But the guards were lazy. Why, after all, was it necessary for three men to work a tower, especially at night? There was no escape from the camp. Even if one of the Imperials managed to get out, there was nowhere for him to go—the peasants surrounding the camp were promised large rewards for the return of any escapees in any condition, no questions to be asked. And even if an Imperial managed to slip past the farmers, where would he go? He was still marooned on a world far inside the Tahn galaxies.
And so a bright guard had figured a way to slave all three sensors to a single unit. Only one guard was required to monitor all three of them.
So when Virunga ordered the carefully orchestrated ruckus to start inside one of the barracks and a guard swung his spotlight, all sensors on that tower pointed away from the two scuttling blobs of darkness that went to the wire.
There were three strands of wire to cut before Sten and Alex could slip through into the no-go passage, three razored strips of plas. Sten's knife would make that simple. But those dangling strands would be spotted within a few minutes. And so, very carefully, Alex had collected over the past several cycles twelve metalloid spikes.
Sten's knife nerve-twitched out of its fleshy sheath. Very gently he punched two holes side by side on a razor strip. Alex pushed the spikes through them, then used his enormous strength to force the spikes into the plas barrier posts. With the strip thus nailed in place, Sten cut the wire. One... two... three... slip through the gap... repin the wire... and they were in the no-go passageway.
Across that, and again they cut and replaced the wire.
For the first time in three years Sten and Alex were outside the prison camp, without guards.
The temptation to leap up and run was almost overwhelming. But instead they crawled slowly onward, fingers feathering in front of them, expecting sensors and screaming alarms.
There were none.
They had escaped.
All that remained was getting offworld.
CHAPTER FOUR
"Now...where the hell is that clottin' sentry?" Sten whispered.
"Dinna be fashin' Horrie, m' lad," Alex growled.
Horrie. Somehow Alex not only had managed to make Sten a lower-rank but had found a diminutive for Horatio.
"You'll pay."
"Aye," Alex said. "But th' repayment ae a' obligation dinna be ae gay ae th' incurrin't ae it."
Sten did not answer. He stared at the dispatch ship, sitting less than 100 meters from their hilltop hiding place.
Sten and Alex had discovered a potential way off the planet when they were assigned to a work detail on the prison world's landing field. They had both observed and noted a small four-man dispatch ship, once state of the art but now used for shuttle missions between worlds. The ship might have been obsolete, but it had both Yukawa and Anti-Matter Two drives. All they had to do was steal the ship.
Once Sten and Alex were beyond the camp's wire, it should have been simple for them to sneak the few kilometers from the camp to the landing field. But it took more hours than they had allowed. Neither of them realized that one of the corollary effects of malnutrition was night blindness.
And so, in spite of their Mantis skills, they found themselves stumbling through the dark as if they were untrained civilians. Only their reflexive abilities from Mantis on night and silence moves kept them from being discovered as they crept past the peasant farms surrounding the prison camp.
"While we be hain't ae sec," Alex said, "whidny y' be likin't Ae tellin't th' aboot th' spotted snakes?"
"If you do that, I shall assassinate you."
"Th' lad hae nae sense a' humor," Alex complained to the sleeping reek in the tiny box in front of them. "An' here com't thae ace boon coon."
Below them, the sentry ambled across their field of view.
The airfield security was complex: a roving sentry, a wire barricade, a clear zone patrolled by watch animals, a second wire barricade, and internal electronic security.
With the sentry's passage logged and timed, Sten and Alex went forward. They crawled just to the first wire barricade. Alex patted the small box.
"Nae, y' wee't stinkard, go thou an' earn th' rent."
He flipped the top open, and the reek sprang out. Fuddled by its new environment, it wandered through the wire, into the clear zone. Then it sat, licking its fur, wondering where water would be, and waking up. Its slow thought processes were broken by a snarl.
The caracajou—three meters on three dimensions of fur-covered lethality—waddled forward. The skunk bear was angry, which was the normal disposition of its species. But the crossbreeding and mutation to which the Tahn had subjected its forebearers made the mammal even angrier. It dully reasoned that two-legs was its only enemy, and somehow it was forced to be kindly to those two-legs who fed it yet destroy any other two-legs. Also, it was kept from breeding and from finding its own territory.
This caracajou had spent five years of its life walking up and down a wire-defined corridor, with nothing to release its anxieties.
And then, suddenly, there was the reek.
The skunk bear bounded forward—according to instincts and general piss-off.
The reek—also according to instincts and general piss-off—whirled, curled its worm tail over its back, and sprayed.
The spray from its anal glands hit the caracajou on its muzzle. Instantly the creature rose to its hind paws, howled, and, trying to scrub the awful smell from its nostrils, stumbled away, one set of conditioning saying find shelter, the second saying find the two-legs that can help.
The reek, satisfied, hissed and scuttled off.
"Th' stink't tool work't," Alex whispered.
Sten was busy. Once again the barrier wire was drilled, pinned, and then, after the two crawled past, replaced.
The ship sat in sleek blackness, less than fifty meters away. Neither man went forward. Alex slowly reached inside his ragged tunic, took out four segmented hollow tubes, each less than one centimeter in diameter, and put them together. That made a blowpipe nearly a meter long. At its far end, Alex clipped on a pierced fish bladder, which was filled with finely pulverized metal dust.
Kilgour put the tube to his lips, aimed the blowpipe at a bush, and blew. The invisible dust drifted out, collected around the bush, and settled. Both men went nose into the dirt and thought invisible. Minutes later, the Tahn patrol charged up. Then they stopped and milled about.
In their initial casing of the escape, Sten and Alex had noted that inside the field's perimeter were electronic detectors. They theorized that from a distance the detectors would be fairly simple: probably radar-based. This was, after all, a world far behind the front lines.
The Tahn corporal commanding the patrol lifted his com.
"Watch... this is Rover. We are in the suspect area, clear."
"Rover... Watch. Are there any signs of intrusion?"
"This is Rover. Hold."
The overage and overweight corporal used his torch to scan the ground. "Rover. Nothing."
"This is Watch. Are you sure? Sensors still show presence in area."
"Clot if I know," the corporal complained. "But there's clottin' nothing we can see."
"Rover, this is Watch. Maintain correct com procedure. Your inspection of site recorded... your report logged that no intrusion has been made. Return to guard post. Watch. Over."
"Clottin' wonderful," the corporal grumbled. "If there's nobody out here, we done something wrong. If there's somebody out here, we're gonna get the nail. Clot. Detail... form up."