Midworld (26 page)

“Is he dead?” inquired Ruumahum.

Geeliwan snorted a reply. “He sleeps deeply.” The furcot joined his companion in studying the doorway. “How does this open. It is not like the doors the persons have made in the Home.”

Born’s whisper reached them from under the sealed entrance. “Ruumahum, there is a handle near you, shaped like the grip of a snuffler. You must move it down and then pull to open the door. We cannot do so from inside.”

The big furcot examined the protrusion carefully. Gripping it in his teeth, he turned his head according to Born’s instructions. Born neglected, however, to mention that the handle would stop at the proper place. There was a pinging sound, loud in the quietness.

“It came off, Born,” Ruumahum reported, spitting out the metal.

Losting rose and took a couple of steps toward the back of the room. “I’ve had enough of this place, mad-on-the-hunt. Come if you will.” Giving Born no time to argue, he ordered, “Open the door, Geeliwan, now!”

Geeliwan rose on his rear feet, his head nearly touching the corridor ceiling. Falling forward, he pushed simultaneously with fore- and midpaws. There was a groan, accompanied by a pinging sound like the broken handle had made only much louder. The preformed section of alloy bent at the middle and folded over into the room, hanging loosely by its bottom hinge.

Born and Losting leaped over the barrier and followed the furcots down twists and turns in the corridor neither man remembered. Distant mutters and shouts of confusion rose around them like a nest of Chollakees. All at once a man confronted them, appearing at the end of the corridor like a bad memory. He reached for his belt—even as his jaw dropped—and started to pull something small and shiny from it.

Ruumahum hit him with a paw in passing. The glancing blow lifted the man off his feet and slammed him against the wall. He was still crumpling to the floor as they passed.

The furcot rumbled terribly, “This place needs killing,” and showed signs of returning to finish off the guard.

Born argued otherwise, and they ran on. “Not now, Ruumahum. These creatures kill without thinking. Let us not fall prey to the same frailty.” Ruumahum muttered under his breath, but led on.

Moments later they reached the wide corridor that encircled the station. Both Born and Losting had their axes out now, but there was no need to use them. The station was still half asleep, the source of the disturbance behind them as yet unknown.

Another minute and they were at the hole Ruumahum and Geeliwan had ripped in the station floor. Ruumahum led the way. Born jumped in after, feet first, followed by Losting. Geeliwan was right behind.

Like a flotilla of fluorescent bees, lights around the station began to wink on erratically; alarms began to sound. In the outlying turrets, curses replaced idle comments as the gun crews rushed to man instruments of destruction. Alert, welltrained eyes, both human and mechanical, scanned the open area round the station, minutely examined the unchanged forest wall. Within that tensely monitored region nothing threatening moved, nothing unexpected showed itself.

Suddenly something appeared on the computer screen, filling a fair-sized section within range of the north turret. The triggerwoman engaged her electronic sensors and let fly. The burst totally demolished a small cloud of flitters which had left the hylaea for the beckoning station lights. That had unnerved the inhabitants of the station until the central detectors report what had been destroyed.

Still blinking sleep from his eyes, a disheveled Hansen struggled to untangle robe and hair as he was conducted by a guard to the hole in the floor.

“A centimeter of duralloy over a meterthick ferrocrete base,” someone in the little crowd that had gathered muttered. The group parted as Hansen arrived. He fought to keep incredulity from his face when he saw the size of the cavity.

“I thought they weren’t supposed to have any advanced tools.”

“They don’t.” Everyone turned to see who offered the answer.

Logan joined them, pulling her hair back away from her face as she bent to examine the gap’s interior. Her expression was drawn. “The furcots must have done it,” she concluded tiredly.

“A singular pronouncement,” Hansen declared. “What is a furcot, Logan?”

“It’s an associate animal Born’s people live with. A hexapodal omnivore. At least we assume it’s an omnivore.” She turned her gaze back to the hole. “When night came and their human companions didn’t return or send for them, they must have decided to come looking on their own.”

“Interesting,” was all the station chief murmured.

Reports and people came and went. The population of the little crowd changed without shrinking. After a while equipment was brought and a designated “volunteer” lowered into the cavity. He was not gone too long before he had secured the information Hansen required.

