Lost and Found (18 page)

Then he saw Walker. Wearing a harried yet exultant expression, the human stood in the middle of the corridor, striving to avoid being trampled by the stampede of freed captives. When he saw George speeding toward him, his face lit up in a smile the likes of which the dog had never seen before. Without thinking, without hesitation, the mutt bounded into the human’s open arms and began licking his face, wetly and noisily.

“All right, all right. I’m glad to see you, too. I was beginning to wonder if I ever would, again.” Gently, he set the dog down on the deck and wiped at his face with the back of one forearm. “Couldn’t you just shake hands?”

“My style of greeting, take it or leave it. At least I didn’t French you.” Reunion over, he resumed his run up the corridor. “We can get soppy later. Right now we need to find Braouk!”

Walker hurried after him. “Wait a minute! Where’s Sque?”

“Tickling the light proactive!” the dog yelled back to him. “And waiting for us.”

“Look out!” George found himself yelling a moment later as the first Vilenjji he had seen since the deactivation burst out of a side corridor and came rushing toward him.

He sounded the warning just in time. The alien flew over him with room to spare, but had he not called out a warning it would have slammed into Walker, who was working hard to keep up, with crushing impact. As it was, the human threw himself to one side just in time to avoid the flying purplish mass. The Vilenjji, however, was not attacking. It was not even in control of itself. This was shown by the force with which it landed on the corridor floor, bounced, and rolled over several times before lying still, its arm and leg flaps splayed loosely around it. On closer inspection, the panting Walker decided that dislocated might be a better description.

Joining back up with George, he resumed running up the curving corridor, until a roar that shook the walls brought them up short. It was thunderous. It was overpowering. It was downright poetical.

“Perish the foul, to the darkness damning, I send!”
A steady drumming counterpointed the words.

Advancing with instinctive caution, man and dog found their friend. As soon as they saw him, the source of the drumming sound as well as the versing became immediately apparent.

Effortlessly swinging the heavy Vilenjji by one of its under-limbs, the Tuuqalian was repeatedly slamming the alien skull-first against the corridor wall. Or rather, had been, as there was no longer much of the alien’s tapering brainpan remaining. That did nothing to reduce the enthusiasm with which the Tuuqalian continued to swing the broken body.

“Braouk!” Walker moved as close as he could without getting himself brained by the very airborne, very dead Vilenjji. “It’s me, Marcus Walker! The human.” He indicated the eager quadruped at his side. “George has come back. He says we need to go with him!”

“Now,”
the dog added as sternly as he could.

Slowly, the Tuuqalian stopped swinging the dead Vilenjji, letting the lifeless mass dangle from one pair of cablelike tentacles. “Walker. George. Much pleasure given, it is to me, seeing again.” He started toward them.

“You can leave that.” Walker nodded in the direction of the mush-headed Vilenjji whose lower limb the Tuuqalian still gripped unbreakably.

“Ah, yes.” Letting the flaccid corpse fall limply to the deck, Braouk rejoined his friends.

Sque’s prediction had been correct. As human and Tuuqalian joined George in retracing the dog’s route, all around them was chaos, the noise and confusion compounded by the unceasing shrieking of the Vilenjji alarm. Vitalized by unexpected freedom, captives ran, crawled, slithered, and in at least one case, glided wherever they could. Their efforts were ultimately futile, of course. Trapped on the ship, with nowhere to go, they were each and every one doomed to recapture and reincarceration. So were Walker and his friends, but they were determined to postpone that seeming inevitability for as long as possible. And unlike their fellow captives, they had discovered a prospective means for doing so.

The ramp that led downward lay directly ahead. But instead of following George, Walker literally skidded to a halt on the slick floor.

“What are you doing?” With Braouk looming over him, an anxious George paused at the top of the ramp to look back at his friend.

“Just a quick piece of unfinished business.” Ignoring the dog’s protesting yips, his expression grim and set, Walker disregarded the ramp as he continued past it and on down the corridor.

The Ghouaba never saw the human coming. Wandering aimlessly, marveling at both its unforeseen liberty and new surroundings, its large, slightly protuberant eyes were focused on the far end of the corridor. Old skills unforgotten, Walker tackled the much smaller biped from behind, much as he had once brought down opposing quarterbacks.

