Other

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Someone—Bleys did not see who—fired off a smoke gun. A brown cloud, very like the fringe of the dust storm Bleys had looked down a mountainside at on New Earth, enclosed them and the side of the ship against which they stood. He breathed in smoke without thinking, but it did not seem to irritate his throat or lungs.

  Still, Bleys felt a sense of relief when Henry pulled from his pocket a small canister with a squeeze trigger handle. He squeezed it, pointing in various directions around them, and whatever was in the canister cleared a cave-like open space, the area of a good-sized room, around them. Visible now to Bleys were Henry, Kaj and the driver, together with half a dozen Soldiers. As Bleys watched, these turned and ran to the edge of the clear area, dropped to the ground, and lay as if looking out under the smoke, where it came down to the pad.

  “The clear will hold four minutes. After that, we can spray again, if we have to, Carl”—Henry said to him—“Carl? Good you’re still with us here. Give Bleys that extra smoke gun and spray pump.”

  Carl Carlson, particularly recognizable to Bleys because of his graying hair, reached into a belt-pack at his waist and brought out the two items Henry had called for. He passed them to Bleys silently.

  “Carl, who had the power cannon?”

  “Jim Jeller and Isaac Murgatroyd, Henry.”

  Carl gestured toward a point in the cleared space behind Henry. Henry turned. Bleys stepped aside to see around him and made out two more Soldiers, on their feet, with the awkward and heavy weight of a portable power cannon balanced on their shoulders.

  Bleys knew that, in theory, one man could fire it by himself. But he would almost have to fire it from the ground or from some other solid rest. It was two meters in length and weighed almost as much as either of the men now carrying it—an awkward, angular chunk of gray plastic and metal and black handgrips. Under actual battle conditions, it came to Bleys from some early reading, the weapon should be held and fired by two men together. But they would need to be on their feet, with the gun balanced on their shoulders as it was now—and they would necessarily have to be erect and motionless with a strong grip on the weapon.

  “Good, keep them with us,” Henry was telling Carl. “Bleys, there’s probably three hundred shots in your smoke gun, but only about two hundred clearing sprays in the pump-spray. The spray’s our own Friendly invention, by the way.”

  Bleys stared at him, because Henry had given one of his sudden rare, brief smiles.

  “The Militia used to use smoke guns against us, and we came up with this out of our own kitchen chemistry. These Newtonians aren’t likely to know about it—too locked into their gadgets. It gives us an edge.”

  Bleys looked around him. The men lying at the edge of the smoke had power pistols in their hands, needle rifles slung on their backs.

  “Why not power rifles?” Bleys asked.

  “At the short range between parked ships, pistols are handier,” Henry said.

  As he spoke, one of the men they looked at tilted his pistol up and fired into the smoke cloud on an angled, upward slant.

  “He’s firing blind,” Bleys said.

  “No,” Henry said. “The smoke won’t hold down on a surface hotter than the air around it, so there’s a clearing between the top of the pad and the bottom of the smoke. It’s not enough to do anyone on the outside any good, but our men can see out at legs, wheels—whatever’s there. When they see a pair of feet, they simply aim through the smoke at where the body should be above it. It’s a trick you’ve got to work to learn, but you finally get the feel of it. Most of my Soldiers are good enough so the smoke cloud might as well not be there. But the fact that he’s fired means someone’s caught up with us now. Carl, have you shown Bleys the map?”

  “Not yet. Here it is,” said Carl. He had already pulled out a tightly-folded piece of paper. Once he started unfolding it, it flattened out perfectly, without creases. A one-molecule sheet. On it was an odd diagram with little elliptical shapes and different paths starting from beside one such shape and going in different directions to other shapes, only to come together again at a final ellipse, close to the right-hand edge of the page.

  “The circles are spacecraft like this one.” Carl struck with his fist against the side of the spacecraft where they stood; a hollow, ringing noise sounded from the hull. There was no response inside the ship. They were, Bleys noticed now, only a few steps from the entry port, which was shut and obviously locked.

