For Love of Mother-Not Page 18

  “Hold it!” Lauren said sharply. “You don’t know what’s going to happen to her. More important, you don’t know when.”

  “Soon!” he insisted. The door popped open and slid back into the transparent outer wall. He stared out into the forest in the direction he knew they must take even though he hadn’t checked their location on the tracking screen.

  “I promise that we’ll get to her as fast as is feasible,” Lauren assured him as she slipped the sling of the dart rifle over her shoulder, “but we won’t do her or ourselves any good at all if we go charging blindly in on those people, whoever they are. Remember, they carried paralysis weapons on their vehicles. They may have more lethal weapons here. They’re not going to sit idly by while you march in and demand the return of the woman they’ve gone to a helluva lot of trouble to haul across a continent. We’ll get her back, Flinx, just as quickly as we can, but recklessness won’t help us. Surely you know that. You’re a city boy.”

  He winced at the “boy,” but otherwise had to agree with her. With considerable effort he kept himself from dashing blindly into the black forest. Instead, he forced himself to the back of the skimmer and checked out the contents of the backpack she had assembled for him. “Don’t I get a gun, too?”

  “A fishing lodge isn’t an armory, you know.” She patted the rifle butt. “This is about all we keep around in the way of a portable weapon. Besides, I seem to recall you putting away an opponent bigger than yourself using only your own equipment.”

  Flinx glanced self-consciously down at his right boot. His prowess with a knife was not something he was particularly proud of, and he didn’t like talking about it. “A stiletto’s not much good over distance, and we may not have darkness for an ally.”

  “Have you ever handled a real hand weapon?” she asked him. “A needler? Beam thrower, projectile gun?”

  “No, but I’ve seen them used, and I know how they work. It’s not too hard to figure out that you point the business end at the person you’re mad at and pull the trigger or depress the firing stud.”

  “Sometimes it’s not quite that simple, Flinx.” She tightened the belly strap of her backpack. “In any case, you’ll have to make do with just your blade because there isn’t anything else. And I’m not going to give you the dart rifle. I’m much more comfortable with it than you’d be. If you’re worried about my determination to use it, you should know me better than that by now. I don’t feel like being nice to these people. Kidnappers and wervil killers.”

  She checked their course on the tracker, entered it into her little compass, and led him from the cabin. The ground was comparatively dry, soft and springy underfoot.

  As they marched behind twin search beams, Flinx once more found himself considering his companion. They had a number of important things in common besides independence. Love of animals, for example. Lauren’s hair masked the side of her face from him but he felt he could see it, anyway.

  Pip stirred on its master’s shoulder as it sensed strange emotions welling up inside Flinx, emotions that were new to the minidrag and left it feeling not truly upset but decidedly ill at ease. It tried to slip farther beneath the protective jacket.

  By the time they reached their destination, it was very near midnight. They hunkered down in a thick copse and stared between the trees. Flinx itched to continue, knowing that Mother Mastiff lay in uneasy sleep somewhere in the complex of buildings not far below. The common sense that had served him so well since infancy did more to hold him back than logic or reason.

  To all appearances, the cluster of dimly lit structures resembled nothing so much as another hunting or fishing lodge, though much larger than the one that Lauren managed. In the center were the main lodge buildings, to the left the sleeping quarters for less wealthy guests, to the right the maintenance and storage sheds. Lauren studied the layout through the thumb-sized daynight binoculars. Her experienced eye detected something far more significant than the complex’s deceptive layout.

  “Those aren’t logs,” she told Flinx. “They’re resinated plastics. Very nicely camouflaged, but there’s no more wood in them than in my head. Same thing goes for the masonry and rockwork in the foundations.”

  “How can you tell?” he asked curiously.

  She handed him the tiny viewing device. Flinx put it to his eyes, and it immediately adjusted itself to his different vision, changing light and sharpening focus.

  “Look at the corner joints and the lines along the ground and ceilings,” she told him. “They’re much too regular, too precise. That’s usually the result when someone tries to copy nature. The hand of the computer, or just man himself, always shows itself. The protrusions on the logs, the smooth concavities on the ‘rocks’—there are too many obvious replications from one to the next.

  “Oh, they’d fool anyone not attuned to such stuff, and certainly anyone flying over in an aircraft or skimmer. But the materials in those buildings are fake, which tells us that they were put here recently. Anyone building a lodge for long-term use in the lake country always uses native materials.”

  Closest to their position on the little hillside was a pair of long, narrow structures. One was dark; the other had several lights showing. Phosphorescent walkways drew narrow glowing lines between buildings.

  To the right of the longhouses stood a hexagonal building, some three stories tall, made of plastic rock surmounted with more plastic paneling. Beyond it sprawled a large two-story structure whose purpose Flinx could easily divine from the tall doors fronting it and the single mudder parked outside: a hangar for servicing and protecting vehicles.

  Nearby squatted a low edifice crowned with a coiffure of thin silvery cables. The power station wasn’t large enough to conceal a fusion system. Probably a fuel cell complex, Flinx decided.

