Star quest Page 9

  "But I can't walk on that goddamn ledge!"

  "Shh! We made allowances for that. We knew you were a poor, incompetent normal." He didn't say anything.

  She took a strong nylon cord-rope from her rucksack, tied one end through the bars, almost knocking him from his perilous perch. "Use your feet against the wall to keep from sliding down and burning your hands. And please do be quiet—if that isn't beyond your meager talents."

  He grabbed the rope, swung away from the building, wriggling around to face it on the first outward arc, planting his feet against the wall when he swung back. As easily as possible, he moved down. Swinging… Jumping…

  Swinging, jumping, swinging… A human spider… Mayna waited, watching him go. Her eyes glinted green in the starlight-… "Very good," a voice said below.

  For a moment, he froze, imaging gestapos below. But then his mind cleared itself and he recognized the voice as Babe's. He dropped the last few feet, letting the rope slap against the wall. He looked up. Mayna still waited on the ledge, looking somewhat like a great vampire woman nestled there in the shadows. But now she was turning very adeptly and moving along the narrow ledge toward the rainspout.

  "Here," Babe said, tugging urgently at his shirt. "The shrubs."

  They ran, Tohm crouching to match Babe's height, and made the shelter of the bushes without incident. They turned and watched Mayna creep easily down the building, using the rainspout very little. She swung gracefully, down, down, down… Hitting the earth, she bounced on the balls of her feet, rocking back and forth for a short moment. Then, bent almost in two, hugging the ground and nearly blending with it, she ran across the courtyard to where they waited.

  "C'mon," she said, moving behind the hedge that paralleled the street, taking the lead.

  Tohm followed her swinging hips, losing the dark form of her in the still darker night, recapturing sight of the vision when the lights of the street broke through gaps in the hedge and glimmered in her hair, trapped like fireflies in her silken cage. Babe brought up the rear, an unlighted cigar clamped between his teeth. They weaved along, skirting the rear of the House of Nubile Maidens, stopping suddenly at the edge of the main avenue.

  "What's the matter?" Tohm asked her as she peered into the street from their hiding place behind a number of garbage bins in the alleyway. "Listen."

  Then he heard it too. The faint slip-slap of boot heels on pavement, snapping out a rhythm. They hunched themselves down in the shadows, peeping through the crevice between wall and garbage bin. In moments, a cadre of Royal Romaghin Guards moved past, their colorful, plumed uniforms somehow out of place in the dark night streets. There were twenty of them, moving to positions along the city wall and at the city gate to change duties with guards already there. The officer would march these men from position to position, losing some and gaining the tired sentries coming off duty, eventually to return to the garrison at a slightly slower pace and a slightly more slipshod rhythm. It seemed to Tohm that the Romaghins were paranoid in the fear of the Muties. And ironic in that they were trying to keep Muties out of the capital by guarding the gate while said Muties were actually living in it—rather, under it.

  "We'll wait a few minutes before crossing the street," Mayna said.

  He put his mouth close to the delicate shell of her ear. "Listen, I want to thank you for saving my Me. This was a lot of trouble and danger to go through."

  She turned, smiling a smile that did not exactly indicate pleasure. The corners of her mouth were strained in their upturned mimicry of joy, her sharp teeth glittering brightly. "Hero Tohm, I would just as soon have left you rot there. But they would have tortured you before the hanging, trying to get information about us."

  "Torture?"

  "And they are good at it. We couldn't risk your spilling everything to them. We had to come and get you."

  He eased away from her glumly, and sat silently waiting.

  "Okay," she said at length. "One at a time across the street and into the alley over there. Run on tiptoes and don't make a lot of noise."

  She moved first, like a piece of airy fluff hardly touching the ground at all, totally silent. She gained the darkness at the mouth of the opposite alley, waved an arm for the next.

