Stardogs (25 page)

Sam grinned, “I’m with you, Princess Lady. I’m a city a boy, and even a dead and ruined city has got to be better than this.”

“But which way do we go?” Caro looked at the dune-desert. “I mean, if we go out there we’ll just get lost and die. People do, you know.”

Deo spoke quietly. “The radio unit has a signal intensity meter on it. A little experimentation will give us direction.”

The Viscount looked at him sharply. He might be the Princess’s rent-boy, but he had a sharp mind. “With a bit of patience we can even work out distance. Good thinking, Watsisname.”

It took several hours of patient pacing and considerable calculation to work out that they should go north over the ridge. The signal was coming from roughly two hundred miles off.

“Well, we should be there in four or five days”, said Johannes, rubbing his hands together.

Lila looked at him with contempt. “We’ll be lucky if we get there in four weeks.”

“But it’s only two hundred miles. Say if we walk four miles an hour, say for ten hours a day…”

He could read scorn in her eyes as she stared at his flabbiness. “On the flat with nothing to carry, and good food and water,
you
couldn’t walk forty miles a day. Over that,” she pointed at the scree and steep glassy krantzes above them, “you could take a day to cover one mile in the right direction.”

“And we’ll have to carry food and water. And we do not have enough,” added Deo quietly looking up from his calculations. “At two pints per man per day for the twelve of us, we have, including all our bottled supply, less than eight days of water. Even rationed we don’t have enough for the weeks it will take us.”

“We’ll just have to search for water.”

“But if we fail to find any, we’ll have even less,” Johannes said.

“If we don’t find water, we’re dead anyway.”

Juan had enough water. Enough food for a while too, if you counted cirrith seeds. A direction was what he didn’t have… or a way of reaching the water. For on the sand between him and it and any possible way out lay a fat New Oz diamondback, sunning itself and occasionally flicking its slim dark tongue across its glossy black-purple lips. The boy didn’t dare move. He hardly dared breathe. Three yards away the snake lay fat and lazy and didn’t move either, keeping an unblinking pseudo reptile eye focused coldly on this large invader to its domain. Actually the only reason the diamondback hadn’t left was another fascinating smell it was tasting with its flicking tongue. Warm, frightened rat.

Juan’s tensed muscles were screaming. His legs were getting to the point where no matter what orders his frightened brain sent, they had to straighten.

His knee jerked. The diamondback hissed like an angry kettle and began to bunch itself up, to strike… or flee. Galvanized by fear the boy screamed and flung the Denaari Mnemonic crown at the creature with all his might. Juan was a better-than-average null-g ball player. It didn’t help him much down here in the gravity well. He missed by miles. The snake, however, decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and, with a sinuous slither, left for less populated parts.

For minutes Juan just stood there gulping air like a water-dispossessed goldfish. Snakes had seemed pleasantly frightening and exciting on vid. You could
keep
them in real life! Finally, tentatively, he bent down and retrieved the crown. The odd-shaped thing hadn’t been damaged at least. He held it between both hands and then, without thinking or intent, he put it on his head.

“Did you hear that?” Sam Teovan paused, head twisted, listening.

“No. What?” Mark Albeer was hot, out of breath, and already beginning to be thirsty. He was regretting volunteering for this expedition. He didn’t have the build for rock-climbing and this was rapidly what the attempt to cross the ridge had turned into. Looking back you could see the others picking through the remains of the ship’s fittings.

“Sounded,” pause, “like a,” pause, “scream”, panted the third expeditionary and the reason that the bodyguard had volunteered. Caro Leyven was even less well suited to climbing than himself. They’d had to wiggle up several cracks and she’d loudly cursed her breasts several times. Mark had expected to have to help her back to the cave after a short distance, but despite her obvious exhaustion and the sweat gluing her blouse to her body in interesting places, she hadn’t complained.

Mark scanned and counted the people down in the valley below them. “All there. Nobody showing any signs of panic. Couple of them sitting down idling, mind you.”

“It came from over the ridge.” They were nearly at the crest now.

“Animal maybe? Something we could eat?”

“It sounded like a person to me.” Sam looked doubtful.

“Well, let’s listen for a few minutes.”

But the only sound was that of Caro trying not to pant. After a while they went on. About ten minutes later they could see into the next valley. There was no sign of life. It was a narrow, steep sided valley. Beyond it lay yet another ridge, higher than the one they were on, and lipped with cliffs.