  More puzzling was the absence of any kind of fence or other barrier. That was carrying verisimilitude a little too far, he thought. In the absence of any such wall, Flinx’s attention, like Lauren’s, was drawn to the peculiar central tower, the one structure that clearly had no place in a resort complex.

  She examined it closely through the binoculars. “Lights on in there, too,” she murmured. “Could be meant to pass as some kind of observation tower, or even a restaurant.”

  “Seems awfully small at the top for an eating room,” he commented.

  Searchlights probed the darkness between the buildings as the rest of the internal lights winked out. Another hour’s wait in the damp, chilly bushes confirmed Lauren’s suspicions about the mysterious tower. “There are six conical objects spaced around the roof,” she told Flinx, pointing with a gloved hand. “At first, I thought they were searchlights, but not one of them has shown a light. What the devil could they be?”

  Flinx had spotted them, too. “I think I recognize them now. Those are sparksound projectors.”

  She looked at him in surprise. “What’s that? And how can you be sure that’s what they are?”

  He favored her with a wan smile. “I’ve had to avoid them before this. Each cone projects a wide, flat beam of high-intensity sound. Immobile objects don’t register on the sensors, so it can be used to blanket a large area that includes buildings.” He studied the tower intently.

  “Just guessing from the angles at which the projectors are set, I’d say that their effective range stops about fifty meters out from the longhouses.”

  “That’s not good,” she muttered, trying to make out the invisible barrier though she knew that was impossible.

  “It’s worse than you think,” he told her, “because the computer which monitors the beams is usually programmed automatically to disregard anything that doesn’t conform to human proportions. The interruption of the sonic field by anything even faintly human will generate a graphic display on a viewscreen. Any guard watching the screen will be able to tell what’s entered the protected area and decide on that basis whether or not to sound further alarm.” He added apologetically, “Rich people are very fond of this syst
em.”

  “When we didn’t see a regular fence, I was afraid of something like this. Isn’t there any way to circumvent it, Flinx? You said you’ve avoided such things in the past.”

  He nodded. “I’ve avoided them because there’s no way to break the system. Not from the outside, anyway. I suppose we might be able to tunnel beneath it.”

  “How deep into the ground would the sound penetrate?”

  “That’s a problem,” he replied. “Depends entirely on the power being fed to the projectors and the frequencies being generated. Maybe only a meter, or maybe a dozen. We could tunnel inside the camp and strike it without knowing we’d done so until we came up into a circle of guns. Even if we made it, we’d have another problem, because the beams probably cover the entire camp. We’d almost have to come up inside one of the buildings.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she murmured, “because we don’t have any tunneling equipment handy. I’m going to hazard a guess that if they have the surface monitored so intently, the sky in the immediate vicinity will be even more carefully covered.”

  “I’d bet on that, too.” Flinx gestured toward the tower. “Of course, we could just run the skimmer in on them. There aren’t that many buildings. Maybe we could find Mother Mastiff and get her out before they could react.”

  Lauren continued to study the complex. “There’s nothing more expensive than a temporary facility fixed up to look permanent. I’d guess this setup supports between thirty and a hundred people. They’re not going to make this kind of effort to detect intruders without being damn ready to repel them as well. Remember, there are only two of us.”

  “Three,” Flinx corrected her. A pleased hiss sounded from the vicinity of his shoulder.

  “Surprise is worth a lot,” Lauren went on. “Maybe ten, but no more than that. We won’t do your mother any good as corpses. Keep in mind that no one else knows we’re here. If we go down, so do her chances.”

  “I know the odds aren’t good,” he said irritably, “but we’ve got to do something.”

  “And do something we will. You remember that partially deforested section we flew over earlier today?”

  Flinx thought a moment, then nodded.

  “That was a trail line.”

  “Trail line for what?”

  “For equalization,” she told him. “For evening out the odds. For a better weapon than this.” She patted the sling of the dart rifle. “Better even than that snake riding your shoulder. I don’t share your confidence in it.”

  “You haven’t seen Pip in action,” he reminded her. “What kind of weapon are you talking about?”

  She stood and brushed bark and dirt from her coveralls. “You’ll see,” she assured him, “but we have to be damn careful.” She gazed toward the camp below. “I wish I could think of a better way, but I can’t. They’re sure to have guards posted in addition to monitoring the detection system you described. We don’t even know which building your mother is in. If we’re going to risk everything on one blind charge, it ought to be one hell of a charge.

  “The weapon I have in mind is a volatile one. It can cut both ways, but I’d rather chance a danger I’m familiar with. Let’s get back to the skimmer.”

  She pivoted and headed back through the forest. Flinx rose to join her, forcing himself away from the lights of the camp, which gleamed like so many reptilian eyes in the night, until the trees swallowed them up.

  They were halfway back to the little grove where they had parked the skimmer when the sensation swept through him. As usual, it came as a complete surprise, but this time it was very different from his recent receptions. For one thing, no feeling of pain was attached to it, and for another, it did not come from the direction of the camp. It arose from an entirely new source. Oddly, it carried overtones of distress with it, though distress of a confusing kind.

  It came from Lauren and was directed at him.

