Joel smiled. “Fine with me, Corp. I suggest we get the hell out of here right now. I feel that’s the safest thing to do—right now.”
Without the Extractor, that would have been impossible to accomplish. They angled toward the river, avoiding the grassy strips as much as they could, but from time to time there were places where runnels had carried away the soil in a maze of long ribbons of dirt, all of which were covered with growth.
The Knackers scattered dingballs everywhere there was concealment—Joel thought they must drop them every time they took to the shuttles to reach their own mother ship. The Scanner was gone with Gumble, but the smaller one set into the Extractor was enough to allow them to find those in their direct path.
They moved with glacial slowness, but in the darkness that came down on the flatland they could not risk speed. At least, out there in the open as they were, the darkness hid them from anything except a scanner that spotted life-forms.
The dust and smoke in the air had thinned to a haze when the second moon rose. That made a muddy light by which Joel could see a bit deeper into the gloom than before. When the fursnake in his side pocket began hissing like a leaking valve, that light allowed him to see the Knacker group before its members could see him and Cleery.
A half dozen of the leggy creatures were stalking along between the escarpment and the Rift, their gait swift and their attention obviously focused on the catastrophe ahead of them in the mountains. Joel sank flat and Cleery beat him down.
The fursnakes subsided into a faint sibilance. Those in his pockets again seemed comforted by the size and warmth of his body. He wondered what, aside from general irritation, the Knackers had done to make themselves so roundly hated by the cliff-dwellers.
However, the hostility was proving useful, and he welcomed the furry shapes in his pockets as he heard the group clack and scritch away into the night. Whoever is my enemy’s enemy is my friend, he remembered reading in some long-forgotten book.
Perhaps he and Cleery had found allies, here on the Knackers’ slaughterhouse world.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Within the space of that night, the countryside began to crawl with Knackers. Only the discovery of a deep cleft, too narrow to be visible from below, in one of the buttress cliffs allowed Joel and Cleery to escape discovery many times over.
That climb was one Joel never remembered long afterward, for he scampered up the steep with the sounds of Knacker claws clicking in his ears from below. The fursnakes in his pockets were hissing like small kettles all the way, though they quieted when he reached the ledge. That became, in time, another slot into which he and Cleery crammed themselves.
“You were right,” Joel said, wiping grit from his face onto his wrist. “These creatures make fine warning systems. If they all hadn’t gone off like raid alarms, we would have been, if you’ll pardon the pun, in the soup.”
The Corp snorted. “If you’d of told me, before, that I’d be carryin’ around a bunch of little furry animals, I’d of said you were crazy. But here we are, and we seem to be getting farther from the river, instead of closer to it. How in hell we going to make it to the Drop if we can’t get down into the Rift? If the Knackers don’t get us, the dingballs will, and you and I both know it.”
Joel stared out into the dawn. The distant lowland was astir with spider-legged shapes, which hurried about their search with a determination that didn’t reassure him at all.
“We just got to lie here and eat grit and wait,” he said. “If they were going to find us up here, I think they already would’ve. That bunch we almost ran into was too close to miss getting us on their scanners. The only thing that may have saved us, besides going straight up the cliff again, was having the life-traces of the fursnakes all mixed up with ours.
“We must have a dozen or more inside our clothes and in our pockets, and that makes a pretty good amount of alien trace. Maybe their equipment can’t untangle it and thinks this is some new kind of life entirely.” The thought comforted him considerably.
However it was, there seemed no interest among the searchers in climbing any of the cliffs walling the west side of the valley that ended at the Rift. As the shadows crept eastward, the search moved away northward, leaving the lowland quiet and colorless.
The first moon was a fleck of silver light just above the horizon beyond the Rift, now. Soon darkness covered the country below them, and no further sound of Knacker equipment or personnel came to Joel’s ears. It was time to move, if they were ever going to get clear of the escarpment.
He poked Cleery with an elbow. “Wake up, Corp. Time to shag our asses out of here.”
The corporal groaned. Then he spat out the gravel that had found its way into his mouth while he dozed, face-down, on the ledge. “If I’d of known how much dirt I was goin’ to eat on this tour of duty, I’d of took my discharge and never re-upped. Knackers I can stand, at a distance and for a little while, but grit in my teeth just about makes my hide crawl clean off me.” His tone of disgust was one that Joel knew of old.
“Grit or no grit, we’ve got to move,” he said. “And maybe down below we can make enough time to get to the river. Thank God the water’s good!”
The long stretch of flat ground looked deceptively peaceful, under the light of the small moon. There was very little of that sort of terrain on 3G 789, and Joel found himself particularly wary of this one. He’d already had enough experience with the nasty little matters that could be found in innocent-looking places.
Cleery, behind him, cleared his throat. “You think we can risk it?” he asked. “Or is it just too good to be true?”
Sitting on his heels in the shelter of a squatty tree with more thorns than leaves, Joel surveyed the expanse. He remembered with great clarity the other Techs who had been blown to confetti by the dingballs set in the grassy strips. The fact that only the pair of them was left alive and unprocessed by the Knackers was enough to make him think a long while before risking anything at all.
