Xenopath (33 page)

She pulled it
out, fingers trembling, and could only think of Pham.

"Good
girl," the man smiled. "Now, over there."

She could do
nothing, she told herself, nothing at all but obey him. Even so, as
she tossed the shield across the carpet she could not but help feel
that she had betrayed both Pham and Jeff.

The man stared
at her, eyes wide in concentration. He flung back his head and brayed
with laughter.

"I don't
believe it," he said to himself in a whisper. "I trawl the
fucking length and breadth of the Station, and all the while..."
He stared at her. "When will she be back?"

She knew that
her every thought was open to him, that she could withhold nothing.

The Westerner
smiled. "So... I think I'll just make myself comfortable and
wait for Pham to get back," he said. "And then I might as
well wait for Vaughan to return."

Sukara was
slowly shaking her head, wondering how it had come to this. Life had
been so good; she had been so happy, and all that was about to end at
the hands of this evil man.

Now she knew
that she had been right to fear her forebodings.

The Westerner
said, "There is no such thing as good and evil, merely those who
are powerful, and those who are weak."

She watched him
raise the pistol and aim at her, and she could only think of Jeff and
Pham, and of her unborn baby.

Then he fired
his laser and shot Sukara through the head.

BREITENBACH

Vaughan thought
back to the laser fight in the star-ship, overcome now with an odd
retrospective dread; he had felt fear at the time, but fear only for
himself. Now he realised that, had he died back there, Sukara would
have borne the brunt of his passing, alone on Bengal Station,
bringing up their daughter. The idea filled him with horror, and he
told himself that no more would he put himself in a situation where
his life was at risk.

Which was a fine
sentiment, but he wondered if the combined forces of
Scheering-Lassiter would bear that in mind if they apprehended him.

He flew a
convoluted course south, through the snow-clad massifs of the
southern range, following the route marked on the screen of Weiss's
palmCom. He had completed around half the journey so far, which had
taken him a couple of hours. He hoped to reach Breitenbach well
before sunset.

He was
perpetually on the lookout for pursuers. He turned in his seat,
attempting to scan three hundred and sixty degrees for any sign of
fliers, like an old-fashioned fighter pilot. He wondered how long it
might be before Denning's team was missed. No doubt Denning had had
orders to report his progress at intervals, and after a while without
word from him a search party would be sent out. How long, after that,
would it be before an alert was broadcast for S-L forces to be on the
lookout for a stolen flier?

Not that there
seemed to be much sign of life in this region of Mallory. This range
of mountains was the longest on the planet, stretching the
thousand-kilometre length of the southern coastline and extending
inland, in places, for a hundred kilometres. It was bitterly cold and
inhospitable down there, and Vaughan wondered what kind of bolt-hole
Breitenbach had fashioned for himself.

Ten minutes
later he made out the first sign of a road far below, though on
further inspection it was less a road than a precarious track carved
into the side of the mountain. It wended its way around the cliff
face and over a saddle-like ridge. He slowed and consulted his map. A
faint track was marked, leading to the coast. Breitenbach's position
was marked as a circle on the screen of the palmCom, a hundred
kilometres west of the road.

For the next
twenty kilometres Vaughan's route would follow the track below,
before he peeled off west and began the last leg of the journey.

As he came over
the crest of the track, between the mountain peaks, he saw with a
sudden jolt of shock that there was a vehicle far below. Then he saw
the others—four military troop carriers strung out in convoy
along the narrow track. He throttled back, slowing, so as not to
overtake the convoy and show himseif. He took the flier up, beyond
the peaks of the nearby mountains, then pulled the binoculars from
his jacket and focused on the vehicles.

The trucks,
splotched with blue and white camouflage markings, leapt into silent
life in the viewfinder as they trundled south. Each vehicle carried
perhaps thirty soldiers, sitting in rows under glassed-in canopies,
gripping laser rifles.

His first
thought was that they were looking for him; his second, that he was
being paranoid. They were doing what the rest of the military was
doing in this part of the planet: slaughtering the pachyderms.

He took a great
loop around the mountain peak and rejoined the track ten kilometres
further on. Five minutes later, looking down at the narrow grey track
slung around the mountainside like a contour line, he saw the object
of the military exercise.

Perhaps twenty
Grayson's pachyderms were strung out along the track, plodding slowly
south, their long articulated legs taking what seemed like great,
slow motion strides. Compared to the progress of the following troop
carriers, the herd was moving at a snail's pace. It could only be a
matter of minutes before the military caught up, and then it would be
a bloody rout, with nowhere for the animals to run: a precipitous
drop of a thousand metres to the left, and lasers burning mercilessly
from the rear.

Vaughan, hanging
five hundred metres above the pachyderms, had never felt as powerless
in his life. The carnage was inevitable. The only imponderable was
whether he should remain to witness it.

Any intervention
on his part would be futile, he knew, and would only alert the
military's attention to his presence. He had a duty to Weiss, Larsen,
and the other radicals, to deliver the crystals to Breitenbach.

He was about to
bank right, away from the track, when he noticed that the file of
animals down below was slowing and coming to a stop. Then he saw why:
the leader of the herd, a great bull with a daunting array of facial
tusks, had come to a halt and was easing his way up a defile in the
rock face. It disappeared, and was followed by the second in line.
Slowly, as the minutes ticked by, one by one the pachyderms inserted
themselves into the fissure and continued on their journey up the
narrow cutting. The last animal slipped into the cliff face perhaps a
minute before the first troop carrier hove into view around a bend in
the mountain.

Hardly able to
believe that the creatures had managed to save themselves, Vaughan
watched as the carriers approached the cutting. Had they tracked the
pachyderms so far, perhaps with heat-seeking devices, and would they
easily detect their sudden turn?

