The Omega Cage

by Steve Perry

  It seemed like a long time, but it could only have been a few seconds before she yelled again. "Got him!" Marc's shoulder felt like it was being torn loose as Raze contracted the muscles of her upper body. Scanner's hand cleared the sand, followed by his arm and then his head. He coughed violently as Raze, anchored by Maro and the others, dragged him free of the sand. His shoulders and chest appeared, then his hips. He pawed at the sand with his free hand as if swimming, and after a moment his feet came out of the treacherous ground.

  "Back up!" Maro commanded.

  The chain of people shuffled backward, dragging the still-coughing Scanner. In another moment they were clear of the trap.

  Chameleon laughed, a release of tension, and Maro felt the urge to join him. That had been close—

  The ground started to vibrate. Two meters behind Scanner, the sand began to churn. It erupted upward suddenly into a cloud of fine particles and a rattle of… bones.

  Maro saw clearly the dead, dry bones as they showered down, long ones, ribs, an oblong skull, thumping and sinking back out of sight into the sand.

  Then, out of the sand came a nightmare.

  It looked vaguely spiderlike, in that it had a lot of legs, but it seemed to be as big as Maro's cell. The limbs were short and paddle-shaped, and centered in the top of the fat, brown oblong body was a gaping hole surrounded by three or four sets of serrated pincers. That would be the mouth, Maro thought, almost calmly. The thing didn't seem to have any eyes, but then, it didn't seem to need any.

  The sand monster scrabbled easily toward Scanner, its body tilted, hind legs rearing it up so that the mouth was almost parallel to the ground. Maro released Raze's wrist and grabbed for the flare pistol. He dropped it, snatched it up, and managed to get to his knees. The rest of it was almost instinctive. He pointed the weapon at the monster's open mouth and fired as fast as he could pull the trigger. The gun spat four flares. Three of them went into the thing's maw before it could close the opening; the fourth flare hit the armored carapace as the mouth snapped shut, bounced high into the air trailing red, and landed twenty meters away to sizzle on the desert floor.

  The monster opened its mouth again and screamed. Smoke poured out with the sound, and the light of the burning flares looked even redder than usual. The thing shook its body back and forth, then backed away. Maro caught the odor of burning tissue, a nidorous smell, as the thing roared again, its cry like that of a woman screaming in pain.

  Without realizing his actions, Maro reloaded the flare pistol, then held it extended with both hands, aimed at the monster. It wasn't necessary. The thing's legs churned the surface, flippers showering Scanner and Raze with buckets of the fine, dustlike sand as the creature swiftly dug its way back out of sight. The ground rumbled for a moment, then faded to stillness.

  Maro stood, flare gun still pointed at the now-quiet patch of almost liquid sand. The others got to their feet. The silence was unbroken until Chameleon said, "What the fuck was that!"

  "I don't know," Maro said. "But I don't want to be anywhere near here if it comes back."

  "Amen," Raze said.

  Maro looked at her, then the others. "As long as we're on this kind of flat stretch, we hold hands. Anybody object to that?"

  Nobody did. "I'll take the lead," Maro continued. "If I hit one of these traps, try and pull me out. If you can't, let go and run like hell."

  From the looks on their faces, it didn't seem as if he would need to worry much about that.

  Juete's energy was just about gone. She walked mechanically, glad to have Raze's hand on the one side and Scanner's on the other. They weren't walking single file any more, but at about a forty degree angle, with Dain leading. Any of them could step into another pit, but as bunched up as they were, it was likely Dain would hit it first.

  "I don't think we'll run into another of those things for a while," Scanner said.

  "What makes you think so?" Juete asked.

  "I don't think the desert will support too many of them. They eat those horse-things, looks like, and we haven't seen a lot of them. Something that big must eat a fair amount, and if there were too many of them around, they'd starve."

  Sandoz said, "That sounds pretty good, but what if the thing has more than one trap? I'd think it had a bunch— otherwise, it might be a long time before it caught anything."

  "I think maybe this one won't be interested in checking his traps for a little while," Raze put in. "Too much pepper in its last meal."

  Dain laughed at that, and the sound made Juete's pulse speed up. She liked hearing him laugh.

  Both Scanner and Raze squeezed her hands then, almost at the same instant. They had felt her joy, her excitement. She felt as if she could trust Scanner and Raze, at least for now, and she returned the hand pressure. She had learned the hard way that you had to take your friends where you could find them. And friends were something to look for, especially when you were as vulnerable as were the albinos of Rim.

  The moons began to set, and the sky gradually grew darker, even under the luminous swath of stars that swept across the heavens. The six escapees walked across the sea of sand, still alive for now. That was something, at least. They weren't dead yet, and that was in itself a kind of miracle.

  But they hadn't really escaped yet, either. If Dain and Scanner's mining site was there, if they could get a vehicle working and if the warden's guards didn't find them, then they had a chance. It was a lot of "ifs," she knew, and any one of them could short the whole plan. And another whole set of questions lay beyond these: could they get a ship and get offworld? That was the only way they would stay alive, and that was the biggest worry of all.

