Voyagers III - Star Brothers (33 page)

IT was night in the rugged mountains of the Fossey Preserve, along the border of Rwanda and the Congolese Republic.

Lela sat in a tight knot as far from the fire as she could, knees pulled up to her chin, thin black arms circling her legs. The blond had asked her for the final time if she would call Koku to them. She had refused.

Now the men were sharing liquor from a metal flask, laughing and eying her. The silvery flask gleamed in the firelight as they tilted it back. Lela could see their Adam’s apples bobbing as they swallowed.

“I’m first,” said the redhead. “I found her, so I go first.” He had not shaved in the several days since he had discovered her; his rust-colored beard looked shaggy and vermin-infested.

Lela tried to block out their coarse jokes as the men swilled the liquor. All but the blond, who sat some distance away from the others, on the far side of the fire, his face looking tired and grim.

“Call the damned ape and save yourself!” he had hissed at her, only a few moments earlier. Now he sat staring at her the way an angry teacher would stare at a child who has gotten into mischief and must be punished.

The irony was that Lela could sense Koku. The young gorilla was near, very near. Lela wanted to command him to go away, to race as fast as he could to the territory where the females waited, protected by rangers and university students. But she could not. Her mind was filled with the terror of death staring her in the face, wearing the mask of a morose blond Englishman.

And the ordeal the others would put her through before they killed her. I could run, Lela thought. In the night I could probably get away from them.

But in the following day, she knew, they would track her down and find her. She would only be postponing the inevitable. Worse, Koku would probably seek her, linked by the biochips implanted in their skulls, and when the hunters found Lela they would also find the gorilla.

No, Lela told herself, hugging her shins tightly to keep from shaking like a wind-blown leaf, once I am dead Koku will go his own way. He will stay clear of these hunters. He knows enough to be afraid of them now. At least I have taught him that much.

Koku felt the swirl of emotions in Lela’s mind. The young gorilla knew she was very near, and her growing terror filled him with a nameless fear. He could not build a sleeping nest. He could not sleep.

But he could not run away, either. His eyes saw nothing to be afraid of. His nose smelled the thin smoke of a campfire, but he felt no danger from that. The only sounds he heard were the normal hoots and shrills of the night. Yet Lela was afraid, and because she was, Koku felt fear also.

Fearful yet uncertain, wanting to run away yet unable to leave Lela, Koku paced back and forth on his knuckles, three hundred pounds of gorilla trying to deal with complexities that his brain had no way of unravelling.

But then a white-hot shriek of fright scalded his brain. Even without the biochip he heard Lela’s scream. He charged off through the brush toward her.

The four men were all over Lela, their hands tearing at her clothing, gripping her flesh. She could smell their foul breaths and feel their fingers clutching at her. She screamed and struggled, and they laughed as they stripped her.

Twisting her arms painfully they pushed her to the ground. The redhead gripped her ankles and spread her legs apart.

A thundering roar. A blur of black smashed into the redhead and sent him sprawling, tumbling right into the campfire. He howled with pain and tried to get up but could not. The fire licked at the backs of his legs as he shrieked and yowled.

Koku’s backhand slap knocked the two blacks away, and the other white man cowered and scrambled away, scuttling backwards, his eyes so wide Lela could see white all around the pupils.

Koku stood on his hind legs and roared at the men, slapping his palms against his stomach. It sounded like a huge drumbeat of doom.

“Koku, no!” shouted Lela. “Get away! Get away!”

She knew that the gorilla had done his worst. He could push strangers away from Lela, and his push could snap frail human bones. But he was not aggressive. Having moved the strangers away from Lela, Koku roared and threatened. But he could never attack.

The blond knew it. While his redheaded friend roasted in his own fire, his back broken, while Lela shouted and pleaded with Koku to run back into the safety of the trees, the blond calmly got to his feet, automatic rifle in his hands, and put the gun to his shoulder.

“Don’t!” Lela’s scream was lost in the roar of gunfire.

