The Defiant Agents

by Norton, Andre

  “They should reach our ship in two days … three at the most … if they are pushing,” Travis said thoughtfully. “It would be a help—if that flyer is a link in any com unit—to destroy it before its crew picks up and relays any report of what happens back there.”

  Jil-Lee grunted. He was surveying the heights above the pocket in which Menlik and two of the Mongols were piling brush. “There … there … and there….” The Apache’s chin made three juts. “If the pilot swoops for a quick look, our cross fire will take out his blades.”

  They held a last conference with Menlik and then climbed to the perches Jil-Lee had selected. Sentries on lookout reported by mirror flash that Tsoay, Deklay, Lupe, and Nolan were now on the move to join the other three Apaches. If and when Manulito’s trap closed its jaws on the Reds at the western ship, the news would pass and the Apaches would move out to storm the enemy fort on the prairie. And should they blast any caller the helicopter might carry, Menlik and his riders would accompany them.

  There it was, just as Menlik had foretold: The wasp from the open country was flying into the hills. Menlik, on his knees, struck flint to steel, sparking the fire they hoped would draw the pilot to a closer investigation.

  The brush caught, and smoke, thick and white, came first in separate puffs and then gathered into a murky pillar to form a signal no one could overlook. In Travis’ hands the grip of the gun was slippery. He rested the end of the barrel on the rock, curbing his rising tension as best he could.

  To escape any caller on the flyer, the Tatars had remained in the valley below the Apaches’ lookout. And as the helicopter circled in, Travis sighted two men in its cockpit, one wearing a helmet identical to the one they had seen on the Red hunter days ago. The Reds’ long undisputed sway over the Mongol forces would make them overconfident. Travis thought that even if they sighted one of the waiting Apaches, they would not take warning until too late.

  Menlik’s bush fire was performing well and the flyer was heading straight for it. The machine buzzed the smoke once, too high for the Apaches to trust raying its blades. Then the pilot came back in a lower sweep which carried him only yards above the smoldering brush, on a level with the snipers.

  Travis pressed the button on the barrel, his target the fast-whirling blades. Momentum carried the helicopter on, but at least one of the marksmen, if not all three, had scored. The machine plowed through the smoke to crack up beyond.

  Was their caller working, bringing in the Mongols to aid the Reds trapped in the wreck?

  Travis watched Menlik make his way toward the machine, reach the cracked cover of the cockpit. But in the shaman’s hand was a bare blade on which the sun glinted. The Mongol wrenched open the sprung door, thrust inward with the tulwar, and the howl of triumph he voiced was as worldless and wild as a wolf’s.

  More Mongols flooding down … Hulagur … a woman … centering on the helicopter. This time a spear plunged into the interior of the broken flyer. Payment was being extracted for long slavery.

  The Apaches dropped from the heights, waiting for Menlik to leave the wild scene. Hulagur had dragged out the body of the helmeted man and the Mongols were stripping off his equipment, smashing it with rocks, still howling their war cry. But the shaman came to the dying smudge fire to meet the Apaches.

  He was smiling, his upper lip raised in a curve suggesting the victory purr of a snow tiger. And he saluted with one hand.

  “There are two who will not trap men again! We believe you now, andas, comrades of battle, when you say you can go up against their fort and make it as nothing!”

  Hulagur came up behind the shaman, a modern automatic in his hand. He tossed the weapon into the air, caught it again, laughing—disclaiming something in his own language.

  “From the serpents we take two fangs,” Menlik translated. “These weapons may not be as dangerous as yours, but they can bite deeper, quicker, and with more force than our arrows.”

  It did not take the Mongols long to strip the helicopter and the Reds of what they could use, deliberately smashing all the other equipment which had survived the wreck. They had accomplished one important move: The link between the southbound exploring party and the Red headquarters—if that was the role the helicopter had played—was now gone. And the “eyes” operating over the open territory of the plains had ceased to exist. The attacking war party could move against the ship near the Red settlement, knowing they had only controlled Mongol scouts to watch for. And to penetrate enemy territory under those conditions was an old, old game the Apaches had played for centuries.

