Earthblood (30 page)

"So what? It won't cut chromalloy."

Sidis backed from the wall until the six foot chain attached to his wrist came taut.

"How much time you think we got, Cap'n?" he asked.

"They'll be along soon."

Sidis licked his lips. "Then I better get moving." He brought the machete up and with one terrific stroke severed his left hand.

They stood in a dark room, amid a jumble of piping and tanks.

"Smells like a derelict's bilge," Askor snorted.

"Dead end," Sidis grunted. His stump was bound in rags torn from Askor's shirt and there was a tourniquet around his massive upper arm. His face looked pale and damp.

Roan went to the center of the room, studying the floor. "Maybe not," he said.

Askor came up. There was a three-foot metal disk set in the floor, with a ring near its edge.

Roan gripped the ring and lifted the lid, exposing a dark hole and the rungs of a corroded ladder. Water glistened at the bottom.

The voices outside were suddenly louder. Askor stepped to the door, looked out. "Oh-oh! They're right on our tail . . ."

"I hope they get here quick," Sidis said. "I don't want to miss nothing."

"Do you feel well enough to travel?"

Sidis nodded. "Never better, Chief." He took a step, staggered, then stood firm.

"Askor, you go first," Roan said quickly. "Sidis, you follow him."

"Too bad we had the burn the door; we could maybe have foxed 'em." Askor started down the ladder. "Come on, Sidis; shake it up."

"I'll stay here," he said. "They got to pass the door one at a time, and Gut-biter'll get all the action he wants."

"Down the hole," Roan snapped. "Fast!"

"Cap'n, I ain't—"

"That's an order!"

Sidis started down, awkwardly, one-handed.

"Hey, Chief, wonder where this thing leads to?" Askor's voice echoed from below.

Roan knelt at the manhole. "If you're lucky, it will take you out to a drainage ditch in the open."

Sidis turned his tattooed face up. "What's that mean, Boss? If we're lucky—"

"I'm covering you," Roan said. "I'll give you a ten minute start and then follow—"

Sidis started back up. Roan put out a hand. "If you get clear, wait for me ten minutes. Maybe they'll miss the door—"

Below, Askor was shouting: "Hey, what's that? What's Cap'n saying?"

"Shut up and get moving. If you get through, come back and get me. With our cruiser you can blow this place wide open—"

"We ain't going without you, Cap'n. You know better'n—"

"They won't kill me," Roan said. "I'm Pure Strain, remember? They'd burn you two down on sight—"

"We come this far, we ain't—"

"Did you ever hear of discipline?" Roan said harshly. "This is our only chance. If I've tried to teach you anything, it's how to follow orders like Men instead of behaving like a bunch of Geeks!"

Sidis looked at Roan. "If that's what you want, Cap'n . . . But we'll come back. You stay alive, Cap'n."

"I'll stay alive. Get going!"

When they were gone, Roan slid the manhole cover back in place and turned to face the door.

Captain Trishinist lounged behind the wide desk in the office recently vacated by Admiral Starbird.

"Why?" he repeated sourly. "Seventy-two hours, holed up in a filthy sewage pumping room, without food, drink, or sleep, aiming a gun at the door. Why? You must have known you'd be taken in the end."

Roan blinked at the fog before him. His head ached and his throat was like dried husks.

"Was it just for that precious pair of animals?" The captain's eyes seemed to glitter as he stared at Roan. "What hold had they on you?"

"Did they get clear?" Roan asked. His voice was blurry with fatigue.

"You're a fool," Trishinist said. "But you'll talk to me in time. There are methods for dealing with recalcitrants—effective methods."

"I'll bet they got through," Roan said. "Your kind couldn't stop them."

"Oh-hoh, you think to tempt me to angry disclosures!" The captain smirked.

"How really quaint."

"You're so quaint you stink," Roan said. "But you can't touch me. You're afraid to. You'd gut your own grandmother and make bonfires out of children, but you can't kill a real Terry."

Trishinist glowered. "Don't press me too far, spy—" Roan laughed aloud. "You're a poor half-breed with pretensions, Trishinist. You're pitiful. Even my poor Gooks got past you—"

Trishinist was on his feet, shaking with rage. "Your wretched creatures died in unspeakable agony an hour after you saw them last!"

"You're a liar," Roan said.

