McCade's Bounty (4 page)

McCade brought the shuttle down through the lowest layer of dark gray clouds and sent it skimming over pristine whiteness. He flew low and slow. Rocky hills swelled here and there, bare where the wind had scoured them clean, their sides covered with low vegetation.

Then the hills were gone and the shuttle entered the mouth of a long, low valley. Days of snow had hidden most of the damage, with only wisps of smoke and a higher-than-usual radiation count to indicate damage had been done.

McCade knew that to the north and east a number of low-yield nuclear devices had exploded, each destroying a surface-to-space missile battery, but leaving the underground population centers untouched. At least
that
strategy had worked.

Now, as the shuttle neared the capital city of New Home, the damage became more apparent. Shattered domes, covered with a dusting of new snow; wrecked crawlers, sitting at the center of fire-blackened circles; half-blasted radars, still searching the skies for targets long disappeared; and here and there, the pitiful huddle of someone's last stand, now little more than bumps under a shroud of white.

McCade bit his lip and glanced at Rico. The other man's feelings were effectively hidden behind his beard, but his eyes were on the view screen, and they were as cold as the land below.

All was not death and destruction however. Here and there signs of life could be seen. Fresh vehicle tracks in the snow, a hint of underground warmth on the infrared detectors, and the vague whisper of low-powered radio traffic. There was life down there, less than before, but life nonetheless.

McCade stuck an unlit cigar between his teeth. "Run the frequencies, Rico. Someone's talking. Let's see who it is."

Rico flipped some switches and ran the freqs, starting with commonly used civilian bands and working his way upward. "Rico here . . . anybody read me?"

The response was almost instantaneous. A surprisingly cheerful male voice said. "Pawley here, Rico . . . nice of you to drop in."

Rico grinned. "Pawley? What the hell are you doing here? I thought you were down south working the G-Tap."

McCade knew, as did all the planet's citizens, that "G-Tap" stood for "geothermal tap," and was a project to harness the energy resident in the planet's core. A lot of effort and a lot of tax money had flowed into that project, and Brian Pawley was the G-Tap team leader.

"We were lucky," Pawley replied soberly, "either they missed us, or thought us unimportant. In any case we survived and came back to help. Everybody's pitching in. Ranchers, miners, you name it, they're all lending a hand."

McCade saw the landing pad up ahead. Two piles of snow-dusted wreckage marked where a ship and a shuttle had been caught on the ground. Energy weapons had cut a confusing hatch work of dark lines into the ground. McCade cut speed and prepared to land.

"We're about to land," Rico said. "Where should we head?"

Pawley was silent for a moment. When he spoke there was a forced cheerfulness to his voice, as if he felt one way, and was saying something else.

"Stay on the pad . . . I'll pick you up."

McCade killed the shuttle's forward motion, fired repellors, and settled gently onto the pad.

A huge cloud of steam billowed up to obscure the view. As the wind blew it away McCade saw a crawler roll out onto the pad, its white and gray camouflage useless against the burnt area behind it, twin rooster tails of snow flying up behind it.

It took McCade and Rico a good ten minutes to pull on their heat suits and enter the lock. Phil was already there, sans suit, with a big grin on his face. Thanks to his thick layer of fur the variant could stroll through winter snowstorms that would kill Rico or McCade in a few short minutes.

The lock cycled open and they left the protection of the ship's hull. McCade had opted to leave his hood and goggles hanging down his back. The cold cut into his face like a thousand tiny knives. He removed the unlit cigar from his mouth and threw it away.

Unlike Sara, Rico, and Phil, McCade hated the cold, and would've preferred a warmer planet. Sara . . . Molly . . . the names were like spears through McCade's heart.

Their boots made a crunching sound as they approached the crawler. A door hissed open and released a blast of warm air. McCade scrambled inside, closely followed by Phil and Rico.

Pawley was at the controls. He turned sideways in his seat. Though normally clean-shaven, Pawley wore a two-day growth of beard. He had short hair, a crooked nose, and thick rather sensuous lips. "Welcome aboard, gentlemen."

Pawley's words were followed by an awkward silence. Rico was the first to break it. "No offense, ol' sport . . . but let's go straight to the bottom line. Who made it and who didn't?"

