Sargasso of Space (Solar Queen Series) (7 page)

For the first time he remembered that he should have maintained contact with the others, and hurriedly turned the key on his com-unit. Instantly Tau’s voice rang thinly in his ears.

“Calling Ali—Calling Thorson—come in—come in!” There was an urgency in the Medic’s voice which brought Dane away from the wall, set him on the back trail even as he replied:

“Thorson here. Am at end of valley. Wish to report——”

But the other cut into that impatiently. “Return to flitter I Ali, Thorson, return to flitter!”

“Thorson returning.” Dane started at the best pace he could muster down the valley. But as he trotted, slipping and sliding on the loose stones and gravel, Tau’s voice continued to call Ali. And from the engineer-apprentice there came no answer at all.

Breathing hard, Dane reached the place where they had left the Medic. As he came into sight Tau waved him to the side of the flitter.

“Where’s Ali?” “Where’s Kamil?” Their demands came together and they stared at each other.

Dane answered first. “He said he was going downstream—to follow the crawler tracks we found. I went upstream——”

“Then it must have been he who—” Tau was frowning. He turned on his heel and studied the valley leading to the plains. The presence of water had encouraged a thicker growth of brush there and it presented a wall except for where the stream cut a passage.

“But what happened?” Dane wanted to know.

“I got a call on com—it was cut off almost immediately——”

“Not mine, I was off circuit,” returned Dane before he thought. It was only then that he realized what he had done. No one on field duty goes off circuit out on scout, that was a rule even a First Circler in the Pool had by heart. And he had done it the first time he was on duty! He could feel the heat spreading up into his cheeks. But he offered no explanations nor excuses. The fault was his and he would have to stand up to the consequences.

“Ali must be in trouble.” Tau made no other comment as he climbed in behind the controls of the flitter, a very quiet Dane followed him.

They arose jerkily, with none of the smooth perfection Ali’s piloting had supplied. But once in the air Tau pointed the nose of the flitter down valley, cutting speed to just enough to keep them airborne. They watched the ground below. But there was nothing to see but the marks of blaster fire and beyond undisturbed green broken by bare patches of gravel and jutting rock.

They could also sight the crawler tracks and Dane related the information he had. Tau’s countenance was sober.

“If we don’t find Ali, we must report to the
Queen
—”

That was only common sense, Dane knew, but he dreaded having to admit his own negligence. And perhaps his act was worse than just carelessness in not using the com-unit, perhaps he should have insisted on their sticking together, deserted though the valley appeared to be.

“We’re up against something nasty here,” Tau continued. “Whoever used those blasters was outside the law——”

The Federation law dealing with X-Tees was severe, as Dane well knew. Parts of the code, stripped of the legal verbiage, had to be memorized at the Pool. You could defend yourself against the attack of aliens, but on no provocation, except in defense of his life, could a Trader use a blaster or other weapon against an X-Tee. Even sleep rays were frowned upon, though most Traders packed them when going into unknown territory among primitive tribes.

The men of the
Queen
had landed unarmed on Limbo, and they would continue unarmed until such a time as the situation was so grave that either their lives or the ship was in danger. But in this valley a blaster had been used in the wanton indulgence of someone’s sadistic hatred for the globe creatures.

“They were’t attacking—those globe things, I mean?”

Tau’s brown face was grim as he shook his head. “They had no weapons at all. I’d say from the evidence that they were attacked without warning, just mown down. Maybe for the fun of it!”

And that projected such a picture of horror that Tau, conditioned by life under the Trade Creed, stopped short.

Below them the valley began to widen out, cutting in a fan shape into the plain. There was no sign of Ali anywhere on that fan. He had vanished as if he had stepped through the cliff wall. The cliff! Dane remembering the end of the crawler trail, pressed against the windshield to inspect those walls. But there were no tracks ending before them.

The flitter lost altitude as Tail concentrated on landing. “We must report to the
Queen,”
he said as he set them down. Not leaving his seat he reached for the long-range beam mike.

