Star Guard

7. The Badlands

As they left the river the rest of the scouts fanned out. Only Kana continued with Bogate. He was a supernumerary in this operation, his duties beginning if and when they found traces of intelligent life. To his surprise, instead of ignoring his presence entirely, Bogate waited for him to catch up, asking:

"Just what do we look for?"

"Hansu thinks we may find Cos — they're a pygmy race supposed to inhabit these mountains — hate the Llor and are highly dangerous — use poison darts and build mantraps."

Bogate's reply to the sketchy information was a grunt. The wind was rising in gusts which whistled eerily between the heights, propelling the migrating puff-balls — circular masses of spiky vines which traveled so until they found water where they could root for a season. Of a sickly, bleached, yellow-green, they were armed with six-inch thorns and the Terrans granted them the right of way. This was the start of the Fronnian windy season. And to fight across the ranges during that period was to front dangers no Llor would willingly face.

A weird moaning rose to a shriek among the rocks far above them as the wind was forced through crevices and cracks. But for the most part the scouts were sheltered from the full blast by the ridges.

Here the soil was a mixture of gravel and clay, liberally salted with the rocky debris of slides. Each side canyon or gully had to be blazed with a fluorescent brand so that the Horde would keep to the main trail. They detoured around boulders taller than a man until Kana began to wonder why such a large number of landslides should occur in the length of a single dried watercourse. Suddenly the answer to that lay before his eyes and it was grim.

Sun flashes reflected from something half buried in the soil. He knelt to scrape away the earth. A Llor sword protruded from under a rock. And its haft was still encircled by the finger bones of a skeleton hand!

"Smashed flat — like a bug!" was Bogate's comment. The veteran's eyes narrowed as he looked along the way they had come and then on up the slit at the dusky shapes of the mountains. He had been too well trained by warfare on half a hundred planets not to mistake clues.

"Rolled rocks and caught 'em. Neat. This Cos work?"

"Might be," Kana assented. "But it was a long time ago — " He was interrupted by a shout which sent Bogate sprinting ahead.

The narrow canyon they had chosen to follow widened out into an arena — an arena where a deadly game had once been played and lost. Bones brittle with years carpeted the arid floor. And Llor skulls, very human looking, mingled with the narrow, fanged ones of guen, were easy to identify in the general litter, but not one skeleton was unbroken or entire. Kana picked up a rib, the bone light in his fingers. He had been right — those deep indentations could only be the marks of crushing molars. First there had been a killing and then — a feasting! He pitched the bone away.

Keeping aloof from the mass of ghastly relics the Terrans walked around the wall of the valley. There were no weapons in that gray waste, no remains of Llor war harness. Even the trappings of the guen were missing. The dead had been stripped completely. And since they lay unburied, the massacre must have gone unavenged.

"How long ago, d'you think?" Bogate's throaty bellow was subdued.

"Maybe ten years, maybe a hundred," Kana returned. "You'd have to know Fronnian climate to be sure."

"They got caught bunched," Bogate observed. "Larsen," he snapped at the nearest scout, "climb up and use the lenses — cover us from above from now on. I'll take point on the other wall. The rest of you — go slow. Soong, report back on the speecher. We haven't seen nothin' livin' so far. But we don't want our fellas caught like this!"

At a snail's pace they progressed to the far end of the valley of death, threading the narrow opening there as if they feared any second to hear the roar of an avalanche. But Kana, taking notice of the barren countryside, thought that the Cos would not ordinarily inhabit that section. The slaughter behind them might be the sign of some war — if Cos had caused that havoc. The tooth marks on the rib continued to haunt him. Some primitive peoples ate enemy dead, believing that the virtue of a brave foe could be so absorbed by his slayer. But surely those scars on the bone had never been left by the molars of a humanoid race!