  “They’re just keeping their skirts clean, inside,” said Henry. “The Newtonians don’t dare fire into our smoke for fear of hitting the ship. Go on, Carl.”

  “The lines here”—Carl pointed—“are the general routes the different Teams will try to take, to confuse whoever’s come against us. Our line’s the green one. We’ll move to this next ship, and from there to the next. See?”

  His finger indicated one of the central zigzag lines.

  “If we hit opposition, we can break right or left to join the routes of the Teams moving nearest us. There’s an extra power pistol and needle rifle here for you, if you want.” Even as he spoke, he was beckoning two of the men lying about the circumference of the cleared area to them. The two got up and ran back to stand with them. “Do you want them?”

  “No,” Bleys said. “—Yes! I know how to shoot at targets, at least.”

  One Soldier lifted the slim shape of a second needle rifle from one of his shoulders and the other unstrapped an extra power pistol in its holster from around his waist. They fastened these on Bleys. The Soldier with the power pistol grinned up at Bleys for a second, when it turned out that the belt went around Bleys’s waist and buckled at one notch less than it had around his own.

  Meanwhile Carl Carlson was holding up his own wrist control pad, studs gray-green against the black of an imitation leather.

  “You want to set your control pad to Where,” he was saying, “and I’ll touch-transfer my data to your wristpad, so that you’ll have everything there.”

  Bleys nodded and touched the proper studs on his wristpad. An area the size of his little fingernail lit up like a small screen with the image of a simple meter, a curved line divided at regular intervals by black cross sections, and a needle pointing to a center point above which was something that looked something like a “W,” but was actually Old Earth’s ancient Greek symbol for Omega, the last letter in the old Greek alphabet and meaning “end.”

  Now Carl touched a stud on his wristpad. The needle of the meter wavered for a second, then settled a little to the right of the centerpoint.

  “The needle points you along the route our Team’s got laid out for it on the map. If you join another Team, it’ll switch to their route,” Carl said.

  Needles from guns firing outside the smoke cloud had begun to ricochet off the pad, either through the smoke or just short of it, into the cleared space. No one seemed to be trying to shoot with power weapons from outside.

  “Time to move,” Henry said.

  They went up along the side of the spaceship. One of the Soldiers in the lead, followed by the two carrying the power cannon, was spraying a narrow but clear path for them through the smoke toward the front of the ship. They passed around its bow, the wide observation transparency there now blacked out, and around to the other side, still in the smoke.

  There was a short pause while the Soldier with the spray gun went forward to have a look at things beyond the obscurity. He came back, nodded and they moved out of the smoke into clear air, onto a pad showing nothing but silent closed spaceships.

  “Go!” Henry said.

  They all ran toward the farther ship that Henry had indicated with an outflung hand. Bleys ran almost without effort, his mind reveling in its alertness.

  They reached another ship. Smoke cloud again, Soldiers down and peering out under its bottom edge as they all caught their breath.

  Kaj Menowsky was close beside Bleys, and Bleys noticed that he was not breathing at all heavily after their run. Obviously he was in good
physical shape himself. He had no power pistol or needle rifle; but then, almost no Exotics would touch weapons; and many Exotic-trained medicians from other New Worlds also refused to do so, as a matter of principle.

  A Soldier peering under the smoke looked back at Henry and made pushing motions through the air with one hand toward the space beyond the other side of the vessel.

  “Go!” Henry said, pointing.

  They went. They reached one more ship without trouble, then another, and even one more with no sign of opposition. A comer of Bleys’s mind began to worry that the groups Toni and Dahno were with might have drawn all the Newtonians’ attention from Henry’s group.

  He looked at Henry; but Henry was already indicating several of their Soldiers. One of them was the woman who had been part of their original group when they had left the vehicles.

  “—All the way out!” Henry was saying.

