The Game of Stars and Comets (24 page)

"We rest on flattened brush. But there is a tree of some size leaning from the front part of the machine so we are not level."

"Behind us?"

"More brush."

"No trees?" Salariki eyesight at night was far better than Terran, as he knew. She must be able to see in greater detail.

"None of any size."

Rees moved one hand in a sweep over the instrument panel. If the roller itself just had suffered no harm from their rough landing . . .

"I am going to try backing," he told her. "But you'll have to watch and guide me."

He fumbled for the right button, pressed it down. The roller lurched from side to side, shook in a way which told him that much of the surface of both treads must be supported on broken bushes above the ground level. Now the machine rocked back and forth, but it was also creeping in retreat, the tree support in front holding them less high. There was a crackling of brush all around. How long did they have before the Crocs swam the river to bag their victims?

And how badly was the roller damaged by the backwash of the beam? Rees clung to one small hope—that the attackers might have seen that erratic crash landing and that it appeared, from a distance, worse than it really was. The natives might now believe they were firmly grounded. If that were true the Crocs would take their own time about following them, sure of their own ability to track down and take any survivors.

The jungle car rested on an even beam now, its treads getting a grip on something solid through a mush of leaves, twigs and splintered branches. Also the brilliant pinwheels before Rees' eyes were fading.

"Now," the Terran appealed again to his companion, "any clear sky around except straight up?" The roller was no 'copter, it could not be jumped from a stand into a vertical rise.

"Not here."

To go out of the jungle to the open of the river bank was to offer themselves as an easy sitting target for the beam operator. They could plow ahead, waiting to find a clearing big enough to afford them the necessary hop run.

"Where's the most open ground path?"

Again he felt her move on the seat, guessed she was making a careful survey of their surroundings.

"Trees ahead and to the right. Only brush to the left but that way will return us to the river bank."

"Behind?" The roller was responding sluggishly.

"Yes, it is better that way."

They began a painful retreat, the machine swiped and beaten by branches and vines. Rees became aware that the sonic curtains had failed and a pounding on its button aroused no answering hum. Insect life—Rees flinched as a pin-point of fire lanced the side of his neck just above the shoulder meeting. But this was no time to worry about such minor matters.

"Wait!" Isiga's hand clamped down on his forearm, until her nails cut his skin. "A little, just a little more and you can turn. No trees there, just bushes and many vines."

No trees maybe, but vines could be worse in their way. However, he could only try. Rees waited for her cry of "Now!" and swung the control wheel. The roller obeyed awkwardly and they crackled on, beating a path through the resisting jungle wall.

"Get your head down,
keep the children back there, well under cover!" Rees ordered and crouched lower on the seat. The whipping lashes of brush and broken vine swept across the top of the roller as they crunched a path onward. The young man blinked frantically. Shadows against shadows, a faint difference in the quality of light, the pinwheels fading. He gave a sigh of relief; the blindness was only temporary as he had hoped.

"The dials, to the left, second on the panel on your side," he got out breathlessly, his words shaken from his lips by the jolts of the roller. "Any change of the indicator?"

"The bar points straight up."

"Bang on it with your hand!" Rees rapped out, afraid to accept that without a test.

"Now the bar swings," she reported a moment later, "but it returns to the same position."

"Then it's still working—and we aren't followed yet."

But why not, Rees thought. Unless, unless their over-the-river crack-up had looked much worse than it was to any Crocs watching. The enemy might deem them grounded; either dead or else easy meat for more leisurely follow-up, to be picked up later after they had wiped out the last off-world pockets in this section. He said as much to Isiga.

"Since I, too, thought we were finished," she observed, "perhaps they are not to be blamed in judging our descent fatal. How long now to Wrexul's?"

"I don't know. If we could appeal for a com cast we could ride a finder beam in. As it is we'll have to depend on the spy-scout, and make sure it doesn't guide us to a Croc raiding party. But Crocs with a force beam! They can break . . ." He stopped short, aware at last of what that fact could mean.

