The Witches of Karres (26 page)

SMALL PERSON, announced the vatch, THIS IS THE TEST! THE SITUATION THAT WILL DETERMINE YOUR QUALITY! THERE IS A WAY TO SURVIVE. IF YOU DO NOT FIND IT, MY INTEREST AND YOUR DREAM EXISTENCE END TOGETHER--

The captain looked quickly over at Vezzarn and Hulik. But their faces showed they'd heard nothing of what that great, ghostly wind-voice had seemed to be saying. Of course, it was meant for him.

He'd switched off the intercom connection with Yango moments before. "Any ideas?" he asked now.

"Skipper, " Vezzarn told him, jaw quivering, " I think we'd better surrender, while he'll still let us!"

The do Eldel was shaking her head. "That man is the Agandar!" she said. "If we do surrender, we don't live long. Except for Dani. He'll squeeze from us whatever we can tell him, and stop when he has nothing left to work on. "

"We'd have a chance!" Vezzarn argued shakily. "A chance. What else can we do? We can't stop a war robot, and there's nowhere to run from it!"

Hulik said to the captain, "I was told you might be a Karres witch. Are you?"

"No," said the captain.

"I thought not. But that child is?"

"Yes. "

"And she's asleep and we can't wake her up!" Hulik shrugged resignedly. Her face was strained and white. "It would take something like magic to save us now, I think!"

The captain grunted, reached over the desk and eased in the atmosphere drive. "Perhaps not," he said. "We may have to abandon ship. I'm going down."

The
Venture
went sliding out of orbit, turning towards the reddish disk of the silent planet.

Vezzarn had all the veteran spacer's ingrained horror of exchanging the life-giving enclosure of his ship for anything but the equally familiar security of a civilized port or a spacesuit. He began arguing again, torn between terrors; and there was no time to argue. The captain took out his gun, placed it on the desk beside him.

"Vezzarn!" he said; and Vezzarn subsided. "If you want to surrender," the captain told him, "you'll get the chance. We'll lock you in one of those cabins over there and leave you for Yango and the robot to find."

"Well…" Vezzarn began unhappily.

"If you don't want that," the captain continued, "start following orders."

"I'll follow orders, skipper," Vezzarn decided with hardly a pause.

"Then remember one thing. . . " The captain tapped the gun casually. "If Yango starts talking to us again, I'm the only one who answers!"

"Right, sir!" Vezzarn said, eyeing the gun.

"Good. Get busy on the surface analyzers and see if you can find out anything worth knowing about this place. Miss do Eldel, you've got good hearing, I think… "

"Excellent hearing, Captain!" Hulik assured him.

"The intercom is yours. Make sure reception amplification stays at peak. Compartment E is the storage. Anything you hear from there is good news. D is bad news; they'll be through one emergency wall and on their way here. Then we'll know we have to get out and how much time we have to do it. G is drive section of the engine room. Don't know why Yango should want to go down there, but he could. The other compartments don't count at the moment. You have that?"

Hulik acknowledged she did. The captain returned his attention to the
Venture
and the world she was approaching. Vezzarn hadn't let out any immediate howls at the analyzers, so at least they weren't dropping into the pit of cold poison the surface might have been from its appearance. The lifeboat blister was in the storage compartment; so was the ship's single work spacesuit. Not a chance to get to either of those ... The planetary atmosphere below appeared almost cloudless. Red halflight, black shadows along the ranges, lengthening as the meridian moved away behind them...

How far could he trust the vatch? Not at all, he thought. He should act as if he'd heard none of that spooky background commentary. But the vatch, capricious, unpredictable, immensely powerful, not sane by this universe's standards, would remain a potential factor here. Which might aid or destroy them.