A cloud came over Pawley's face. "I'm sorry, Rico . . . Vanessa was killed. She died defending the fusion plant."

Rico nodded, and looked out through scratched plastic at the bleakness beyond. Tears ran down his cheeks and into his beard.

Pawley looked at Phil. The variant stared back, trying to read the scientist's eyes, steeling himself against the worst.

Pawley ran his tongue over dry lips. "We just don't know, Phil . . . Deena's unit went off-air more than a day ago . . . she's missing in action."

Phil gave a grunt of acknowledgment. Missing rather than dead. There was hope at least.

Now it was McCade's turn to look Pawley in the eye. "Well?"

The word sounded harsh, and McCade wished he could pull it back, but there was no need. Pawley understood.

"Good news and bad news, Sam. The good news first. Sara was wounded but she's alive. Doc Lewis says she'll be fine in a couple of weeks."

"And Molly?" McCade croaked the words out. If Sara was the good news, then . . .

Pawley swallowed hard. "They took her, Sam . . . along with sixty or seventy other children."

McCade let his breath out in a long, slow exhalation. At least she was alive. Frightened, lonely, but alive.

McCade's fingers curled into hard fists. First Molly, then Mustapha Pong. Not for money, not for empire, but for himself. McCade's Bounty.

Molly McCade bit her lip and refused to cry. She'd done a lot of crying during the last few days and it didn't do any good. The pirates didn't care, and the other girls were just as scared as she was. She didn't know where the boys were and hadn't seen any since the attack.

Molly rolled over, careful not to wake anyone who might be asleep. Sleep was a precious commodity for the children. It was a time of much needed rest and escape from the horror of the ship's small hold.

The girls were packed into four-foot-high sections, with cold metal gratings under their backs, and very little room to move around.

They were allowed to leave the hold twice a day. First came the scramble up ladders to the pressurized launch bay, then a bowl of tasteless protein mush, followed by fifteen laps around the hangar. Then they were forced through a bank of over-used chemical toilets, an antiseptic spray, and returned to the gratings.

And since everything was done in alphabetical order, there was no hope of a better position on the gratings.

Poor Susy Zobrist. She was stuck on the bottommost grating and cried all the time.

Some kids threw up a lot, others had to go to the bathroom all the time, and whoever lay just beneath them took the brunt of it.

But some dribbled past, and ended up at the very bottom of the hold where it coated everyone and everything.

From the pirate point of view it was an extremely efficient low-cost way of transporting a lot of people at once. Not only that, but when the gratings were removed, the hold could still be used for more conventional cargoes.

Looking up through the dark crisscross of metal gratings, and the black sprawl of supine bodies, Molly could see the glow of a single greenish light.

It reminded her of the night light in her room on Alice. As long as the light was on nothing could sneak up and hurt her. There had been two greenish lights originally, but one had gone out two cycles earlier, and now Molly feared that the other one would too.

"Oh, please, God," she prayed, "don't let the light go out. And if Mommy's with you, tell her I miss her, and I'm trying to be good. And, God, if Daddy's coming, tell him to hurry."

They used hand blasters to cut down through the permafrost. After that the robo shovels moved in, their drive wheels squeaking in the cold, their scoops biting into frozen dirt.

Steam rose from the temporarily warmed earth, eddied around the mourners like strands of errant ectoplasm, and was whipped away by a steady breeze. It came from the south and made the minister's robes swish and pop. His words were feeble and small against the vast backdrop of frozen wilderness and gray sky.

" . . . And so it is that we lay these valiant souls to rest, secure in the knowledge that their essence lives on, looking forward to the time when we shall see them again . . ."

McCade felt Sara shift her weight from one leg to the other. Her right leg still hurt where the slug had ripped through her thigh. It was a miracle that she was still alive. Twenty-seven men and women had defended the main entry. Three had survived.

McCade thought Sara should be in the hospital, but between the pressures of office and her own stubbornness, she'd been up and around for a day now.

McCade tightened his arm around Sara's waist and pulled her even closer. He gloried in the feel of her, and had Molly been there beside him, he would've been secretly happy.

But she wasn't, and that, plus the guilt McCade felt for putting his own family first, pulled his emotions down.

