Stardogs (24 page)

Desert xerophytes can survive in the ordinary warm sun and frequent rain which makes soft green things flourish. But take them to the desert and try them with blistering hot days, bone-freezing nights and water as a distant dream, and then the soft green plants will die. The xerophytes will not. They will still survive. Some will even flourish. Ordinary human society hides many, many xerophytes.

The Upanishad of the Gardener-Dewa Celine.

Juan stumbled, for perhaps the three-thousandth time. He had never had to deal with anything but absolutely level corridors before. He had never had to learn to watch where he put his feet before. He was learning fast and hard now. The darkness hadn’t helped either. On the other side of the ridge the rising moons made it quite bright. Here in the shadowed valley it was pitch-dark. And
cold
. The thermo-controlled environment of the Space-station had not prepared him for this. The station was always a comfortable twenty-four degrees… He was dressed for a little more than that because the controlled temperature on the royal barge was set for the comfort of gentlemen in jackets. But with the rapid coming of desert night the air temperature had plummeted. The breeze coming up the valley had been warm at first. Now it cut like a whip through his station-weave. Surely it must be going to snow any minute now? At least that would give him a drink.

The clear sky above him meant nothing to the boy. Perhaps the way the stars twinkled instead of burning cold and steady was an indicator of the coming snow. He stumbled on, grateful when the light of the first moon actually made it past the lip of the valley and down onto his rocky path. It also showed him that the saddle he’d been heading for, that he’d thought he’d reach in twenty minutes max, was still a long, long way off.

Eventually he just had to stop. He found a rock which offered some shelter from the horrible wind, and hunched down behind it, huddling his body around the warmth of Rat. He was exhausted and very, very thirsty. The rationed mug of water that Johannes had felt so mingy on the other side of the ridge would have been heaven to the boy.

Rat, in the fashion of rats, repaid Juan for the transport and warmth, by squirming out and dropping plumply to the ground, before setting off, nose to the ground into the tumble of rocks. Juan stared owlishly at his sole companion’s departing white posterior for a moment. “Hey Ratty! Here, Rat!” Rat paid him no attention, but followed his whiffling pink nose. Juan had little choice but to crawl after him, through a groove so narrow that it pressed against his ribs. Juan thought cracks in the rock were cracks in the rock, but this one was in fact a water-worn chute. It led into a small rock-enclosed bay of sand and debris. Along the one edge of the bay under the wide overhang that kept the sun off, lay a deep rock-pool full of water, rippling away from the drinking rat in the moonlight.

Juan couldn’t believe it. He touched it several times before he dared taste it. Then he drank until his sides ached. Then he turned to find Rat, to heap totally undeserved praise and affection on the animal’s head.

Rat, having drunk his fill was contentedly nibbling at a seed he had found. There were plenty more still hanging from the dry stalks of cirrith-grass from Abelard that had hastily sprouted, grown, and seeded again just after the rain had come. The little desert ger-mice native to Tani V didn’t come here. The cirrith-covered corner next to the tank had a resident diamondback pseudosnake, who was, at the moment, still sleeping off its last meal. Anyway it was too cold to stir now.

The flavour of raw Cirrith seeds has been described as peanut-scented oily cotton waste, by the flattering. Even the ravenous Juan couldn’t say they were delicious. But if Rat could eat them, surely they were edible? He chewed and swallowed the handful stoically. His belly was dutifully grateful, and he washed it down with more water from the pool, before venturing on some more. Actually, Cirrith is the source of about a third of Abelard’s income, and is processed into a bewildering array of products from cattle-cake to sperm-whale oil substitute. And yes, you can live on it. Juan only knew that by the time he’d eaten three handfuls of the stuff he wasn’t hungry any more, just incredibly tired. He managed to scrape together a few handfuls of cirrith-straw in a corner, and passed out on it, Rat once again cheerfully snuggled against his belly, the Denaari Mnemonic crown lying on the sand beside them. He slept well into the next day.

On the other side of the ridge the other crash-survivors awoke to the sound of collapsing metal.

“What the hell?” Mark Albeer was up, his gun in hand. So was the Viscount, but their weapons were not going to be of any use. The sound came from the wreck of the ship. Part of it had collapsed. As they ran towards it, the morning sunlight shone on streamers of drifting iridescent bubbles, homing in on the ship. The ship was being digested. The clattering was the human installed ironmongery falling. The little starfish-spitbugs were even burrowing into the sand, devouring the remnants of the ship.

“Back off. They’re eating the engine section. The power unit, whatever it is, is bound to blow,” shouted Martin Brettan.

They retreated, but other than the sound of more bits of falling steel from the human refit, nothing happened. The starfish-spitbugs began bubble-blowing and drifting away.

All that was left were human-refit debris in a half collapsed sand hole.

“Oh shit.” The Leiutentant Albeer pointed.

It seemed a terribly inadequate thing to say, when the ship’s water-reservoir was slowly draining onto the sand.

A frantic and largely unsuccessful effort to block the rip in the ship’s cistern followed. Of the ten thousand litres it had contained, perhaps seventy remained in a corner. Afterwards the castaways found themselves picking through the leftover debris like a flock of dejected vultures. He was so dispirited by the loss of the water that Johannes almost kicked the radio unit from the ruins of his fellow leaguesman’s cabin aside. Then, without any eagerness he bent and picked it up. It seemed to be still intact. Why had the Leaguesman had a radio-unit in his personal chambers? Even an agent-supervisor had no need of such a thing, surely?