Trishinist spewed saliva and fury. "Dead!" he screeched. "I took them and stripped the hide from them alive—"

"Prove it. Show me the bodies."

"I'll show you nothing! Slave! Treacher! Spy! What need have I to prove—" Roan laughed in his face. "Good for Askor. I knew he'd get through. I hope he stole one of your better ships."

"Take him away!" Trishinist screamed. "Put him in the Hole! Let him rot there!"

The Man holding the rope looped around Roan's neck jerked it, and Roan stumbled and almost fell.

"And when you're ready to tell me your heart's secrets, beg, and perhaps!

Perhaps! I'll find time to listen!"

Trishinist was still fulminating as Roan was led along the corridor. The rope urged him roughly through a small door into a paved court, across it and out onto dry hard-packed dirt. The air was cold here, and the sparse stars of the Rim gleamed through mist. Roan stumbled on, determined not to fall and be dragged.

The tugging at the rope stopped at last, and a rough hand shook him.

"Don't go to sleep standing up, you. Grab the rope—unless you want to hang!"

He took the slack rope on his hands, looping it around his forearms, and a blow on the back sent him reeling forward—and then he was falling, and his arms felt as though they had been torn from their sockets as he brought up short. He felt himself descending, the taut rope trembling in his grip. Above, the circle of dark-glowing sky dwindled. Down, down—

He slammed the mucky bottom with a force that knocked him flat. There was a whistling, and the coils of rope fell down about him. Far above, someone called:

"Trishinist won't kill ye, maybe, bucko! But if you die on your own, that's yer privilege!"

At first, Roan was hungry all the time. He was so hungry he chewed on the rope, and so thirsty he licked at the water that dripped everlastingly along the muddy circumference of the pit. And he tried, again and again, to climb the slimy sides of the hole. He scraped hand and footholds with his fingers, even after his nails had broken off, and always the crevices he made oozed away. And once, when he'd gotten several feet up, someone flashed a light in to watch him, and laughed when he fell. And Roan lay where he'd fallen, listening as the laughter echoed down the hollow hole.

One evening the old man threw down the bread and then something else, something alive and bristly that struck Roan on the arm and sprang away, and as it leaped across his hand, it bit him. It was hard to make out the shape of the thing in the dim twilight of the hole, but it had red eyes that glittered and it was bigger than Roan's foot.

Its frightened bite made a vicious, screaming kind of pain and Roan could feel the blood oozing from his hand. He found the bread and then sat in the dark, his back against the cold, wet mud of the wall that clotted in the tatters of his clothes, and ate. He no longer longed for a bath, just as he no longer felt hungry all the time. He watched the red eyes glitter in the dark, listened for the scrabble of its claws. It leaped at the walls again and again and fell back with a thud and a splash. Once in its panic it ran over Roan's lap and then leaped at the slime of the wall again.

Then, finally exhausted, it stopped, and crouched across the floor from Roan, panting horribly, loud as a man. The panting slowed, and Roan watched, his hands aching, thinking of ways to kill the thing—later, when he felt better. . .

Roan awoke with a start. The rodent had crept to his foot, attempted to gnaw his ankle. He kicked out, cursing. The rat retreated a few feet, sat watching him, sensing his weakness.

Roan felt the gashed skin of his ankle, the slippery blood. The bite on his hand ached, a swelling, throbbing ache. He was dizzy and hot now and, wiping his forehead, Roan realized it was dry, feverish. He shut out from his mind every thought except the need to survive. He wasn't going to be eaten alive by a rat at the bottom of a dark hole. Somehow, he was going to escape, and get to Terra. And if it was impossible, he'd do it anyway.

"Ye still alive, boy?" came the voice, and Roan, startled, came out of his sleep. He saw the head silhouetted against the dark sky above.

"Yes, curse you. I'm still alive and so is the rat. Double the rations." The old man laughed. "Got no orders to double the ration." The bread struck one side of the hole, bounced to the other, and the rat ran out, went for the crumbs that the bouncing had dislodged.

