Starquest: Scourge of the Spaceways, page 30
Athos realized he was not seeing this with his eyes. His eyes were held, his mind was clouded. He was seeing this with his second sight, just as, long ago now, he had once seen the Shrine Maiden's Kirlian spirit-form walking like a ghost among the stars.
Athos drew and threw his spear before he was even aware that he was moving. The sound of his shout echoing from the icy canyon walls was his first awareness that he had shouted.
Arbogast the Spider reared up, hoisting his abdomen off the frozen river surface, and digging the claws of four or six of his legs into the ice. With his rear legs, whipping like angular flails, Arbogast seized Gutwound and Tisquantum, and tossed them to the left and right. The fur-cloaked men sailed through the air to land in heaped snowdrifts. Gutwound toppled to land on his face. Tisquantum somersaulted to land on his feet.
Athos slipped on a patch of icewater as he made his spear-cast. Nonetheless, the spear flew straight and true, but rebounded harmlessly from the shield of kinetic glass the Imperial Centurion had propped before him. The Spider, with the well-honed preservation instincts of his race, flinched back from the motion, and dropped out of sight. The Centurion Spider had taken the precaution of affixing two sentry guns to the spires of ice to either side of him, and his sudden retreat triggered them to open fire. Athos, meanwhile, unbalanced, slid on one foot a yard or two, and fell supine.
These guns were not true robots, and their brains were too simplistic to correct for every variable of marksmanship. The plasma bolt from the first gun flew high, rushing and roaring and white-hot, through the empty spot where Athos would have been, were he not falling to his rump. The second gun attempted to lead the target, overestimated, and blasted the ice in front of him, the spot he had not yet reached. Ice chunks, steam, and boiling water sprayed into the air before his feet. This steam cloud expanded suddenly in the sub-zero air, and the aiming beams of the sentry guns, not as sensitive as the eyesight of the Centurion Spider, swept back and forth, confused by this spreading cloud, and lost track of Athos.
The gunfire struck and had cracked the ice below. Now the ice opened like the trapdoor of a gallows. Down Athos fell.
Being flung into arctic water was like being struck from all sides by spiked clubs of numbness. Athos was blind for a moment, and ringing filled his ears. The shock made Athos' lungs gasp for air involuntarily. Water filled his mouth, throat and lungs, and he lost sensation in the middle of his body.
He fought back panic. Panic now meant death. He could not control the air-gasping ache in his lungs, so he kicked and scrambled, trying to drive his face upward against the coffin-lid of ice over his head, hoping for a trapped air pocket.
It was no use. The weight of gear and his sodden furs dragged him down. The heat fled his body with shocking, nightmarish rapidity, as if his nerves were being cut.
His next instinct was to rip off his mittens, and claw at the fur at his chest, trying to find the Deathmask of the Ancient Mariner. The dim thought in his dying brain was that it might be able to control his body puppet-like even while his nerves and muscles failed through cold-shock. His fingers were too numb. He could not feel nor find the mask nestled against his chest.
Yet he felt the claw-tips of the mask clamps tickling his chest, neck, ears, and the sides of his skull. The eerie myth-tech appliance, like a ghost crab from the land of the dead, was crawling out of its own accord from beneath his garb. It fitted itself, unasked, over his face.
This was the first and only time that the sensations of strange force-fields and unseen strands of energy reaching into and through the bones of his face to the brain beyond seemed welcome and wholesome.
The deathmask took control of his body. Athos ceased to hyperventilate. The mask expelled the water from his lungs in a sustained vomitous gush, and then clamped his mouth and nose shut. He wrestled the heavy skis, which were now broken, off his back and tossed them aside. He ripped off his furs, hoping the thermal fabric and coating of lard beneath would retain enough heat in his body over the next ten minutes, and allow his limbs to move.
A fiery red light issued from his body. The deathmask was projecting a holographic forcefield shaped like the plumed hat and scarlet coat of an old-fashioned pirate hunter. The illusionary clothing was woven of immaterial forces able to deflect a laser ray or negate a blaster bolt, but did nothing to keep him warm.
