Dark of the Woods

IX

Davis finished digging the snug cave into the drift and said, “Hand me the blanket.” When she passed the coverlet to him, he pushed it to the back of the snow-walled chamber without unfolding it, examined his handiwork once again, then turned around, smiling. “It's all done and looks like it won't cave in on us. We ought to have even a few minutes to spare to give the wind a chance to erase our tracks.”

“Proteus,” she reminded him.

He turned to the hovering protection robot, reluctant to make this final move. He had come to depend on the presence of a mechanical bodyguard, and there was something almost sacrilegious — something taboo — about shutting it down without having a temporary replacement. But when he looked down the slope and saw the lamps of the soldiers who were beating the brush for them, lamps lighted only moments earlier, not even five minutes away now, he reached out, thumbed the stud that opened Proteus's sliding access panel, and quickly cycled down the machine's systems with one toggle control until it was totally inactive except for its grav plates, which damped slowly to a complete shutoff, letting the sphere settle softly to the ground without sustaining damage. None of the sensors nodes gleamed from without or within. For the first time in nearly three years, Proteus was “asleep.”

Davis hefted the sphere, pushed it through the narrow tunnel that led into the snow cave, shoved it to the far end of the small chamber. Leah went through next, disappearing from sight, and he brought up the tail end after taking a final look at the approaching, irresistible line of lights that bisected the valley floor. Inside, he required two minutes of hasty work to block off the entrance with snow which had been piled in the entrance tunnel for that purpose. He knew the seal must be clumsily obvious from outside, a blotch on the smooth sweep of the remainder of the drift, but he could do nothing more but trust to the now rather stiff and persistent winds and the whipping clouds of fine, dry snow to conceal his labors as well as the majority of their footprints.

Inside the igloolike dwelling, the air was relatively warm, for there was no wind at all, and what little body heat did escape them was contained in the small area that had been carved out of the white stuff. Snow proved such a good insulator, against even the slightest draft, that he wondered why he had not thought of this the first night out rather than erecting the flimsy and dangerous lean-to. He supposed it was because the survival instinct had not yet bloomed from the bud he had then possessed.

They sat, quietly, shoulder to shoulder with Proteus at their feet, still and mute.

They could hear a faint wind.

As yet, nothing more.

Davis felt as if they were mice, huddled there in the darkness, anxiously waiting for the cats to pass by and leave them so they might resume life as normal mice should live it. And, like the mouse in his wall nest, he felt as much relieved as afraid. There was at least two, and possibly three feet of snow on every side of them except one. Snow would either hold their body heat within the little room he had excavated or filter the warm air into coolness before it reached the world outside. On the one side where there was no snow, the back of the chamber, there was a rock wall, which should certainly prevent the emanations of bodily heat from reaching the delicate sensors of the thermal detectors carried by the Alliance troops. If things worked as they planned, as they thought they should, the searchers would stomp right by them and collide with the sentries at the top of the ridge. They would then conclude that their quarry had somehow gotten through the pass — either before the line of sentries had been posted or in the first moments of the watch when the soldiers' attentions were not as sharp as they should have been. Excuses would be made, heads would roll, but at least he and Leah would get by unscathed.

He hoped.

“Have they gone by and—” she began.

He shushed her.

Outside, the faint sound of footsteps, breathing, and a few muttered commands passed as if down a line in chain communication, echoed in the night and found their way through the shell of the snow cave.

Davis sat very still, as if the slightest movement might cause the drift in which they hid to collapse and blow away on the wind, leaving them exposed and defenseless.

The voices faded; the footsteps faded; the breathing sounds were gone…

The wind replaced all of them.

“I think it worked,” she whispered.

“Let's wait,” he said.

The time went by so slowly that he felt he was going to have to scream to get it moving again. He remembered how, when he was hollowing out the drift to make a place to hide, the minutes went by so rapidly. If time were not only so subjective, but objective as well, maybe a man would not have so much trouble in life!

Then the sound of footsteps came again.

They were slower, more purposeful, and accompanied by commands shouted by the officers to search into the trees as well as to all sides. Every few steps there was a commanded halt when, Davis imagined, every rock and snowflake received an intimate scrutiny. He wondered whether the wind had done its job well enough to allow the seal to their snow chamber to pass that close investigation.

Then the footsteps drew even with them and another halt-and-examine period was called for.

Leah took his hand, snuggled against him.

Time passed.

He wondered how quickly he could activate Proteus and get him working, then remembered that Proteus could not be used against other men, even if they did mean you harm.

“Advance!” a voice called. Immediately, the line walked several more paces, past the entrance to their hideout before stopping for another examination of the terrain immediately before it. They were safe. The command had ordered a second search of the valley, had sent tired men back to tackle an even more tiring chore than that which they had just finished. And both times, their dugout had withstood scrutiny and had not aroused any suspicions.

He was about to turn to Leah to ask what they could do to celebrate the occasion and still remain inside a cramped hole inside a hollow snowdrift on top of a mountain, in subzero weather — but he heard her light, fluttering snore and discovered she had fallen asleep even as the line had been passing them. He shook his head, chuckled, unable to envision the sort of steel nerves that would have allowed sleep at a moment like that, even if sleep was so terribly in need.

Gently, he unfolded the heat radiating blanket, pulled it around them, aligned the heat makers, and settled down for a night's rest. It was very likely that the Alliance would hang around through the earliest of the daylight hours, just to check the place over one more time, in full light, before admitting the fugitives had slipped through their grasp. But if the entrance seal had been sufficiently covered now, it would even be more obscured in the morning. By tomorrow afternoon, they should be able to break out, rested and fed, and continue the journey. There was the possibility that they could find themselves coming up on the tail end of the Alliance search party, which would now be ahead of them; but as long as they stayed in territory the troops had thoroughly searched, they were safe. And then there was the chance…

… sleep found him in the middle of the thought.