The burst of bullets stitched Koku’s chest. He staggered backwards a few steps, then sank to his haunches. Lela saw blood gush from his mouth and he pitched forward. Lela crawled to him, sobbing. The gorilla reached out a massive hand toward her, but then his eyes froze and he went still. A final sigh, so much like a human, and Koku was dead.

Gasping, panting, crying, Lela sat frozen on the ground. The redhead and both blacks lay very still, bones broken, skin ripped open. The other white was on his hands and knees, eyes squeezed shut now, rocking back and forth like an autistic child.

Koku lay less than a meter from Lela. She crawled to him and lay her head on his hairy back, the bloody bullet holes already matting. She sobbed, crying as she had when her baby brother had died of fever so many years ago.

Through tear-filled eyes she looked up at the blond. He had slung the rifle over his shoulder and was picking up his backpack. Without a word, without looking back at her or the creature he had murdered, he walked off into the shadows of the forest.

Lela knew where he was heading. She stopped crying. Her entire body shook, but now it was not from fear. Pulling the tatters of her blouse around her, she got to her feet and went toward the sleeping bags. The redhead was muttering incoherently, his legs black and smoking in the fire, his hands twitching uselessly. She walked around him, reached the sleeping bags, and picked up one of the leather cases that held an automatic rifle.

Sliding the gun out of its protective casing, she briefly looked it over, found the safety, and clicked it off. Then she worked the bolt as she had been taught to on hunting rifles.

Planting the plastic stock firmly on her hip, she shot the two blacks first. The blast shook her slim body and bellowed through the night like a stuttering lion. The blacks’ bodies jerked and rolled as the bullets plowed through them.

Traitors, thought Lela. Thieves and murderers.

The redhead’s eyes followed Lela as she stepped slightly toward him, then fired the gun again at the white who still hunched on hands and knees. He was knocked over sideways, gouts of blood and dust churned up by the bullets.

Lela looked down at the redhead. His face was contorting fiercely. He was trying to move but could not, his back broken.

She relaxed her grip on the rifle, let its muzzle point downward. “The jackals can deal with you,” she said to him.

Then she put together a backpack, took a fresh, fully loaded rifle, and started after the blond.

Stoner knew the layout of Delphi base better than anyone else there, since he had directed its design and construction.

Strapped in the stiff-backed chair, still pretending unconsciousness, he instructed Ilona Lucacs and Paulino. The young Latin also had a fair knowledge of the base’s layout; at least he knew where pressure suits were kept, and how to work inside a suit.

While Paulino and Ilona crept stealthily along a deserted corridor toward a set of lockers where the suits were, Stoner mentally examined the TV camera that was watching him. Probing the electromagnetic fields it generated, he traced the pattern of the picture it was sending back to the bored, half-asleep oriental who sat at the monitoring desk in the base communications center.

By the time Paulino and Ilona had zipped up their suits and begun plodding toward the evacuated corridor where Stoner’s room was situated, he had altered the camera’s inner workings so that it simply continued sending the same electrical transmission, no matter what its lens saw. The commando monitoring the camera continued to see Stoner slumped in his chair.

But Stoner slowly straightened up and flexed the muscles of his arms and torso. He was soaked with sweat from the effort of mentally jiggering the camera. How much easier it would have been to use physical tools instead of mental ones, he thought. The human race had developed physical tools instead of its rudimentary extrasensory abilities because a bone club worked much more surely than a mental death projection; for most humans, the club was more efficient and much easier to use.

The blindfold was a help rather than a hindrance. By eliminating all the thousands of bits of visual data his eyes provided every second, Stoner and his star brother were able to concentrate much more certainly on the mental tasks at hand.

Now for these handcuffs, he thought. There were many, many incidences of what the media and even the medical profession called hysterical strength: A mother sees her child pinned beneath an overturned car and lifts the car with her bare hands high enough to allow the child to wriggle free. A man being chased by a murderous mob leaps a wall that not even a top athlete could clear. Under certain conditions of stress, the human body is capable of fantastic feats of strength.

Stoner’s star brother duplicated such conditions. A tremendous surge of adrenalin, a sudden flood of the phosphate and other compounds that energized the muscles, a wild lightheaded moment as he strained to snap the chain that linked the cuffs together.

