Under the Eye of God Page 3

  Finn charged after him. The hard ground of the desert thudded underfoot. The dry air smelled of smoke and ozone. Murdock’s blasts came less frequently now.

  And then, abruptly, everything went silent.

  Sawyer and Finn stopped in the middle of the ghostly ruins and looked at each other.

  “Lost her?”

  “No.” Sawyer didn’t sound convincing. He frowned at his terminal. He punched in a program.

  The two remaining skyballs probed at the tumbled walls and rocks. They hovered and shifted and sprayed their lights across the ground.

  Nothing moved.

  Finn scratched at his neck abstractedly. “We’ll have to go in on foot. I don’t like it.” He pulled two pieces of a long-barreled weapon out of his coat and began to assemble it.

  Sawyer raised an eyebrow at him. “The rocket launcher?”

  Finn nodded. “You saw the thickness of her armor.” He squinted down the barrel, checked the fuel cells, and slapped a magazine of six darts into place. “Well, I’ve had it. No more Mr. Nice Guy.” He unlocked the safeties and armed the targeting monitor. “I don’t have to put up with this. I gave her a chance to surrender peacefully.” He sighted down the ravine.

  As if in answer, another beam sizzled out of the darkness. Another skyball blew apart in the air, showering sparks in all directions.

  Sawyer said, “I don’t think she did that herself. Maybe she has automatics in place. Or mines.”

  Finn shook his head. “Why waste it on skyballs? Why not just take us out directly?”

  “She likes to play with her food?”

  Finn shuddered.

  The last remaining probe dodged back and forth, but both brothers knew it didn’t stand a chance. The skyballs worked best in swarms.

  Down below, from deep in the notch, Murdock’s red beam disintegrated the last aerial tracking unit. Glowing pieces tumbled away into brightness.

  “Right,” said Sawyer. The now-useless hand terminal disappeared back inside his coat. Instead, he fitted a pair of tracking goggles over his eyes. Finn followed suit and the world took on an ephemeral gray sheen. All the rocks glowed in pastel shades: the ebbing heat of the day, the burning radiation of the night.

  “There,” pointed Sawyer. Murdock’s footprints throbbed in pale orange, a trail of fast-fading spots across the hard broken ground. “Her armor wastes a lot of heat.”

  “Not the armor—her metabolism.”

  Sawyer winced at the thought.

  The two brothers scrambled down the slope, across the jumble and deeper into the narrowing notch. They advanced like ghosts, gliding silently across the ground. Sawyer moved like a dancer, turning in graceful pirouettes while his weapons probed the gloom; Finn rolled like a tank, swiveling his whole body in cautious circles. Finn focused through his rocket launcher, Sawyer held the last of his grenades ready to throw.

  They stepped gingerly down the last remains of the broad stepway that bordered the descending avenue. Once, huge trucks had rumbled up and down this road. Now, only the wind whistled here.

  Past the fallen walls and broken doorways, past the junk and gravel, past the rocks and blocks and folded webworks, past the dead eyes and the empty vandalized sockets, past the sad incomprehensible graffiti and the fallen tiles and finally past the gaping boxlike structures that stood apart like desolate questions; down and down they followed Murdock’s elephantine steps.

  Something moved and both the brothers whirled, guns held at the ready.

  An uncomfortably long sinewy shape, lithe and black, twisted and wound between two rocks. It scuttled rapidly across the empty steps below them and disappeared hissing into a crevice.

  Finn relaxed first. “Siamese weasel,” he identified the creature.

  Sawyer nodded. “You know what that means?”

  “Uh-huh. Watch out for the rest of the ecology. Especially ratchet-lice and scorpions.”

  Sawyer frowned suddenly. “Listen—” he said. He held up a hand to stop Finn from moving.

  Finn waited. Sawyer touched his belt, adjusting the level of his monitors. Finn turned up the sensitivity of his ears too. Nothing. Silence rained, leaving only the hiss of their own blood in their veins, only the thud of their own hearts in their chests. The air burned brightly around them.

  “She’s gone to ground.”

  “I told you. She has to have some kind of base here.”

  Finn nodded his reluctant agreement. “That thought does not fill me with anticipation.”

