"Pull up over there. This must be the Elchites."
"For all you know the mutants have taken these Elchites and are waiting for us to do just what you're proposing."
Jon scanned the cabs of the mantids. No one was in sight. Could Braunt be correct? He hardly wanted to find out by getting shot or captured.
"Stop," he commanded. Braunt kept going. Jon prodded him with the assault rifle. The hovercraft slowed, idled.
"Back up."
Very gradually they approached the silent mantids.
Jon opened the door on his side, ordered Braunt out on his side.
A figure stepped around the edge of the nearby machine hulk and aimed his rifle at them.
Jon recognized the Elchite Acolyte Gesme.
"Gesme," he called, raising his hands in the air.
The rifle didn't waver. Jon thought Gesme was about to fire. "M'Nee lied! He was responsible for my disappearance—had me kidnapped by slavers."
The rifle stayed high. "That's a serious allegation. Do you have any proof?"
"Nothing except myself. If I'd betrayed you I wouldn't have come all this way to find you."
Gesme thought that over; there was an inescapable logic to the reply.
He saw Hawkstone in the cab and the lean figure of Braunt. "Who's that?" The gun gestured.
"Braunt, my driver, brought me down the fast way, over the High West Pass."
"Why did you bring the captain back? He told us he wanted to go to Quism and find a way home. He is a coward."
Jon fluttered his hands. "Not too loud, Gesme, he'll hear you. Things are really delicate right now with the captain. He starts hearing voices and things."
Gesme wavered. Then a whistle sounded, faint but audible. He looked off into the distance. "All right, stay where you are. We'll let the Bey decide. They're coming back now."
A couple of minutes later four figures in full desert uniform with goggles and breathing apparatus came out of the blazing heat.
They stepped into the shadow and lifted the bugeye glare shields, retaining just their polarizers against the blinding brightness.
At the sight of Jon, Eblis Bey broke into a broad smile. "I knew you'd be back," he said.
The young Elchites paused, swallowed, stared at the Bey.
"It's all right," he bellowed. "This is Jon Iehard. He's no traitor, are you, Jon?"
He put his arms around Jon and clapped him on the back. "I see you brought the captain back too. However did you manage to inspire him to return with you?"
"I had to bring him; I pulled him out of some mutant's meat herd just a day away from the stewpot. He's lost control, I'm afraid. But I brought you someone else too." And Jon gave the Bey the mote, which awoke at the first touch of the old man's hands.
It immediately squawked and yowled in a strange, complex tongue that meant nothing to Jon. To his amazement, the Bey replied in a passable imitation of the same noises.
Eblis Bey looked up at him. "Mr. Stardimple is greatly in your debt, Mr. Iehard, and he confirms, at least, that you wore a slaver's band on your ankle."
The other Elchites came forward to shake his hand.
The Bey then produced something from a pocket on the inside of his suit.
It was the silver cube!
Jon smiled. The little cube felt cool and pleasant to the touch.
"I found it in your hotel room. When I saw it I knew you could not have disappeared voluntarily."
"I'd missed it. I wondered what had happened to it."
"Come over to the mantid and I'll brief you on our plan. Time is short, as usual."
Jon left Gesme to guard Braunt, Hawkstone, and the mantid.
The Bey switched on a screen and ordered up a map of this sector of the machine belt.
"When the winds pick up again and the dust gets thicker we'll head on down the trail another few kilometers. We captured a mutant and made him lead us to the Hardscabby larders."
"I heard that you hired them as trail guides."
"A terrible mistake. If I hadn't been so worried that you'd been taken by Superior Buro I never would have considered it. As it was, they only succeeded in their ambush because the Ornholme people refused to take sufficient precautions."
"The trail guides seemed to think it was a mistake too."
"We will teach the mutants a lesson," the Bey said grimly. "But we must move quickly. We have missed our first appointment with the man with half a head. We shall have to try and catch up with him in the south where he awaits us. With the Buro so close on our trail I did not dare approach him directly in Quism."
While he explained the plan and showed Jon the layout of the larder, a space enclosed beneath a great fallen disk, the wind outside began to moan. In the middistance the dust thickened.
