The Loranth (Star Sojourner Book 1) (14 page)

As for my friends,
I sent to Kor,
until you release them they're worse than dead, you parasite.

“Jules!” Jack ran down from the tent, the beam rifle grasped in a hand. I lifted Carrier onto Gretch's back and swung up behind her. Gretch hissed and moved sideways. She turned her long neck and flicked her tongue to smell Carrier, who flapped like a dying fish. I prayed she wasn't. Gretch's scaly lips drew back, exposing fangs.

“No! No, girl.” I reached over Carrier and patted Gretch's neck. “That's a good grunithe.” Her long yellow eyes glowered from beneath bony ridge plates. Would she accept Jack, too, I wondered. “It's OK, Gretch. Trust me.”

Water. We both needed it now, Carrier and I. There must be canteens in the tent. “Meet me at the tent!” I called to Jack. I urged Gretch into a lope and guided her to the tent with leg pressure and body weight. Jack yelled something and started back.

I think Carrier panicked when she felt the world lurch beneath her. She lifted her tail and slammed it hard against Gretch's shoulder. There was a smell of singed hide, a wisp of smoke. Gretch shrieked. I've never heard her make that sound.

She leaped forward and twisted around, snapping, leaving me with two meters of air where she'd been, and a hard drop to the ground. I hit with Carrier across my legs. And felt razor teeth slice into my thigh. I screamed, and tried to kick her off. Sharp talons clung to my leg and hip. “Jack! Get her off me! Get her off!”

I tore at her head, ripping nails across sensory pits, digging fingers into her gills. Panic and pain gave me desperate strength. Still she clung like nightmare, scalpel talons slicing deep into muscle. The fear of the damage she was doing was worse than the pain. “Get her off!” I lunged to my feet, clawing at her tough body, tried to run and slammed into a tree.

I thought the flash of light was behind my eyes as I fell, strength suddenly draining. But Carrier shuddered and miraculously slid off. I saw Jack lower his rifle. Carrier was still moving. I kicked her away and she rolled downhill, leaving a trail of black blood.

“What took you so long?” I gasped as Jack approached, and tried to stop shaking. I refused to look at my leg. Was I mutilated for life? Crippled? I moaned, turned onto my stomach and tried to get up.

Jack rolled me to my back. “Let me see it.”

“Leave it alone!”

“OK.”

I felt his hands gently probe around the wound. “Keep that fucking Carrier away from me!”

“OK.”

“Is she crawling back?”

“No. Take it easy.”

I began to tremble. “I'm cold.”

He said nothing as he examined my leg. I know. I was listening to his every breath and heard only my own breathing.

“Stay here,” he said unnecessarily, patted my knee and headed for the tent.

I felt nauseated, but I lifted my head and looked, expected to see flesh laid bare, white bone showing. It was a burn. A chemical burn. The Loranths were just full of surprises. The pants material and skin had melded, but it wasn't deep, and I'd been expecting so much worse.

Carrier was dragging herself in an erratic path toward the dig site entrance. A dark hole behind her sensory pits bled. Jesus ChristLotus! If we lost her…

I saw Gretch chasing her own tail and realized she was snapping at a burn on her shoulder. I stood up with the help of the tree. The wound blazed like fire as I hobbled after Carrier.

“Jules!” Jack ran back with slung canteens bouncing against his hip, a small bag of med supplies and his rifle over his shoulder. “Stay put, will you?”

“I'm all right.” I waited for him, took a canteen and nodded toward Gretch. “It's a chemical burn. See if you can help her.”

“You sure you're OK?”

“Yeah!” We need Gretch to get out of here.”

He dropped the bag and started toward her.

I kneeled and poured water over the wound, material and all. It hurt to the point of distraction, made seconds grow heads and tails, but there was no permanent damage, and that made all the difference. I took a long draft of water and started toward Carrier with the canteen.

I'll give Jack credit for his struggle with Gretch. She's not exactly easy to handle.

He grabbed the orange tufts ringing her gullet and forced her to hold relatively still, though the two of them moved in circles as she kept backing away from him and he kept pouring water over the burn on her shoulder. Well, some of it was on target, but Jack got more of the bath. She finally calmed down though, and even rested her scaly muzzle on his arm, a trusting gesture.