  “Let’s just find the door. Then we’ll call down the floaters and use the heavy artillery.” Sawyer pointed forward. He didn’t wait for Finn’s agreement, he just headed down toward the darkness at the end of the cleft.

  “Sure you don’t have a bad feeling about this yet . . . ?” Finn called after him one more time. Sawyer didn’t respond. Finn shrugged and followed. “Okay. Just thought I’d ask.”

  The Tunnel

  At the bottom of the cleft, the ruins and the rubble became indistinguishable from one another. Clumps of dirty black brush still clung to the rocks here, the remainder of some hopeless attempt to reforest the area. Apparently, it had failed; the scrub looked dead.

  Here, at last, the wide descending avenue faded out into a pattern of broken stones, diving abruptly downward and disappearing into shadowy gloom. As the mining colony had scratched its way north, it had tried unsuccessfully to cover its past behind it. Here, the last steep tumble of slag and rocks, the endless stones and gravel and dirt, fell away into an empty dark crevasse. Above, the walls of the notch loomed ominously.

  “Shit,” said Finn.

  “You said a mouthful.” Abruptly, Sawyer pointed. “She came this way, all right.” Murdock’s glowing footsteps led down into the darkness and disappeared.

  They followed cautiously. What remained of the roadway continued steeply into the earth, slanting away into an impenetrable black murk. The huge open mouth of a deep mining tunnel lay gaping below them. Sawyer stepped down further, unclipping a hand-torch from his belt. He adjusted the beam to a stark white cone, and aimed it deep into the tunnel. Nothing. No echo, no reflection. The light simply disappeared. The darkness within gloomed total and absolute.

  “You want to go back for the tank?” Finn asked.

  “Sounds like a good idea,” agreed Sawyer; he moved forward down into the tunnel.

  “Uh, Soy—?”

  Sawyer angled his beam up and around. The tunnel had a high bare ceiling, carved cleanly from the dark brooding rock. The giant mole that had dug this tunnel had defined its passage with tight sawtoothed chisel-bites; then it had flash-glazed and exposed surface, both for strength and efficiency. The result looked both sculpted and barren. The nakedness of the walls reflected that of the ceiling and the floor. Sawyer advanced slowly. Against his better judgment, Finn followed. He unclipped his own hand-torch and switched it on.

  Deeper and deeper, they descended in claustrophobic silence. The steepness and the unevenness of the floor made their footing uneasy. The gloom around them swallowed up even the sounds of their steps. Neither spoke. The sense of pressure in the tunnel grew unbearable. Finn glanced worriedly toward his brother, but Sawyer looked resolute. Behind them, already far above them, the pale glow of night gently faded out and vanished; the mouth of the tunnel disappeared.

  “Soy—?” Finn stopped his brother.

  “What?”

  “Notice anything?”

  “You mean those scratches on the floor and the walls?”

  “Uh-huh. Do they remind you of anything?”

  “You gonna remind me about the tunnel worms again?”

  “Don’t I always?”

  Sawyer snorted and shook his head. “Uh-uh. Forget it. Not here. It wouldn’t make sense. Not even for Murdock. For one thing, the local ecology has no significant biomass. That puts a caloric ceiling on everything. This degenerate dirtball can’t support its humanoid population, let alone a colony of worms.”

  “One worm t
hen.”

  Sawyer made a sound of disgust. “Let go of it, Finn. The worm thing doesn’t apply here. Stop looking for it. You know as well as I, you can’t isolate one worm and keep it healthy. They go psychotic as individuals.”

  “But look at it from Murdock’s perspective. Having a psychotic worm the size of a trawler sitting outside your front door does slow down the unwanted visitor.”

  “You can’t control it,” argued Sawyer. “And you still haven’t licked the maintenance problem. What do you do when it gets hungry? Even a—you should pardon the expression—sane worm consumes its own weight in organic matter every day. Where do you get the biomass? Think about it. What do you feed a tunnel worm—?”

  “Murdock.”

  “Uh-uh. Even a tunnel worm has some taste.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. I meant, if Murdock wanted to guard her base with a tunnel worm, then she’d also find a way to keep it fed.”

  “Too expensive,” muttered Sawyer.

  “Not for Murdock,” said Finn. “Not for what she needs to protect.”

