Sargasso of Space

CHAPTER SEVEN: SHIP OUT OF SPACE

Tau’s fingers clicked the call key of the far-range caster when that sound was drowned out by a wail, both weirdly familiar and strangely menacing. Here on the edge of the burnt-off land there was no soughing of the wind, nothing to break the eternal silence of the blasted country. But this tearing over head brought both of the Terrans to their feet. Tau, out of his greater experience, identified it first.

“A ship!”

Dane was no hundred flight man, but something in that shrieking crescendo splitting the sky above them argued that if a ship were coming in, all was not well with it. He caught at Tau’s arm.

“What’s the matter?”

The Medic’s face paled beneath the dark space tan. He bit hard on his lower lip. And the eyes still fastened on the arch of sky were haunted. When he answered he had to scream to be heard over the rumble.

“She’s coming in too fast—not on a braking orbit!”

And now they could see as well as hear—a dark shape in the morning sky, a shape which tore across that same sky to be gone in an instant to a landing somewhere among those jagged peaks which were the mountains of Limbo’s northern continent.

The sound was gone. It was broodingly quiet. Tau shook his head slowly.

“She must have crashed. She couldn’t have come out of that one in time.”

“What was she?” puzzled Dane. The passage of that shadow had been so quick that he had not been conscious of any identifying outline.

”Too small for a liner, thank the Lord of Far Space. Or at least—I hope it was no liner—”

For a passenger ship to crash would be utter horror. Dane could understand that.

“A freighter maybe,” Tau sat down and his hand went out to the click keys. “She must have been out of control when she entered atmosphere.” He began to relay this last information on to the Queen.

They did not have to wait long for an answer. They were to remain where they were until the second flitter joined them carrying Tau’s full medical kit. This flyer would then head out into the mountains in an attempt to locate the scene of the crash, so if there were any survivors the men from the Queen could render aid. While a smaller party would stay and try to trace Kamil.

It was only a matter of minutes before the other flitter did appear. Kosti and Mura dropped from it almost before it hit dirt and Tau hurried across to change places. The flyer whirled up into the sun of mid-morning and cut a straight course towards the rock teeth of the range, following the line of flight Dane and Tau had seen that shadow travel.

“Did you see her from the Queen?” Dane demanded of the other two.

Mura shook his head. “See her, no, hear her, yes. She was out of control!”

Kosti’s broad face wrinkled in concern. “She must have hit hard. A bad smash—no one living, perhaps. I once saw a smack landing like that on Juno—very bad—all dead. That ship—she must have been out of control before they started down. She was not even fighting the fall—she came in like a thing already dead.”

Mura whistled softly. “Plague ship, maybe—”

Dane shivered. Plague ships were the terrifying ghosts of the space lanes. Wandering derelicts, free roving tombs holding the bodies of the crews who on some uncharted world had contracted some new and virulent disease, dying alone in the reaches of the heavens—perhaps by stern choice—before they could bring their infection to inhabited worlds. The solar system guards had the unenviable task of rounding up such drifting threats of death and sending them into cleansing suns or giving them some other final end. But here, beyond the frontiers of civilization, a derelict could drift for years, even centuries, before some freak of chance brought it into the gravitational pull of a planet and so crash it on an unwary world.

But the men from the Queen knew the score, there would be no rash exploration of the ship if they did locate it. And its smash-up might have been a thousand miles away, well out of the range of the flitter. Tau was there—and of all men a Medic was the last to take any chances with a plague.

“Ali—he has disappeared?” Kosti brought them back to the business at hand.

Dane, not overlooking his own carelessness, reported in detail what had happened in the valley. To his relief neither of the newcomers made any comment on his part in the affair but centred their attention on the task at hand. Mura was the first to suggest a plan of action.

“Let Kosti take up the flitter and cruise above us. Then you and I shall search the ground. There may be some trace left which you could not easily sight from the air.”