At least Phil was alright. Deena had been found and was recovering in the hospital.

The minister paused, turned a page in the tattered book, and intoned the ancient words. " . . . Ashes to ashes . . . dust to dust . . ."

Sara leaned her head against his arm. She was crying.

McCade watched Rico as the coffins were lowered into the grave. They were all that remained of a full section. The rest would never be found. The second belonged to Vanessa. As her coffin disappeared from sight, Rico whispered a prayer and threw something in after her. McCade caught the glint of gold.

When the last coffin had been lowered into the grave, and blasters had rewarmed the earth, a robo shovel filled the trench.

Then, their shoulders covered with a dusting of snow, the mourners crunched their way back to the line of waiting crawlers. One had been set aside for Sara, McCade, Rico, and Phil.

It dipped and rolled through broken ground to waddle out onto the landing pad. The elevator mechanism that normally lowered ships below the frozen surface was still under repair, but both of the burned-out hulks had been pushed aside, and another shuttle sat beside his own. It was old and extremely beat-up.

A tramp freighter had dropped into orbit the day before. After all the death and destruction it seemed hard to believe that life would go on, that the rest of humanity was still going about its business, but the shuttle proved it. Things, outer things that didn't mean much, were returning to normal.

Somewhere, deep in space, a message torp was on its way to Imperial Earth. There wouldn't be much that the Emperor could do but it was worth a try.

Rico and Phil were quick to buss Sara on the cheek, say their good-byes, and head for the shuttle. The door opened and closed with a rush of cold air.

McCade glanced toward the driver but saw that the connecting hatch had been tactfully closed. Not for him, but for Sara. After all, she was head of the planetary council and a person of some importance.

McCade cupped Sara's face with his hands and used his thumb to remove a tear. "Don't cry, honey, I'll find Molly and bring her back."

"And the rest of the kids too."

McCade nodded solemnly. "And the rest of the kids too."

Sara bit her lower lip and nodded. He no longer saw the scar. She looked so pretty it made his heart ache.

"Be careful, Sam. Pong hates you so much he's willing to destroy entire planets. The possibility of losing Molly is bad enough . . . but if I lose you too . . ."

McCade put a finger over her lips. "It won't happen. Molly's got a good head on her shoulders. She'll hang in there and we'll do the rest."

Sara nodded slowly, her eyes searching every aspect of his face, as if committing it to memory. "Keep a close eye on Rico, Sam, he's hurting, and God knows what he might do."

McCade answered with a kiss, a long one that kindled memories and desires as well. When it was over Sara smiled.

"You'd better get out of here, Sam, or the driver will have a racy story to tell her friends, and I'll never live it down."

McCade laughed, kissed her on the tip of her nose, and keyed the door. It opened and he didn't look back. He was afraid to. Afraid he'd break down and start babbling what he felt. Conflicting things that didn't make sense and were all jumbled together.

That he should've been dirtside when Pong attacked. That he shouldn't leave Sara alone on Alice. That he should've started the search yesterday.

McCade was halfway to the shuttle before the cold cut through his thoughts and chilled his skin.

Every search has to begin somewhere and Lakor seemed a likely bet. A somewhat primitive planet, featuring a mishmash of high and low tech, Lakor was best known for its slave markets. Ugly, sprawling places, filled to overflowing with miserable sentients, they provided a much-needed source of foreign exchange.

In fact, Lakorians claimed the dubious distinction of being the biggest slave traders in all of known space, a claim disputed by the Zords, but probably true.

McCade, Rico, and Phil knew Lakor rather well, since they'd spent some rather unpleasant time there and weren't eager to return.

Still, knowing that pirates generally unload slaves as quickly as possible, Lakor was a logical place to go. After all, maybe they'd get lucky and find the children right off the top.

It could happen . . . especially if Lif came to their assistance.

While searching for the War World some years before, McCade had been dumped on Lakor by a rather unfriendly Il Ronnian naval officer and taken into slavery. McCade was rescued by Rico, but Sara wasn't so lucky. Together with Phil the two men set off to find her. During the journey they encountered the then Baron Lif, entered a conspiracy to overthrow King Zorta, and eventually did so, rescuing Sara in the process.