Stoner felt as if his arms would snap instead, but suddenly the chain broke with a sharp
crack!
and his hands pulled loose from behind his back.

He took several deep breaths while his star brother adjusted his body metabolism back to normal. His wrists were badly bruised, but free. He reached up and unbuckled the strap across his chest. Finally he undid the strap across his thighs and, on shaky legs, stood erect for the first time in hours.

He smiled grimly to himself. Like the old Frankenstein films when the monster breaks free of its chains and goes off to terrify the village.

For a few moments he puzzled over the mechanism of the locks on the cuffs. Once he clearly pictured the microscopic fields of the mechanism he easily moved them. The cuffs clicked open and fell languidly away from his raw bruised wrists in the gentle gravity of the Moon to clunk lightly on the concrete floor.

Stepping to the storeroom’s only door, Stoner realized that its electronic lock was more complex. But the fields it generated were much easier to sense.

He sensed Ilona and Paulino entering the corridor through one of the airtight doors that separated all the corridors of the base just as watertight hatches separated the passageways of a warship. He directed them to his door until they were just on the other side.

“There is an electronic lock,” said Ilona, her voice muffled by the door’s thickness, “and a metal bar jammed across the doorway.”

“Can you remove the bar?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Paulino.

“Before you do, can you find the emergency pump and put air back into the corridor?”

“I don’t know where the pump is.”

“There’s a control panel set into the wall next to each of the airtight doors. Emergency instructions are printed on it.”

A moment’s hesitation. “I don’t read English…”

“That’s all right,” Ilona cut in. “I can.”

Stoner heard their boots clumping down the corridor. He thought, If a section of corridor starts to leak air it sets off the alarms in the comm center. But there are no alarms if you refill a section with air. Just a set of monitoring lights on one of the consoles changing from red or yellow to green. Will the men in the comm center notice the change?

He decided that even if they did, it would be too late for them to do anything about it. Frankenstein’s monster would be loose, and anyone who tried to stop him would be in for a shock.

The two came back and told him that the corridor was filled with air once more.

“I have raised the visor on my helmet,” said Paulino. “The air is good.”

“You shouldn’t have taken that risk,” Ilona said. Stoner sensed more admiration in her voice than admonition.

It took him a few seconds to spring the electronic lock. Stoner remembered a professor from his college days telling him, “The more complicated a device is, the more ways it can fail.” Or be made to fail, he added mentally. That was the trouble with that damned guard robot in Beirut, he told himself. Too damned simple.

The door popped open with a little sigh of air and Stoner grabbed its edge and pulled it all the way back.

He felt astonishment from the two others.

“You are still blindfolded!” Ilona gasped.

“Oh!” With an almost embarrassed grin, Stoner tore the blindfold off and tossed it sailing back into the storeroom. He blinked several times before his eyes adjusted to the light of the fluorescent strips along the ceiling of the corridor.

“Come with me,” he commanded Ilona and Paulino. With the scowl of an Old Testament patriarch on his bearded face, Stoner stalked off toward the chamber where the starship was being built, the chamber where his wife and Li-Po Hsen stood face-to-face.

The first hint of dawn was graying the sky when Lela caught up with the blond. He was working his way down a steep slope, long-leafed fronds of blackberry bushes slapping at him. Lela followed him down the heavily wooded ravine and then stopped, panting, while the blond continued up the next slope.

Her face and arms scratched bloody by the thistles she had pushed through, Lela watched in the dim early light as the blond doggedly made his way to the top of the ridge. He is heading for the females, Lela told herself. He knows where they are and he knows how to slip past the rangers patrolling this area.

As the blond neared the top of the ridge, Lela unslung the heavy rifle she carried. Stretching out prone on the damp ground, she unhooked the gun’s muzzle bipod and set it firmly on the ground. Squinting through the sights, she waited until the blond was clearly silhouetted against the milky sky. Then she squeezed the trigger. The gun blasted half a clip of ammunition before she could take her finger away.