  The street was a broad, open plain with lights that seemed almost, at this moment of exposure, to be brighter than the sun at noon. But he ran anyway, trying not to bring his feet down too heavily, meeting with less success than he had hoped. He made the shadows in relative quiet, although not so easily as she had. Babe followed. He waddled rather than walked.

  "Ho! Stop there!" a voice called from up the street

  Babe doubled his efforts.

  Two Romaghin guards had turned the corner and were pursuing him.

  "Stop or be killed!"

  Mayna leaped into the open, crouching, a hand laser aimed down the avenue. Before the guards could even finish drawing their own, they were seething masses of bubbling flesh on the street. She, indeed, was a champion marksman.

  "Thanks," Babe wheezed, pounding into the alley, his belly shaking, his double chin bathed in sweat

  There was scattered shouting on the street and the clip-clip of boots on cement. Evidently, the soldiers had been off duty, reveling at some private orgy and had turned the corner just after Mayna had gunned down their two friends. Now they would be hunting. No one gunned down a Romaghin soldier on his own world—no one but a Mutie.

  "Hurry," Mayna said, disappearing into the darkness.

  They followed, trying to be as quiet as she, not succeeding. The faint echo of their steps was sure to attract the guards. And did.

  The walls along the alley glistened wetly as hand torches of low-beam lasers lit up the entranceway they had left, searched slowly, closer, closer, much closer. Tohm felt as well as saw, the light wash over him for an instant, then flick back and hold.

  "Haiti-There was a louder pounding of feet behind them. Tohm no longer tried to be quiet; he concentrated only on watching the catgirl's feet and matching her speed.

  She turned abruptly into a side alley. They were moving now into the slum areas of the city where not as many lights burned and the ways between buildings were twisted and crisscrossed into a maze they might be able to put to their advantage. The cobblestones beneath their feet were slimy with garbage tossed out through windows. The laser torch was no longer on them, but the voices were still close behind, several turns away. They turned again. Again.

  Mayna pulled to a stop and stood panting. Tohm was surprised and pleased to see that this seemingly indefatigable creature was registering exhaustion. Almost as much as he was.

  "Look," she said, "these alleys to the right all connect with the Avenue of Beggars. The wall between the Avenue of Beggars and the next street isn't high. If we climb it, it is only a block to the alley and the entrance to the hutch."

  "No," Tohm said flatly.

  "What do you mean?" she almost snarled.

  "No. All of those alleys do not connect with the Avenue of Beggars. If you want to get there, we go straight ahead, not right. You've lost your sense of direction."

  "You're insane. Follow me."

  He grabbed her shoulder. "Okay, so you hate to be proven wrong—especially by me. But, remember, I have a memorized street map in my head."

  Footsteps and voices were growing louder.

  Somewhere an owl moaned as the search disturbed his home…

  "Babe, who do you stick with?" she asked, facing the boy-man.

  He looked at Tohm, back to her. He was thinking of her fast action and good shot that had saved his life hack there. "You, I guess."

  "Hell," Tohm moaned.

  "Either go with us or go on your own."

  "Lead on, lady," he said.

  She turned into a corridor between two buildings that had been roofed over for weather protection. It was pitch-black. They moved carefully but steadily, now and then aware of the soft bodies of rats bumping against their legs in an attempt to get out of their wa
y. There was an odor of sewage and of rotting food scraps. Vapors of animal wastes and the unpleasant perfumes of garbage-suckling plants lay over all, smothering.

  When they left that and ran into the next street, they were directly in front of the garrison on Royal Guard Avenue.

  "I—" she started to say.

  A laser blast smashed into the bricks just above their heads, sent orange powder cascading over their shoulders.

  A second blast slightly lower…

  "Now will you follow me?" Tohm roared.

  That had been a hard way to prove a point, but he was gloating.

  Her face showed confusion, the first time he had seen it there, twisting those beautiful features into something approaching agony.

  Sssang! A third shot.

  Babe screamed.

  They turned, saw the black scar across the arm and the blood beginning to bubble out. Babe twisted his face in pain, clutched at the wound.

