He could make out very little in the murk of night, but the trees around him had become raucous with hoots, honks, chirrups, rasps, howls, and other distressing sounds. To his fevered brain, every noise seemed threatening and vicious. When he mustered the strength to lift his head, trying to see into the pitch black of the swamp, some live thing thrashed away into the reeds, making a loud splash as it hit the water.
Ardan moved again, very cautiously. At his side, a tiny voice said "Meep? Meep?" with maddening persistence. He reached slowly for his leg-knife. Once in his hand, its metal reassuringly solid in this murky world, he felt somewhat better. His body screamed for a drink of water, but he dared not slake his thirst on this brackish slime. If only he still had his canister...
That thought brought back the memory of his last moments of combat with the Zeus. It had not stayed to finish him off, but had lumbered away toward the sounds of battle in the east But what if the Zeus were to come back for him, after all? How could Ardan defend himself with just a knife, and nearly naked in his shorts and useless cooling vest? He would have to get away from this spot, he thought feverishly, but he dared not venture into the water in the dark.
The night wore on with painful slowness, but the sounds and the slitherings around him did not cease. Whatever those creatures might have been, to Ardan's shaky state of mind and body they were menaces beyond anything spawned in any swamp on any known world.
When a thread of light finally touched the sky beyond the thick treetops, he relaxed a bit Though he had dozed in the night, some new alien touch on his hair or body had continually jerked him awake. Now he saw that the night-crawlers had retreated to their burrows. He was alone on the mudbank. Gathering his courage, Ardan made himself slide, headfirst into the greenish-black water.
It was shallow. He could float along, head above water, propelling himself with his good hand along the slimy stickiness of the bottom mud. From time to time, his palm met something that quivered or throbbed beneath it. That shook him.
He tried to move parallel with the edge of the clear ground. This swamp had to be part of some waterway. Waterways led to rivers. Once he had found a river...then what? He didn't want to think any farther than that. He would find help, or he would not. His head was in no condition to make coherent plans.
The air warmed, but he shivered uncontrollably in the water. His skin wrinkled and grew pale, but Ardan pushed on. The world spun about him, misty with steam over the water, misty with the obscurity growing inside his mind. Eventually, he was shaking so uncontrollably that he had to drag himself onto a mudbank, out of the water. There he saw the imprint of a large body and a wide, dragging tail in the mud. He didn't care.
He lay, face-down, gasping, shivering. Then, his back arched, and he vomited dark liquid. Had he drunk some of the water as he traveled? He must have. Now his belly knotted, and Ardan curled, shaking, nauseated, into a ball. He lay there, unable to move, for what seemed like hours, before he was roused from his stupor by a grunting sound nearby.
He turned to see a fat, pale-skinned shape wallowing in the shallows below him. Its piglike head was cocked upward, watching him. The eyes were black, small, hostile. As he watched, it flapped a wide, leathery tail against the water, raising a shower of droplets.
The owner of the mudbank, Ardan thought dreamily. Then he sank into delirium again.
This time he dreamed.
He was inside his 'Mech, facing hostiles. He tried to raise the arm. There was no response. He tried to scan his surroundings, but the monitors were all dark. He wanted to run....any direction, just to have motion. The legs refused to move.
He was blind, helpless, trapped inside the behemoth, waiting for his enemy to strike him down. He screamed, and the echo went round and round inside his helmet He was sliding...down, down a chute toward the emergency hatch.
He came out onto a wide plain, stretching away on either hand as far as he could see. No sign of life met his despairing gaze. The grass beneath his feet was burnt brown. The sky was coppery yellow, the sun staring down evilly. His throat was sore; breath came with difficulty into his lungs.
He gasped and sank to his knees. It felt as though a 'Mech were sitting on his chest What had happened to his unit? Where was Sep? Jarlik? Denek and Fram?
He groaned, and his own voice woke him. He looked up into a pair of round pink eyes, which shocked him fully into consciousness.
