by Andre Norton
That rock had not bounded down the mountainside by chance; it had been hurled with intent and aimed carefully at its target. And no Throg would kill one of his fellows. Or would he? Suppose orders had been issued to take a Terran prisoner and the Throg by the ship had disobeyed? Then, why a rock and not a blaster bolt?
Shann edged along until the upslanted, broken side of the Throg flyer provided him with protection from any overhead attack. Under that shelter he waited for the next move from his unknown rescuer.
The clak-claks wheeled closer to earth. One lit boldly on the carapace of the inert Throg, shuffling ungainly along that horny ridge. Cradling the blaster, the Terran continued to wait. His patience was rewarded when that investigating clak-clak took off uttering an enraged snap or two. He heard what might be the scrape of boots across rock, but that might also have come from horny skin meeting stone.
Then the other must have lost his footing not too far above. Accompanied by a miniature landslide of stones and earth, a figure slid down several yards away. Shann waited in a half-crouch, his looted blaster covering the man now getting to his feet. There was no mistaking the familiar uniform, or even the man. How Ragnar Thorvald had reached that particular spot on Warlock or why, Shann could not know. But that he was there, there was no denying.
Shann hurried forward. It had been when he caught his first sight of Thorvald that he realized just how deep his unacknowledged loneliness had bit. There were two Terrans on Warlock now, and he did not need to know why. But Thorvald was staring back at him with the blankness of non-recognition.
“Who are you?” The demand held something close to suspicion.
That note in the other’s voice wiped away a measure of Shann’s confidence, threatened something which had flowered in him since he had struck into the wilderness on his own. Three words had reduced him again to Lantee, unskilled laborer.
“Lantee. I’m from the camp.…”
Thorvald’s eagerness was plain in his next question: “How many of you got away? Where are the rest?” He gazed past Shann up the plateau slope as if he expected to see the personnel of the camp sprout out of the cloak of grass along the verge.
“Just me and the wolverines,” Shann answered in a colorless voice. He cradled the blaster on his hip, turned a little away from the officer.
“You…and the wolverines?” Thorvald was plainly startled. “But…where? How?”
“The Throgs hit very early yesterday morning. They caught the rest in camp. The wolverines had escaped from their cage, and I was out hunting them.…” He told his story baldly.
“You’re sure about the rest?” Thorvald had a thin steel of rage edging his voice. Almost, Shann thought, as if he could turn that blade of rage against one Shann Lantee for being yet alive when more important men had not survived.
“I saw the attack from an upper ridge,” the younger man said, having been put on the defensive. Yet he had a right to be alive, hadn’t he? Or did Thorvald believe that he should have gone running down to meet the beetle-heads with his useless stunner? “They used energy beams…didn’t land until it was all over.”
“I knew there was something wrong when the camp didn’t answer our enter-atmosphere signal,” Thorvald said absently. “Then one of those platters jumped us on braking orbit, and my pilot was killed. When we set down on the automatics here I had just time to rig a surprise for any trackers before I took to the hills—”
“The blast got one of them,” Shann pointed out.
“Yes, they’d nicked the booster rocket; she wouldn’t climb again. But they’ll be back here to pick over the remains.”
Shann looked at the dead Throg. “Thanks for taking a hand.” His tone was as chill as the other’s this time. “I’m heading south.…”
And, he added silently, I intend to keep on that way. The Throg attack had dissolved the pattern of the Survey team. He didn’t owe Thorvald any allegiance. And he had been successfully on his own here since the camp had been overrun.
“South,” Thorvald repeated. “Well, that’s as good a direction as any right now.”
But they were not united. Shann found the wolverines and patiently coaxed and wheedled them into coming with him over a circuitous route which kept them away from both ships. Thorvald went up the cliff, swung down again, a supply bag slung over one shoulder. He stood watching as Shann brought the animals in.
Then Thorvald’s arm swept out, his fingers closing possessively about the barrel of the blaster. Shann’s own hold on the weapon tightened, and the force of the other’s pull dragged him partly around.
“Let’s have that—”
“Why?” Shann supposed that because it had been the other’s well-aimed rock which had put the Throg out of commission permanently, the officer was going to claim their only spoils of war as personal booty, and a hot resentment flowered in the younger man.
“We don’t take that away from here.” Thorvald made the weapon his with a quick twist.
To Shann’s utter astonishment, the Survey officer walked back to kneel beside the dead Throg. He worked the grip of the blaster under the alien’s lax claws and inspected the result with the care of one arranging a special and highly important display. Shann’s protest became vocal. “We’ll need that!”
“It’ll do us far more good right where it is.…” Thorvald paused and then added, with impatience roughening his voice as if he disliked the need for making any explanations, “There is no reason for us to advertise our being alive. If the Throgs found a blaster missing, they’d start thinking and looking around. I want to have a breathing spell before I have to play quarry in one of their hunts.”
Put that way, his action did make sense. But Shann regretted the loss of an arm so superior to their own weapons. Now they could not loot the plateship either. In silence he turned and started to trudge southward, without waiting for Thorvald to catch up with him.