7
   
SHIP OUT OF SPACE

T
AU’S FINGERS
clicked the call key of the far-range caster when that sound was drowned out by a wail, both weirdly familiar and strangely menacing. Here on the edge of the burnt-off land there was no soughing of the wind, nothing to break the eternal silence of the blasted country. But this tearing over head brought both of the Terrans to their feet. Tau, out of his greater experience, identified it first.

“A ship!”

Dane was no hundred flight man, but something in that shrieking crescendo splitting the sky above them argued that if a ship were coming in, all was not well with it. He caught at Tau’s arm.

“What’s the matter?”

The Medic’s face paled beneath the dark space tan. He bit hard on his lower lip. And the eyes still fastened on the arch of sky were haunted. When he answered he had to scream to be heard over the rumble.

“She’s coining in too fast—not on a braking orbit!”

And now they could see as well as hear—a dark shape in the morning sky, a shape which tore across that same sky to be gone in an instant to a landing somewhere among those jagged peaks which were the mountains of Limbo’s northern continent.

The sound was gone. It was broodingly quiet. Tau shook his head slowly.

“She must have crashed. She couldn’t have come out of that one in time.”

“What was she?” puzzled Dane. The passage of that shadow had been so quick that he had not been conscious of any identifying outline.

“Too small for a liner, thank the Lord of Far Space. Or at least—I hope it was no liner—”

For a passenger ship to crash would be utter horror. Dane could understand that.

“A freighter maybe,” Tau sat down and his hand went out to the click keys. “She must have been out of control when she entered atmosphere.” He began to relay this last information on to the
Queen.

They did not have to wait long for an answer. They were to remain where they were until the second flitter joined them carrying Tau’s full medical kit. This flyer would then head out into the mountains in an attempt to locate the scene of the crash, so if there were any survivors the men from the
Queen
could render aid. While a smaller party would stay and try to trace Kamil.

It was only a matter of minutes before the other flitter did appear. Kosti and Mura dropped from it almost before it hit dirt and Tau hurried across to change places. The flyer whirled up into the sun of mid-morning and cut a straight course toward the rock teeth of the range, following the line of flight Dane and Tau had seen that shadow travel.

“Did you see her from the
Queen?”
Dane demanded of the other two.

Mura shook his head. “See her, no, hear her, yes. She was out of control!”

Kosti’s broad face wrinkled in concern. “She must have hit hard. A bad smash—no one living, perhaps. I once saw a smack landing like that on Juno—very bad—all dead. That ship—she must have been out of control before they started down. She was not even fighting the fall—she came in like a thing already dead.”

Mura whistled softly. “Plague ship, maybe—”

Dane shivered. Plague ships were the terrifying ghosts of the space lanes. Wandering derelicts, free roving tombs holding the bodies of the crews who on some uncharted world had contracted some new and virulent disease, dying alone in the reaches of the heavens—perhaps by stern choice—before they could bring their infection to inhabited worlds. The solar system guards had the unenviable task of rounding up such drifting threats of death and sending them into cleansing suns or giving them some other final end. But here, beyond the frontiers of civilization, a derelict could drift for years, even centuries, before some freak of chance brought it into the gravitational pull of a planet and so crash it on an unwary world.

But the men of the
Queen
knew the score, there would be no rash exploration of the ship if they did locate it. And its smash-up might have been a thousand miles away, well out of the range of the flitter. Tau was there—and of all men a Medic was the last to take any chances with a plague.

“Ali—he has disappeared?” Kosti brought them back to the business at hand.

Dane, not overlooking his own carelessness, reported in detail what had happened in the valley. To his relief neither of the newcomers made any comment on his part in the affair, but centered their attention on the task at hand. Mura was the first to suggest a plan of action.

“Let Kosti take up the flitter and cruise above us. Then you and I shall search the ground. There may be some trace left which you could not easily sight from the air.”