There were other meat eaters in plenty on Fronn. The ttsor, large felines, the hork, a bird or highly evolved insect (the record-pak had not been certain) a smaller species of which was tamed and used by the nobles of the land for hunting, much as the ancient lords of his own world had once flown their falcons for sport. Then there were the deeter, whose exact nature was uncertain for they were nocturnal and dug pits to trap their prey. But those mysterious creatures inhabited the swamp jungles of the southern continent. Which left — the byll! But he had thought that those highly dangerous, huge, flightless birds were only to be found on the plains where their speed in the chase earned them their food. More dangerous than the ttsor — who did not willingly attack — the bylls were twelve feet of bone, muscle, wicked temper, and vicious appetite.

This mountain country was bare of vegetation except for a few clumps of knife-edged grass, withered and sear from the long dryness of the calm season. On the plains this grass was ruthlessly burnt off by the Llor, but in these mountain gullies it flourished in ragged patches to slash the skin of the unwary.

The scouts took hourly breaks, ate ration tablets, drank sparingly from their canteens and pushed on. The country about them looked as rugged as a lunar landscape in their own system, lacking all life. It was when the dried stream bed they followed branched into two that Bogate called a halt. Both of the new canyons looked equally promising, though one angled south and the other north. The Terrans, shivering a little in the bite of the wind from the snow peaks, were undecided.

Bogate consulted his watch and then compared its reading with the length of the shadows beyond the rocks.

"Quarter of an hour. We split — return here at the end of that time. You" — he indicated four of the scouts— "come with me. Larsen, you take the rest south."

Kana scrambled up the wall of the northern fork, lenses slung around his neck. Zapan Bogate was in the lead and had gained on his companions. The man immediately below Kana was having heavy going. Slides blocked his assigned route and he had to make frequent detours.

It was by sheer chance that Kana caught that flicker of movement behind Wu Soong. A rock shadow bulged oddly. He swung his rifle and shouted a warning. Soong threw himself flat behind a rock and so saved his life. For the ugly death which had been stalking him struck — empty air.

Kana fired, hoping to hit some vital spot in that darting red body. But the thing moved with unholy speed, its long scaly neck twisting with reptilian sinuosity. He was almost certain he had hit it at least twice but its frenzied darts at the rock where Soong had gone to earth did not slow. No longer silent, it shrieked its furious rage with a siren blast which tore their ears.

A burst of white fire enveloped the byll. When that cleared the giant bird lay on the ground, headless but still struggling to move its shattered legs.

"Bogate," Kana shouted down, "those things sometimes hunt in packs — "

"Yeah? Fire the recall, Harv," he ordered one of the awe-stricken men. "That ought to bring Larsen. We'll stick together. If there's any more of them, stalkin' us in crowds, we're gonna be ready for 'em. And not all scattered out so close to dark."

Soong made a wide circle around the body of the byll to join the others as Bogate gave Kana an order.

"You keep an eye out — cover us back to the forks."

From then on they investigated every shadow, every crevice in the canyon walls. It was with a sigh of relief Kana saw them back to the fork where Larsen and his men waited. Bogate put them all to work at once, rolling up good-sized boulders, erecting a breastwork which should stop any byll's charge.

"Those things hunt at night?" he wanted to know.

"I don't know. By rights that one shouldn't have been back here in the mountains at all. They're meat eaters and their regular territory is the central plains."

"Meaning that if they do come here, it's because they can hunt?"

Kana could only nod in agreement. As arid as the country seemed to be, it must harbor life — enough life to attract the bylls.

Since a fire was out of the question — they dared show no lights — the scouts huddled together behind the wall of their temporary fort. The mountains cut off the light of the sinking sun. In the gloom Kana found himself listening — for what he did not know.

The wind rose again to swoop and wail. But through their hours of travel the Terrans had become so accustomed to its moans that they no longer heeded it. In one of the infrequent intervals of quiet, when the mountain blasts died, Kana listened again. Had he heard — ? But nothing stirred beyond the wall.

They slept in fitful snatches, two of their number on watch in turn. Kana was dreaming when an elbow in his ribs brought him into full wakefulness and Soong's sibilant whisper warmed his ear.

"Look!"

