More Than Fire

So be it.

Halfway up the road, he came to a high stone wall across it and extending up into the hills. A dozen armed men were lounging in front of the gate. He turned around and rode back into town. There he managed to trade some of his small coins for lodging for his horse. The owner of the stables did not seem very curious. There were too many foreigners in this harbor city for him to be surprised to meet one, even out here, miles from the metropolitan area.

Or it could be that he had been told by a Red Orc agent to pretend indifference.

Kickaha walked back to the bottom of the hill and went into the woods a few yards from the road. Here he waited for nightfall, meanwhile napping and then eating his own rations and drinking from his own canteen. Though he was theoretically immune to any disease, he did not want to chance the local food or the water. After a long time, midnight came. By then, the sky was overcast. But he wore the headband and its attached night-vision device. He worked uphill through the trees some distance from the road until he came to the wall. Though it was ten feet high, he got over it easily by throwing a grappling hook and climbing up the rope.

When he was on top and had drawn the rope up, he took from the backpack a sensor-detecting instrument given him by Khruuz. He swept the immediate area with it. It registered nothing. That only meant, however, that any sensors planted out there were not active. There could be plenty of passive detectors camouflaged as rocks or tree bark. It did not matter. He was pressing onward and upward.

He let himself down to the ground and whipped the hook free. After coiling it and hanging it from a strap on his belt, he climbed up almost vertical slopes. Then he came to less steep ground. Again, he swung the sensor-detector in a semicircle. Its light, set within a recess, did not come on.

After he had climbed to the top of another stone wall, he used the detector again. Now, its indicator glowed. He set it to determine what frequency the detectors were on. Having done that, he rotated a dial on the machine's side until it matched the frequency. Then he pressed a recessed button in its side. Immediately, the inset light turned off. The machine had now passively canceled the transmitted waves so that they would not register his body. But the alarms in Red Orc's house might go off if this action was detected.

He was, he thought, in a tiny canoe moving on a river of uncertainty and ambiguity, a craft leaking from holes, with the paddle on the point of breaking. But if it sank, he would swim on upstream.

He wiped the sweat from his forehead and drank deeply from the canteen. This he had emptied and refilled a dozen times during his trip with water from clean streams flowing from the hills. He pushed through the thick bushes among the trees for a few yards, stopping when he saw the lights in the upper-story windows of the great mansion. The ground floor had no windows. Like those large houses in the valley, this building was constructed of white stone blocks.

Kickaha removed his night-vision goggles and looked behind him and down. The valley was in darkness except for a few widely scattered lights, probably clusters of torches. He resumed his walk toward the east side of the house. The ground was level, and the gravel path he was following wound through beds of flowers. Forty feet from the house, the lawn began. Glancing at his detector now and then, Kickaha proceeded to the corner of the house and stuck his head around it. Lit by torches set in brackets on the front wall was a wide porch. Along the front edge of the porch were seven columns covered by carved figures.

Two spearmen stood before the eight-foot-high arched doorway.

He took two minutes to stun them with the beamer, tie their hands behind them and their feet together, and slap tape on their mouths. He did not know when the change of guard would be and did not care. There was no lock on the big iron door. Since it resisted his push, he supposed that it had been barred from the inside. His beamer cut through the door and the big rectangular wooden bolt behind it.

The only noise was the sputter of melting metal and the clang as the bolt and metal bracket on the other side fell onto the floor. He had to push them aside when he entered. He stepped inside a well-lit room big enough to hold a medium-sized sailing ship. The illumination was the sourceless lighting of Thoan technology. Cool air was blowing from a wall vent near him.

No one appeared to defend the house. After searching through the ground floor and finding no one there, he went up a wide staircase to the second story. There he found the room in which Anana had been subjected to the memory-uncoiling. It was as empty of people as the first floor. The third revealed nothing useful except the lights he saw through his gate-detector. So far, he had found gates on every floor, ten in all. Red Orc believed in having many escape routes close at hand.

The "attics," the twin domes, were entered by trapdoors in the ceiling of the third story. Though he did not expect to find anything significant there, he was wrong. Each dome housed an airboat. If Red Orc failed to get to a gate fast enough, he could use one of these to escape. Kickaha got into the cockpit of one and reacquainted himself with the controls and instruments. Having done that and started the motor, he pushed the button that energized the control mechanism of the dome door. It slid to one side, showing a still-cloudy sky.

The airboat lifted and pointed toward the doorway. He was going to fly back to the Vasquez rocks and regate there to Manathu Vorcyon's World. Since he was one-hundred-percent sure that all the gates in the house were trapped, he would take none. He was begi

He pressed down on the acceleration pedal. The craft surged forward, pressing him against the back of the pilot's chair. He should go slowly until he was out of the dome, but he was in a hurry.

That haste was his undoing. Or maybe it wouldn't have made any difference.

In any event, when he saw the shimmering, which was a few inches outside the dome-hangar door, it was too late to stop. He howled, "Trapped!"

The airboat passed through the shimmering curtain, the gate that Red Orc had set to be triggered when the craft approached it.

16

JUST AS HE BULLETED THROUGH THE VEIL, HE PRESSED TWO buttons to fire big and powerful "ca

No, they would not. The ca

He should have checked them out before taking off. Red Orc had deactivated them.

Though furious at himself for not testing the beamers, he did what was needed to keep the airboat from slamming into the opposite wall of the gigantic hangar he had shot into. His foot lifted from the acceleration pedal. At the same time, he turned the magnetic retro-fire dial to the fullpower position. His body surged forward slightly, but the pressure was so intense he felt crushed. The magnetic restraining field kept him from breaking his chest bones against the steering wheel. Its nosetip almost touching the wall, the boat had stopped.

He slid back the canopy and looked over the side of the cockpit. About fifty feet below was the hangar floor. Parked at the rear of the vast room were two score airboats of different sizes and a zeppelin-shaped and -sized vessel. On the floor near the front of the building, a dozen men were aiming their beamers at him. What he had thought was a wall was the upper part of the closed hangar door.