Since the Ghouaba could not have weighed more than sixty pounds, the impact of a moderately large biped nearly four times its mass hitting it from behind was devastating. As the much lighter alien gasped from the shock of the concussion, Walker felt slender bones snap beneath his weight. The long, slim arms crumpled, fractured in several places. Rising from the writhing jumble of stretched skin and broken bones, Walker began methodically booting the daylights out of the still-living carcass. A firm tug on his drawn-back leg restrained him.

It was George, jaws locked firmly but gently on the human’s pants. “Let it go, Marc,” the dog instructed his friend as he released his grip on the increasingly ragged jeans. “You want the Vilenjji to find you here?” He nodded at the trashed Ghouaba. “You want the Vilenjji to find you here doing
this
?”

Walker hesitated. It would only take a moment to break the alien’s neck. Then he decided it would be better to leave it the way it was. If the Vilenjji wanted to take the time and trouble to try to fix the damage he had done, the work might keep a few of them busy. Vilenjji occupied with repairing the Ghouaba would be Vilenjji who would not have time to look for him and his friends. Or, he thought, grinning wolfishly, they might decide instead to sell the Ghouaba at a reduced cost and as was: damaged goods. But then, he reflected as he turned to follow George back to the top of the rampway, the malicious little alien had been damaged goods from the beginning.

Braouk had not been bored waiting for them. Racing up the ramp to the enclosure level, a pair of Vilenjji armed with restraining glue guns had been caught looking the wrong way. While preoccupied with immobilizing a comparatively harmless, panicky Aa’loupta from Higraa III, they had forgotten to watch behind them. One only noticed the arrival of the rampaging Tuuqalian when Braouk proceeded to separate its companion’s head from its upper body. Attempting to bring its own weapon to bear on their attacker, the other Vilenjji ended up eating it, courtesy of Braouk’s pistoning tentacles. Walker had to clutch at the Tuuqalian to drag him away from his sport, much as George had been forced to pull Walker off the Ghouaba.

They encountered no further resistance as they raced down the ramp. With those freed captives who had not yet been rounded up now scattering deeper and deeper throughout the ship, the Vilenjji were being forced to split up as well in order to pursue them. And while the other fleeing prisoners, sadly, fled without direction or purpose, the oddly matched trio that came barreling down the ramp knew exactly where they were going.

With an excited George reminding Braouk to duck, they passed through the door the dog was getting to know so well. Partway down the corridor on the other side, a frantic Sque was waiting to greet them. Mounting anxiety had caused her to tie several of her tentacles in knots.

“I was beginning to wonder if your combined paucity of intellect had led you astray,” she told them as they slowed to meet her.

“We’re glad to see you again, too.” Walker was breathing hard, but with the amount of adrenaline that was surging through him at that moment, he felt as if he could run all the way back to Earth. “I don’t know how you did it, Sque, but you did it.” And leaning over, he planted without hesitation, a loud, echoing kiss smack atop the shiny dome of her head.

She squirmed away from him. “How dare you! After what I have just done for you!”

“That is a sign of endearment among my kind,” he informed her. A glance showed an amused George nodding confirmation.

“Oh. I suppose that is all right, then.” A tentacle tip brushed self-consciously across the top of her head. “As a superior being, one must learn to tolerate the archaic affectations of primitive peoples, I suppose. At least the gesture was not dehydrating.”

As she finished, full illumination returned to the corridor. Four sets of eyes that varied considerably in size and shape scanned their immediate surroundings. They were still alone.

“Seems the Vilenjji have succeeded in restoring their lighting,” Walker murmured uneasily.

“Your kind must be famed for its ability to restate the blindingly obvious.” Sque immediately headed off to her right, scuttling past the control box. “We need to absent ourselves from this place.”

“Drowning in freedom, my hearts are glad, onward advancing,” Braouk declaimed as he followed.

“But advancing where?” Walker wanted to know. Having grown used to the K’eremu’s innate sarcasm, he was able to largely ignore it.

