The trail was so plain there was nobody born who could have missed it or failed to follow it. The quarry had at least been a little devious, zigzagging back and forth and even backtracking once or twice, but he was so inept at concealing his progress that it had made no difference. For all his efforts, he might as well have gone straight in yelling and singing.
Big Ears eyed with more than a little suspicion the large rocky hill that stood out so prominent and lonely in the otherwise dead flat grasslands. Up close it didn’t look so much like a monster or spook, but it did look a lot bigger and higher, too, and with no obvious way up.
“Here’s where they went,” Littlefeet noted, pointing. “There’s some kind of ledge up there, maybe twice my height. See it?”
“Yeah, sort of. You seein’ them chalky dirt spills, huh?”
Littlefeet nodded. Big Ears wasn’t incompetent, only overcautious—which was possibly the reason the Father had assigned him as Littlefeet’s partner.
Littlefeet tensed, went into a coiled stoop while keeping his eyes firmly on the ledge, then jumped with all his power. He was a strong runner, whose legs were quite powerful; he didn’t make it to the ledge, but he did make it close enough that his hands got a grasp up there, and he was able to pull himself up the rest of the way. His hands were a little scuffed and his arms hurt, but he quickly got over that and looked down at Big Ears.
“It’s a kind of trail in the rock, leading up!” he called down. “You want to try and get up here? If that guy they were chasin’ made it, you sure can! Throw me my spear, first, and yours, too, if you’re cornin’.”
Big Ears hesitated for what seemed like a very long time, weighing the risks and benefits, then sighed and said, “Oh, all right. Get back. I’m a lot taller’n you!”
Being almost a head taller did help, although he, too, found the going took every muscle he had. He pulled himself up and over onto the ledge, then lay there a moment, getting back his wind. Finally, sensing his partner wasn’t exactly standing over him, he turned, looked around, and got up fast. “Littlefeet?”
“Come on! I don’t want it to get dark on us here!” his friend called from what seemed higher as well as farther away. Big Ears muttered a series of curses under his breath, picked up his spear where Littlefeet had left it, and started following the trail.
And it was a trail, too, or at least a path, clearly made long ago by somebody for some reason. It spiraled around the big rock, taking him gently upward. It was still pretty steep, and he found himself breathing hard. He was just about to sit and take a break when he came upon Littlefeet and the corpse.
It was a particularly grisly scene, even for two who had seen a lot of ugly deaths. They had hacked him open like animals, and there were blood and parts of guts all over the place. It was pretty tough even figuring out his looks; the skin on his face had been almost filleted off, and the eyes were gouged out as well. And it stunk.
“Notice anything wild about the guy?” Littlefeet asked Big Ears, just sitting to one side on a rock outcrop and staring.
“Huh? Other than the fact that they tortured and ate half of him? No.”
“No tattoos. No marks on the skin we can see at all. No sign he ever wore rings or stuff, either. The hair’s in a kind of fashion I never saw, and, well, what you can make out just don’t look right. Don’t look like nobody I ever heard of, but he looks somehow familiar, like. I can’t figure out how, though.”
Big Ears studied the mess but came no closer. “I think I know,” he said softly.
“Huh?”
“Remember the pictures in the lockets? The Family Chest? That kind of hair, that sort of face—it’s like them.”
Littlefeet squinted and looked again. “You know, you’re right. The guy looks like one of the ancestors. You don’t think any of ’em survived, do you? I mean, like some kind of underground colony or something? I heard stories...”
“Now it’s you with the stories,” Big Ears responded, throwing the smaller one’s logic back at him. “Just stories. Ain’t nobody survived the Titans. Nobody ’cept folks like us. Jeez, I mean, if even a fire in the dry season can bring ’em, you know nobody’s runnin’ none of them old things that took magic power. That’d bring a Titan ball faster’n anything.”
“Help me turn him over,” Littlefeet said, approaching the corpse. “I want to see his back. I think it should be kinda still together from the looks of him.”
Big Ears almost gagged. “You mean touch him? That?”
“Sure. His spirit’s gone to the land of the ancestors now. Ain’t nothin’ but dead, rotting meat. Come on. He’s too heavy and too stuck in his own dried shit for me to do it alone.”
Revulsion sweeping through him, Big Ears did participate sufficiently to let his spear be the lever that turned the torso over. When it did, the head came loose and rolled a short distance, making things even uglier.
“What I thought,” Littlefeet commented. “C’mon. Let’s get back.”
“What you thought? What the hell did you think to do this? There wasn’t nothin’ there but a bare back!”
“A red back. I seen it before on a couple Family members who were hurt bad and hid in the caves for a couple weeks to heal. When they come back out, one or two days of sun, they looked like that. ‘Sunburned,’ they called it. I noticed it on the shoulders and some of the face. I couldn’t be sure with all this blood and crap, but the back wasn’t touched by that.”
