Beast Master's Planet: Omnibus of Beast Master and Lord of Thunder (Beastmaster) (33 page)

They were certainly not in any good position to meet an attack. To get the horses up out of the burrow again was a difficult task at best, and to be jumped while so employed—Hosteen made a mind cast for Surra. He was sure the cat had already left the djimbut burrow. Baku must have flown on to the cache and be waiting there for
them. She had not returned the evening before, and her wings made her free from the toilsome march the rest must take. But with Surra one part of the team was still in reach.

“Who—?” He turned to Gorgol for enlightenment.

“Wild ones.”

“The peace poles are up,” Logan’s hands protested.

Gorgol tossed his head in the equivalent of a human shrug.

“These may be far-back ones—they want horses.”

The Shosonna and other lowland tribes had their own methods of recruiting their studs. Their young men hiring out as herd riders, their yoris hunters, could trade for the horses they wanted to build up clan herds. For the wild Norbies of the high country, envious of their fellows but fearful of venturing down to contact the settlers, there was another way of acquiring the wonder animals to which the Arzoran native-born had taken with the same ease and fierce joy that Hosteen’s own Amerindian ancestors had welcomed the species when the Europeans introduced them to the western continental plains. The wild ones were horse thieves of constantly increasing skill.

And to such thieves, the trail of this party must have been a heady inducement. Any experienced tracker crossing their traces would know that four riders had a total of nine horses with them, counting the pack horses and extra mounts—a windfall not even the raising of a peace pole could save. And here the enemy could simply wait them out with lack of water as the lever to pry them from their refuge.

Which left only Surra. Hosteen said as much, and Gorgol twittered to Kavok before he signed:

“The furred one is not here. Kavok saw her go when the sun was still a sky bead. Perhaps she is beyond your call—”

Hosteen leaned against the now crumbling wall of the burrow, closed his eyes, and threw all his strength and energy into one long call, noiseless, quick, and, he hoped, far reaching enough to touch minds with the cat.

With the snap of one pressing an activating button on a com and receiving an answer, he made the break-through. There were the few moments of seeming to see the world slightly askew and weirdly different—which told him that they had made contact. Then he gave his instructions and had agreement from Surra. Distance
meant little to her, and her form of reckoning was not that of a man. He could not tell how far she now was from the wrecked burrow nor how long it would take her to track down the enemy, waiting out there, and deliver the counterstroke that could mean the difference between life and death for those underground. But before she went into action, she would report.

“Surra is movin’ in?” Logan asked in a half whisper.

Hosteen nodded. The strain of making that contact was still on him. Gorgol’s head was up, his finely cut nostrils expanded.

“They are all about us,” he reported.

“How many?” Hosteen demanded.

The smooth head, its ivory horns seeming to gleam in the gathering twilight, swung in a slow side-to-side motion before the Norbie answered:

“Four—five—” He flicked one finger after another as he located the raiders with his own kind of built-in radar. “Six—”

That finger count reached ten before it stopped. Cramped as they were in this earth bottle, those odds seemed impossible. Kavok had no arm room to use his bow. And while Logan and Hosteen had stunners and Gorgol another that had been Hosteen’s gift on their first war path months earlier, the weapon of the settlers was a defensive device for which one had to see a good target.

Surra was ready!

Hosteen signed a warning. Kavok had dropped his useless bow, drawn his knife. Leaving the horses, they pushed to the foot of the improvised ramp down which they had brought those animals in the early morning.

“Now!” Hosteen’s lips writhed in an exaggerated movement that he knew Gorgol would recognize at the time his order flashed to the waiting cat.

Surra’s shrill, ear-splitting scream tore the air. In answer came the terrified neighing of horses, not only from behind but also from the opening ahead. They heard the drum of racing hoofs and the high twittering of Norbie cries.

Hosteen broke for the ramp. Outside, he rolled behind a rock, then pulled himself up to survey the ravine. Surra yowled again, and he saw a figure with blue-dyed horns stand recklessly out in the open
fitting arrow to bow cord. The Terran thumbed his stunner button and beamed the narrow ray for the skull wearing those blue horns. The Norbie wilted to the ground in a lank fold-up of long, thin arms and legs.

