The D’neeran Factor (122 page)

“Come along, come along, Mike. We have to go.”

“In a minute. A few more minutes.”

Hanna chewed her fingernails.

*   *   *

The mountains swooped into the great valley and then started up again on the other side, not as high there, but high enough to cut off the sun at a rather early hour. The western shadows crept across the valley and made a final leap; suddenly it was dusk. The gleam of the river faded. Shen got food from the galley and carried it back to Control. There was nothing to see out
GeeGee
's nose with the naked eye any more, so she adjusted the monitors for night vision and watched them instead. But the radar was more important, the radar searching the sky. Though that, she knew, was terrifyingly limited. The
Avalon
could wind through the mountains low and slow, come up behind that last tall peak, and never be spotted or suspected till she came around the mountain accelerating and spitting fire.

Shen began to think about lifting
GeeGee
into the air, getting above the mountains and scanning exhaustively for an intruder. The only recourse of an unarmed ship facing one with arms was flight. With people on the ground to be picked up, seconds would count.

“Come on,” she growled. “Get him out of there. Come on!”

She took the remains of her meal back to the galley and put them away. When she returned to Control, she had made up her mind. She would take
GeeGee
up and look around.

She was reaching for the communications switch to tell Hanna that when the
Avalon
rose up from behind the mountain peak, and radar picked it up and set off a shrill alarm.

*   *   *

The communicator on Hanna's wrist went off frantically. The noises outside were unmistakable, the scream of
GeeGee
taking off in a single max-power burst, the thunder of other engines, then a roar that split the night. Hanna flung open the door just in time to see a gout of flame erupt where
GeeGee
had been—but no longer was; she was a flurry of light streaking up the valley and up into the air, headed for space. “She's gone!” Theo said in despair, but Hanna said, “
GeeGee
's our only chance. Shen's got to keep her safe. And she's drawn them off. We've got some time.”

There was another burst of fire, high this time, and far away. Hanna held her breath, but there was no explosion, no fireball.
GeeGee
was still intact, still running hard.

She looked around and saw Michael with relief—the old Michael, to whom danger was a practical problem with concrete solutions.

“They'll come back,” he said. “Theo and Lise could stay here. B doesn't know them.”

“Henrik does.”

“Henrik. Damn him. All right; we've all got to go.” He asked Otto, “Have you got anything that would help us get out?”

“Carts,” Otto said. “Beasts.”

“We'll go on foot, then.”

“Where to?” Hanna said.

“Sutherland,” Michael said. “Come on.”

*   *   *

He had lied, though. As soon as the night hid them from Croft he turned away from the road and led them down the riverbank. “There were too many people back there,” he said. “Otto won't tell them what I said, Carmina won't—maybe. What are they going to say when their neighbors are threatened? And there were people there I don't know. Who don't understand what it means, why we have to get away. There used to be a ford here.” It was still there. They had to use the light, worrying Michael, but a hillock on the edge of the stream largely hid the ford from Croft. The rocks were slippery underfoot.

“Where's there to go?” Theo said.

“The mountain. Caves there. We've still got food tabs, there's plenty of water; if we're careful we can even use fire. We could hold out for a while.”

“They won't stop hunting till they find us,” Hanna said.

“If they're looking around Sutherland, though, it'll give Shen a chance to come back and get us.”

They ran up the long bare slope of the mountain's foot until Lise lagged behind, her breath coming in painful gasps she had tried to suppress. Michael carried her for a time, and they walked, but they did not stop. It was imperative to get under cover. Even the line of the first trees above was no guarantee of safety; there was no reason to suppose anything was wrong with the
Avalon
's infrared sensors. They
had to get under the earth, into the caves Michael remembered. There was still a long way to go.

