The scent was overpowering, sickly sweet. There was a sound like the whirring of a bull-roarer, which at first I could not trace to its point of origin. Then I saw something clambering over the lip of one of the blossoms, and realised that it was a huge flightless insect, the size of a man’s head, coloured as darkly as the plant on which it wandered, in shades sufficiently similar to make it difficult to see until it moved. I realised then that the sounds must be made by similar creatures, chafing their body-parts like grasshoppers.
“Do you recognise this place?” I asked the vormyran, my voice not much above a whisper.
“No,” he replied. “I have traveled in most of the tropical lands of my homeworld, but I have seen nothing remotely like this.”
I wondered if this was the native territory of the people who lived on this level. If so, it would be easy to believe them giants. But I did not leap to that conclusion. For one thing, the ceiling was only twelve metres above our heads— no higher than the ceilings in levels one, two and three, which had been inhabited by humanoids of normal size. For another, the grey wall to either side of the doorway curved quite noticeably as it extended away. If that curve were to be extrapolated, its implication was that we were in an enclave no more than a kilometre in diameter. This was nothing but a big garden, or a vivarium; it was not an entire world by any means.
I was about to ask what we should do next, but the question died unasked when there came a new sound, much louder than the chirring of the pollinators which scrambled around the giant blooms.
There was no mistaking the sound; it was gunfire.
33
The gun that was being fired wasn’t a flame-pistol, nor even a needier. It was an old-fashioned crash-gun blasting away on automatic, sending out a veritable hail of bullets.
The moment the gunfire stopped, the insects started. When we had first heard them, they had obviously been in their restful mood—now, they were panicked. The bull-roarer sound was amplified a thousand times, into an appalling screech, which went on and on and on.
I clasped my hands to my eardrums, trying to keep out the dreadful noise, and Amara Guur did the same, although the needier was still tightly clutched in the fingers of his right hand. I tried to move back into the corridor from which we had come, but I hit the solid wall, and when I half-turned in surprise, I found that the portal was no longer there. The grey wall was solid and seamless, enclosing us.
We huddled against the smooth surface until the sound died away, the crescendo easing down until the former level of sound was restored. Only then was it possible to speak.
“That way,” said Guur, gutturally. He pointed away to the right, in the direction from which the noise of gunfire had come.
There was a narrow curved pathway running along the edge of the wall, where the plants did not quite extend themselves to the boundary of their allotted space. It was easy enough to follow, and we followed it at a run.
A hundred metres or so round the curve we found a nearly-naked Spirellan and a scantily-clad Kythnan female crouching over a bloodstained body. The body was wearing dark underclothes of a kind I had seen before—under a Star Force uniform. The Kythnan was Jacinthe Siani; I jumped immediately to the conclusion that the Spirellan, who was still holding a handgun pointed at the dead man, was my old acquaintance Heleb.
While Guur and I approached from one direction, two more vormyr were approaching from the other. I suspected that the trouble I was in had just become five times worse.
I went quickly to the dead man. It was Khalekhan—he had taken three shots in the chest and had almost been cut in half. He was holding a flame-pistol, which hadn’t been fired. I didn’t even reach for it, but Heleb grabbed me round the neck with a hairy arm, and held me tight until one of the newcomers had appropriated it. When he let me go, I remained kneeling, but I turned away from the body to look up at my captors.
“That is one of the persons who ambushed us,” said Heleb. “I saw him—just before those robots swarmed all over us.” I knew it was a case of mistaken identity, but I wasn’t about to say so.
“Was he alone?” growled Amara Guur. He sounded uncertain, perhaps because he hadn’t seen anyone at the ambush, but I knew that he could put two and two together once he realised the flame-pistols were Star Force weapons, not at all in the style of our present captors.
Heleb hesitated before he said: “I think so.”
“You think so!”
Heleb cringed before Guur’s obvious wrath. It takes a lot to make a Spirellan cringe. No human could ever achieve such an effect.
“I didn’t see anyone else,” the Kythnan put in.
Guur looked at the gun in Heleb’s hand. “How many shots do you have left?” he demanded.
Heleb released the clip from the butt of the gun and checked it. “Three,” he said. He didn’t sound very happy about it, and I could understand why. Nobody had anything on but the underclothes they’d been wearing beneath their cold-suits. The bastards who were keeping tabs on us had left several of us with guns, but they hadn’t provided any extra ammunition. Heleb had sprayed a dozen shots around when he’d let fly at Khalekhan, probably because he was habitually over-generous in the violence department. Now, he had only three bullets left.
He could do arithmetic too, if forced, and his counting must have told him that there might be three more starship troopers lurking in the bushes, plus one extra-large android.
I looked around at the shattered and wounded blossoms that had been blasted apart by the shots that had missed their target. Several of them were leaking viscous brown sap, and looked for all the world as if they were bleeding. One of the insect-like things had copped it too; its insides had been spread all over a net of green-and-purple leaves, grey and brown and sticky. The creature’s exoskeleton was more leathery than chitinous; only its six legs were rigid. The legs were still moving, jerkily, in the grip of some autonomic reflex, but while I watched they gradually slowed down.
It was fairly clear that the chances of our all getting together and declaring a truce until our present predicament could be sorted out were pretty damn slim. The star-captain wasn’t a forgiving sort, and one of her boys had just been killed. I could imagine how angry that would make her, even though Heleb was only getting his own back for what had happened up on three.
I realised, uncomfortably, that I was in a very unenviable situation. I was in the hands of the wrong party: a captive, or a hostage. I didn’t know why the mysterious observers had cast me in that role—because they had sure as hell given me to Amara Guur by arranging things the way they had—but I had no illusions about how difficult it was going to be to play the part.
“It doesn’t matter whether he was alone or not,” said Guur, pensively. “If the other humans are here, they must have heard the shots, and that racket which the shots provoked. But there are only three soldiers, and they seem as anxious to destroy the android as we are. Even if they have guns, we are stronger. We are five, and now that we have the flame-pistol, we are all armed.”
I checked his arithmetic, and was unsurprised to find it sound. Both of the vormyr who had come from the other direction had been holding needlers. One of them now passed the flame-gun to Heleb, who gave his own pistol to Jacinthe Siani. Clearly, she was counted among the combat troops, though it was equally clear that she was considered to be expendable. She didn’t protest the allocation, even though it was hot-headed Heleb who had left the gun dangerously undersupplied with firepower.
I came slowly to my feet. Guur guided me up against the grey wall, and stared into my eyes once again.