Through the Reality Warp

by Donald J. Pfeil

  Lieutenant Garth, watching her approach radar, spotted a flight of combat boats below and to the right of them. A quick check over the com link told Billiard that whoever they were, they weren’t members of his squadron. That meant they were fair game for Santha’s guns.

  Billiard and Ellv rammed toward the enemy ships at full acceleration. Through the direct-vision port in front of him, Billiard saw a line of torps trace a path from Ellv’s ship straight to an enemy boat. The Lorian turned, streaming fire and bits of wreckage; then, an instant later, another ship did the same as Santha’s weapons found their target.

  Billiard was busy piloting his ship visually, not bothering with his radar at this range and altitude, so he was immediately aware when Ellv’s boat got into trouble. A trail of smoke was issuing from the right-side drive nodes, and Ellv’s ship slanted down in an easy glide at almost subsonic speed—meat on the table for whichever of the Lorians decided to come in firing.

  “Get out, Ellv!” Billiard yelled over the com link. “Hit your pod ejector! Ellv! Ellv!”

  He was almost screaming, as if he could make contact direct, without radio. But not a sign of life came from the gliding combat boat. Lorian craft came in at this moment, meaning to finish off Ellv, and Billiard threw his ship at them with Lieutenant Garth pouring laser and kill-torp fire at random into the crowd of boats, hoping to drive them away from the stricken revolutionary.

  Billiard knew his task was hopeless, if only because he was beginning to take heavy fire himself. He could feel bits of metal from near-misses striking his ship, and his controls were becoming sloppy as laser fire opened gaps in the boat’s skin, disturbing its aerodynamics. Below him Ellv’s ship suddenly became a ball of fire hurtling through the atmosphere, all the while trailing a greasy-looking black trail as it vanished into the cloud deck.

  With a swift effort, Billiard threw every bit of power from his engines into the drive nodes, trying to pull away from the Lorian boats. But it was too late. A glancing blow from a kill-torp tore open the hull in front of him and it was as if he had stuck his head into a blast furnace! Only the fact that he had on a pressure suit kept him from being roasted in his own juices.

  He turned quickly and peered through the smoke and fire at the gunner’s position, three feet away. Santha was leaning forward, reaching for her emergency-pod release; and he reached down for his own, pulling it sharply upward.

  With a ten-gee slam, his pod blasted out of the burning combat boat, and he barely had a chance to see the twisted metal on the right side of the ship—wreckage that might keep Santha’s pod from releasing—when his brake popped open with a jerk that snapped his head back. The brake slowed him to below the local speed of sound, almost to the speed where the parachute attached to the pod could open. Then, suddenly and with a bone-rattling crash, the pod was underwater—and was leaking! Billiard knew if he stayed with it, he would soon be on the bottom of whatever body of water he was sinking into—not necessarily a bad thing, since he was wearing his pressure suit. But if the body of water was too deep, he wouldn’t be able to swim to the surface without his suit—and that would be difficult; and if it was too far to shore, he would never be able to walk along the bottom until he came out into air.

  Billiard punched the button that split the pod down the middle, kicked free, and yanked on the quick-release seams of his pressure suit. With only slight negative buoyancy, the suit was sinking slowly, so Billiard had no trouble kicking free and getting to the surface. Even without his suit, however, if the surface proved to be in the middle of an ocean, Billiard was dead anyway.

  He was almost afraid to look when his head did break out into the air, but he need not have worried. Luck had been riding with him, and his pod had slammed down in the middle of a river that was not more than a hundred meters wide. Had the pod missed the river, hitting ground at the speed it was traveling, Billiard wouldn’t have had to worry about anything—ever again. As it was, all he had to do was swim for less than five minutes and he was on dry ground.

  III

  Billiard was not standing. When he climbed out of the water he had tried to get to his feet and fallen flat when his right leg refused to support him. From the knee down it was numb, and for a moment he thought it was broken. An examination luckily showed only a bad bruise, probably one he’d made when he had kicked his way out of the sinking pod. A pinched nerve doubtless accounted for the numbness, which a few minutes of massage eliminated.

