Hunters of the Red Moon

by Marion Zimmer Bradley,;Paul Edwin Zimmer

  Time seemed to crawl, to stretch itself out interminably. It was Dallith, with a quick indrawn breath, who warned them all; her eyes gleamed and she sat abruptly upright, her face drawn and pale. Rianna had evidently been watching her beneath half-closed lids; she sprang off her bunk and took up her place near the bars. Aratak went into a tense crouch. The word, in a whisper, was running up and down through the rows of cages, more than a full minute before the first loud clang marked that down at the far end the Mekhar had thrown the switch which controlled all the cage locks.

  Dane, moving slowly toward the doors, saw and felt the air of tension in their own area, and thought, The others, everyone, must know that something's happening. We can't keep them from knowing now, well simply have to hope that no one alerts the Mekhars.

  The two Mekhar guards were coming down the corridor now. They shoved the coded food packages into one cage area after another, and withdrew. Now they were about to unload it inside the area where Dane and his friends waited, tensed to the breaking point. The Mekhar with the food-cart, moving exactly as usual, trundled it in through the unlocked door and began to unload the coded trays. Behind him his colleague, with a drawn nerve-gun, covered the cage inhabitants. The Mekhar with the cart finished the unloading, turned to trundle it out again, and at the moment when the cart momentarily blocked the door, Dane and Aratak leaped at his back.

  Dane made one vicious karate chop across the lion-thing's neck; he went down, sprawling, roaring an ear-hurting howl, and the Mekhar behind him fired with the drawn nerve-gun; Dane felt the hiss of the bolt behind him, ducked. Someone shrieked, but by that time the Mekhar he had knocked down was coming to his feet again, hissing, roaring, and Dane, taking a fighting stance, was ready for him. He kicked out, a vicious kick that would have thrown any human, paralyzed, to the floor; the Mekhar roared and went for him with claws bared. Behind him, he saw that men from the next cage were pouring out, swarming over the Mekhar with the nerve-gun. They had his gun; they were kicking him; he lay unconscious on the corridor floor. Aratak's huge arms swiped the second Mekhar from behind; he went down, struggling, and Dallith darted in, hauled the nerve-gun from his belt, moving swiftly as a cat herself; the Mekhar made a wild swipe, his claws raking blood from Dallith's arm, and the girl exploded into a biting, kicking fury; she threw the nerve-gun to Rianna and flew at the prone Mekhar, screaming, clawing at his eyes.

  Dane hauled her off him with both hands. "No need to kill him," he said. At his touch Dallith quieted and began to tremble. "Unfasten his belt, there. That's right. Aratak, you're the strongest, you put it on; you can do more than the rest of us if we get into a tangler field." He buckled the other Mekhar's belt around his waist, thinking, It takes two people, skilled in unarmed combat, to disarm one Mekhar. Let's hope they don't throw eighty crew members at us all at once.

  "Come on," he said, between his teeth. "Out, everybody. Out of the cells. We don't know how long we have before somebody notices these two haven't come back from feeding the animals, and comes down to see what's keeping them."

  They emerged from the cell area into the corridor and Dane stood for a moment, confused. He had been brought here unconscious and had no idea which way he should go to the bridge, to the area where the other crewmen were, to the ship's controls. He shot a quick question to Roxon, who was marshaling the captives in the hall and giving them quick low-voiced orders.

  "We were all brought in unconscious," Roxon said. "It's their policy. But I think we're at the lower levels; we have to keep going up as far as we can." He led the way along a long ramp, which led upward and upward, curving blindly now and then. The other prisoners swarmed behind him, and Dane thought, apprehensively, We, who are the ringleaders, should stay together! These others, who've just joined in and don't know what we're doing, may be pretty badly in the way when we start acting! He pushed and thrust forward through them, toward the lead, Dallith hurrying at his shoulders. Rianna caught Dallith's arm.

  "Quick! Which way are the Mekhars? Where?"