By the time the Bey had finished the dust was howling past them and was so thick it was hard to see more than fifty meters in any direction.
Jon returned to Braunt's mantid. He urged the sullen driver to follow the other two hovercraft into the wind.
Keeping the others in view, they pushed forward into billowing white clouds. Together they left the southbound trail and headed across a bumpy dunefield toward a distant tower. When they reached it they stopped.
The Bey and the Elchites clambered out. Jon turned to Braunt and Hawkstone. "Well, my friends, here's the moment of truth. I'm getting out here to try to rescue the others from Ornholme. Obviously I can't prevent you from turning back to Fort Pinshon. So you'll have to make your own decisions."
Hawkstone wore a look of acute distress.
Jon slipped out into the wind, ran to join the Elchites. The wind was a physical force. He had to lean into it to make progress. Around his boots the pleochroic crystals were shifting, flowing, running over the dunes.
He sensed Braunt starting up his engines and driving away but he didn't look back. He hadn't expected them to stay.
The Bey pointed ahead. Dimly through the clouds he could see a smooth mound shape. A dark hole at its mouth. "The front entrance of the larder."
Wisps of black smoke rose from a pipe that jutted from the dark entrance, but the wind quickly dissipated it. The cannibals prepared for their next feast.
"We'd better hurry," Jon said. "You keep up the pressure at the front, while I creep in the back hole."
"Gesme, go with him," the Bey said.
They separated. Jon and Gesme moved clockwise around the huge circular plate that roofed in the Hardscabbies' hole, creeping carefully through the dunes toward a pipe stem that jutted from the sand a short distance from the plate. No one guarded it; the Hardscabbies had never thought that outsiders would actually want to visit their larders.
A crudely knotted ladder of human hide and femurs led down into the dark. An odor like that of roasting pork assailed their nostrils. To his disgust, Jon found himself salivating.
"I'll go first," he whispered, then climbed over the edge and began to descend. Gesme attached a small radio transmitter to the edge of the pipe, which would rebroadcast their signal when they were ready.
Jon listened hard for movement below but discerned nothing. With any luck the mutants would be too busy feasting to keep a good look out. Cautiously he worked his way down the pipe, trying to keep the ladder's movements to a minimum.
When he reached the end of the ladder, however, he found a problem of a quite unexpected sort.
The ladder simply terminated in midair, yet he judged the floor was about seven meters below. He was hanging in midair in a big room with circular walls. Boxes and sacks were stacked around the sides.
He sat on the lowest femur and began swinging the ladder back and forth. When it was moving as far as the storage boxes he swung down to hang by his hands and then dropped the last three meters onto the boxes.
It was a harder landing than he'd expected. A box collapsed under him, he teetered for a moment on the verge of a fall, then the pile of crates stabilized. Heart pounding, he crouched still for a few moments and listened.
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The sound of festivities came from somewhere nearby—some coarse singing or chanting accompanied by drums and a piercing flute.
Jon climbed carefully down the boxes to the floor and crept to the doorway, an aperture as high as the room but only a meter wide.
He looked out into a very large space, cut up into room-sized sections by walls and equipment. Several of the black-cabbed vehicles with balloon tires that he and Braunt had fought off were parked in the center. Beyond them was the primary light source, a big glow bar sticking straight up for five meters.
Here and there in the farther parts of the space, other lights were visible in what he presumed were private quarters.
Close by was a stack of coffin-shaped boards, hanging on thongs from a large frame. His eyes passed over these at first, seeing nothing to interest him, then they returned to a flash of white and orange, a medical cast in the shape of a fist and forearm! There were other human outlines on those boards. He observed several men and women strapped down on them, connected together by a black hosepipe.
There was no one in sight. Jon glided over.
Bound down on the boards, the men and women were attached to a force-feeding machine. Above the machine was a small hopper filled with an oily-looking feed mix. The tubes ran into their throats. When the machine was turned on, the feed would be pumped into them.