So it was arranged. The flitter, cut to its lowest cruising speed, circled slowly around, never venturing too far ahead. While Dane and Mura on foot, having to swing bush knives in places against the thick mat of vegetation, made their way into the sinister valley. They found the place where the track of the crawler came from the rock of the burnt-off land to bite into the soft soil of the healthy area.

Mura turned there and stared back, over the plain. They could not sight from this point the blotch of brightly coloured ruins. But they were certain that the crawler had come out of the blasted area, to be driven with intelligent purpose towards the mountains—until it vanished into the solid rock of a cliff wall!

“Dr Rich’s party—?” Dane aired his suspicions.

“Perhaps—perhaps not,” was Mura’s ambiguous reply. “Did you not say that Ali thought this machine was not of the usual type?”

”But—” Dane gaped, “you can’t mean that the Forerunners survived—here!”

Mura laughed. “They say that all things are possible in space, do they not? But no, I do not think that those ancient rulers of the lanes have here left their sons to greet us. Only they may have left other things—which are now being put to use. I would like to know more about those ruins—a great deal more.”

Perhaps that guess Rip had made days earlier—that on some planet might lie, waiting to be discovered, possessions of the legendary Forerunners—was close to the truth. Had such a cache been discovered by parties unknown here on Limbo? But with that marched the grim warning voiced by Ali that Forerunner material in Terran hands might be a threat to all of them.

Slowly they combed the mouth of the valley, reassured by the flitter cruising above. Dane broke open his field rations, chewing as he went, on a cube of rubbery, tasteless stuff which was supposed to provide his lank young body with all it needed in the way of balanced nourishment—and yet which was so savourless and far removed from real food.

He hacked at a mass of prickly shrubs and stumbled through the clutch of longer branches to come into a pocket-sized clearing entirely ranged with thorn-studded greenery. Underfoot was a thick mat of decaying leaves through which not even the spears of grass could grow.

Dane stopped short. The brown muck of the mat had been disturbed. He was conscious of an unwholesome reek of decay which came from scuffed patches where a green slime had been recently uncovered.

He went down on his hands and knees, circling that ploughed up patch. He was no tracker, but even to his inexperienced eyes this had been the site of a scuffle. And since the slime was still uncrusted, that event had taken place not too long ago. Dane surveyed the brush which walled in the tiny area. It was just the place for an ambush. If Kamil had come through—over there—

Taking care not to disturb the churned muck, Dane made his way to the opposite side of the clearing. He was right! The cut of a bush knife showed where a branch had been lopped away.

Someone, armed with regulation Terran field equipment, had come through here.

Come through here—to find some one, or something, waiting for him!

The globe creatures? Or those who had used the strange crawler and burnt the globes in the valley?

But Dane was certain that he had discovered where Ali had been surprised—not only surprised but overpowered by a superior force. Overpowered—to be taken where? He subjected the walling shrubs to a careful scrutiny. But in no other place did he see any suggestion of disturbance or break. It was almost as if the hunter, having made certain of his prey, had vanished into thin air, transporting the prisoner with him.

Dane was startled by a crashing in the brush. His sleep ray-rod was out as he spun around. But it was Mura’s pleasant brown face which was framed in a circle of torn leaves. At Dane’s wave he came into the clearing. It was not necessary to point out the signs of battle—he had already noted them.

“They jumped him here,” Dane was convinced.

“But who or what are ‘they’?” was Mura’s counter. And seconds later he added the unanswerable question, “And how did they leave?”

“The tracks of the crawler went right through the wall of the cliff—”

Mura edged out on the carpet of muck. “No indications of any trap door here,” he observed, gravely, as if he had expected to find something of the sort. “There remains—” he jerked a thumb into the air where the purr of the flitter grew louder as Kosti circled back towards them.

“But we would have heard—have seen—” protested Dane, all the time wondering if they would have. He had been at the other end of the valley when Tau had caught that interrupted cry for help. And from this point the place where the Medic had been at that moment was hidden by at least two miles of broken ground.