Nodding and listening intently, Hansen received the explorer’s report. He patted the man on the back, then returned to the edge of the hole. The group gathered around it now consisted of section heads, men like Cargo and Blanchfort.

“Can any of you imagine where this hole goes?” Hansen demanded. Cautious silence. Woe to the bureaucrat who volunteered inaccurate information! Besides, they would know in a minute. “Don’t any of you even know where you’re standing?” Puzzled glances all around. “The hole continues on downward into one of the three trunks this station is set upon. It appears this one tree isn’t quite solid. It appears,” Hansen continued, his expression and rising fury sufficient to make his underlings recoil, “that there’s some kind of native animal that runs burrows through such trees! All these furcots had to do was locate such a burrow below the level we cleared off and walk within digging distance of this floor.
This floor,
ladies and gentlemen!”

His voice dropped slightly. “They didn’t have to worry about our monitors and guns. They didn’t have to worry about the charged screens encircling the trunks. The only thing that puzzles me is—how did they know they didn’t have to worry about such things?”

Cohoma had joined the others. “They’re a bit more than animals, sir. They can talk, a little. Enough to make conversation. I talked to them myself. They don’t like talking, as I under—”

“Shut up, you idiot,” the station chief said in a quiet voice that was worse than a shout. He continued muttering, “And they expect me to run a clandestine operation like this, on an inimical world like this, with a crew like this—”

“Excuse me, Chief,” the head of engineering offered quietly. “Do you want me to round up some people to plug this thing?” He gestured toward the gap.

“No, I don’t want you to round up some people to plug this thing,” Hansen shot back, mimicking the engineer’s querulous tone. “Cargo, where’s Cargo?”

“Sir?” The head of station Security stepped through the group.

“Leave this opening untouched. Mount a rifle over it with a four man crew, and rotate the crew every four hours.” He put hands on hips and rubbed absently at the brown robe. “Maybe they’ll try and come back this way. No more talk this time, not with one man already dead. We’ll find this Home and start fresh with these folk.”

“Sir?” Cargo hesitated, then asked, “The turret crews are a bit skittish. They’re not too sure what they’re supposed to be watching out for.”

“A couple of short, swarthy men accompanied by—” He looked over his shoulder, snapped at Logan, “What are these things supposed to look like?”

“Six-legged,” she explained to Cargo, “dark green fur, three eyes, long ears, a couple of short thick tusks sticking up from the lower jaw, several times the mass of a man …”

“That’ll do,” said Cargo drily. He nodded to Hansen, spun smartly on one heel and strode away to communicate with his people.

“Tell me,” Hansen queried Logan, “did you ever get the impression that your friend Born might not approve of our aims in coming here?”

“We never went into specifics about our activities, Chief,” she replied. “There were times when one could have read his questions and answers several ways. But since he was in the process of saving our lives, I didn’t think it expedient to argue motivations with him. I felt our primary objective was to get back here whole.”

“Yet despite this uncertainty about how he might react, you let him leave these two semi-intelligent animals free to mount a rescue.”

Logan couldn’t keep herself from showing a little anger of her own. “What was I supposed to do? Drag them along bodily? It seemed to me best at the time to stay on friendly terms with Born and Losting. The furcots saw what a laser cannon can do. None of Cargo’s brilliant assistants located any passageways in these support trunks! How could I guess that—”

“You could have insisted he bring his pets along.”

“You still don’t understand sir.” She fought to make it plain. “The furcots aren’t
pets.
They’re independent semisentient creatures with extensive reasoning powers of their own. They associate with humans because they want to, not because they’ve been domesticated. If they want to do something like remain behind in their forest, there’s no way Born or anyone else can force them to do otherwise.” She glanced significantly at the hole in the floor where the metal had been peeled back like the skin of an apple. “Would
you
want to argue with them?”

“You debate persuasively, Kimi. It’s my own fault. I expect too much of everyone. And those expectations are always fulfilled.” He looked broodingly at the dark tunnel. “I wish there were some way of avoiding a confrontation. Not because it would make our operation here any less illegal if we have to kill a few natives.”

