"Three," Flinx corrected her. A pleased hiss sounded from the vicinity of his shoulder.
"Surprise is worth a lot," Lauren went on. "Maybe ten, but no more that. We won"t do your mother any good as corpses. Keep in mind that no one else knows we"re here. If we go down, so do her chances."
"I know the odds aren"t good," he said irritably, "but we"ve got to do something."
"And do something we will. You remember that partially deforested section we flew over earlier today?"
Flinx thought a moment, then nodded.
"That was a trail line."
"Trail line for what?"
"For equalization," she told him. "For evening out the odds. For a better weapon than this." She patted the sling of the dart rifle. "Better even than that snake riding your shoulder. I don"t share your confidence in it."
"You haven"t seen Pip in action," he reminded her. "What kind of weapon are you talking about?"
She stood and brushed bark and dirt from her coveralls. "You"ll see," she a.s.sured him, "but we have to be d.a.m.n careful." She gazed toward the camp below. "I wish I could think of a better way, but I can"t. They"re sure to have guards posted in addition to monitoring the detection system you described. We don"t even know which building your mother is in. If we"re going to risk everything on one blind charge, it ought to be one h.e.l.l of a charge.
"The weapon I have in mind is a volatile one. It can cut both ways, but I"d rather chance a danger I"m familiar with. Let"s get back to the skimmer."
She pivoted and headed back through the forest. Flinx rose to join her, forcing himself away from the lights of the camp, which gleamed like so many reptilian eyes in the night, until the trees swallowed them up.
They were halfway back to the little grove where they had parked the skimmer when the sensation swept through him. As usual, it came as a complete surprise, but this time it was very different from his recent receptions. For one thing, no feeling of pain was attached to it, and for another, it did not come from the direction of the camp. It arose from an entirely new source. Oddly, it carried overtones of distress with it, though distress of a confusing kind.
It came from Lauren and was directed at him.
There was no love in it, no grand, heated follow-up to the casual kiss she had given him in the skimmer. Affection, yes, which was not what he had hoped for. Admiration, too, and something more. Something he had not expected from her: a great wave of concern for him, and to a lesser extent, of pity.
Flinx had become more adept at sorting out and identifying the emotions he received, and there was no mistaking those he was feeling now. That kiss, then, had not only carried no true love with it-it held even less than that. She felt sorry for him.
He tried to reject the feelings, not only from disappointment but out of embarra.s.sment. This was worse than looking into someone"s mind. He was reading her heart, not her thoughts. Though he tried hard, he could not shut off the flow. He could no more stop the river of emotion than he could willingly turn it on.
He made certain he stayed a step or two behind her so she would not be able to see his face in the darkness, still soaking up the waves of concern and sympathy that poured from her, wishing they might be something else, something more.
They hesitated before approaching the skimmer, circling the landing area once. The quick search revealed that their hiding place had remained inviolate. Once aboard, Lauren took the craft up. She did not head toward the camp; instead, she turned south and began to retrace their course over the treetops. Very soon they encountered the long, open gash in the woods. Lauren hovered above it for several minutes as she studied the ground, then decisively headed west. Flinx kept to himself, trying to shut the memory of that emotional deluge out of his mind. Then, quite unexpectedly, the open s.p.a.ce in the trees came to a dead end.
"d.a.m.n," Lauren muttered. "Must have picked the wrong direction. I thought sure I read the surface right. Maybe it"s the other way."
Flinx did not comment as she wheeled the skimmer around and headed southeast. When the pathway again ended in an unbroken wall of trees, she angrily wrenched the craft around a second time. This time when they encountered the forest wall, she slowed but continued westward, her gaze darting repeatedly from the darkened woods below to the skimmer"s instrumentation.
"Maybe if you were a little more specific, I could help you look," he finally said, a touch of frustration in his voice.
