Legacy (6 page)

Sarnac wasn't paying attention. As he struggled to keep them aloft with the dying gravs, he saw out of the corner of his right eye the bogies swooping in.
Yeah, finish us off with lasers. It's a nice clear day, and why waste more depletable munitions?

What followed happened almost too quickly to register on the mind.

With a thunderous roar, one of the bogies exploded in a gout of flame and smoke, raining wreckage on the forest below. Then, like a streak of silver, a new craft screamed in from the west. Once past the bogies, it began to shed velocity, and started a 180 degree turn. It couldn't be doing it on gravs, which wouldn't have maintained stability—yet there was no sign of any kind of reaction drive at the tail of that sleek shape.

The remaining bogie tried to maneuver, seeming as slow and clumsy as Sarnac suddenly felt his own craft—or any craft he had ever flown—to be. But the stranger came around and, while Sarnac was still wondering whether to admire the pilot or the technology the pilot commanded, launched a missile that flashed home with preposterous speed, and sent the Talon-6 to join its fellow in fiery death.

But the stranger cut it a little too close, unable to kill all of his velocity, before he swept through the flying chunks of debris that had been a Talon-6. He flashed on, but now a trail of smoke appeared behind him as he began to lose control.

Sarnac snapped out of his trancelike concentration on the impossible dogfight, when he suddenly saw that the damaged grav-repulsors were failing. But the fate of their inexplicable savior could not concern him as he sought to nurse the shuttle to an emergency landing.

As the forest's green roof—Danuan plants used a pigment very similar to Earth's chlorophyll—drew closer, he remembered that he hadn't heard any sound from the other two for a while. And he discovered that he needed some human noise . . . badly.

"Did I just see what I think I just saw?" he asked the shuttle at large.

"You did." Natalya's voice sounded frayed from more than merely pain. "We all did. But the radar didn't."

It was all Sarnac could do to concentrate on the gravs. The development of sensors had advanced to keep pace with stealth technology. What they still called radar was a far more broad-spectrum affair than the twentieth century original. State of the art stealth hulls could fool sensors—but not at this close a range.

Then a wicked-looking tangle of tree limbs was whipping upward at them with vicious speed, and all he could think about was getting the shuttle down.

Sarnac brushed what he decided he might as well call an insect—there were no pedantic biologists around—from his face. It wasn't the exercise in futility it would have been on Earth, for
these
insects hadn't acquired a tormentingly persistent taste for homo sapiens. Sarnac's visitor instinctively recognized a life form it couldn't live on, and took the hint.

Of course, it cut both ways. If the local life forms couldn't live on them, the reverse also held true. It wasn't that Danuan food would poison them. Some of the plants would—but even without the notes and specimens they had left behind at their base camp, they could recognize the safe ones. But it also wouldn't sustain them. Certain essential vitamins were missing. Luckily, they had salvaged some vitamin supplements from the shuttle. What would happen when those ran out was something Sarnac had resolved not to let himself think about just yet.

He had brought the crippled shuttle down to a near-miraculous landing,
sans
gravs, in the dense forest. At first, the shuttle had been suspended in a tangled canopy, formed by gigantic ancient trees, and it had taken some ingenuity to lower themselves and the gear they could carry to the ground. After which they had gotten as far as possible from the alarmingly swaying shuttle and the creaking, groaning trees that supported it. The support soon gave way and the shuttle smashed to the ground, breaking its back and bursting into flames.

And now they were doing the only thing they could think of: continuing to get as far as possible from the wreckage, which the Korvaasha should have no trouble finding. In fact, they evidently
had
found it, for the trio—the sole humans on this planet—had already dodged one patrol. The three decided to head for the river they had noted during their descent, and to follow it westward to the sea. There, on the coast opposite the island they had explored, maybe they could find natives who spoke a dialect close enough to that of the islanders, which would allow Natalya to communicate, using the language disc in the pocket computer she had salvaged.

What they would do then—besides wait for some miraculous rescuers and try to think of a way of signalling them—was something else Sarnac decided to defer for future consideration. For now, they had a goal. Analysis might prove the goal irrational, but it was better than hopelessness.

"Bob!"

Frank's voice, vibrating inside Sarnac's skull, interrupted his brown study. "I'm blocked by a tributary. Come ahead. I'll stay out of sight."

