Postmarked the Stars sq-4

by Andre Norton

  Beyond Rip, as he was able to focus better, he saw Ali wearing a thermo jacket, already at the hatch as if impatiently awaiting him.

  “What’s the—?”

  “We may have trouble,” Ali answered. “See?”

  He pointed. Ali had made certain safeguard arrangements when they had completed their two caches—that of the box and that of the embryos. He had set small ray warns on each so that any disturbance would be recorded on an improvised pickup, and now one was blinking red with warning enough to shake Dane fully out of sleep.

  “Which one?” With their present luck it would be the box, of course. He swung stiffly out of the hammock and reached for his own thermo wear.

  But Ali surprised him. “The embryos. Fire rockets, can’t you—this is a speed job!”

  They came out into the early morning and a crisp chill, which made Dane pull up his hood with its visored face plate and tuck his hands into the gloves, which dangled at the ends of his sleeves, but he remembered to make fast the hatch, ensuring that the brachs were safe in the warm cabin.

  There was a rime of frost on twigs and leaves, giving a silvery coating to the vegetation, and their breath formed small white clouds.

  “Listen!” Rip threw up his hand as if to bar them from entering the path they had made yesterday when dragging the containers to the cache.

  They heard a crackling, as if something large forced its way through the brush. There was another noise, a kind of snort sounding now and then, and from that they judged that whatever might be sniffing around was no small creature.

  Dane drew his stunner, thumbed its controls to full force, and saw that his companions were doing the same. The growth hid whatever crunched along, and they could only trace it by sound. But by the sound it was going away, not coming toward them. They stood listening for several minutes until they were sure the unknown had retreated farther into the wood.

  That it had been nosing about the embryos’ cache Dane was sure. Perhaps there was some scent that attracted it. They had best see how much damage it had done. The lathsmers were useless to the settlers— that was positive—but no cargo could be destroyed until ordered, and Dane did not have that order. Therefore, he must protect the boxes until he did.

  They had not gone far along the tracks left by their journey of the day before when they came to the signs left by the other thing. It had tramped, or rather stomped. There were prints breaking the frozen crust of the ground, large enough so that when Dane knelt to measure his hand beside them, the marks spread beyond the stretch of his fingers. They were not very plain, for the frostbound soil had resisted even this heavy weight. They were more like rounded holes than anything else.

  A stunner set on high would take care of most creatures, but there were on some worlds menaces with nervous systems on which such a ray would have no more effect than the flick of a twig. Then a blaster was the only answer, but those they did not have.

  So now they went slowly, listening, relying on the fact the crashing was faint and the unknown was still going from them. When they came to where they had hidden the containers, they had more proof of the strength of what they had not yet seen, for the stones and earth they had piled with such backbreaking effort to hide the cache had been pulled away. The containers themselves had been battered and broken, though they had been made to withstand all the shocks and strains that might occur during space flight. They were twisted and rent, and two had been opened as if they had been as easy to handle as an E-ration tube.

  And as an E-ration tube would have been by a hungry man, they had been completely emptied. Dane kicked one out of the way to see a third that had been bent and then left. He had not been mistaken. What had rested so cushioned inside was stirring. But it was not time for it to be decanted yet! As with the brachs, its “birth” was coming ahead of schedule.

  He could see the writhing of the monster body inside. A few more minutes and it could certainly die. Since it was a monster, let it. Only his sense of duty objected. Cargo intact—that was what it said. And perhaps it would be proof of their own innocence to keep these embryos intact until the techs could assess what had happened to them.

  But this scaled, half-serpent thing—they could not nurse it in the LB. And how long before Jellico sent them instructions?

  Dane knelt beside the broken container. Surely the thing would be frozen stiff soon. Reptiles were especially sensitive to extremes of both cold and heat. Perhaps they could freeze it and keep it that way, as they had kept the body of the dead stranger on the Queen.

  What had seemed feeble straggles at first were growing stronger instead of weaker. If the thing felt the cold, the chill stimulated it to greater efforts instead of sending it into stupor and death. The container shook back and forth now under the wriggling and fell over on its side. Through the rent in the top, not large enough for the creature to crawl through, was thrust a scaled foot, large claws gouging at the frost- filled ground for purchase to pull itself out.

  Dane changed the reading on his stunner to half and rayed the container. The clawed foot released its clutch on the soil and relaxed. The container ceased rocking.

  “Two more want out.” Ah had been stacking the containers. Now he indicated two set to one side.

  These had not been misused by the feaster. However, before the men could move, now the tops swung open as they were triggered to do at “birthing,” and the things inside began to crawl out. Rip beamed them unconscious.

  Dragon heads on long necks swung limply over the edges of their boxes.

  “How about the others?” Dane went to check. But there were no more signs of life. The warning tags on the covers were safely blank.

  “What do we do? Give them full beam and finish them off?” Ali asked.

  Probably the most sensible move. But they were cargo, and they might be needed. Dane said as much and saw Rip nod slowly as if he agreed.

  “The labs might want them. Maybe they could tell more about the radiation by examining them. But where do we put them?”