"I told you. Weapons. Allies, actually. It comes to the same thing. No sign of them, though. They must have finished eating and entered semidormancy. That"s how they live; do nothing but eat for several days in a row, then lie down to sleep it off for a week. The trouble is that once they"ve finished an eating period, they"re apt to wander off in any direction until they find a sleep spot that pleases them. We haven"t got the time to search the whole forest for the herd."
"Herd of what?" Flinx asked.
"Didn"t I tell you? Devilopes."
Enlightenment came to Flinx. He had heard of Devilopes, even seen a small head or two mounted in large commercial buildings. But he had had no personal experience of them. Few citizens of Drallar did. There was not even one in the city zoo. As Flinx understood it, Devilopes were not zooable.
The Demichin Devilope was the dominant native life form on Moth. It was unusual for a herbivore to be the dominant life form, but excepting man, a fairly recent arrival, they had no natural enemies. They were comparatively scarce, as were the mounted heads Flinx had seen; the excessive cost of the taxidermy involved prevented all but the extremely wealthy from collecting Devilope.
The skimmer prowled the treetops, rising to clear occasional emergents topping ninety meters, dropping lower when the woods scaled more modest heights. Occasionally, Lauren would take them down to ground level, only to lift skyward again in disappointment when the omens proved unhelpful. There was no sign of a Devilope herd.
Meanwhile, another series of sensations swept through Flinx"s active mind, and Pip stirred on his shoulder. He had continually tried to find Mother Mastiff"s emotions, without success. Instead, his attempts seemed to be attracting the feelings of everyone but his mother-not. He wondered anew at his heightened perception since he had acquired his pet; though it was likely, he reminded himself that here in the vastness of the northern forests where minds were few and scattered, it might be only natural that his receptivity improved.
These latest sensations carried a female signature. They were also new, not of Mother Mastiff or Lauren. Cool and calm, they were vague and hard to define: whoever they belonged to was a particularly unemotional individual. He felt fear, slight but unmistakable, coupled with a formidable resolution that was cold, implacable-so hard and unyielding that it frightened Flinx almost as much as Mother Mastiff"s own terror. Save for the slight overtones of fear, they might have been the emotions of a machine.
The feelings came from the camp where Mother Mastiff was being held. Flinx had little doubt that they belonged to one of those mysterious individuals who had abducted her. From the one brief, faint sensation he felt he could understand her fear. Then it was gone, having lasted less than a minute. Yet, in that time, Flinx had received a complete emotional picture of the person whose feelings he had latched onto. Never before had he encountered a mind so intent on a single purpose and so devoid of those usual emotional colorations that comprised common humanity. Pip hissed at the empty air as if ready to strike and defend its master.
"This isn"t working," Lauren muttered, trying to see through the trees. "We"ll have to-" She paused, frowning at him. "Are you all right? You"ve got the most peculiar expression on your face."
"I"m okay." The coldness was at last fading from his mind; evidently he hadn"t been conscious of how completely it had possessed him. Her query snapped him back to immediacy, and he could feel anew the warmth of the skimmer"s cabin, of his own body. Not for the first time did he find himself wondering if his unmanageable talent might someday do him harm as well as good. "I was just thinking."
"You do a lot of that," she murmured. "Flinx, you"re the funniest man I"ve ever met."
"You"re not laughing."
"I didn"t mean funny ha ha." She turned back to the controls. "I"m going to set us down. This skimmer really isn"t equipped for the kind of night-tracking we"re doing. Besides, I don"t know about you, but it"s late, and I"m worn out."
Flinx was exhausted too, mentally as much as physically. So he did not object as Lauren selected a stand of trees and set the skimmer down in their midst.
"I don"t think we need to stand a watch," she said. "We"re far enough from the camp so that no one"s going to stumble in on us. I haven"t seen any sign of aerial patrol." She was at the rear of the skimmer now, fluffing out the sleeping bags they had brought from the lodge.