Now he could see. Around him were the jagged rocks of a lifeless river. The cold current was swift, and had carried him away from the hole through which he'd fallen. Now he was lodged amid the mud and slabs of the river bottom, motionless.
Thermal and sonar images filled his darkened brain. Heated water from upstream was laced with a dangerous level of radioactivity. No doubt this was discharge from the powerplant of the Malign Tower. Thanks to this heat, the frozen river here was unfrozen, leaving only a thin surface in place. It formed an effective natural deadfall and deathtrap for him.
But there were also mines down here: a scattering of thermal and kinetic detonators upstream and waiting for an unwary intruder to pass overhead. Athos was not surprised to see them: Similar mine fields had been downstream, less densely packed, and Arbogast had been picking a careful and circuitous route along the ice above, never getting within trigger range of these waiting explosives.
Athos kicked against the river bottom, rose, and struck the icy surface with his shoulder. Once and twice he struck. And the pain in his shoulder would have dazed him had not the deathmask, or perhaps it was the icewater, benumbed the sensation.
The ice was too thick. He was trapped, and out of air. There was no escape.
Unwilling to surrender, even when death seemed sure, Athos dove again. He brought out a second spear from his weapon harness, telescoped it to full length, and stabbed the anchor pin of one of the thermal detonators littering the river floor. Whirling, he drove the spear overhead, with the detonator riding the speartip. It ignited, and blasted a crack in the ice.
Here was air. Here was life.
Athos jammed himself, mask-first, into the narrow crack, and breathed. Even with the mythical supertechnology of the deathmask laboring mightily to keep his body from hypothermia, however, he had no time to spare. The spear haft was still in his hands, even though the spearhead had been blasted asunder by the detonation. Into the crack he thrust this as a crowbar, placed his feet against the ceiling of ice, and strained mightily.
With agonizing cracking and creaking the ice resisted.
Time stood still. It seemed to him then as if he had always been in freezing water, blood going cold, limbs going numb, strangled and smothered by endless, poisonous, radioactive black water.
Then the ice slab tilted and fell aside. Up through the hole Athos leaped, lithe as a salmon.
There was a legionnaire in armor standing just above this hole, peering down, as if curious about the noise. This was not the Spider who had being lying in wait, but a biped, a humanoid. From the shape of his helm, he might have been a Devonian.
Before the luckless wight knew what was happening, a sharp-fanged, metal-faced, one-eyed, lion-man in an outrageous costume of flying plumes and flapping coat hems rose out the water, glowing like fire in the night.
The man raised his rifle, but the apparition with superhuman strength and a nonhuman roar seized the stock and tore the weapon from his hands. Energy claws a cubit long suddenly jutted from the fists of the fiery figure to puncture the soldier's breastplate and ribcage.
The iron-faced pirate hunter hoisted the doomed man aloft, held him overhead for a moment, struggling and kicking, and threw him headlong into the hole in the ice, down into the black and freezing water. The river current snatched him away without a sound. Perhaps if the man were a Devonian, he would not drown, but instead die of severe wounds, hypothermia, or radiation poisoning.
Blaster bolts smashed against Athos' chest and wounded shoulder, throwing him from his feet. His forcefield coat turned the blasts, but the impact was like a kick from a mule. Athos on his belly scrambled behind the small protection offered by the upturned slab, no bigger than a table tilted on its side, standing upright next to the ice hole.
He stared at his hands a moment, distracted. The blast-rifle was in one hand. Claws jutted from the other, glowing and humming. He could have cut through the surface ice easily. Instead he had panicked.
"Fool!" he muttered. "Don't get yourself killed,"
"Wise advice!" he muttered back, looking up. "How is it to be done, praytell?"
Across the ice of the river were a dozen legionnaires, advancing, and firing as they came. Of course the Spider centurion had set a thorough trap, and had men standing by. The whole race was famous for setting thorough traps.
Athos rolled, stuck the muzzle of his captured rifle underwater, fired. One of the mines ignited and set off its neighbors, which set off theirs. With a muttering dragon-roar of smothered thunder, the ice on which the advancing troopers walked glowed red, shook, cracked, and flew upward, carrying the whole squad into the air. Shards of ice flew like shrapnel, puncturing any joints or masks hit, and the men collapsed amid broken ice and were swallowed by the icy water, pulled under by their armor. Only one man, whose helm sported the long antennae of an officer, a decurion, scrambled back from a tilting slab and saved himself from the water.
