Now they both heard a high yammering cry that had been torn from no off-world throat—a Nitra in trouble? Yet surely the native would be busy among the horses racing from the blazing corral. The thornbush fire lit up a whole scene as men ran across the area around it, covering the ground in zigzag advance patterns that told Storm all he needed to know about their past activities. Those were troops who had known action, snapping into defense positions with veterans’ ease and speed.
Then a light that swallowed up the glow of the fire snapped on—to make a sweeping path reaching almost to the ship. The beam moved, catching and centering on running horses. And did one of those have a figure crouched low on its back? Storm was not sure, but the mount he thought suspicious did dodge out of the line of the light with almost intelligent direction.
Again the light tried to catch the horses, but this time they were not so closely bunched, spreading out—two or three taking the lead by lengths from the others.
There was a crack of sky-splitting thunder and purple fire lashed up from the sod to the far left. Storm’s teeth clicked together, he was on his feet, Surra pressed tight against his thigh, snarling in red rage. That was not new either, they had both seen that whip of destruction in action before, lashing out to herd fugitives, only that time the fugitives had not been horses! Gorgol! If he could only call the Norbie back to safety. This was no time to try to catch one of those maddened animals, not with someone using a force beam so expertly. And the native knew nothing of Xik weapons or their great range.
The Terran went down on one knee. He was loath to risk Surra, but he must give Gorgol a chance. With his hands resting lightly on the dune cat’s shoulders, his thumbs touching the bases of her large sensitive ears, Storm thought his order. Find the Norbie—bring him back—
Surra growled deep in her throat and the force beam struck again—this time to the right. Their safety would depend on how far the operator could revolve his beam base, or the full extent of its power. A skillful gunner made force lashing an art and Storm had seen incredible displays on Xik-held worlds.
The cat strained a little against his touch. She had her briefing and was ready to go. Storm lifted his hands and Surra disappeared into the high grass. The air tickled his throat, carrying with it the stench of burning where that man-made lightning had left only scorched earth, black and bare.
Now the first of the horses ran past him—another, a third. He could see them only as moving shadows. Let them pound on at that mad pace into the frawn herd and they would start a real stampede. If only Surra could get Gorgol back—!
Again the power beam slapped the earth, making eyes ache with its burst of force. Horses wheeled, ran back from that horror—but the three leaders had gotten through. And had one of them carried a rider? Gorgol—Where was the Norbie—and Surra? To be caught out there was to be in peril not only from the crack of the lightning flash, but also from the horses now racing in a mad frenzy. There was no possible hope of capturing any one of them.
Storm set himself to watch the play of the beam, trying to judge the farthest extent of its reach. Unless the operator was purposely keeping it keyed to a low frequency, it did not touch near the ship, nor hit the terraced slopes behind the Terran. If the Norbie would only return, they could climb to safety. Storm, as resourceful as he was, had a very healthy respect for the weapons of the enemy.
The slaps of the beam were coming closer together, cutting in a regular fan pattern from their source. It would appear that the operator of the machine was now under orders to work over the whole meadowland between the western wall of the mountain and the ship. The Terran’s hands jerked toward his ears as the terrible tortured scream of an animal in dire pain answered one flash. They must be deliberately cutting down the horses! The use of the lash had not been just to stop their getaway!
Were the Xiks sacrificing their own animals to get any Norbies who might be trying to round up the runaways? That form of sadistic revenge went well with the character of the enemy as he knew it. Storm fought down his wave of rage, made himself stand and watch that slaughter, adding it to the already huge score he had long ago marked up against the breed of alien men out there, if you could even deem them “men.”
Horses continued to die and Storm could not control the shudders that answered each agonized cry from the meadow. Surra! Surra and Gorgol. He did not see how they could escape unless they already had won to the terraces.
Hing cried, digging her claws into his skin, her shivering body pressed tight to his chest. Then Storm jumped backward and—in a moment—felt immense relief when soft warm fur pressed against him and Surra’s rough tongue rasped his flesh. He fondled her ears in welcome and then caught out in the dark, his fingers scraping across yoris hide—Gorgol’s corselet.
The Norbie swung around, only a very dimly seen bulk, bringing his other side against the Terran. He was half-supporting another body, slighter, shorter than his own. Storm’s hand was on frawn skin fabric in rags, on flesh, on a belt like his. The rescued one was no tribesman, but someone in settler dress.
Storm located that other’s dangling arm and hitched it across his shoulder so that now Gorgol and he shared the weight between them. As they made their way onto the first terrace the limp stranger roused somewhat and tried to walk, though his stumbling progress was more of a hindrance than a help to his supporters.
They struggled up two terraces, pausing for breath at forced intervals. The clamor in the meadow was stilled now, though the force beam still beat methodically back and forth. Nothing lived there—it could not—yet it seemed the Xiks were not yet satisfied.
A third terrace, one more and they would be on a level with the pass. The stranger muttered, and once or twice moaned. Though he did not seem fully conscious and had never replied coherently to Storm’s questions, he was more steady on his feet and obeyed their handling docilely.