So it was arranged. The flitter, cut to its lowest cruising speed, circled slowly around, never venturing too far ahead. While Dane and Mura on foot, having to swing bush knives in places against the thick mat of vegetation, made their way into the sinister valley. They found the place where the track of the crawler came from the rock of the burnt-off land to bite into the soft soil of the healthy area.

Mura turned there and stared back, over the plain. They could not sight from this point the blotch of brightly colored ruins. But they were certain that the crawler had come out of the blasted area, to be driven with intelligent purpose toward the mountains—until it vanished into the solid rock of a cliff wall!

“Dr. Rich’s party—?” Dane aired his suspicions.

“Perhaps—perhaps not,” was Mura’s ambiguous reply. “Did you not say that Ali thought this machine was not of the usual type?”

“But—” Dane gaped, “you can’t mean that the Forerunners survived—here!”

Mura laughed. “They say that all things are possible in space, do they not? But no, I do not think that those ancient rulers of the lanes have here left their sons to greet us. Only they may have left other things—which are now being put to use. I would like to know more about those ruins—a great deal more.”

Perhaps the guess Rip had made days earlier—that on some planet might lie, waiting to be discovered, possessions of the legendary Forerunners—was close to the truth. Had such a cache been discovered by parties unknown here on Limbo? But with that marched the grim warning voiced by Ali that Forerunner material in Terran hands might be a threat to all of them.

Slowly they combed the mouth of the valley, reassured by the flitter cruising above. Dane broke open his field rations, chewing as he went, on a cube of rubbery, tasteless stuff which was supposed to provide his lank young body with all it needed in the way of balanced nourishment—and yet which was so savorless and far removed from real food.

He hacked at a mass of prickly shrubs and stumbled through the clutch of longer branches to come into a pocket-sized clearing entirely ringed with thorn-studded greenery. Under foot was a thick mat of decaying leaves through which not even the spears of grass could grow.

Dane stopped short. The brown muck of the mat had been disturbed. He was conscious of an unwholesome reek of decay which came from scuffed patches where a green slime had been recently uncovered.

He went down on his hands and knees, circling that plowed up patch. He was no tracker, but even to his inexperienced eyes this had been the site of a scuffle. And since the slime was still uncrusted, that event had taken place not too long ago. Dane surveyed the brush which walled in the tiny area. It was just the place for an ambush. If Kamil had come through—over there—

Taking care not to disturb the churned muck, Dane made his way to the opposite side of the clearing. He was right! The cut of a bush knife showed where a branch had been lopped away. Someone, armed with regulation Terran field equipment, had come through here.

Come through here—to find someone, or something, waiting for him!

The globe creatures? Or those who had used the strange crawler and burnt the globes in the valley?

But Dane was certain that he had discovered where Ali had been surprised—not only surprised but overpowered by a superior force. Overpowered—to be taken where? He subjected the walling shrubs to a careful scrutiny. But in no other place did he see any suggestion of disturbance or break. It was almost as if the hunter, having made certain of his prey, had vanished into thin air, transporting the prisoner with him.

Dane was startled by a crashing in the brush. His sleep ray-rod was out as he spun around. But it was Mura’s pleasant brown face which was framed in a circle of torn leaves. At Dane’s wave he came into the clearing. It was not necessary to point out the signs of battle—he had already noted them.

“They jumped him here,” Dane was convinced.

“But who or what are ‘they’?” was Mura’s counter. And seconds later he added the unanswerable question, “And how did they leave?”

“The tracks of the crawler went right through the wall of the cliff——”

Mura edged out on the carpet of muck. “No indications of any trap door here.” he observed, gravely, as if he
had
expected to find something of the sort. “There remains—” he jerked a thumb into the air where the purr of the flitter grew louder as Kosti circled back toward them.

“But we would have heard—have seen—” protested Dane, all the time wondering if they would have. He had been at the other end of the valley when Tau had caught that interrupted cry for help. And from this point the place where the Medic had been at that moment was hidden by at least two miles of broken ground.