"Roger," Sarnac spoke softly into his implant communicator. It wasn't necessary to subvocalize; if the Korvaasha were
that
close, the humans would be dead or prisoners. But they didn't dare shout at each other, any more than they could venture into the open area near the riverbank. To avoid Korvaash orbital surveillance they were keeping under the forest canopy, with the river visible as an occasional flash of reflected sunlight on the water through the trees to their left.

"Come on, 'Tasha."

Natalya nodded wearily and trudged a little faster. The exploding instrument panel had showered her left shoulder and upper arm with shards of metal and plastic, and their first aid supplies were minimal. It wouldn't get infected—and drugs kept the pain at bay—but her body cried out for healing rest. So far, she had kept up without complaint.

Soon the trees began to thin out ahead, and Frank motioned to them through the undergrowth. They settled in beside him on the edge of a bluff and joined him in staring morosely through the trees at the confluence of the river they were following and the tributary that blocked their further progress.

"Well, Fearless Leader, what now?" Frank inquired. "Do we try to swim it?"

Sarnac chewed his lower lip. It was the obvious course—or would have been if Natalya had had two good arms. Still, they could probably get her across. Sarnac was a good swimmer, Frank a competent one.

"Yeah," he decided. "But we can't risk it now. We'll wait till dark." He stole a look at Natalya's haggard face and decided it was just as well that they were being forced to take the break she would never have asked for.

Swinging their satchels to the ground, they settled down on the pseudo-turf, and tried to relax in the heat. They were still wearing their light-duty vac suits, having had nothing else on but underwear. The suits weren't really heavy, but they weren't intended as tropical wear. At least they provided some protection from the undergrowth.

"Hey," Sarnac spoke with a crooked grin, "have you considered that we're doing what Scouts are
supposed
to do? Haven't you ever noticed that in the VR adventures Scouts always seem to be trekking through jungles?"

"Yeah, right," Frank replied sourly. "Those bullshit artists ought to show the kind of places we usually end up. Deserts, or landscapes where the vegetation is so sparse and primitive . . ."

". . . that it isn't very picturesque," Natalya finished for him. Even in her haze of exhaustion she disagreed out of habit. "You know perfectly well that those programs are all made in Brazil, Frank. Shouldn't we be making some kind of raft for our gear? These satchels aren't waterproof."

Sarnac decided to put his foot down. "Frank and I will make one. Your job is to get some rest so you'll be able to keep up tomorrow." She subsided with minimal protests, and the two men got busy with monomolecular-edged knives and carbon-fiber rope carefully doled out from a line they might need later for climbing.

"Why don't we make a full-sized raft and float down this river?" Frank wondered out loud as he cut off another limb. "We could cover ourselves with branches and leaves during the day."

"Don't even think about it. We might be able to fool surveillance satellites, but the first time a Korvaash patrol on the riverbank eyeballed us we'd be dead meat."

"Aw, come on, how many patrols can there be in this area? I think . . ."

Sarnac never learned what Frank thought, for a loud
crack!
shattered the stillness. At the same instant, the woodpile they had been accumulating seemed to explode into flying splinters. They were instantly flat on the ground, for they knew the sound of a bullet-sized projectile breaking mach. When Sarnac stole a look upward he saw a Korvaasha gesturing silently with his heavy railgun for them to rise. Even in his shock, he couldn't help but reflect that his captor looked as wrong on Danu as he would have on Earth—or anywhere in a universe ordered according to human standards of rightness.

Many people had tried unsuccessfully to analyze the stomach-churning effect that the Korvaasha had on humans. Some of them lacked the crude bionic parts attached, with such obscene obviousness, to the anatomies of the specialized lower castes—but they were equally hideous.

Part of their eight-foot height was accounted for by long thick necks, with gill-like slits that opened and closed in a sucking action, as they performed respiration and produced inaudible speech. The thick, wrinkled greyish hide was not really what made the Korvaasha repulsive—nobody finds elephants nightmarish. There was something indefinably odd about the angles and proportions of the torso and limbs, but compared to some extraterrestrials, the bilaterally symmetric, two-armed, bipedal shape should have seemed positively homey. Maybe, Sarnac thought as he got to his feet, that was it: the Korvaasha weren't quite different enough. Except, of course, for the head.

