John Dalmas - Return to Fanglith.pdf
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I scrambled out of the scrub onto the open, moonlit
crest and straightened, gasping for breath. Then I
heard hooves and turned. A rider had been coming
along the crest in my direction and, seeing me, had
spurred his horse into galloping attack. Ignoring his
lance, he drew his sword, leaning sideways to strike.
My hand seemed to move in slow motion - drawing my
stunner, raising it, pointing, thumbing. His horse
nose-dived, hitting the ground so heavily I swear I
could feel it through my feet. The Saracen hurtled
over its head in a billow of robe, moonlight flashing
on sword. I zapped him too, as he skidded. He stopped
not ten feet from me.
He was dead of course. On high intensity at such
close range, I'd really curdled his synapses. I took
his shield; I'd need one when daylight came.
PART ONE
ESCAPE FROM EVDASH
ONE
I wasn't actually undernourished, but we'd been on
tight rations, and more or less hungry, for
fifty-seven days. Which is something you can get used
to, but not what I think of as ideal. In space you
can't stop off at a friendly nearby restaurant or
food store. The nearest planets are likely to be
parsecs* away, and have a couple of Imperial frigates
flying sentry around them, with chase craft ready for
launch. We'd had more than enough of those.
Now Fanglith lay beautifully blue and white,
primitive and savage, only 40,000 miles off our
starboard window with, so far no sign of a picket
ship on our instruments. Which were good ones, as
you'd expect on a stolen naval patrol scout.
I wasn't sure what we could hope to accomplish there;
we had no plans. But just then, food was what I was
mainly interested in.
"I never expected to see this place again," I said,
more to myself than to Deneen or Bubba or Tarel. We'd
been lucky to get away alive the first time. But
sometimes fate-whatever "fate" is-hits you when
you're least prepared. And when it does, it can be
with three or four punches, one after another.
We'd been 646 parsecs* from Fanglith, on a wilderness
trek in the Snowy Range Preserve, when the first
punch hit. Bubba was the first to notice. At that
point, all that the rest of us noticed was Bubba. His
big wolf's head raised, alert, attention fixed,
looking off west.
*A parsec equals 3.258 light-years.
Deneen, my sister, put down the seared hind leg of a
burrow pig. "What is it, Bubba?" she asked.
He didn't make a sound; didn't look at her. His
attention was all on what he heard, or maybe what he
was receiving telepathically.
Then the rest of us began to hear it, too. It was so
low-pitched, it was as if we felt it before we heard
it-a deep bass thrumming, barely audible. Yet somehow
it seemed very loud-loud but far away. Uncle Piet and
Bubba got to their feet, the rest of us a half second
behind, and we all trotted through the trees to the
edge of the cliff a hundred feet away. From there we
could see southward across the foothills, toward the
Valrith Plain.
"So it's happened," Piet said softly, as if talking
to himself.
What we'd heard was a Federation battleship. Make
that an Imperial battleship-things had changed. I
stood there in my moccasins, staring. It must have
been more than a quarter mile long, cruising across
the clear morning sky two miles or so above the
foothills, and maybe three miles south. It answered a
question we'd been talking about a few days earlier.
"Let's go home," Piet said.
It took us very little time to break camp and leave,
all without conversation. We had almost nothing to
carry-no sleeping bags, no cooking gear, no tent.
Each of us, except Bubba of course, carried a small
blanket, a heavy belt knife, a spark wheel for
starting fires, a tinder box, a sharpening stone, a
self-made backpack, woven at Piet's instructions from
the inner bark of a tree, and a water bag made the
previous butchering season from the boiled-out gut of
a fatbuck. We were being as primitive as we knew
how-or as Piet knew how.
I doused the fire with a minimum of water-it was a
small one-then stirred the coals, wet ashes, and dirt
with a stick to make sure it was out. Tarel wrapped
what was left of the burrow pig in its flayed-off
pelt and stashed it in his pack. Jenoor untied the
cords we used to set up shelters, and put them in
hers. Like the packs, the cords were inner bark, cut
into thin strips. They'd be hard to replace if we
lost them, because it was late summer now, and the
bark wouldn't strip off the trees anymore.