He caught a hint of motion at the corner of his eye that made him freeze in the stringy shadow of the tree. Cleery grunted softly too. Then they waited, patient as primitives, to see what was traveling across the stony stretch flanking this segment of the mountain chain.
There was no sense in retracing the route the platoon had taken. That was probably going to be swarming with Knackers, furious from the earlier attacks against their stronghold, for days to come. Yet Joel knew that he and Cleery had to get back upriver to find the drop area. Only there could the shuttle pick them up. Only then would they find any safety on this world.
There was another flicker of motion, moonlight flashing on something pale, which seemed to be crawling over the rough ground, moving away from the dark line that marked the edge of the cleft holding the river. Joel heard Cleery getting the Glass from his pack.
“By Gerroun and Gannesaw!” the older man grunted. “Look, Karsh. Just you look what’s escaped from the Knackers.”
Joel reached back for the Glass, which had been adjusted to its infra-red mode. Setting the eyepiece in place, he scanned the weird contrasts of the area ahead, found a strong impulse, and realized he was looking at a woman.
CHAPTER EIGHT
She was, of course, strange-looking in this mode, but it was a real live human woman. She wasn’t in combats, so she had to be one of the “cattle” the Knackers had brought here for the slaughter. That posed an entire set of new problems.
Before, they had only had to worry about getting to the drop-site. Now they had to worry about whether or not to try getting this totally unexpected civilian out with them. Cleery was already skinning out of his pack, getting ready to head for the rescue.
“Corp,” said Joel, his tone carefully non-aggressive, “don’t you think you ought to check this out a little more before you go dashing out there in the open?”
“Shut up!” the corporal growled, hi
s tone fierce. “The day ain’t come when I’ll sit by and let a human woman get eaten by a bunch of hairy-legged Knackers, without doing something to stop it. You sit here until your ass falls off. I’m going out there and fetch her in.”
Joel felt perfectly sympathetic, but something about the set-up made his neck-hair crawl. This was just too plain and easy-seeming. First of all, nobody he’d ever heard about had escaped from the Knackers. They were all shot full of dope that kept them barely ambulatory, if you could believe the Intelligence reports. Their minds were shut off, and just their bodies worked. So if there was a real human woman out there in the thin veil of moonlight, it was just about certain that she had been put there by her captors.
“Listen!” Joel insisted.
Cleery paused, his back still to the Tech. “To what?” he asked.
“How do you suppose anybody could get loose from the aliens, let alone get out of one of those cattle pens they keep their...their live catch in?”
“People can get out of anything, you give them a chance,” the corporal said. He sounded irritated.
“And nothing about this set-up smells to you like a trap?” Joel was trying to sound perfectly cool. “I want to go and get her too, but what I don’t want is to go rushing out there like some damned Holovee actor and get myself caught.
“They’ve got to know that somebody out of our platoon survived. Hell, they tracked us. Then we called down the missile strike on that stronghold—they’re not stupid, Cleery. They know somebody is loose on old ThreeGee, and what better way would there be to get us than to trick us into doing something crazy? Like rescuing a Fair Maiden in the middle of a rock-patch?”
“Tech Karsh, you can sit there, safe and snug under that thorn tree, until your teeth fall out. You can argue with that rock there. But you’re not going to talk me out of going after that poor kid. She’s scared to death—you just look through the Glass again, if you don’t believe me. I’ve got a girl not much younger than she is—or I had one, till the triple-damned Knackers raided Terminus Two. I’m going!” He lay flat on his belly and began wriggling across the stony soil toward the river.
Joel sighed. He would have liked to follow, but if there was chicanery afoot he would be needed here, with his weapon ready. Cleery was a good supply corporal, but he never claimed to be a Big Brain, much less a tactician. If he was going to come out with his butt intact, he’d better have some backup.
Their Combats blended with almost anything. Even knowing that he was out there in the moonlight, not ten meters ahead of him, Joel found it hard to focus on the camouflage pattern, as the corporal moved. He kept his eyes flicking from side to side, scanning the distant shape of the woman, the dark side of the mountain to right and to left, the detail of the moonlit landscape, which was stark gray-black, hiding anything concealed in a shadow.
He used the Glass from time to time, hoping to pick up traces of any large living creature, but he hadn’t much hope of that. The Knackers had learned to make some kind of material that shielded their images. Knowing their blood was considerably cooler than his own kind’s, Joel felt sure it hadn’t been as difficult as it sounded.
He looked at the woman again. Her face was a silvery triangle amid the mingled grays of the scraggly growth through which she crawled. Her eyes were wide, dark, terrified.
He felt sick with empathy, for a moment, thinking of what she must have gone through. As he watched, she saw Cleery at last. She went still for a moment.
Then she got to her feet and waved frantically. “Run! Run!” she shouted, her voice a tiny sound in the distance.
Cleery flattened himself, which was his superb instinct showing itself once again. A sear of energy flashed over the area, blinding Joel temporarily.