Moving with great difficulty, he turned onto his side. The small animal—if that's what it was—sitting beside him seemed undisturbed by the movement It regarded him calmly, as he pushed himself up, one-armed, to sit facing it.
His head was still reeling, but Ardan felt certain that this was reality. The swamp looked exactly as he remembered it The mudbank was real. The pain in his arm, legs, head, and back was real.
The creature he was staring at was short. Seated, it came just barely to his shoulder. Its head was as round as its eyes, and it had long-lobed ears hanging to its shoulders. The mouth was thin and straight, creating a prim expression much at variance with its infantile eyes. What Ardan had first taken to be an animal now seemed to him more a being somewhere between beast and human.
Ardan cleared his throat, tasting the remnant of vomit in the back of his throat. "Hello," he said, with some difficulty.
The thing jumped backward from a sitting position with catlike agility. Now it was standing, showing that it had long, thin legs, a stocky body, and a rudimentary tail that twitched with nervousness.
It stared at him for a moment. Then it uttered a high, thin wail that carried through the trees and echoed back from the depths of the swamp.
Bewildered, Ardan shook his head. The creature watched with much attentiveness. It shook its own head, mocking his motion exactiy. When Ardan held out his hand in the gesture that meant peace on most known worlds, it held out its own. That meant nothing, Ardan knew. It was purest mimicry.
Then, in the distance, he heard another strange sound. Spattering steps were racing through shallow water. Shrill hoots and chirps accompanied the noise. Before he realized what was happening, he was surrounded by a dozen exact replicas of the creature sitting beside him. They were clad in only their own pale-furred hides, indistinguishable from one another.
The newcomers hooted briefly at their fellow, who chirruped back in a concise burst of sound. They seemed to be communicating in a language of their own, which amazed Ardan. He dimly recalled some of the computer briefings on the swamp life of Stein's Folly, but none of that information had prepared him for the intelligence he sensed among these pink-eyed beings. They turned, with one accord, and fell upon Ardan. Before he could react, he was tied into a sort of bundle with fiber cords. Then the creatures hoisted him on their shoulders, two on either side, and carried him away into the swamp, going deeper and deeper between the increasingly huge trees.
That was when things became hazy. At times, Ardan thought he was back on his father's farm, riding a load of grain to the bins. At others, he felt himself carried away on a berserker 'Mech, running uncontrolled across the countryside.
He burned with fever. He shook with chill. He vomited down the length of himself and all over the creatures carrying him. They dunked him into a pool, splashed water over themselves, and trudged on.
He went out, at last, into a blackness that was a great relief. When he came to, it was to the pitch darkness of the nightbound swamp.
He stirred. There came a twirping sound from somewhere nearby. Another chirrup, more distant, answered the first. A glimmer of light moved toward him, letting him see that he was in a kind of wicker hut, very crude but quite efficient
He lay on a pallet of tree-moss, still tied up, but much less painfully than before. His mouth felt cleaner. They had given him water, he was almost certain. He hoped it wasn't the terrible stuff from the swamp.
A short figure stumped into the hut with a tiny torch in its hand. It was exactly like every other he had seen thus far, without even any sex differentiation,
as far as Ardan could tell.
The thing squatted beside him, tested his bindings, held the torch close, and lifted one of Ardan's eyelids. It grunted. The sound indicated satisfaction, as nearly as Ardan could tell.
"I'm glad you're happy. At least one of us is," he said crossly.
The creature sank onto its heels, staring at him. A complex series of grunts, honks, hoots, and chirrups gave him a notion of the source of some of the night-sounds that had troubled him. There was no point of similarity with any language Ardan had ever heard, however. He tried to shrug, but his broken arm made him groan instead.
The creature nodded twice, decisively. It touched his face with an inquiring finger, poked at his bare chest, examined his toes with much interest. Then it took itself and its glow-worm torch back off. The hut was dark again.
