Starwolf (Omnibus)

by Edmond Hamilton

  As he showed Chane how to bind the logs together, Bollard said, "I used to read stories where they would bind logs together with vines and make rafts. Did you ever see a vine that would tie anything together so it'd stay tied?"

  "I've been on a lot of worlds, and I never did," said Chane.

  They used the jungle knives to carve a steering-sweep and a yoke to set it in. Oddly, in all this time there was not a sign of the Nanes.

  The raft floated readily. "All right, get our invalids aboard," said Dilullo.

  The exhausted members of the party stumbled onto the rough raft and promptly lay down. Chane pushed out into the current of the river with the long steering oar.

  They floated. They went down and down the great river of Arkuu, and the sun set and the stars and moons came up, and then the yellow flare of Allubane rose into the sky again. Most of them just lay flat and rested. But on the first day on the raft, Vreya dived off it and swam around and around, and then got back on board and lay down to dry herself and her short jerkin in the sun.

  Chane gave her a leering wink as she lay there. She stuck out her tongue at him and he broke up laughing.

  They went down the river and there seemed nothing at all to see but the jungle-covered banks. On the third night, Chane sat with Dilullo at the steering sweep while the others slept. Both moons were in the zenith, and the river had become a running sea of silver.

  "Faster than light across the stars," said Dilullo. "And then ten miles an hour on a raft. I feel like an aging Huckleberry Finn."

  "Who is Huckleberry Finn?" asked Chane.

  "You know, Chane, I'm sorry for you," said Dilullo. "You're an Earthman by descent, but you've got no frame of reference. You don't know the legends, the myths, the stories ..."

  "We have some good legends on Varna," said Chane.

  "I'll just bet," said Dilullo. "How Harold Hardhand the Starwolf went raiding and broke a lot of skulls and stole a lot of other people's goods and came home triumphant."

  "Something like that," Chane admitted, and then he suddenly got to his feet, staring intently ahead.

  The moonlit river was sweeping around in a great curve, and ahead of them on both sides of the river there loomed great, dark ruined towers against the moonlit sky.

  "That," said Dilullo, "would be the dead city M'lann."

  Chane nodded. "Yes. And look what's waiting for us there."

  XIX

  At first glance, it looked as though the moonlit ruined city was crowded with hordes of Nanes. Then Chane realized that actually the creatures could be counted only in the dozens, but as he had never seen so many together before, they looked like a crowd. Their bodies gleaming white in the moonlight; they looked almost beautiful from this distance as they ran along the stone quays of the dead city, toward two massive half-ruined bridges.

  "Wake up the others," said Dilullo. "We've got trouble."

  Chane woke them, and they stared in fear and repulsion at the lithe white shapes. The raft was bearing them steadily down toward the first of the two bridges.

  "We've got one laser still operative," said Dilullo. "We've got the ato-flashes—they won't last long, but get them out. There's also the jungle knives."

  He added, "Chane, you take the sweep and steer. If we run aground, we're done for. Ashton, you and Sattargh don't have strength enough to do anything; I want you to lie down and hang on."

  Chane went to the steering-sweep, and as he went he grabbed Vreya's arm and hustled her along, sitting her down behind the place where he stood at the sweep.

  She opened her mouth to protest angrily, and then shut it. They were nearing the first bridge.

  There were now at least fifteen Nanes on the bridge, looking in the moonlight like white ghost-men as they waited for the raft. From far across the towering ruins there came long, falling, wordless cries, an unhuman ululation that grew louder as other Nanes answered the calls.

  "They're going to jump down on us, John," said Bollard.

  "Close your eyes, everybody," said Dilullo, and hurled up three of the tiny light-bombs in quick succession.

  Through closed eyelids, it was as though brilliant lightning flashed three times.

  There were sounds of splashes nearby, and thumps of things hitting the raft. Chane opened his eyes to see that, even though momentarily blinded, the Nanes had jumped. There were two of them on the raft.

  The laser cracked as Dilullo fired, and one of the two creatures on the raft fell overboard, scorched and lifeless. But the other one that had struck the raft had hit Garcia, and had now grabbed him; he was screaming.

