The Queen of Space, page 14
“Thank—thank God you found me!”
She couldn’t tell him she had lost the trail.
21
Wrapped in whirling snow, all she could see was the blaze of her lights against it and, sometimes, a narrow fan of white-drifted hollows and hummocks ahead. The wind had filled the shallow roller prints.
When she groped to find herself, the whole snowscape seemed to tip and spin. Bottomless hollows and looming ice hummocks leered at her, all alike. She stopped the machine to watch the driving snow, hoping for a clue in the wind direction, but the great flakes seemed to swirl from everywhere.
She made herself glance at her father. He had collapsed into the far corner of the seat, perhaps asleep. His scab-rimmed eyes were closed, but his mouth yawned wide on the broken teeth, streaks of foam and blood drying on his beard.
Sick from his reek, she felt sicker from her lost orientation. Sicker than she had been on that first bad morning on Alpha III. She groped for her pilot sense, found only giddiness. A cruel irony struck her. The mutation, adapting the Gyrels for life in space, had unfitted them for planets.
Groping for anything, she drove on to the crest of the next hummock and stopped there to search again for the trail. The dazzle of her lights against the driving snow still hid everything. She turned them out.
Darkness.
She waited to let her eyes adjust. Still there was only total blackness. The planet was moonless. If any starlight filtered through the clouds, it was too faint for her to see. She felt trapped in a suffocating dungeon.
A wave of panic paralyzed her. Her father’s drama, so dreadful she could hardly bear to think about it. The monster in him, soon to wake and kill him. The stakes so great, the odds so grim. Shivering, she thrust at the wheel. Any direction was better than none. Almost at random, she drove on across the crest and down the unbroken slope beyond.
Above the motor whine, she heard her father breathing. A croaking snore, interrupted with rattling moans. His mouth was gaping wider when she looked again, his swollen tongue protruding, black-splotched and bleeding. He lurched forward suddenly, screaming.
“Out!”
His bog-rot stench filled the cab again, so thick she couldn’t breathe. Chilled and shivering from a sudden sweat of illness, she saw him scrabbling at the door.
“Lock—” The thick-tongued gasping was hardly intelligible. “Whatever—don’t let me in!”
The cab door came open. Thrashing, shrieking, he plunged outside. The machine rolled on for a few more meters until she could stop and spin back. The lights picked him up, a flat little huddle in the snow.
She stopped again beside him.
“. . . back!” The motors quiet, she heard his quavering yell: “Lock the cab!”
She sat motionless.
“Save yourself!” A scarecrow moving, he jerked to his feet. “Get the warning—to anybody human—”
Icy air had rushed through the open door. It was clean to breathe, and a deep gulp of it roused her. Shuddering, she leaned to lock the door, backed a few meters away.
His ragged arms spread, waving her farther. He turned and tried to run. Limping, staggering, he fell on his face. For a moment he lay unmoving. Then his thin limbs jerked and began to flail the ice. Moving like nothing human, his body pitched and twisted.
Something black came out of it.
A swelling cloud. Like a wisp of smoke at first, it became blacker and denser than smoke had ever been. It grew larger than her machine, a monstrous blot swelling against the glare of her lights on flying snow.
It was alive. Its black shape flowed, and blackness darted out of it. Arrows of blackness probing into the night, thrusting at the ice, striking at the machine, stabbing at her.
She knew she should move farther away, but her hands were frozen on the wheel. Trembling, shaking her head in a hopeless effort not to believe what she saw, she watched that blackflashing cloud swell again, draw itself back into something denser, lift at last, leaving something on the ice.
Something very small, flat and torn and scarlet.
Shock left her shuddering and powerless. She tried to pull her gaze away. She knew she had to move. Yet she sat there, chilled and stunned, till she saw the black cloud stirring. Lifting, spinning, drifting after her. An arrow of blackness flashed into the cab.
Colder than cold, it went to her bones. It stopped her breathing. It left her skin tingling strangely, as if a million sticky insect limbs were crawling on her. Left a crimson afterimage blazing in her eyes. And it jolted her out of her daze.
She whirled the machine and fled.