Among those tied to the boards were Finn M'Nee and Gelgo Chacks. They saw him, faces alight in astonishment. Next to M'Nee was a small woman now swollen to a grotesque volume. Jon estimated she weighed at least three hundred pounds.
This then was mutant feast meat. He gave M'Nee a long cool stare then left them behind and moved on into the big room. A chamber formed by walls of puffcrete opened to one side. He glanced in. Two mutant females, with small human skulls on thongs covering their genitals and breasts, were working on a pile of tubers, peeling and cutting and mashing them. They had the same, thick, lumpy skin as Gnush Two Tusks. Their long black hair was tied up with finger bones on top of their heads.
Jon returned to the storeroom, pushed several crates into a pile underneath the thong-and-bone ladder, and whistled softly to Gesme.
When they were both on the ground, Jon pressed the comstud on his wrist and the code signal flashed to the main rescue party.
He waited a few seconds, then he and Gesme shifted into the main room and took positions.
Half a minute went by. Jon could feel M'Nee and Chacks' eyes pressing on him from the shadows where they waited helplessly.
He was half inclined to leave them to the mutants.
Abruptly there was a blast of sound and bright flashes of light in the front entrance. More explosions followed and the lightbar disintegrated. A chorus of screams and roars of rage came from the mutants.
Mutant males leaped to the entrance to fire long bursts out into the daylight with hand weapons. Jon and Gesme rose and began shooting them down from behind.
More screams. The two women he'd seen before ran out. Each carried a long knife and ran straight for him. His assault rifle cracked twice and the bullets exploded in their heads, sending fountains of gore and brain matter over the puffcrete walls. A bullet whined off the puffcrete behind him, showering him with dust and splinters. He dove for better cover and worked his way into the room.
Bullets, tracer and explosive fragments were ricocheting everywhere and figures were struggling in the main doorway as more explosions rocked the interior.
Jon ducked behind a bale of human hides with heads and limbs attached. A movement caught his eye: A huge mutant male, with fighting tusks agape, suddenly emerged from behind the bale.
Jon had barely rolled aside when a long knife struck where he'd been crouched, then the mutant was upon him. It stank of oil and blood and possessed terrible strength. In a moment it had bent him back and was bringing those tusks to bear on his shoulder. Jon screamed from the stabbing pain and drove his fist into the creature's heavy belly. It bore down harder and a fist the size of a plate slammed him in the face. He felt another big hand groping for his throat, when Gesme appeared above them and brought his rifle butt down on the mutant's head, once, twice, three times, before it finally went limp.
Jon pushed it away, got to his feet, found his rifle. Blood was trickling down his arm from the tusk wounds.
"Thanks," he managed before a trio of mutants charged across the floor. Jon and Gesme fired, the guns shuddering in their hands, until all were dead. Jon dropped the rifle and drew his Taw Taw longbarrel. He stalked through the ruined rooms. But the battle was over. The remaining mutants were lying facedown under the guns of the Elchites. A pile of half a dozen bodies filled the front entrance.
The Elchites had about them the fire of righteousness, their eyes seemed to blaze under the lifted goggles and polarizers. Jon observed that one of them, Yondon, lay among the dead mutants. Another, Dekter, was having a shoulder wound bandaged.
"Where are the Orners?" asked Jon.
"Over here," said the young Elchite named Aul. He led Jon around a partition of skin stretched over a metal frame. In a pit seven meters long and five wide were dozens of people, including the surviving Orners, Dahn, Bergen, Hargen, and Wauk.
"Where is Rewa Kolod?" Jon asked Officer Wauk, who had tears running down his face, though whether from relief or sorrow was unguessable.
There was a pressure on his arm. Jon turned to Aul. "Kolod is over there."
Jon looked where he indicated and saw Rewa Kolod's head on a pole. On a grill were arrayed her limbs and pieces of her torso, dripping fat into the coals below. Jon felt a long moment of nausea, then turned away.
The Elchites put a ladder made of human bones down into the pit and the contents of the Bluescabbies' larder climbed out.
"I think we should hurry and get away from here," Eblis Bey said. "There are bound to be visitors from the main shelters of the tribe. We don't want to be trapped in here."