  Bollard and Janssen sprang upon the back of that Nane, plunging the jungle knives into its body, trying to do it to death and not succeeding. The creature dropped Garcia and whirled around, and at that moment Dilullo triggered the laser and killed it.

  "They are coming from behind us," rang Vreya's voice from behind Chane.

  The Nanes swam like white man-fishes, and from behind and on either side they were starting to leap up out of the water onto the raft.

  Dilullo triggered, but the laser had gone dead. "Lie flat!" yelled Chane, and pulled the big steering-sweep out of its yoke and used all his strength to use it as a flail.

  The old battle-cry that he and his comrades had used on so many worlds sprang from his lips. "Kill, Starwolf!" he yelled in the Varnan tongue, and swung his oar.

  He knocked Nanes back into the water in two tremendous sweeps of the oar. Another of the things came up mewing onto the logs behind him, and Chane used the butt of the oar as a punch and drove the creature's face in.

  "Steer!" yelled Dilullo." Or we'll have more of them on us!"

  Chane's battle-fury faded enough for him to see what Dilullo meant. They were drifting down toward the second bridge now. This one had a big section gone out of its central span, but on the projectingpartsof it still intact, other Nanes were waiting. And they were going to drift under one of those ends.

  Chane put the sweep back in its yoke and strained mightily. The raft swung lumberingly toward the center of the river.

  Garcia was lying and moaning but nobody was paying any attention to him. White hands with nailless fingers came up out of the water and gripped the edge of the raft. Bollard spurted the little flare of his ato-flash at the hands, and they let go.

  And amazingly, of a sudden, the fight was over. The raft went past the bridge and the creatures on its projecting broken ends seemed to realize they were too far away to reach the raft by swimming. They mewled and sobbed their wordless cries, but that was all.

  "Well," said Dilullo. In the moonlight, his face was sweatstreakedandalittlewild."Let'sseehowwestand."

  Garcia's both arms and some of his ribs had been broken by the grip of the Nane. Bollard's left wrist had been fractured by a blow. The others had only bruises.

  "When I think how strong those things are, I wonder we're still alive," panted Dilullo. "You did damned good work with that sweep, Chane."

  "You take it and steer," said Chane. "I'll help fix up Garcia and Bollard."

  "I'll keep well away from shore," said Dilullo. "The last thing we need, if we're ever to get to that rendezvous, is more fighting."

  XX

  "You look," said Kimmel, "as though you've been having quite a time. Where's Milner?"

  "He got it," said Dilullo.

  They had waited five days at the rendezvous, where the great river ran into the heaving ocher-colored ocean, before the ship came and saw their smoke signal, and landed at the place which Dilullo had selected.

  "You found the man?" asked Kimmel.

  Dilullo waved his hand toward Ashton. "Mr. Randall Ash ton."

  "Found me? They kidnapped me," said Ashton. "I was all right, till they came ..."

  "You were lying there, slowly dying," said Dilullo. "You're going back with me, and I'll take you by the hand right into your brother's office and collect our wages for bringing you. But after that, if you want to come back here and do it all over again and ki
ll yourself, that's perfectly all right with me."

  Vreya looked at Chane, where they stood on the edge of the group.

  "What about you, Chane? Will you come back some day and go Free-Faring with me again?"

  "No," he said. "The Free-Faring is not for me. But maybe I'll come back, at that."

  She shrugged her golden shoulders. "By then, I may have another man."

  "That's all right," said Chane. "I'll just knock him out of the way."

  Vreya smiled. "It sounds interesting."

  Dilullo was giving Kimmel some instructions, and Kimmel looked as though he didn't like them.

  "It's simple," said Dilullo. "Take the ship up to medium altitude and then come back down and land out on the clear land around that city Yarr, Vreya can get out and we can be on our way before they spot us."

  "Now wait a moment," said Kimmel. "I don't like to run a chance going as close to the city as that. The ship ..."

  Dilullo surprised them all. An angry color came into his cheeks and his voice snapped.