“Not natives, sir,” Logan reminded him, “survivors of—”

Hansen cocked his head and glared at, her, his voice steady, hard. “Kimi, back in spoke twelve I saw a maintenance subengineer named Haumi with his face pushed in and his back broken. He’s dead, now. As far as I’m concerned, that makes Born and Losting, and any of their cousins who feel similarly about our presence here, natives, hostile ones. I have an obligation to the people who put up the credit for this station. I’ll take whatever steps are necessary to protect that. Now, is there any chance you could find your way back to this village, or Home?”

Logan paused thoughtfully.

“Considering some of the twists and turns, ups and downs we took, I doubt it. Not without Born’s help. Our skimmer must be nearly covered by fresh growth by now. Even if we were to locate it, I don’t know if we could find the Home from there. You’ve no idea, sir,” she half pleaded, “what it’s like trying to move through this world on foot. It’s hard enough to tell up from down, let alone horizontal direction. And the native carnivorous life, the defensive systems developed by the flora—”

“You don’t have to tell me, Kimi.” Hansen jammed his hands into the robe’s pockets. “I helped clear the space for this station. Well, we’ll still try to take at least one of them alive when they come back.”

“Your pardon, sir,” Cohoma said, his expression uncertain. “Come back? I’d think Born would tend to hightail it back to the Home to organize resistance to us and warn his fellows.”

Hansen shook his head sadly, smiled condescendingly. “You’ll never be much more than a scout, Cohoma.”

“Sir,” Logan began, “I don’t think you’re being entirely fair—”

“And the same goes for you, Logan. Goes for the two of you.” His voice sank dangerously, all pretense of fatherliness gone. “You’ve both been guilty of underestimating your subject. Maybe their smaller stature made you feel superior. Maybe it was the fact that you’re the product of a technologically advanced culture—the reasons don’t really matter. You probably still think you talked this Born into making this trip. You think you kept him in the dark concerning the station’s true purpose. Instead, look what’s happened. Why do you think Born wanted advanced weaponry above all else? To fight off local predators? Patrick O’Morion, no! So he could eventually deal on even terms with
us!

“Now he knows the nature and disposition of our defenses here, the station layout, has a rough idea of our numerical strength, and sees how really isolated from outside help we are. He’s also divined our intentions and decided they run contrary to his own. No, I don’t see that kind of man running for help. He’ll take at least one crack at us on his own.”

Cohoma looked abashed. “None of which would matter,” Hansen went on, “if he was still sitting back in that room, under guard. It pains me to have to kill so resourceful a man. The trouble is this spiritual attitude they apparently take toward the welfare of every weed and flower. That’s what you two have failed to perceive. With your Born, our announced activities here are grounds for a holy war. I’ll bet my pension he’s out there now, sitting on some idolized thornbush, watching us, and thinking of ways to make the blasphemer’s way into hell fast and easy. Now, tell me more about these furcots of theirs.” He kicked at the bent metal around the hole. “I’ve got the evidence of one dead man and a breach in the station proper to testify to their strength. How invulnerable are they?”

“They’re flesh and bone—flesh, anyway,” Cohoma corrected himself. “They’re quite mortal. We saw several of them slain by a marauding tribe of local killers called Akadi. The time to worry is when they throw nuts at you.”

Hansen eyed Cohoma oddly, decided to press on with his questions. “What about weapons?”

“Something called a snuffler, kind of like a big blow-gun. It shoots poisonous thorns. Otherwise all we saw were the usual primitive implements—knifes, spears, axes, and the like. Nothing to worry about.”

“I’ll remember that,” Hansen said grimly, “the first time I see one sticking out of your neck, Jan. A club can kill you just as dead as a SCCAM shell. Anything else?”

Logan managed an uneasy smile. “Not unless they’ve learned how to tame a silverslith.”

“A what?”

“A large local tree-dweller. It’s at least fifty meters long, climbs on several hundred legs, and has a face only an AAnn nestmaster could love. According to Born, it never dies and can’t be killed.”

“Thanks,” Hansen replied tartly. “That encourages me no end.” He started to leave, turned back. “There’s also the chance nothing at all’s going to happen. So we’re going to continue with normal operations under more than normal security. I can’t afford to close up shop waiting for your little root-lover to proclaim his intentions. You’ll both report for duty tomorrow as usual and check out a new skimmer, pick up new assignments.”