We were ready for the trail in about two minutes,
maybe three. No one needed to ask what next. We'd go
down to Piet's floater and fly home, hopefully to mom
and dad and Lady and the pups. After that. . . . We'd
see.
The Snowy Range is beautiful, but hiking out, I
didn't pay much attention to aesthetics. The country
was rugged and mostly forest, there was no
established trail where we were, and we were
hurrying. When my attention wasn't on picking the
route-I was the pathfinder that day-I had things on
my mind. All of us did, I guess.
We'd been three weeks in the Snowy Range on a
survival-training trek-part of the training Piet was
giving us. Piet isn't really our uncle; he's more of
an "honorary" uncle. He'd worked with our parents
back when dad and mom had been members of the
underground on Morn Gebleu, the executive planet of
the Federation. Dad and mom had taken Deneen and me
away from Morn Gebleu when we were little, to bring
us up on Evdash, a world that was safer and a lot
more democratic-an old colony world, well outside
Federation boundaries.
They'd started training us seriously for the
resistance after we'd come back from our crazy,
unintentional- adventure, I guess you could call
it-on the forgotten prison planet, Fanglith.
Piet had come to stay with us about a year later.
He'd been a lot of places and done a lot of things,
and became another trainer. One of the places he'd
been-he'd hidden out there a couple of years-was a
world where the intelligent species was a two-legged
felid type with a primitive hunting/fishing culture.
He'd learned things there about living in wilderness
conditions that the known human worlds had lost long
before, and he'd been teaching us the basics. By
Bubba's standards, our wilderness skills were still
pretty poor, of course. Espwolves had been pack
hunters before their planet banged heads with a
comet. Only a few dozen of them got evacuated with
the human colonists there. Bubba had been pretty much
grown already-old enough to have learned the skills
of an adult wolf.
Espwolves are more than just telepathic. They're
intelligent, with mental processes a lot like
humans'. You kind of half forget that sometimes,
because they look so much like any large canid
species, and because they don't say much.
That's right-some of them can talk. Bubba had taught
himself to speak Evdashian, more or less. By
combining telepathy with intelligence, he'd analyzed
words and speech patterns, and their meanings. Then
he'd substituted certain sounds he could make for the
human speech sounds he couldn't.
His approximation of Evdashian wasn't easy for him,
though, so he wasn't much for small talk.
Because he belonged to a telepathic species, his
brain probably didn't even have a speech center, and
his mouth and throat weren't built for talking. His
grammar was adequate, but rough-anything to keep it
brief-and he usually avoided words that were hard for
him, but with practice you could understand him. Our
family had no trouble at all.
Anyway, a month earlier, the news had come that the
Federation had declared itself "The Glondis Empire."
That wouldn't make a lot of difference on Federation
planets. Since the Glondis Party had taken over the
Federation government, a few years before I was born,
they'd run it more and more as a Party dictatorship.
But the declaration of empire would make a big
difference to us. Our parents and Piet talked a lot
about politics in front of us and to us; it was part
of our continuing education. And they'd agreed that
if it was now formally calling itself an empire, then
the Party must feel about ready to start taking over
the outlying independent planets. It would be just a
matter of time before they got to us.
Evdash had been colonized by refugees the last time
the central worlds had been an empire, four centuries
ago. Most of the so-called colony worlds had been
settled by refugees at one time or another. The
central worlds have a tendency to go imperial now and
then, and an empire usually became a dictatorship
after a while, if it wasn't one to start with.
Our way out of the wilderness was mostly downhill-
about four thousand feet downhill-but that didn't
mean it was fast or easy. We hiked through old forest
with lots of blown-down timber to pick your way over
or around, arid down ravines littered with boulders
and fallen trees. Toward noon a thunderstorm came
through, booming and banging, and we stopped to wait
it out in a thick dense glaru grove that would keep
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