"A force beam," Isiga finished for him a greater calm than he believed he could summon at the moment, "could also burn a path through the Wrexul defenses, is that not so?"

"Yes. But if our people knew that the Crocs were so armed, they could do something."

"What?" she asked bleakly.

What indeed? A well defended post such as Nagassara port itself, that could stand up to a force beam, put up a counter-force cast which would send the power of the attacking beam back, to burn out the caster and those who sighted it. But not even Wrexul's would possess protection of that type here. The defenders would not be expecting to front one of the top Patrol weapons in the hands of jungle fighters. Also, primitive jungle hunters would not know how to use it, certainly not with the accuracy which had downed the roller. Someone in that band had had training in modern off-world weapons.

"Wrexul's is our only chance," Rees said dully. "We can't lift over the mountains in this machine." He was beginning to doubt if they were going to roll any distance further here either. The roller was handling in a way which could not be explained by the rough terrain through which they were boring a path. The sonic was out. What about its other protective measures?

"Wait!" Isiga's voice was sharp. "That dial, the bar on it moves now!"

Rees gripped the half-wheel tighter. "In what direction, to what degree?" To him the faint glimmer of the instrument panel was too blurred to read.

"It swings right . . . ten points . . . now more . . ."

"That means the Crocs are across the river. What's ahead of us?"

Her hand was on his shoulder to steady herself as she stood up in the rocking machine, using her better-than-Terran night sight on the path before them.

"Ahh! Pull up—quick!"

Rees obeyed, and the roller lurched as he applied the cut-off, slewed around in the crushed brush. The flamer! If he could use the flamer! He fully expected to front a Croc attack out of the dark.

"We are near to the edge of a drop," Isiga reported. "How deep a one I do not know, but it is wide. Can we hop it?"

Rees' fingers went to that other button, thrust hard. The machine spurted, but there was no answering surge strong enough to raise it from the mass of vegetation where it rested. He was right, more than the sonic had suffered back there in the crash.

"The hop power is out," he said. What to do now? Try to swing around so he could rake the brush with the flamer? All he had been trying to remember this nightmare day and night about the spider's eye was at last beginning to pay off. He'd be taking the biggest gamble of his life, a bigger one perhaps than he should have. But it could be their only chance.

"Get this," he spoke incisively having made his decision. "I'm going to turn, with my back to the drop. You empty the storage compartments, fill the canteens from the tank, take all rations—you can pack it all into those blankets—get the children ready. As soon as we stop, take them and the supply packs out of here. Head to the right, along the edge of the drop. Wait . . ." he unfastened the blaster belt with its comfortably filled holster. "Do you know how to use one of these? Three pressures of the firing button gives you maximum, and you'll need that to burn through Croc belly armor."

"And you?" She took the weapon from him.

"I'm going out in a blaze of fire power as far as the Crocs are concerned. It's the pattern they follow when they are cornered in battle. They'll come up, get the flamer in the face. And then the roller will buck back into the drop and blow up. If any of them survive that toasting, they'll think we all went up with the machine. I'll join you as soon as I can."

"This machine is too disabled to aid us farther?" Her cool acceptance of their danger was a steadying support.

"Yes. It might conk out completely at any moment. Now get moving!"

He helped her gather the canteens, the packs of rations, the aid kit, two bush knives. Then he handed Zannah out into her waiting arms, saw Gordy stumble after, the small boy manfully lugging the second blanket bundle. They were gone and Rees was alone, grimly hoping his choice was the right one. With any luck he should be able to make their pursuers believe that they were all trapped in the disabled roller.

Gingerly he maneuvered the jungle car about, and his suspicions concerning the future were amply proven by the stiff, limited responses to its controls. Once the motor cut out entirely and Rees thought it was gone, until it answered haltingly to his frantic coaxing. He was turned around now, his back to the gulf masked in the darkness, the flamer facing the way the Crocs must come. Luckily his eyes had recovered to the point where he could read the spy-scout dial. Its pointer had swung well past the half-way mark. The Crocs were coming, fast now.