Let nothing surprise you,
he warned himself. The immediate range of choice was very narrow. If the compartment walls didn't hold, they had to leave the ship. If the walls held, they'd remain here, at emergency readiness, until Goth awoke. But the Agandar's frustrated fury would matter no more than his monster then, unless Yango's attention turned on the strongbox in the vault. No telling what might happen ... but that was borrowing trouble! Another factor, in any case, was that while Goth remained unconscious, Yango would want her to stay alive. All the pirate's hopes were based on that now. It should limit his actions to some extent...

"Skipper?" Vezzarn muttered, hunched over the analyzers.

"Yes? "

Vezzarn looked up, chewing his lip. "Looks like we could live down there a while," he announced grudgingly. "But these things don't tell you everything--"

"No." The
Venture
wasn't equipped with an exploration ship's minutely detailing analysis instruments. Nevertheless, there'd been a sudden note of hope in Vezzarn's voice. "You're sure you're coming along if we have to get out?" the captain asked.

The spacer gave him a wry, half-ashamed grin. "You can count on me, sir! Panicked a moment, I guess."

The captain slid open the desk drawer. "Here's your gun then," he said. "Yours, too, Miss do Eldel. Yango collected them and I took them back from him."

They almost pounced on the weapons. Hulik broke her gun open, gave a sharp exclamation of dismay.

"Zero charge! That devil cleaned them out!"

The captain was taking a box from the drawer. "So he did," he said. "But he didn't find my spare pellets. Standard Empire military charge; hope you can use them!"

They could, and promptly replenished their guns. The captain looked at the console chronometer. Just over nine minutes since he'd broken intercom contact with Yango. The lack of any indication of what the pirate was doing hadn't helped anybody's nerves here; but at least he hadn't got out of the storage compartment yet. The captain set Vezzarn to detaching and gathering up various articles, keys and firing switches to the nova gun turrets, the main control release to the lifeboat blister, the keys to the main and orbital drives...

There were mountains just below now, and the shallow bowls of plains. The dull red furnace glare of the giant sun bathed the world in tinted twilight. The
Venture
continued to spiral down towards a maze of narrow valleys and gorges winding back into the mountains...

They flinched together as the intercom hurled the sounds of a hard metallic crashing into the control room. It was repeated a few seconds later.

"Compartment D!" whispered Hulik, nodding at the intercom panel. "They're through the first wall--"

A dim, heavy snarling came from the intercom, then a blurred impression of Yango's voice. Both faded again.

"Shut them off," the captain said quietly. "We're through listening." Eleven and a half minutes ... and it might have been a minute or so before Yango set the Assassin to work on the wall.

Hulik switched off the intercom system, said, a little breathlessly, "If Yango realizes we've landed… "

"I'm going to try to keep him from realizing it," the captain told her. The ship was racing down smoothly towards the mouth of a steep-walled valley he'd selected as the most promising landing point barely a minute before.

"But if he does," Hulik said, "and orders the robot to beam a hole directly through the side of the ship, how long would it be before they could get outside that way?"

Vezzarn interjected, without looking up from his work, "About an hour. Don't worry about that, Miss do Eldel! He won't try the cargo lock or blister either. He knows ships and knows they're as tough as the rest of it and can't be opened except from the desk. He'll keep coming to the control room, and he'll be here fast enough!"

"We've got up to thirty minutes," the captain said. "And we can be out in three if we don't waste time! You're finished, Vezzarn?"

"Yes. "

"Wrap it up, don't bother to be neat! Any kind of package I can shove into my pocket--"

The red sun vanished abruptly as the
Venture
settled into the valley. On their right was a great sloping cliff face, ragged with crumbling rock, following the turn of the valley into the mountains. The captain brought the ship down on her underdrives, landed without a jar on a reasonably level piece of ground, as near the cliffs as he'd been able to get. Beside him, Hulik gave a small gasp as the control section lock opened with two hard metallic clicks.

"Out as fast as you can get out!" The captain stood up, twisted the last set of drive keys from their sockets, dropped them into his jacket pocket, jammed the package Vezzarn was holding out to him in on top of them, zipped the pocket shut, and started over to the couch to pick up Goth.
"Move!"