The first troop
carrier approached the fissure and showed no sign of slowing down.
The other vehicles raced by, and when the last carrier passed the
cutting Vaughan punched the dashboard in jubilation.

He banked,
slowed, and eased the flier into the cutting, ascending so as not to
startle the creatures. A minute later he overflew the slowly plodding
file, pressing his face against the side-screen to look down at their
leader.

At that second,
the great bull looked up, as if sighting the flier, and raised its
abbreviated trunk as if both in greeting and in acknowledgement of
its herd's close escape.

It struck
Vaughan, then, that the bull was the same one that had led him
towards the detour on his first day on Mallory. He smiled at the
romantic notion and accelerated away from the herd, following the
route on the palmCom south-west.

Fifteen minutes
later the southern ocean came into view, a stretch of silver lame
coruscating on the horizon beyond the last of the mountain peaks.
According to the palmCom, Breitenbach was in hiding in the mountains
overlooking the sea.

The more he
thought about the lone radical, the more questions he realised there
were to be answered. Breitenbach, if Weiss were to be believed, was
privy to the secrets of the crash-landed extraterrestrials—though
how this might be so, when the ship had arrived on Mallory many
thousands of years ago, and no aliens had survived to this day, was a
mystery. According to Weiss, Breitenbach had described to Travers the
aliens' appearance, which seemed an impossibility. Could it be,
Vaughan speculated as the mountain peaks flicked by outside, that the
aliens had survived the crash-landing and lived on in the mountains
of Mallory?

He smiled at the
conceit.

And,
disregarding the aliens, what was to be made of Breitenbach's claim
that the pachyderms were sentient creatures—or that at least
some
of them were?

The thought that
soon he would locate the radical, and have his questions answered,
filled him with anticipation.

He glanced at
the palmCom. He was perhaps ten kilometres from Breitenbach's
position. He slowed, following the marked route as it took him over a
broad valley cradled between soaring, scimitar peaks, and through a
pass towards the coast.

Down below, on a
path leading from the valley to the pass, he saw another dozen
pachyderms ambling south in slow procession.

And then, once
he'd seen the first herd, he made out many more: they were strung out
across the valley, in single file, trundling with slow, ponderous
footsteps on a journey which must have taken them over hundreds of
kilometres through the mountains. And if Breitenbach was right, and
the pachyderms were intelligent, then what might be signified by this
mass exodus into the southern ranges?

He counted more
than a hundred animals, then gave up and turned his attention to the
palmCom.

Breitenbach was
located some three kilometres away, beyond the pass. Vaughan banked
the flier and skimmed across the valley, alongside the great
caravanserai of alien beasts. Many of them turned their heads to
regard his passage, but there was no sign of consternation or panic
in their ranks. It came to Vaughan, fancifully, that they were aware
he was on their side.

He hopped over
the pass between the peaks and was confronted by the great shimmering
expanse of the southern ocean. Above it to his right was the bloated
orb of the late afternoon sun, and directly before him two of the
three moons sailed in slow motion through the sky.

He glanced at
the palmCom. The marked route veered right, hugging the mountains
that paralleled the line of the shore. He banked and overflew a
littoral of blue grassland, glancing inland at the sheer mountains in
which Breitenbach evidently made his home.

He banked again,
approaching the first range of grey peaks, and he understood then why
the palmCom had brought him in this way: before him, looming in the
side of the mountain like a yawning mouth, was the opening to a great
cave.

The marked route
on the screen of the palmCom led directly into the cave.

He decelerated,
eased the flier into the shadow of the opening, and came down on a
shelf of rock as flat as a landing pad. The setting sun flung the
shadow of the flier ahead of him, and illuminated a natural chamber
without the slightest sign of habitation. When the turbos cut out,
Vaughan sat for a while, then climbed from the vehicle and stared
about him.

The first thing
that struck him was the silence. It sealed around him like something
solid and impermeable. When he took steps towards the back of the
chamber, his boots rang on the rock, amplified and echoing. He felt
as though he were trespassing on hallowed ground, the sound of his
footsteps a profanity.

The second thing
he noticed was an opening in the rock to his right, large enough to
admit the flier. He looked around the chamber, but could see no other
openings he might explore.

He was tempted
to call Breitenbach's name, but something about the cathedral hush of
the chamber prevented him.

He returned to
the flier, turned on the headlights, and fired up the turbos. He
eased the flier forward, its roar deafening in the confined space. In
the cone of light flung before the vehicle, he made out the natural
archway of the opening and steered the flier through it.

The corridor
seemed, to Vaughan's untutored eye, to be a natural feature of the
rock. It twisted and turned, narrowing and opening out by turns, but
never closing to the point where the flier could not pass. He
estimated he had been in the corridor for perhaps ten minutes when he
made out, in the patch of darkness far ahead where the headlights of
the flier did not reach, a glimmer of light.

He cut the
turbos, and when the flier settled he turned off the headlights too.
There, in the distance, was a hazy yellow glow: the light at the end
of the tunnel.

He restarted the
flier and flew along the remaining length of corridor. It opened out
and the illumination grew brighter, and a minute later he could see
through an arched opening—clearly not the work of nature—into
an open area cradled in the mountain-tops.

The flier
emerged into daylight and he cut the turbos, climbed out, and stared
around him in amazement.

He was on a path
that led down into a miniature valley, perhaps half a kilometre from
end to end and almost as wide. Low peaks to his right admitted the
day's last rays of sun, slicing the valley into two equal halves of
light and darkness.

It was not the
valley, however, that caused Vaughan's amazement, but rather what the
valley contained.

At first he
thought they were some kind of alien termite mounds, hundreds of them
filling the valley in orderly rows. Then he made out, in each
beehive-shaped construction, the unmistakable shapes of doors and
slit windows.