Beast Master's Planet: Omnibus of Beast Master and Lord of Thunder (Beastmaster) (29 page)

Deciding to plunge, Hosteen dialed three dishes he had not tasted since his last service leave. He was sipping at a tube planted in a dalee bulb when someone paused by his table, and he glanced up to see Kelson, the Peace Officer of the Peak section.

“Heard you were looking for me, Storm.”

“Tried your office com,” Hosteen assented. He was a little at a loss as to how to word his question. Should he just bluntly ask what was up—if there was any news being withheld from the holdings? But Kelson continued.

“Coincidence. I was trying to reach you. Called the Peaks—Quade said you were here registering your squares. You’ve decided to settle in the Peak country then?”

“Yes—horse breeding with Put Larkin. He’s off-world now. Heard of a new crossbreed on Astra—Terran blood interbred with the local species of duicorn. Can stand up to desert heat there—or so the breeder claims.”

“So they might do for the Big Dry here, eh? It’s a thought. But your range isn’t open yet—”

What did that matter, Hosteen wondered. No one would start on holding work until the rains came. But Kelson was beckoning to someone across the room.

“There’s a problem—maybe you can help us,” the Peace Officer continued. “Mind if we join you? Time’s essential in this one—”

The man who came up was an off-worlder of a type usually not seen on a frontier world. His sleek form-fitting tunic, picked out with a silver-thread pattern, and the long hose-breeches of flat black were those of a business executive on one of the densely populated merchant worlds, and fashionable though they might have been on his home planet, they were as incongruous here as they were ill-becoming to his pudgy figure. Ridiculous as he might look in this Ar-zoran restaurant, one did not think him a figure of fun when one observed his craggy face, saw the square set of a determined and
forceful chin and the bleak eyes that were those of a man used to giving orders. Hosteen recognized the breed and stiffened—it was one with which he had little sympathy.

“Gentle Homo Lass Widders, Beast Master Storm.” Kelson made the introductions, using the title of respect from the inner planets for the stranger, who seated himself without invitation across the table from Hosteen and proceeded to survey the Terran with an appraisal the other found insolent.

“I am not of the forces now.” Hosteen corrected Kelson perversely. “So it is not Beast Master—today I light and tie for Quade.”

“You’re a holding head rather since an hour ago, aren’t you? You’ve located your stakes. Have you set up a brand?” Kelson asked.

“Arrowhead S,” Storm replied absently. “And what do you wish of a mustered-out Beast Master, Gentle Homo?”

“About a month, maybe more, of your time and services,” Widders rapped out in the clicking Galactic basic of the business worlds. “I want to have you—and your team—guide me into the Blue section—”

Hosteen blinked and looked to Kelson for confirmation that he had really heard that idiotic statement. To his surprise, the expression on the Peace Officer’s face read that this stranger from one of the hothouse worlds meant exactly what he said.

“It is a matter of time, Beast Master. I understand we must get into that country within the next two weeks if we go at all before next season.”

Hosteen did not blink this time. He merely replied with the truth.

“Impossible.”

“Nothing,” returned Widders with his irritating confidence, “is impossible, given the right man and credits enough. Kelson believes you are the man, and I can provide the credits.”

There was no use giving this madman a blanket denial; he would not accept that. Listen to his story, get the reason behind this insane plan, then prove to him its utter folly—that was the only way to proceed.

“Why the Blue?” Hosteen asked as he spooned up some lorg sauce and spread it neatly over a horva fritter.

“Because my son’s there—”

Again Hosteen glanced at Kelson. The Blue was unknown. Those mountains, which were its western ramparts, were known, and appeared on the maps of the Peak country. But what lay behind that barrier existed only as a series of hazy aerial photos. The treacherous air currents of those heights had kept out ’copter surveys, and the territory was the hunting ground of the feared wild Norbie cannibals, hated, shunned, and fought by their own kind of generations. No one—government man, settler, yoris hunter—had ever gone into the Blue and returned. It was posted off limits by government order. Yet here was Kelson listening to a proposal to invade the forbidden section as if Widders was doing no more than suggesting a stroll down a Galwadi street. Again Hosteen waited for enlightenment.