Flinx sat quietly watching her. He had known a few girls-young women-back in Drallar. Inhabitants of the marketplace, like himself, students in the harsh school of the moment. He could never get interested in any of them, though a few showed more than casual interest in him. They were not, well, not serious. About life, and other matters.
Mother Mastiff repeatedly chided him about his att.i.tude. "There"s no reason for ye to be so standoffish, boy. You"re no older than them." That was not true, of course, but he could not convince her of that.
Lauren was a citizen of another dimension entirely. She was an attractive, mature woman. A self-confident, thinking adult-which was how Flinx viewed himself, despite his age. She was already out of pants and shirt and slipping into the thin thermal coc.o.o.n of the sleeping bag.
"Well?" She blinked at him, pushed her hair away from her face. "Aren"t you going to bed? Don"t tell me you"re not tired."
"I can hardly stand up," he admitted. Discarding his own clothing, he slipped into the sleeping bag next to hers. Lying there listening to the rhythmic patter of rain against the canopy, he strained toward her with his mind, seeking a hint, a suggestion of the emotions he so desperately wanted her to feel. Maddeningly, he could sense nothing at all.
The warmth of the sleeping bag and the cabin enveloped him, and he was acutely aware of the faint musky smell of the woman barely an arm"s length away. He wanted to reach out to her; to touch that smooth, sun-darkened flesh; to caress the glistening ringlets of night that tumbled down the side of her head to cover cheek and neck and finally form a dark bulge against the bulwark of the sleeping bag. His hand trembled.
What do I do, he thought furiously. How do I begin this? Is there something special I should say first, or should I reach out now and speak later? How can I tell her what I"m feeling? I can receive. If only I could broadcast!
Pip lay curled into a hard, scaly knot near his feet in the bottom of the sleeping bag. Flinx slumped in on himself, tired and frustrated and helpless. What was there to do now? What could he possibly do except the expected?
A soft whisper reached him from the other sleeping bag. Black hair shuffled against itself. "Good night, Flinx." She turned to smile briefly at him, lighting up the cabin, then turned over and became still.
"Good night," he mumbled. The uncertain hand that was halfway out of his covering withdrew and clenched convulsively on the rim of the material.
Maybe this was best, he tried to tell himself. Adult though he believed himself to be, there were mysteries and pa.s.swords he was still unfamiliar with. Besides, there was that surge of pity and compa.s.sion he had detected in her. Admiring, rea.s.suring, but not what he was hoping to feel from her. He wanted-had to have-something more than that.
The one thing he didn"t need was another mother.
Chapter Thirteen.
He said nothing when they rose the next morning, downed a quick breakfast of concentrates, and lifted once again into the murky sky. The sun was not quite up, though its cloud-diffused light brightened the treetops. They had to find Lauren"s herd soon, he knew, because the skimmer"s charge was running low and so were their options. He did not know how much time Mother Mastiff had left before the source of fear he had detected in her came to meet her.
Perhaps they had been hindered by the absence of daylight, or perhaps they had simply pa.s.sed by the place, but this time they found the herd in minutes. Below the hovering skimmer they saw a mult.i.tude of small hills the color of obsidian. Black hair rippled in the morning breeze, thick and meter-long. Where one of the hills shifted in deep sleep, there was a flash of red like a ruby lost in a coal heap as an eye momentarily opened and closed.
Flinx counted more than fifty adults. Scattered among them, were an equal number of adolescents and infants. All lay sprawled on their sides on the damp ground, shielded somewhat from the rain by the grove they had chosen as a resting place.
So these were the fabled Demichin Devilopes!-awesome and threatening even in their satiated sleep. Flinx"s gaze settled on one immense male snoring away between two towering hardwoods. He guessed its length at ten meters, its height when erect at close to six. Had it been standing, a tall man could have walked beneath its belly and barely-brushed the lower tips of the s.h.a.ggy hair.
