by Jean Kilczer
I stroked his silky shoulder. “Huff, when Sophia and the five aliens come back in the jeep, show yourself and go to the Orghe camp with them. But don't let the Shayls see you. Will you do that, buddy?”
He touched his head to mine. “I will remember all you say, and the soft, scratchy sound of your voice. I will remember how your yellow hair flutters when the wind rides through it. I will remember your eyes when the sea looks at the sky. I will remember your pale, furless skin, like the smooth inside of the bottom sheller.”
“Don't make it sound so final, buddy.”
“Each time we take different paths, I ache in my liver that I might not see your smile again, or hear your voice, or smell your pungent odor.” He licked my cheek.
I resisted a reflex to wipe it.
“I have no cub of my own, Jules of Earth. But if I ever do, I will implore the gods to grow my cub's liver as great, and wide, and as filled with honor as your own.”
“That's beautiful, Huff, thank you, my dearest and best friend.”
He touched the small wooden statue of Orin, its hand outstretched, hanging around my neck. “Will this god keep you safe in The Pit?”
“It can't hurt.”
He stared at the sky and I saw tears wet the fur on his cheeks. “While I wait,” he murmured, “I will entreat the Ten Gods. At least one among them, maybe two, will hold onto your paws tight in The Pit.”
“I'll take all the help I can get.” I put the jeep in gear. “Go with God, Huff.”
He nodded and watched me leave.
I crested the hill. Below, Big Mack's camp lay sprawled across the sand, held in the arm of the silver river.
The main gate swung open as I approached. Mack stood beside beefy, tattooed Tempest on his right, and lanky, curly-haired young Quirrel on his left. Two grim-looking, tattooed mercs flanked my five alien friends.
“You tags OK?” I asked Zik, the BEM. He stood straight and defiant on his eight jointed tentacles. His sable coat was ungroomed and beginning to curl at the edges. His huge disc eyes went amber and he leaked a slime trail, sure signs of stress.
“I speak for all of us,” he said. “Our bodies are well enough. Our minds are sorely in need of the freedom of autonomous beings!” He whipped a tentacle around his mantle. “We were never born to be slaves!”
“It won't be long now, Zik,” I told him.
“So you believe.” He moved aside and I saw diminutive Evrill, the tel Egruan. But where was Sophia? I tried to steady my breathing.
“Where's my woman?” I asked Mack.
“Nice job, Rammis,” he said. “According to the Shayls, you creamed all the Orangs.”
I got out of the jeep. “Where is she, Mack?”
He hooked his thumbs behind his holster. “I decided to keep her here. For you.”
“I should've known you wouldn't keep your word.” I tried to go around Tempest and get to Mack, but Tempest held me back.
“Call it collateral,” Mack said and scratched his oily hair.
“I want to see her. Now! Or the deal's off.”
Mack came forward and patted my cheek. I knocked his hand aside.
“You're devious, Rammis, and you have a dangerous mind. You know what I'm thinking, but I don't always know what you're thinking. You'll get a cut for your work, an' you'll be a part of my team. But I need a little insurance, an' the bitch is it.”
Your woman is well, Evrill sent and kept her head down. Unhappy but well.
I didn't look at her. Where is she being held?
I would be punished, possibly killed, now that my employer has you, if I told you the place of her confinement.
But she's OK?
Her heart grieves for you, but she is well.
Thank you.
I watched a hovair take off and turn toward the Orghe camp.
“Just some holos,” Mack said, “to send to my employer and confirm that I successfully completed my mission.” He winked at me. “Only lost one man. Bit of a putz anyway.”
“When can I see Sophia?” I asked.
“When we're in space.”
“Heading back to Earth?”
“Earth? Hell no. Our flight plan will take us first to New Lithnia to collect our pay, and see if there's another job in the offing.” He turned toward the cafeteria. “I'm hungry.”
The mercs guided the group in that direction, then separated out the five alien slaves and marched them to the prison tent. Trumbil, my Kubraen friend from planet Charis, turned his silver, slitted eyes on me from beneath thick, charcoal hair, and extended an ivory-skinned hand in a gesture of friendship. I nodded and extended my hand. A merc pushed him forward. Not good enough to sit at a table with us, in Mack's twisted mind.