Maybe we could ride out of here after all, I thought as I limped toward Carrier. I took off my ragged shirt, folded it and paused to tie it around the wound on my thigh. I'd think about antibiotics later, when we reached my sanctuary. I wasn't about to hang around here long enough to look for them in the tent. Did Kor's sphere of influence extend as far as the sanctuary? I doubted it. He hadn't intruded on my thoughts under the tree with Christine, and that was a lot closer.

Crotes! Carrier seemed to be recovering, moving faster now than I was. What were Loranth recuperative powers like? I wondered as I hobbled after her. She headed for the entrance with a hunching, springing motion.

Jesus! She was going to make it. “Jack!” I pointed to her. He was closer. “Get her!”

“What?”

“Get her! Without her we'll never get away.”

He picked up his rifle.

“No! Don't fire!” I shouted as he fired.

Carrier spasmed, curled into a twitching ball, then flopped to her back and lay still.

“Oh, shit.” I limped toward Jack and Gretch. “Oh shit. Why did you shoot her, you scramballed croteass?”

Jack scowled. “You told me to get her.” He picked up the canteens and the bag. “I figured you knew what the hell you were talking about!”

“I told?” I climbed onto Gretch's back, careful to avoid her wound, and extended a hand to Jack. “Hurry up!”

“What the hell was that thing? The alien?”

An explosion tore the dig site. Rocks and dirt rained down. Jack held onto the bag and the canteens as I grabbed his free hand swung him up behind me.

“That's the alien,” I said. “C'mon, Gretch!” I slapped her flanks with bare heels. She trumpeted, flashed the whites of eyes as she swung her neck to look at Jack. Suddenly she reared and arched her back. Jack clung to me as I stroked her neck and tried to relax my body, to impart a sense of reassurance. She shook herself, as though to throw off flies.

There was a deafening crash. Ground caved in behind us and made a new gully.

Gretch stumbled and dragged her tail through bushes.

“Uh, Julie.” Jack tapped my shoulder hard. “Can you talk her into going that way?” He pointed away from the site.

“Sure.” I turned her head with pressure from my open palm and leaned forward. “Gretch, baby,” I whispered, “for all the juicy lace pods I've – “

A slit cracked open in ground to our left with a blast that left Gretch disoriented and my ears ringing. It ran jagged, black lightning seeking a strike.

Gretch suddenly leaped forward, neck extended, tail raised, and reached out with those long, ground-devouring strides. Sinewy shoulder muscles rippled under brown scales, powerful hindquarters propelled us over downed trees and between boulders.

Jack clung to my jacket as wind riffled my hair and cooled my bare chest.

“You're beautiful, Gretch!” I told her. “Goddamn! You're beautiful. Just keep – “

Run, destroyer, run. Though you flee to your homeworld, I will be waiting

“Kor! Listen to me. It was an accident. Don't, don't kill any of the human hunters.”

“What?” Jack said.

They're innocent
, I sent.
You know that.

No Terran is innocent of treachery. You suckle it with the poisoned milk of your bearers. Urge your hunter on. She can run swifter than that.

All right! I'll turn back, Kor. We aren't all treacherous. I'm the one responsible for Carrier's death.
I tried to swing Gretch around with leg pressure, but heading back to the demolished site was not in her plans.

“Where is he, Julie? What the hell does he want?”

I gave you my word, Terran,
Kor sent.
Freedom. For a time. Retribution for all those who desecrate Keepworld. All those who do violence to me and my kin.

“You mean Cape Leone?”

No answer.

“Is
that
what you're saying, Kor? Cape Leone itself?”

He was silent.

Jack leaned forward. “What about Cape Leone?”

“I don't know. I don't know what he means.”

All,
Kor sent.

“You can't do that! Kor? Listen to me.”

No answer.

“Kor!”

But he was through talking. “You're not so goddamn innocent to judge us,” I yelled into the wind.

Jack remained silent, though I felt him turn every so often to check that the way behind us was still empty. I knew it would be. I put a hand lightly over the tied shirt around my leg, wished the pain would stop and fell into a black mood as I considered these Lords of Keepworld.

