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  I exterminated the first beast, blasting him into a pink mist of body parts. Taa kicked in like a Starfighter’s afterburner to help me escape from the others. An observer of the savannah etch-a-sketch would have seen a straight line appear in the grass as if by magic. I was almost all the way across the meadow during the time it took a bolt of lightning to jag from one edge of the sky to the other.

  Taa ran out abruptly. I felt what I assumed to be the beginning stages of lintatai. I stumbled, returning to normal time, and fell exhausted to my hands and knees. My head dropped between my arms into an inch or so of collected water. I breathed heavily, trying to regain control, feeling my body heat up like a stove. Heating up rapidly.

  Wait!

  Easy enough for you to say.

  Look, said the GP, the Good Presence. A vision appeared. A peaceful Ganesh evening when the sky blazed with stars and planets and there was a breeze across a silver lake. The breeze was cool and it touched my face. Feel it? Let it take away the heat. Look for the peace.

  There can be no peace.

  Peace is inside us. That is where we must look.

  Who are you? I asked again.

  I am who I am and who you are.

  That tells me shit.

  Later.

  I felt the heat dissipating.

  Thank you, whoever you are.

  It was your doing.

  After some more deep breathing, I managed to stagger to my feet and look back on the trail I had made through the grass. The lizards were out of sight. I called out thought-wise to the GP, but it was gone. I wondered what assistance the evil Presence provided Blade, if it were in fact stronger than my Presence.

  I struggled out of the meadow and into the rocks and twisted electric-wrecked jungle below the old campsite and still some two or three kilometers to the south of it. I had made up some time with the taa, but now my feet were leaden weights and it was all I could do to put one foot before the other as I began to climb. Blade must still be ahead of me. He would reach the camp first.

  Kadar San …?

  Pia! You must run! Run for your life!

  I lurched forward, attempting to run toward her plea. I tripped and fell hard. I hadn’t the strength to get up. Pushing the Indowy box ahead of me, still holding the Punch Gun, I crawled on hands and knees. I couldn’t make it to her in time. I had failed her.

  Kadar San …?

  I collapsed in the mud and dank forest growth. Water ran off the hillside and over me. My muscles refused to work. All I had left, at least temporarily, was my Talent. I reached out with it and felt Pia, frightened and alone but not as ill as she had been before. I had to get across to her the urgency of her situation. Whether Blade’s LF was fully functional or not, he would find her if she remained near the old camp.

  I pushed with my mind, pushed hard to overcome any inadvertent resistance on her part.

  Pia, I will show you the way. Can you walk?

  Kadar San …?

  Yes. Move it. Now! Look, I am showing you where to go.

  If Blade’s LF was losing power, its range would be considerably reduced. That was our only hope, her only hope.

  I formed a route in my mind and transmitted it to her. I showed her how the hill was a waterslide that she could use — that I had used before — to escape into the forest below.

  I don’t understand. You want me to slide …?

  Go! Go!

  Images were coming back from her now. I felt terror and saw through her eyes Blade toiling up my side of the slope toward her, disappearing in and out of the rocks and trees. His chameleons were off and he carried his rifle. His head looked huge and otherworldly in his battle helmet. He glared up the hill toward her. He moved with caution.

  I screamed at her through my thoughts. I showed her the waterslide.

  She started crawling on her belly, slithering. I saw through her eyes Atlas’ body sprawled before his half-erected pop-up bivvie. He seemed to have shrunk over the past few days. Pia gasped and looked away from him, and I saw through her how the camp was torn apart. Destroyed items were scattered about everywhere among the corpses of the dead former DRT-bags.

  She tobogganed downhill with the runoff water. She cried out from the pain of slamming into rocks and other obstacles. I was afraid she would pass out again, which meant her end and the end of all hopes for my own escape.

  She made it to the thicker forest on the lee of the slope opposite me, still conscious and retaining some energy.

  There is a game trail. See it? I showed it to her. She reflected it back to me.

  Follow it.

  It was raining hard and the rain would wash out her tracks before Blade followed them.

  It was almost dark in the forest where she was. Her breath came in quick, fearful gasps. Creepers and finger-like vines snatched at her clothing. Shadows lurked in dangerous places. I felt her poor heart thudding in her chest, pounding out a rhythm of sheer terror. She kept tripping, falling down, getting up, and falling down again.

  He’s coming! He’s coming!

  Keep going, Pia. There is a little waterfall over a ledge …

  My head spun and I blacked out for an instant. When I revived, Pia was still there, anxious because I had disappeared for awhile.

  The waterfall? she prompted.

  She revealed it back to me.

  Good.

  I showed her how to get through the fall and into the little cave underneath where it was reasonably dry and all but concealed. Within a minute or two, I saw the underside of the waterfall through her eyes. I felt her nausea again, her weakness coupled with mine.

  Do you have anything to eat? I asked her.

  It didn’t come through. I played a scene of her eating so she would understand.

  Food? she said.

  Yes. You need to eat if you have food.

  An energy bar?

  Yes. Something.