  Billiard’s flight suit was torn in several places. He must have ripped it, he thought, when he fought his way out of his pressure suit. But the pocket containing his personal communicator was intact, and the ready light glowed green when Billiard thumbed the power switch.

  “Lieutenant Garth, can you hear me? Lieutenant Garth, answer please.” Billiard waited for several seconds, then flipped the transmit switch again. “Santha, if you can hear me please answer. Santha, answer. This is Billiard. Please respond, if you can hear me.”

  He heard nothing but the hum of an open circuit, so he changed the frequency of the unit to that of the combat boat and called again, still without results. But this time the power dial of the com unit showed that the carrier wave was still coming out from the boat. By slowly turning and keeping an eye on the power dial, Billiard was able to determine the direction from which the signal was coming.

  The planet was hot, indeed tropical. Billiard observed what looked like a cross between a forest and a jungle in front of him as he started off from the water. Picking a low gulley that seemed to be headed in the right direction, he began climbing away from the river. Much to his surprise he had covered less than a mile when, through a fresh break in the foliage, he saw ahead of him the battered hulk of a combat boat.

  It was his own!

  Forgetting caution, ignoring the fact that the Lorians were bound to be searching for the downed ship and might already have spotted it, Billiard ran the last hundred yards to the wreckage. The ship was lying on its side, smoke coming from the drive nodes and engine compartment. For a minute, he looked around for something to pry open the bent airlock door with; then he saw the hatch hole through which he had been ejected, now almost hidden under the side of the ship.

  Three minutes of frantic digging enlarged the hole the ship had dug in the soft ground enough for him to wiggle through the hatch. The cabin was filled with smoke, but there was enough light from above for him to see that Santha was still strapped in her shell. A small trail of blood ran from one corner of her mouth, and he noticed a large red patch on her pressure suit where a piece of shrapnel had sliced into her body. But her eyes were open and she smiled when she saw him crawling through the debris toward her.

  “You okay?” he asked somewhat inanely, bringing a fresh smile to her lips.

  “Well, besides the fact I think this planet just fell on me, I guess I’m all right.”

  In spite of her words, Santha’s face was white with pain and her voice was thin. Billiard ripped open her pressure and flight suits and checked the shrapnel cut over her right breast. It was wide and long and had bled a lot, but it wasn’t too deep. He slapped a large wound patch on it, then reached over and released her shock harness.

  “Come on, Santha,” he panted, still out of breath and struggling to help his only partially conscious gunner to her feet. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here! The Redhats can’t be too far away. We’ve got to get moving—and right away!”

  “Sorry, but I don’t think so…” Santha whispered, pain in her every word.

  Billiard ignored her as he pulled out a fresh flight suits for both of them from the supplies cupboard and grabbed the emergency-escape kit from its bracket on the rear wall of the cabin. Ready to move out, he reached down to help Santha to her feet. The young woman turned white when she moved, but she kept her lips clamped tightly and followed Billiard out through the escape hatch.

  Outside he pried open one side of the drop compartment and loaded himself with food, explosives, and ammunition
—as much as he could carry. He also snatched away a heavy rapid-fire recoilless rifle and four pocket lasers before starting back down the gulley toward the river.

  As soon as the gulley banks became low enough for them to see over, Billiard led Santha upward and out of the spreading wash. Then he angled their course more northward, although still heading toward the river as a reference point. He had picked up an orbital map of Thopt from the case on the ship, and even though the map was designed only for use in picking out major landmarks from space, he was sure he had his and Santha’s position pretty well spotted.

  The closer they came to the river, the more the forest they were moving through resembled like a jungle. Soon Billiard was using the survival knife from the emergency kit to cut them a path through the underbrush, leaving as little track as possible for the Red-hats, who he was sure were not far behind. By the time they reached the river’s edge, the trees were high and dense, and thick dangling creepers muted the sunlight to a semigloom they had to squint to see through.