“Hey! Leave that! It is mine!” Kadar stormed across toward Johannes. He attempted to snatch the radio unit away from him.

“Ow! My arm!”

“What are you two scuffling about?” Mark Albeer had, with frightening casualness, picked each of them up by the scruff of the neck.

“Let go of me, you… That is my radio-unit.” Kadar kicked, his face red and his eyes popping.

“Radio-unit? Does it work?” The bodyguard asked as if he was not holding two people aloft.

“Don’t know. I just found it. Let me down!” protested Johannes.

“Here Lila. Come check this out.” Mark called to the girl who was digging out bottles.

She came over. He put the two men down but retained his grip on their tunic collars. “Give it to her, Leaguesman.”

“I was going to… I wasn’t trying to keep it to myself.” Johannes was indignant.

“Yes,” said Albeer, dryly. “And the devil hands out free ice-creams at the gates of hell. Do you know how it works, lassie?”

She nodded, finding herself flushing slightly. Lassie indeed.

“It’s mine!” said Kadar, reaching for the unit.

“Shut up.” He twitched the collar again.

She clicked the power switches. An LED came on. “Well, we’ve got power, but it probably needs an aerial.”

“See if there is an extender at the back?”

There was. She unreeled the four yards of cable. “We’ll have to try it at various angles, but let’s see if we get anything.” She spun the dials. Suddenly out of the crackling silence, an eerie sequence of rapid clicks and whistles came across the ether.

Most of the rest of the survivors had gathered around them by now.

“There is something out there.”

“And we are the first humans to hear Denaari speech in more than three thousand years.” Tanzo’s voice was full of reverence.

“They don’t speak such good Imperial, do they?” Sam Teovan grinned crookedly. “And they’re probably not going to be that pleased to see us, eh?”

“It is probably an automated signal,” Shari said cooly.

“Yes. Welcome to Denaar. Now go away, or we’ll blow you to smithereens,” said Martin Brettan, deliberately without respect. “What I want to know is why you Leaguesmen had a unit like this on board the ship?”

“Ask Kadar. I had nothing to do with it,” said Johannes sulkily.

But that man was listening in horror to the gibberish coming out of his radio. “It’s what I heard in space,” he said dazed. “I thought it was just some kind of Imperial scrambler… on the ship….

“And you didn’t tell anyone, so we couldn’t reply. What a nice man you are Kadar. Who were you trying to contact?” Shari’s eyes burned at him.

He stuttered.

“The Emperor used the Yak. You were planning to blame the Imperial agents, weren’t you? So whose agents were those who were killed?”

“Mine! You witch…” Mark Albeer slapped Kadar with an open hand, and Leagesman fell.

Martin Brettan noted the strength of the stocky man. Strong, but then was Albeer a master of martial arts and an expert in the use of sabre and pistol, as he was? The bodyguard was probably trained with firearms and also surely had had instruction in the basic hand-to-hand combat stuff.

Martin Brettan was unaware that Shari was observing him as carefully as he was observing the bodyguard. The man had shown no reaction to the information that the people who had been shot on the ship were not Imperial agents, but League agents. Well… either he had known nothing of it all, or he’d been the one that killed them. But why?

Deo had not been in the crowd. He’d been watching someone else who wasn’t attracted to the alien radio-broadcast. Prince Jarian ought to have taken sneaking lessons. He’d been painfully obvious trying to slip off to the remains of the cabin he’d been confined in. Deo followed like a ghost. He saw Jarian scrabble through the ruins of the wardrobe. He heard the boy’s crow of delight when he found the small black case he’d been looking for. He watched as Jarian shoved it into his pudgy waistline and attempted to fluff out his doublet to make it less obvious. The Prince headed back to the rest of the party. Deo drifted silently away towards the bare ground where the engine room had hung. There were two solitary bags lying there, and he wanted to investigate them.

The bags were stationer-made stuff. He cautiously opened one bag. It was full of badly packed stationer-style clothes. And in typical stationer fashion each garment was neatly labelled.

J. BIACASTA. AMRITSAR.

SECTOR V. CORRIDOR 29.

APARTMENT A17

He shook out the top coverall. Whoever J. Biacasta was or had been he was not very large. Male, by the cut of the garment, and small. He put it aside and bent to examine ovoid bits of something that wasn’t the polished sand of Denaar. Ah. Rat droppings. Well, that was at least easier to understand than the presence of the clothes of either a small or a young stationer. He made his way back to the argument around the radio-unit.

“Look, we must go to the source of the signal, even if we don’t signal back.” Tanzo was flushed and vehement.

“They tried to kill us, Lady lock-tickler. You want to give them a second chance?”

“It was an automated defense system. Incoming ships carried a plague.”

“After more than three thousand years? What sort of system would survive that?”

“Either a self-repairing one or one built to last. Our ship lasted that long.”

“In deep space, yes, but in the atmosphere?”

“The Denaari built to last. The original colony building on Joshua has been restored three times. The Denaari buildings are still intact and they’re in better condition than the restored colony buildings.” Tanzo held stubbornly to her thesis.

“Our choice, as I see it, is a simple one. Either we stay here, and if we don’t starve or die of thirst, we dwindle into a desert tribe of involuntary colonists, or,” Shari paused, “We go hunting either live Denaari, or their civilisation’s remains. Much as I dislike being a scavenger, it could give us a head start.”