He fired off his own weapon in a sweeping beam of energy, knowing that Cleery and the girl had both gone down, dead or alive. By the time his eyes cleared, nothing was moving out in the open space.
Nothing moved into the moonlight to check on either of the people there. Evidently, incinerated flesh wasn’t on the Knacker menu.
CHAPTER NINE
Joel waited until the shadow of the mountains at his back had covered half the span of grass. Then he slid out from his new position (nobody but a fool would have stayed in the spot from which he had fired), and began crawling toward the last spot in which he had seen Cleery. He went with care, as silently as possible, pausing from time to time to check out the terrain.
He put his hand on Cleery’s foot, before he knew he had reached the corporal. The foot jerked. “Who’s that?” came the gruff query.
“Karsh. You all right, Corp?”
“Alive. Scorched down my back, but nothing that won’t get better, given the chance. You go and check out that little girl. She done her best to save me. I don’t know if they got her or not. Haven’t heard a thing, all this time.”
He sighed heavily. “You’re a good man, Karsh. If you’d come with me, we’d both be scorched, and maybe none of us would get out. You go on now. Check her out.”
“Yessir.” Joel grinned. Between Cleery’s instinct and his own ability to think things out, they might just get out of this disaster alive. Too many of their comrades hadn’t, that was certain.
He oriented himself by the calibrations he had set into the Glass, every time he had scanned the area. She should be off to his left, some twelve degrees. He flattened himself, shivered when he left the inky shadow, and slid over the sharp pebbles.
She, being clad in a pale coverall, was much easier to see than had been Cleery and the Combats he wore. She lay on her face, her head on her wrist. Her back quivered, and he knew with relief mixed with exasperation that she was alive.
“Hey!” he called softly. “You all right?”
The pale face lifted off the wrist. Dark eyes assessed him intently, as if she didn’t dare trust in his appearance. Then she nodded.
“I think so, except for my back. They swept the beam over me very low, and it blistered me from neck to heels. But nothing serious, I think. How are we going to get out of this?”
Joel found he had other, more pressing questions, but this was not the time or the place to interrogate her. “Crawl after me. Keep your butt down—it’s sticking up like a lump!” Without waiting, he turned and moved back toward Cleery.
The corporal had already retreated deep into the shadow of the range of peaks, and they found him picking bits of scorched material out of the blisters he could reach. Joel dug out the burn cream, a necessary item in every soldier’s pack, and a few squirts made him more comfortable.
Diffidently, Joel asked the woman, “You want me to put some of this on your back? It’ll help a lot. I think your burns are where you can’t reach ’em very well, from the look of that coverall.”
Cleery snorted and turned it into a cough. Cover-nothing would have been a better description of the garment the Knackers put on their waiting meat animals. It was a sort of cape wrapped over one shoulder and under the other, stamped with a symbol that was probably a number. About her waist was a strip of papery stuff, extending over her buttocks—barely—and marked off with directions for butchering this piece of meat.
The beam that seared the back had, of course, cut each piece into two, and it was with much difficulty that she was keeping something covering her front.
But she was a sensible girl, whatever it was that her instincts were telling her to do. Joel thought he would probably be screaming and crying, but she had set her teeth.
She nodded. “If you don’t mind, that would help. It’s getting painful, now the shock is wearing off a bit.”
He dabbed his fingers into the stuff and stroked it onto her pale skin, forcing himself to think of something other than how long it had been since he had seen his fiancée. It was hard to do.
“We go downriver,” said Joel. “How, I don’t yet know. But that is where the drop-point
is.”
He made it no more specific than that. If she had been bugged by her captors, she wouldn’t know it, of course, and that would tell the Knackers nothing they didn’t already know. If she wasn’t, there was no need to worry her with the difficulties of going where they had to go.
“How in ’ell did you get loose from those buggers?” asked Cleery. “I never knew nobody to do that before.”
“I didn’t. I didn’t even know where I was or what was happening. They got me in my front yard, watering my roses”—she struggled to hold back tears. “When I came to, I was on a hard table in some kind of metal room, and these...well, I knew the Knackers were ugly and mean-tempered, but now I know how big an understatement that is.
“They were giving me some sort of shots. After a while I could sit up and think straight.” She huddled her arms across the thin stuff covering her chest and shivered.
Joel reached into his pack and pulled out his blanket, which she accepted with a smile. Wrapping it about her, she went on. “They took me out in some kind of vehicle that moved on land and water both. They put me in the middle of that place and left me there.
“I didn’t figure out what they were doing until I saw somebody crawling toward me. Then I knew it had to be a trap, and anybody they wanted to catch or kill had to be a friend of mine. So I yelled.”
“They’re out there, waiting for us to make another move,” Cleery said. “And here we sit, pinned down neat as a bunch of fish in a pond. I didn’t do you a bit of good, Miss....”
“Call me Helen,” she said. “And I don’t think we’re pinned down. When they fired at you, I went down to keep out of the way. I was looking back at the spot where they’d hidden the weapon when this man fired back. He destroyed it and the Knacker they left to use it. I saw him go into the river, and the gun just...just melted. It’s there now.”
Slaughterhouse World Page 3