Hoping to delay pursuit, she turned the lights off. In the heavy dark, the black thing vanished. Blind, she felt the machine pounding over frozen drifts, heard the skidding rollers screaming through ice-floored hollows. It jolted and careened, but no danger mattered.
Sheer panic swept her on and on, until she found herself sliding and pitching down a steep slope that seemed to have no end. When she reversed the rollers, it spun sidewise and finally stalled, half-buried in windblown snow. Afraid to use the lights, she waited there for day.
The icy night seemed endless.
Her father’s fate had left a burning wound in her mind, the facts too hideous to think about, yet too near and dreadful to forget. Huddled under the wheel, she tried to imagine what day might bring, tried to think what she could do.
Get back to Freeholm? Even that seemed barely possible. Larron had hidden his refuge well. Though the winds might die by dawn, the last traces of the trail would surely be gone. If by chance she did get back, would Larron let her transmit the warning? Not likely. Not since he had felt the mode of the goring bull.
Yet hope refused to die. She slapped her body to fight the creeping cold. Fumbling numbly, she found a knob that turned the heater up. Trying not to think of shadowflashers or her father, she let her body sag back into the seat.
Cold sunlight woke her.
The storm had stopped. Rubbing sticky eyes, she peered out of the cab, down into a purple chasm. Her blind flight had brought her back to the edge of the ice, almost over the rim of that awesome canyon she had first seen from space.
The machine had stalled in the last deep drift of snow blown off the ice. The boulder slope below her fell sharply to the giddy brink. With her little skill, she scarcely dared touch the wheel again. Yet day had come. She was alive. She saw no shadowflasher.
She found water bags and space rations behind the seat. Her appetite surprised her. Her first effort failed to move the machine, but it crept a little forward when she tried less power. She found that she could rock it, each lunge longer. Another skid took her breath, but at last it tipped back to level ice.
The canyon yawned just below, still night-clotted. Sunlight blazed all along its icy brink. Searching the ragged bends of that, she found a far-off, rust-red streak. Leatherweed, she thought, on the ledge outside hidden Freeholm.
Many kilometers from her, but there was no wind yet and the sun had brought direction back. She steered for where the descending trail must be. The ice sloped again, toward shelving sandstone. She found roller prints still visible, then the rocky path.
At its foot, Lord Archy met her.
“Greetings, Miss Three. May we guide you to Mr. Two?”
She followed his dancing bubble toward a leatherweed thicket. Diamondwall waddled out of it to meet her.
“Waiting for you, lass.” He hauled himself into the cab, blinking at her woefully. “Things have gone mortal wrong.”
“I saw my father.” Her voice shook. “Found him—it’s hard to speak about. He has been possessed by a horrible thing inside him. He said—said they have others. Spying on us. Betraying—”
She had to gasp for breath.
“Please—please believe me!”
“I believe you, lass.” He nodded bleakly. “I know the fearful truth.”
“Then you’ve got to call the Legion—”
“Too late, lass. Too mortal late!”
“I saw—saw my father die.” She shivered. “Saw the—the thing come out of him. A shadowflasher. Too dreadful to believe. If you had seen it, you’d take any risk. Even Larron would—”
“Lass, lass!” Blinking dismally, he shook his head. “You haven’t heard the mortal misfortune that happened to us here. As fearful as any shadowflasher.
“Last night the wicked drillers came.”
She sat listening blankly, stunned almost beyond understanding his wheezy rush of words.
“Drilled their way to us through the mortal rock. Crumbling granite into flour. Hit us with no warning. Took the reactors first, and left us dying in the mortal dark. Lord Archy and I were lucky. They caught us up in the blessed dome, and we got out alive.
“Larron, too, with a handful of his precious clones. All the rest buried alive or smothered in that mortal dust when the tunnels caved in.” He shuddered, squinting at her gloomily. “In the fearful end, they may be the lucky ones. Because I see no mortal hope for any of us.”
With a doleful headshake, he gestured toward a thin smoke plume rising a few hundred meters down the ledge.