Gretch maintained a tireless gait and carried us toward the Sorrel Mesas, my sanctuary, and lowering night. The night was in my soul, too

“I just want to see Annie an' the kids off planet.” Jack threw cold coffee on the ground and stared into the campfire with his shoulders hunched, while flickering flames made shadows jump across his tense coarse features.

I watched him rub a hand over his lips and peer southwest toward unseen Leone, sixty kilometers away, “After that…”

“I know.” I sat next to him on the log.

Kor said he'd be waiting for me even back on Earth. Telepathically, I'd assumed. I tried again to contact him with thought-messages, but met only silence.

I had told Jack everything that happened since I'd left the Homeward Inn with Hallarin. He'd told me about Stan and Thad and his decision to come looking for me. He didn't mention Annie's fears, or how difficult it must have been to leave his family for this dangerous task.

He didn't have to.

The pre-dawn sky was thick as oil paint and heavy with purple rain clouds. Gretch dozed beneath a sheltering lump tree. We'd ridden through half the night and she would go no further than this small clearing.

A thought came up from some deeper mental plane and begged to be explored. I had been in a telepathic link with Kor. Had he tapped a latent tel power of my own to do that? Would it last past the stone walls of his lair? I opened myself to receiving and tried to probe Jack's mind.

There!

A thought like an echo bounced off some distant hill. Fear. For his family. Well, it didn't take a tel-link to know that. But beyond…something more. I closed my eyes. A whisper, as though eavesdropping on a private prayer.

Annie,
it came.
On my way home. You were right, Kit. I should've never left.

I quietly withdrew. “Uh, Jack, did Annie ask you not to come looking for me?”

“Sure, she did. Why?”

“Just wondering.”

He sat on the log. “I was just thinking about her.”

“Oh? You, uh, sometimes you call her Kit, don't you?”

He stared at me. “How'd you know that?”

“I think Kor tapped into some latent telepathic powers I didn't know I had.”

“You mean you were reading my mind?”

I shrugged. “It was a test. I won't do it again without your permission.”

“I'd appreciate that.”

“But Jack, think of the possibilities if I can still read Kor's thoughts now that I'm free.”

“I'm afraid to think.”

“And maybe the minds of other Loranths,” I added.

“If they give you permission, buddy.”

“Yeah. There's that.”

“Just don't make things any worse with these aliens than they already are, OK?” He got up and paced again. “This is one for the Worlds Government to tackle.”

“C'mon, Jack, you know the military's knee-jerk reflexes. They'd send a negotiating team with an attaché case full of demands and veiled threats. This is the Loranths' homeworld, not ours.”

“So then what's plan B?”

I stood up and brushed fibrin dust off my ripped pants. “I'd like to try to contact a member of the race who isn't a nut case.” Cautiously, I put out mental feelers. All I received were rudimentary thoughts without language from wild animals in the area. Perhaps we were already out of Kor's range. Perhaps all his threats to destroy Cape Leone were just impotent posturing. That would be a pleasant turn of events, and we were past due for pleasant. Did I feel a mental chuckle or was it just my own response? I couldn't tell.

“Hasn't she rested enough?” Jack gestured sharply toward Gretch.

“It's only been a half hour.”

He studied the sky and shoved his hat lower. “You think rain'll slow her down?”

I opened my mouth to answer.

“I just want my family off Tartarus! After that, I'll track down the crotemunger and kill him myself!”

I bit my lower lip. “He's not after you, specifically, Jack, or your family.” I thought of Carrier.
All,
Kor had said, meaning all Terrans, I had to assume. “I don't know for sure, but there's a chance he's bluffing. Even if he isn't, we don't know that the other Loranths would go along with him.”

“You think these…Loranths, could destroy the town? I mean the whole goddamn
town
?”

I gestured helplessly. “They haven't in forty years. I think Kor's a deviant member of his race. He must be, Jack. An entire race of deranged members is not evolutionarily viable. So maybe they're subject to laws, the same as we are.”

“Yeah, but what laws, Julie? That's the question. Cannibals have laws, too.”

It was.

I put a hand on the material wrapped around my leg. The pain had subsided. It no longer interfered with thinking. I pictured Leone emptying out, its people marching, zombie-like, toward the cliffs above the Chablis Sea and…My stomach knotted into a ball.

