John Dalmas - Return to Fanglith.pdf - John Dalmas - margozap

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

John Dalmas - Return to Fanglith.pdf

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