Quirrel trotted up beside me and gave me his toothy grin that made his chin disappear into his neck. “I have a treat for you. I especially made you a steak a 'la unicorn rump, smothered in wild trullyburry nuts, and redberries.” He gestured toward the cafeteria as we approached it. “Orange gourds from the premier sand quarries, marinated in yellow sap du jour, and a crisp salad of green and black native plants. Uh, do you happen to have some digestalls? We're almost out.”
I nodded, but my stomach was tied in the proverbial knots. “Bring it to Sophia's cell. I'll eat it there.”
Quirrel stopped short. “Oh. I can't do that, tag.”
“Somehow,” I said, “I didn't think you could.”
I tel-probed the prison as we walked past it, and paused when I touched Sophia's mind.
A desert of the soul. Past tears. Past help. Past hope.
I sent comforting thoughts, though she was not a sensitive and couldn't receive. Still, I could transcend the loneliness that kept non-tels so isolated within their minds, and surround her with an aura of comfort and support on a subliminal level. “Sophia,” I whispered, “my Sophia,” and wrapped the send in an envelope of love.
I watched Mack talk casually to Tempest as we reached the cafeteria, and formed my plan.
* * *
Lunch looked good, but I couldn't eat. I picked at the salad to allay any suspicion of my feelings, which swung from sorrow over Sophia's condition, to an overwhelming hatred of Mack that bordered on an insane desire to see his head on a bloody stake, complete with smoking cigar.
Evrill glanced up at me from across the crowded table, where she was swamped by taller Terrans. Her large amber eyes moved forward to focus and she drew back thin lips in an imitation of a Terran smile.
I smiled back and cleared my mind of all thoughts, my heart of all feelings, and tried to ignore the smell of cigarette smoke that mixed with the aromas of cooking food and made for a sickening brew.
The forty or so mercs at the tables laughed and jostled each other playfully as they ate. I caught images of their starship, The Sword of Terror, homeward bound.
A muscular Asian merc, with hair as shiny black as my stallion, Asil, slapped me on the back as he walked by with an empty tray. “Nice job, Rammis! We owe you.”
The mercs tapped their plates with forks in acknowledgment of my part in the death of a community of Orghes.
I waved back but couldn't restrain the thought: “Slimeballs!”
Evrill glanced at me, lowered her head, and ate.
“Rammis!” Big Mack called from down the table. I almost choked on a lettuce leaf. “You're not eating. That's prime steak.”
“Had a big breakfast.” I got up and headed for the door.
The Asian merc, and a skinny teenager with ears like antennas and a twitch in his right eye, got up and followed me. Two more met me by the door, a red-bearded brawny stump of a man, and a tall bald African with a bushy beard. I couldn't help thinking that the African looked as though his head was on upside down.
Evrill, I sent on a hunch, will you help me evade them?
I felt her apprehension. To what end?
The chances are good that Big Mack will kill you instead of paying you, now that he has me. He hates your race. Your only chance mi
ght be to escape.
To where?
Earth, I hope, with my team when the WCIA starship picks us up tomorrow. From there, I'll buy you a ticket to Equus, if that's what you want.
Perhaps. And perhaps not.
Give it some thought. I walked toward the bunkhouse and stopped at the door. “I'm going to take a nap,” I told the four mercs. “You tags want to babysit?”
“I've got a better idea.” Red Beard pulled out a pair of handcuffs from his back pocket and nodded toward the door. “Let's go.”
“I thought I was one of you,” I said.
“Once we're off-planet,” the Asian moved toward me, “you'll get the rites of passage, so to speak.”
“I've got to pee.” I went inside and headed for the bathroom. “Anybody want to join me?”
I got no answer. I closed the bathroom door behind me. The tent had a low window. I quickly unzipped it.
“Dammit!” I muttered. There was a sealed metal screen behind it. My leg knife would never cut through that, but it might cut the tent material around the screen. I unsheathed it.