They couldn't carry a beamer, not over this broken ground, unless they had it mounted on a lift platform. And if they also had one of those . . . Rees smiled, a stretch of thin lips which did not in the least denote humor. That would have to come straight along the swath the roller had cleared. The flamer would take it, the beam it transported, and any firing crew riding it, dead center.

The Terran made two other preparations and sat quietly to wait. He regretted the loss of the sonic. The undergrowth flattened in the passage of the jungle car must have been the valued home of countless insects. All Rees could do was trust in the strength of the repellent he had smeared on his skin moments earlier, but that did not guard him against all stings, bites, and the crawling exploration of creeping things he could not see (and did not want to anyway). Waiting; that bit, too, worse than any insect. He began to count mentally, try thus to estimate how far Isiga and the children could have traveled since they left the roller.

Rees' eyes adjusted, and not a moment too soon! Not even Crocs, jungle wise as they were, could mask that object hanging well above the road of the roller, appearing as a blotch against the sky. It swung on and the diffused radiance of a half crushed lamp-bush gave Rees an idea of its outline. So they
were
bringing in the beam on a lift!

The Terran pushed the flamer button. A tongue of raw red fire licked out. It must have caught the lift platform and its burden square on. But Rees did not wait to make sure. His arm shielding his eyes from the glare, he spun out of the seat, clung to the door with one hand, just long enough to kick at the starter. Then he hit the ground and squirmed to his knees, scuttled over a rocky surface which bruised the skin of his palms.

Roller treads grated on the rock as the car groveled backwards. Fires were blazing around as the flamer slewed back and forth, tonguing out in a fan-shaped sweep before the retreating machine. Then that spear of fire pointed skywards as the car teetered on the brink of the drop. Rees, yards away now, dared pause to glance back.

Down it went, toppling back into the gulf. And some of the enemy had survived. The rasping, coughing screeches of the Crocs made a harsh clamor. The Terran took to his heels, hoping that they would congregate on the edge, even start down towards the wreckage. He had hit them hard and they would be swept out of prudence, wanting to take his head. The skull of a valiant enemy was a far better trophy for the High Tree of a clan than that of a victim cut down in a massacre.

Rees gasped as a pain caught him under the ribs. Now he must depend not only on his own speed and agility, but on Isiga's night sight. If the Salarika kept to the edge of the gully as he had ordered, he should catch up with the fugitives before too long. But as he scuttled faster to put as much distance between him and the crash as he could, Rees still waited for the finale he had planned.

That came with more force than he had deemed possible. A crackle of light fiercer than the native sun lit up the Ishkurian landscape, even though its source was at the bottom of the drop. Rees stumbled on, a sound rising from his lips, not quite a laugh. Any headhunters caught in that explosion of a heated motor fed a full stream of energy would no longer be interested in skulls—not even their own!

The leaders of that Croc party must have been operating the force beam on the lift. And Rees could probably count on their having been killed by the flamer. Now if there had been any survivors of the roller explosion they would not be out to track off-worlders. Rees had copied the pattern of their own people when facing overwhelming odds; get the enemy and end one's own life into the bargain.

Only, now he was beginning to worry about Isiga and the children. Surely they could not have gone any farther than this. He slackened pace, trying to see more than the splotches of lamp-bush. Then another light brought Rees to an abrupt stop.

Well overhead, but coasting down on a flight track which would connect with the ground just ahead of him, was a red line, or rather a pin-pricked outline of a monstrous head, jaws agape and every fang a small pulsating coal.

In the roller or even in the open with a blaster, Rees would have been able to face that menace with the confidence of the superior armed. But his knife was no protection against an air dragon in the thing's own territory. This was a creature of the Ishkurian night, using its light celled head to dazzle and terrify its prey into helplessness. And it was on the hunt now but Rees realized he was not the quarry.