The downsloping, heavily muscled neck drooped from between a pair of immense humped shoulders to end in a nightmarish skull from which several horns protruded. Some Devilopes had as few as two horns, others as many as nine. The horns twisted and curled, though most ended by pointing forward; no two animals" horns grew in exactly the same way. Bony plates flared slightly outward from the horns to protect the eyes.
The forelegs were longer than the hind-unusual for so ma.s.sive a mammal. This extreme fore musculature allowed a Devilope to push over a fully grown tree. That explained the devastated trail that marked their eating period. A herd would strip a section of forest bare, pushing down the evergreens to get at the tender branches and needles, even pulling off and consuming the bark of the main boles.
The Devilopes shifted in their sleep, kicking tree-sized legs.
"They"ll sleep like this for days," Lauren explained as they circled slowly above the herd. "Until they get hungry again or unless something disturbs them. They don"t even bother to post sentries. No predator in its right mind would attack a herd of sleeping Devilopes. There"s always the danger they"d wake up."
Flinx stared at the ocean of Devilope. "What do we do with them?" Not to mention how, he thought.
"They can"t be tamed, and they can"t be driven," Lauren told him, "but sometimes you can draw them. We have to find a young mare in heat. The season"s right." Her fingers moved over the controls, and the skimmer started to drop.
"We"re going into that that?" Flinx pointed toward the herd.
"Have to," she said. "There"s no other way. It ought to be okay. They"re asleep and unafraid."
"That"s more than I can say," he muttered as the skimmer dipped into the trees. Lauren maneuvered it carefully, trying to break as few branches and make as little noise as possible. "What do we need with a mare in heat?"
"Musk oil and blood," Lauren explained as the skimmer gently touched down.
Up close, the herd was twice as impressive: a seething, rippling ma.s.s of s.h.a.ggy black hair broken by isolated clumps of twisted, ma.s.sive horns, it looked more like a landscape of h.e.l.l than an a.s.sembly of temporarily inanimate herbivores. When Lauren killed the engine and popped open the cabin door, Flinx was a.s.sailed by a powerful odor and the steady sonority of the herd"s breathing. Earth humming, he thought.
Lauren had the dart rifle out and ready as they approached the herd on foot. Flinx followed her and tried to pretend that the black cliffs that towered over them were basalt and not flesh.
"There." She pointed between a pair of slowly heaving bulks at a medium-sized animal. Picking her spot, she sighted the long barrel carefully before putting three darts behind the ma.s.sive skull. The mare stirred, coughing once. Then the head, which had begun to rise, relaxed, slowly sinking back to the surface. Flinx and Lauren held their breath, but the slight activity had failed to rouse any of their target"s neighbors.
Lauren fearlessly strode between the two hulks that formed a living canyon and unslung her backpack next to the tranquilized mare. Before leaving the skimmer, she had extracted several objects from its stores. These she now methodically laid out in a row on the ground and set to work, Flinx watched with interest as knife and tools he didn"t recognize did their work.
One container filled rapidly with blood. A second filled more rapidly with a green crystalline liquid. Lauren"s face was screwed up like a knot, and as soon as the aroma of the green fluid reached Flinx, he knew why. The scent was as overpowering as anything his nostrils had ever encountered. Fortunately, the smell was not bad, merely overwhelming.
A loud, sharp grunt sounded from behind him. He turned, to find himself gazing in horrified fascination at a great crimson eye. An absurdly tiny black pupil floated in the center of that blood-red disk. Then the eyelid rolled like a curtain over the apparition. Flinx did not relax.
"Hurry up!" he called softly over his shoulder. "I think this one"s waking up."
"We"re not finished here yet," Louren replied, stoppering the second bottle and setting to work with a low-power laser. "I have to close both wounds first."
"Let nature close them," he urged her, keeping an eye on the orb that had fixed blankly on him. The eyelid rippled, and he feared that the next time it opened, it would likely be to full awareness.
