Ride the Star Winds (46 page)

He got his eyesight back and turned to look up the ramp. Shirl and Darleen were coming down it and Maggie was silhouetted in the doorway.

“Shut the inner door before you come down!” he yelled.

“What?” he heard her scream.

He repeated the order.

The light behind her diminished as she obeyed him. The airlock chamber itself was only dimly illumined. And then she was following Shirl and Darleen to the ground.

Grimes led the way up the mountainside. There was no possibility of their getting lost; all that they had to do was to keep to the bank of the stream. It was more of a torrent now, swollen by the downpour, roaring and rumbling as displaced boulders, torn from the banks, ground against each other. The wind had almost as much weight as the rushing water, buffeting them as they bent into it, finding its way through the fastenings of their raincapes, ballooning the garments, threatening to lift their wearers from their feet and to send them whirling downhill, airborne flotsam.

The raincapes had to go. Grimes struggled out of his. It was torn from his hands, vanished downwind like a huge, demented bat. The women shed theirs. Maggie, shouting to make herself heard above the wild tumult of wind, water and thunder, made a feeble joke about the willful destruction of Federation property and the necessity thereafter of filling in forms in quintuplicate.

But she could still joke, thought Grimes. Good for her. And the others were bearing up well, even Fenella. No doubt she was thinking in headlines. MY WALK ON THE WILD SIDE.

Bruised and battered by flying debris, deafened by shrieking wind and roaring thunder, blinded by lightning, the party struggled up the mountainside.

And of all the miseries and discomforts the one that Grimes resented most bitterly was the trickle of icy-cold water that found its way through the neckband of his coveralls, meandering down his body to collect in his boots.

Chapter 27

They came at last
to the village, such as it was, the huddle of low stone houses, little better than huts most of them, all of them with doors and windows tightly battened against the storm. There was one building, two-storied, larger than the others. From its steeply pitched roof protruded what was obviously a radio communications antenna, a slender mast that whipped as the gusts took hold of it and worried it. It was a wonder that it had survived the storm thus far; not only was there the rain but there was the lightning, stabbing down from the swirling clouds at even the stunted trees that were hardly more than overgrown bushes, exploding them into eruptions of charred splinters.

It had survived thus far; it would be as well, decided Grimes, if it survived for no longer. If Brasidus and his guards were in this house the sooner that means of communication with Sparta City was destroyed the better. He pulled his laser pistol from its holster, tried to take aim at the base of the mast. The wind grabbed his arm and tugged viciously. He tried to use his left hand to steady his right, pressed the firing stud. During a brief, very brief, period of darkness between lightning flashes he saw the beam of intense ruby light, missing the target by meters. He tried again. Maggie tried. Even Fenella tried. The radio mast remained untouched by their fire.

Grimes saw that Shirl was taking one of the metal discs from the pouch at her waist, holding it carefully by the small arc of its circumference that had been left unsharpened.
And what good will that do?
he asked himself scornfully. A thrown missile, launched in the teeth of a howling gale . . . Metal—tough metal admittedly—against metal at least as tough as itself. (That mast must be tough to have survived the storm.)

Shirl stood there, her body swaying in the gusts that assailed her, making no attempt to hold herself rigid as she took aim, not fighting the forces of nature as Grimes and Maggie and Fenella had been trying to do, accommodating herself to them. Her right arm, the hand holding the gleaming disc, went back and then, aided by a wind eddy, snapped forward. Like Grimes and the others, she had been aiming for the base of the mast. Unlike Grimes and the others she might even have hit it. But the disc itself, generating with its swift passage through the heavily charged air a charge of its own, was itself a target. A writhing filament of dazzling incandescence snaked down from the black sky to enmesh the missile, to follow its trajectory even as it was reduced to a coruscation of molten steel.

The disc, what was left of it, would narrowly have missed the base of the mast—but the lightning struck it. Momentarily it took, Grimes thought, the semblance of a Christmas tree, etching its branches and foliage of flame onto his retinas. Slowly he regained his eyesight. Somebody—Maggie—had him by the upper arm, was shaking it.

