Doomstar

24

Kettrick started up. He could hear Ghnak's deep grunting bass crying out that the god had spoken. Other voices shouted "Ghnak! Ghnak!" Women began to howl shrilly. There was a lot of stamping about, and the drums were still.

Kettrick and the others ran.

They met Ghnak between walls of fern and sawgrass, on the trail that led to the talking place and the bank of the river.

"The god my brother has told me," he said. "The tribe of Hhurr beyond the Many Hills has seen the magic of the sun-slayers."

Kettrick said, "Ghnak will lead us." He looked at his companions, seeing their faces as blank as he knew his own must be. They did not believe it. He did not believe it.

They did not dare believe it.

"A volcanic upheaval," said Hurth. "Or an earthquake."

Glevan said nothing. His lips moved without sound.

Ghnak was chanting. The tribesmen answered him. They stamped their feet and performed ritual obscenities of a defiant sort, their tails erect and quivering. In a moment there would be a rush to pick up weapons and then a surge back to the river bank. Kettrick stepped aside into the clearing where the talking log lay on its supports. It was hollow and had a long slit on its flattened top surface. The sticks were hung beside it. Kettrick switched on his radio and called the lifeboat.

After what seemed a moderate eternity the copilot answered, sounding very distant and rather peevish.

"Negative so far," he said. "Nothing but dust and volcanoes. This is a hell of a world. I've lost the cruiser now but her last transmission was negative."

"I may have something," Kettrick said, and explained rapidly, leaving out the supernatural embellishments. "The Many Hills are the line of buttes west of where you dropped us. How far beyond them this tribe lives I don't know. The country is a mess seen from the air…"

"I know. I saw it this morning. We'll give it a closer look when we reach it." Kettrick heard him talking to the pilot, and then he added, "That will be our next westward sweep. We're almost at the terminus now and about to head east."

Kettrick said, "You don't think it would be worth your while to go a little bit out of your way."

"We were assigned to a definite sweep pattern, Kettrick. We can't just drop out a few thousand miles of it because one of your apes down there saw a thunderstorm or an…"

"Volcanic upheaval," said Kettrick. "Sure. Suit yourself."

He cut the switch. He was angry, though he knew he had no right to be. The copilot was completely correct.

The tribe came streaming back down the trail with their weapons slung over their shoulders, following Ghnak. Kettrick and the others joined them. At the edge of the water the tribe's two river craft were pulled up onto the mud. The Krinn, quite nonapelike, were fearless and expert in the water. They swam, hunting the aquatic mammals with great skill. For long voyages they built a kind of rude catamaran out of two long buoyant logs sharpened at both ends and lashed together with cross branches about four feet apart. The river was the great highway, and from it other rivers branched, and the Krinn traveled for astonishing distances, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of desire for conquest or sheer curiosity. They were a gutty, energetic breed. In another million years or so they might amount to something. If they lived.

The craft were pushed off. Holding long paddles, a dozen or so Krinn bestrode each log. The men found places among them and Chai, holding herself rigidly in check, climbed obediently up behind Kettrick. The Krinn had found it convenient to ignore her, but she was finding it not so easy to ignore them. Kettrick laid his head back against her and said, "Soon over now. Be patient."

The Krinn began to churn the water, one of them on each craft calling out, "Ough! Ough! Ough!" rhythmically to mark the time. They picked up the beat and the logs shot away downstream, toward the Many Hills and the tribe of Hhurr who had seen the magic.

And here we go, thought Kettrick, a brave little band with our tails in the air, to save the sun.

Once more the strange feeling of unreality came over him, but this time the comfortable detachment was lacking. I have done this before, he thought. And he had. He had ridden a smooth log in the midst of a line of Krinn rowers, watching their hairy backs bend and the paddles swing, flashing in the sun. He had seen the banks of the river gliding past and felt the warm suck of the water on his legs and smiled at the way the tails of his fellow sailors were carried daintily aloft out of the wet.

Yet after a while he understood that this was not what he meant.

He understood that at last he was living the dream.

They went downriver with the current. They moved swiftly, but not so swiftly as the sun that hastened to reach its zenith, rushing toward its doom. A sick sun, a dying sun, and to Kettrick it seemed that a strangeness came into the light and turned all the landscape into such a place as one might see in fever. Dim shapes flopped and floundered and swirled in the tainted waters. The great buttes reared high, their flanks torn to the bleeding red rock, their foreheads shattered by lightning. The forest crept darkly along the banks, full of sounds and furtive motion, and far on the other side of the sink, atop the desert wall, the yellow curtain of a sandstorm blew and trailed its raggedness down and down across the treetops. The rowers, humped and fanged, churned tirelessly from nowhere into nothing, under the shining of the Doomstar.

The lifeboat, its delta wings extended, appeared high in the western sky.

The Krinn broke their rhythm, shouting that the sun-slayers had come. Kettrick, shaking off his daze, cried out that this was some of the help that the god and his brother Ghnak had sent for. He clawed at the radio.