“Something smaller than one of our flitters.” Mura was thinking aloud. “It could be done. One thing we may be sure of—they have collected Kamil and we must find out who they are and where they are before we can get him back!”

He plowed away through the brush and Dane followed him out on a bare strip of ground from which thev could signal to the flitter.

“Found him?” Kosti called as he brought the machine down.

“Found where someone scooped him up.” Mura went to the keyboard of the caster.

Dane turned for a last look up that sinister valley. But all at once his attention was drawn from the valley and its cliffs to a new phenomenon in evidence on a higher level. He had not noticed that the sun had disappeared while they had been making their search of the brush. But now clouds were gathering—and not only clouds.

The naked, snow touched peaks of the range, which had been so sharp set against the pallid sky of Limbo when the ship out of space had swept over them, were gone! It was as if that milky, faded sky had fallen as a curtain to blot them out. Where the peaks had been swirled fog—fog so thick that it erased half the horizon as a painter might draw a blotting brush across an unsuccessful landscape. Dane had never seen anything like it. And it was moving so fast, visibly cutting off miles of territory in the few moments he had watched it. To be lost in that—!

“Look!” he ran to the flitter and jogged Mura’s arm. pointing to the fast disappearing mountains. “Look at that!”

Kosti spit out an oath in the slurred speech of Venus. Mura simply obeyed orders and looked. Another huge section to the north was swallowed up as he did so. And now they noted another thing. From the tops of the valley cliffs curls of grayish, yellow vapor were rising, to cling and render misty the outlines of the rocks. Whether this was all part of the same they did not know, but the three Terrans insensibly drew closer together, chilled as much by what they saw, as the cold apparent with the going of the sun.

They were shaken out of their absorption by the click of the caster summoning them back to the ship. The change on the mountains had been noted on the
Queen
and both the flitter searching for the wreck and their own were ordered to report in at once.

There was further change in the atmosphere, a speeding up of the mists—The swirls above the valley walls combined, formed banks and began to drop, cutting visibility.

Kosti watched them anxiously. “We’ll have to swing out—away from the valleys. That stuff is moving too fast. We
can
ride the beam in, but I’d rather not unless I have to—”

But, by the time they were airborne, the mist was down to the level of the valley floor and was puffing out in threatening tendrils onto the rough terrain of the burnt-off land. The mountains had vanished and the foothills were being fast swallowed up. It was uncanny, terrifying in a way, this wiping away of solid earth, the substitution of a dirty, rolling mist which swirled and spun within its mass until one suspicioned movement there, alien, menacing movement.

Kosti set the controls to full speed, but they had covered little more than a mile of the return journey be- fore he was forced to throttle down. For the mist was not only spilling out of the valleys, it was also curling up from the land under them, each thread of haze spinning to join and thicken with others.

It was true that they were in no danger of being lost. The thin reed of sound humming in their ears provided a guide to bring the flitter back to the parent ship. But they were none the easier knowing that as they coasted above a curdling sea of mist.

The stuff rose about them forming viscid bubbles on the windbreak. Only the constant hum of the radar beam linked them with reality.

“Hope our boys made it down from the mountains before the worst of this hit,” Kosti broke the strained silence.

“If they didn’t,” Mura replied, “they will have to land until it clears.”

Kosti throttled down once more as the radar hum sharpened. “No use crashing into the old lady——”

Within the blanket of mist all sense of direction, of distance was lost. They might have been up ten thousand feet, or skimming but one above the broken surface of the rock plain. Kosti hunched over the controls, his usually good-humored face pinched, his eyes moving from the mist to the dials before him and back again.

They sighted the ship—a dark shadow looming through the veil. With masterly precision Kosti brought the flitter down until it jarred against the ground. But he was in no hurry to climb out. Instead he wiped his face with the back of his hand. Mura leaned forward and patted the big man’s shoulder.

“That was a good job!”