Ardan fell asleep, much to his surprise. When he woke, there was light in the hut. Dim green light that was filtered, he surmised, through the interlocking branches and leaves of tremendous trees.
He felt ill. Never in his healthy life, even when injured in battle, had he felt so awful. Fever shook him from time to time. Chills covered him with gooseflesh. His stomach heaved, but lacked anything more to eject.
He smelled smoke. These creatures had fire, then, as well as tools? They were sapient, then. A few other non-human sapients had turned up among the worlds of the Inner Sphere, but these were surely the strangest-looking of any yet known.
He lay still, waiting. The fever cushioned him somewhat from reality. Nothing made much difference now. Whatever happened, he didn't care a great deal.
When the procession came for him, he didn't struggle at all. They lifted him again, still tied, and carried him outside. There they laid him on a litter made of green branches tied together with the familiar fiber cording. When they had him situated, they decked the litter with odorous green, pink, and purple flowers resembling orchids, except for their dragonlike yellow maws.
"Here comes the bride," he murmured, quoting from an old book. Ancient traditions and rituals had always fascinated him. Now he looked fair to become a part of one.
One of the Pinks (he decided that he had to call them something, even if only in his thoughts) screeched shrilly. The rest lined up instantly, lifted the litter, and splashed into the water surrounding the hummock holding the hut.
It seemed to Ardan that they walked a long way. He stared up into the vine-clad trees. Birdlike creatures flitted overhead, while other creatures resembling the arboreal primates of Old Earth scampered along the branches and vines, keeping pace with the procession.
He fell into a peaceful state that was interrupted only when his bearers stopped. They tipped the litter up so that he was standing, supported by the wooden frame to which he was tied.
He was on a sizeable spot of solid ground surrounded by dark green water. A number of trees stood about at considerable distance from one another. There were eighteen, which, for some reason, Ardan counted. Bound to all but one tree were skeletons tied with seemingly indestructible cord.
The bones were indubitably of human origin. No Pink had ever grown to such height The skulls were distinctive, the rib-cages ribboned with climbing vines. The foot-bones were hidden in a light growth of thin grass.
"Oh, wonderful!" he groaned. How long had the Pinks waited for the last victim to complete their set?
"Stein? Is that you, old boy?" he asked aloud. The Pinks ignored him.
"Folly is right. I'll just bet you and your boys and girls tramped off into the swamp, bent on exploration and glory, and wound up as...what?" He turned his gaze to the Pinks, who were very busy about some inscrutable business.
Six approached him, cut away the litter with their clawed fingers, and propped him against the single undecorated tree. They flipped ends of cord about him, then wound them round and round the tree trunk and his body.
Without another sound, they were gone, leaving Ardan to contemplate his fate.
16
Hanse Davion stood beside the holotable, staring down at the nervous blinks that represented ships in transit. The fact that each of the distant craft had already reached its destination and that the table was only catching him up on the most recent information didn't comfort him. He knew his men had retaken Stein's Folly, but the struggle was not over yet. The Prince must now make decisions that might or might not aid those commanders whose instincts had pulled victory from the very jaws of defeat
He looked up as Ferral, his personal aide, entered the room. "We were lucky, Fer," he said. "If we didn't have the best commanders in the business, our strike would have gone down the tubes. Has the messenger finished his report?"
The younger man looked down. His jaw tightened, and his entire stance showed his reluctance to say the thing that had brought him.
When he looked up, Hanse was staring at him, worry already beginning to wrinkle his brow.
"The report is that...that Ardan Sortek has been lost in action. Not killed...no body has been found, though his Victor was pretty well savaged. But there was no trace of him."
"Have searchers scoured the area?" The question was sharper than the Prince's usual even tone.
"No. There has been so much to do, what with the remaining stiff resistance. All available manpower has been occupied in keeping the areas we have taken. Liao troops are pulling off regularly, and we think they are withdrawing to Redfield, but we still have our hands full."