  While they waited for the signals from the peaks, a camp was established and a Mongol dispatched to bring up the rest of the outlaws and all extra mounts. Menlik carried to the Apaches a portion of the dried meat which had been transported Horde fashion—under the saddle to soften it for eating.

  “We do not skulk any longer like rats or city men in dark holes,” he told them. “This time we ride, and we shall take an accounting from those out there—a fine accounting!”

  “They still have other controllers,” Travis pointed out.

  “And you have that which is an answer to all their machines,” blazed Menlik in return.

  “They will send against us your own people if they can,” Buck warned.

  Menlik pulled at his upper lip. “That is also truth. But now they have no eyes in the sky, and with so many of their men away, they will not patrol too far from camp. I tell you, andas, with these weapons of yours a man could rule a world!”

  Travis looked at him bleakly. “Which is why they are taboo!”

  “Taboo?” Menlik repeated. “In what manner are these forbidden? Do you not carry them openly, use them as you wish? Are they not weapons of your own people?”

  Travis shook his head. “These are the weapons of dead men—if we can name them men at all. These we took from a tomb of the star race who held Topaz when our world was only a hunting ground of wild men wearing the skins of beasts and slaying mammoths with stone spears. They are from a tomb and are cursed, a curse we took upon ourselves with their use.”

  There was a strange light deep in the shaman’s eyes. Travis did not know who or what Menlik had been before the Red conditioner had returned him to the role of Horde shaman. He might have been a technician or scientist—and deep within him some remnants of that training could now be dismissing everything Travis said as fantastic superstition.

  Yet in another way the Apache spoke the exact truth. There was a curse on these weapons, on every bit of knowledge gathered in that warehouse of the towers. As Menlik had already noted, that curse was power, the power to control Topaz, and then perhaps to reach back across the stars to Terra.

  When the shaman spoke again his words were a half whisper. “It will take a powerful curse to keep these out of the hands of men.”

  “With the Reds gone or powerless,” Buck asked, “what need will anyone have for them?”

  “And if another ship comes from the skies—to begin all over again?”

  “To that we shall have an answer, also, if and when we must find it,” Travis replied. That could well be true … other weapons in the warehouse powerful enough to pluck a spaceship out of the sky, but they did not have to worry about that now.

  “Arms from a tomb. Yes, this is truly dead men’s magic. I shall say so to my people. When do we move out?”

  “When we know whether or not the trap to the south is sprung,” Buck answered.

  The report came an hour after sunrise the next morning when Tsoay, Nolan, and Deklay padded into camp. The war chief made a slight gesture with one hand.

  “It is done?” Travis wanted confirmation in words.

  “It is done. The Pinda-lick-o-yi entered the ship eagerly. Then they blew it and themselves up. Manulito did his work well.”

  “And Kaydessa?”

  “The woman is safe. When the Reds
saw the ship, they left their machine outside to hold her captive. That mechanical caller was easily destroyed. She is now free and with the mba’a she comes across the mountains, Manulito and Eskelta with her also. Now—” he looked from his own people to the Mongols, “why are you here with these?”

  “We wait, but the waiting is over,” Jil-Lee said. “Now we go north!”

  18

  They lay along the rim of a vast basin, a scooping out of earth so wide they could not sight its other side. The bed of an ancient lake, Travis speculated, or perhaps even the arm of a long-dried sea. But now the hollow was filled with rolling waves of golden grass, tossing heavy heads under the flowing touch of a breeze with the exception of a space about a mile ahead where round domes—black, gray, brown—broke the yellow in an irregular oval around the globular silver bead of a spacer: a larger ship than that which had brought the Apaches, but of the same shape.

  “The horse herd … to the west.” Nolan evaluated the scene with the eyes of an experienced raider. “Tsoay, Deklay, you take the horses!”