  The three—no, four—Soldiers ran in different directions toward the four ships nearest to them. They took varying times to reach their goals, and the first three to arrive peered quickly around a ship’s end and signaled back with the same pushing motion of one hand that the Soldier peering under the smoke had used a short while before.

  The woman was the last one to reach her ship, which was the farthest away. Indeed, she never reached it. Before she got there, Bleys heard the hollow boom of a power gun. She was struck and thrown through the air some small distance, to fall and lie still as a cast-aside rag doll.

  Bleys made an instinctive step in her direction, but Henry was speaking again.

  “The other way, then! Everybody!”

  And once more they were running—and, as suddenly, with no transition whatsoever, Bleys found himself once more inside a smoke cloud, pressed up against the side of yet another ship, with needles ricocheting through the smoke at them. As ricochets, the needles no longer had the power to go through the side of the spaceship, but they were still dangerous—if not lethal—to human bodies.

  Bleys saw that at least two of the men had already been hit. One had an arm dangling uselessly; the other was bleeding from high on his head, his blond hair now stained dark in the sunlight by the blood from what could be merely a scalp graze, or something more serious. But he was on his feet.

  “Move!” Henry circled his hand in the air and pointed back along the side of the ship they were up against.

  They moved, Henry first, clearing a path with his spray gun, followed by the two Soldiers still carrying the power cannon, and Bleys, with all the rest, behind them.

  They went back along the silent side of the ship, in the narrow lane through the smoke, around the back end of the ship and finally past the thick edges of the massive plates that directed the thrust on which the ship relied in atmosphere for its landings and takeoffs into space.

  “Scout,” Henry said, and a Soldier dodged past Bleys, the power-cannon carriers and Henry himself to venture into the smoke ahead.

  “Clear,” his voice came back.

  They moved, and in a moment they were out in the open air. Henry was pointing at another ship off to their right, and they ran.

  They were all taking their pace now from Henry and the cannon carriers behind him, who were going as fast as they could. Bleys felt as if he was actually running at his top speed; though he knew he was not—nowhere near it. His feet pounded on the surface of the pad, and his lungs heaved as if he were at the very limit of his exertions; but none of this was true. He simply could not go ahead and leave any of these with him behind. It had been bad enough to leave behind the Soldier woman he had just seen die.

  They were almost to the ship Henry had indicated. They were closest to its bow end, and Henry turned slightly to his left to circle out around it. The others caught up and they went around it in a body.

  —And ran almost body to body into a group of Newtonian space soldiers, each with a power rifle and a needle rifle slung from their shoulders.

  Henry, the cannon carriers and the rest of the Soldiers had instantly dropped to the pad. Bleys was a second late in seeing what they had done and following them and in that moment he felt a sudden impact on his left side. But by that time he was down on the pad. Around him, the Soldiers had their power pistols out and were using them. The Newtonians were dropping.

  Almost immediately Henry and the others were getting back to their feet again and holstering their guns. There had been only a few, late return shots from the men they had run into—and all of those were now dead, lying scattered singly, or in small heaps on the pad. They had been taken by surprise; and Bleys suddenly realized that probably these military spacemen had never actually been in a firefight before. It had been almost like an execution.

  More dead. Bleys tried to keep his mind from counting.

  “Go!” It was Henry again.

  All about them, there were only ships and pad, no movement. But Henry now had them running toward one more, farther ship.

  I will not count, Bleys said to himself. He had the sudden wild feeling that they were not so much progressing toward the unseen goal of the ship that actually waited for them, as running and re-running over again the distance between the last ship behind which they had taken shelter, to the ship just beyond it; and then somehow starting all over again to run the same distance under the same urgency—and suddenly everything was different again.