“Sunburned? What the hell you mean? Red, yeah, but—”
“Ain’t nobody burn like that guy did. You burn like that, you’re dead. But this guy burned! So there may be some truth to them rumors after all. I mean, where’s the only place where the sun don’t never get to you?”
Big Ears saw his point. “Underground... Jeez! But what was he doin’ here?”
“Who knows? No way to figure it now. But lookit his fingers on that one hand, there. Smooth and nice as a baby’s, even with the scuffing. This guy didn’t live like we do, didn’t work like we do.”
Big Ears nodded slowly, then shook his head in wonder. “But if he was all protected and soft, then why did he come up here?”
They were both silent for a moment, awestruck at where evidence and logic had taken them. Then, suddenly, there was a voice. A third voice. It sounded quite near, and quite pleasant, but it shouldn’t have been there.
“I can answer some of your questions,” said the voice, a very kindly male voice. They both tensed and the spears came up menacingly, and they were suddenly back to back, looking for the speaker.
“Please don’t be alarmed,” said the voice, which seemed to be coming out of the rock itself. “I mean you no harm. I could not harm you anyway. I am quite dead, I assure you.”
Both boys screamed and ran so fast down the trail they almost walked over one another’s back, and their leaps to the ground and their speed away from that haunted rock set new Family records, no question.
FOUR
Mayhem, Real and Simulated
“How many does that make so far, Joe?”
They were aboard the tender Margaite, in the orbital docking area above the planet, examining the liner Odysseus close up.
“Nine, Mister Harker,” responded the chief, checking a list on a small portable tablet. “Your opera singer, if that’s what she is; the Orthodox priest; the physicist from the University of New Kyoto; the mathematician from Hendrikkaland; Colonel N’Gana; his sergeant; Admiral Krill; the archaeologist from Tamarand; and the Pooka, profession unknown.”
“The Pooka’s the only nonhuman in the bunch?”
“Far as I can tell. Of course, who knows what Madame Sotoropolis is under all that stuff?”
Harker sighed. “Well, she’s a real person, anyway. Would you believe we even found some recordings of hers in her prime? Old stuff—took forever to find something that would play it—but she was good. Of course, now you can have the perfect opera singer, good looks instead of battleaxes, too, with perfect pitch and a fi
ve-octave range just by dialing your preferences in.”
“Never went in for opera, sir. They get stabbed and then they sing like stuck pigs for forty minutes before they croak. If I want that level of realism, I’ll watch the ancient cartoons.”
The officer chuckled. Still, it was an interesting, if eclectic, group and it didn’t make any sense. The only thing they had in common was that they all suddenly had quit their jobs and flown out to this godforsaken place, walked into the Cuch, and asked for the Dutchman. Then, getting no satisfactory answer, they’d all gone, one by one, to the spaceport and boarded the shuttle that just happened to come down to meet them from the Odysseus, which still hadn’t filed any kind of departure plan or papers.
Some were of Greek ancestry, of course, like the family of the Odysseus. The priest and the old lady and the ship, anyway. But that wasn’t much of a tie to the others. When Colonel N’Gana and Sergeant Mogutu appeared, it had at least added spice to the puzzle. Their reputation as mercenaries and experts in their craft was well known and respected. N’Gana was said to have gone in and out of a moon of Malatutu, spiriting off wealthy and influential evacuees even as the planet below was falling. It was rumored that he’d actually gotten down to the surface and lifted off somehow, but while that was believed by the masses it was doubted by the military. There was just too much data suggesting that if you got within the Titans’ energy field then any machinery you might have would be sucked dry of power in nanoseconds.
“You see a correlation, Chief?” he asked, more fishing in his own mind than expecting an answer.
“No, sir. Except that maybe this Greek angle is being overplayed. Maybe it’s something else about them that’s the real clue.”
Maybe, but they’d run that through some pretty smart computers and not come up with anything that made practical sense.
Maybe it wasn’t supposed to make practical sense!
Suppose... Okay, the Melcouris were from a world called Helena, probably very Greek in its settlement and culture considering the name and the family. The priest, Father Chicanis, had been at seminary there, but had spent much of his time in missions on planets with far stranger names and ethnic backgrounds. Dame Sotoropolis had been related to the Melcouri family. Fine. But there the linkages and potentials stopped.
A priest, an old opera singer, a shipping family, a physicist, a math genius, two expert mercenaries who’d worked in the occupied regions, a retired admiral who designed sophisticated weapons systems for a couple of major defense contractors (for all the good it did them), an archaeologist, and a creature that was long and furry and fluffy and was best known for being able to squeeze itself into and out of tight places.
That suggested that they were going after some sort of treasure in occupied areas: something from ancient times. A group to get you in and hold off the enemies while your nonhuman squeezed in and got something, with guidance from the archaeologist. And how did you get out? Nobody had solved that, because anybody who did would be named Emperor of the Universe and more if they could. The computers gave a sixty percent chance, give or take, that the treasure scenario was correct, but they stipulated that only someone who solved that exit problem would try.