This man took cover behind an outcropping of rock, shouldered his blaster rifle, and opened fire. Athos ducked back behind an upturned slab of ice, and returned fire. Bolts rebounded and ricocheted from the ice, roaring and whining, hissing red like flickers of lightning in the still white canyon. Neither man could hit the other. But the ice slab protecting Athos cracked and groaned and cracked again, and started to drip and steam. This cover would not last long.
Athos did not see Gutwound or Tisquantum. He did scent a whiff of the malodorous blubber his men used for insulation. It issued from a crevasse halfway up the canyon wall. But in the night, seeking a target that emitted no heat sources, even the augmented eyes of the deathmask could not pick out a hominid form in hiding. Wherever they were, even if they saw him, they did not see Blackjack Rackstraw, Pirate Chief, but the Ancient Mariner, Pirate Killer. No help could come from them. Perhaps Arbogast could penetrate his disguise, but no self-interested Spider in the history of the galaxy risked life or limb for another being.
The decurion raised his gauntlet to his mask. "New enemy! A Nemean pirate-hunter! Close in on my position! Bring the skimmer! Will engage!"
Athos, even with his hearing augmented by the deathmask, could not hear the reply, but the decurion said, "Negative! Stay back! The mines are live! No ground troops!"
Athos heard the shriek of a snowskimmer from his left, before it rounded the corner. It was coming up from downstream. To his right, upstream, the ice was broken, and the mine fields were more thickly placed. There was also a web of half-unseen strands draped across the whole canyon. Some of the strand cables were connected to sentry guns. There was no retreat that way. Before him and behind loomed canyon walls. Climbing either would expose him to fire from the Malign Tower once he reached the top, and then to the patrols on the glacier surface above.
The decurion fired again, forcing Athos to crouch down behind his ever-shrinking slab of ice. The skimmer came into view in the near distance, zooming around from behind a crag. The driver had erected portable force-shields, narrow oblongs of shimmering transparency, across the prow of the skimmer.
Then Athos saw a crack in the canyon wall, which echolocation showed would lead into a deeper cave. It was quite nearby, and he could reach it before the skimmer brought its heavy cannon to bear, but he would be exposed to fire from the decurion.
Athos leaped to his feet with a roar, his weapon set to continuous fire, and he sprayed a stream of plasma bolts across the icy knoll of rock where the decurion had taken cover. The man ducked his head — this gave Athos a moment to dash for the cave mouth.
But the decurion now inched just the tip of his barrel into view, and activated an aiming beam behind his bayonet lug, like a submarine's periscope. He fired grenades, lobbing them high, so that they arched up from behind his covered position, toppled through the cold air, and landed at Athos' feet with a gush of blinding light and a shock of deafening thunder, spraying a globe of shards in each direction. Athos' holographic coat also boasted a webwork of counter-electronics and stealth gear meant to baffle aiming beams, so the grenades flew wide. Athos dropped, seeking cover, but then slid and landed in the freezing water once more. His rifle slid from his fingers, and was swallowed by icy blackness.
This time, he did not panic, but kicked, arrowing through the water to the river bank. He rose and bumped his head painfully against the ice. Here he swept his claws in a huge semicircle, back and forth, overhead, and pushed his way out of the crude manhole thus made in the thick ice. Up he rose. The cave mouth was just before him.
Blaster fire from the decurion rebounded from the ice wall to the left of the cave mouth. Athos ducked and dodged, but not swiftly enough: a blow to his back sent him sprawling, but his forcefield garment neutralized the bolt, shedding the heat and neutralizing the voltage, saving his life. More bolts landed to his left and right as he scrambled on hands and knees into the cave mouth. Athos had lost his rifle, and could not return fire.
The decurion fired one last grenade. Athos, with his energy claws, swatted it out of the air like a tennis player and tossed the buzzing, burning shell back toward the decurion, who swore a blistering space oath at the unlikely sight, and fell prone behind his jagged knoll of rock.