To climb the terraces and then to force one’s way along them was a difficult task. And had not the vegetation proved to be thinner near the upper rim of the valley they might have been held to a dangerously slow pace. The sky was gray when they reached the edge of the plateau where the dead yoris had lain. Surra glided back to give the alert. There was danger standing between them and the pass.
If he could be sure that only a Norbie opposed them, Storm would have given the big cat the order she wanted and let her clear the way. But an Xik outlaw armed with a slicer or some other of their ghastly array of weapons was more than the Terran would let her risk meeting. Storm signed caution to Gorgol to take to cover, working his way on to the pass alone.
Again Surra’s acute hearing had saved them. There was a guard stationed there right enough. And he had holed up, well protected in a rock niche, taking a position from which he could sweep the whole approach. There was no advancing until he was somehow picked out of that shell. Storm squatted behind a rock of his own and studied the field. It was plain to him now that the outlaws had been willing to sacrifice their horse herd to insure the death of someone. And a quick process of elimination suggested that that someone was the stranger Gorgol had rescued. He might even be the same man the Norbie had seen earlier in Xik hands, on the day they had accounted for the Survey party.
Doubtless every way out of the valley was now under guard. The next logical move for the enemy would be to start a careful combing of the terraces, driving their prey toward one of the known exits and so straight into the blaster sights of the men stationed there. It was a systematic arrangement that Storm, though it was used against him now, could approve as an example of good planning. But then the Xik forces could never be accused of stupidity.
Who was this stranger—that his recapture was of such great importance? Or was it a case like that of the murder of the Survey people—a killing ordered because no one who knew of this base could be allowed to escape? The why was not important now. What was important was that Storm and those with him win past this check point before that drive started down in the valley or befo
re the one man now ahead could be reinforced.
He had one good trick left. If it worked! Storm’s head went down until it rested on his crooked arm. He closed his eyes to the plateau. But he held in his mind the picture of the enemy guard in his rock post—making it as vivid as he could. Clinging to that image, the Terran drew upon that other sense he had never tried to name, launching a demanding call. Surra he was sure of. Hing could be controlled only by hand and voice, her sly mind touching his on the far edge of the band that united the team. But Baku—now he must reach the eagle. She would be up in the air at dawn, cruising for sight of him. If he could attract her by that unvoiced call—!
That tenuous thing that he could not rightly call power but which tied him to cat, eagle, and meerkats, centered now on that one purpose. For so long they had been united in their life and efforts that surely the bond had been strengthened until he could rely upon it now for the only help that would mean anything to them. Baku—come in, Baku! Storm sent that strong soundless call up into the gray-mauve sky, a sky he did not see except as a place that might hold a wheeling black eagle.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
B
aku—Storm’s will became a cord—a noose tossed high in the lighting heavens to find and draw down that wide-winged shape. Once before, more than a Terran year earlier, he had summoned the great eagle to a similar task and she had obeyed, with all the power in her fearless body and those raking talons. Now—could he do it again?
Surra crowded against him, he could feel through fur and flesh the tension of the cat’s nervous body, as if she had joined her untamed will to his, strengthening his calling. Then the dune cat growled, so almost noiselessly that Storm felt rather than rightly heard that warning.
The Terran raised his head from his arm, opened his eyes to the morning sky. It seemed to him that he had been using his will for hours, but the space of time could not have been more than a few moments. The Xik guard was still there, still half-crouched by one of the rocks he had chosen for his improvised fort, staring downs-lope, slightly to Storm’s left.
“Ahuuuuuuu!” That cry might have been a scream from the furred throat of one of Surra’s large kin. Once it had been the war shout of a desert people, now it summoned the team to battle.
The strike of a falcon or eagle is a magnificent piece of precision flying. It is also one of the most deadly attacks in the world. The guard at the pass could have had a second of apprehension, but only a second, before those talons closed in his flesh, the beak tore at his eyes, and the wings beat him close to senselessness.
Storm sped from one side, Surra from the other. The attack was all over in moments. And the Terran stripped from the other’s body those weapons that would go a long way to insure the safety of his own party. Then he dragged the body of the guard along to thrust it into a crevice where it would lie hidden unless there were a detailed search. No man would now recognize the badly torn features, but Storm did not need to see that faintly green skin, the welling blood that was a different color from his own, to identify the species of the dead man. The Xiks were humanoid—perhaps more so in appearance than the Norbies, setting aside such small differences as color of skin and texture of hair. But there was a kinship of feeling between the horned and hairless Norbies and the Terran-descended settlers, which could never exist between man and Xik. So far no common meeting ground with the ruthless invaders had been discovered, in spite of patient search. And though they could and did mouth each other’s speech understandably, there was no communication between his species and the Xiks that reached below surface exchange of information. Dramatically opposed aims drove the two peoples. Failure upon disastrous failure had followed every contact between them.
