TangleRoot (Star Sojourner Book 6) (13 page)

They came around the building's corner. “Something's trying to pull me inside!” I reached for Chancey's extended hand. We grasped each other's wrists and he dragged me away from the door.

Huff stared into the black interior and growled, deep in his throat. He crouched.

“No, Huff,” I said as he sprang through the doorway. I heard his teeth snap and his long claws click on the floor. I got to my feet as he loped back out.

“Let's get out of here,” I said. “There's something that wants me in there pretty badly.”

As we trotted toward the hovair, I felt a ghostly presence, more a pressure, on my mind. “C'mon!” I said to my companions. We broke into a run. Blue sparks burst in tiny puffs around us as we headed toward the lights of the hovair. Something was trying to force down my shields. Was it to communicate or attack? I fought back and kept the shields up.

What was that ominous noise? That chitinous sound of bristra on the move? Roots like slithering snakes rose up to cover the hovair's lit windows and exterior lights as the root system swarmed over the craft.

I gasped and put out a hand to stop Chancey.

“Holy shit!” he exclaimed.

“They can't get inside, Chance. But neither can we.” I wiped snow from my face.

Chancey unholstered his stingler. “We'll burn the bastards off!”

“No. I tried it, when they attacked me and the Mafia tags. The roots surrounded us and stacked up like firewood. You can't burn through that. C'mon.”

“C'mon
where
?” Chancey asked.

“I don't know. Away from the roots. Huff, c'mon.”

“I am c'moning,” he said. “These creatures of air make the fur on my back stand up like icicles.”

We ran into the night, away from the roots, and away from our hovair. The strange blue lights sparked like small fireworks and I felt that pull again.

“They're tracking us, Chance.” I shivered, not only from the cold.

“Who is, man? Those blue lights?”

“I think so. Whatever tried to pull me into the cottage.”

It was dangerous to run in this frigid air and work up a sweat that would freeze and make us colder, but we had no choice. The bristra had sniffed us out and its eastern flank was rolling toward my group like a mass of writhing pythons. The blue lights swirled around us, leaving pale green streamers. Something was pounding at my mental shields and I was afraid I couldn't sustain them much longer.

My legs felt heavy as we ran uphill on loose snow and shale to escape the advancing roots. I was gasping for breath in the thin, oxygen-poor air. The muscles in my legs began to burn. My head throbbed and I felt nauseous. I heard Chancey breathing hard. How much longer could we keep up this pace? Only Huff covered ground in an easy lope on all fours.

I slipped and fell. When I tried to get up, I only made it to my knees. My arms and legs felt like lead. I was afraid to look back at the encroaching bristra, but the chitinous clamor of their carapaces jostling each other grew louder and filled the night.

Chancey came back, gasping for air, and helped me to my feet.

“I will carry you,” Huff told me.

“No, Huff,” I said. “I'll only slow you down. You can outrun them. Chancey. Go!” I took out my stingler and forgot to breathe. The red light blinked. NO CHARGE lit up.

“That's impossible!” Chancey said.

I shook my head and tried to catch my breath. “It's the aliens. They…they took control of the hovair. Now this.”

Chancey pulled out his stingler. He drew in a breath and stared at the red blinking light.

I got up, took a few steps, and sank to my knees. The shields weakened and a probe came through.
Stay where you are. Do not move.

“Chance!” I said. “Whatever those lights are, they're telling us to stay put. I don't have a choice. You and Huff take off.”

Chancey sat down heavily in the snow. “How much further can we run, anyway?”

I rubbed my hands over my throbbing temples. I was shaking badly from the cold. “Huff, you can still outrun them. Save yourself.”

He came and sat beside me, and pulled me onto his warm, furry legs. He reached out a forearm and Chancey crawled on all fours and leaned against him.

“Gods of Kresthaven,” Huff said, “here are these three of us who tried hard to take the right path instead of the wrong path. Take us to your warm safe den in the sky now and keep us close to your liver.”

“Amen.” I watched the bristra approach. It began to stack and loomed high in the night air. There was no use calling on Spirit for help. He would have to kill us all to destroy his creation. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against Huff's chest. “Great Mind. Make it quick.” I pictured Lisa's face, laughing as she ate an ice cream cone at a county fair in Denver. “I love you, Lis',” I whispered, “better than anything else.”

