Baku’s wings folded neatly once again. The meerkats chirruped happily to one another. As long as they were with the others, they did not care. Surra took longer to consider. She must wear collar and leash, restraints that could bring her to stubborn resistance. But perhaps Storm’s mind-picture promised even more to her than it had to Baku. She padded across the room, to return holding the hated collar in her mouth, dragging its chain behind her.
“Yat-ta-hay –” Storm spoke softly as always, the sound of the old speech hardly more than a whisper. “Yat-ta-hay – very, very good!”
The troop ferry on which they shipped out was returning regiments, outfits, squads to several different home planets. That war, which had ended in defeat for the Xik invaders, had exhausted the Confederacy to a kind of weary emptiness, and men were on their way back to worlds that lay under yellow, blue, and red suns firm in the determination to court peace.
As Storm strapped himself down on his bunk for the take-off, awaiting the familiar squeeze, he heard Surra growl softly from her pad and turned his head to meet her yellow gaze. His mouth relaxed in a smile that this time did reach and warm his eyes.
“Not yet, runner on the sand!” He used again that tongue that now and forever here after must be a dead language. “We shall once more point the arrow, set up the prayer sticks, call upon the Old Ones and the Faraway Gods – not yet do we leave the war trail!”
Deep in his eyes, naked now that there was no one but the big cat to see, was the thing the Sirian Commander had sensed in him. The galaxy might lie at peace, but Hosteen Storm moved on to combat once again.
There was a company of Arzoran men on board, third- and fourth-generation descendants of off-world settlers. And Storm listened to the babble of their excited talk, filing away all the information that might be useful in the future. They were frontiersmen, these fighters from a three-quarter wilderness world. Their planet produced one product for export – frawns. Frawn meat and frawn-skin fabric, which had the sheen of fine silk and the water-repellent quality of ancient vegetable rubber, were making modest fortunes for the Arzor men.
The frawns moved in herds across the plains; their shimmering blue, heavily woolled foreparts and curving horned heads sloping sharply back to slender, almost naked hindquarters gave them a top-heavy look, which was deceitful since the frawn was well able to protect itself. There was no meat elsewhere in the galaxy to compare with frawn steak, no fabric to match that woven from their hair.
“I’ve two hundred squares cut out down on the Vakind – running straight back to the hills. Get me a crew of riders and we’ll –” The fair-haired man Storm knew as Ransford held forth eagerly.
His bunk mate nodded. “Get Norbies. You don’t lose any young stock with them riding herd. They’ll take their pay in horses. Quade uses Norbies whenever he can get them –”
“Don’t know about that,” cut in a third of the Arzoran veterans. “I’d rather have regular riders. Norbies aren’t like us –”
But Storm lost the thread of the conversation in the sudden excitement of his own thoughts. Quade was not a common name. In all his life he had only heard it once.
“Don’t tell me you believe that blather about Norbies being hostile!” The second speaker had challenged the third sharply. “Me and m’ brother always sign Norbies for the roundup, and we run the tightest outfit near the Peaks! Two of ‘em are better at roundin’ herd than any dozen riders I can sign up at the Crossin’. And I’ll name names right out if you want me to –”
Ransford grinned. “Climb down off your spoutin’ post, Dort. We all know how you Lancins feel about Norbies. And I’ll agree with you about their bein’ good trackers. But there has been trouble with stock disappearin’ – as well you know.”
“Sure. But nobody ever proved that Norbies made them disappear. Bush anyone around and he’ll try to loosen your teeth for you! Treat a Norbie decent and square, and he’s the best backin’ you can get in the outcountry. The Mountain Butchers aren’t Norbies –”
“Mountain Butchers are herd thieves, aren’t they?” Storm asked, hoping to steer the conversation back to Quade.
“That they are,” Ransford returned pleasantly. “Say, you’re the Beast Master who’s signed up for settlement, aren’t you? Well, if all the stories we’ve heard about your kind of trainin’ are the straight goods, you’ll be able to light and tie right off. Mountain Butchers are a problem in the back country. Start a stampede in the right stretch of land, and they can peel off enough young stock durin’ it to set up in business. A man and his crew can’t cover every bit of the range. That is why it pays to hire Norbies, they know the trails and the broken lands –”
“Where do the Mountain Butchers sell their stolen goods?” Storm asked.
Ransford frowned. “That’s something every owner and rider, every frawn-protection man on the planet would like to know. There’s just one space port, and nothin’ passes through that without being checked double, sidewise and across. Unless there’s some hidden port out in the hills and a freebooter runnin’ cargo out – why, you’ve as good a guess as I have as to what they want the animals for. But they raid –”
“Or Norbies raid and then yell about outlaws when we ask pointed questions,” the third Arzoran commented sourly.
Lancin bristled. “That isn’t so, Balvin! Don’t Quade hire Norbies – and the Basin country swings along by Brad Quade. He and his folks has held that district since First Ship time and they know Norbies! It’d take an eruption of the Limpiro Range to make Quade change his mind –”
Storm’s gaze dropped to his own hands resting on the mess table – those brown, thin hands with the thread of an old scar across the back of the left one. They had not moved, nor could any of the three men sitting with him see that sudden change in his eyes. He had the answer he wanted. Brad Quade – this man of importance – whom he had come so far to meet. Brad Quade who had a blood debt to pay to other men on a world where life did not and could not exist, a debt Storm had come to collect. He had sworn an oath as a small and wondering boy, standing before a man of power and knowledge beyond that of other races calling themselves “civilized”. A war had intervened, he had fought in it, and then be had journeyed halfway across the galaxy –
“Yat-ta-hay –” But he did not say that aloud. “Very, very good.”
Immigration and custom inspection were only a formality for one with Storm’s papers, though the Terran was an object of interest to the officers at the space port as he loosed his animals and Baku. Beast Team tales had been so exaggerated across deep space that Storm believed none of the port personnel would have been surprised if Surra had answered in human speech or Baku waved a stun ray in one taloned foot.
Men on Arzor went armed, though the lethal blaster and the needier were both outlawed. A stun ray rod hung from all adult male belts and private differences were settled speedily with those, or with one’s fists – a custom Storm could understand. But the straggle of plasta-crete buildings about the space port was not the Arzor he wanted. The arch of sky overhead, with the tinge of mauve to give it an un-Terran shade, and the wind that swept down from the distant rust-red ripples of mountains hinted of the freedom he desired.
Surra held her head into that wind, her eyes slitted, and Baku’s wings lifted a little at its promise. Then Storm halted, his head snapped around, his nostrils dilated as Surra’s could. The scent borne on that wind – he was pulled by it, so strongly that he did not try to resist.