Up and far ahead was a wink of light — a light which flickered to prove that it was no star. And to its left — another! Kana used the lenses. Those were fires right enough — beacons! In all he counted five. And beacons on those heights could only mean that someone was alert to the Terran invasion of this mountain territory. Not the royalists — the flames were not the blue of Llor torches. As he watched one winked and disappeared, then it blinked out again — off and on — in a pattern. There was no mistaking the meaning of that — signals! Would that exchange of information lead to such a one-sided battle as had taken place in the arena they had crossed that day?

"Signals!" Bogate was awake and watching also. "They must have spotted us!"

Kana heard rather than saw the veteran scramble over the wall. A moment later a growl from the dark relayed the other's displeasure. Kana climbed the barrier to look back along the route they had come. He saw then what had brought that grunt out of Bogate. High on the cliffs which walled the canyon was a speck of light. But they had no more than sighted it than it disappeared, not to be seen again. An answer to the signal ahead?

The veteran cleared his throat with a rasp. "Maybe that was `orders received.' " He parroted the official phrase. "Soong, use the speecher. Tell Hansu about those signals — "

"Well," he added a few moments later, "the show must be over for tonight — "

He was right, three of the fires ahead were gone, and the two remaining seemed to be dying. Kana shivered as icy fingers of wind pried within his coat. Were they going to walk into trouble?

"Camp answered," Soong reported out of the dark. "They saw a fire a little ahead of them, but not the others. Told 'em about the byll, too. They're at this end of the bone valley."

"Good enough. Turn in. We'll go on tomorrow."

In the morning Bogate chose the southern fork of the old river for exploration. Since Tharc lay to the south, it was logical to head in that direction. Whether the presence of byll in the other valley influenced his decision, or the fact that the fires they had watched had been to the north were points he did not discuss with the rest of the scouts.

Their new path was clearer of rock slides than any they had found so far and within a half mile Kana noticed an upward slope. They were climbing at last, instead of burrowing at the bottom of rock-walled slashes.

But they had not been an hour on their way before they came upon their first trace of the mountaineers. Luckily their experience with the byll had made them overly cautious and they were constantly alert to any faint indication of the abnormal. Larsen, who was in the lead, stopped abruptly at the edge of a wide, smooth expanse of sand. When Bogate came up the scout pointed to a curious depression in the center of the strip.

Kana, recalling one of Hansu's warnings about the Cos, spoke first:

"Might be a trap — "

Bogate looked from the recruit to the depression. Then he walked away to choose a stone, under the weight of which he staggered, waddling up to plop his burden onto that smooth surface.

There was a crack. Sand and stone together rushed down into a gaping hole. Kana inched up to look. What he saw made his insides twist as his imagination leaped into action. It was a trap, all right, a vicious, deadly trap. And the captive who fell into it would die a lingering death on the spikes artfully planted below.

The Terrans exchanged few words as they crept around the edge of the pit. On the other side Soong reported on the speecher, informing the Horde of this new risk.

From then on their progress slowed to a crawl. Not only must they watch for bylls, but every smooth patch of ground underfoot became suspect. They tested three more such stretches by Bogate's method, to have the last open again into darkness, this time a darkness from which such a frightful stench arose that they made no attempt to examine it closer.

"Do we now journey straight to someone's front door?" Soong shifted the weight of the speecher from one hip to the other.

"If we do — he's the sort who doesn't welcome visitors." Kana's attention was divided between the cliffs which walled in the stream bed and its flooring — death might come suddenly from either direction. And he was the AL man — the one supposed to contact the opposition. But none of the training he had known prepared him for a situation such as this — bare mountains which showed no signs of life — and these unmanned defenses against invaders. You couldn't contact an enemy who wasn't there. The Cos — if Cos they were — plainly pinned their faith on the devices of the weak or few in number — devices which would kill at a distance without involving too closely those who used them. If he could only bring about a meeting, convey to the mountaineers the idea that the Horde, winding its way into their jealously guarded territory, had no quarrel with them — on the contrary was now arrayed against their own ancient enemy, the Llor.