  There was no love in it, no grand, heated follow-up to the casual kiss she had given him in the skimmer. Affection, yes, which was not what he had hoped for. Admiration, too, and something more. Something he had not expected from her: a great wave of concern for him, and to a lesser extent, of pity.

  Flinx had become more adept at sorting out and identifying the emotions he received, and there was no mistaking those he was feeling now. That kiss, then, had not only carried no true love with it—it held even less than that. She felt sorry for him.

  He tried to reject the feelings, not only from disappointment but out of embarrassment. This was worse than looking into someone’s mind. He was reading her heart, not her thoughts. Though he tried hard, he could not shut off the flow. He could no more stop the river of emotion than he could willingly turn it on.

  He made certain he stayed a step or two behind her so she would not be able to see his face in the darkness, still soaking up the waves of concern and sympathy that poured from her, wishing they might be something else, something more.

  They hesitated before approaching the skimmer, circling the landing area once. The quick search revealed that their hiding place had remained inviolate. Once aboard, Lauren took the craft up. She did not head toward the camp; instead, she turned south and began to retrace their course over the treetops. Very soon they encountered the long, open gash in the woods. Lauren hovered above it for several minutes as she studied the ground, then decisively headed west. Flinx kept to himself, trying to shut the memory of that emotional deluge out of his mind. Then, quite unexpectedly, the open space in the trees came to a dead end.

  “Damn,” Lauren muttered. “Must have picked the wrong direction. I thought sure I read the surface right. Maybe it’s the other way.”

  Flinx did not comment as she wheeled the skimmer around and headed southeast. When the pathway again ended in an unbroken wall of trees, she angrily wrenched the craft around a second time. This time when they encountered the forest wall, she slowed but continued westward, her gaze darting repeatedly from the darkened woods below to the skimmer’s instrumentation.

  “Maybe if you were a little more specific, I could help you look,” he finally said, a touch of frustration in his voice.

  “I told you. Weapons. Allies, actually. It comes to the same thing. No sign of them, though. They must have finished eating and entered semidormancy. That’s how they live; do nothing but eat for several days in a row, then lie down to sleep it off for a week. The trouble is that once they’ve finished an eating period, they’re apt to wander off in any direction until they find a sleep spot that pleases them. We haven’t got the time to search the whole forest for the herd.”

  “Herd of what?” Flinx asked.

  “Didn’t I tell you? Devilopes.”

  Enlightenment came to Flinx. He had heard of Devilopes, even seen a small head or two mounted in large commercial buildings. But he had had no personal experience of them. Few citizens of Drallar did. There was not even one in the city zoo. As Flinx understood it, Devilopes were not zooable.

  The Demichin Devilope was the dominant native life form on Moth. It was unusual for a herbivore to be the dominant life form, but excepting man, a fairly recent arrival, they had no natural enemies. They were comparatively scarce, as were the mounted heads Flinx had seen; the excessive cost of the taxidermy involved prevented all but the extremely wealthy from collecting Devilope.

  The skimmer prowled the treetops, rising to clear occasional emergents topping ninety meters, dropping lower when the woods scaled more modest heights. Occasionally, Lauren would take them down to ground level, only to lift skyward again in disappointment when the omens proved unhelpful. There was no sign of a Devilope herd.

  Meanwhile, another series of sensations swept through Flinx’s active mind, and Pip stirred on his shoulder. He had continually tried to find Mother Mastiff’s emotions, without success. Instead, his attempts seemed to be attracting the feelings of everyone but his mother-not. He wondered anew at his heightened perception since he had acquired his pet; though it was likely, he r
eminded himself that here in the vastness of the northern forests where minds were few and scattered, it might be only natural that his receptivity improved.

  These latest sensations carried a female signature. They were also new, not of Mother Mastiff or Lauren. Cool and calm, they were vague and hard to define: whoever they belonged to was a particularly unemotional individual. He felt fear, slight but unmistakable, coupled with a formidable resolution that was cold, implacable—so hard and unyielding that it frightened Flinx almost as much as Mother Mastiff’s own terror. Save for the slight overtones of fear, they might have been the emotions of a machine.

  The feelings came from the camp where Mother Mastiff was being held. Flinx had little doubt that they belonged to one of those mysterious individuals who had abducted her. From the one brief, faint sensation he felt he could understand her fear. Then it was gone, having lasted less than a minute. Yet, in that time, Flinx had received a complete emotional picture of the person whose feelings he had latched onto. Never before had he encountered a mind so intent on a single purpose and so devoid of those usual emotional colorations that comprised common humanity. Pip hissed at the empty air as if ready to strike and defend its master.

  “This isn’t working,” Lauren muttered, trying to see through the trees. “We’ll have to—” She paused, frowning at him. “Are you all right? You’ve got the most peculiar expression on your face.”

  “I’m okay.” The coldness was at last fading from his mind; evidently he hadn’t been conscious of how completely it had possessed him. Her query snapped him back to immediacy, and he could feel anew the warmth of the skimmer’s cabin, of his own body. Not for the first time did he find himself wondering if his unmanageable Talent might someday do him harm as well as good. “I was just thinking.”

  “You do a lot of that,” she murmured. “Flinx, you’re the funniest man I’ve ever met.”

  “You’re not laughing.”