The skimmer, meanwhile, had closed the distance. As it slid to a halt, the gunner trained the bowchaser cannon at the cave mouth and opened fire. This gun was a magnetic rail accelerator, and it fired explosives, incendiaries, kinetic bolts or grapeshot in rapid mix. Unlike blaster cannons, railgun ammo was limited, so the loader tended to be sparing. So only a single gush of burning gelatin struck the cave mouth, followed by a hailstorm of bullets and pellets that pockmarked and chewed the ice wall, leaving fist-sized craters.
But the spectral figure of the glowing red pirate hunter vanished into the crack which formed the cave mouth in the canyon wall. Glints and gleams of his erubescent glow could be seen reflected from the icy threshold of the crack.
The decurion rose to his feet. The skimmer opened its landing claws and dug them into the icy surface underfoot, to steady the cannon for its next round of fire. The skimmer was able to hammer the cave mouth and the cave beyond, but only up to the first bend in the fissure. The cave itself ran back from the cavemouth at a sharp angle, and the cannon could not rake the interior. The gunner knew the pirate hunter was there, because the reflections off the cave wall of the pirate hunter's fiery coat were still visible.
The decurion, still swearing, leaped to his feet and sprinted toward the cave, firing his blaster rifle from the hip as he ran. The driver of the skimmer rose to his feet and called out, warning the decurion not to enter the cave. The warning went unheeded.
In he went. The driver drew his side arm, aimed toward the cave mouth, and, over the radio, took command of the two sentry guns, which also tilted on their mounts to cover the cave mouth. The gunner, meanwhile, ordered the loader to load hard shot, not explosives, in case a precise target needed to be hit.
There came commotion, the sound of struggle from inside the cave, an eerie scream. The gunner was tense. The driver was visibly shaken, and the aiming beam from his side arm twitched and wavered across the cave mouth.
Suddenly the iron-faced red-litten apparition appeared in the cave mouth, running oddly, his arms twisted in an unnatural fashion. The pirate hunter was screaming a strange battlecry, and he spun and slid preposterously as he rushed forth. Energy claws gleamed on his fist. A voice from the cave cried out, "He's killed the captain! O-open fire!"
The gunner struck the screaming red figure in the midsection. The hardshot was energy-neutral, and pierced the forcefield fabric easily, cutting the apparition in half. The pirate hunter collapsed in a spray of blood.
The gunner's scope showed no heat sources were present in the cave. It was true. Their officer was dead.
In rage, the gunner called to the loader, and then fired shot after shot into the target. The pirate hunter was coated with liquid flame and pierced with a hundred bullets.
In the midst of the flames, the glow from the coat flickered and went out. The image of hat and plumes were gone.
An explosive shell cracked the ice on which the severed body, now dismembered, was burning. The bits and pieces of severed corpse fell into the dark water, and the strong current carried them downstream, into a mine field. Additional explosions could be heard beneath the water, like a thunderstorm beyond a mountain.
The fire spread, and more of the river surface broke loose and began to float downstream. Open water, black and rapid, now separated the skimmer from the cave mouth. The gunner frowned at the radioactivity readings of his scanscope. Crossing the radioactive water was a bad idea. After a brief consultation, the driver lifted the landing gear, rose into the air, and the skimmer headed south.
Quiet came. All was black save for a few stars above, and scattered pools of incendiary gel burning near the cave mouth like funeral torches. All was silent, save for the muttering hiss of river water, now audible, as it lapped the rocky riverbanks.
Halfway up the icy slope above, what might have been mistaken for a lump in the snow raised its hooded head. This was Gutwound. The stink of his own sweat from exertion and fear mingled with the odor of the insulation lard coating his body beneath his parka. He wiped the snow from his facemask goggles and stared down at the black river, wondering what he had seen.
A tall, round shadow blotted out the stars above. The bulk of a Spider layered in furs was at the crest above him, pinecone eyes tilted his direction, or some of them. On a strap where head met abdomen, now hung the holsters and beltloops of the weapons and comm gear that had once belonged to the Imperial Centurion Spider. All the gear was well made and fitted to be held and used by Spider mandibles or leg-claws, but now it was spattered with Arachnid ichor and circulatory fluids.