  Billiard turned what appeared to be due north at the river’s edge and began forcing a pace along its now more heavily forested banks that soon had them both wringing wet and panting for breath. Their situation was so desperate that he could give little consideration to Santha’s weakened condition. After an hour, nevertheless, he was forced to stop: Santha, weakening, had fallen farther and farther behind, then had finally collapsed in the muddy gloom, unable to take another step.

  She lay for a moment, trying to catch her breath. Suddenly she rolled over onto her back and began stripping off her sodden new flight suit, trying to cool her body in the fetid air and to ease the itching of the wound patch covering the upper right side of her breast.

  Billiard had moved on another hundred yards before he realized that the sound of Santha tramping through the swampy ground behind him had stopped. When he discovered he was alone, he looked back disconsolately along his trail. His mind, now dulled by fatigue, slowly turned over thoughts, questions… Above all came the question of whether or not, in light of his duty to Earth, he should abandon the wounded girl and concentrate on saving himself. But then he retraced his steps, grumbling, looking down at each of his previous footprints, slowly filling with green-scummed water. When he found the fallen woman he dropped next to her in the mud.

  “You’ve got to keep your flight suit on, Lieutenant,” he said in a tired voice. “Look!” He pointed down at the woman’s bare stomach, at the small purplish lumps of skin rising like hives.

  “Nerve-eaters,” Billiard said quietly. “They get under your skin and eat nerve endings. They excrete a very good local anesthetic, so you never know they’re there until they’re deep in your body. And by then it’s too late to do anything except organize a burial party.”

  Santha began to scratch hastily at the bumps, the tempo of her scratching increasing as she began to claw at the skin of her stomach.

  Billiard pulled her hands away from the welts she was raising, and took out his laser. Setting it on minimum discharge, he first stuck the nose of the gun into the mud and pulled the trigger; then, after quickly wiping the end clean, he pressed the still-hot discharge nozzle against one of the bumps on Santha’s abdomen.

  A small curl of white, acrid-smelling smoke rose straight up in the still air, and Santha twitched as her flesh burned. But the anesthetic which had kept her from feeling the worms eating into her skin also kept her from feeling the full heat of the laser. She turned only slightly green when a small, orange-and-blue-striped worm fought its way out from her dermis, seeking escape from the hot gun muzzle.

  After some fifteen minutes, Billiard finally got all the nerve-eaters from under Santha’s skin and zipped up her flight suit again, checking to make sure its ankle, wrist, and neck bands were tight. She stood up drunkenly. Then he checked his own body, finding three worms which had started to work their way in despite the tight fastenings on his suit.

  Billiard looked thoughtfully back down the trail they had made through the forest, then reached over and shook the shoulder of the now fitfully sleeping woman.

  “Yeah?” she said sleepily. “What is it?” Her eyes snapped open and darted from shadow to tree trunk to bush to river, probing the ominous gloom that hung like a curtain in the steamy air.

  “I’m going to scout back along our trail to try to find out how many Redhats may be following us and how close they are. I want you to keep moving north. I should catch up with you before dark.” Without another word, without waiting for agreement or argument from Santha, Billiard moved off back down their trail without a backward glance at the wounded woman he had sent along on her own.

  Moving by himself, on a trail he had already covered, Billiard found the traveling much faster. His leg, where he had bruised it getting out of his escape pod, felt tight—as if he were getting a mild cramp in his calf. But he put the discomfort out of his mind and concentrated on getting back near the area of the crashed combat boat as quickly as he could. There was a good chance, he thought, that the Redhats might still be there, not yet having taken up the chase.

  He slipped through the thinning trees, moving up the gulley as quietly as possible, sticking to the edge of the ten-foot-deep by fifty-foot-wide cut. In that way he would hopefully be able to approach the still-smoking wreckage without being seen.