It was a dreamless night until, near wakefulness, he began to have a nightmare in which he was caught by Alliance troops, shackled and led away to be turned over to the rep who had promised to destroy him. In the port city, he was taken down into dungeons beneath the gray block building of the government headquarters and chained to a wall where he was beaten, severely, again and again by an assortment of guards. Then the rep had him transferred to a cot where he was tightly lashed, and the ancient Chinese water torture was applied. Drop by drop, the liquid splashed on his forehead, ran down his face and neck. The sound of it grew from an almost inaudible tick to a resounding, crashing boom that was driving him insane. All the while, he marveled at the effectiveness of so ancient and simple a torture in a time when Science and man were so developed and sophisticated. It seemed anachronistic.. But it worked. Drop… by… drop… booming… on his… head… head… head… He felt his mind beginning to go, and he screamed — which awakened him.

The scream he had bellowed in the nightmare issued as a faint croak in his throat in the reality of the morning on Demos. But a piece of the nightmare persisted. The water continued to drop on his head. From a white ceiling, a steady, quick rhythmically timed series of water droplets fell to explode on the bridge of his nose. For a moment, he could not imagine where he was and what the dripping water could mean. Then a section of the snow ceiling, about as large as his hand, fell directly onto his face, a cold mass of slush that remedied his disorientation and woke him fully.

With a sinking feeling in his stomach, he sat up as if he had been propelled by a spring mechanism. The melted spot above his head was not the only breach of the shelter. There was a second hole past his shoulder where another column of hot air had worked its way through, and there were four places whose thinness was apparent from the amount of light that passed through and flushed into the cavelet. In a very little while, their sanctuary would cease to exist.

The disaster had been unavoidable. They would have frozen to death without the heat blanket, even with the body heat that would have collected in the tiny room. Yet the heavy amount of heat produced by the device was bound to be more than the snow could filter to coolness without, itself, being melted. Unavoidable, yes. A surprise, no. He should have thought of it, should have tried to arrange some method of waking in the middle of the night to turn it off, to give the crystalline walls of their dugout a chance to recuperate. He had been tired and had given in to the urge to consider the victory last night a final victory — when he knew perfectly well it could only be temporary. The Alliance was never going to give up that easily.

He sat there, very tense, waiting for the sound of a soldier, waiting for the startled exclamation of discovery and the shout of triumph. But when, after a long while, he heard nothing, he pulled up the sleeve of his coat and checked the time. It was already past midday. The soldiers would have had sufficient time, starting at dawn, to comb the valley again. They were gone by now, surely.

He tickled Leah's nose until she finally lifted an eyelid to stare at him sleepily with an expression that said she had not decided whether to kiss him or pulverize him. “They're gone,” he informed her.

She sat up, yawning. “For now.”

“I'm supposed to be the pessimist here.”

“You've infected me, then,” she said, smiling thinly.

They had a breakfast of vitamin paste, chocolate, stew, and water. Though that was not the most agreeable combination to put into their stomachs and begin the day on, they both agreed that every bite of everything had tasted like something they might have purchased in a delicacy shop. After toilet duties had been finished with, and they had exercised their cramped and aching muscles thoroughly enough to dare to put them to the torture of more walking and climbing, they made their way up the last thousand feet of the ridge, to the brink of the valley which had been so heavily guarded last night and was now so lonely and bleak.

They looked back the way they had come, to the mountain they had crossed the day before. Three helicopters fluttered around the tops of the yil trees on that last mountain, and from the flurry of hoisting and lowering, it appeared the search had been shifted to this area and that a good number of ground troops were involved. Such a fortuitous decision would never have been made by the Alliance if Davis had prayed for it, he was certain. But without hope, their luck had changed for the better, and the enemy was off on some wild goose extravaganza behind them. Perhaps they would make Tooth after all.

They turned, went down the other side of the ridge, out of the forest into a clearing three hundred yards across which broke between two arms of the heavy woods. The sky was only partially clouded, and bits of sun shone down on them, making their faces warm as they walked. They moved briskly, though they knew the enemy was far behind, for they had become accustomed to moving in shadows and felt oddly as if they were on a stage when out in the open. They did not have to worry about leaving prints, for the troops and helicopters which must have been here until just a short while ago had destroyed the smooth blanket of windblown snow.

Halfway across, Davis saw something which did not seem right, though he could not pinpoint what it was. He carefully examined the area of the approaching woods which he had been watching when the feeling of uneasiness had descended over him, and saw it again, in a patch of brush: the gleam of sunlight on glass or metal…

“Veer left,” he said.

She asked no questions, but did exactly as he instructed.

“Walk as fast as you can, but don't break into a run.”

The moment their pace picked up, the camouflage net dropped away from the one-man scout copter which had been on sentry duty, and the machine kicked its rotors on, danced off the ground, and sped toward them, the sound of its blades cracking in sharp echo on the open basin between the trees.

“Run!” he shouted, grabbing the suitcase and wrenching it from her. He knew the copter pilot had radioed the other Alliance aircraft that he had found the fugitives and that the area of search would be hot on their trail in minutes. He also knew, with a certain dread, that though the Alliance might want to take them alive, this pilot probably also had orders to kill if they seemed about to gain the next strip of woodland before the other copters could arrive. They would not have the slightest idea how the two of them had hidden in a valley searched two or three times with thermal tracking units, and they would not want to give them a second chance to use the same trick.

“Run! Run!” he shouted to her as she lagged behind him by half a dozen paces.

The woods looked so far away.

The first stutter of gunfire burst from the one-man copter and tore into the ground fifteen feet behind them.