The bathroom door swung open. The Asian tag stood there, his stingler in his hand. He swung the ring to stun. “Having trouble finding the toilets? You'll take that nap right here on the bathroom floor.”
“No, that's all right.” I sheathed the knife and stood up.
“Give me that!”
“What?”
“The knife, smartass.”
I took it out and slapped the hilt into his outstretched hand. “Don't hurt yourself.”
He motioned me to the bunkroom and followed me there.
Four of them. I had influenced three on rare occasions, and that was a stretch. Four could be over the top. If they became aware of my probes, I might take that nap sooner than I wanted to, or worse. Then again, if I were caught at it, I could say that I just wanted to see my woman. Would that fly?
I let Red Beard handcuff my right wrist to the bunk's metal frame, and I lay down to get comfortable and to assume a non-threatening position. “How about a bedtime story?” I asked.
“Here's one,” Red Beard said. “Once upon a time there was a pain in the ass who was thrown out of the airlock in space. The End.”
“Nice,” I said. “That makes me sleepy. Good night.” I closed my eyes and formed a red coil behind my forehead. It would have to be fast and strong, and it would have to disperse to reach all of them.
I could almost hear the tel cell clusters, born in quantum, singing within my head, the song of the stars. The coil tightened to white-hot and spun with the force of a small tornado. My ears rang from the power being unleashed behind my eyes. This was more savage than I expected. It seemed another probe overlaid mine in a combined ferocity of power.
Spirit? I sent. Is that you?
From the depths of a storm raging within my brain, I felt a ruthless beast of the id rise up with blooded claws to the daylight of the conscious mind. A tsunami crested behind my eyes and broke.
I was transfixed, No more able to move than a moth pinned inside a glass case. No more able to open my eyes than the dead could see. I heard screams around me. The last frantic shrieks of tortured souls, lost, dragged down to Hell by demons of their own creation.
Spirit! I cried in a throat frozen into silence, and tried to see in eyes sewn shut.
The horrible shrieks collapsed to pitiful whimpers, and then to nothing. My breath shuddered in my chest. Sweat leaked down my cold forehead. My muscles convulsed in spasms I couldn't stop. With each breath, the smell of blood grew sharper. “Great Mind,” I muttered. “Help me.”
“Open your eyes, Jules,” I heard, or felt within my mind. I wasn't sure.
I did, and sat up, holding myself with a palm pressed against the cot. Four dead mercs lay at my feet. The dirt floor was grooved where they had raked furrows in their agony. Runnels of blood still ran from the ravaged bodies, torn like disemboweled carcasses of slaughtered cattle. Their mouths hung open, as though in death they still cried out their agony.
The handcuff was open. I slid my wrist out of it, picked up bloody stinglers from the dead, washed them off in the small bathroom sink, dried them, and stuffed them into my jacket and behind my waistband. I reeled out the door and gasped in breaths of cold fresh air. Spirit?
It is I, Evrill.
I saw her there, standing before the prison door, diminutive and unassuming, almost blending in with her tan skin and colorless clothes. Did you…? I sent.
Not me. We. Hurry, before we're discovered.
She opened the prison door. I trotted there and we ran inside. I closed and locked it. “How did you…we?”
“Go to your woman. Her door will be unlocked, so will the cell of your alien friends. Our time is short, before the bodies are discovered.”
Strange that in the middle of this disturbing experience, I felt as though time had slowed. Now I knew how Evrill's race could destroy the formidable Bristra, that devastating blackroot animal/plant that had been let loose on Equus. My own tel powers seemed like child's play compared to hers.
She glided to the aliens' cell. “Is this truly the time for contemplating the innate skills of my race? Yes, Terran! We possess the ability of Psychokinesis. What is your plan?”
“My plan? Oh, we steal their hovair and return to my team and the Orghe camp.”
“Why not steal their starship?”
“They intend to leave New Terra tomorrow on that ship. If they're forced to stay, they might find out that the Orghe people weren't poisoned. Mack will go after them with everything he's got. It'll be a slaughter.”
“Always provide your enemy with a way out?” Evrill asked.