“Something smaller than one of our flitters,” Mura was thinking aloud. “It could be done. One thing we may be sure of—they have collected Kamil and we must find out who they are and where they are before we can get him back!”

He ploughed away through the brush and Dane followed him out on a bare strip of ground from which they could signal to the flitter.

“Found him?” Kosti called as he brought the machine down.

“Found where some one scooped him up.” Mura went to the keyboard of the caster.

Dane turned for a last look up that sinister valley. But all at once his attention was drawn from the valley and its cliffs to a new phenomenon in evidence on a higher level. He had not noticed that the sun had disappeared while they had been making their search of the brush. But now clouds were gathering—and not only clouds.

The naked snow touched peaks of the range, which had been so sharp set against the pallid sky of Limbo when the ship out of space had swept over them, were gone! It was as if that milky, faded sky had fallen as a curtain to blot them out. Where the peaks had been swirled fog—fog so thick that it erased half the horizon as a painter might draw a blotting brush across an unsuccessful landscape. Dane had never seen anything like it. And it was moving so fast, visibly cutting off miles of territory in the few moments he had watched it. To be lost in that—!

“Look!” he ran to the flitter and jogged Mura’s arm, pointing to the fast disappearing mountains. “Look at that!”

Kosti spit out an oath in the slurred speech of Venus. Mura simply obeyed orders and looked. Another huge section to the north was swallowed up as he did so. And now they noted another thing. From the tops of the valley cliffs curls of greyish, yellow vapour were rising, to cling and render misty the outlines of the rocks. Whether this was all part of the same phenomenon they did not know, but the three Terrans insensibly drew closer together, chilled as much by what they saw as the cold apparent with the going of the sun.

They were shaken out of their absorption by the click of the caster summoning them back to the ship. The change in the mountains had been noted on the Queen and both the flitter searching for the wreck and their own were ordered to report in at once.

There was further change in the atmosphere, a speeding up of the mists. The swirls above the valley walls combined, formed banks and began to drop, cutting visibility.

Kosti watched them anxiously. “We’ll have to swing out—away from the valleys. That stuff is moving too fast. We can ride the beam in, but I’d rather not unless I have to—”

But, by the time they were airborne, the mist was down to the level of the valley floor and was puffing out in threatening tendrils on to the rough terrain of the burnt-off land. The mountains had vanished and the foothills were being fast swallowed up. It was uncanny, terrifying in a way, this wiping away of solid earth, the substitution of a dirty, rolling mist which swirled and spun within its mass until one suspicioned movement there, alien, menacing movement.

Kosti set the controls to full speed, but they had covered little more than a mile of the return journey before he was forced to throttle down. For the mist was not only spilling out of the valleys, it was also curling up from the land under them, each thread of haze spinning to join and thicken with others.

It was true that they were in no danger of being lost. The thin reed of sound humming in their ears provided a guide to bring the flitter back to the parent ship. But they were none the easier knowing that as they coasted above a curdling sea of mist.

The stuff rose about them forming viscid bubbles on the windbreak. Only the constant hum of the radar beam linked them with reality.

“Hope our boys made it down from the mountains before the worst of this hit,” Kosti broke the strained silence.

“If they didn’t,” Mura replied, “they will have to land until it clears.”

Kosti throttled down once more as the radar hum sharpened. “No use crashing into the old lady—”

Within the blanket of mist all sense of direction, of distance was lost. They might have been up ten thousand feet, or skimming but one above the broken surface of the rock plain. Kosti hunched over the controls, his usually good-humoured face pinched, his eyes moving from the mist to the dials before him and back again.

They sighted the ship—a dark shadow looming through the veil. With masterly precision Kosti brought the flitter down until it jarred against the ground. But he was in no hurry to climb out. Instead he wiped his face with the back of his hand. Mura leaned forward and patted the big man’s shoulder.

“That was a good job!”