"You know me better than that," she said firmly. Flinx waited, screaming silently for her to hurry. Finally, she said, "That"s done. We can go."
They hurried back through the bulwark of black hair. Flinx did not allow himself to relax until they sat once more inside the skimmer. He spent much of the time trying to soothe Pip; in response to its master"s worry, it had developed a nervous twitch.
Despite the tight seal, the miasma rising from the green bottle nearly choked him. There was no odor from the container of blood.
"The green is the oil," she explained unnecessarily. "It"s the rutting season."
"I can see what you have in mind to do with that," Flinx told her, "but why the blood?"
"Released in the open air, the concentrated oil would be enough to interest the males of the herd. We need to do more than just interest them. We need to drive them a little crazy. The only way to do that is to convince them that a ready female is in danger. The herd"s females will respond to that, too." She set to work with the skimmer"s simple store of chemicals.
"You ought to be around sometime when the males are awake and fighting," she said to him as she mixed oil, blood, and various catalysts in a sealed container. Flinx was watching the herd anxiously. "The whole forest shakes. Even the tallest trees tremble. When two of the big males connect with those skulls and horns, you can hear the sound of the collision echo for kilometers."
Five minutes later, she held a large flask up to the dim early-morning light. "There, that should do it. Pheromones and blood and a few other nose-ticklers. If this doesn"t draw them, nothing will."
"They"ll set off the alarm when they cross the sonic fence," he reminded her.
"Yes, but by that time they"ll be so berserk, nothing will turn them. Then it won"t matter what they set off." She smiled nastily, then hesitated at the thought. "My only concern is that we find your mother before they start in on the buildings."
"We"d better," Flinx said.
"There should be enough confusion," she went on, "to distract everyone"s attention. Unless they"re downright inhuman, the inhabitants of the camp aren"t going to be thinking of much of anything beyond saving their own skins.
"As to getting your mother out fast, I think we can a.s.sume that she"s not in the hangar area or the power station or that central tower. That leaves the two long structures off to the west. If we can get inside and get her out before whoever"s in charge comes to his senses, we should be able to get away before anyone realizes what"s happening.
"Remember, we"ll be the only ones ready for what"s going to happen. A lot will depend on how these people react. They"re obviously not stupid, but I don"t see how anyone could be adaptable enough to react calmly to what we"re going to do to them. Besides, I don"t have any better ideas."
Flinx shook his head, "Neither do I. I can see one difficulty, though. If we"re going to convince this herd that they"re chasing after an injured Devilope in heat, we"re going to have to stay on the ground. I don"t see them following the scent up in the air."
"Quite right, and we have to make our actions as believable as possible. That means hugging the surface. Not only would tree-level flight confuse the herd, air currents would carry the scent upward too quickly and dissipate it too fast."
"Then what happens," Flinx pressed on, "if this idea works and the herd does follow us back toward the camp and we hit a tree or stall or something?"
Lauren shrugged. "Can you climb?"
"There aren"t many trees in Drallar free for the climbing," he told her, "but I"ve done a lot of climbing on the outsides of buildings."
"You"ll find little difference," she a.s.sured him, "with the kind of motivation you"ll have if the skimmer stalls. If something happens, head for the biggest tree you can find. I think they"ll avoid the emergents. The smaller stuff they"ll just ignore." She hesitated, stared sideways at him. "You want to wait a little while to think it over?"
"We"re wasting time talking," he replied, knowing that every minute brought Mother Mastiff closer and closer to whatever fate her abductors had planned for her. "I"m ready if you are."
"I"m not ready," she said, "but I never will be, for this. So we might as well go." She settled into the pilot"s chair and thumbed a control. The rear of the cabin"s canopy swung upward.
"Climb into the back. When I give the word, you uncap the flask and pour out, oh, maybe a tenth of the contents. Then hold it out back, keep it open, and pour a tenth every time I say so. Got it?"