  Dallith hardly seemed to hear. Her face was set and twisted. Abruptly she cried out in horror, and simultaneously Dane saw Rianna stumble; struggle to rise. The prisoners began to drop, one by one, moving slowly, thickly. The tangler field, thought Dane. He himself, thanks to the Mekhar guard's belt, felt nothing, but Dallith clutched at him, struggling to pull herself along.

  Dallith shrieked, "They know, they know, they're waiting for us—"

  The door at the top of the ramp burst open. Half a dozen Mekhars, armed with nerve-guns, stood there, and at the sight the prisoners stopped, surged forward. Aratak, like Dane unhindered by the tangler field, sprang forward; he knocked one Mekhar sprawling, back broken, laid another out, screaming in a thin high whine, before he went down under a shot. Roxon fell, writhing and convulsing.

  Dane fought on, struggling through the prisoners, grimly determined, before they got him, to kill one or two of the Mekhars; he saw Dallith struggling like a wild thing between a pair of them. Then something struck him a killing blow on the head and he went down into darkness. I was right all along; they expected us to attack and they were glad. But why?

  He screamed, "Why?" into the darkness, but the darkness did not answer, and after a million years he stopped listening for the answer.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  His head ached, and his arms felt as if they had been broken off at the wrists. Dane Marsh opened his eyes, and found that he was in a cell he had never seen before. One arm was fastened in a tight cuff to the wall, by a chain about six feet long. Across the cell from him, Aratak was manacled with a similar arrangement. Rianna lay asleep on the floor; Dallith sat hunched over, her arms wrapped around her knees, staring fixedly at him. As he opened his eyes she said, "You're alive!" and her face was suffused with surprise and joy. "I wasn't sure, you were so far away...."

  "I'm alive, for what that's worth," Dane said. "I see you are, too. What happened to the others?"

  Rianna opened her eyes. "Roxon was the first one they killed," she said. "They killed half a dozen others, too, I think. As for the others, they unloaded them—and I heard them say it was at the Gorbahl slave mart—three days ago. I expect they have something special in mind for us, but as for what it is"—she smiled bitterly—"your guess is as good as mine. My personal notion is that they're saving us for dinner. We killed two of the Mekhars, and that's not something they're going to sit back and accept."

  "It isn't bad," Dallith said stubbornly. "There's something hopeful about it. They were pleased at what we did."

  "How can you tell?" Rianna shouted. 'This is all your fault. If Dane hadn't saved your life we'd all have gone to the Gorbahl slave mart, but Roxon would be alive, and there might have been a chance for some of us—"

  Aratak said in a commanding rumble, "Quiet, child. None of this is Dallith's fault, any more than yours. You, too, were eager to take part in the escape, and as for Roxon, perhaps he too felt he would rather die than live as a slave. In any case he is dead and beyond your pity or your help, and Dallith is not. The four of us are all together in trouble, and if we begin to quarrel, there is truly no chance."

  "There's none anyway," Rianna said bitterly, and rolled over, hiding her face beneath her bright hair.

  "Rianna—" Dane said, but she turned her back again and would not look at him.

  She blames me for Roxon's death, and the death of the others, he thought.

  But there was nothing he could say to that. Perhaps it was true. Perhaps he, having less to lose than the others—whatever happened, his own world was irrevocably lost—had been indifferent to life or death.

  Aratak said, "At least you three are of one people, creatures of one blood. None of my kind remain on board this ship. Must I find myself alone?"

  Dallith went slowly toward him and slipped her small delicate hand into his huge clawed paw. She said gently, "We are brothers and sisters in misfortune, Aratak, under the Universal Law. I know that. Dane knows it. And Rianna will know it again, soo
ner or later."

  Dane nodded. He felt very close to the huge lizard-man at whose side he had nearly been killed. "We made a good fight of it, anyway," he said. "Between us, we accounted for a couple of those damned cat-faced things! Whatever happens to us now, it was worth it."

  Aratak gave an emphatic nod and his gills glowed blue. Dane found himself wondering, What now? "Do they feed us?"