Another broke from cover, thrusting into the open, his head turned on his shoulders, his whole body expressing his terror as Surra’s head and forequarters rose into view. The cat ducked back into cover as Hosteen fired again. Surra was doing her part—driving the wild tribesmen into the waiting fire like the expert she was in this form of warfare.

G

“Nitra,” he identified.

Kavok thrust a booted toe under another of the attackers and rolled him over.

“They still live—” he commented, fingering his knife as he surveyed the limp body, his thoughts as plain as if he had shouted them aloud in Galactic basic.

Warrior trophies were warrior trophies. On the other hand, these unconscious enemies, now flat on sand and gravel or looped over the rocks where they had been stun-rayed as they tried to evade Surra, were by custom the property of those who had brought them down. Hosteen, Logan, and Gorgol had the sole right to collect horn tips to display at a Shosonna triumph drumming.

“Let them remain so,” Hosteen signed to both Norbies. “The peace poles are up. If the Nitra break the laws of Those-Who-Drum-Thunder, do the Shosonna also work evil?”

Kavok thrust his knife back into its sheath. “What then do we? Leave these to recover from your medicine fire so that they may trail us to try again?”

“The cool of night will be gone and the sun rising before they wake from their sleep,” the Terran answered. “And we take their horses. They must make day refuge in the burrow or die. I do not think they will try to follow us.”

“That is true,” Gorgol agreed. “And also it is right that we do not break the peace. Let us be on our way that we may find your water place before
we
greet the sun.”

The mounts of the Nitra had been prevented from bolting by
Surra’s presence down canyon. Now, sweating and rolling their eyes fearfully, they were caught and fastened to the horses of Hosteen’s pack train. And the party was well on its way across country, leaving its late opponents slumbering by the ruins of the djimbut burrow, before the night had completely closed in.

In the false dawn they came upon Widders’ dump, where a section of the far tip of Finger Canyon widened out. The Norbies whistled in surprise, for they fronted a bubble tent of plastaglau, its blue-gray surface opaque and heat-resistant. From a rock beyond, Baku took off to fly to Hosteen. There was no other sign of life there.

Logan glowered at the off-world mushroom squatting arrogantly on Arzoran earth.

“So—what does this civ think we are? Pampered pets from the inner worlds?”

The Terran shrugged. “What he thinks does not matter—it may be that he considers this to be necessary shelter. What he brings is more important—we need those supplies.”

But he, too, was startled by that tent, unwanted and unreal in its present setting. It gave the appearance of more than just a dump, though their plans had not called for any base here.

“You say we ride for water—this is an off-world live place!” Kavok’s protest came on snapping fingers. Hosteen disliked the hostility in that outburst. Widders had made just the stupid mistake that settlers on Arzor tried to avoid. Some off-world equipment and weapons the Norbies accepted as a matter of course. But a strange dwelling set down in the heart of their own territory without any agreement beforehand—that was an aggravation that, in the present precariously balanced state of affairs, might well send them all packing out of the Peaks—at the very best. Why Kelson had allowed Widders to commit this might-be-fatal mistake Hosteen could not understand.

He came up to the plasta-glau hemisphere and smacked his hand with more than necessary force against the close lock, taking out some of his irritation in that blow. There was a shimmer of fading forcefield, and he could see the small cubby of the heat lock open before him.

This thing imported from off-world must have cost a small fortune. To set up camp here did not make sense, and things that did not make sense were suspicious. Hosteen’s foot pressure on the bal-floor of the lock activated the forcefield, sealing him in before a second barrier went down, making him free of the interior.

Perhaps this was only a utility bubble, intended for what an inner-planet man would consider the most rustic living, Hosteen thought, for there was only one big room. The supplies he sought were piled in boxes and containers in its center. But around the slope-walled perimeter he saw fold beds—four of them!—a cook unit, a drink unit, and even a portable refresher! No, this could not have been intended as a one-day camp!