“You’re a veteran of Confed forces, Storm. Well, my son is, too. He served with a Breakaway Task Force—”

Hosteen was a little jarred. To find an inner planet man among the Breakaways—those tough, very tough, first-in-fighters—was unusual.

“He was wounded, badly, just before the Xik collapse. Since then he has been on Allpeace—”

Allpeace, one of the rehabilitation worlds where men were rebuilt from human wreckage to live passably normal lives again. But if young Widders had been on Allpeace, how had he gotten into the Blue on Arzor?

“Eight months ago a transport left Allpeace with a hundred discharged veterans on board, Iton among them. On the fringe of this system, that ship hit a derelict hyper bomb.” Widders might have been discussing the weather if you did not watch his eyes and note that small twitch of lip he could not control.

“Just a month ago a lifeboat from that ship was discovered on Mayho, this planet’s sister world. There were two survivors. They reported that at least one more LB left the transport, and they cruised with her into this system. Their boat was damaged, and they had to set down on Mayho. Their companion headed on here to Arzor, promising to send back help—”

“And didn’t arrive,” Hosteen stated instead of questioned.

But Kelson was shaking his head. “No—there is a chance she did arrive, that she crashed in the Blue. Weak signals of some sort were
recorded on robot coms in two different line camps out in the Peaks. A cross check gives us a Blue landing point.”

“And your local climate would mean death to any survivors out there without adequate supplies or transportation at this season,” Widders continued. “I want you to guide me in—to get my son out—”

If he
was
on that LB and is still alive, Hosteen added silently. But he made his oral reply as plain as he could.

“You are asking the impossible, Gentle Homo. To go into the Blue at this time is simply suicide, and there is no possible way of getting behind the Peaks during the Big Dry.”

“Natives live there all year around, don’t they?” Widders’ voice scaled up a note or two.

“Yes, the Norbies live there. But their knowledge of the country is not shared with us.”

“You can hire native guides, anything you need. There is no limit on funds—”

“Credits can’t buy water knowledge from a Norbie. And there is also this—right now the tribes are making medicine in the Peak country. We would not be able to ride in under those conditions even in the Wet Time when all the odds are in our favor.”

“I’ve heard about that,” Kelson said. “It has to be looked into—”

“Not by me!” Hosteen shook his head. “There’s trouble shaping up back there. I’m down here partly to report it and to try and hire riders to replace our Norbies. Every native has pulled out of the Peak country during the past week—every one—”

Kelson did not appear surprised. “So we heard. And they are moving northeast.”

“Into the Blue.” Hosteen digested that.

“Just so. You were a short way into that country when you discovered that Xik nest. And Logan—he’s hunted along there. You’re the only two settlers who have any ground-level information we can use,” Kelson added.

“No.” Hosteen tried to make that negative sound final. “I’m not completely crazy. Sorry, Gentle Homo, the Blue is closed country—in more ways than one.”

Widders’ eyes were no longer bleak. There was a spark of anger in their gray depths. “If I refuse to accept that?”

Hosteen slipped a credit disk into the table slot. “That is your privilege, Gentle Homo, and none of my business. See you later, Kelson.” He rose and walked away from Widders and his problems. He had his own to deal with now.

T

“What had he done?” Brad Quade asked.

“Tried to wipe off the pavement of a street, using the aeropilot of the Valodian minister for a mop. The minister was rather upset about it—his protests got Havers twenty days or forty credits. He’d lost his last credit at Star and Comet, so he was sweating out the twenty days. Had served three of them when I paid his fine. He seems to know his business, though.”

“And you saw Kelson?”

“Kelson saw me. He’s blown all his rockets and is spinning in for a big smash if you ask me.” Unconsciously Storm dropped into the old service slang.

There was a soft growl from the shadows, where Surra picked up his mood of irritation and faint apprehension, translating it into her own form of protest.

“What did he say?”

“He had an inner-planet civ in tow. They wanted a guide into the Blue—right now!”