  Rianna sat up, flinging her red hair back. She said, "Who cares? If you do, yes; if anything they feed us better than ever, though they shove our food in through the bars—no one comes near us now."

  Dane said, "Then they certainly aren't going to torture us to death, and if they were going to kill us I think they'd have done it. Cats aren't subtle creatures. They'd have torn us to pieces right then, if they were going to."

  "That's what I've been trying to tell you," Dallith said. "I don't know what's in store for us—I can't read their minds without going—berserk—as I did then, when I tried—I tried—" She suddenly shuddered. "For a moment, I was the Mekhar. I went for him with teeth—and claws—"

  She was silent. Then, firmly, dismissing the thought, she said, "But this I know. They are not going to kill us, and we have become even more valuable to them. So it is my turn to say don't think about dying, Rianna. Keep up your strength and your hopes. We'll find out now, very soon, what is going to happen. We're alive, and we're all together. There's no need to despair."

  It was at least evident that their status had changed and that they were now regarded as dangerous. Food was thrust through the bars—from a safe distance—by Mekhars who never spoke to them and seemed wary even of coming close to the bars. Three times a day, the chains on Dane and on Aratak were lengthened—by loosening a staple from outside the cell—so that they could enter a small shower–toilet area. At all other times they were left strictly to themselves to entertain whatever guesses, conjectures, or thoughts they might devise about their eventual fate or fates.

  This went on, Dane later surmised, for about two weeks. There was nothing for the captives to do except to exchange life histories, if they chose, to tell each other about their home worlds, and, in general, to get to know one another. Dane told them all he could about the social and political history of Earth, although he suspected part of their interest was wonder and amazement that even a partially civilized world could so far have been missed by the Unity. Only Rianna hazarded a guess as to why this might have been.

  "You have a certain degree of scientific and technological advancement," she agreed, "but in other fields you're far behind, probably because you are so cut off. For instance, you say that never in your known history have you been visited even by observer or guest teams from other planets."

  "Not in our known history, no. Although some scientists have suspected that some of our religious myths may be garbled memories of such visits before written history."

  "That seems unlikely," Dallith protested. "Scientist and observer teams from the Unity, at least, are usually very careful to make certain that the planets they visit don't get any such notions!"

  "But there's no way of telling that the visitors were from the Unity—if there were any such visitors," Rianna said. "They might have been from anywhere. No, the most likely thing is that they simply overlooked your solar system. There are so very many uninhabited worlds that one, or two, or two hundred, could simply be overlooked in cataloguing. Didn't you say that only one world in your system is habitable by ordinary animal life? That's very unusual; the most likely thing is that they visited one or two planets, found them uninhabitable, and gave up on the system. Sloppy scientific work, of course, but it does happen."

  Dallith suggested, "Perhaps your Earth was visited at a time before sapient life had developed. Or while your men were still living in treetops."

  Aratak rumbled, "That wouldn't stop them. My world entered the Unity before the Divine Egg had gifted us with the wheel!"

  This made Dane Marsh remember a favorite theory of science fiction writers. "People used to suggest that visitors from space had avoided us, or put us under a sort of Cosmic quarantine, because of our atomic wars and such."

  "If total and permanent peace were a qualification," Rianna said dryly, "the Unity might possibly be made up of as many as two dozen worlds, mostly inhabited by empaths. Instead of, as we now have, several hundred. The Unity will do anything possible to help member planets resolve their internal differences—and sometimes even the presence of the Unity helps the people of a planet to develop a feeling of solidarity and internal harmony with one another. But the way the Unity is set up, it simply serves as a total barrier to interplanetary or interstellar war. Most planets settle the war problem earlier in their history than yours, but then yours seems to have a history torn by climatic changes, natural cataclysms, and the like, which typically cut off small groups of people from other small groups, and exaggerated their ethnic, cultural, social, and linguistic differences. The result would, naturally, be a prolonging of the 'war' period in planetary history. Although I admit it's a little freaky for wars to be prolonged past the Industrial Revolution stage of development."