Lise said finally, “I can walk.” It was the first thing she had said since the crisis began. He put her down and trudged upward. The wind had died with the day, and walking kept them warm. Hanna's face was turned to the sky; she tripped once or twice. But she was no longer looking for the
Avalon,
at least not entirely. She was looking because the sky, clear now, was alive. A tiny moon that cast little light moved across it so quickly the motion was visible; before it disappeared another came, describing a different arc. The Ring was a high distant arch, unchanging; only now that she could see it well, she saw it was really a plurality of rings, a series of delicate-looking bands separated by strips of night. Now and again a meteor flared. It was not the season for any of the great showers. But in one quadrant of the sky a comet shone like a stylized picture of all the comets that had ever existed. All these phenomena stood out prominently in a sky that otherwise was scantily starred. No sky anywhere else was like it.

They came up under the trees, which quickly thickened and cut off the sky. Michael cast the light about, hesitating. His hearing seemed unnaturally sensitive; now he, too, listened for the sounds Hanna strained to hear, the noise of a spacecraft moving across the sky. But there was icy silence on the mountainside. There was only a small cold wind which they had come high enough to feel, a wind that did not touch the valley below. The dying leaves on their malleable trees rattled in the wind; they would not fall until spring.

“This way,” he said with more hope than certainty, but when they had wound through a grove where the trees stood close together, he saw he had been right. The game trail he remembered had scarcely shifted. They followed it up.

*   *   *

The
Avalon
was as Henrik had remembered it, only worse in some ways. It was still dark, and it smelled worse than ever, as if no one ever bothered to clean any part of it up, and remnants of food had lain carelessly in corners for months. A bin of foodstuffs had gone bad—as Henrik discovered when he opened it, looking for something to eat,
and the stench nearly knocked him over. He closed it quickly, but not before he got a glimpse of what was inside—a writhing heap of something white and wet.

He tried not to think of the
Golden Girl—
the light and the music. But the music would not stay out of his head.
Tambours and sackbuts.
“It's not my fault the bastard got born a thousand years too late,” Henrik said, but he only said it to himself. He couldn't say it to anyone here. It was strange to think he could have said that to Theo, or Hanna, or even to Michael Kristofik; Kristofik would only have laughed.

Since there was no one to talk to, he went back to his old cabin and crouched in a corner with his head in his hands, in the dark. Maybe he had done the wrong thing. But it did not seem to him that he had done anything at all. He had watched Michael leave the
Golden Girl
and plunge into the sea of trees and rain, tall and confident, with Hanna and Shen—leaving Henrik behind, like Lise, with Theo to babysit for both of them. There was nothing to do but wait, nothing but stay where he was put. He had resented it, and the resentment had grown through a day and a night until it filled him and burst out. He had been carried here against his will, and was he now to be left behind while the others were out in the rain and fresh air? Was he less of a man than the women? At the end of the second day Theo was dozing, Lise invisible. It took only minutes to get what he needed and get outside. He made his way to the road and started down it; maybe he would meet the others coming back. He did not, and the night came, and he meant to turn back, and then realized that he would never see, in the dark, the place where he must leave the road to get back to the ship. And the ship might take off before he reached it; what if it took off? He did not think Theo would wait for him.

The rain came down drearily. The night was colder than he had expected. There was nothing to do but keep following Michael. There was shelter on this road, at least; he had heard the others tell Theo about it the night before. He had to find it. He kept walking.

He did find it; found Orne, his suspicions now fully aroused; woke at dawn with Orne grumbling in his ear, was urged into the ramshackle truck. “I want to find the others, I just want to find them,” he said. Orne said, “Well, and this
is the way they went.” And the town in the cold morning, the curiosity, the talk that went so fast he could not keep up with it. And the pretty brown girl, the radio hidden among her scant belongings, preset for the issuing of warnings. She had not wanted to use it, but her grandfather pushed her aside and took it, plain fear in his eyes. And then the
Avalon
came in across the sky, and it was too late for Henrik to run, too late for him to do anything even if he had been able to think of anything to do.