Faces looked rather pale all around, including, he suspected, his own. But everybody was moving...

THE CAPTAIN used the ground-level mechanism to close the lock behind them, sealed the mechanism, and added the key to the seal to the assortment of minor gadgetry in his jacket pocket. Then, while Hulik stood looking about the valley, her gun in her hand, he got Goth up on his back and Vezzarn deftly roped her into position there, legs fastened about the captain's waist, arms around his neck. It wasn't too awkward an arrangement and, in any case, the best arrangement they could make. Goth wasn't limp, seemed at moments more than half-awake; there were numerous drowsy grumblings, and before Vezzarn had finished she was definitely hanging on of her own.

"Been thinking, skipper," Vezzarn said quietly, fingers flying, testing slack, tightening knots. "He ought to be able to spot us in the screens--"

"Uh-huh. Off and on. But I doubt he'll waste time with that."

"Eh? Yes, a killer robot'd be a good tracking machine, wouldn't it?" Vezzarn said glumly. "You want to pull Yango away from the ship, then angle back to it?"

"That's the idea."

"Desperate business!" muttered Vezzarn. "But I guess it's a desperate spot. And he wants Dani. I never'd have figured her for one of the Wisdoms!. . . There! Finished, sir! She'll be all right now--"

As he stepped back, Hulik said in a low, startled voice, "Captain!" They turned towards her quickly and edgily. She was staring up the valley between the crowding mountain slopes.

"I thought I saw something move," she said. "I'm not sure..."

"Animal?" asked Vezzarn.

"No... Bigger. Farther away ... A shadow. A puff of dust. If there were a wind--" She shook her head.

The air was still. No large shadows moved anywhere they looked. This land was less barren than it had appeared from even a few miles up. The dry, sandy soil was cluttered with rock debris; and from among the rocks sprouted growth, spiky, thorny, feathery stuff, clustering into thickets here and there, never rising to more than fifteen or twenty feet. "Let's go!" said the captain. "There probably are animals around. We'll keep our eyes open--"

As they headed towards the ragged cliffs to the right of the ship, the valley's animal life promptly began to give indications of its presence. What type of life it might be wasn't easy to determine. Small things skittered out of their path with shadowy quickness. Then, from a thicket they were passing, there burst a sound like the hissing of ten thousand serpents, so immediately menacing that they spun together to face it, guns leveled. The hissing didn't abate but drew back through the thicket, away from them, and on to the left. The uncanny thing was that though their ears told them the sound was receding across open ground, towards the center of the valley, they could not see a trace of the creature producing it.

They hurried on, rather shaken by the encounter. Though it might have been, the captain thought, nothing more ominous than the equivalent of a great swarm of harmless insects. A minute or two later Hulik said sharply, "Something's watching us!"

They could see only the eyes. Two brightly luminous yellow eyes peering across the top of a boulder at them. The boulder wasn't too large; the creature hidden back of it couldn't be more than about half-human size. It made a high giggling noise behind them after they were past. Other sets of the same sort of eyes began peering at them from around or above other boulders. They seemed to be moving through quite a community of these creatures. But they did nothing but stare at the intruders as they went by, then giggle thinly among themselves.

The ground grew steeper rapidly. Goth's weight wasn't significant; the captain had carried knapsacks a good deal heavier in mountaineering sport and during his period of military training. His lungs began to labor a little; then he had his second wind and knew he was good for a long haul at this clip before he'd begin to tire. Vezzarn and Hulik were keeping up with no apparent effort. Hulik, for all her slender elegance, moved with an easy sureness which indicated she was remarkably quick and strong, and Vezzarn scrambled along with them like an agile, tough little monkey.

The ground leveled out. They waded through low tangled growth which caught at their ankles, abruptly found a steep ravine before them, running parallel to the cliffs. Beyond it was a higher rocky rise.