“Larron and the clones he has left. Mostly mortal naked. Huddled over a smoldering blaze of dead leatherweed, trying to save themselves from freezing. Not a blessed bite to eat. Nor water either, unless they can climb for ice to melt.”
“We can help,” Jil said. “I found space rations and water bags in the locker back of the seat, and the craft will give them at least a little shelter. Let’s drive on—”
“Wait, lass!” He clutched at the wheel. “You don’t yet know the moral worst. I had Lord Archy climb to look for you. Two thousand meters up, he saw you coming back and found evil trouble brewing out across the icecap, where we left the blessed ship.
“A strange spacecraft, like he never saw before, down beside our silo.”
“The shadowflasher battlecraft!” she whispered. “The one my father came on. He said he’d managed to disable it when he broke free of the parasite. Smashed the navigation gear—”
“So that’s why!” He nodded. “Lord Archy says they’ve pulled our precious Hedonian out of the silo. He saw it taking off. Wobbling in the sky till they got the hang of the controls, but turning back this way now. He thinks they’re coming here. I don’t know why—the drillers left mortal little for anything to take.”
“I’m afraid—afraid I know!” She shivered. “There’s a flasher in it. Looking for hosts.”
“Hosts?” His old voice quavered high. “What are hosts?”
“Creatures—” Her own voice caught. “Creatures to breed its young.”
“Not me, lass! It can’t use me. I’m too mortal old to be trained.”
“It takes no training. They plant the eggs in your body, my father said. The monsters hatch and grow inside you, feeding on your flesh and taking your brain to work you like a puppet—”
“Don’t, lass! Don’t!” His voice became a squall. “For sweet life’s sake, conceal the blessed craft and pray they overlook us.”
She drove the machine into the thicket. Panting with terror and exertion, he helped her tear off leatherweed fronds to brush away the track it left and hide it from the sky. Watching from the icecraft through the tangle of bitter-scented leaves, they waited for the flashers.
22
Larron’s clones squatted around their smoldering fire. He came striding out of the thickets to join them, a bronze-beared patriarch, massive and commanding. Others followed, nude and shivering, limping under loads of long brown fronds.
When Diamondwall ran his window down for a better view, Jil caught the bitter pungence of burning leatherweed. The scent brought her girlhood back. Hawkshead Pass, and the sulphur-reek of the meteor storms, and the rank weeds her mother had tried to fight in her grandfather’s yard.
Her mother?
Cruel questions rose to haunt her. What had the plotters done to her mother? Had the parasite in Shon Macharn planted a shadowflasher egg in her? To ensure her loyalty to the “movement”? And turn her, finally, into that mindless shadow thing aboard the Purple Empress?
Jil shivered. The notion seemed too hideous to be true, yet she couldn’t shake it off. It explained too many things, and it turned her old resentments into aching pity and a haunting shame. If she had ever guessed—
Rem Brendish?
She recalled him as she had glimpsed him back on Alpha III, suspended in his null-G gear with her mother on the slidewalk, hovering over her like some monstrous insect. If her mother had been possessed, what was he? Another tortured tool, forced to compose his Antiac ballad as one more weapon in the secret war on the Legion?
She wondered. His sparrow body had not been ravished. Yet his deeds seemed hardly human. She found no answers. The parasites were far too horrible to think about, yet too near to be escaped. She pulled herself straighter in the seat, inhaling the leatherweed smoke. To her, it had always been exhilarating.
She looked at Larron, leaning to stir the fire with a long leatherweed bloom stalk. Standing back, he waved it like a wand. She heard the boom of his voice again, saw a nude and blood-streaked clone tossing her load of fronds into swirling smoke. Yellow flame flared again.
Even now, with his small world destroyed, he was still magnificent. She felt a throb of admiration, another twinge of regret for the way he had been humbled by the mode of the goring bull. . . .
Lord Archy bounded off Diamondwall’s pudgy knees.
“Information, Miss Three,” his bell voice rolled. “We detect the S.S. Hedonian. Descending to land.”
The bright-walled starship came down on the exploding cushion of its jets, too near Larron and his huddled clones. The hot white cloud roared over them. Suddenly silent, it spread and cooled and slowly rose. Looking where the fire had been, she found it blown away.