  “Yes, where?” Ali demanded. “The LB? If so, we’d better move out. It’s turned into a part-time zoo already. And these”—his nose wrinkled—”are not the best shipmates. At least they don’t smell fresh—”

  Certainly the fetid odor of the inert reptiles made them the last things one wanted penned under or around one’s bed. But they would never live outside unless some kind of a heated pen could be rigged. Dane wondered about that aloud.

  “We have the brach cage. If they cooperate as they did last night,” Rip suggested, “we can put them in the extra hammock. And these containers, could we pound them out and weld them around the cage with a heat unit hooked up?”

  Ali picked up one of the smashed containers. “Can’t promise anything, but it’s worth trying. At least we can’t share the LB with them loose or in boxes either. That stink’s enough to send one’s stomach into space. How long will they stay under?”

  Dane did not want to touch the unconscious things, and he had no way of judging. The only answer was that one of them would have to stay on guard while the other two worked.

  “There’s another problem,” Rip said, and it was not the kind of thought to add brightness to their day. “That thing that smashed in here might have acquired a taste for pseudo lathsmer. If it trails or hunts by scent, it might follow to the LB. Do we want that?”

  That made sense, Dane thought. His first solution had been to get the creatures back to the craft and build the heated pen right outside. But did they need to do that?

  Ali responded to the same idea. “We could set up a nasty jolt for anything that did come hunting,” he offered. “Stotz gave me a tool kit when we left, and we can run a wire from the ship and set up a force field—”

  Dane was willing to trust to Ali. Anyone who held a cadet’s berth under Johan Stotz knew his business, and it would not be the first time that a Free Trader crew improvised. Half their wandering life depended upon imaginative thinking when confront
ed by a crisis.

  So that long day was spent in hard labor—Ali providing the information and technical knowledge they must have, Rip and Dane giving untrained labor. They straightened out the three containers the strange hunter had mauled and two others whose tabs reported the contents dead, throwing the misshapen embryos those had held into a pit and rolling stones over them, well away from where they proposed to build the pen.

  In the end they had a somewhat lopsided-looking structure that should be large enough to house the three still sleeping creatures, and this fitted about the brach cage stripped of all its contents. Ali rigged his force field, warning them that they were thus exhausting the power of the LB.

  The brachs appeared perfectly content to be transferred to the fourth hammock in the cabin. In fact, they slept away much of the day, and Dane wondered if they were, in the natural state, nocturnal, reminding himself to be sure to dog down the hatch door that night just in case they took a fancy to wander.

  They did not leave the dragon pen by the rest of the containers. Those they restacked and recovered with many more stones. In the bargain, Ali cut down three fairly good-sized trees and dragged them so that their thick upper branches met and tangled about the cache.

  The pen they set closer to the LB, using the saw to clear the underbrush not only around the site they chose but also in a cutting back to the LB, so they were given a clear path to it, should need arise.

  Dane had no idea as to what food the mutants would eat. Judging by their teeth, they might be carnivores. So his offering was a panful of squeezed out E-rations, which he left for the creatures when they awakened from the stunner-induced sleep. If they ever did—for it seemed to him that their day-long sleep was ominous, though it made their own task that much easier.

  Ali rigged an alarm to awaken them if the pen was approached during the night. They were all almost too tired to eat as they settled in their hammocks for the night. Dane checked the door before he went to his. There had been stirring among the brachs, but he had left out food and water. He only hoped that if they did go roaming, they would be considerate enough to avoid waking the human members of the crew, but there was a small nagging worry in his mind, as a hint of toothache might come and go before a final explosion of pain in the jaw. The brachs had been too quiet, too cooperative during the day. He wondered if they were laying plans of their own.

  The fact that it was freezing cold out might deter them from exploration, even if they could master the locking system set up on the hatch door. He did not believe they would really venture out. He was so tired that even the prick of worry could not keep him awake.

  Cold—bitter, bone-reaching cold. He was buried in the glacier looking down into the emerald lake, but the cold was a part of him. He must move, must break the film of ice, gain his freedom—or else he would slide, still in the core of a block, to be lost forever in green water depths. He must break loose. He made a mighty effort.

  Under him the block swung and shook. It was giving away—he was falling into the lake! He must get free—

  The jar of landing on the deck of the LB, the hammock twisted over him, brought Dane awake. He was shivering still with the cold of his dream. But it wasn’t from his dream! Cold air did sweep over him. He scrambled to his hands and knees, and in the very subdued light of a single rod over the controls, he saw the hatch door partly open and heard the moan of the wind outside.

  The brachs! He shut the hatch first and then turned to the hammock where they had bedded down the aliens. As he expected, that was empty. Only the pile of bedding from their cage lay there, though he wasted a moment to pull that aside, hoping to find them cuddled under it.

  He still had that in his hand when the buzz of the warning Ali had rigged sounded loudly through the LB.

  If the hunter had sniffed them out, the brachs could not only be in the freezing cold but helpless before that menace!

  Dane grabbed his thermo jacket even as he saw Rip and Ali begin to pull out of their hammocks.