“John! John!” she was saying, “They’re coming out!”

He blinked, then raised his hand to clear the rain from his eyes. A door had opened on the lee side of the building, the side on which they were standing. A figure was standing in the rectangle of yellow light, another one behind it, women both of them.

“I’m not going out in
this
!” Grimes heard faintly.

“Somebody has to. Something has happened to the mast.”

“Blown down. Struck by lightning. In this weather anything could happen.”

“We have to see what’s wrong so we can fix it. Out with you,
now!
”

“Oh, all right. All right.”

The smaller of the two women ventured out into the night, picking just the wrong moment for her excursion. A shrieking gust eddied around the house so that even on its lee side there was little protection. Her weatherproof cloak was whipped up over and around her head, blinding her and trapping her arms. She staggered out blindly, her naked legs luminescent in the darkness. She blundered right into the arms of Shirl and Darleen. Her shriek as a hard fist connected with the nape of her neck was muffled by her enveloping garment. She fell to the sodden ground and lay there, face down, her bare rump exposed to the lashing of the driving rain. She would be visible from the open doorway; Grimes and his companions, in their dark clothing, would not.

“Lalia!” the woman standing in the door was screaming. “Lalia! What’s wrong? Did you fall?”

And then she had left the shelter of the house, was staggering out over the rough ground, buffeted by the wind, her flimsy robe shredded from her body as she made her unsteady way toward her fallen companion. Grimes and the others withdrew to one side, hoping that they would not be seen, and then, with him in the lead, ran toward the house, their stunguns out and ready. Once inside they slammed and barred the door. (Grimes felt a brief twinge of pity for those two near-naked females shut out in the storm.)

The room in which they were standing was sparsely furnished—a rough table, a half-dozen equally rough chairs, a pressure lantern hanging from a rafter. Against the far wall a wooden staircase—more of a ladder really—led to the upper floor. In the side wall to the left was an open doorway.

From it came a female voice.

“Sounds like they’re back. Now, perhaps, we’ll be able to get this accursed transceiver working again.”

“I’m sure that dear Ellena is waiting with bated breath for the rest of our weather report,” sneered another female voice.

“Be that as it may, we’re still supposed to be in touch every six hours, on the hour, if only to let her know that his sexist lordship is doing as well as may be expected.” She raised her voice. “Lalia! Daphne! What’s keeping you? Is that aerial still standing?”

Grimes and Maggie, stunguns in hand, advanced to the open door, the others behind them. They saw the four women, who were huddled over the large transceiver upon which they had been working, replacing power cells and printed circuits. One of them he recognized; it was the fat blonde with whom he had tangled on the occasion of the Archon’s abduction, although what had been brassy hair was now no more than a gray stubble. There must have been a discharge from the set when the lightning struck and she must have been in the way of it. She looked up from her work and stared at him.

She jumped to her feet, screwdriver in hand.

“You!” she snarled.

“Yes, me,” agreed Grimes pleasantly as he shot her.

Beside him Maggie’s stungun buzzed as she disposed of two of the other ladies and from behind him Fenella, determined not to be left out of things, loosed off a paralyzing blast at the redhead who was about to throw a spanner at the commodore.

We should have left one of them awake,
thought Grimes,
to take us to where they have Brasidus.
Not that it much mattered. This house, little more than a shack, was no castle. There would be very few rooms to search.

They went back into the first room. Somebody was hammering on the door to outside and yelling, “Let us in! Let us in, damn you!”

“Let them in,” Grimes whispered to Shirl.

She obeyed.

The two women who had gone to inspect the aerial stumbled in. In normal circumstances they might have been attractive, with what remained of their rain-soaked clothing clinging to quite shapely bodies, but Grimes thought they looked like two drowned rats. They screamed when they saw the intruders, screamed again when the two New Alicians grabbed them, one to each, held them with their arms twisted up painfully behind their backs. Still they stared defiantly at Grimes. One of them spat at him.

“Ladies, ladies,” he admonished. Then, with the whipcrack of authority in his voice, “Where is the Archon?”