Kosti grinned. “It had to be!”

They crawled out of the flitter and, on impulse, linked hands as they started for the dim pillar which was the Queen. The contact of palm against palm was not only insurance and reassurance, but it was also security of a type Dane felt he needed—and guessed that his companions wanted also. The menacing, alien mist pressed in upon them. Its damp congealed greasily on their helmets, dripped from them as they moved.

But ten paces took them to the welcome arch of the ramp and they went up, to stand a moment later in the pleasant light and warmth of the entrance hatch. Jasper Weeks teetered back and forth there, his pallid little face expressing worry.

“Oh—you—” was his unflattering greeting.

Kosti laughed. “Who did you expect, little man—a Sensor dragon breathing fire? Sure, it’s us, and we’re glad to be back—”

“Something wrong?” Mura interrupted.

Weeks stepped to the outer opening of the hatch once more. “The other flitter—we haven’t heard from them for an hour. Captain ordered them back as soon as he saw the fog closing in. Survey tape says these fogs sometimes last a couple of days—but they aren’t usual this time of year.”

Kosti whistled and Mura leaned back against the wall, unbuckling his helmet.

“Several days.” Dane thought of that. To be lost out in that soup for days! You’d just have to stay grounded and hope for the best. But an emergency landing in the mountains under such conditions—! Now he could understand why Weeks fidgeted at the hatch. Their own journey over the unobstructed plain was, under the circumstances, a stroll in a Terran park, compared to the difficulties those on the other flitter might be forced to face.

They went up to make their report to the Captain. But all through it he sat with at least half his attention given to the com where Tang Ya sat before the master visa-screen, his hand ready for the key of the caster or to tend the rider beam which might guide the missing flyer in. Somewhere out in the mystery which was now Limbo was not only Ali, but Rip, Tau and Steen Wilcox—a good section of their crew.

“There it is again!” Tang’s forehead creased, his hands pulled the phones from close contact with his ears. As he did so the rest heard the clamour which had jolted him. Not unlike the drone of the rider beam—it scaled up to a screech which was real pain.

It continued steadily for a space and as Dane listened to it he became conscious of something else—a muffled rhythm deep within that drone—a rhythm he had known before—when he laid his hands upon the wall of the sinister valley. This disturbance was akin to the vibration in the distant rock!

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the sound was gone. Tang put on his earphones once more and listened for a signal—either from the missing flitter or from Ali’s personal com-unit.

“What is that?” Mura asked.

Captain Jellico shrugged. “Your guess is as good as ours. It may be a signal of some sort—been cutting in at regular intervals all day.”

“So we must admit—” that was Van Rycke looming in the door of the control cabin, “that we are not alone on Limbo. In fact there is much more to Limbo than meets the casual eye.”

Dane voiced his own suspicion. “Those archaeologists—” he began, but the Captain favoured him with a sharp pointed stare that stopped him almost in mid-word.

“We have no idea what is at the root of this,” Jellico said coldly. “You men get some food and rest—”

Dane, smarting from his abrupt dismissal, trailed Mura and Kosti down to the mess cabin. As they passed the Captain’s private quarters they could hear the wild shrieks of the Hoobat.

That thing sounded, Dane thought, just the way he felt. And even warm food, bearing no resemblance to the iron rations he had eaten earlier, did little to raise the general curtain of gloom.

But the meal had an excellent effect on Kosti’s spirits. “That Rip,” he announced to the table at large, “he’s got a lot of sense. And Mr. Wilcox, he knows what he’s doing. They’re all snug somewhere and’ll stay holed up until this stuff clears. Nobody’ll come out in this—”

Was Kosti right there, Dane wondered. Suppose there were those on Limbo who knew the tricks of the climate, who were familiar enough with such fogs to be able to navigate through them—use them as a cover—? That signal they had heard blatting out of the com—could it be a beam to guide some expedition creeping through the mist? An expedition heading towards the unsuspecting Queen?