Jon could not have agreed more. Ignoring the cuts in his shoulder, he moved to the back of the shelter and cut the people free from the force-feeding machine. The grotesquely overfed woman fell down weeping hysterically, trying to kiss his boots. Finn M'Nee and Gelgo Chacks got up from the fattening boards with long, level stares. They said nothing, and when they were able to walk again, they went quickly to the main entrance and left.
Jon turned to Gesme. "No thanks from them, eh?"
"They are a strange pair. Truly they are not popular with the rest of us."
While the Elchites tended the wounded and guarded the entrance, Jon and then Gesme siphoned fuel from the mutants' vehicles and loaded it onto a captured hovercraft, an older vehicle called a turtle, with seats for six people and storage trunks at front and rear.
With reserves of fuel and ammunition taken from the Hardscabbies, the expedition regrouped around the pair of surviving mantids and the turtle.
There was a long moment as Eblis Bey inspected Finn M'Nee and Chacks. They stared back impassively.
"For some reason you have lied to me and committed a most dangerous crime." Neither moved to protest. They stared straight ahead, unseeing.
"Unfortunately, we haven't the time to hold a hearing to investigate the matter now; it will have to wait. However, should there be any repetition of these problems we will have to resort to summary methods. All personal dislikes and feuds will be forgotten as of now! Is that understood?"
M'Nee's head bobbed in a barely perceptible nod.
"All right. M'Nee and Chacks will ride in the turtle with the Orners. Jon Iehard will take Yondon's place in the lead mantid. Everybody to your places, we must hurry."
The Bey turned to the other survivors of the Hardscabby larder. "We have no spare equipment for you. I suggest, however, that you ransack this place for supplies and try and make your way to Fort Pinshon. You are about thirty kilometers south and west of the fort. I would suggest these vehicles here as your best method of transport to safety."
A gaunt man in the tatters of a surface suit poi
nted to the few surviving mutants lying facedown by the entrance. "What about them? Will you kill them or leave them to us?"
The Bey looked at the shuddering mutants with revulsion. "Cannibalism is a disgusting atavism. Perhaps it would be better to kill these creatures. On the other hand, mercy is one of the greatest of human characteristics. We will leave them to you, and I would suggest that time is more valuable to you than the joy of revenge." The Bey turned away and strode toward the entrance.
The escapees from the larder searched for weapons with chilling little cries.
Jon found Owlcurl Dahn staring at him. "You came back for us," she whispered. "M'Nee lied."
"Yes," he said simply. She noticed the blood on his shoulder, the cut on his cheek.
"You are wounded!" She reached out to examine the damage. Officer Bergen joined them then went to the turtle and returned with a first aid kit. Owlcurl Dahn applied antiseptic and a medipack to the gouges.
"The question that gnaws at me," Jon confessed, "is why does M'Nee risk our mission for such personal hatreds?"
She shrugged. "I do not know, but I am glad to see you again and to have those charges against you disproved." The dressing was completed. She gave him a little kiss on the cheek as he pulled his desert suit back over his shoulder. They parted and she climbed into the turtle, which started up with a roar of engines and moved out through the front entrance of the larder. Jon followed, trotting to catch up with Eblis Bey.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The party of four hovercraft, three crouched, black mantids, and the lumbering turtle regained the Oolite trail without further molestation by the Hardscabbies.
They headed for Fort Pinshon, to renew supplies and to obtain a new guide before heading south. The winds had died down somewhat, the dust had thinned. They drove across a flat plain of shimmering sequins, the hulks of ancient machines on either side in perfectly spaced multitudes stretching into the smoking distance. Light dust whipped from the dunes into the heatscatter of the sun.
Eblis Bey was consumed with anxiety. The decades-old plan for contact was in ruins. He had panicked in Quism and run too soon. Ulip Sehngrohn had been unable to arrange a firm meeting site. All the Bey knew was that Sehngrohn would be in the south. If not at Fort Pinshon then at Bengo's in the Boneyards, or at Guillotine Rock. He had not been at Fort Pinshon and now the Bey had lost half a day or more in freeing the Ornholme people.
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