Sarah just glared at him, unimpressed even if his pain was real.
“Look now, everyone. I’m very sorry to be such a burden. I really regret every bite of excess food I’ve ever indulged in right now, believe me. But if we can pull together, if we can stick it out, we’ll all survive.”
“Save it,” grunted Sarah, grimly taking a new grip on the pole and stumbling forward into the dark trees.
Zimmerman wisely fell silent for a time. Trudging forward, exhausted and injured, Sarah thought that this march had to be the worst experience of her life. Not for the first time, she reflected that the luck of her family had gone bad at the point of her husband’s accident. It was as if she were in a deep well of bad luck, where she and Bili spiraled ever downward until now it seemed that the light at the top of the shaft had all but vanished entirely.
Utilizing reserves she didn’t know she possessed, she eventually reached the outcropping of rocks that Zimmerman had said to keep an eye out for. At that point, he directed them to proceed downhill into a steep gully. The sides of the gully were wet and slick with moss. They almost lost hold of Zimmerman and pitched him squalling onto the rocks before reaching the bottom.
“Over there, under the tangle-bush. There should be a cave mouth,” hissed Zimmerman, hushed now that their goal was so near. There was a genuine, feverish excitement in his voice.
They set down the stretcher and Sarah went forward to investigate. Using a hand-held glow-lamp they had taken from a fallen trooper on the way out of the nest, she examined the walls of the gully closely. After a time she discovered the entrance.
“There’s no way a flitter could fit inside that hole,” she said, returning to Zimmerman. She directed the glow-lamp, set at its highest setting, into his sweating, dirty face.
He squinted and waved at the light in irritation. “Just take me inside. I’ll show you.”
Grudgingly, she obliged. Inside, the cave was quite a bit larger than it appeared. Although she saw no immediate signs of the flitter, she did see numerous familiar-looking bales of bluish reeds. Along one wall were stacked a dozen barrels of bluish dust.
“These barrels are full of blur dust. This is a smuggler’s cache,” she said, blinking in surprise.
“Of course. But fortunately, the former owners are beyond caring about this particular cache.”
“How do you know that?”
“This was Mudface and Daddy’s property,” he explained, hauling himself into a sitting position. “Recall the feast.”
Sarah shuddered. “I’d rather not.”
“Didn’t I tell you it was here?” demanded Zimmerman, beaming and looking for credit.
Bili gave him a wry glance. “Just tell us where the flitter is, fatso.”
He waved his hand at the stack of barrels. “Look back there.”
They did and found the flitter. It was a smaller model than Sarah had hoped for. It could hold six passengers in a pinch, four comfortably. She eyed the refined blur dust speculatively, licking her cracked lips. Any one of the barrels would bring a fortune on another system. She shook her head, as if to clear it. She was done with that kind of business. It had brought her nothing but trouble.
She noticed that the skald was eyeing the flitter curiously, running his pale thin hands over the stubby wings and the silvery landing skids.
Directly above the flitter was a camouflaged hole that leaked starlight. It would be a simple matter to leave the cave, except for one thing. “Where’s the card-key, Zimmerman?” she demanded.
“Isn’t it in the slot?” asked Zimmerman, smiling.
“No.”
“Carry me into the flitter and I’ll tell you where it is.”
Sarah made no move. She glared at him. “You tell us now, or we leave you here for the killbeasts to sniff out.”
“I don’t want you to be tempted to leave me behind.”
“I’ve never been more tempted to do anything in my life, but you will tell me now, before I carry your sorry ass another foot. I can hot-key a flitter, you know. As you continually point out, I am a smuggler.”
Zimmerman looked concerned. “It would take longer.”
Sarah only shrugged. Behind her, the skald had boarded the flitter and now sat quietly in the back.
Zimmerman chewed his lips and eyed her speculatively. “All right,” he sighed at last. “The codekey is in the flare kit, attached to the back of the hatch.”
Sarah snorted at the obviousness of the hiding place and went to retrieve the key. She stood there in the hatchway, looking back toward Zimmerman where he lay on the floor, still on the makeshift stretcher. He was doing his best to look pitiful. She moved to wave the skald forward to help carry Zimmerman again, when a heavy cough sounded outside the cave mouth.
“Landshark,” hissed Bili, grabbing her arm and trying to pull her into the flitter. Sarah’s mouth sagged. It must have tracked them, stalking them while they moved through the forests and following their spoor down into the gully. Wildly, she thought of the story of the boy who cried wolf once too often.
She stepped out of the hatchway, moving to help him, but she was too late. The landshark was already thrusting its snout into the cave mouth. A great bulbous head appeared, blocking the entrance almost entirely. Powerful forelimbs with six-inch curved claws made for digging followed.
“Let’s go, Mom!” shouted Bili.
Zimmerman, terrified as deeply as he had been during the feasting, found the strength to struggle erect. Trembling with the effort to lift his bulk on one thin leg, he determinedly began to hop toward them, dragging his injured leg behind him. The landshark caught up with him in a sudden lunge, just as he reached the barrels full of blur dust. They went over with a crash, firing great clouds of bluish dust into the air.
In horror, Sarah slammed the hatch shut before the dust could reach them. There was no hope for Zimmerman now. Breathing in that much blur dust at once was definitely fatal. A few grains of the hallucinogen could keep you high for hours. Breathing in gouts of it was deadly. She doubted if even the landshark would survive.
With a great gulping motion, the landshark sucked the man into its toothy maw, making jerking motions as his legs vanished into its head.
Demonstrating its initial effects, the blur dust gave Zimmerman a sudden rush of inhuman vigor. Although he was already mortally wounded, he beat at the head of the monster with wild fury. Savage blows rained around its eyes and the sensitive olfactory regions, making it wince. Sarah thought that Zimmerman was probably breaking the bones in his hands, but he kept on striking it, even as his life’s blood gushed out.
Then she managed to shove the codekey into the slot and hit the throttle for emergency lift. The flitter shot out of the shaft and into the open night air.
After a few minutes she managed to steady the wobbling craft and set a course for Grunstein Interplanetary.
Beneath them the treetops swept by with blinding speed. She hugged as close to the leafy canopy as she dared, hoping to avoid detection. None of them spoke about what they had left behind in the smuggler’s cave.
Long after midnight, Drick was awake and back at his old desk. To his delight, he found his portable holoset and his flask of blur distillate were still there, although more than half of the moonshine had leaked out. The holoset was a disappointment as well, as all the net stations were out except for the automated ones that showed only the most dull comic reruns at this time of night. Not surprisingly, KXUT hadn’t been heard from since the building had been bombed.
The vaporous distillate had lost none of its flavor however, and with a heavy contented sigh, Drick loosened his sash and leaned back in his self-contouring chair. Suddenly, he sat up with a brilliant idea. Keying in his account codes, he accessed the public net and coaxed the computers into providing him with a private viewing of last week’s rayball game. He had been interrupted with the invasion at that point and had missed it. Damn the price, what did a few credits matter now?