Jack lit a cigarette. I saw his hard expression in the flame. “What're you thinking, Julie?”

“Nothing much.”

“Yeah!” He kicked a rock out of his path and paced, then ground out the cigarette. He was a shadow himself, standing there in deeper shadows of trees, staring southwest.

Rain began to dapple the ground. I kicked dirt onto the fire. “Gretch!”

The dead and dying were all around me. Insects buzzed, swarmed in dark hordes across carcasses of snufflers, grunithes, brawns, slaotees, though the swamp mumbler, by some miracle, seemed to be healing. The odor was suffocating, sharpened by moist air.

It had become a sanctuary for death.

Where to begin? Drag the dead out to the burial pit. Then treat the serious cases that still had a chance. Dynorphin for the pain. I went into the treatment hut and took a dose myself to ease the ache from the burn and the slashes on my side. Antibiotics, also for myself too, and native medications. Water if they'd drink it. Try to make them comfortable. A comfortable death.

Jack had taken Gretch and headed for Leone after we'd tried, without success, to contact Annie, then the police department, then a scan of all frequencies. A babble of static. That's all.

Could Sye Kor mentally jam transmissions? I'd told Jack my comlink probably wasn't working. Could be that moisture got into some gismo inside it, I'd told him, and half believed it myself.

He'd said nothing, just waited for Gretch to eat and take a breather. Then he left. I'd told him to turn her loose when he reached Leone. She'd come back.

I hoped.

My last patient was an old crotemunger, literally. I doubted he'd make it. He lifted his grizzled head and licked my hand as I treated him. His four black eyes blinked independently. I patted his horny brow, then broke a few tight oil sacs on his back with paper towels and spread the dark smelly fluid across his skin. He closed his eyes and twitched an ear.

How widespread was this cross-species plague, and what was the agent for it? Had we humans brought it to Tartarus? My God, were Loranths subject to it? Being water creatures, their physiology was very different from ours, and the disease might be airborne. But it seemed to cross all barriers, even that great barrier of biological differences between beings evolved on separate worlds. I tried not to think about Loranths or Cape Leone as I dragged a dead scrabbler out to the pit and slid him into it.

A large, many-legged insect followed the scent trail to the body. I raised my booted foot, then held it there while he scurried under its shadow. His solid brain was just obeying instincts.

What rules was Kor obeying?

I'd go to Leone with fluid, blood, and fecal samples from the sick animals and drop them off at the Institute's bio lab.

Then, after a chat with Hallarin on fulfilling obligations, I'd have myself checked to make sure I wasn't carrying plague, too. I didn't trust the ships' decon locks. Then I'd catch an outbounder to Earth.

I think for the first time I really wanted to go home. It was strange. Standing there by the gate of the sanctuary, sky and distance a pearl-pink mist, the smell of death on my clothes, I found that I was suddenly unafraid of Loranths, or facing Althea and telling her to forget the letter I'd sent about consenting to the divorce. And consider forgetting the divorce.

I wanted to go home. And this time I meant it. Maybe we can retreat from life and live with guilt for just so long, and then some inner mechanism kicks in and says 'Enough!' It's self-defeating. Your ancestors didn't make it out of the trees on self-pity. Let's see if you can stand on two legs too.

I went to my cabin, shaved off the bush I had grown, showered with gritted teeth as soapy water ran down my many wounds, treated the burn on my thigh, the slashes on my side, then changed into fresh, untattered clothes, and ate the best meal I'd had in two months. The reconstituted, remashed refried beans were floating in a brown sauce. The soy was dressed to look like cheese. Multi-vitamined mock beef burgers with artificial marbling of heart-healthy fat, boiled french fries that sizzled like fried in my dish, and berrybru from the imported condensed genetically altered fruit trees of Gallo Three, an Earthlike planet in the Vin System. I sat back. It was good to eat real food again.

Kor was bluffing,
I thought as I lay down and listened to the mating chirp of the insect beneath my window. He had to be. He'd led me around by the proverbial ring in my nose. But the crotemunger's tel couldn't even reach me here, let alone influence the town.

I exhaled sleepily. Like the patterns for new life forms that reside in each of us, the ability to draw on untapped reserves, to redirect our lives, seems also innate. One of nature's benedictions. Also called adaptability. I closed my eyes.