  That was all I could do for her now. Hopefully, Blade’s LF would not be able to find her. I used my remaining strength to pull myself deeper into thick brush. I rested my head on crossed arms. Tired, so tired …

  Pia …?

  There was no answer. I felt myself slipping into oblivion.

  C·H·A·P·T·E·R

  FORTY FIVE

  The shorter of the two nights came while I lay passed out with the Indowy lindal eavesdropping on me, sending out its message: Here he is! Here he is! When I regained consciousness, I assumed Blade went looking for Pia. Either he had found her or he had not. Whichever, he must surely have noticed that my signal on the box went stationary. He would approach me now, more cautiously this time, suspecting a trap, locking up his thought and emotion the way he did so I couldn’t locate him. He must be near, I thought, waiting for first light.

  I probed for Pia. Off the air. That meant she was unconscious again, sleeping — or dead, a possibility that filled me with sadness. It was a risk going to the cave, but one I must assume for my own sake as well as hers. We needed each other.

  I moved one hand, then the other. Finally, my legs. I gingerly sat up. I felt much stronger and somewhat recovered, although my body ached all over and pain carved through my chest with each indrawn breath. I must have re-injured my chest plate during the taa burn to escape the lizards.

  I was one beat-up elf. These Humans played a rough game.

  It was a relatively short distance over the crest of the ridge and down the other side to the cave where I hid the first night after Blade’s neural grenade. It was rough going in the darkness, but soon I experienced a sense of deja-vu as I came near, like a replay of an old VR. Been here, done that, got the T-shirt, doing it again. Some things, I thought wryly, shouldn’t be done more than once.

  I couldn’t see shit in the dark, to coin an old, old Earth expression. I found the vicinity of the cave only through intuition and the lay of the land. I squatted and listened, hearing nothing but the dripping of the forest and, off in the distance, the shriek of some creature disturbed by bad dreams
or injured by a lightning strike. I sent Pia a thought message so concentrated and forceful that it must surely wake her if she slept. I kept sending it for long minutes. I felt my body temperature rising with the effort.

  No answer.

  I tried again.

  No answer. Blade must have found her.

  Then: Kadar San …

  A wave of relief swept over me. I could have almost cried.

  Are you alone?

  It would be like Blade to capture her and hold her for bait, but there was no way he could control her thoughts.

  I’m in the cave, Kadar San.

  Guide me. It is too dark out to see.

  How?

  Just keep thinking about yourself. I will follow the brain wave.

  She must be feeling better as well. With a hint of mischief, she showed me how she looked when she was getting into the time couch, wearing only her panties. They were blue. I bumped into trees and other obstacles following the delightful image. I soon heard the waterfall. A minute later, I ducked through the liquid curtain. She hugged me mightily and smothered my face with kisses.

  “I knew if you were like most men,” she explained happily, “that your penis would guide you when everything else failed.”

  “Females follow their intuition. Men follow their member. Is that the way the old, old Earth expression goes?”

  She laughed her wonderful laugh that I thought never to have heard again. Tears mixed with the laughter. She shuddered. I warmed her with my campfire hands. She snuggled into my arms. I endured the pain in my chest in order to hold her.

  After a moment, whispering, she brought me up to date. She survived the neural grenade when it went off, she said, only because she was sitting with her back shielded against a rock. When she regained consciousness — hours later? Days later? — she lay in mud face up. She could not move. Neural grenades affected the central nervous system. The only thing she saw was somebody’s lifeless body nearby sticking out from behind a boulder.

  “I … I kept lapsing in and out of awareness. I didn’t know what happened. I thought maybe the Blobs … I didn’t know. I thought everyone was dead. I had some nutrition bars in my cammie pockets. Finally, I moved my hands and I ate the bars to stay alive and drank the rain. They gave me strength enough to sit up and look around, but I still couldn’t walk. I was too weak. I … They … Captain Amalfi, Sergeant Shiva … Atlas … All of them lay dead and I couldn’t get away from that place of death. I had to sit in the middle of that … graveyard and watch their bodies … Once, the dragonflies came like vultures and I had to watch them … They ate Gorilla first. They sucked out his bodily fluids and …”

  Her voice caught.

  I squeezed her. “Do not think about it, Pia.”

  “I’ll have to think about it later.”

  “But not now. Later.”

  She touched my cheek. “I called for you, Kadar San. I kept calling for you in my mind the way you said I could.”

  “I was not listening for awhile. I thought you were … with the others.”

  “But then you heard!”

  “I heard.”

  She sighed. “It was Blade, wasn’t it? Everything in the camp was destroyed when I woke up, like someone had gone through taking what he wanted and wrecking everything else. The only bodies I didn’t see were Blade’s and … yours.”

  “You thought I had done it?

  She squeezed me hard.

  “Not once did I think that, Kadar San,” she cried. “In my heart I knew you were the most loyal among us. It was just that sometimes … sometimes … I can’t explain it. Something came over us as a team, something evil that caused us to turn on each other. Do you understand?”

  “The Presence,” I whispered.

  I felt her shiver because it had a name.

  “I am not certain I understand either,” I admitted. “I call it the Presence for lack of a better term. It first appeared in the pod when we water landed. Remember?”