He persuaded the Norbies to enter, brought in the horses, and set up a line of supply boxes to mark off a temporary stable, since that was one need the designer of the bubble had apparently not foreseen. The quarters for settlers and natives were correspondingly cramped, but Hosteen knew they could weather the day now with more comfort than they had known even in the depths of the burrow.

Gorgol and Kavok examined their new housing with suspicion, gradually overcome by interest. They were already familiar with the conveniences of cook and drink units, and having seen Hosteen and Logan make use of the refresher, they tried it in turn.

“This is a fine thing,” Kavok signed. “Why not for Norbie, too?” He looked inquiringly at the settlers, and Hosteen guessed the young native was trying to reckon in his mind the amount of trade goods it might take to purchase such a wonder for the clan.

“This be a fine thing—but see—” Hosteen opened the control box of the cook unit, displaying an intricate pattern of wiring. “Do this break, one man maybe in Galwadi, he could fix—maybe he could not. Some pieces might have to come from beyond the stars. Then what good is this?”

Kavok digested that and agreed. “No good. Many yoris skins, many frawn skins to be paid for this?”

“That is so. Quade, our blood-father” he made the sign for clan chief—“he is a man of many horses, many fine things from beyond the stars. That is so?”

“That is so,” the Shosonna agreed.

“Yet, Quade, our blood-father, he could drive all his horses and half his frawn herd in the Peaks to the Port, and there he would have to give them all up for a place such as this, a place that, when it broke, no man could have mended without giving many more horses, many frawn hides—”

“Then this is not a good thing!” Kavok’s reaction was quick and emphatic. “Why is this here now?”

“The off-world one who seeks his son, he is not used to the Big Dry, and he thinks that one cannot live—as perhaps he could not—without such a thing.”

“He is truly an off-world child of little knowledge,” was Kavok’s comment.

Baku sidled along the edge of a box she had selected for a perch. Now she mantled, her wings a quarter spread, and gave a throaty call. Surra was already at the door.

“Company.” Hosteen drew his stunner. But somehow he did not believe they were about to face another native raiding party. Baku’s warning was of an air approach, and he expected a ’copter.

What he did not foresee as he strode out to the patch of ground already bearing the marks of several landings and take-offs, was the size of the flyer making an elevator descent there. The ’copters, used sparingly by the settlers because of the prohibitive cost of replacement parts and repairs, were able, at best, to hold three or four men crowded together, with a limited space for emergency supplies or very valuable cargo. The machine now agleam in the early-morning light was a sleek, expensive type such as Hosteen had never seen on any frontier world. And his estimation of Widders’ wealth and influence went up again. To transport such a craft to Arzor must have cost a small fortune. No wonder that with such a carrier the civ had been able to send in a bubble tent and all the other trappings of a real safari.

Nor was the Terran too amazed to see Widders himself descend the folding ladder from the flyer’s cockpit. He had at least changed his off-world clothing for more durable coveralls such as a pilot wore. And he had belted about his slight paunch an armory of gadgets such as Hosteen had not seen since he mustered out of the Service.

“So you finally got here!” Widders greeted him sourly. Glancing
around, he added in a petulant spurt of words, “Where’re all those horses you were sure we needed so badly?”

“In there.” Hosteen nodded toward the tent and was amazed at the answering flood of dusky color on the other’s craggy face.

“You—put—animals—in—my—tent!”

“I don’t lose horses, not when our lives depend on them,” the Terran retorted. “Nor would I sentence any living thing to a day in the sun during the Big Dry! Your pilot had better taxi over under that overhang if he wants to save this ’copter. At this hour you can not hope to get back to the nearest plains shelter—”

“I have no intention of returning to the plains region,” Widders replied, and he meant that. Short of picking him up bodily, Hosteen realized, and putting him forcibly into the ’copter, there was no way of shipping him out—for now.

However, one day in the crowded and now rather stale-smelling interior of the tent might well induce the civ to reconsider his decision. There was no use wasting energy fighting a wordy battle now when time and nature might convince him. Hosteen relayed his warning to the pilot and left the civ to enter the tent by himself.