Roan stood, shakily, pulled off his heavy metal-link belt, tied his trousers in a knot at the top. They were inches too wide for him now, and the blades of his hips jutted out like knives. His dizziness turned to nausea whenever he moved. His strength had gone out of his body and into the earth . . . Roan held the belt by one end, walked toward the rat, then swung with all his strength. He caught the rodent as it turned to dart away, and it screamed a woman's scream, kicking in the mud, filling the already fetid air with its smell of fear. Roan felt his knees going. He fell, lay in the mud, listening to the death struggle. Roan was afraid to believe it even when he could feel the death in it, so he strangled it again with his hands. And knowing his weakness and starvation were probably going to kill him, feeling half insane but knowing he must have nourishment, he skinned the rat with the sharp edge of his belt buckle and ate it.

It was three days and nights before the fever went away; Roan tried to rebuilt his strength by pacing the circumference of the hole and swinging his arms, but he found it harder to exercise his mind, and sometimes all day would go by and it would seem like a minute, and other times a night would seem like centuries and the only time anything different happened was when it rained and the water rose knee-deep before it drained away. And time passed . . .

Then, one evening the old man didn't come with the bread. And Roan could do nothing but wait, wait eternities. The stars came and went and then the stars again, and Roan, trapped for so long in the dark, slimy pit, wondered if indeed he had died and this was what death was—an aching and a waiting forever and all of the world a small hole and a circle of changing sky fifty feet above. Roan lay in one spot against the wall and ignored the pain in his stomach and tried to sleep, and perhaps dream of Stellaraire and of food. Stellaraire bringing him food, feeding him the delicacies of a hundred worlds washed down with ancient Terran wines, Stellaraire smiling. . .and fading. The food disappeared and Gom Bulj was yelling and Henry Dread was yelling and . . .

Someone was yelling, up above, a head silhouetted against dark sky. Roan saw the rope dangling in front of him. Was it real? For a long time it didn't seem worth the trouble of reaching up to find out. He had waited so long . .

.

But he did reach up, almost without hope that it was a real rope, real people calling him to loop the rope around his waist. But he complied, and the rope pulled, lifting him, and it hurt, and he gripped the rope, thinking he would never reach the top. Probably there was no top.

Then hard hands were on him, lifting him up, and a broad, ugly face was bending over him, and he saw the glint of light on filed steel teeth.

"Gee, Boss," Sidis said. And Roan had the strange thought that it must be raining, because there was water running down the leathery face.

"You Gooks . . . took your time . . ." Roan said. And then Askor was there, grinning a meat-eating grin, and their faces were prettier than any faces Roan had ever seen, and he smiled, and smiling, he let it all go and whirled down into the bottomless soft night.

"Eat slowly," a testy voice said from somewhere; Roan's eyes were almost shut against the bright light. "And not too much." Roan sipped a brothy soup, the bowl trembling in his hands. After the soup the doctor poked him, shone lights in his ears and mouth, and whistled.

"I'm giving you a walloping shot of Vitastim," he said. "You'll feel human in about an hour. But don't overdo it. Unless, of course, you want to," he added.

Askor and Sidis hustled him into a hard shower, gave him a brush to scrub with. Then they let him sleep. By the time Roan had on a uniform which almost fit his bone-thin body, he'd come back to himself. The face that looked back at him from the mirror was a stranger's. A gaunt, old-looking, deep-eyed stranger. And the hair above his ears had silver streaks in it. But Roan grinned at the reflection.

"We're alive," he said. And behind him, Askor and Sidis smiled, too.

"Let's go, men," Roan said. "There's nothing more here for us."

* * *

Aboard the stolen light cruiser Hell's Whore and an hour's run in space, Roan relaxed in the big padded first officer's chair, studying the pattern of lights on the screen.

"I'm glad you two showed up when you did," he said. "But it was pretty stupid of the two of you to try it alone."

"We wasn't alone, Boss," Sidis corrected. "We had their best bucket here. Tough we had to wait around out there on Four for three months to get a crack at her, but you know there wasn't much left of the old Rage of Heaven."

"Nice work, taking a cruiser with that hulk," Roan said. "Maybe you're learning after all."

"Nothing to it. They thought they was taking us."

"I wish I'd been there—instead of where I was."

"You didn't miss nothing." Sidis flashed his teeth and examined the tip of the steel toothpick with which he had been grooming them. "It was kind of pitiful, them bums pulling guns on us."

"And that's what they call the Imperial Terran Navy," Askor snickered.

"Them nancies—"

"Those weren't real Terries," Roan said. "That was just some sort of ragtag gypsy outfit using the name. The real Terries are on Terra."