Hanse stared again into the holotable, as if the mechanism might tell him where his friend might be. When he looked up again, he was fully in control.
"Give orders that every effort be made to locate Sortek," he said. "Not only is he an old and dear friend, but he also knows things about me and our methods that the enemy might find most useful. Chemical questioning bypasses the instincts of the most loyal. He must not fall into the hands of the enemy. And if he should, then he must be rescued at any cost."
Davion turned to stare from his arched window into the afternoon sky. "Assign at least one unit to that task. It is of utmost importance, both to me personally and to our security." He did not look around as the aide replied.
Only when the door closed did Hanse turn again to the table. It had been a gamble balanced on a knife-edge of skill and luck. He was the most fortunate of men, lucky to have in his service men of the caliber of Felsner, Hamman...and Ardan Sortek.
He thought of Ardan as a child, riding on Hanse's own strong young back, later learning games and skills from him as they roamed the fields outside the town where they had been reared.
He shook himself and turned to a monitor. He must read the fresh reports. He must make the crucial decisions. He must not think of Ardan again until something concrete could be done about him.
* * * *
The tree was rough against his shoulders. The cooling vest, now much the worse for wear, did nevertheless protect the skin of his back. The Pinks had pulled his arms behind him when they retied him, however, and the ridges of tree bark dug into them.
Ardan, still protected by the fever, giggled softly. This had to be the silliest hallucination ever experienced. The Pinks themselves were ridiculous. This ritual with the skeleton-decorated trees was even worse.
He looked about at the nearest of the bony trophies. Most had turned brown with time, and some were also greenish with fungus. Grungy-Iooking things. How could his mind, even distorted with fever, come up with something so bizarre as this?
He stared at the adjacent tree. Its tenant grinned back at him absendy. The skeleton looked bored, as if the joke had long ago worn thin. A reptile, brilliant yellow striped with mud-green, came into view, crawling up through the rack of bones to coil about the collarbones.
His stomach heaved, and Ardan retched. The motion sent agony through him. The tight bindings had cut off circulation to his extremities, and they throbbed unmercifully.
The pain brought him entirely to his wits for the first time in many hours. This was no delusion. This was real. He was tied to
a tree in the middle of a swamp with the remnant of some earlier human expedition. He would rot, as they had done, and snakes would nest in his belly.
He knew mere was nothing to be gained by shouting, but he shouted, anyway. To his surprise, he heard a distant but distinct "Hallooo!" in return.
Friend? Or enemy? At the moment, Ardan didn't much care.
* * * *
Henrik hated the swamp. His uniform, standard Liao-issue, was too thick, too hot, too constricting for moving about in such country. The foul water soaked through pants-legs and into the boots, making his feet swell and steam. He knew that his men were cursing him silendy. He was just as silendy cursing his own commander, though he knew that Ridzik had good reason to order this search.
The muck teemed with reptiles and even more evil-looking creatures. The air was aswarm with insects, most of which either stung or bit. He swatted aside a loop of vine, and found himself holding a long green body that wriggled about with terrible quickness to sink fangs into his sleeve.
For an instant, he blessed the same heavy clothing he had been cursing for so long. The fangs did not penetrate the tough fabric, and twin beads of yellow venom were left to roll off into the water about his boots.
He dropped the thing with a yell, and his men scattered to give it room to escape. Most were from worlds that had no serpents, and so most of them recoiled instinctively. Recoiling himself, Henrik stepped back into a deep hole, and fell backward with a mighty splash. The brown-green mud roiled up where his foot had slipped, and he ended up lying on his back, looking up into the tree that leaned overhead.
Henrik found himself staring into a pair of pink eyes, round and frightened in an almost featureless circle of face. Another oddball animal. Its pale fur clung to its colorless hide, and its short, useless tail was quivering nervously.
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