  They nodded, and began the long crawl which would take them two miles or more from the party to stampede the horses.

  To the Mongols in those domelike yurts horses were wealth, life itself. They would come running to investigate any disturbance among the grazing ponies, thus clearing the path to the ship and the Reds there. Travis, Jil-Lee, and Buck, armed with the star guns, would spearhead that attack—cutting into the substance of the ship itself until it was a sieve through which they could shake out the enemy. Only when the installations it contained were destroyed, might the Apaches hope for any assistance from the Mongols, either the outlaw pack waiting well back on the prairie or the people in the yurts.

  The grass rippled and Naginlta poked out a nose, parting stems before Travis. The Apache beamed an order, sending the coyotes with the horse-raiding party. He had seen how the animals could drive hunted split-horns; they would do as well with the ponies.

  Kaydessa was safe, the coyotes had made that clear by the fact that they had joined the attacking party an hour earlier. With Eskelta and Manulito she was on her way back to the north.

  Travis supposed he should be well pleased that their reckless plan had succeeded as well as it had. But when he thought of the Tatar girl, all he could see was her convulsed face close to his in the ship corridor, her raking nails raised to tear his cheek. She had an excellent reason to hate him, yet he hoped….

  They continued to watch both horse herd and domes. There were people moving about the yurts, but no signs of life at the ship. Had the Reds shut themselves in there, warned in some way of the two disasters which had whittled down their forces?

  “Ah—!” Nolan breathed.

  One of the ponies had raised its head and was facing the direction of the camp, suspicion plain to read in its stance. The Apaches must have reached the point between the herd and the domes which had been their goal. And the Mongol guard, who had been sitting cross-legged, the reins of his mount dangling close to his hand, got to his feet.

  “Ahhhuuuuu!” The ancient Apache war cry that had sounded across deserts, canyons, and southwestern Terran plains to ice the blood, ripped just as freezingly through the honey-hued air of Topaz.

  The horses wheeled, racing upslope away from the settlement. A figure broke from the grass, flapped his arms at one of the mounts, grabbed at flying mane, and pulled himself up on the bare back. Only a master horseman would have done that, but the whooping rider now drove the herd on, assisted by the snapping and snarling coyotes.

  “Deklay—” Jil-Lee identified the reckless rider, “that was one of his rodeo tricks.”

  Among the yurts it was as if someone had ripped up a rotten log to reveal an ants’ nest and sent the alarmed insects into a frenzy. Men boiled out of the domes, the majority of them running for the horse pasture. One or two were mounted on ponies that must have been staked out in the settlement. The main war party of Apaches skimmed silently through the grass on their way to the ship.

  The three who were armed with the alien weapons had already tested their range by experimentation back in the hills, but the fear of exhausting whatever powered those barrels had curtailed their target practice. Now they snaked to the edge of the bare ground between them and the ladder hatch of the spacer. To cross that open space was to provide targets for lances and arrows—or the superior armament of the Reds.

  “A chance we can hit from here.” Buck laid his weapon across his bent knee, steadied the long barrel of the burner, and pressed the firing button.

  The closed hatch of the ship shimmered, dissolved into a black hole. Behind Travis someone let out the yammer of a war whoop.

  “Fire—cut the walls to pieces!”

  Travis did not need that order from Jil-Lee. He was already beaming unseen destruction at the best target he could ask for—the side of the sphere. If the globe was armed, there was no weapon which could be depressed far enough to reach the marksmen at ground level.

  Holes appeared, irregular gaps and tears in the fabric of the ship. The Apaches were turning the side of the globe into lacework. How far those rays penetrated into the interior they could not guess.

  Movement at one of the holes, the chattering burst of machine-gun fire, spatters of soil and gravel into their faces; they could be cut to pieces by that! The hole enlarged, a scream … cut off….

  “They will not be too quick to try that again,” Nolan observed with cold calm from behind Travis’ post.