I would attempt to contact other Loranth members, see if I could hash out things with the Lords of Tartarus. And then I was going home. I yawned and put aside all questions. Just a nap…

And awoke nine hours later to a scratching at my window screen. The night smelled of almonds, overripe ones. I jumped up. “Gretch?”

She snuffled outside my bedroom window and scratched again with her muzzle.

What time was it? I knocked over the clock. 6:15 AM. Why was she back? It was too soon. Two days too soon! I got up, threw on the floodlights and went outside, sloshing barefoot through mud. “Jack?” I called on a hunch. Only the cries and grunts from my torpid patients. I ran through the open gate of the compound.

“Jack!”

Darkness there.

And shapes my fears conjured from trees and bushes given counterfeit life by wind.

I ran back to the cabin and switched on the inside lantern. My hand shook as I flipped the comlink's switches, turned dials and swore at the static. I had a terrifying thought. Had Kor purposely not intruded on my privacy? Was I…I resisted forming the thought. Was I the last human alive on Tartarus? Was
that
his revenge on me? The room seemed full of unfamiliar shadows, the walls too thin to keep out the night. I turned up the lantern. I wanted light. All the warm yellow light I could get. I wanted Earth's sun.

I held my breath and listened to sounds I'd normally ignore. No, dammit! I would not give in to fear. Not again!

“You crotemunging son of a bitch!” I sent to Kor, if he were listening. I picked up the comlink and threw it across the room, wishing it were his head. I'd have started for Leone in the dark, but Gretch was staggering.

While she slept, I sipped strong coffee, numbed my mind to all questions, and then packed the sample tubes, jars, slides, into my saddlebags, along with my other jacket and packets of dried food. I tied a canteen and a rolled sleeping bag on top of the pile.

For the rest of that short night I stared at stars. One in particular.

It was afternoon when Gretch finally awoke. I treated the animals for the last time while she was out hunting and left them food and water.

When she returned I said goodbye to my wards, mounted and turned Gretch toward Leone. Some of my patients howled mournfully. Did they think of me as God? Why not? I'd brought them hope and despair.

Speaking of which, I figured we'd reach Leone by nightfall of the next day.

* * *

Gretch was in worse shape than I'd realized. She stopped often to rest during the day's long drizzly ride. Mud slowed her, too.

I kept calling out Jack's name, hoping Gretch had thrown her unfamiliar rider and he was walking back to Leone.

By late afternoon Gretch was restless and testy and I knew she had to hunt. It became a battle of wills to keep her on course. Finally I capitulated, unsaddled her and turned her loose. No matter my needs or the situation with Jack, this was not a master/slave relationship. My hope that I'd catch up to Jack had faded. If he were on foot, I would have seen him by now, or passed his body on the route to Leone. The other alternatives, packs of wild hunting brauns, Kor's own hunters, were also not easy to consider.

I camped on a plateau above Coal Canyon and the swift running Tartarus River, twenty kilometers northeast of Leone, while I waited for Gretch to return, and distracted myself with taking notes on the surrounding topography.

From the vertical thrust of land formations, I figured these were the roots of a vanished alpine mountain range whose ice-capped peaks probably scraped clouds millions of years ago. The earth is fluid, and only our small flickers of life make it seem solid. I threw a stone into the river, which cascaded liquid mud as it plunged through a gorge. I'd considered retreating to the jungle when Hallarin had made the alternative seem grim. Now, if he'd been successful in wiping out Leone, would I have any alternative? Could Kor prevent a rescue ship from landing? I thought of the Calypso Memorial. Or bring it plummeting down, as doomed Calypso had?

These were my lonely thoughts as I stared at the sky glow of Leone's distant lights. Did people still laugh and talk, love and die beneath that dome of light? Were our alien colleagues affected too? I was haunted by an image of deserted streets, kitchen tables set with half-eaten meals, holo screens and holo walls blaring their canned messages to empty armchairs. I rubbed a hand over my eyes and tried to squeeze away an image of bloated bodies washing ashore on a sluggish tide.

Jack.

I pictured his square honest face the way I liked to remember him, grinning crookedly over a drink that could double as an explosive.