The thinness of the skin over the roughly serrated skull, the slowly pulsating tympani that served as ears, and the wide lipless mouth that ingested food in a way that he couldn't bear thinking about . . . all were bad enough. But the single umber eye—large and faceted in a pattern that allowed depth perception—was truly disturbing.

Their Korvaasha captor made another jabbing motion with his long, heavy railgun. Among human infantry it would have been a tripod mounted squad support weapon. High technology didn't always act as an equalizer. The heaviest gauss weapons that humans could use as small arms accelerated mere steel slivers—like the weapons they had left with Natalya. Unarmed, they felt no inclination to argue with a being aiming a weapon at them. They shuffled together through the forest in the direction the Korvaasha had indicated.

They soon emerged in a small clearing where Natalya crouched beside their satchels, under the eye of a second Korvaasha. This one had more obvious enhancements than the first one, including a metallic forearm which was probably some kind of weapon housing. He was talking silently into a portable communicator, just as the pair of them could have been communicating in their subsonic speech for some time, for all the humans knew.

The alien put his communicator away, leaned down, and grasped Natalya's arm in a massive hand of four, mutually opposable digits. Her self-control broke in a strangled scream of pain as he jerked her to her feet. Sarnac saw Frank's jaw muscles clench and his eyes narrow, clearly estimating the distance to the satchel holding their needlers.
Don't do it, Frank
, he silently pleaded. Then the men's captor jabbed them in the backs with the muzzle of his railgun, pushing them forward as the other Korvaasha shoved Natalya ahead and scooped up the satchels, and the moment was past.

Sarnac thought he saw something off to the side. He could hear a rustling sound. And there it was again—or was it? It wasn't an object, it was more a flickering . . . no, a
wavering
, in the shape of a swiftly moving human form in the woods. Wait a minute, now there was an object—a knife blade, floating in mid-air where it would be if the phantom were real, and holding it. What the hell . . . ?

With the eerie silence that, it seemed to humans, accompanied everything the Korvaasha did, the one with the railgun convulsed, his neck-slits palpitating madly with what must have been a horrifying subsonic scream as the seemingly magical blade swept in from the side and slashed him across the base of the neck. Blood—thick, pale red Korvaash blood, that unpleasantly suggested human blood mixed with white syrup—fountained.

The other Korvaasha could hear his comrade's cry. He whirled around with a speed that Sarnac doubted his bionic enhancements could entirely account for. With a sharp
snick!
a long blade extruded itself from his artificial forearm. He shoved Natalya to the ground, and dropped the satchels as he moved toward his fellow, writhing weakly on the ground.

Before Sarnac could move, Frank sprang forward in a desperate dive for the satchels. As the Korvaasha swung back toward him, he snatched out one of the needlers—about the size and shape of an old-time machine pistol—and fumbled with the safety.

Then the Korvaasha was on him and he instinctively lifted his left hand with a repelling gesture. The Korvaasha's implanted blade flashed, and Frank's hand flew off from the blood-spurting stump of his left wrist.

"
Frank!
"

At Natalya's scream, Sarnac snapped out of his paralysis. He sprang forward, unmindful of futility—and then, with a flash of reflected sunlight, that magical-seeming knife flew past him, as if thrown in a flat trajectory, and embedded itself in the Korvaasha's side.

The alien arched his back in surprise and pain as Frank rolled over on his left side, face contorted with agony, and brought the needler practically into contact with his enemy. There was a rapid-fire, crackling noise, and a row of tiny, closely spaced holes appeared on the Korvaasha's back. For an instant, the tableau held. Then blood gushed from the Korvaasha's neck-slits and he crashed to the ground.

It was over. It had only taken a few seconds. The first Korvaasha's convulsions had ceased, and Natalya was applying a tourniquet to Frank with material snatched from the first aid kit. Sarnac was also on the ground beside Frank, whose pain was ebbing thanks to his biomonitor implant, but whose eyes were glazing over with shock and drugs. It was then that they heard, coming from midair, a sentence in a liquid, altogether unfamiliar language . . . and a slender, apparently female human figure suddenly stood there, dressed in a grey coverall with a face-concealing hood.