He was reasonably sure that any Cos spying on them would be stationed on the heights. And when the scouts took their break at the end of an hour's advance, he approached Bogate with a plan of his own. The veteran surveyed the tops of the cliffs uneasily.

"I dunno — " He hesitated. "Yeah, if they're spyin' they're up there — I'll grant you that. But they may be miles away — and we can't lie around waitin' for you to prowl, huntin' for somethin' which maybe ain't there. We'll see later — "

Kana had to content himself with that half promise. But the country offered an argument on his behalf not many minutes later. They rounded a curve and found themselves fronted with a wall of rock down which the vanished river must once have crashed in spectacular falls. Bogate waved to Kana.

"Well, here's a place where somebody's gotta climb. Suppose you do it and see what you find. Take Soong with you."

They shucked off their packs, taking only their rifles, and began the ascent — not up the water-worn face of the falls but along the relatively rough cliff to the left. After he finished this enlistment, Kana thought as he crept fly-wise from handhold to handhold, he would be qualified for service with a crack mountaineering Horde.

When they reached the top they faced west again. Here once more was the bed of the stream, but it was narrower than in the canyon below. And not too far ahead the somberness of the rock was broken by patches of yellow-green vegetation which promised moisture.

"There is something — " Soong pivoted slowly, studying the landscape.

Kana sensed what bothered his companion. He, too, felt as if they were under observation. Together they surveyed every foot of the rocky terrain. Nothing moved and the wind tore at them, whirling dust devils before it over the edge of the falls. They were alone in a dead world — and yet something watched! Kana knew it by a twitching between his shoulder blades, a cold crawling which roughened his skin with nervous tension. They were being watched — with a detached, non-human curiosity.

"Where is it?" Soong's voice came plaintively between the howls of the wind.

Kana knelt in the sand and brought out his number one package for trade contact. He selected a bare stretch of stone and laid out upon it the pieces he believed flashy enough to catch the eye and pin the attention of any native. Then he pulled Soong with him to the far left, picking out concealment well above the stream bed.

As the minutes passed Kana began to wonder if his nerves had misled him. The gold chain, the handful of bright stones drew the weak sunlight to make a flashing pool of fire which would have attracted the attention of any watcher, would have brought him out of cover had he been of any race the Terrans knew.

"Lord of Space!" Soong's voice hissed between his teeth.

Something had moved at last. A shadow floated with liquid, feline grace between two rocks and stood above the trade station. Kana's breath caught. A ttsor! That greenish fur — treasured by the Llor for mantles of state — could not be mistaken. The round skull with its large brain case, the fringed ears— A tail, able to grasp and hold, whipped around and selected the gold chain from the display, holding it up before the large yellow eyes. The ttsor sniffed at the rest of the collection, using the giant thumb claw of one paw to spread then around, and dropped the chain. It was not interested in what had no food value.

Kana's hand shot out to depress the barrel of Soong's rifle.

"It won't attack — don't shoot!"

The ttsor stiffened, its body tense, its head pointed upstream. Then in an eye wink it was gone and they saw it speeding away, up out of the river bed to the heights.

A sound reached them above the moan of the wind — a muffled roar Kana could not identify. He looked upstream. Then he whirled and grabbed for Soong, dragging him back from the lower part of the valley which was now a deadly trap. Together they ran for the cliff. Kana saw the white faces of those below turned up to him. Soong fired into the air — the three spaced warning signals — and Kana waved his arms trying to urge the others back against the canyon walls. His message must have made sense for they scattered and ran — some to one side and a few to the other. How many made it he did not have a chance to see before the black wall of water poured over the lip of the falls to hide the scene in a wild welter of spray.

The flood arose to lap at Kana's boots, lashed at him with spray. Shoulder to shoulder with Soong he wedged himself between anchoring rocks. Again the unseen mountaineers had used nature to defend their country, had turned loose this flood to rid their land of invaders. Soong was busy with the speecher trying to warn the Horde marching along the path of disaster.