“I have not just been standing here, tentacles aflutter, waiting for you to put in an appearance.” Thanks to her flexible body, Sque was able to look back at him without slowing her forward motion. “In addition to instrumentation, in the time that was available to me I was able to access a selection of schematics of this vessel. It is, as I originally surmised, fairly large. Large enough to hide even one so grossly unwieldy as a Tuuqalian, if we are careful in our movements.” They were heading, Walker saw, deep into a rapidly darkening maze of conduits, machinery, and related equipment.

“Won’t the pointy-heads have some way of tracking us down as we move through their ship?” George trotted alongside his human, occasionally glancing back over a shoulder. The corridor behind them remained empty as the control box receded around a curve.

“Why should they?” Sque was comfortably, if not justifiably, confident. “No one treks the service ways of a vessel who does not belong there, and anyone encountering difficulty or needing help would carry with them the means to summon it. There is no reason to build in an expensive systemology to follow the movements of those who have with them the means to call for assistance. Exercising care, I think we can extend the period of our freedom for some time.”

“They’ll be after us,” Walker pointed out. An exasperated Sque replied without repeating her previous criticism.

“That the lighting has been fully restored suggests that the electrical barriers that restrain captives within their enclosures have also been reactivated. The Vilenjji will be busy for some time recapturing those of our fellow unfortunates who are racing aimlessly through the same corridors that are utilized by the crew. After that, our captors will be forced to spend some time winkling out the smarter ones among the escapees, who will be busily seeking hiding places from their captors. By that time we should be well away from here, in another part of the vessel, where hopefully they will not think to search for a while.”

Both Sque and George seemed to know exactly where they were going. As such, it did not take long before the escapees found themselves standing (and in Braouk’s case, crawling) beneath the particular enclosure that had been home to Walker from the day he had first awakened to find himself a captive on the alien spacecraft. It felt strange to be standing there, so close to his simulated piece of California mountains, knowing that familiar objects like his tent, and spare clothing, and miscellaneous but homey camping gear lay not far above his head, yet impossibly out of reach. Even if they could somehow manually operate the small, circular food service lift, he did not dare risk ascending lest Vilenjji surveillance equipment detect his presence. As far as their current accessibility was concerned, everything from his compact flashlight to his few remaining energy bars might as well have been lying buried in the dust of Earth’s moon.

In place of the latter he and George helped themselves to as many of the stacked food bricks as they could. Ripping some flexible bits of what looked like metal fabric from nearby mechanisms, Braouk showed himself to be as adept a weaver of scavenged materials as of words, fashioning a brace of crude but serviceable carry sacks for all four of them. The impermeable material was capable of holding water as well as bricks. Two problems immediately presented themselves.

“I’ll carry yours,” Walker told his companion when it was apparent that George’s back was too narrow to support even a small sack.

The dog grinned up at him. “I always said humans were good for something.”

The second awkwardness was less easily resolved.

“I do not carry things.” Tentacles contracted as Sque refused the sack proffered by Braouk. “The K’eremu do not indulge in manual labor.”

“What do the K’eremu deign to indulge in?” The Tuuqalian’s eyestalks extended threateningly toward the much smaller alien.

Walker stepped between them and extended a hand. “It’s all right, Braouk. I’ll carry hers.”

The big alien hesitated. Then, instead of handing over the pair of empty sacks he had fashioned for the K’eremu, a powerful tentacle took the ones the human had been holding out of Walker’s hand and slung them over a fourth limb. They hung there, all four of them, as easily as an old lady’s purse from her shoulder.

“Never mind. I will carry all the food and drink. The sum of it weighs less on my mind than the complaining of others.”

Sque had prepared a riposte, but for once the K’eremu took Walker’s cautioning glance to heart, or whatever equivalent internal system she employed to pump critical body fluids through her system.

Retracing their earlier steps, she and George led the way to the locations beneath both her enclosure and that of the Tuuqalian. When they had accumulated all the food bricks, cubes, squares, and liquids they could reasonably carry, the K’eremu led them out from beneath the vast circle of the enclosures and back into the light of the service corridor that encircled them, following, as she informed them, “the map I have made in my mind” based on what information she had been able to glean from her time spent waiting in the manipulative miasma of the Vilenjji control box.