The copilot still sounded peevish. But he said, "We decided to come back this way, just to break the monotony. It is a high probability area. You said west of that line of buttes? And north of the river. How large an area do you suggest?"

"Not too large, if the visual and aurak phenomena could be detected from the river. But I don't know how far west the tribe is."

"The scanner shows a bunch of critters gathering on an open landing place on this side of the bend. They seem to have spotted us. That's probably your tribe."

The lifeboat swerved and dropped and presently was out of sight behind the buttes, for the catamarans had not yet turned the bend of the river.

"It is a mess," the copilot complained. "Old craters, old lava beds, rugged little mesas…"

"Do you see anything?" said Kettrick into the transmitter. "Anything?" He was aware of Boker and Hurth and Gevan straining from their log perches.

"Nothing yet. We're circling, as low as we dare." A long silence. "No…" Some background gabble with the pilot. "Nothing." Another silence. Then, wearily, "Oh, hell, we might have known. It was a good try, Kettrick, but we should have stuck with our pattern…"

The pilot's voice cut suddenly across his, loud and curiously flat. "Look at that."

The copilot made the beginning of a startled cry.

Then nothing. A crackle of static, but nothing more.

Kettrick worked furiously with the radio, shouting until he was hoarse. Finally he understood that they were not going to answer. The boat's radio was dead.

The boat itself had not reappeared, nor would it.

"They may have crashed," said Boker. "Or they may have landed. But did they sight the thing, that's what I want to know. Did they sight it?"

Kettrick shook his head. He kept the radio open but there was not a whisper from it, all the way down the bend of the river to where the tribe of Hhurr waited at the landing beyond the Many Hills.

And now the sun was beginning its last journey to the west.

Kettrick let the two chiefs have the first and most important part of their ceremonial greeting, and then he said, "It is known to Ghnak, and no doubt to Hhurr also, for they are both great chiefs, that the sun must be saved before its setting. Where has Hhurr seen the magic of the sun-slayers?"

Hhurr, a muscular Krinn with many scars and the twenty heartstones around his thick neck, pointed to the tumbled land beyond the belt of forest.

"On the Black Hill the magic has been done."

"Ghnak will lead us," Kettrick said, "and also Hhurr. They will lead us as swiftly as the wind."

They set off, two tribes of Krinn now, or the males thereof, numbering something over a hundred, with the four men and Chai. The chiefs apparently were impressed by the need for haste. They ran, and the Krinn could run like deer. Chai kept up with them easily, though her tongue lolled and dripped in the heat. The men, weakened by two or three million years, soon had to submit to the indignity of being helped, and then carried by relays of grunting tribesmen.

They left the forest and the shade behind them. They ran in the naked blaze of the sun across stony slopes where scaled things hissed at them and slid away. There were lava beds and scattered malpais, and in a half circle to the west and north a nest of old volcanic cones thrust up. At their feet were the eroded remnants of a plain, flat rock tables of which the largest was the Black Hill.

It was black, with old lava, black against the charred stumps of the volcanoes, and it was impossible to see its top. But as they strained toward it, all at once they saw a quick bright flash against the blackness, and heard the unmistakable crack and whish of a missile going skyward, and Kettrick said, "It is."

The ragged file of tribesmen had stopped. They pointed, shouting harshly, at the already silent mesa and the sky. "The magic! The magic!" cried Hhurr.

Ghnak thumped his chest and screamed with rage and fright. The men shook their weapons. Kettrick licked his parched lips and summoned all the voice he had.

"They throw spears at the sun! The sun-slayers! Kill! Kill!"

"Kill! Kill!" shouted the tribesmen. They leaped forward. The sun threw their tailed shadows long across the sand,

"There won't be anyone there to kill," said Glevan.

"We'll kill the launcher," Kettrick answered. "It's all one to them." He looked at the sun and the length of the shadows. "How many more of them until sunset?"

"At least two," Boker said. "Maybe three." He too looked at the sun and then at the distance they had yet to go. "Better hope it's three. Unless you can raise the cruiser." He glared at the fatuously crackling radio with a species of hate.

"Not yet," said Kettrick. He turned it off. "They had the bigger part of the globe to cover. They're working this way, but I don't think we'd better count on them."

"What happened to the lifeboat?" Hurth muttered. "That's what they must have seen, a missile going off. But what happened?"

Kettrick said, "Don't worry about it now."

The radio was an encumbrance and he shed it. They ran stumbling in the hot sand, blinded with glare, hauled and hurried by stinking tribesmen with the rank sweat dried and crusted on them. The shadows of the old crones lengthened and the Black Hill seemed to come no closer, and once again from its unseen summit a flaming spear went up to wound the sun. Kettrick felt himself very oddly empty of emotion. He was not excited or triumphant or even greatly interested. He had set himself to run toward a certain place, and he was running, and his energies were entirely absorbed in the performance of that act. He thought that probably he was just a little out of his head.