The Terran could not control his instinctive aversion as he dragged the body into hiding—and that feeling was far more than his dread of touching the dead—just as he could not and had not tried to smother the rage that ate into him the night before when he had been forced to witness the cold-blooded torture slaying of the horses. There was no understanding the invader mind. One could only guess at the twisted motives that drove them to do the things they did. The destruction of Terra had been one result of their kind of warfare—and perhaps it was just as useless as the continued carnage in the meadow below, for spread throughout the galaxy in numberless colonies the Terran breed had survived the destruction of their first home, while here the prisoner the Xik had thought to catch in the power net was now also on his way to safety.
Gorgol had only been waiting to have their path cleared. Already he was moving at the best pace he could force his charge to maintain across the plateau to the pass itself. The Norbie’s greater height was pulled to one side as he supported the wavering stranger. And Storm, having set Surra and Baku to scout duty and having slung the plundered blaster over his shoulder, hurried to lend a hand.
In the increasing daylight it was easy to see that the rescued man had been brutally handled. But not as badly as some captives Storm had helped to release from Xik prison camps. And the very fact that he was able to keep on his feet at all was in his favor. But when Storm came up to steady the shuffling body, Gorgol allowed the full support to shift to the Terran. He had pulled his wounded arm out of its sling, and now he signed swiftly:
“Horses—free—on the side trail. We shall need them—I bring—”
Before Storm could protest he sped away. They could use the mounts right enough. But the sooner they were safe out of this sinister valley, the better. And goodness only knew how far the beaters in that drive for the fugitive had advanced below. The Terran kept on through the pass, staggering a little under the lurching weight of the stranger.
Surra he stationed in the pass. If Gorgol did flush horses up that narrow trail, she would help to herd them in. The big cat was tiring, but she was able to do sentry duty awhile, while Baku would provide them with eyes overhead. Hing scampered along before them, pausing now and then to turn over some flat stone and nose out an interesting find.
A band of aching muscles began to tighten about Storm’s legs, his breath came in short, hard gulps that ended in a sharp stitch in his side. Must be out of condition, he thought impatiently—too long at the Center. He tried to plan ahead. Their camp on the gravel bar was too exposed—and they could not push the stranger too far into exhaustion, even if Gorgol did produce horses to ride. That meant they must discover a hiding place down in the flooded valley.
Storm knew of only one, much as he disliked it, the cave into which Rain had blundered during the cloudburst. That lay to the east of the pass they now threaded, perhaps a mile from the gravel bed. Surely the water had fallen well below its entrance now. Water—Storm ran a dry tongue over drier lips and turned his thoughts resolutely from the subject of water.
There would be no time to rest in the camp—just gather together their few supplies and mount the stranger on Rain, then get moving at once. And now Gorgol’s try for horses no longer seemed so reckless. If successful, it would make very good sense. That is—if the poor brutes hadn’t been run until they were almost foundered. Mounts could mean the difference between disaster and safety for the fugitives.
“You’re—not—Norbie—” Though the words came in slow pauses from those cut and battered lips, they startled Storm. He had been unconsciously considering his companion as so much baggage that had to be supported and tended, but that had no individual will. To be addressed intelligently by the stranger surprised him.
The face half-turned to his was a mass of cuts and bruises, so well painted with dried blood that it was hard to guess at the fellow’s normal features. Nor did Storm realize that his own attempt at camouflage war paint did almost as well to make him equally a mystery.
“Terran—” He replied with the truth and heard a little gasp from the other, which might have been in answer to that statement or because the stranger stumbled and slapped one dangling hand inadvertently against an outcrop.
“You—know—who—they—are—?”
r /> Storm needed no better identification for that “they.” “Xiks!” he returned tersely, using the very unflattering service term for the invaders.
The explosive sound of that word was echoed by the walls of the pass, but above it sounded the pounding of hoofs. Since Surra had given no warning, Gorgol must have been successful. Storm drew the stranger back against the wall and waited.
It would have taken an expert horseman to see any value in the three animals that picked their way down the slope, their heads hanging, the marks of dried foam on them, their eyes glazed. None could be called upon for any great effort now, save that of keeping on its feet and moving. But Gorgol strode after them, the ivory of his horns glowing in the growing light of the morning as he held his head high in this small triumph. He clapped his hands together, the small report loud enough to turn the weary shuffle of his charges into a limited trot. Then leaving them to drift on downslope to the outer valley, he came to help Storm with his charge.
“You have had good hunting!” the Terran congratulated him.
“No time—or hunting—would have been better. The Butchers are foolish—few horses are left to them now—but still they do not try to round them up—” Gorgol replied before he used his hands for the purpose of aiding the injured man.
With the Norbie to take half the burden, the three covered the rest of the distance to the floor of the valley in better time. The horses, too exhausted to graze, stood with drooping heads, while Rain cantered up, full of interest, to inspect the newcomers. Beside the overdriven trio the stallion was a fine sight as he stood, pawing at the sod with one forehoof, the wind pulling at his red mane and forelock.