  “The brachs are gone,” he told them tersely, “and the cage alarm is on.” He need not have added that, with its buzz punishing their ears in that confined space.

  He picked up a hand beamer and snapped it to the fore of his belt, leaving his hands free. The brachs rather than the dragons must be their first concern. Outside the LB it was as cold as he had feared. By his timer it was well past midnight, into the early morning hours. The low ray of his beamer—for he kept it to the low cycle—picked up marks in the frost, not well defined, but which he thought were brach tracks. He could only hope that the thick wall of brush had kept them to the path for a swift escape.

  Dane heard the hatch clang shut and knew that the others must be on his heels, but he tried to walk as noiselessly has he could and with what speed the night, the low light, and the rough ground would allow. Luckily they did not have too far to go, always supposing that the brachs had been entrapped in the force field Ali had set by the dragon cage.

  Though Dane might be going carefully, there was something ahead that sought no such progress. The thud of the same ponderous tread they had earlier heard was loud.

  So the hunter had come back in search of the embryos. Now, as Dane half hesitated, holding his stunner at full charge but ignorant of what protection it would be against an alien life form, he heard a cry—shrill, rising in ululation of fear. And though he had not heard a brach scream before, he was very sure that had come from one of their throats.

  Dane snapped the beamer to full and ran, the magnetic plates on his boot soles waking a hollow echo on the frozen ground. It was only seconds before he burst into the clearing they had made for the cage.

  Around it blazed the haze of the force field. Within that tenuous defense crouched the brachs. One of the kits lay on the ground, its brother or sister huddled against it, while, with their heads down to present nose horns to the enemy, the two adults stood guard.

  It was a pitiful guard, for that which confronted them might have smashed both into bloody paste with a single swipe of one of its six limbs. It reared high, bracing itself back so that its rounded abdomen touched the ground, four limbs serving as a ship’s cradle to anchor it there, while it swung its smaller torso and its long front arms back and forth before the force screen.

  Apparently it was wary of that, for it did not try to touch the haze, but the strangeness of the attacker startled Dane into momentary immobility. Ant—beetle? No, it had no hard overskin such as those insects possessed. Instead it was covered, over rounded paunch, back, and thorax with long fur of hair of grayed- black, matted and filled with twigs and leaves, until it almost resembled one of the bushes moving, supposing its head, those waving forelimbs, and its aura of malignancy might be disregarded.

  The upper limbs ended in long, narrow, toothed claws, which it constantly opened and shut, making swift darts with them at the force field, though it seemingly still hesitated to reach into that. Dane took aim on the round head in which the fore part was largely covered by great faceted eyes, another insectile resemblance.

  The head shook as his stun beam must have caught its center. Then the thing looked down, over its shoulder at an angle he would not have thought possible for any living thing with a backbone or skeleton to assume.

  One of the clawed forelimbs swung, but Dane grimly stood his ground, continuing to pour the full strength of the stun beam at its head. However, its actions were such that he feared he had chosen the wrong way to knock it out. Did it carry what brain it had somewhere else in that monstrous body? Ali and Rip, seeing that Dane’s attack did not knock it out, aimed lower, one at the thorax, the other at the barrel abdomen. Some one of the three must have reached a vital part, for the flailing limbs fell, to flap feebly a time or two against the body. It shuffled half around, as if attempting to flee, and then crashed, missing the dragon cage and the beleaguered brachs by only a little.

  Ali snapped off the force field, and they hurried to the smaller creatures. Three were unhurt, but
the kit lying on the ground had a tear along its shoulder down to its ribs, and it whimpered pitifully as Dane bent over it, the rest of the family drawing back as if they knew he meant to help.

  “The dragons”—Ali had gone to peer into the cage—“are gone. Look here!” Under his touch the door swung open as if they had never latched it. But Dane would have taken an oath that they had.

  He gathered up the kit with all the gentleness he could and started back for the LB, the other three brachs close behind him, chittering those sounds that, the more one heard them, sounded like words.

  “We’ll look for the dragons,” Rip said, “if you can manage.”

  “I can.” Dane wanted to get the brachs back to the warmth and safety of the LB. Neither Ali nor Rip would take chances with the stunned monster he knew. The first thought must now be for the wounded brach.

  Whether remedies intended for humans would heal the wounded kit, he had no way of being sure, but those were all he had to use. So he sprayed the wound with antibiotics, painted it with a thin coat of plasta- heal, and settled the small body in the hammock where its mother speedily joined it, pulling it gently against her and licking its head until its eyes closed and apparently it slept.

  The male brach and the other kit still squatted on the shelf where they had all climbed to watch Dane at his doctoring. Now, as he put away the med-kit, the cargo master looked at them. That they seemed able to speak to one another was evident. Could they communicate with him or he with them? There was one provision that was regular equipment on an LB and that he might try. He went to one of the emergency storage pockets and brought out a box, taking up its contents with care. There was a small mike, a voice box to strap to his own throat, and a flat disk. The second set of throat mike and strap he put to one side. Then he set the disk before the male brach.

  “I, Dane—” He tried the oldest of all approaches, giving his own name. “I, friend—”