“Why should we tell you?” growled the taller of the pair.

Grimes raised his stungun in his right hand, with the fingers of his left adjusted the setting.

“John, you’re not going to . . . ?” expostulated Maggie. “You said that there was to be no killing.”

Grimes hoped that he had the setting right. There was one beam intensity the use of which was supposed to be illegal, against the rules of civilized warfare. It was a matter of very fine adjustment, a fraction of a degree above MAXIMUM STUN although less than LETHAL. Una Freeman, a Federation police officer whom he had once known, had taught him this nasty little trick, telling him that it might come in handy some day. “But be careful,” she had warned him. “Overdo it and you’ll finish up with a human vegetable who’d be better off dead.”

“Where is the Archon?” he demanded again.

“Get stuffed!” came the defiant reply.

Grimes raised the bulky pistol.

“That’s right,” sneered the woman. “Put me to sleep so I’ll never talk. D’you think I don’t know a stungun when I see one?”

“Drop her!” Grimes barked to Darleen. “Get away from her!”

For a moment the tall, black-haired woman stood there, then she started toward Grimes, clawlike fingers extended.

Grimes pressed the firing stud.

The weapon whined.

The woman was cut down in mid-leap then fell to the floor, writhing in agony, the muzzle of the pistol still trained on her, still emitting its beam. She was making a shrill grunting noise through her closed mouth and, above this, could be heard the grinding of her teeth. Throughout her body muscle fought against muscle. She was on her back squirming in a ghastly parody of orgasm, and then only her heels and the back of her head were in contact with the floor. Blood trickled from the corners of her mouth.

“Stop!” screamed Maggie.

He released the pressure on the firing stud.

His victim collapsed in a shuddering heap.

“Where is the Archon?” repeated Grimes.

She lifted her head to glare at him. She spat out blood and fragments of broken teeth.

“Get . . . stuffed . . .”

Hating himself, and hating her for being so stubborn, Grimes took aim again.

“I’ll tell!” screamed the small, mousy blonde. “I’ll tell you! But don’t hurt her again!”

“Gutless little bitch!” was all the thanks she got from her friend.

But Grimes felt better when he discovered that his harsh interrogation had been necessary after all. There was a cellar, the trapdoor to which had been concealed by the heavy rug upon which the table had been standing, that could be opened only by pressing a stud, disguised as a nailhead—one among many—in the wooden floor. There was a rough wooden staircase down into the black depths.

“Brasidus!” yelled Grimes into the opening.

“Here!” came the reply from below. Then, “Who’s that?”

“Grimes. We’ve come to get you out!”

But there was something that had to be done first. Grimes set the control knob of his pistol to MEDIUM STUN. He pointed the weapon at the black-haired woman who was still sprawled on the floor, twitching and moaning. He said gently, “This will put you out. You’ll feel better when you recover.” (It was not quite a lie, although it would be days before the soreness left her overstrained muscles and she would require considerable dental work.)

“Bastard!” she hissed viciously from her bleeding mouth. “Bastard!”

And then she was silent and her body and limbs were no longer twitching.

Darleen lifted the pressure lamp from its bracket, started toward the open trapdoor.

“Hold it!” ordered Grimes. “Let
her
go first.” He hustled the small blonde toward the head of the stairway. “There may be booby traps.”

So they followed their prisoner down into what was more of a cellar than a real dungeon, smelling of the wine and the spicy foodstuffs stored therein, although in one corner there was a cage constructed from stout metal bars, its door secured by a heavy padlock. In this stood Brasidus. He was naked and his beard and hair were unkempt but otherwise he seemed in good enough condition.

“John!” he cried. “Maggie! By all the gods, it’s good to see you!”

“And good to see you!” said Grimes. He grabbed the small blonde by her shoulder. “Where’s the key to this cage?”

“I . . . I don’t know . . . .”

“Give her the same treatment that you gave the other bitch,” suggested Fenella viciously.

But Maggie had returned her stungun to its holster, pulled out her laser pistol. An acrid stink of burning metal filled the air and incandescent, molten gobbets hissed and crackled as they fell to the floor.