  "This girl is worth twenty ships," he said. "She has some cockeyed notions, but she acted like a soldier all the way. We'll do it the way I say, and set her down safe."

  Vreya went and kissed him. Dilullo gave her an embarrassed smile, and patted her awkwardly on the shoulder.

  They did it that way, at dusk, and the last Chane saw of Vreya was as she walked with her swinging stride toward the lights of Yarr.

  They went back up fast into the glare of Allubane, and while Kimmel cautioned and pleaded with the imperturbable Mattock, Chane looked back at the Closed Worlds.

  He did not think they would be closed much longer. He thought that Vreya had the strength to be a leader. And he thought now that she had been right when she said she was strong enough to resist the deadly lure of addiction to the Free-Faring.

  Later, when they had gone into overdrive, Dilullo called him into his little cabin. He pushed the bottle toward him.

  "Everybody who does good work likes to have it noticed," said Dilullo. "So I'll say now, you did good work, Chane. There were a couple of times when, without your strength and quickness, we wouldn't have pulled through."

  "I thought so, too," said Chane.

  Dilullo made a disgusted sound. "Ah, you just can't be nice to some people."

  He poured himself another drink. Then he said,

  "You know, Chane, you never did tell us much about what you did in the Free-Faring."

  "No, I didn't," said Chane.

  "Did you go to Varna?"

  Chane nodded.

  "I thought so," said Dilullo. "There was a kind of a homesick look on your face afterwards. Well, I'll tell you ... there's different kinds of homesickness, and I've got a special kind of my own. So I think I know a little how you feel."

  Chane said, "I'm going to go back to Varna, some time." Dilullo looked at him, and then nodded his head. "Chane, I think you will."

  Book III:

  World Of The Starwolves

  I

  He was a long way now from the stars, and that was all right with him. Damn the stars, thought Dilullo. I've had enough of them. He sat on the browned, sun-warmed grass on the side of the low hill, hunched with his knees drawn up, looking in his gray coverall like an old rock set in the slope. And Dilullo's face had something rock-like in it too, a roughly carved face of harsh planes, his hair graying at the edges.

  He looked down at the streets and buildings of Brindisi, at the cape and the mole and the little islands, with beyond them the blue Adriatic shimmering in the hot Italian sun. He knew the old city very well, but it had changed since he had hurried through it as a boy on his way to school.

  Working and studying, to get to be a starman, he thought. And what did the stars give me when I got to them? Danger and worry and sweat, and when I went out to them once too often I came back to find that everybody and everything I had was gone.

  The sun wheeled lower, and still Dilullo sat and stared and remembered. Then he was drawn back to the present by the sight of a man walking up the slope toward him.

  He was a young man, compact of figure, his dark head bare. He wore a coverall and there was something about the easy springiness with which he came up the slope that made Dilullo peer more closely. He had never seen but one man who walked quite that way.

  "I'll be damned," he said aloud. "Morgan Chane."

  Chane came up to him and nodded. "Hello, John."

  "What the devil are you doing here?" demanded Dilullo. "I thought you'd have been long gone from Earth on some Merc job by now."

  Chane shrugged. "I would have been, only it seems nobody wants to hire Mercs right now."

  Dilullo nodded understandingly. The Mercs ... the Mercenaries ... would do tough, dangerous jobs anywhere in the galaxy if the pay was right. But sometimes there just weren't any jobs.

  "Well, you got enough money for our job at Arkuu to keep you for a while," he said.

  Chane smiled. He smiled easily, and his dark, lean face was that of a very nice young Earthman ... only Dilullo knew that he was not a nice young Earthman at all but a human tiger.

  "I thought," Chane said, "that I'd see how your new house is coming along. Where is it?"

  "I haven't started building it yet," said Dilullo.

  "Not started?" exclaimed Chane. "Why, it's been weeks and weeks since you quit the Mercs and left us. You didn't talk about anything but this grand new house, and how anxious you were to get it started."

  "Listen," said Dilullo testily, "if you're going to spend a lot of money on a house to live the rest of your life in, you don't hurry it too much. You've got to be sure of the right site, the right design ..."