  Once he spotted the gleam of torn metal through the low leaves and branches, he moved even more slowly, crawling forward with all his senses sharp and tuned for the slightest sign that any Lorian had spotted him. Before he came close enough to view the area around the crashed boat clearly, he knew what he was going to see. Every breath he took filled his lungs with the smell of hot metal and ionization from floater motors.

  The troops in the clearing were Lorian regulars, some of the army types assigned to Thopt for guard duty: it would not do for Lori to leave a planet undefended when there were Goromi fighters, even on peace terms, on the same planet. Billiard, expecting to find only a small Redhat detachment from a combat ship, was surprised. Instead, his boat had been found by what appeared to be a motorized brigade that had evidently come across country in armored floaters and a couple of tracked crawlers.

  He moved along the edge of the clearing, staying in the bushes. Watching the group of soldiers, he began to spot, here and there, a Redhat or two. The army troops were lounging about now, their weapons stacked in tripods. It was the perfect picture of a temporary bivouac in open country on a new or semi-explored planet. Billiard almost laughed at the thought that he and Santha had forced the Lorian guard forces, and even some Redhats into such a situation this deep inside the borders of the Lorian Empire.

  A great deal of noise was being made by the soldiers’ chatter, the coming and going of floaters and crawlers, instructions being given by officers, orders being given by noncoms. Floaters were parked around the small clearing without plan or order and troops sat around on the ground, eating field rations out of shiny plastic packs, laughing and joking. In one cluster stood three army officers and two Redhats. They were talking excitedly, pointing a great deal at a map they had spread across the sloping front of a floater, but Billiard could not quite make out the specifics of what they were saying. He didn’t need to, however. He knew the problems the Redhats would be facing right now, and the few possible courses of action open to them for solving those problems.

  For one wild moment, Billiard thought about mounting a one-man surprise attack on the troops in front of him. About a hundred of them were relaxed and eating, their weapons stacked, the vehicle-mounted lasers and recoilless rifles safetied. With the explosive charges he had taken from the drop compartment of his boat, along with his own weapons, and taking into account the element of surprise, he had a chance. But he gave up the whole idea; he might get fifty of them, or even seventy-five if he got lucky, but that was all. And anything except getting all of them was pointless.

  He backed away from the clearing, turned, and made his way down along the gulley to the trail h
e had cut from the gully on a diagonal to the river’s edge. Once there, he was moving almost due north. If his estimates of the location of the crash site were anywhere near correct, he had about a hundred miles to cover to the Goromi enclave.

  Surely the Redhats would know that too. They knew as well as he did that reaching the Goromi colony was his only chance to get off the planet. And he was certain the Redhats here would be maniacally devoted to catching one of the men who had raided an inner planet of the Lorian Empire. They needed either him or Santha for a trial. To catch one of them would be to prove that the empire was not really threatened by the revolutionaries. They also needed a captive to prove to the Goromi and any other races on their borders that they were not about to fall, to become easy pickings for a military incursion.

  The motorized army unit back at the crash site would not be able to follow Billiard and Santha across the swamp-like country. An air search would be useless as long as the two stayed inside the protection of the jungle. Even an infrared tracer would be stopped by that mass of steaming vegetation. So Billiard knew that even though the Redhats had a good idea of where he and Santha were, and where they would be heading, the enemy would have to organize a ground team to come after them, or wait for them near the Goromi enclave.

  The trouble was, Billiard thought as he moved along the freshly cut trail, that such a team would be equipped for jungle operations and, worse still, would be fresh. The possibility that he and Santha might make it to the Goromi enclave before those jungle troops caught up with them was very slim. But that narrow possibility was better than the certainty of what would happen to them should they ever be captured by the Redhats. Even a slow death in the jungle would be preferable to that alternative.

  It took Billiard three hours to catch up with Santha, and when he did he spent at least five minutes chewing her out. He had been gone almost five hours, and she had covered less than three miles on her own.