So now he crouched in the dark, ignored, unimportant, trying to think. B would never go back to the Polity, and Henrik's only chance was to get back to Michael and get away when the others did. Unless they had already gone on the ship B had failed to shoot down.

But B did not think they were all on that ship.

He had asked Henrik: “If some were on the ground, would the others go?”

“No,” Henrik had said. He knew them well enough to be sure of that. He had lived with them long enough to know.

He huddled in the dark and waited. No one came near him. No one had spoken to him except B. Ta had not said, “Where you been?” Bakti had not said, “Good to see you.” They had not looked the same. There was strained desperation in their faces—and it must have predated the
Golden Girl
's coming here, it was etched too deep to have sprung up all at once. They looked like men who did not want to be where they were.

The
Avalon
was moving, but no one had told him where. The door opened, the light came on, and he looked up. Maybe someone would tell him something. B stood there, the old empty smile on his lips.

“I think I've got it straight what you did,” he said. “Think of anything else I ought to know?”

His voice was toneless. Henrik was reassured. He had told B only what he had to, more than he wanted to; he had not dared to refuse. But he would not offer any more information. He could give Michael that, he could give Hanna that.

“I don't know any more,” he said gratefully. “There's nothing more that would help.”

“Sure?”

“Sure.”

B's hand came around from behind his back. There was something in it, laser pistol or disruptor, Henrik never decided which and there was no time to think about the mistakes he had made; there was an instant of shock, and he was dead.

*   *   *

If the caverns had been too high on the mountain, they could not have made it. Michael was sure of that; sure the
Avalon
would be back in the night, whether it caught up with
GeeGee
or not. If it caught up with
GeeGee—
his first thought was of Shen, but he forced it down. Shen wouldn't like that. She would call him soft. Well, then, even with Shen and
GeeGee
gone there would be a way out, though it would mean getting control of the
Avalon.

But all they could do now was hide. He urged the others up the mountainside, climbing, climbing. Old landmarks rose up in the dark and fell behind, it was a shorter climb than he remembered; no, his legs were longer, twice as long, an eerie echo of trance. Theo and Hanna went on steadily, breathing hard till the second wind came; then they seemed, as Michael felt, tireless. But it was hard on Lise. She leaned on his arm; he half-carried her.

They came around the edge of a high bluff, and he turned and plunged into the brush at its base.

The opening was still there, and hidden even better than in his childhood; a tree had grown up in front of it. He probed at the undergrowth, using the light openly now, and carefully. Not all the beasts in these mountains were harmless, and some visited caves. He heard Hanna behind him, listening. For bestial near-thought from the cave? For something in the sky? If the latter, there was nothing to hear but Lise gasping and wheezing, desperate for rest.

Hanna said nothing about an animal presence, and there was no sign of a path through the dried grasses underfoot. He got on his knees—the opening was low—and crept in, flashing the light now ahead, now back for the others. His hands and knees sank into mud and scraped on pebbles. Lise objected to the mud, fretful, and he heard Hanna speak to her softly, encouraging, promising sleep.

The mud dried up and faded into rock. A dislodged stone rolled ahead on a gentle downward slope; the ceiling lifted overhead. He got up and walked, crouching, then
straightened fully. “Mind your head,” Hanna said to Theo or Lise; then they stood beside him in a clutter of loose rocks. The stone underfoot was cool and damp. There was the sound of water nearby, a slow-moving stream; he knew just where it was.

He said, “This is far enough. Somebody's got to be posted at the opening all the time. If Shen calls, we might not pick it up in here.”

Theo said, “We can't call
her.
They'd hear.”

“Yes. We can only listen, till we know she's close. I'll take the first watch.”

Theo looked relieved. He had had even less sleep than the others. He kicked stones away and sat down on the rock without further discussion, leaning against the cave wall. “This feels soft enough,” he said. Lise nearly fell next to him. She put her head on his shoulder and he put his arm around her.