  He was once more in a smoke cloud, once more beside a ship, but this time he had the feeling it was not the ship they were running for a few minutes before. This time he had the feeling that a longer length of time had passed. Needles were coming in, but Henry held them all where they were. Again, whoever was firing at them was deliberately firing into the smoke cloud at an angle so that the needles would ricochet through whatever position they might have within the smoke cloud—dangerous to them, but harmless to the ship against whose hull they were now clustered.

  Some of the Soldiers, he saw, were down; some moving, some not.

  One of the fallen was Henry.

  Everything went strange to Bleys for a moment.

  Chapter 37

  “No, I’m all right,” Bleys said.

  The sensation of strangeness cleared, like tunnel vision expanding once more to normal range.

  “Henry!” Bleys started to move toward Henry, but felt himself checked by a grip on his right arm. He was about to break loose when his mind also began to clear. He looked to see the face of Carl Carlson beside and looking up at him.

  Bleys was still clearheaded and strong, but there was a sudden cold rage in him; and instead of dominating it and pushing it from him as he normally would, he let it grow.

  It was a rage at his life that had given him a lonely childhood, had made him different from other children; set him apart and isolated, belonging neither to the child world nor the adult world that had separated him from everyone else.

  He looked past Carl again at Henry.

  This, at least he would not let happen; and if life had already robbed him of Toni and Dahno, he would find some way to make life pay. But if nothing else, Henry and the rest of those with him now would not be taken by Newtonians. He would get them to Favored—even at the cost of his life’s plan.

  “Bleys Ahrens?” Carl was saying. “Are you really all right? Can you hear me?”

  “What makes you think I’m not?”

  “I thought you were fine, up to a minute ago,” said Carl. “I was saying—we can carry Henry and the Solider who can’t walk. Henry’s only wounded, but I don’t know how badly. Hit in the body. It’s up to you now. Tell us what to do.”

  “Where are we?” Bleys asked. “How far to Favored!”

  “Almost there,” Carl said. “If it wasn’t for the smoke cloud, you’d see it. It’s straight ahead, looking from this ship’s side. They’re firing at us from the left of it. To our right, the only way between a couple of other ships is blocked by two cannon wagons that came up. Jeller and Murgatroyd took our hand power cannon and knocked them out. The wagons’re
still there, but nobody’s been dodging out from behind them; and there’s no fire from that direction.”

  Bleys glanced around; and saw that the power cannon, as well as the two he had seen carrying it, were not in the cleared area.

  “Where are Jeller and Murgatroyd?” he asked.

  “Either just inside or outside the edge of the smoke, I think. A little to your right as you go directly out. They haven’t come back.”

  “Our power cannon’s with them?”

  “Yes, Bleys Ahrens,” Carl said. “Do you want me to send someone else out to bring them back with it? The chances aren’t good, if Jeller and Murgatroyd were needled and the cannon’s lying out, clear of the smoke now. Whoever goes can put more smoke out to cover picking it up, but if they do, all the shooting is going to zero in on their area; and their chances of getting back, particularly with the hand cannon, are up to God alone. Shall I send someone?”

  Bleys mind had put aside his rage now, but his decision remained. His thoughts flowed rapidly, concisely and capably. The situation was clear, complete and in his hands.

  “Not yet,” he said. “You say we can carry our wounded? All of them?”

  “I think we can carry all, Bleys Ahrens. It will slow us, though; and if we make our run in the open, I don’t think any of us have much of a chance of getting to Favored. We’ll try it in a smoke cloud, of course, but we’re still going to lose people.”

  “Why?”

  “The needle gunners. I’m not sure why the fire from the two power-gun wagons is dead. But just the needle gunning from our left, even with with us moving in the smoke, is going to take half of us out. Some, maybe all, of the other Teams are there already; but they can’t come out again and help us, not without compromising the ship’s extraterritoriality, now Favored’s given them sanctuary.”

  “Right,” said Bleys. “But we can’t stay here. So the only chance we’ve got is going in a smoke cloud for Favored. So, go. But I want that hand power cannon. I’ll carry it. I can carry it alone.”