Once away from the blasted area, the wolverines ranged ahead at their clumsy gallop, which covered ground at a surprising rate of speed. Shann knew that their curiosity made them scouts surpassing any human and that the men who followed would have ample warning of any danger to come. Without reference to his silent trail companion, he sent the animals toward another strip of woodland which would give them cover against the coming of any Throg flyer.
As the hours advanced he began to cast about for a proper night camp. The woods ought to give them a usable site.
“This is a water wood,” Thorvald said, breaking the silence for the first time since they had left the wrecks.
Shann knew that the other had knowledge, not only of the general countryside, but of exploring techniques which he himself did not possess, but to be reminded of that fact was an irritant rather than a reassurance. Without answering, the younger man bored on to locate the water promised.
The wolverines found the small lake first and were splashing along its shore when the Terrans caught up. Thorvald went to work, but to Shann’s surprise he did not unstrap the force-blade ax at his belt. Bending over a sapling, he pounded away with a stone at the green wood a few inches above the root line until he was able to break through the slender trunk. Shann drew his own knife and bent to tackle another treelet when Thorvald stopped him with an order: “Use a stone on that, the way I did.”
Shann could see no reason for such a laborious process. If Thorvald did not want to use his ax, that was no reason that Shann could not put his heavy belt knife to work. He hesitated, ready to set the blade to the outer bark of the tree.
“Look—” again that impatient edge in the officer’s tone, the need for explanation seeming to come very hard to the other—“sooner or later the Throgs might just trace us here and find this camp. If so, they are not going to discover any traces to label us Terran—”
“But who else could we be?” protested Shann. “There is no native race on Warlock.”
Thorvald tossed his improvised stone ax from hand to hand.
“But do the Throgs kno
w that?”
The implications, the possibilities, in that idea struck home to Shann. Now he began to understand what Thorvald might be planning.
“Now there is going to be a native race.” Shann made a statement instead of a question and saw that the other was watching him with a new intentness, as if he had at last been recognized as a person instead of rank and file and very low rank at that—Survey personnel.
“There is going to be a native race,” Thorvald affirmed.
Shann resheathed his knife and went to search the pond beach for a suitable stone to use in its place. Even so, he made harder work of the clumsy chopping than Thorvald had. He worried at one sapling after another until his hands were skinned and his breath came in painful gusts from under aching ribs. Thorvald had gone on to another task, ripping the end of a long tough vine from just under the powdery surface of the thick leaf masses fallen in other years.
With this the officer lashed together the tops of the poles, having planted their splintered butts in the ground, so that he achieved a crudely conical erection. Leafy branches were woven back and forth through this framework, with an entrance, through which one might crawl on hands and knees, left facing the lakeside. The shelter they completed was compact and efficient but totally unlike anything Shann had ever seen before, certainly far removed from the domes of the camp. He said so, nursing his raw hands.
“An old form,” Thorvald replied, “native to a primitive race on Terra. Certainly the beetle-heads haven’t come across its like before.”
“Are we going to stay here? Otherwise it is pretty heavy work for one night’s lodging.”
Thorvald tested the shelter with a sharp shake. The matted leaves whispered, but the framework held.
“Stage dressing. No, we won’t linger here. But it’s evidence to support our play. Even a Throg isn’t dense enough to believe that natives would make a cross-country trip without leaving evidence of their passing.”
Shann sat down with a sigh he made no effort to suppress. He had a vision of Thorvald traveling southward, methodically erecting these huts here and there to confound Throgs who might not ever chance upon them. But already the Survey officer was busy with a new problem.
“We need weapons—”
“We have our stunners, a force ax, and our knives,” Shann pointed out. He did not add, as he would have liked that they could have had a blaster.
“Native weapons,” Thorvald countered with his usual snap. He went back to the beach and crawled about there, choosing and rejecting stones picked out of the gravel.
Shann scooped out a small pit just before their hut and set about the making of a pocket-sized fire. He was hungry and looked longingly now and again to the supply bag Thorvald had brought with him. Dared he rummage in that for rations? Surely the other would be carrying concentrates.
“Who taught you how to make a fire that way?” Thorvald was back from the pond, a selection of round stones about the size of his fist resting between his chest and his forearm.
“It’s regulation, isn’t it?” Shann countered defensively.
“It’s regulation,” Thorvald agreed. He set down his stones in a row and then tossed the supply bag over to his companion. “Too late to hunt tonight. But well have to go easy on those rations until we can get more.”
“Where?” Did Thorvald know of some supply cache they could raid?
“From the Throgs,” the other answered matter of factly.
“But they don’t eat our kind of food.…”
“All the more reason for them to leave the camp supplies untouched.”
“The camp?”
For the first time Thorvald’s lips curved in a shadow smile which was neither joyous nor warming. “A native raid on an invaders’ camp. What could be more natural? And we’d better make it soon.”
“But how can we?” To Shann what the other proposed was sheer madness.
“There was once an ancient service corps on Terra,” Thorvald answered, “which had a motto something like this: ‘The improbable we do at once; the impossible takes a little longer.’ What did you think we were going to do? Sulk around out here in the bush and let the Throgs claim Warlock for one of their pirate bases without opposition?”
