Something moved in the shadows and a curiously shaped creature swathed in a long cloak came up to us. He flipped back the hood and I saw the leathery face of a Rishian.
“You’re late,” he said unhurriedly. “A couple of local gendarmes nosing about. Best we waste no time.” He turned and moved off toward the freighter. Fsha-fsha and I followed. We had covered half the distance when an actinic-green floodlight speared out to etch us in light, and a rusty-hinge voice shouted the Drathian equivalent of “Halt or I’ll shoot!”
7
I ran for it. The Rishian, ten feet in the lead, spun, planted himself, brought up his arm and a vivid orange light winked. The spotlight flared and died, and I was past him, sprinting for the open cargo-port, still a hundred yards away across open pavement. A gun stuttered from off to the right, where the searchlight had been, and in the crisp yellow flashes I saw Drathian Rule-keepers bounding out to intercept us.
I altered course and charged the nearest Rule-keeper, hit him fair and square. As he fell, my fingers, which had learned to strip the carapace from a twelve-pound chzik with one stroke, found his throat and cartilage crumpled and popped and he went limp and I was back on my feet in time to see the other Drathian lunge for Fsha-fsha. I took him from behind, broke his neck with my forearm, lifted him and threw him ten feet from me. And we were running again.
The open port was just ahead, a brilliant rectangle against the dark swell of the hulk. Something gleamed red there, and Fsha-fsha threw himself sideways and a ravening spout of green fire lanced out and I went flat and rolled and saw a giant Drathian, his white serape thrown back across his shoulder, swinging a flare-muzzled gun around to cover me. I came to my feet and dove straight at him, but I knew I wouldn’t make it—
Something small and dark plunged from the open port, leaped to the Drathian’s back. He twisted, struck down with the butt of the gun, and I heard it thud on flesh. He struck again, and bone crunched, and the small, dark thing fell away, twisting on the pavement; and then I was on the Rule-keeper. I caught the gun muzzle, ripped it out of his hands, threw it away into the dark. His face was coming around to me, and I swung with all the power that the months of mule-labor had given my arm, and felt the horny mask collapse, saw the ochre blood spatter; he went down and I stepped over him and the small, dark creature that had attacked him moved and the light from the entry fell across it and showed me the mangled body of a H’eeaq.
8
Up above, a shrill Rishian voice was shouting. Behind me, I heard the thud of Drathian feet, their sharp, buzzing commands.
“Srat,” I said, and could say no more. Thick, blackish blood welled from ghastly wounds. Broken rib-ends projected from the warty hide of his chest. One great goggle-eye was knocked from its socket. The other held on me.
“Master,” the ugly voice croaked. “Greatly . . . my people wronged you. Yet—if my wounds . . . may atone for yours . . . forego your vengeance . . . for they are lonely . . . and afraid. . . .”
“Srat . . . I thought . . .”
“I fought the Man, Master,” he gasped out. “But he was stronger . . . than I. . . .”
“Huvile!” I said. “He took the ship!”
Srat made a convulsive movement. He tried to speak, but only a moan came from his crocodile mouth.
I leaned closer.
“I die, Master,” he said, “obedient . . . to your . . . desires. . . .”
CHAPTER TEN
Fsha-fsha and a Rishian crewman hauled me aboard the ship; Srat’s corpse was left on the ramp. Other species aren’t as sentimental about such things as Man is. There were a few angry objections from Drath Traffic Control as we lifted, but the Drathians had long since given up Deep Space travel, and the loss of a couple of runaway slaves wasn’t sufficient reason to alienate the Rishians. They were one of the few worlds that still sent tramps into Fringe Space.
Once away, Fsha-fsha told me all that had happened since I was sent to the rafts:
“Once you’d planted the idea of escape, I had to go ahead with it,” he said. “The next chance was three months later, two of us this time, just one overseer. I had a fancy plan worked out for decoying him into a side alley, but I had a freak piece of luck. It was a loading job, and a net broke and scattered cargo all over the wharf. The other slave got the whole load on his head—and a nice-sized iron casting clipped the guard and laid him out cold. He had the controllers strapped to his arm, in plain sight, but getting to them was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. I used a metal bar from the spilled cargo on them and fainted at the same time.
“I came out of it just in time. The Load-master and a couple of Rule-keepers were just arriving. I got up and ran for it. They wasted a little time discovering my controller was out of action, and by then I had a good start. I headed for a hideaway I’d staked out earlier, and laid up there until dark.
“That night I came out and took a chance on a drinking-house that was run by a non-Drathian. I thought maybe he’d have a little sympathy for a fellow alien. I was wrong, but I strapped him to the bed and filled both my stomachs with high-lipid food, enough to keep me going for two weeks, and took what cash he had in the place and got clear.
“With money to spend, things were a little easier. I found a dive where I could lie low, no questions asked, and sent out feelers for information on where you’d been sent. The next day the little guy showed up: Srat.
“He’d been hanging around, waiting for a chance to talk to someone from the Triarch’s stable. I don’t know what he’d been eating, but it wasn’t much; and he slept in the street.
“I told him what I knew; between us, we got you located. Then the Rish ship showed up.”
The Rishian captain was sitting with us, listening. He wrinkled his face at me.
“The H’eeaq, Srat, spoke to me in my own tongue, greatly to my astonishment. Long ago, at Rish, I’d heard the tale of the One-Eyed Man who’d bartered half of the light of his world for the lives of his fellows. The symmetry of the matter demanded that I give such a one the help he asked.”
“The little guy didn’t look like much,” Fsha-fsha said. “But he had all the guts there were.”
“You may take pleasure in the memory of that rarest of creatures,” the Rishian said. “A loyal slave.”
“He was something rarer than that,” I said. “A friend.”
2
Fsha-fsha and I stayed with the freighter for three months; we left her on a world called Gloy. We could have ridden her all the way to Rish, but my destination was in the opposite direction: Zeridajh. Fsha-fsha stayed with me. One world was like another to him, he said. As for the ancestral Tree, having cut the ties, like a man recovered from an infatuation, he wasn’t eager to retie them. The Rish captain paid us off for our services aboard his vessel—we had rebuilt his standby power section, as well as pulling regular shifts with the crew. That gave us enough cash to re-outfit ourselves with respectable clothes and take rooms at a decent inn near the port, while we looked for a Center-bound berth.
We had a long wait, but it could have been worse. There were shops and taverns and apartments built among the towering ruins of a vast city ten thousand years dead; but the ruins were overgrown and softened by time, so that the town seemed to be built among forested hills, unless you saw it from the air and realized that the mountains were vine-grown structures.
There was work for us on Gloy; by living frugally and saving what we earned, we accumulated enough for passenger berths inward to Tanix, a crossroads world where the volume of in-Galaxy shipping was more encouraging. After a few days’ wait, we signed on a mile-long super-liner. It was a four months’ cruise; at the end of it we stepped off on the soil of a busy trading planet, and looked up at the blaze of sky that meant Center was close.
“It’s still three thousand lights run to Zeridajh,” the Second Officer for Power told me as he paid me off. “Why not sign on for another cruise? Good powermen are hard to find; I can offer you a nice bonus.”