The Dutchman. There wasn’t any crime in asking for him, but hadn’t he promised the old lady that he could get in and out? If they believed him, what sort of treasure could be worth that kind of risk with that undependable and highly nasty character? Or was the Dutchman merely a code word used by an old lady with a background in opera?
“Admiral Krill will be there with something to keep us from following,” Harker noted. “That should be child’s play for her.”
“She didn’t take much baggage aboard,” the chief pointed out.
“Didn’t have to. Whatever she’d need would be likely illegal and they’d have picked it up in one of those containers ahead of time or in pieces that she’d now be busily having the loadmaster robots assemble. Chief, you’re an old hand. We’ve gone round and round that ship. How would you track it if they could jam any conventional tracking devices or systems?”
“With that kind of assumption, they’re home free,” the chief replied. “Hell, any universe in which I can have lived for thirty-six years and still be a hundred and four years old is beyond me to track.”
But they could do it. The computers that now really were smart enough to figure out most everything could at least come up with that. You didn’t try and track it; instead, you attached something to it and went right along with the ship. The computers suggested, of course, a computer with a mobile tactical robotic component, but the theory did admit that a human or two in full combat e-suits would add tremendously to the flexibility of such a scheme. It did, of course, also note that the probable survival rate of the human component was in the range of one or two percent tops, at least insofar as actually getting back to tell the tale.
“Man’d be crazy to strap himself to the outside of a ship like that,” the chief commented. “And they might well figure some kind of external probe anyway.”
“I doubt it,” Harker replied. “The true Odysseus is only the pilothouse and the engines, remember. The rest of it is rolling stock from a dozen worlds. You couldn’t possibly put sensors on every square millimeter of the outside of those; you’d have to tear ’em apart and put ’em back together. The security seals on the internal cargo areas would have to do. Besides, anybody who went, man or machine or both, would have to detach to even send a dispatch, let alone get a way back. The moment you did that, the ship’s sensors would pick it up.”
“Makes my point,” the chief insisted. “You’d have to be insane to volunteer for something with odds like that.”
“You might be right, Chief. Whether they have any surprises for such a move is what we’re up here to find out. I want as thorough a scan of the entire outer skin as possible.”
Harker did not consider himself insane, but he did feel that his own personal curiosity was probably going to get him killed anyway. There was no way that the Odysseus was simply going to fire up and jump out of here into oblivion and never reveal its secret, at least to him.
The chief sighed. “Aye, sir.” But he hadn’t changed his mind one bit. He knew, or at least suspected, that Harker had already put such a plan to his superiors and that it was likely to be approved. It was too bad. He liked the young fellow.
“Don’t worry, Chief,” Harker consoled. “I think, for some twisted reason, that they want somebody independent to be on their tail, able to bring in a third force if need be. They signaled that by all going in so nicely to a dive where everybody from criminals to Navy cops would undoubtedly be hanging out, and deliberately asking for the top of the Most Wanted list as if he were just another captain likely to be sitting in one of the booths drinking.” Was he fooling them? Or was he their insurance policy against this character?
• • •
The command console computer for base security had news.
“The ship’s been several places before this, picking up cargo and possibly passengers,” the CCC informed Harker. “We’ve had enough traffic come in or pass through now that we’ve gotten something of a pattern, although not anything we can use. It’s impossible to say what they have on that ship by now, let alone who and how many. They’ve been dropping empty containers and picking up full ones with private loads all along until here.”
“Those look like stock containers. I could see the usual corporate symbols on them when we did the full scan.”
“Irrelevant. All of them are rented on a one hundred percent of value insurance rating, which means they are effectively purchased. While commerce has been going on apparently normally, they have in actuality picked up only containers that dummy corporations controlled by Melcouri family members own or control. I tried to masquerade as a normal commercial trader in the shipping manifests and log in one of our own containers. It was refused with a ‘not in service’ return. I can see no reason why they are still here.”
“The latter is unlikely, but the former, either someone or something missing, is probable. They have laid in port almost two weeks now, and that costs money in anybody’s book. They are fully fueled and serviced, fully provisioned for a small army, and they have taken on nothing more. The only person to come back and forth is the load-master, Alexander Karas. He is the opera singer’s great-grandson and a native of Helena, although he was far too young to remember anything about it. His actions seem routine, and the company is paying its bills properly, so it is difficult to see what more they could want.”
“Anything on the Dutchman?”
“It is unlikely that our real Dutchman has anything to do with this, but, no, there have been no reports of activity by his raider at any point since the Odysseus left port after taking itself out of actual service over a subjective two and a half months ago. This is not, however, considered unusual, since he’s often waited as long as six months subjective between actions.”
“Did you plot any reports of his movements from the last attack?”
“Yes, we thought of that. It is impossible to divine much, but it does seem that he emerged out of Occupied Space. The last three attacks were almost in a straight line, then one back again almost to the Occupied lines. It has long been thought that he hides out in there. Why not? If he does not come near any Titan ship or land on any Titan world, he has an enormous area to hide in, an area we could never properly search.”
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