“Thorson returning.” Dane started at the best pace he could muster down the valley. But as he trotted, slipping and sliding on the loose stones and gravel, Tau’s voice continued to call Ali. And from the engineer- apprentice there came no answer at all.
Breathing hard, Dane reached the place where they had left the Medic. As he came into sight Tau waved him to the side of the flitter.
“Where’s Ali?” “Where’s Kamil?” Their demands came together and they stared at each other.
Dane answered first. “He said he was going down stream—to follow the crawler tracks we found. I went upstream—”
“Then it must have been he who—” Tau was frowning. He turned on his heel and studied the valley leading to the plains. The presence of water had encouraged a thicker growth of brush there and it presented a wall except for where the stream cut a passage.
“But what happened?” Dane wanted to know.
“I got a call on com—it was cut off almost immediately—”
“Not mine, I was off circuit,” returned Dane before he thought. It was only then that he realized what he had done. No one on field duty goes off circuit out on scout, that was a rule even a First Circler in the Pool had by heart. And he had done it the first time he was on duty! He could feel the heat spreading up into his cheeks. But he offered no explanations nor excuses. The fault was his and he would have to stand up to the consequences.
“Ali must be in trouble,” Tau made no other comment as he climbed in behind the controls of the flitter, a very quiet Dane following him.
They arose jerkily, with none of the smooth perfection Ali’s piloting had supplied. But once in the air Tau pointed the nose of the flitter down valley, cutting speed to just enough to keep them airborne. They watched the ground below. But there was nothing to see but the marks of blaster fire and beyond undisturbed green broken by bare patches of gravel and jutting rock.
They could also sight the crawler tracks and Dane related the information he had. Tau’s countenance was sober.
“If we don’t find Ali, we must report to the Queen—”
That was only common sense, Dane knew, but he dreaded having to admit his own negligence. And perhaps his act was worse than just carelessness in not using the com-unit, perhaps he should have insisted on their sticking together, deserted though the valley appeared to be.
“We’re up against something nasty here,” Tau continued. “Whoever used those blasters was outside the law—”
The Federation law dealing with X-Tees was severe, as Dane well knew. Parts of the code, stripped of the legal verbiage, had to be memorized at the Pool. You could defend yourself against the attack of aliens, but on no provocation, except in defence of his life, could a Trader use a blaster or other weapon against an X-Tee. Even sleep rays were frowned upon, though most Traders packed them when going into unknown territory among primitive tribes.
The men of the Queen had landed unarmed on Limbo, and they would continue unarmed until such a time as the situation was so grave that either their lives or the ship was in danger. But in this valley a blaster had been used in the wanton indulgence of someone’s sadistic hatred for the globe creatures.
“They weren’t attacking—those globe things, I mean?”
Tau’s brown face was grim as he shook his head. “They had no weapons at all. I’d say from the evidence that they were attacked without warning, just mown down. Maybe for the fun of it!”
And that projected such a picture of horror that Tau, conditioned by life under the Trade Creed, stopped short.
Below them the valley began to widen out, cutting in a fan shape into the plain. There was no sign of Ali anywhere on that fan. He had vanished as if he had stepped through the cliff wall. The cliff! Dane, remembering the end of the crawler trail, pressed against the windshield to inspect those walls. But there were no tracks ending before them.
The flitter lost altitude as Tau concentrated on landing. “We must report to the Queen,” he said as he set them down. Not leaving his seat he reached for the long-range beam mike.
CHAPTER SEVEN:
SHIP OUT OF SPACE
Tau’s fingers clicked the call key of the far-range caster when that sound was drowned out by a wail, both weirdly familiar and strangely menacing. Here on the edge of the burnt-off land there was no soughing of the wind, nothing to break the eternal silence of the blasted country. But this tearing over head brought both of the Terrans to their feet. Tau, out of his greater experience, identified it first.
“A ship!”
Dane was no hundred flight man, but something in that shrieking crescendo splitting the sky above them argued that if a ship were coming in, all was not well with it. He caught at Tau’s arm.
“What’s the matter?”
The Medic’s face paled beneath the dark space tan. He bit hard on his lower lip. And the eyes still fastened on the arch of sky were haunted. When he answered he had to scream to be heard over the rumble.
“She’s coming in too fast—not on a braking orbit!”
And now they could see as well as hear—a dark shape in the morning sky, a shape which tore across that same sky to be gone in an instant to a landing somewhere among those jagged peaks which were the mountains of Limbo’s northern continent.
The sound was gone. It was broodingly quiet. Tau shook his head slowly.
“She must have crashed. She couldn’t have come out of that one in time.”
“What was she?” puzzled Dane. The passage of that shadow had been so quick that he had not been conscious of any identifying outline.
”Too small for a liner, thank the Lord of Far Space. Or at least—I hope it was no liner—”
For a passenger ship to crash would be utter horror. Dane could understand that.
“A freighter maybe,” Tau sat down and his hand went out to the click keys. “She must have been out of control when she entered atmosphere.” He began to relay this last information on to the Queen.
They did not have to wait long for an answer. They were to remain where they were until the second flitter joined them carrying Tau’s full medical kit. This flyer would then head out into the mountains in an attempt to locate the scene of the crash, so if there were any survivors the men from the Queen could render aid. While a smaller party would stay and try to trace Kamil.
It was only a matter of minutes before the other flitter did appear. Kosti and Mura dropped from it almost before it hit dirt and Tau hurried across to change places. The flyer whirled up into the sun of mid-morning and cut a straight course towards the rock teeth of the range, following the line of flight Dane and Tau had seen that shadow travel.
“Did you see her from the Queen?” Dane demanded of the other two.
Mura shook his head. “See her, no, hear her, yes. She was out of control!”
Kosti’s broad face wrinkled in concern. “She must have hit hard. A bad smash—no one living, perhaps. I once saw a smack landing like that on Juno—very bad—all dead. That ship—she must have been out of control before they started down. She was not even fighting the fall—she came in like a thing already dead.”
Mura whistled softly. “Plague ship, maybe—”
Dane shivered. Plague ships were the terrifying ghosts of the space lanes. Wandering derelicts, free roving tombs holding the bodies of the crews who on some uncharted world had contracted some new and virulent disease, dying alone in the reaches of the heavens—perhaps by stern choice—before they could bring their infection to inhabited worlds. The solar system guards had the unenviable task of rounding up such drifting threats of death and sending them into cleansing suns or giving them some other final end. But here, beyond the frontiers of civilization, a derelict could drift for years, even centuries, before some freak of chance brought it into the gravitational pull of a planet and so crash it on an unwary world.