  “How could anyone forget that awful laugh! I said it was evil then. Remember? It destroyed the robots, didn’t it?”

  “The robots got too near the energy source and it blew them up as a demonstration and a warning. I think whatever it is, it is not entirely sane. Apparently, however, it cannot affect sentients the same way. They can only influence. They cannot exert actual control or cause physical harm.”

  “They?” Pia asked, sounding alarmed. “There’s more of them?”

  The running waterfall and the rain hissing in the little stream covered our voices, as they also might cover the approach of an enemy. I drew my Punch Gun and lay it across my lap. Stick your head in here, Blade, and it will end now.

  “We talked about opposites once, Pia. Darkness and lightness, right and wrong …”

  “Good and evil …”

  “Good and evil. There is a Good Presence to counter the other. I think the bad Presence was testing us at first to determine which of us it could use.”

  “It chose Blade.”

  “Or Blade chose it. Not this time, but the time before when he was here. It has patience. It used his greed and his basic cussedness against him and against us. Now, it is hard to tell where he leaves off and the Presence takes up.”

  “What does it want …?” She caught herself. I felt her hand reach across me to the Indowy case. “Pandora’s box,” she said in a wavering voice.

  “Pia, this lindal is one of the machines the Indowy developed to control the Zentadon through taa. To one extent or another, it can do the same thing to other races and intelligent species. The Revolution assumed all such machines had been destroyed, but this one must have survived. The best I can determine, the Presence has only one motive — to release its evil on the galaxy once again. It is using Blade as its vessel.”

  “Destroy it, Kadar San! Destroy it now!” Pia cried.

  “I have tried. I thought of shooting it with my Punch, but I am sure the Indowy thought of that and built in protections. There must be ways of destroying it, but we don’t have them here.”

  “Get rid of it, then!”

  “We cannot leave it here. Even if Blade does not find it, the Blobs might. Imagine what could happen if the Blobs came into its possession. There is also the likelihood that one day this planet will be colonized, Dark Planet or not. After all, Humans and most other intelligent races and species have a strong urge to go out and conquer. I have a feeling that the Presence is a spirit that lasts for eternity. If not this Blade, then some day the Presence will find another Blade. We cannot take a chance that the genie will ever be loosed upon civilization again. We must take it with us and lose it in the vastness of space where the Presence cannot follow.”

  She was silent for a long fearful moment. “Where does that leave us?” she asked. “Blade will keep chasing us until he gets it.”

  “Even if I give him the lindal, which I will not, he still has to kill you before he can get off the planet,” I said. “You are the ranking living member of the team, the only one who can activate the pod. He will have examined the bodies by now and know it is you.”

  “Life is just one damned thing after another,” she murmured.

  “An old, old Earth expression.”

  She giggled in spite of the situation. “Here’s another one for you: Out of the frying pan and into the fire. How far are we from the pod?”

  “We could be there tomorrow except …”

  “Except …” She sighed. “Except it took everything out of me to drag myself this far. I heard you calling me in my thoughts, Kadar San. I tried to do what you said, but I kept passing out.” She paused. “Did you say there was an opposite to the evil Presence? A good presence?”

  “It saved my life.”

  She squeezed my hand. “It selected you to fight the evil because you were the best and strongest among us.”

  “If this is good versus evil, then I am losing the fight,” I said wearily.

  I leaned forward and stuck my head outside thro
ugh the waterfall. It was still pitch black out, but daylight would be coming soon. The chase must resume. Only this time I was burdened with a handicap who happened to also be the key to our escape.

  “How can Blade track us in this rain?” Pia asked. “The LF has to be running out of power, like everything else. Can’t we beat him to the pod?”

  I explained about the tracker bug Captain Amalfi placed on the box. It didn’t require much energy to monitor it and keep on our trail.

  “It will be easy for him to block us from reaching the pod,” I said.

  Blocked at every turn.

  Pia put something into my hand. “It’s an energy bar. I’ve been saving it. This is as good a time as any for a celebration.”

  I checked outside again. It was either my imagination or I saw trees dimly emerging from the darkness.

  “We will have to go soon,” I said. “Eat up, Pia. The odds are about to even up some,” I added encouragingly. “I actually saw Blade when he came up the hill. His chameleons are failing, and there are some really pissed off lizards back there aching to get even.”

  C·H·A·P·T·E·R

  FORTY SIX

  Exhausted and unwell from her ordeal before, during, and after the neural grenade, Pia dozed with her head on my chest and her arms wrapped around me and mine around her. I stroked the short crop of her hair with one hand, luxuriating in the contact. My Human mother had hair like that, thick and soft and dark. It was one of the few things I remembered about her. I always told everyone she was dead, that she died of heartbreak when she saw that I was born, minus the tail, more Zentadon than Human. I told it so often that I believed it myself. In fact, I didn’t know whether she was alive or dead. She abandoned me when I was five-years old to a Zentadon orphanage.

  “Who is my mother?” I asked the Keepers when I was ten-years old.

  “A Human whore.”

  “Who is my father?”

  “A Zentadon fool.”