His back burning with the anticipation of a bullet, his ears straining to catch the sounds of pursuit, Ari reached the doors-and froze.
His eyes squeezed shut and his teeth clenched in a grimace of sudden indecision. He had left his satchel in the lockers near the restrooms. His eyes slid that way, and he wavered for an instant, his fear of the Nexus-loyal security people almost outweighed by his anxiety about the satchel. Then there was a shout behind him, a guttural sound without words, the sound of a Gopus lynch-mob that has just caught up with a reed-rustler in the deep swamps. The sound raised the hair on his neck and lifted the heels of his boots, goading him through the door and out onto the sidewalk. He stepped out of their sight and broke into an all out run for the parking lot.
“There’s no militia van out there,” spoke up a security woman. There was deep suspicion in her voice. She, like all the spaceport personnel, was loyal to the Nexus first, rather than the militia and the colonial Senate.
Manstein’s eyes followed hers to the General’s retreating back. “Right you are,” he said, rising up from his crouched position behind the barricade. He dusted off his pants as the others stood with him. “He’s running out on us. Remember that crash that killed the last governor that the Nexus sent out? I recall Steinbach getting promoted from Colonel to General right after that.”
“Well, let’s demote him this time,” suggested another man, waving his pistol at the ceiling.
Manstein raised his big hands, quelling their urge to chase the General down. “Let’s have a vote right now.”
That got their attention. The tape of the failed assassination tape ended and Droad’s ID shots came up, proving his claim to the governor’s seat. The simple silver star and black background, the seal of the Nexus, glittered under his serious face.
“Our new governor has gotten himself in a jam. If we join him, we could be killed by those personal armies out in the Slipape Counties, or even the militia themselves. This could even mean civil war. So the question is, do we play it safe and slink home like the General, or do we stand by the Nexus?”
There was a brief moment of hesitation, but only a brief one. Unanimously, they voted to join Governor Droad.
When Sarah and Bili came floating down into the horkwoods, Sarah had at first been crazy with worry that Bili would be hurt. After finally extricating themselves from their harnesses and finding one another in the deep shade beneath the green canopy, she began to feel despair. They had lost everything.
“We can’t let them catch us, Bili,” she told her boy, gathering their survival kits from their crash-seats and heading uphill, deeper into the forests.
“I know. If they put you in jail, Mudface and Daddy will kill you now for sure,” Bili finished for her gloomily.
“We have to head away from the wreck. If we go deeper into the mountains, we might get away from the search lifters,” she told him. Silently, she added to herself the fact that going uphill should take them farther from the landsharks which infested the wet valleys of this region.
“I hope they blast that other pirate,” said Bili darkly. “I hope he goes down with his ship, too.”
Sarah said nothing. She couldn’t approve of her son’s wishing someone dead, but she felt the same way herself. Blind chance had reached out and dealt her family another bad hand. Bad luck seemed to follow the Engstroms. It seemed to shadow their lives. Right after they had gotten married, her husband Daniel had lost an eye in a pressure accident. The injury hadn’t kept him from working, but had put his commercial piloting days behind him. She had gotten pregnant soon after the accident, and although she loved Bili more than anything in the world, he had not made life any easier. When they had finally gotten things together and seemed to be making some headway, the second accident had come. With her husband dead and her son injured, finding the credit to make ends meet had become a daily struggle. Now, here they were in the cold mountains of Grunstein with nothing, chased by the law and soon the criminals as well.
With an effort, she pushed aside such depressing thoughts and tried to come up with an escape plan. It was Bili, however, who gave them the direction they needed.
“Mom, look over there,” he said, pointing into the forest.
Following his gesture, Sarah frowned at a path cut into the trees. Perhaps a dozen of the great trees in a row seemed to be down, their thick trunks lying like tumbled matchsticks. They stepped closer, cautiously.
“Looks like they just went down today,” said Bili, looking up and down an open alleyway in the forest that had been cut by some mysterious force. A ruler-straight clearing had been slashed through the trees. Murky light fell down upon the dank recesses of the forest, touching plants that had perhaps not been struck by such radiation in centuries. Examining the scene more closely, they could see that the trees had indeed been recently knocked down. The leaves of the giant horkwoods were still green and fresh-looking. The exposed dirt craters around their roots were fresh wounds in the black ground, like the bleeding gums of pulled teeth.
“I know what it is!” said Bili out loud, and at the same moment Sarah knew too.
“The other ship dropped its payload,” she said, finishing Bili’s sentence for him. She understood it all now, the other smuggler had dropped his goods out as soon as he came out of the Yeti. This made the fact that he had jumped out so early more reasonable. After a slanting fall of perhaps ten miles or more, the payload had landed here, cutting a swath through the forest and probably burying itself in the hillside.
She was just considering the idea of pilfering the payload, and the counter idea that someone would soon be along to pick it up, when she thought she heard a sound. It was more of a vibration really, beneath her feet.
With a premonition of great fear, Sarah grabbed Bili by the shoulders before he could step out under the open sky. She hunkered down with him, hiding in the undergrowth. Bili glanced over his shoulder at her as if she was crazy, but at the look in her eyes he was silent. Together they watched the strange clearing closely; breathing through their open mouths so their nostrils would make no whistling noises.
Then, just as Sarah was beginning to think she had gone mad, there was another sound. It was an odd, scraping sound, muffled somewhat as if someone didn’t want to be overheard. The scraping sound continued for a time, then stopped. Hardly daring to breathe, Sarah pulled the pistol out of her survival kit with fantastic care.
As she thumbed off the safety, making a tiny click, a new sound erupted. It was the sound of dirt being tossed about. It grew in intensity, and suddenly a large creature nosed its way out of the ground at the far end of the clearing. Together, Sarah and Bili put their hands to their mouths to stifle an involuntary scream. The creature was huge and hideous. With a streamlined snout and a rippled, leathery surface, it swam through the black forest dirt like a fish in water. Dozens of curved claws protruded from its walrus-shaped body. As they watched these claws scooped and churned at the dirt, tossing a hail of debris behind the monster. In essence it swam through the dirt, tearing and splashing through the ground like thick black liquid. Heavy clods with green crusts sailed about the clearing.
It churned around in a circle, showing itself to be over thirty feet in length and perhaps eight feet thick. Then the gigantic walrus-like monster finally dove back into the ground, disappearing from sight. Sarah and Bili took this opportunity to run from the scene, back into the cool gloom of the forest.
What kept them running a long time, despite their great fatigue, was the certainty that the creature they had seen was not natural to Garm. The Engstroms were nothing if not well-traveled, and they had never encountered or even heard of such a monster before. Nowhere in the great forests of Grunstein, nor down south in the steamy jungles of Amazonia and New Chad, nor even on the remote archipelago of the skalds did such a creature exist.