  "This way," Tohm said, grabbing both of them and turning back into the covered lane. He ran first, Babe between, Mayna bringing up the end. They broke into the alley they had just left seconds before, confronting the guards who had first chased them.

  Tohm launched himself at the largest, a muscular man in the red plumes, gold cape, and gray pantaloons of an officer. They crashed into the stone street, the officer's head striking the wall of the building. Mayna turned a second guard's head to mush, whirled and burned the legs from a third, who didn't even have time to scream. Tohm smashed a fist into the officer's face, saw blood, was nauseated and excited at the same moment. His stomach flopped, and for an instant he hesitated as the conservative side of him momentarily dominated the sadistic. The other man took advantage of the lull, heaved, twisted loose, kicked out with a foot that caught Tohm in the chest, tossed him against the wall. Mayna had turned, fanning the beam into the covered alleyway, interfering with any approach from the garrison.

  "Oof," Tohm moaned as the larger man leaped and landed on him. He grunted as the heavy arm of the Romaghin pressed against his throat, cutting the air off, crushing his vocal cords. Only his left arm was free. He brought the edge of that palm down hard against the officer's skull, lowered his aim to the back of the neck, slammed down again, again. His throat was trickling blood on the inside, and his head was looping the loop with wild abandon, his eyes swimming out of focus, in, out, in-out, inoutinoutinout. His karate hand was a separate object. It did not seem to be part of him any longer, but merely a thing. Distantly, he saw it hack at the flesh of his opponent. Smashing. Again. Suddenly there was a crunching noise of cartilage or bone giving way to pressure. For a moment, he was not sure whether it was his own throat or the other man's spine. But the inrush of fresh air and the dead weight upon him told him which. He wriggled loose of the Romaghin, managed to stand, swaying.

  "They've stopped trying to come this way," Mayna said, motioning to the covered alley. "But they'll be hunting new routes."

  "How's your arm?" Tohm asked Babe.

  The Mutie gritted his teeth. "Hurts like Hell, but it isn't bleeding much. The burn cauterized the wound, closed up the main gash."

  "Good," Tohm said, his throat sore, his lungs grasping at the air as if it were gold and they were the hands of Midas. "Now," he said, turning to Mayna, "follow me."

  They moved straight forward, listening uneasily to the voices of soldiers on both sides as the guards searched the maze of streets and semi-streets, alleys and walkways. Eventually they came to the end of the slum system that the Romaghins so cleverly hid in the heart of the city behind a facade of new buildings and looked out upon the Avenue of the Beggars. It was deserted at this late hour, littered with the paper scraps and food bits that were the remnants of the day, when the poor had clustered there to meet the clergymen who daily distributed alms. Tohm pulled his head back into the gloom.

  "One trouble," he said.

  "What?"

  "A guard. Halfway up the block. He can survey most of the street. He'll see us before we make the wall"

  "I lost my laser running," she said. "It's back there somewhere."

  "We won't need it if you're game," he answered, searching out the green glint of her eyes.

  "What do you mean?"

  "There is a ledge, much like the one at the prison-only wider—running a dozen feet above his head. If you can climb the wall in here, move around the corner and onto the ledge out there without being seen, you could get above him. Perhaps you could jump, knock him down, confuse him until I can get there without being beamed down. I'll run the moment you jump. I'll try to knock him out."

  She looked around the corner, surveyed the guard and the ledge. It was as he had said. Without comment, she scaled the wall of the alley like a spider spewing her invisible net, her feet finding every crack a good toehold, moving unfailingly ahead. She inched around from the ceiling into the street and held her breath. The guard had not seen her, for his peripheral vision was occupied in the scanning of the street, not the walls. He stood fifty feet away, his rifle across his arms. She gained the ledge and moved silently down, balanced perfectly, her tiny feet like gyroscopes, trembling but always on an even keel.

  Tohm tensed himself to dash the second she leaped. He would have to move quickly.