“When you can.”
“That way.” She pointed down the hall of cells. “Your woman.”
As I ran to her cell, I shouted “Sophia!” and gripped the metal bars of the door. It swung open. “Sophia,” I whispered.
The cell was dark, except for a ray of sunlight that filtered through the small, high window and fingered her with warm light as she lay curled on the cot, her raven hair covering her face, her hands clasped together between her knees. She wore one shoe. The other was under a chair beside a bare wooden table.
I went to her and kneeled. “Sophia, it's me, Jules.” I gently brushed back her hair. “Babe, it's me.”
She lifted her head. Her eyes were dull, her lips, parted, as though she had just risen from a deep sleep. “Jules,” she murmured. “This is just another cruel dream.” Tears slid down her face.
“No, babe, I'm real. I've come to rescue you.” I lifted her hand to my face and smiled. “See? Real me.” I put her other shoe on her foot and lifted her to her feet. “We have to go, before we're discovered.”
“Oh, Jules, I didn't dare hope.” She wrapped her arms around me. “Hope would've killed me.”
A wail of alarms announced the discovery of the dead mercs.
“Come!” Evrill called from outside the cell. “There'll be time enough to get acquainted.”
Trumbril, and Grothe, the tall Kubraens, entered the cell. I handed them three guns. “Give one to Zik. You two keep the others.” I kept one for myself.
Wygrum and Furro, the two slender Denebrians, with long, brown fingers clutching their green coveralls in distress, pursed their round, furrowed mouths and wailed softly as they waited in the hall. Denebrians are a gentle race, so passive, I was afraid they'd hesitate to kill, even at the risk of their own lives.
I tried to help Sophia out of the cell. She tripped and we both fell.
“Grive her ta me!” Trumbril lifted her easily over his shoulders.
“This way!” Zik waved us toward a back door, glided there, and opened it.
About a hundred yards of flat nothing lay between us and the hovair, parked beside the Sword of Terror, on its pad. Mercs poured out of the cafeteria. Others, already inside the bunk tent, shouted and gestured for the rest to come there.
We crowded the doorway, hesitating. The mercs we
re spreading out. We were in range of their beamers.
“Threy know exactly where we are,” I said. “We've got to make a run for it.”
“We could surrender,” Wygrum offered.
“We could be executed,” Evrill said.
“Wygrum,” I said, “you didn't see what's back there. They'll want our heads. Literally.”
“We didn't do anything,” Furro, the other Deneb said as I went out the door.
“Do what suits you!” Zik leaped through the doorway, almost knocking me over, and stretched seven of his eight jointed tentacles in a wild gallop toward the hovair, the stingler held high, firing blindly around himself.
We'll be lucky, I thought, if he doesn't shoot one of us.
Trumbril ducked through the doorway with Sophia held tightly over his shoulders, his long ridged legs and slab feet pounded the ground as he raced for the hovair with his companion Grothe beside him.
I fired at the charging mercs and ran behind Trumbril to offer Sophia some protection.
“I hope the hatch is unlocked!” I shouted to Evrill, who caught up to me. “Where's Wygrum and Furro?” I called and glanced back. “Oh, no!”
They stood, their arms above their heads, and faced the approaching mercs.
“Those two idiots will be killed!” Evrill wheezed and ran past me. It seemed that we Terrans are among the slowest runners.
Grothe reached the hovair and yanked on the hatch's bolt. He turned, his slitted eyes wide. “Locked!”
A flash of blue light burned the hull. Smoke rose from it.
I reached the craft, panting, and tried to yank open the hatch. Another blue beam burned through the hull so close I felt its heat.
The mercs were closing. Big Mack stood in a jeep that raised a plume of dust as it roared toward us. “Take them alive,” he screamed into a mic that blasted his voice over speakers across the flats. “I want to kill the bastards myself.”
Evrill pushed me away with a strength I didn't know she possessed, and spread her hands over the hatch. Her disc eyes clouded. I felt the residual energy of her psychokinetic power as she called upon forces that made the air vibrate.
The hatch swung open.