  Juete mentally shrugged. One miracle at a time.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Stark awoke just before dawn, after no more than two or three hours of sleep. He lay on the bed for a few minutes, but knew he wasn't going to recapture that blessed unconsciousness. He got up, showered and dressed, and went to his office.

  He felt a little better than he had; some sleep was better than none. He powered up his desk terminal. Time to review his options.

  There were things he could do to catch the prisoners. He could call Omega City for help. They would footprint the likely routes of the escapees with one of their looksats, and probably pick up the bastards within a pass or two. That would solve one problem, but it wouldn't do him any good personally. Getting them back wasn't as important as keeping quiet the fact that they were out in the first place. He knew there was no way he could keep a lid on it forever; eventually, it would get out. But if he caught them before it happened, then it would not be a real escape. The Confed might grumble, but I-took-care-of-it-myself was a prime defense for any kind of military snafu.

  He could keep his men searching for another day or two in hopes of nailing the runners. He could expect that much time before Karnaaj really started throwing his weight around. By then, he could smile and blandly assure the SIU ghoul that there had been some trouble, but it was all in the past, and here's Maro for you. Juete? Oh, she had an accident. Dead, I'm afraid. Cremated, of course. Pity, but there it is. Fortunes of war, what?

  As a last resort, there was the Juggernaut—that option was becoming more attractive all the time. He still might be able to use it and keep it quiet long enough to dump it where it would never be found.

  Or he could always simply open a line to Confed HQ for the sector, tell them he had an escape, and throw himself upon their mercy. Which would be rather like throwing himself upon a thicket of poisoned spikes.

  None of the solutions seemed very appealing, but it wasn't time to panic yet. In two more days he would make the hard decisions. Until then, he would keep things as they were.

  Maro could understand why desert cultures had so many different words to describe sand; otherwise, every sentence about the terrain would be so adjective-laden as to collapse under its own weight. There was the hard-packed sand of the flat sections, ridged by the wind into waterlike ripples; powdery
drifts like dry snow; cakelike crusts atop ridges that left gaping holes under each footstep, and half a dozen other variations, none of which seemed very much like any of the others.

  At this point, as the sun began to lighten the sky, Maro had seen enough of different kinds of sand to last him a lifetime.

  "We should be getting close," Scanner said.

  Maro nodded. "Good. Why don't we take a break here, and I'll climb that dune and see what I can see."

  The dune loomed just ahead, rising a good thirty meters above the desert floor. Nobody argued, and nobody volunteered to go along. Maro gave a tight grin that hurt his dried skin. They were tired, as was he, but nobody was complaining, either.

  A wind was rising, swirling the more powdery sand around like dust. The others walked to the base of the dune where the wind was less, and collapsed on the cool and soft drift. Maro circled toward the end of the dune; experience had taught them that trying to climb up the drifted sides took too much energy. Sinking hip-deep made for slow movement. Where the dune tapered down, the crustier cap material allowed for somewhat better footing if one moved slowly and carefully.

  It took about fifteen minutes of step-crunch, step-crunch, to reach the peak. The breeze was harder here, tugging at his clothes, and the fine sand formed a stone wind that abraded and stung where it touched bare skin.

  Scanner had been right. To the east, the seemingly endless drifts and dunes came to an abrupt end. There were trees and rocks there, perhaps five kilometers away. Just beyond that, Maro thought he could see the line of rocks known as the Girdle. Somewhere on that hard strip was their destination.

  He turned and looked down at the others. They were below and to his left. Going down would be easier; gravity could do the work, and it didn't matter if he sank somewhat. He started to step off the harder surface of the dune for the descent when he heard the sound.

  In the distance, there came the whine of a small engine.

  Maro searched the skies. The sunlight was not up to full strength, but he made out a dot skimming well above the tallest dunes, moving toward him. It was hard to say for sure, but it looked like a single-person cycle.

  In another minute it would be right on top of them.

  Stark moved as if an amphetaminic coursed through his system, flogging each nerve, whispering insistently for action, movement, speed! He walked the wall, the Zonn metal slick beneath his boots, and stared off into the distance. It was almost as if he might somehow will the escapees to return by being there, act like some sort of biological magnet, drawing them to himself.

  Foolish thought, of course. He knew he should remain calm, should wait for his people to locate their quarry, should avoid doing anything rash. But those thoughts came from the mind, borne of his intellect; his gut, which churned up emotions much more primal, called for him to do something, and do it now!

  It had always been so with him, and he wondered at times if other people had the same war ongoing inside. The age-old battle between the neocortex, secure in its military background, counselling caution, procedure and patience; and, opposing, the hindbrain, the reptilian remnant, shouting without subtlety about fight-or-flight and self-preservation.

  Usually, the intellect won out; usually, but not always. Sometimes jungle reaction was the proper response; sometimes doing something, anything, turned out to be better than doing nothing. And there was no way to know, of course, when a man should turn loose the hormonal hounds and let them run and bay. Therein lay the problem. More and more, he was feeling that it was time to move, to put himself into the field, even though he was not sure of the wisdom of it.

  Stark stared at the cleared patch between the wall and the bush. Something darted out of the trees, a lizardlike creature. It thought better of its action, turned and ran back to cover.