A broken wall of rock appeared before him. He began to climb it. On both sides of him and before him ragged lines of Krinn went clambering swiftly. He knew then that they had reached the Black Hill. He was not conscious now of being tired. He was astonished at how quickly he was able to scale the rock. And Chai, who was not so good at climbing, was beside him.

Strangely, here and there, Krinn began to lose their footing and fall.

Chai said urgently, "John-nee…"

There were men on top of the mesa, firing at them. Beams from their weapons whiplashed downward, crackling, flicking away the tribesmen wherever they struck.

Kettrick shouted, "Hug the rock! Stay close!" He did not know whether anyone heard him or not. The Krinn were screaming, howling their war cries. Some of them continued to scramble up toward the summit, spurred on by the sight of actual enemies. Others hesitated, fierce and furious as ever but daunted by the powerful magic of weapons that made the rock smoke and brushed their brothers away like flies. Kettrick thought that in a minute or two they would break and run.

He hunched himself into the rock as tight as he could and pulled out the weapon he had brought from the lifeboat. He began to fire upward at the heads and leaning-out bodies silhouetted above him against the sky. There were not many of them, no more than eight or ten. Other sidearms now began to crackle where Boker and the others were. Wooden spears flew upward ineffectually and fell back and one of them hit Kettrick a glancing blow, nicking his buttock. One of the silhouetted heads above him appeared to disintegrate. The body belonging to it came bumping and sliding down. Another head hung at a broken angle over the rock edge. The others drew back. The fire slackened and stopped altogether as a third man who had reached out to take careful aim at somebody, Kettrick or another of the humans who had punishing weapons, lost his own weapon and the hand that held it.

Kettrick shouted, "Ghnak will lead us! Kill! Kill!" He began to climb again as quickly as he could. The Krinn howled and swarmed upward, their tails lashing. Boker shouted something but Kettrick could not hear what it was. Boker and Glevan came on. Only Hurth remained where he was. Rather incredibly, it seemed, he had grown tired of the battle and curled up to sleep between the rocks. Kettrick saw him and called to him twice before he realized that Hurth was dead.

The mesa rim was close above him now. The first wave of the Krinn went over it. There were more whiplash noises, and screams mingled with the war cries. Kettrick hauled himself over the edge, lying as flat as he could, and a dead Krinn gave him shelter.

The men who had fired from the edge had now withdrawn toward a structure erected on the flat top of the mesa. It was a moment before Kettrick's sun-dazzled eyes could distinguish its outline, even though he knew what it had to be. Then he understood why the lifeboat had been able to pass over it repeatedly at a low altitude without seeing it until the actual firing of the missile gave it away.

The top of the mesa was black with the old lava that gave it its name. The launcher was all black, the entire assembly, even the missiles in the slotted track of the loader. Everything was black, with no single glint of bright metal, and overhead a black camouflage net covered the whole assembly except for the firing tube, so that not even a too-regular or too-solid mass of blackness should reveal its outline.

Beyond the launcher, at a distance dictated by the force of its landing jets, a lifeboat stood erect on its tripod gear. At first Kettrick thought it must be the one from the cruiser, but then he saw the difference in its size and shape and knew that it was from Silverwing, and that the vanishing of the yacht in jump had been only a deceptive maneuver. And now he was quite sure what had happened to the cruiser's boat.

The seven surviving men formed a wall between the attackers and the launcher. Behind them the carrier track of the loading mechanism moved with a heavy, measured clicking sound as inexorable as the ticking of a clock, bearing another missile toward the tube. In front of them, far in front, the first wave of Krinn lay dead or dying, the few survivors dropping back desperately over the edge.

The body that was giving Kettrick a little shelter was the body of Ghnak. The necklace of heart-stones burned and shimmered about the neck. Otherwise Kettrick would not have known. But the Krinn knew, and the men of Ghnak's tribe were wavering. Kettrick reached to unloose the collar.

Beside him Chai gave a sudden whimpering cry, and then she was gone.

He saw her running, stooped low and running like the wind. The Krinn who saw her cried out in astonishment and surged forward over the edge, and perhaps that distracted the man for a second or two, or perhaps it was simply the shock of seeing her there alive and rushing toward him like a gray vengeance. She was already in midspring when he fired. She screamed, a high, terrible cry, but her clawed hands, outstretched, did not waver. They struck down, and the man fell beneath her and was hidden by her body.

Kettrick yelled, as hoarse and wild a cry as any animal might make. He stood up with the necklace of heartstones in his hand and held them up like a banner and rushed forward, firing, too wild with hate and grief to think of death. There were other weapons firing beside him. He saw two of the men fall, and then the others wavered and the Krinn rolled over them like a wave.

Kettrick did not see the very last of it. He was holding Chai in his arms. She said, "Not kill, Johnn-ee." She had not. Seri still lived, though her claws had torn him cruelly. She moved her head against Kettrick's shoulder, the old affectionate thrust, and started to say his name, and never finished it.

The launcher still had two missiles in its carrier track, one of them only six minutes from firing, when Boker and Glevan shut off the power supply and stopped the steady clicking march of the Doomstar.