  Sawyer didn’t answer. He couldn’t win this argument. Finn didn’t hear logic, not about tunnel worms—not after that escapade on Lorca IV. They continued on downward. This endless descending tunnel didn’t seem to have a bottom.

  “Soy—?” Finn stopped his brother again.

  “What?”

  “Notice anything else?”

  Sawyer looked. “No more scratches?”

  “No more footprints.”

  Sawyer looked again. He turned and looked back up the way they’d come. He frowned, thoughtfully. “We know she came down this way. . . .”

  “We missed something.”

  “You think—?”

  Finn nodded. “I think we should get out of here.” He waited for Sawyer’s agreement.

  Sawyer hesitated. “I really hate quitting.”

  “Consider the alternative,” Finn reminded him. “I really hate dying.”

  “How would you know? You’ve never died.”

  “Good point. But I don’t want to try it tonight. Maybe some other time.”

  “Wait,” said Sawyer. “I want to try one thing more.” He readjusted his earphones again. He turned back and forth, listening. Abruptly, he shook his head. “Nope. Nothing. I think she’s blanked the whole tunnel.”

  “Nobody spends that much money casually. I think we’ve finally found her base.”

  Reluctantly, Sawyer nodded. “All right. You win. Let’s get out of here. We’ll have to come back with the tank.”

  They turned and started back up the tunnel, back up toward the memory of light.

  Up ahead, far above them, something opened its smoldering eyes—something big. It squatted in the darkness, a heavy black shape. They could see its glowing orange eyes burning like the embers of two dead moons. It moaned hungrily. It blinked—sput-phwut—and started down the tunnel toward them.

  “Uh-oh. . . .” said Sawyer. “I think I finally have a bad feeling.”

  “I love your timing,” said Finn.

  “Fight?” asked Sawyer. “I’ve got grenades.”

  “They didn’t work the last time, did they?”

  Sawyer shook his head. “They only made it angry—”

  Finn unshouldered his rocket-launcher.

  “Bad idea,” said Sawyer. “You’ll trigger a cave-in.”

  “Do you prefer the alternative?”

  Sawyer shook his head. “No.”

  “Well, you have all the brains in the family,” Finn accused. “Make a suggestion.”

  “We do Plan B.”

  “Plan B?”

  Sawyer shrugged. “We go down—”

  “We don’t seem to have a lot of choice,” Finn agreed, reshouldering his weapon. “We go down.”

  High above them, the worm moaned again.

  As one, they turned back down the tunnel and started moving as fast as they could, running, skidding, slipping and sliding over the flash-polished descent. The beams of their hand-torches bobbed crazily, hurling wild sprays of light down the deepening abyss before them. Behind them, the moan increased to a howl.

  “This does not fit my concept of a good time,” gasped Finn.

  “You knew the dangers when we accepted the warrant—” Sawyer lost his footing then, caught himself and slipped anyway, tumbling headlong forward across the laser-slicked rocks, rolling and sliding ever downward. Finn hurried after. “Soy—!”

  Sawyer bounced off a wall and came to a sudden stop. For a moment, he lay motionless.

  “Sawyer!”

  “No problem—” Sawyer gasped; he rolled back up onto his feet. “Keep going. I can handle it. Life gets harder every year—”

  “—And then you die.”

  “Right. And then they throw dirt in your face.”

  “And then the worms eat you,” added Finn.

  Sawyer finished the catechism. “Thank Ghu it happens in that order.”

  “Uh—” Finn voiced his fear. “It might not always work that way.”

  Sawyer glanced backward. “I can’t see it—”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll keep up.”

  “Uh-oh—” Sawyer skidded to a halt—tried to halt, but slipped instead, his feet sliding wildly out from under him. He came down heavily on his rump and kept on sliding downward, his speed increasing as he tumbled. He shot ahead into the darkness, his screams echoing up and down the tunnel, his hand torch marking his descent until both it and Sawyer disappeared abruptly in the distance. The last frantic echoes faded into silence.

  Finn tried to hurry after his brother. The descent grew steeper here, the stones slicker. Finn found it harder and harder to gain purchase. Then he lost control too, his arms flailed, his legs shot out; like his brother before him, he coasted wildly downward into darkness. Suddenly, the slide beneath him disappeared and he hurtled down and out into empty space.