“What?” Quade’s incredulity was as great as Hosteen’s own had been back in Galwadi.

Swiftly he outlined Widders’ story.

“That could all be true, though why he’s so sure his son was on board that LB—wish-thinking, I suppose.” Quade shook his head. “A Norbie might just make it. Only you’re not going to find a Norbie
who will try, now now. On the other hand—” Quade’s voice trailed off. He was sitting quietly at his file desk, two of Hing’s kits curled up in his lap, a third cuddled down on his shoulder. Now he looked to the map on the wall. “On the other hand, that might be just the direction in which we should do some prospecting.”

“Why?”

“Dort Lancin made a swing up the valley in his ’copter. He spotted two clans on the march, and they weren’t just shifting camp. They were moving with a purpose—so fast they had left a stray mare—”

Storm stopped pacing, eying his stepfather with startled interest. For a Norbie to abandon a horse under any circumstances, except to save life, was so unheard of as to join in magnitude Widders’ desire to enter the Blue.

“Heading northeast?” He was not the least surprised to be answered by a nod.

“I can’t understand it. That’s worse than Nitra country—that’s where they eat THE MEAT.” He made the Arzoran sign for the cannibal tribes. “No Shosonna or Warpt or Fanga would head in that direction. He’d be ritually unclean for years—”

“Just so. But that’s where they’re going—not raiding parties but the clans, with their women and children. So I agree this much with Kelson—we ought to know what is going on back there. But how any of us could get in—that is a different matter.”

Storm went to the map. “ ’Copter would crack up if those wind currents are all they’re reported to be.”

“They are, all right,” Quade returned with grim emphasis. “You might—with a crack pilot—do some exploring along the fringe under the right conditions and weather. But you couldn’t make any long survey flight into that region. Any exploring party would have to go on horses or afoot.”

“The Norbies do have wells—”

“Which are clan secrets and not shared with us.”

Storm was still tracing the lines of the mountains on the mural map. “Did Logan ever learn any well calls?”

Though the human voice box could not duplicate Norbie speech, nor a Norbie produce anything like a Galactic basic word, there was a rarer form of communication that some of the Arzor-born
settlers—those initiated deeply enough into native ways—could understand, even if they could not imitate it themselves. Long, lilting calls, which were almost like songs, were a known code. These were used by native scouts as warnings or reports, and it was common knowledge among the riders that some were used only to signal the appearance or disappearance of water.

“He might have.”

“You’re sure he is riding with Krotag?”

“He wouldn’t be allowed to join any other clan.”

The meercats awoke, squeaked. Again Surra growled, alert to the tension behind that quiet answer. Then the big cat padded soft-footed to the door.

“Someone’s coming—” Storm stated the obvious. Surra was familiar with every living thing at the holding, human, animal, Norbie. She was waiting now for a stranger.

The dune cat’s phenomenal hearing and her better than human nose had heralded the newcomers long before they reached the door, where Quade now stood in the cool gloom of very early morning to welcome them. A path of light from the window picked out the green tunic of a Peace Officer, and a moment later the visitor’s hail came in Kelson’s voice.

“Hallo—the holding!”

“The fire is waiting!” Brad Quade called back the customary answer.

Storm was not in the least surprised to see that Kelson’s companion was Widders, who, in his finicky civ dress, looked even more out of place in the comfortable but rather rough-hewn main chamber. Its chief decorations were trophies of Norbie weapons on the walls, its heavy furnishings were made out of native wood by settler hands, and a few off-world mementos of Brad Quade’s roving past as an officer of Survey were scattered around.

Widders crossed the threshold with an authoritative stride and then halted quickly as he fronted Surra. The big cat regarded him with a long, wide-eyed stare. Storm knew that she had not only imprinted the civ’s appearance on her memory for all time but had also made up her mind concerning him, and that her opinion was not in any way flattering to the off-world Gentle Homo. Majestically, she
moved to the far side of the room and leaped to the low couch, which was her own particular seat. But she did not curl up at ease; instead she sat upright, the nervous tip of her fluffy fox tail just brushing her foretoes, her vulpine ears at attention.