  He broke off and then said, "Ah, what's the use of trying to explain it to you.... what does a home mean to a damned Starwolf!"

  Chane said, "I'd just as lief you didn't call me that, John. They still hang Starwolves most places if they catch them."

  "Don't worry," Dilullo said sourly. "I've never breathed it to a soul. I can well imagine you don't want it told around."

  The Starwolves were the natives of a distant heavy planet named Varna, and there was a reason why they were hated and feared all over the galaxy. They were the most competent robbers of all time. Their heavy world had given them unmatchable strength and speed and ability to endure acceleration, and nobody could beat them in space. They had used that advantage to take loot from all over the universe.

  Nobody but Dilullo knew that Chane had been a Starwolf. He looked like any other Earthman, and his parents had been Earth folk, but Chane himself was born on Varna and had grown to Varnan strength. He had robbed and roved with the Starwolf squadrons until a quarrel with a comrade had resulted in a fight, and a dead Varnan, and Chane fleeing into exile to avoid the vengeance of the dead man's clan. And I had to pick him up, thought Dilullo, and turn him into a Merc, and he's been a damned good one, but all the same I'm glad I don't have the responsibility for this tiger on my hands anymore.

  Dilullo stood up. "Come on, Chane. I'll buy you a drink."

  They went down the slope and into the streets of the old town, and presently sat in a cool, shadowy tavern in which time seemed to have stopped a long while ago. Dilullo ordered, and a waiter brought two bottles, and he shoved one of them across the table.

  "Orvieto abboccato," said Dilullo. "The best wine in the whole galaxy."

  "If it's that good," said Chane, "why are you drinking whiskey?"

  Dilullo answered, a little embarrassed, "The truth is, I've been away from here so long I'm not used to wine any more. It upsets my stomach."

  Chane grinned, and drank his wine, and looked around, at the old wooden furniture, at the smoke-blackened ceiling, at the open doorway outside which twilight was coming to the street.

  "It's a nice town," said Chane. "A real nice place for a man to retire and live quiet in."

  Dilullo said nothing. Chane poured himself more wine and said, "You know, you're lucky, John. When the rest of us are out there
beating up the starways, in trouble up to our necks on some faraway planet, why, you'll be sitting here and drinking and taking it easy, real peaceful-like."

  He drank and set his glass down and added, "I'd sure like to settle down in a place like this myself when I get old."

  "Chane," said Dilullo, "let me give you a bit of advice. Never try to needle people, to cat-and-mouse with them. You don't know how, as you're not quite all human yourself. Now say what you want to say."

  "All right," said Chane. He poured more of the straw-colored wine for himself. "John, do you remember that when we came back from Arkuu, we heard the Singing Suns had been stolen?"

  "I'm not likely to forget it," said Dilullo. "The greatest art-treasure in the galaxy robbed away by the Starwolves. You must have been real proud of your people."

  "I was," said Chane. "Just six ships, slipping in to the throne-world of Achernar and snatching the Suns out from under their noses. Achernar has been screaming bloody murder ever since."

  They had, Dilullo knew, and he didn't blame them. The Singing Suns had been their almost-sacred treasure.

  They were not really suns. They were synthetic jewels, created long ago by a master craftsman, and the secret of their creation had died with him. Big, varicolored, glorious, the jewels represented the forty biggest stars of the galaxy, revolving in a mobile. And the jewels sang, each one differently ... the deep and somber note of Betelgeuse, the soaring sweet tone of Altair, the thrilling sounds of Rigel and Aldebaran and Canopus and all the others, blending together into a true music of the spheres.

  Chane was still smiling. "They talked of sending a war-fleet to Varna to get the Suns back. But that couldn't be done, for all the independent systems in Argo Spur, where Varna is, wouldn't let their sovereign space be violated by a fleet going through them."

  "I've said before," said Dilullo disgustedly, "that it's a damned immoral arrangement. Those Argo systems protect the Starwolves from attack because they profit from the Starwolf loot."