I will deliver the message,
Spirit sent.

Thank you, my friend
.

The alien probe sent a sense of warmth and comfort. Was it a last merciful footnote in our lives before being torn apart by the bristra?

Blue lights swirled between us and the advancing roots. Lightning flashes suddenly laced the backs of the roots. They reared up, twisted, and flopped back down, exposing their bellies and teeth. Their long bodies twitched, sending up sheets of snow dust. Smoke rose from their spasming bodies. Shells cracked open. Fluid burst out in geysers and poured across the snow like a branching yellow river.

“That was too close!” Chancey exclaimed.

As far back as I could see in the curtain of swirling snowflakes, the roots were spasming and smoking. Some sprouted yellow flowers as they died. Tiny clawed legs raked the air in an attempt to escape their agony.

“Huff,” I said, “help me up.”

He held me as I leaned against him.

Chancey shook his head. “Sometimes it's hard to tell the friends from the enemies.”

I sent a light probe, calculated not to intrude but to show our gratitude to our saviors, whoever they were.

The hovair's lights rose through the snowy night. They had broken free of the dead roots. I unclipped my light and waved it skyward to catch their attention. The blue bursts blinked out. I lowered my shields and felt the presence within my mind withdraw.

“What's that light in the sky?” Chancey said.

“What do you mean?” I answered. “Our hovair.”

“No! The one in the Western sky.”

“Oh my God.” I backed up. “There's only one other ship on Equus.”

“The starship Searcher!” Chancey said.

“How the hell did they find us?” I asked.

“You want to hang around an' find out?”

“I think when the bristra was killed, their infrared sensors picked up the hovair. Get out of there, Joe!” I muttered.

We watched as our hovair banked to the east and fled into the night.

“Let's go!” Chancey exclaimed as Searcher turned its nose toward us. Lights raked fluttering snowflakes.

“They don't need lights to find us!” I started to run.

“Where to?” Chancey called.

“The cottage. It's our only hope. C'mon, Huff!”

We plowed through deep snow and my legs began to burn again. My lungs labored for air.

“Are you sure it's this way?” Chancey shouted.

I heard the ship's engines as it approached and lowered. “Maybe not. Huff, which way to the cottage?”

He pointed to our right. “That is the which way.”

“Why didn't you tell us,” I drew in a shuddering breath, “that we were going the wrong way?”

“You did not ask,” he said.

“You sure you want to argue now?” Chancey was plowing ahead in blowing snow.

The engines whined overhead. Glaring spotlights pinned us like insects.

“They won't fire! They want us alive,” I said as a hot beam burned snow and made it bubble in front of us. “Keep going!” I shouted. “They're just trying to stop us.”

Huff dropped back. “They are stopping us in the well!” he exclaimed.

“Keep going, Huff.” I slowed, wanting him close to me so they wouldn't fire on him. They needed a pilot for their interstellar flight. Chancey or I would do. Huff was expendable.

He lumbered forward and I kept him between me and Chancey.

The big ship skidded down with screaming engines and plunged through drifts of snow that enveloped it about a hundred feet away. I pulled out my stingler as I ran. Green light! Fully charged. I checked for hot beam. Chancey did the same. But my legs were turning to burning lead. I stumbled, fell, and got up. Through the storm, I saw the vague outline of a cottage ahead. I started to hyperventilate as I ran, and couldn't catch my breath.

“Climb on my back, my Terran cub!” Huff cried.

Good idea. Covering Huff would prevent the Mafia tags from shooting him.

I threw myself across his back and clung to his fur with the frozen fingers of one hand. I clutched the stingler in the other one.

The ship's hatch sprang open and I heard voices. We were still too far for a stun setting, but Chancey was falling behind.

Ahead, the cottage.

The front door yawned open to a rectangular darkness with those flashes of blue lights. I slid off Huff's back. “Get inside!” I yelled and went to my knees, my stingler pointed at the hatch as Chancey staggered up to me.

“I don't give a rat's ass if we're too far away,” I heard Al shout, “try the stun setting anyway, you friggin' morons!”

A tingling in my chest. A sense of spreading cold. Huff grabbed my jacket collar in his teeth, and dragged me inside. Chancey came in, threw himself on the floor and rolled. He aimed from there. I was on my knees, my stingler held at arm's length in both hands. My fingers were so numb, I wondered if I could pull the trigger.

