"'But at a price." Gustav mused over the rough plans. "What if portable installations could be built? Massed rafts to bear the heavy equipment which could be sent out as the need became manifest? Power could also be supplied from mobile sources and would only be used to give protection when actually needed. At other times they could serve factories and remote areas. You see my point? It would be less expensive and more versatile."
"But less efficient."
"Only relatively so. If…"
Kathryn leaned back in her chair as the discussion continued. Her head ached a little and it was a relief to close her eyes but darkness brought no consolation. Against her lids she could see the pale beauty of Iduna, the Tau, the face of Dumarest now lying in an apparent coma.
Heard again the voice of the technician who attended him.
"No response as yet, my lady, but that is all to the good. As far as we can determine his normal processes are unimpaired." Then she'd added, spoiling it all, "Of course it's early to tell yet. For all we know his mind could have gone as did the others."
Damn the stupid bitch! Couldn't she at least have left her with hope? If Dumarest failed what else did she have?
Chapter Six
He sat on a rock in a plain of coarse, volcanic sand, black grains which stretched as far as he could see to a horizon limned with smouldering ruby. Flame which rose to cover the sky with swirling tendrils of somber red and darting, orange, strands and swaths of savage color edged with black, the black fading to scarlet, to crimson, to fill his eyes with the hue of blood.
A sky Dumarest had never seen before, a plain which was strange.
He moved, feeling the solidity of the stone beneath him, the grate of sand against his boots. He was dressed now, the knife snug in its sheath, warm and divorced from the need of food and water. Able to think and plan and review the situation.
He had run to the Tau as a child. As Iduna must have run to it to hold it close in infantile delight at a strange novelty. Luminosity had engulfed him and, suddenly, he had been elsewhere. In a nursery furnished as if for a giant fitted with walking, talking toys. But a child saw things in a different perspective and would think of normal furniture as being large. The dolls too-many a child had dolls as large as itself. Iduna had been spoiled and would have had such toys.
He had passed into a place fitted for the girl, one which to her would have been familiar, and then he had left it to relive again his own childhood. A portion of it-had there been more? Dumarest frowned, thinking, trying to remember. Had there been another woman who would have been kind to him? A man? He couldn't remember. Even the faces of the others who must have lived close in the settlement were nothing but blurs. Only the man had seemed real. The man he had killed and the woman he had left after taking her knife. And then?
The ship and the captain and, suddenly, this plain.
An area which could hold unexpected dangers. The volcanic sand would be loose and easy to shift and serve to provide burrows for lurking predators. The sky itself seemed to be flaring warnings and Dumarest felt his nerves tense with the old, familiar signal of impending danger. A tension which increased as he heard the faint rasp of shifting grains.
Sand moving when there was no wind!
He lunged forward, rising, his hand dropping, lifting with the weight of the knife as he turned to face horror.
It was big, looming against the sky, a thing of spined limbs and oozing palps, of mandilbles which snapped with the rattle of castanets, of eyes which glowed like jewels mounted in short, bristling hair. An insect, armored and armed with glistening plates of chitin, multi-eyed, multi-limbed. A thing three times the size of a man which reared from the sand in a rain of black granules to scuttle toward its prey.
Dumarest sprang to one side and felt his boot slip in the sand so that, thrown off balance, he swung beneath the sweep of a claw to fall, to roll desperately as serrated edges tore at the sand to leave long, ugly furrows. A moment in which the thing heaved itself totally from the black grains to rear in monstrous silhouette against the flame-shot sky, to turn as it fell, to land and lunge forward in one flickering movement.
Dumarest rose, diving to one side, blade lifted to ward off the slash of a spined limb, steel biting into chitin to release a gush of yellow ichor, to thrust at the membrane of a joint, to dig and twist and leave the thing with a crippled limb.
A minor wound which it ignored as, poised, it stood watching.
A thing which lurked beneath the sand, waiting for unguessable hours for prey to alert it to the possibility of food and moisture. Stimulated by his scent, the meat he carried, the fluid his skin contained.
And against it Dumarest had nothing but his knife. It wasn't enough and he'd known it from the first. The creature was too big, the blade too short to penetrate to a vital organ. The eyes he could attack but they were many and even if totally blinded the thing could trace him by scent. The limbs could be crippled but, again, there were too many. To destroy them all would be to leave it a helpless mass writhing in the sand but to do it would require speed and skill as well as judgment and luck. Too much luck.
But he had to try.
Stooping he snatched up sand in his left hand and darted forward as he threw it at the eyes of the creature. Even as the grains left his hand he lunged to the attack, knife a shimmer as he struck, slashed, twisted at joints and softer portions. A moment in which he seemed to be winning then again the thing reared, revealing an underside blotched and mottled with tufted hairs, legs scrabbling as it twisted, falling to smash against him, one leg numbing his arm with a blow which tore the knife from his fingers and sent it spinning to clash against the rock.
As the limb returned for another blow Dumarest caught it in both hands, threw his weight against it, strained until chitin yielded and the broken appendage flopped in streams of sickly yellow. A minor victory and possibly his last. Stars exploded in his skull as a living club slammed against his head and the twitch of the broken limb he held flung him up and away to land heavily in the sand.
To lie and die.
To rise and run and die.
To overcome his weakness, the dizziness, the stench of the insect, to return to the battle, to do what he could against impossible odds and, because they were impossible, to die.
Always it came to that.
Bare-handed he was helpless and even if he still had the knife the end would have been the same. He needed a laser, a heavy-duty weapon which would burn holes in the thing like a red hot wire in butter. A military-type Mark IV Ellman such as he had used before.
And, suddenly, he had it.
Dumarest rose as the thing charged, the gun cradled in his arms, finger closing on the release as a serrated claw moved to cut him in half. A claw which smoked and jerked and turned on the end of its limb to fall in a shower of yellow as the red guide-beam traced a searing path over the natural armor. A ruby finger which lifted to turn jeweled eyes into patches of char. To send destruction in a swath between the gaping mandibles. To fry the soft inner tissues. To reach the main ganglion and caress it and turn it into ash with the heat of its passion.
To kill!
Dumarest lowered the gun as the creature fell, feeling the weight of it in his hands as thin limbs scrabbled at the sand, the creature threshing in reflex action, black grains rising to fall with whispering rustles. Rustles which were repeated on all sides. Mounting into a hideous chittering as the plain boiled with ferocious life.