  He understood exactly what the thing must have felt.

  A sign. He needed a sign of some kind. Before, he had always gotten some form of indicator, a pointer that made the decision more justifiable, whether yea or nay. It might only be a rationalization, but when it happened, he knew it for what it was.

  So. Give it another day or two. If nothing happened, he would know that he was doing the right thing. If the cosmic finger touched him, however, that would be something else again.

  And more and more, he was beginning to hope for that sign…

  Juete heard Dain yelling, but at first the sound was so garbled by the wind that she couldn't understand what he was trying to say. Then, next to her, Scanner said "Oh, shit!" about the same time that she caught part of what Dain was saying.

  "—aircycle! Dig in! Get out of sight!"

  Raze was already stripping off her shirt and wrapping it around her head. Her flat breasts rippled with muscle as she turned and began to burrow into the base of the dune.

  "Get flat!" Scanner ordered. "Cover your nose and mouth, breath slow and evenly! Stay down until he passes!"

  Juete felt the still-cool sand cascade over her as Scanner shoveled with his hands, burying her. Even under the cupped bowl of her hands the sand trickled into her face, and she sneezed. Around her she could feel the sand vibrating as the others covered themselves. After a moment, things got still.

  She kept her eyes squeezed tightly closed, and the sand pressed against her ears. It was hard to breathe, but the layer over her head was shallow, and her hands kept enough of a pocket for some air. Not enough for long, she realized. Not enough air would filter through the sand, whether shallow or not.

  She was not afraid. Being alone had frightened her to the point of mindless terror, but claustrophobia had never been one of her fears. The others were all around her; she could feel somebody's leg twitching slightly near her left foot. It was oddly comforting.

  She heard the approach of the aircycle. The drone was muted, but loud enough to penetrate her cover. The thing passed overhead, off to one side. Good! But then the fading drone returned. He must be circling back. It grew louder. She felt it through the sand—strange that sand would carry vibrations so well—and then there was an abrupt cut off to it.

  It was getting harder to breathe. The air she had trapped was hot and growing foul. She was trying to sip at it, taking small and even breaths, but the urge to sit up and inhale deeply was growing. It couldn't have been more than a minute since Scanner had covered her, but it felt like a lot longer.

  Somebody walked toward her. She felt the steps. They seemed impossibly loud, as if a giant were slogging across the desert, about to step on her. Then they stopped, very near. What was he doing? Not that it mattered; in another ten or fifteen seconds, she was going to have to have air, no matter who was out there, even if it were Stark himself. There was no way to get around it. Her lungs were crying for oxygen now, and if something didn't happen soon—

  Somebody screamed, a primal, guttural yell, the call of a killing predator about to take prey.

  Juete sat up. The thin layer of sand oozed away from her. She shook her head to clear her ears, and opened her eyes at the same instant.

  A guard stood not two meters away, a heavy pulse pistol in his hands. His attention was elsewhere, however; he was staring upward, a look of astonishment on his face, his body frozen. She saw him flick a glance in her direction, but immediately he jerked his gaze back toward the dune.

  Juete twisted to see what the guard saw. Dain bounded down the side of the dune, screaming and waving his arms. Sand showered from his steps, but he was ten meters away and moving slowly for all his efforts and noise. He must have buried himself under the dune, she thought.

  The guard's momentary paralysis wore off; he whipped the pulse pistol up and fired. His aim was off. Juete heard the hard thrum of the weapon, saw the sand splash and glassify under the bolt a meter to Dain's left. Dain kept coming. The guard corrected his aim, prepared to fire again—

  And all around her, the sand erupted. The guard started, surprised by this new threat. He swung the gun around.

  Chameleon was closer, but Sandoz got there
first. He slammed one elbow into the guard's temple. Before the man could fall, the assassin struck again, the fingers of the same hand and arm extended into an open-handed ridge that smashed the opposite temple. The man's head snapped to one side as if struck by a club, and he fell bonelessly to the sand. The pulse pistol flew from his hand and landed next to Juete. The tip of the barrel smoked as the sand touched it.

  Dain slid the last meter down the face of the dune. He moved to the fallen guard. Raze had her hand on the man's neck, feeling for a pulse.

  "Nobody home here anymore," she said, leaning back.

  Chameleon laughed nervously. "Nice work," he said to Sandoz.

  "Thanks," Sandoz replied, almost absently.

  "Troubles," Scanner said. "If he called for back-up—"

  "He didn't have time to com anything," Chameleon said. Then, uncertainly, "You think?"

  "Probably not," Dain said. "But even if he doesn't call in, they'll come looking for him."

  "Great," Sandoz said. "Fucking great. If I had just gone for the stun we'd have a prisoner who could've sent them off to the goddamned moons looking for us!" He smacked the heel of his hand against his temple. "Stupid!"

  "Well." Raze said, "at least we've got a weapon and a cycle. Maybe we can do some damage before they take us."

  "No, wait," Juete found herself saying. "There's a better way."

  The others turned to look at her. Dain said, "You have an idea?"

  She stood and shook sand out of her hair. "What if he had an accident? If they found him then, they wouldn't connect him to us, would they?"