  Finn Markham screamed throughout the entire long terrifying moment of free fall; his torch tumbled with him, revealing the quickest glimpse of a wall of shining night, and then he smashed painfully into its cold wet surface—

  Dread Planet

  The Lady MacBeth did not often carry passengers of Lady Zillabar’s exalted rank; partly because neither the Captain nor the First Officer enjoyed ferrying warm cargo, and partly because the cruiser’s accommodations did not lend themselves to the level of comfort one might expect on a more opulent vessel.

  The starship’s furnishings, while otherwise acceptable to travelers concerned more with destination than with luxury, possessed a less-than-charming Spartan quality when judged by the standards of the nobility. The Lady MacBeth lacked the elegant proportions and spacious design that individuals of wealth and power expected as a matter of daily convenience. The starship lacked too many of the luxurious services that broke up the tedium of long interstellar voyages; therefore, that class of passenger most likely to reserve the services of a starship for personal transportation remained those least likely to desire this one—a state of affairs which exactly suited Star-Captain Campbell and First Officer Ota. The real profit lay in cargo, not in passengers.

  Unfortunately, the wisdom of these arguments had failed to convince the Lady Zillabar, leader of one of the Regency’s oldest families of immortals. Star-Captain Campbell had tried to reject the Lady’s charter, but Zillabar had chosen The Lady MacBeth for obscure reasons of her own and once having made her decision, she would not accept refusal. She wanted transport for herself, her personal retinue of servants and Dragons, and no small quantity of cargo, from the nexus world of Burihatin to the dark red planet, Thoska-Roole.

  Captain Campbell had tried a second time to refuse the Lady’s charter, but Zillabar did not understand the word no. She made complaints to the local Registry administrators, pointedly not making reference to the unfortunate fates of their predecessors; the validity of her arguments alone convinced them. Shortly, the Burihatin offices of the Interstellar Registry informed the master of The
Lady MacBeth that she would immediately put aside her own concerns and accept the Lady’s charter—or risk the suspension of her certification.

  Captain Campbell chafed in annoyance, but she couldn’t operate without a Registry license. She invented several colorful new curses and accepted the contract with about as much enthusiasm as a Dragon confronting a salad.

  For her part, the Lady Zillabar had not forced the issue simply as a casual exercise of power. She would have much preferred to make the long nasty journey on one of her own vessels; but certain matters of state on Thoska-Roole demanded her immediate presence—and political expediency required that her arrival remain undetected. As unpleasant as the journey aboard this vessel might prove, The Lady MacBeth served her desire for secrecy exquisitely. No ship would seem less likely to carry a Regency noble than this decrepit old tub. Her arrival should pass unnoticed. The Lady cared little that its officers and crew shared neither her passion nor her purpose, as long as they obeyed their orders.

  As expected, the passage across the northernmost reaches of the Palethetic Cluster did prove noxious, noisome, and thoroughly offensive. The tired old vessel rattled and stank and vibrated; she produced disturbing smells and inescapable noises. The crew acted surly and the officers seemed disrespectful, even when they bowed. When the vessel finally arrived at Thoska-Roole, bumping rudely into a very unstandard elliptical docking orbit, the Lady Zillabar allowed herself the experience of a profound relief. “The things I do for my species. . . .” she grumbled.

  Out here, as seen from space, Thoska-Roole displayed a savage beauty; scarred and broken, ravaged by the vicissitudes of time and greed. All ochre and black and orange, she glowered like a dying jack-o-lantern, a rotting pumpkin left too long in the field. Her scars would leave a sense of awe and dread in even the most jaded of observers.

  Brightside, the world had a reddish cast, like the dust of ancient tombs. As the ship came around the terminator line, the planet disappeared against the sprawling wonder of the terrifying Eye of God, leaving only an eerie crescent, outlining an ominous dark hole in the spangled realm of space. A few lonely settlements on the dark side of the disk appeared as faint as fireflies. From this angle, the luminous glow of the primary illuminated the planet’s thin atmosphere like a veil, as well as revealing a dark cone of shadow stretching outward behind it through the pale dust of space.