Down in between the tortured valley boulders the source of their scream lay in a fetal ball, clutching the thing on his head. He whimpered from time to time as alien images and emotions he could not understand plucked and teased at his consciousness. The images were alien and expressed in colors which the human eye is blind to. The emotions, the love and the unfettered sexuality of a Denaari five were beyond his ken too. But there was no escaping the terrible sadness and sheer misery of what had happened. He wanted to keen and chitter and chew his wingtips.

When he’d put the crown onto his ill-suited cranium, he’d been a boy. When several hours later, he took it off and stood up, he was boy no longer. Part of him was a Denaari nest-minder. The crown lacked the ability of the Stardogs to reconfigure its output to human telempathic norms, but the recipient had been similar enough to comprehend the non-detail parts of the crown’s content, the images and raw emotions, tastes, smells and gentle touches. Juan’s head was full of tall towers bright with colors for which he had no words, of the spiral Denaari fives soaring in the sun-bright sky, of the feeling of wind beneath his own wings and of shaping and controlling it, of the taste and the scent of a rare spice which would kill humans instantly, so they could never know its wondrous and intense flavors. Worst, his head was full of the creeling and mewing of the beloved new hatchlings.

Lying down here in the thrall of the crown Juan had not seen or heard the noisy descent of the party from the ridge. They had failed to find water, although the bodyguard had realized that the debris he’d seen must be the product of flooding.

Later, back with the others, Mark held up his spoils. “It’s wood.”

The others examined it. The grey-black fragment was broken and abraded, but when cut with the bodyguard’s pen-knife showed wood-grain. Tanzo squinted intensely at it. She scraped the black end of it. Sniffed the residue. Finally tasted it. “It’s been burnt.”

“There are other people here!” Kadar was jubilant

“Not necessarily,” said the xeno-archaeologist. “There are natural fires, you know. And alien species also use fire. But at least there are plants somewhere upstream. If there are plants there is water.”

They stared at the wood fragment as if it was a sacred relic.

“Well. I think first things first.” Shari was as pragmatic as ever. “We must take ourselves to the source of this bit of wood. Can we get over that ridge the way you went? With a reasonable volume of supplies?”

Sam looked at the black ridge glowering in the afternoon sun. “You’d break your ass trying to get over ‘fore dark. Best to wait for morning, or maybe look for an easier way.”

They prepared packs. It was the right thing to do, even if the search for wood and water might be a vain one. Having a common purpose and direction to work in eased some of the underlying tensions. Still there was a near fight that evening about the water ration.

“I need more water than this! It’s been hot out there dragging stuff around in the sun. The ones who went for a walk can have less.”

“Shut up, Jarian,” said Shari dismissively.

“I won’t! What makes you in charge anyway, you old bag? I outrank you. I’ll give the orders! Give me some more water! Now!”

Nobody moved. Loyal oaths and common sense warred in Mark Albeer’s breast. Surely the Viscount? No, not after last night’s humiliation. Perhaps the Princess’s factotum who had called him to that scene, and let him take the frontal role while he skulked? That man was outranked too.

A similar, if less well defined, argument was going on in Lila’s head too. She was loyal to the Empire. It had taken her in, paid her, given her purpose through the degradation of being Johannes’s bodyslave. If it had been the League rising against the Princess she would have had no doubts.

Actually, Deo was merely coolly waiting. Any person who posed a direct threat to her would die, but in the meanwhile, let her foes be revealed.

“I could use more water too,” said Johannes, declaring himself in, and unwittingly swaying Lila toward the Princess.

Kadar started to open his mouth.

“Oh stop it, you two.” Tanzo stormed up to the Prince, and literally pushed him over. He sat, gaping at her. “We’re all thirsty. Nobody is getting any extra. And I don’t care, Prince Jarian, if you do outrank me. I’ll
sit
on you if I have to. The Princess, I mean, Shari, is doing a lot better than
you
could. As for
working,
why you’re laziest person I’ve ever met. You were forever sitting down and slacking off when the rest of us were working. The only one who came anywhere near you was your equally lazy supporter.”

“Well said! Oh, well said, Tanzo. I’ll help you if you need me to,” said Caro, clapping, surprising herself, and influencing a large bodyguard considerably.

The dumpy little woman looked slightly embarrassed.

“Yeah, Lady Locktickler. I reckon I’ll also give you a hand if you need one,” said Sam, having made his assessment of Deo’s readiness to kill.

“Is anybody loyal to me?” asked Jarian in a half-whimper. “I’ll have you all flayed…”

The Viscount squatted down next to Jarian and whispered in his ear. “Not now! Back down, or we’ll be killed.”