  Dane was glad to get away from discussion of his "freaky" culture and to hear about the others. Dallith came from a highly homogeneous world which had, after a long period of ice ages followed by periods of flood and then of tropical growth, placed so high a value on psi powers for survival that ESP and clairvoyance were firmly established in the racial germ plasm. They were a peaceful people, few in number due to rigorous natural selection, with small technology but highly developed sciences of philosophy and cosmology.

  Rianna's people were more like what Dane had always believed that Earthmen might be someday—a scientific civilization with a highly-developed technology and a tradition of endless exploration and scientific curiosity.

  Aratak's world couldn't have been more the reverse. Here the dominant race, descended from giant saurian and amphibians, virtually without natural enemies, and vegetarian, had briefly experimented with technology, found that its rewards did not compensate them for its troubles, and peacefully turned their backs on it to live, as a race, a contemplative life in a food-gathering culture. They imported a few—not many—artifacts from their companion world, a highly technological race of people who called themselves by a name which the mechanical translator embedded in Dane's throat rendered as the Salamanders. In return they supplied them with raw minerals, certain foodstuffs, and philosophy, which was evidently regarded as a marketable commodity like any other. In fact, Dane gathered that men of Aratak's lizard-like race traveled all over the known Galaxy as teachers of philosophy, and were highly regarded, and treated with lavish hospitality, in return for the great sacrifice of leaving their beloved and peaceful swamps.

  But such stories as they could interchange from their planetary history filled up only part of the time. They had all too much time for brooding, worrying about their eventual fate. It seemed that time dragged endlessly; there were times when it seemed, at least to Dane, that he had been a prisoner for many years.

  Abruptly, it came to an end.

  One morning—or at least what Dane called morning, for it was the first meal following a period of sleep—their cell was entered by three Mekhars with drawn nerve-guns and a portable tangler field, which they took the precaution of turning up to full force before entering, and unchaining Dane or Aratak.

  One of the Mekhars said tersely, "Make no mistake. You will be given—now—no single chance to escape. Even a single unauthorized move, and you will be instantly shocked into total unconsciousness. You will not be killed and you will not be tortured, but you will not be allowed to escape, so you may as well preserve your energies. This is the only warning you will receive, so move carefully. Believe me, you will not be given the benefit of the doubt."

  Dane made no sudden moves. He had no desire to try out for himself what a nerve-gun felt like; he still remembered the screams of the man who had died. His curiosity was caught by one une
xpected phrase, You will be given—now—no single chance to escape. Did that mean that later, they would be given some single chance? It was worth thinking about. (The mechanical translator was almost unbelievably literal; on one occasion when Rianna, infuriated by Dallith's calm, had thrown some kind of colloquial insult at her, the translator had rendered it, simply, to imply that Dallith was a bringer of food to children. Which certainly was no insult by Dane's terms, and probably, judging by Dallith's expression, none by hers either—which hadn't made Rianna any calmer!)

  Evidently the other three prisoners had reached the same conclusion on their own, for they went peacefully with the Mekhars along the winding corridors and up the ramps, until they reached what looked like a small conference room in which half a dozen of the Mekhars, uniformed like ship's personnel, were waiting; there were what looked like television screens and receivers, various other equipment, and a variety of seats. The Mekhars motioned their four captives into seats in what looked like a jury-box, or musician's gallery, along one side of the room; as soon as they were in their seats, restraints (automatically operated, perhaps by their weight) immediately gripped them around the waist and held them fast.

  The jury-box arrangement already had one inhabitant; and he was a Mekhar, but he was held by the same kind of restraints as Dane and his companions. To Dane, all the Mekhars looked quite a bit alike, but it seemed there was something familiar about this one; and no sooner had he come to this conclusion than Dallith, next to him, leaned over and whispered, "It's the Mekhar you disarmed—the guard from the cell. I thought we had killed him."