  In a few minutes of nerve-shattering tension, she was standing above the guard; aphonic, she left the little outcropping of cement as if she were flying instead of falling. She collided with the Romaghin's back, her feet striking first, toppling both of them to the street.

  Tohm ran from his concealment His legs pumped up and down like pistons. But when he got there, there was nothing to do. The guard was dead. Neat rows of claw marks slashed his neck. Blood gurgled out. His eyes were open, staring in bewilderment. There had not been time for a scream.

  He looked up at her.

  "Let's get moving," she said, not returning the stare.

  Babe came from the shadows. Mayna and Tohm topped the wall first, then reached down and lifted the smaller Mutie. From there, the alley and the grating was a very short step. There were no guards around those streets yet. They ran freely, more anxious for speed than secrecy. They gained the grille and the warm cushion of air without incident.

  When they reached the hutch, Corgi rushed to greet them, his eyes flashing with all shades of yellow in riotous waves. "We leave in three hours. The Romaghins have caught on to our attack date. The pressure is on. They might invade Federation worlds to kill us. The Old Man will be here to move us out in exactly three hours."

  PART : TWO

  "NEW DESTINIES, NEW DESIRES"

  Chapter Thirteen

  They were flushed with the heat of love…

  Lying naked on their grass mat in the cool darkness of the hut…

  He rolled over to kiss the lips that he knew to be street and soft and warm…

  And she had no face …

  It had not been torn off, ripped bloodily away in rage, but had simply faded out of existence. "Tarni—" He began to say. But her name was slipping away too, dissolving from his memory…

  He strained to remember the face … As if, by sheer power of the will, he could undo whatever the gods had done to their relationship…

  For a moment, a mouth appeared with a greedy tongue. But that was worse than the blankness—that one, grotesque feature on the barren plain of the face. He stopped frying to remember. He simply ran . . .

  He ran from the hut, weeping…

  He ran through the coolness of the night with the stars overhead…

  He ran with the booming of the surf in the distance…

  He ran beneath the moons, wishing he could howl…

  He ran through the bushes of amber leaves…

  He ran through orange flowers, stopping suddenly to listen to something. What? What was it? What had he heard?

  A hissing. An animal hissing in the bushes nearby…

  "All right," someone said, shaking his shoulder. "No more time for naps."

  He pushed himself off
the couch, wobbling as he stood.

  "We meet the Old Man in forty minutes on the edge of town. There is a passageway through the caves that will take us under the city wall." Corgi's eyes were still flushing with brilliant color. He was excited about the swift culmination of all their years of work, the finish line of their centuries-long race.

  Tohm stretched, blinked the last traces of sleep from his eyes. "I'm anxious to meet this Old Man of yours."

  "Quite a person, quite a person. Come along now. We mustn't be late."

  They entered the caves where he had first heard Mayna singing, where her hatred for him had bloomed, mushroomed into sight for a few short moments. She hadn't spoken a word to him since they had entered the hutch after escaping the Romaghin guards. She was perturbed, he was sure, by the fact that it had been her fault that Babe now wore his arm in a sling and had it patched with heavy heal-and-flex bandages. Corgi and Mayna took the lead, Fish guiding the Seer next, and Babe and himself with Hunk on his shoulder bringing up the rear. Moving past the lake, skirting its shores, they snaked downward for a time through phosphorescent corridors, then turned upward and finally struck out in a straight tunnel with no nonsense to it, Tohm estimated ten or twenty feet to the surface, perhaps as much as thirty.

  The weight of Hunk was already burdening him down, sending throbbing pains through his shoulder. There was no flybelt now to support them, and he was taking all of the Mutie's weight himself with no help from the limited de-grav and propeller plates in the magic waistband.

  "Not much farther," Hunk said, sensing his discomfort.

  "I can't believe it," Babe said, puffing away on his tobacco cylinder. "I can't believe we're finally ready for the big show."

  "I wish," Tohm said, "I understood what this big show is all about."