Since that was the only future Shann had visualized, he was ready enough to admit the truth, only some shade of tone in the officer’s voice kept him from saying so aloud.
CHAPTER 4
Sortie
Five days later they came up from the south so that this time Shann’s view of the Terran camp was from a different angle. At first sight there had been little change in the general scene. He wondered if the aliens were using the Terran dome shelters themselves. Even in the twilight it was easy to pick out such landmarks as the com dome with the shaft of a broadcaster spearing from its top and the greater bulk of the supply warehouse.
“Two of their small flyers down on the landing field.…” Thorvald materialized from the shadow, his voice a thread of whisper.
By Shann’s side the wolverines were moving restlessly. Since Taggi’s attack on the Throg neither beast would venture near any site where they could scent the aliens. This was the nearest point to which the men could urge either animal, which was a disappointment, for the wolverines would have been an excellent addition to the surprise sortie they planned for tonight, halving the danger for the men.
Shann ran his fingers across the coarse fur on the animals’ shoulders, exerting a light pressure to signal them to wait. But he was not sure of their obedience. The foray was a crazy idea, and Shann wondered again why he had agreed to it. Yet he had gone along with Thorvald, even suggested a few modifications and additions of his own, such as the contents of the crude leaf sack now resting between his knees.
Thorvald flitted away, seeking his own post to the west. Shann was still waiting for the other’s signal when there arose from the camp a sound to chill the flesh of any listener, a wail which could not have come from the throat of any normal living thing, intelligent being or animal. Ululating in ear-torturing intensity, the cry sank to a faint, ominous echo of itself, to waver up the scale again.
The wolverines went mad. Shann had witnessed their quick kills in the wilds, but this stark ferocity of spitting, howling rage was new. They answered that challenge from the camp, streaking out from under his hands. Yet both animals skidded to a stop before they passed the first dome and were lost in the gloom. A spark glowed for an instant to his right; Thorvald was ready to go, so Shann had no time to try and recall the animals.
He fumbled for those balls of soaked moss in his leaf bag. The chemical smell from them blotted out that alien mustiness which the wind brought from the campsite. Shann readied the first sopping mess in his sling, snapped his fire sparker at it, and had the ball awhirl for a toss almost in one continuous movement. The moss burst into fire as it curved out and fell.
To a witness it might have seemed that the missile materialized out of the air, the effect being better than Shann had hoped.
A second ball for the sling—spark…out…down. The first had smashed on the ground near the dome of the com station, the force of impact flattening it into a round splatter of now fiercely burning material. And his second, carefully aimed, lit two feet beyond.
Another wail tearing at the nerves. Shann made a third throw, a fourth. He had an audience now. In the light of those pools of fire the Throgs were scuttling back and forth, their hunched bodies casting weird shadows on the dome walls. They were making efforts to douse the fires, but Shann knew from careful experimentation that once ignited the stuff he had skimmed from the lip of one of the hot springs would go on burning as long as a fraction of its viscid substance remained unconsumed.
Now Thorvald had gone into action. A Throg suddenly halted, struggled frantically, and toppled over into the edge of a fire splotch, legs looped together by the coils of the curious weapon Thorvald had put together on their first night of partnership. Three round stones of comparable weight had eac
h been fastened at the end of a vine cord, and those cords united at a center point. Thorvald had demonstrated the effectiveness of his creation by bringing down one of the small “deer” of the grasslands, an animal normally fleet enough to feel safe from both human and animal pursuit. And those weighted ropes now trapped the Throg with the same efficiency.
Having shot his last fireball, Shann ran swiftly to take up a new position, downgrade and to the east of the domes. Here he put into action another of the primitive weapons Thorvald had devised, a spear hurled with a throwing stick, giving it double range and twice as forceful penetration power. The spears themselves were hardly more than crudely shaped lengths of wood, their points charred in the fire. Perhaps these missiles could neither kill nor seriously wound. But more than one thudded home in a satisfactory fashion against the curving back carapace or the softer front parts of a Throg in a manner which certainly shook up and bruised the target. And one of Shann’s victims went to the ground, to lie kicking in a way which suggested he had been more than just bruised.
Fireballs, spears.… Thorvald had moved too. And now down into the somewhat frantic melee of the aroused camp fell a shower of slim weighted reeds, each provided with a clay-ball head. The majority of those balls broke on landing as the Terrans had intended. So, through the beetle smell of the aliens, spread the acrid, throat-parching fumes of the hot spring water. Whether those fumes had the same effect upon Throg breathing apparatus as they did upon Terran, the attackers could not tell, but they hoped such a bombardment would add to the general confusion.
Shann began to space the hurling of his crude spears with more care, trying to place them with all the precision of aim he could muster. There was a limit to their amount of varied ammunition, although they had dedicated every waking moment of the past few days to manufacture and testing. Luckily the enemy had had none of their energy beams at the domes. And so far they had made no move to lift their flyers for retaliation blasts.
