterwards. So that meant you wouldn't know if you'd hit. He'd experienced that one before, most latterly when he'd taken out those two clumsy would-be assassins. Now he worked his way through the ferns and over the squelchy ground. He daren't give the Curlmen a single sight of him. Once they suspected he hadn't been killed they'd be after him. He knew their own pride and arrogant power would not stop until they'd burned half the planet killing him.
Terifia was back there.
Any idea Hook might have harboured of turning and blasting the lot of them was ruptured by that single fact.
Hook knew he'd been growing spineless and weak and a great ninny in star city, and he couldn't blame Terifia for that. She knew what she wanted, and Hook knew what he wanted, and the two had not quite matched. But she'd been a good kid. Her son was out to kill her, and that made her much more interesting. Hook wormed his way through the ferns and he began to get back some of the special hallmarks that made being Ryder Hook so fascinating an existence in the galaxy.
"By Dirtie Bertie Bashti!" he said. "I do believe I'm enjoying myself!"
He was acting now — he told himself with some virtuousness — out of a sense not of injured amour-propre but of rightful justice. He'd damned-well give these Curlmen a rough ride! By God, yes!
The first Voydun he ran across cowered away in absolute mortal terror.
The ferns arched here seven feet over the slushy ground. The Voydun's sleek fur was sleek no longer, and hung matted and muddy and doleful. His great splay feet, flat as boards, were now revealed as being adapted to walk over the slush beneath the ferns. He carried a wooden spear with a fire-hardened tip. Hook mentally doffed his hat at this creature who had tamed fire and made it work for him in this sappy wilderness of water.
"Don't run!" Hook bawled after him. "I won't hurt you."
But the Voydun ran on without stopping. Hook could have caught him. But he let him go. He had an idea of what them people would do next — what he'd damned-well do himself had he been in their position — and so when, an hour later, he felt the fibrous net swing up from the quaggy ground and carry him up to swing three feet off the ground, wrapped like a cocoon, he did not immediately cut himself free. He lay there, swinging, and looked down as they crept out of the ferns.
There were ten Voydun, seven men and three women. They looked repulsive in a way Hook found repulsive to himself.
Strange shapes in humanity meant nothing in this galaxy. But these people were shaped in such a way as, whilst not being untouchable, were pitiable; and that always made a man mad.
Their tusks gleamed in the wet light. The sun was sinking and the fern-aisles darkened into a green twilight. One of the men prodded Hook with his wooden spear.
"I won't hurt you," said Hook. "I don't want to break your net, so loosen the thongs and we can talk."
The Voydun prodding him snarled. With those fangs the snarl was worth every pek. "No good talking to a starman. Only good starman is a dead starman."
Hook felt no surprise, merely confirmation.<
br />
He set himself to explain a few hometruths.
"If you don't cut me free I'll do it myself. Now, hurry up and make up your minds."
The spear point stuck in painfully and that decided Ryder Hook. He never appreciated physical discomfort.
He used the Tonota on low power and burned a few strands and so dropped himself down with a splodgy splash onto the ground.
The spears ringed him — didn't the idiots know the power of the weapon in his hand?
"I won't hurt you," he said, again. "Look —" He notched the Tonota up a trifle and burned down a few dozen ferns.
"There is what I can do — I won't do it to you."
He was talking to himself.
You had to be philosophic about this. What else could anyone expect? Here he'd come barging into their culture and telling them what was to their ears a pack of manifest lies, and then he'd burned the net and then flamed the sodden ferns — no wonder they'd run. In their place, he'd have run, too. Also, however, had he been one of them he'd have — yes — Hook ducked and swerved and the flung spear hissed past his neck.
That was to be expected, too ...
"I mean you no harm!" Hook bellowed into the growing shadows.
He kept an eye open for more spears; but none came from the shrouding ferns.
A voice lifted.
"We do not believe you, starman. But we do not need to kill you. The beasts will do that in the night. You will die starman, and we will not have soiled our hands on you."
"I see you can recognise distinctions like that. I am not a starman."
He wasn't prepared to go into explanations to cover that. He was a man from the stars, yes; he was not a Curlman, and a Curlman was what the Voydun meant by a starman.
Somewhere in the dripping ferns a beast coughed, a giant chest-filled rumble that made Hook notch the Tonota up a trifle to a margin that would stun very quickly indeed. The charge would hold out for a good few blasts yet. After that he would have to see about a recharge.
"We leave you to the beasts, starman."
Star City Page 10
