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Not true that an army marches on its stomach, thought Flandry. It needs information even more than food. Marches on its head. Which, no doubt, is why the Imperial High Command has so many flat-heads.
He chuckled. Bad as it was, the joke strengthened him. And he was going to need strength.
“Will you let me see?” asked Temulak in a small, broken voice.
“I will deprive you no longer of my beauty,” said Flandry. He unhooded the rufous head and drew his wax plugs from the nose. Temulak blinked dazedly into smoke and one dull light. Flandry uncoupled the machines which had kept him alive. “You’ll remain our guest, of course,” he said. “If it turns out you prevaricated, back you go in the dark closet.”
Temulak bristled. His teeth snapped together, missing the man’s arm by a centimeter.
“Naughty!” Flandry stepped back. “For that, you can stay tied up a while.”
Temulak snarled from the cot: “You gray-ski
“And foreclose my mortgage,” said Flandry. He went out, closing the door behind him.
Bryce and Kit started. They had fallen asleep in their chairs. The hunter rubbed his eyes. “God o’ the galaxy, you been at it a long time!” he exclaimed.
“Here.” Flandry tossed him the tape spool. “This has to reach Admiral Walton’s fleet. It’s necessary, if not quite sufficient, for your liberation. Can do?”
“The enemy would pick up radio,” said Bryce doubtfully. “We still got a few spaceships hid, but Kit’s was the fastest. An’ since then, too, the wolf space guard’s been tightened till it creaks.”
Flandry sighed. “I was afraid of that.” He scribbled on a sheet of paper. “Here’s a rough map to show you where my personal flitter is. D’you know this tune?” He whistled. “No? That proves you’ve a clean mind. Well, learn it.” He rehearsed the Vixenite till he was satisfied. “Good. Approach the flitter whistling that, and Chives won’t shoot you without investigation. Give him this note. It says for him to take the tape to Walton. If anything can run that blockade without collecting a missile, it’s Chives in the Hooligan.”
Kit suppressed a gasp. “But then you, Dominic — no escape—”
Flandry shrugged. “I’m much too tired to care about aught except a nice soft bed.”
Bryce, sticking the spool under his tunic, gri
Kit stood as if struck.
Flandry nodded slightly at her. “That’s the way of it.” He glanced at his chrono. “Close to local midnight . Shove off, Bryce, lad. But stop by and tell Dr. Reineke to shift his apparatus and the prisoner elsewhere. It’s always best to keep moving around, when you’re being searched for. And nobody, except the pill peddler and whoever helps him, is to know where they stash Temulak next. All clear?”
“Dominic—” Kit closed her fists till the knuckles stood white. She stared down at the floor; he could only see her short bright hair.
He said gently: “I have to sleep or collapse, lass. I’ll meet you at noon by the Rocket Fountain. I think we’ve a few private things to discuss.”
She turned and fled upstairs.
Flandry departed too. The night sky was a-flicker with aurora; he thought he could hear its ionic hiss in the city’s blacked-out silence. Once he scrambled to a rooftop and waited for an Ardazirho patrol to go by. Wan blue light glimmered off their metal and their teeth.
Judith made him welcome. “I’ve been so worried, darlin’—”
He considered her a while. Weariness dragged at him. But she had put out a late supper, with wine and a cold game bird, as she knew he liked it; and her hair glowed red by candlelight. Sleep be damned, Flandry decided. He might be permanently asleep tomorrow.
He did nap for a few morning hours, and went out before noon . Explorers’ Plaza had been a gay scene once, where folk sat leisurely in the surrounding gardens, sipping coffee and listening to harp trees in the wind and watching life stream past. Now it was empty. The metal fountain itself, in the form of an ancient space rocket, still jetted many-colored heatless fires from its tail; but they seemed pale under the gloomy winter sky.
Flandry took out a cigaret, sat down on the fountain rim and waited. A few preliminary raindrops kissed his half lifted face.
A military truck careened out of a deserted street and ground to a halt. Three Ardazirho leaped from the cab. Kit was with them. She pointed at Flandry. Lightning blinked immediately overhead, and sudden thunder swamped her words. But the tone was vindictive.
“Halt, human!”
It must have been the only Anglic phrase any of the three invaders knew. They bayed it again and yet again as Flandry sprang to the plaza. He ducked and began to run, zigzagging.
No shots were fired. An Ardazirho yelped glee and opened the truck body. Wings snapped leathery. Flandry threw a glance behind. A score of meter-long snake bodies were streaming upward from the truck. They saw him, whistled and stooped.
Flandry ran. His heart began to pump, the wildness of irrational uncontrollable terror. The batsnakes reached him. He heard teeth click together behind his nape. A lean body coiled on his right arm. He jerked the limb up, frantic. Wings resisted him. Fangs needled into his flesh. The rest of the pack whirled and dove and whipped him with their tails.
He started to run again. The three Ardazirho followed, long bounds which took them over the ground faster than a man could speed. They howled, and there was laughter in their howling. The street was empty, resounding under boots.
Shuttered windows looked down without seeing. Doors were closed and locked.
Flandry stopped. He spun around. His right arm was still cumbered. The left dove beneath his tunic. His needler came out. He aimed at the nearest of the laughing ruddy devils. A batsnake threw itself on his gun hand. It bit with trained precision, into the fingers. Flandry let the weapon fall. He snatched after the snake — to wring just one of their damned necks—!
It writhed free. Its reptile-like jaws gri
XII
Most of the year, Vixen’s northern half was simply desert, swamp, or prairie, where a quick vegetative life sprang up and animals that had been estivating crept from their burrows. The arctic even knew snow, when winter-long night had fallen. But in summer the snows melted to wild rivers, the rivers overflowed and became lakes, the lakes baked dry. Storms raged about the equator and into the southern hemisphere, as water precipitated again in cooler parts. Except for small seas dreary amidst salt flats, the north blistered arid. Fires broke loose, the pampas became barren again in a few red days. Under such erosive conditions, this land had no mountains. Most of it was plain, where dust and ash scoured on a furnace wind. In some places rose gnarled ranges, lifeless hills, twisted crags, arroyos carved by flash floods into huge earth scars.
The Ardazirho had established their headquarters in such a region, a little below the arctic circle. Thousands of lethal kilometers made it safe from human ground attack; the broken country was camouflage and protection from spaceships. Not that they tried to conceal their fortress absolutely. That would have been impossible. But it burrowed deep into the range and offered few specific targets.
Here and there Flandry saw a warship sitting insolently in the open, a missile emplacement, a detector station, a lookout tower black and lean against the blinding sky. Outer walls twisted through gullies and over naked ridges; Ardazirho sentries paced them, untroubled by dry cruel heat, blue-white hell-glare, pouring ultraviolet radiation. But mostly, the fortress went inside the hills, long vaulted tu