“Hey, Al, they went in there!” I heard Vito shout.

“They might be waiting for us,” Al said.

“You got that right,” I mumbled between chattering teeth and steadied my stingler.

The door suddenly swung shut. It locked with an audible click.

The room was black, and cold as a tomb, but it was a very welcome tomb.

“Blast the friggin' door!” I heard Al say.

“Uh oh.” I held out the stingler and waited.

A sizzling sound.

“Mother fucker!” Vito exclaimed. “Something zapped my gun.”

The door was still secure.

“Thank you,” I whispered, “whoever you are.”

“I'll second that,” Chancey said between gasps of breath.

I unclipped my hand light and shined it around the room. Bare wooden walls, some planks still held hanging bark. A dirt floor, packed down for easy walking.

“Love the amenities,” Chancey said.

I rolled to my back, my arms spread, and tried to catch my breath. “Too close.”

“Too close for what?” Huff sat on his haunches, looking like a vague pyramid in darkness.

“Doesn't matter,” I squeezed out.

“I thought it mattered very much, my Terran cub, the way you were running.”

I took a deep breath. “We'll talk about it later, OK, Huff? Right now, I just want to breathe.”

“I would not want you to stop that.”

“Jesus Christ!” Chancey said. “How do you put up with him?”

“Did you ever consider, Chance…how he puts up with us?”

Huff cuddled next to me and threw a heavy forearm across my chest. “I put up and down with you.” He brushed snow off me.

“They're not going anyplace,” I heard Al say. “Get back to the fucking ship. We'll camp here an' wait fer them to give it up an' come out.”

“He's got a point,” I said.

“An' if that plane comes back fer them,” Al continued, “blast it outa the sky.”

“What plane?” Chancey asked.

“That's what he calls the hovair,” I told him.

“Tag's a natural born genius,” Chancey said. “Wish we'd kept our comlinks.”

“Yeah, they found us anyway. I wonder if those friendly blue lights would consider protecting our team in the hovair?”

“Why don't you ask them?”

I lowered my shields and imaged the bee climbing up to hover above a petal. “I just sent out an invitation.”

“Do you think those blue lights are the aliens?” Chancey asked.

“I don't think so, Chance. It's a primitive planet, perhaps only a few billion years old. Unless there were some quantum leaps in evolution, I'd say those quadrupeds we saw under the trees are about as far as evolution has come…unless there are primates, too.”

“Then what were those lights, man?”

“Weapons, maybe?”

“Pretty sophisticated weapons for goat people.”

Suddenly, I was so tired the cold floor felt comfortable. I put an arm across my eyes. “And their control of electricity speaks volumes,” I said. “I suspect it's advanced technology, But I'm reserving any conclusions until we have more information.”

“Spoken like a true scientist,” he said. “But we ain't gonna form no hypothesis while we're flat on our backs.”

“It's about all I can manage right now.” My body still ached from the tiring run through the frigid night, the thin air. But the heaviness that overcame my mind seemed to come from a tel probe. I lacked the strength to lift my shields. All I wanted was sleep. “Maybe we can just rest here for a while,” I mumbled.

If Chancey answered, I didn't hear him.

I hovered in the fantasy world between reality and sleep. Huff slid the stingler from my hand. I made a grab for it by pure reflex, then relaxed my hand. He put the weapon in my holster.

Somewhere, in a dreamscape too real for dream, but not real enough for the waking state, I found myself in a red world of devastation. Strange angular structures, burned and broken, jutted from scattered ruins, some still smoldering. The sky was full of roiling red-tinged smoke. Crumpled heaps of humanoid skeletons and rotting bodies with large skulls and hips, and rags that fluttered in the wind, were stacked like firewood among the rubble. I recoiled as the stench hit me. This was no planet under Alpha's jurisdiction of colonized worlds. No aliens I'd ever encountered. I heard myself moan in my sleep. Why were they showing me this? Huff cuddled closer, and lifted my head to his warm forearm.

Then I saw rows of living aliens, shorter than us, I think, and squatter, boarding space shuttles. I was guided to one that docked with a starship in orbit. This race of beings wanted me to know what had happened to them. And why they had come to Equus. I wondered if they understood stelspeak, the universal language of the stars. On a hunch I projected a thought in stelspeak.
Who are you? Is your whole world in ruins? What happened?