The Hub: Dangerous Territory by James H. Schmitz

Then her eyes checked on something the wind hadn’t blown in. It sat in the shadows on a wall shelf to one side of what had been the main room. Puzzled, she went slowly over to it.

It looked like a featureless black cloth figure, a hooded lumpy little doll, less than fifteen inches high. It had been placed on a crumpled dark cloth spread along the shelf. As Nile came up, she saw that the hood and cloak were coverings. There was something beneath them. She pushed the hood back with the UW’s muzzle, looked at the wrinkled blackish unhuman face which might have been carved out of wood, with considerable skill. The bulging heavy-lidded eyes were closed. A narrow mouth slit was the only other feature. In its miniature ugliness it was impressive. It was as if a small demonic idol had been set up to preside over what had become of Ticos Cay’s laboratory. Nile let the hood fall into place, started toward the entrance.

One more discovery then . . . she saw something stir in the dirt piled against one wall and moved the dirt aside with her foot. Three of Ticos’ protohoms lay in a pile, mutilated and slashed almost beyond recognition, still moving. As cruelty it was meaningless; they had no awareness and no sensitivity to pain. But it fitted the pattern of grotesque ugliness here. The UW hissed quickly three times, taking their semblance of life from them.

There seemed no reason to stay longer. The structure held a feeling of nightmare, heavy, almost tangible. At moments it seemed difficult to breathe and her head would begin to swim. But she had a recurrent nagging feeling of missing something. She glanced about once more. The dead shapes were there in their frozen postures. The dark little idol dreamed above them on its littered shelf. No . . . nothing else but unanswered questions.

In a thicket a hundred yards from the structure entrance, where she could watch the stretch along which she had come, Nile tried turning over the questions. Her mind moved sluggishly at first, blurred by fear and surges of pity and sick anger. She had to keep forcing all that to the back of her awareness. What she’d seen didn’t fit the overall pattern she’d assumed. A very different type of mentality seemed involved. A mentality which systematically tortured human minds and bodies, leaving the victims degraded in death and carefully preserving their degradation, as if that were a goal in itself. . . .

It made no sense as yet. But the immediate situation hadn’t changed. If Ticos had known about these intruders before they discovered his laboratory and converted it to the insanity in there, he might still be at large. He’d had a small boat with which he could have slipped away unnoticed to other sections of the island, or even to another island in the floatwood drift. He knew she’d be coming presently and would have tried to leave a message where she could find it, hoping she’d be able to escape capture in turn. Something to tell her what was going on, where he was.

A message where she could find it. Some place she’d associate naturally with Ticos . . . Nile shook her head. There were simply too many such places. She couldn’t waste time checking them over at present. If Ticos was still in the island area, Sweeting might be able to pick up traces of him.

Her thoughts veered. The aircar. They’d have reached it by now, but door and engine keys were in the pouch at her belt. If they hadn’t sunk the car or towed it away, they should still be busy around it. Watching them might tell her more about this group than she could get from Sweeting’s reports. She set off quickly.

When she caught glimpses of the wind-whipped surface of the lagoon through the growth, she paused, calculating her position. The reed bed where she’d touched water should be on her right, not far away. She angled toward it, ran up a thick sloping branch stretching out above the water, turned and went on hands and knees along a lesser branch until she reached a point where sheaves of floatwood foliage overhung the lagoon. Here she straddled the branch, grasped two of the leaf stems, drew them cautiously apart and was looking down on the swirling reed tops two hundred feet below.

The area where she’d set down the car had been widened, the plants thrust aside and mashed down so that she could see a patch of open water. There were other indications that a surface craft had broken a way in from the lagoon. Nile saw nothing else, thought for a moment the car already had been destroyed or hauled off. But then she heard a series of clanging metallic sounds, partly muffled by the wind. Somebody was down there, perhaps engaged in forcing open the car’s doors.

She waited, upper lip clamped between her teeth, heard no more. Then one end of the aircar edged into view, turning slowly as if it were being pushed about. A moment later all of it suddenly appeared in the open area—and on the canopy—

Nile’s thoughts blurred in shock.

Parahuans. . . .

Some seventy years ago they’d come out of space to launch almost simultaneous attacks against Nandy-Cline and a dozen other water worlds of the Hub. They’d done considerable damage, but in the end their forces were pulled back; and it was believed that by the time the Federation’s warships finished hunting them through space, only insignificant remnants had survived to return to their undiscovered home worlds. It had been the last open attack by an alien civilization against a Federation planet—even planets as far out from the Hub’s center as Nandy-Cline.

And we became careless, Nile thought. We felt we were so big no one would dare come again. . . .

With a kind of frozen fascination, she stared at the two bulky amphibious creatures squatting on the car, thickly muscled legs bent sharply beneath them. A swarm of reflections based on various old descriptions of Parahuans went through her mind. The bluish-gray torsos and powerful arms were enclosed by webbings of straps, holding tools and weapons. The bulging eyes on the big round heads were double-lensed, the lower sections used for underwater vision and lidded in air, as they now were. A vocal orifice was connected to a special air system above the eyes. The two Parahuans below seemed to be gabbling at others outside her range of vision, though the wind drowned most of the sounds they were making.

Well, they had dared come again . . . and they already must be in considerable number on the unsuspecting planet, establishing themselves in and under the floatwood islands in recent months. The little figure in the gutted laboratory, the small devil brooding vengefully over the mutilated husks of human bodies, was made in their image.

It changed her immediate plans. In this storm-swept multileveled mountain of dense vegetation she’d felt reasonably safe from human searchers. But she could take no chances with these aliens until she knew their capabilities. She shifted back on the branch, then halted watchfully. In the water of the lagoon beyond the reeds something was moving. Nile couldn’t make out details, but it was a very large creature, dirty white in color. As she stared, it sank slowly below the surface and was gone.

She scrambled back along the branch under cover of the leaves, got to her feet as soon as she reached more solid support, and retreated hurriedly into the forest. In their first campaign the Parahuans had brought a formidable creature along with them which took part effectively in the fighting. It was animalic in behavior, though there was some evidence that it was a gigantic adaptation of the Parahuan life form. Reportedly it had sharp senses, was equally agile on land and in water, and difficult to stop with ordinary weapons.

What she’d seen out in the lagoon just now was one of those creatures—a Parahuan tarm.

Eyes shifting quickly about as she moved on, she paused here and there for an instant. Her knife reached out, slashed stem, seed pod, blossom, fleshy leaf, chunky tentacle from one or another familiar tacapu or plant form. They bled tinted dust, tinted sap, quickly turning to streaks and blots of green, shadow blue, cinnamon, chocolate brown, gray and white on Nile’s body, arms, legs, face, hair, equipment. Breaking outline, blending form into background . . . a trick used in stalking floatwood species wary and keen-sighted enough to avoid undisguised human hunters.

It might not be sufficient disguise now. Humans had a variety of life detection instruments. No doubt, Parahuans had them. For many such devices, one human being in the floatwood became simply one life form blurred among many life forms. But the distinctive human scent remained, and sharp senses read it as well as instruments. She could take care of that presently. To do it, she’d have to get back to the area of Ticos’ laboratory. . . .

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