  Methodically they continued to beam the ship. It would never be space-borne again; there were neither the skills nor materials here to repair such damage.

  “It is like laying a knife to fat,” Lupe said as he crawled up beside Travis. “Slice, slice—!”

  “Move!” Travis reached to the left, pulled at Jil-Lee’s shoulder.

  Travis did not know whether it was possible or not, but he had a heady vision of their combined fire power cutting the globe in half, slicing it crosswise with the ease Lupe admired.

  They scurried through cover just as someone behind yelled a warning. Travis threw himself down, rolled into a new firing position. An arrow sang over his head; the Reds were doing what the Apaches had known they would—calling in the controlled Mongols to fight. The attack on the ship must be stepped up, or the Amerindians would be forced to retreat.

  Already a new lacing of holes appeared under their concentrated efforts. With the gun held tight to his middle, Travis found his feet, zigzagged across the bare ground for the nearest of those openings. Another arrow clanged harmlessly against the fabric of the ship a foot from his goal.

  He made it in, over jagged metal shards which glowed faintly and reeked of ozone. The weapons’ beams had penetrated well past both the outer shell and the wall of insulation webbing. He climbed a second and smaller break into a corridor enough like those of the western ship to be familiar. The Red spacer, based on the general plan of the alien derelict ship as his own had been, could not be very different.

  Travis tried to subdue his heavy breathing and listen. He heard a confused shouting and the burr of what might be an alarm system. The ship’s brain was the control cabin. Even if the Reds dared not try to lift now, that was the core of their communication lines. He started along the corridor, trying to figure out its orientation in relation to that all-important nerve center.

  The Apache shoved open each door he passed with one shoulder, and twice he played a light beam on installations within cabins. He had no idea of their use, but the wholesale destruction of each and every machine was what good sense and logic dictated.

  There was a sound behind. Travis whirled, saw Jil-Lee and beyond him Buck.

  “Up?” Jil-Lee asked.

  “And down,” Buck added. “The Tatars say they have hollowed a bunker beneath.”

  “Separate and do as much damage as you can,” Travis suggested.
<
br />   “Agreed!”

  Travis sped on. He passed another door and then backtracked hurriedly as he realized it had given on to an engine room. With the gun he blasted two long lines cutting the fittings into ragged lumps. Abruptly the lights went out; the burr of the alarms was silenced. Part of the ship, if not all, was dead. And now it might come to hunter and hunted in the dark. But that was an advantage as far as the Apaches were concerned.

  Back in the corridor again, Travis crept through a curiously lifeless atmosphere. The shouting was stilled as if the sudden failure of the machines had stunned the Reds.

  A tiny sound—perhaps the scrape of a boot on a ladder. Travis edged back into a compartment. A flash of light momentarily lighted the corridor; the approaching figure was using a torch. Travis drew his knife with one hand, reversed it so he could use the heavy hilt as a silencer. The other was hurrying now, on his way to investigate the burned-out engine cabin. Travis could hear the rasp of his fast breathing. Now!

  The Apache had put down the gun, his left arm closed about a shoulder, and the Red gasped as Travis struck with the knife hilt. Not clean—he had to hit a second time before the struggles of the man were over. Then, using his hands for eyes, he stripped the limp body on the floor of automatic and torch.

  With the Red’s weapon in the front of his sash, the burner in one hand and the torch in the other, Travis prowled on. There was a good chance that those above might believe him to be their comrade returning. He found the ladder leading to the next level, began to climb, pausing now and then to listen.

  Shock preceded sound. Under him the ladder swayed and the globe itself rocked a little. A blast of some kind must have been set off at or under the level of the ground. The bunker Buck had mentioned?

  Travis clung to the ladder, waited for the vibrations to subside. There was a shouting above, a questioning…. Hurriedly he ascended to the next level, scrambled out and away from the ladder just in time to avoid the light from another torch flashed down the well. Again that call of inquiry, then a shot—the boom of the explosion loud in the confined space.