The clones were gone. It took her a moment to discover them, lying sprawled against the fringe of leatherweed where that reckless blast had flung them. Only Larron remained erect, facing the tall starcraft, still gripping his blackened bloom stalk.
The lock clanged open. The gangway rattled out. Jil’s flesh crawled when she saw the shadowflasher flowing out. A shapeless cloud of total darkness, it swelled as it emerged, lifting, drifting toward Larron.
He strode to meet it, boldly swinging his brittle club. Jil’s eyes blurred, and she felt a sudden ache in her throat. Even now, facing hazards more dreadful than any he had created on the sensorion, he was still the mythic giant.
Unbeatable, he marched to meet the cloud.
Thin beams of total blackness arrowed out of it. At the motionless clones. At the leatherweed clumps and the tall, yellow sandstone cliffs. At Larron himself. She saw him stagger, recover his balance, march defiantly on.
“Lord of worlds!” In sudden panic, Diamondwall ran his cab window up. “The mortal demon—”
Gasping terror hushed him.
She saw blackness lashing at them. Shivering to its chill, Jil heard Diamondwall moaning a warning not to move or breathe for life’s mortal sake. Frozen, they waited till the shadow blade was gone. Daring at last to move, she saw it stabbing into thickets farther on.
She looked again for Larron.
Whirling his slender club, he stalked to meet the cloud. It lifted a little, dropped back to swallow him. His voice rang out of it. A bellow of defiance that became a shriek of agony, choked abruptly off. The cloud rose slowly, floated back toward the starcraft. Larron was left where he had met it, lying face up on the bare sandstone.
But then a final flash of blackness stabbed him into a dreadful mockery of life. His body twitched, writhed. The limbs thrashed. The body rolled over. Awkwardly, it came up on all fours. It crawled back toward the clones. Clumsily, it rose. It stumbled on, gaining speed and precision as its new owner mastered it.
The shadowflasher was gone, back into the ship. At her still half-open window, Jil felt a breath of icy air, heavy with the steam of the jets and edged with that bog-rot stench. Shivering, stomach heaving, she shut the window.
The clones had begun stumbling to their feet, limping to meet Larron. One came to her knees and fell limply back. Still a slow and ungainly puppet, he bent to gather her into his arms, blundered with her toward the gangway. The others followed him into the starcraft.
She heard the clang of the closing lock. The cab trembled to the roaring of the jets. White vapor rushed across the rocky shelf, hiding everything. Thunder drummed inside the cloud, boomed against the cliff behind, slowly climbed and slowly died. When she could see, the ship was gone.
“Ah, lass!” Diamondwall sat trembling in the cab beside her, his moon face livid. “A fearful terror! I’ve met monstrous horrors in my time. Sights that would freeze your blessed brain. But none half so evil.
“Lass, we’ve lived too mortal long!”
Still feeling chilled and sick, Jil opened the window again to breathe clean air.
“Still,” she whispered, “we are alive.”
“If you want to call it life.” He blinked at her dismally. “Marooned on a mortal ice world. Hiding like miserable vermin from black vampires seeking to breed in our bodies while we die of fearful famine.”
“We do have cartons of food,” she reminded him. “Here in the back of the cab.”
“Food?” His plaintive quaver mocked her. “Mortal space rations, dried to bitter rocks and green with mortal mold. Without a drop of blessed wine to help them down.”
“We’ll search,” she said. “Perhaps we’ll find something better. But the first thing is to send my father’s warning on. By any means we can.” She looked at the instrument panel. “No tach system, but at least we have radio—”
“Radio!” A terrified squeak. “Lass, don’t speak of radio. Not with the black vampires still seeking our blessed bodies to incubate their mortal eggs and feed their fearful hatch. Don’t think of the mortal radio—”
“Mr. Diamondwall.” She caught his soft-fleshed arm. “The Legion needs what we know. If we’re going to die here, we’ve very little to lose.”
“Lass!” His small eyes rolled. “We have our blessed bodies and our own precious brains. Can you call that little?” He caught a raspy breath. “You should be grateful for the mortal truth. There’s nobody radio could reach.”
