Читать книгу Revenge of the Damned (Sten #5) - Allan Cole - Страница 9

CHAPTER FOUR

“NOW… WHERE THE hell is that clottin’ sentry?” Sten whispered. “Dinna be fashin’ Horrie, m’ lad,” Alex growled. Horrie. Somehow Alex not only had managed to make Sten a lower-rank but had found a diminutive for Horatio.

“You’ll pay.”

“Aye,” Alex said. “But th’ repayment ae a’ obligation dinna be ae gay ae th’ incurrin’t ae it.”

Sten did not answer. He stared at the dispatch ship, sitting less than 100 meters from their hilltop hiding place.

Sten and Alex had discovered a potential way off the planet when they were assigned to a work detail on the prison world’s landing field. They had both observed and noted a small four-man dispatch ship, once state of the art but now used for shuttle missions between worlds. The ship might have been obsolete, but it had both Yukawa and Anti-Matter Two drives. All they had to do was steal the ship.

Once Sten and Alex were beyond the camp’s wire, it should have been simple for them to sneak the few kilometers from the camp to the landing field. But it took more hours than they had allowed. Neither of them realized that one of the corollary effects of malnutrition was night blindness.

And so, in spite of their Mantis skills, they found themselves stumbling through the dark as if they were untrained civilians. Only their reflexive abilities from Mantis on night and silence moves kept them from being discovered as they crept past the peasant farms surrounding the prison camp.

“While we be hain’t ae sec,” Alex said, “whidny y’ be likin’t Ae tellin’t th’ aboot th’ spotted snakes?”

“If you do that, I shall assassinate you.”

“Th’ lad hae nae sense a’ humor,” Alex complained to the sleeping reek in the tiny box in front of them. “An’ here com’t thae ace boon coon.”

Below them, the sentry ambled across their field of view.

The airfield security was complex: a roving sentry, a wire barricade, a clear zone patrolled by watch animals, a second wire barricade, and internal electronic security.

With the sentry’s passage logged and timed, Sten and Alex went forward. They crawled just to the first wire barricade. Alex patted the small box.

“Nae, y’ wee’t stinkard, go thou an’ earn th’ rent.”

He flipped the top open, and the reek sprang out. Fuddled by its new environment, it wandered through the wire, into the clear zone. Then it sat, licking its fur, wondering where water would be, and waking up. Its slow thought processes were broken by a snarl.

The carcajou—three meters on three dimensions of fur-covered lethality—waddled forward. The skunk bear was angry, which was the normal disposition of its species. But the crossbreeding and mutation to which the Tahn had subjected its forbearers made the mammal even angrier. It dully reasoned that two-legs was its only enemy, and somehow it was forced to be kindly to those two-legs who fed it yet destroy any other two-legs. Also, it was kept from breeding and from finding its own territory.

This carcajou had spent five years of its life walking up and down a wire-defined corridor, with nothing to release its anxieties.

And then, suddenly, there was the reek.

The skunk bear bounded forward—according to instincts and general piss-off.

The reek—also according to instincts and general piss-off—whirled, curled its worm tail over its back, and sprayed.

The spray from its anal glands hit the carcajou on its muzzle. Instantly the creature rose to its hind paws, howled, and, trying to scrub the awful smell from its nostrils, stumbled away, one set of conditioning saying find shelter, the second saying find the two-legs that can help.

The reek, satisfied, hissed and scuttled off.

“Th’ stink’t tool work’t,” Alex whispered.

Sten was busy. Once again the barrier wire was drilled, pinned, and then, after the two crawled past, replaced.

The ship sat in sleek blackness, less than fifty meters away. Neither man went forward. Alex slowly reached inside his ragged tunic, took out four segmented hollow tubes, each less than one centimeter in diameter, and put them together. That made a blowpipe nearly a meter long. At its far end, Alex clipped on a pierced fish bladder, which was filled with finely pulverized metal dust.

Kilgour put the tube to his lips, aimed the blowpipe at a bush, and blew. The invisible dust drifted out, collected around the bush, and settled. Both men went nose into the dirt and thought invisible. Minutes later, the Tahn patrol charged up. Then they stopped and milled about.

In their initial casing of the escape, Sten and Alex had noted that inside the field’s perimeter were electronic detectors. They theorized that from a distance the detectors would be fairly simple: probably radar-based. This was, after all, a world far behind the front lines.

The Tahn corporal commanding the patrol lifted his com.

“Watch… this is Rover. We are in the suspect area, clear.”

“Rover… Watch. Are there any signs of intrusion?”

“This is Rover. Hold.”

The overage and overweight corporal used his torch to scan the ground. “Rover. Nothing.”

“This is Watch. Are you sure? Sensors still show presence in area.”

“Clot if I know,” the corporal complained. “But there’s clottin’ nothing we can see.”

“Rover, this is Watch. Maintain correct com procedure. Your inspection of site recorded… your report logged that no intrusion has been made. Return to guard post. Watch. Over.”

“Clottin’ wonderful,” the corporal grumbled. “If there’s nobody out here, we done something wrong. If there’s somebody out here, we’re gonna get the nail. Clot. Detail… form up.”

The Tahn guards doubled away.

Very, very good, Sten thought. The metallic spray that Alex had blown onto a bush had obviously registered on the nearest sensor. An alert squad had been sent out and had found nothing. Yet the sensor continued to show the presence of something alien. Therefore, that sensor’s reports would be ignored until a repair person fixed that sensor.

And Sten and Alex had free passage to the dispatch ship.

The port was not locked. Alex went to the rear of the ship, while Sten headed for the control room. The unanswered question was whether he could fly it.

The controls were very, very simple.

Sten was in the pilot’s chair, touching controls, when Alex rumbled into the tiny command center.

“Tha’s nae fuel,” he said.

Sten muttered four unmentionables and touched computer keys. Yes, there was fuel. Enough to lift them off into space. Enough to boost them into stardrive. Enough fuel to…

He fingered keys on the navcomputer. Enough to take them out of Tahn space?

Negative.

He slammed the control panel off and spun. “And all of this is for nothing.”

“Nae, nae, lad,” Alex said. “Ah hae checked the fuelin’t records. This ship’ll gae a’ topoff in three days.

All we hae’t’ do is seal it, gae back through th’ wire, an’ then home, an’ wait f ‘r it aye beat. Can we noo come back again?”

Go back through the wire. Go back through the paddies. Go back to the three-year-long hell of the prison camp.

They could not.

But they did.

* * * *

Sten and Alex slid through the wire, through the guards, and into the camp and their barracks close to dawn. All they wanted was to drift back among the sleeping prisoners and get a few moments of sleep. Instead, they found the prisoners awake.

The explanation came quickly.

The furor that Colonel Virunga had set up to cover their escape had provoked revenge. Revenge was a surprise roll call for all prisoners, with the guards checking each Imperial by name, finger- and poreprint, and visual recognition. There was no way for Virunga or any other prisoners to be able to cover that intensive a check.

Of course, the guards knew, Sten and Alex could not have escaped—their check of the perimeter proved that. But the two must be hidden somewhere, preparing to escape. Perhaps digging a tunnel.

It did not matter.

Colonel Virunga gave Sten and Alex the word: When they reappeared, they were to be purged. Along with Colonel Virunga—he somehow had to be connected with their nonappearance.

Sten and Alex eyed each other. They would never be able to make the second attempt to get that dispatch ship. Their next destination would be the mining world and death.

They were wrong—courtesy of the supreme rulers of the Tahn.