The musty stench was so strong that Shann could no longer fight the
demands of his outraged stomach. He rolled on his side, retching
violently until the sour smell of his illness battled the foul odor of
the ship. His memories of how he had come into this place were vague;
his body was a mass of dull pain, as if he had been scorched. Scorched!
Had the Throgs used one of their energy whips to subdue him? The last
clear thing he could recall was that slow withdrawal down the cleft
inside the skull rock, the Throg not too far away--the sound from the
entrance.
A Throg prisoner! Through the pain and the sickness the horror of that
bit doubly deep. Terrans did not fall alive into Throg hands, not if
they had the means of ending their existence within reach. But his hands
and arms were caught behind him in an unbreakable lock, some gadget not
unlike the Terran force bar used to restrain criminals, he decided
groggily.
The cubby in which he lay was black-dark. But the quivering of the deck
and the bulkheads about him told Shann that the ship was in flight. And
there could be but two destinations, either the camp where the Throg
force had taken over the Terran installations or the mother ship of the
raiders. If Thorvald's earlier surmise was true and the aliens were
hunting a Terran to talk in the transport, then they were heading for
the camp.
And because a man who still lives and who is not yet broken can also
hope, Shann began to think ahead to the camp--the camp and a faint,
thin chance of escape. For on the surface of Warlock there was a thin
chance; in the mother ship of the Throgs none at all.
Thorvald--and the Wyverns! Could he hope for any help from them? Shann
closed his eyes against the thick darkness and tried to reach out to
touch, somewhere, Thorvald with his disk--or perhaps the Wyvern who had
talked of Trav and shared dreams. Shann focused his thoughts on the
young Wyvern witch, visualizing with all the detail he could summon out
of memory the brilliant patterns about her slender arms, her thin,
fragile wrists, those other designs overlaying her features. He could
see her in his mind, but she was only a puppet, without life, certainly
without power.
Thorvald.... Now Shann fought to build a mental picture of the Survey
officer, making his stand at that window, grasping his disk, with the
sun bringing gold to his hair and showing the bronze of his skin. Those
gray eyes which could be ice, that jaw with the tight set of a trap upon
occasion....
And Shann made contact! He touched something, a flickering like a badly
tuned tri-dee--far more fuzzy than the mind pictures the Wyvern had
paraded for him. But he had touched! And Thorvald, too, had been aware
of his contact.
Shann fought to find that thread of awareness again. Patiently he once
more created his vision of Thorvald, adding every detail he could
recall, small things about the other which he had not known that he had
noticed--the tiny arrow-shaped scar near the base of the officer's
throat, the way his growing hair curled at the ends, the look of one
eyebrow slanting abruptly toward his hairline when he was dubious about
something. Shann strove to make a figure as vividly as Logally and Trav
had been in the mist of the illusion.
"... where?"
This time Shann was prepared; he did not let that mind image dissolve in
his excitement at recapturing the link. "Throg ship," he said the words
aloud, over and over, but still he held to his picture of Thorvald.
"... will...."
Only that one word! The thread between them snapped again. Only then did
Shann become conscious of a change in the ship's vibration. Were they
setting down? And where? Let it be at the camp! It must be the camp!
There was no jar at that landing, just that one second the vibration
told him the ship was alive and air-borne, and the next a dead quiet
testified that they had landed. Shann, his sore body stiff with tension,
waited for the next move on the part of his captors.
He continued to lie in the dark, still queasy from the stench of the
cell, too keyed up to try to reach Thorvald. There was a dull grating
over his head, and he looked up eagerly--to be blinded by a strong beam
of light. Claws hooked painfully under his arms and he was manhandled up
and out, dragged along a short passage and pitched free of the ship,
falling hard upon trodden earth and rolling over gasping as the seared
skin of his body was rasped and abraded.
The Terran lay face up now, and as his eyes adjusted to the light, he
saw a ring of Throg heads blotting out the sky as they inspected their
catch impassively. The mouth mandibles of one moved with a faint
clicking. Again claws fastened in his armpits, brought Shann to his
feet, holding him erect.
Then the Throg who had given that order moved closer. His hand-claws
clasped a small metal plate surmounted by a hoop of thin wire over which
was stretched a web of threads glistening in the sun. Holding that hoop
on a level with his mouth, the alien clicked his mandibles, and those
sounds became barely distinguishable basic galactic words.
"You Throg meat!"
For a moment Shann wondered if the alien meant that statement literally.
Or was it a conventional expression for a prisoner among their land.
"Do as told!"
That was clear enough, and for the moment the Terran did not see that he
had any choice in the matter. But Shann refused to make any sign of
agreement to either of those two limited statements. Perhaps the
beetle-heads did not expect any. The alien who had pulled him to his
feet continued to hold him erect, but the attention of the Throg with
the translator switched elsewhere.
From the alien ship emerged a second party. The Throg in their midst was
unarmed and limping. Although to Terran eyes one alien was the exact
counterpart of the other, Shann thought that this one was the prisoner
in the skull cave. Yet the indications now suggested that he had only
changed one captivity for another and was in disgrace among his kind.
Why?
The Throg limped up to front the leader with the translator, and his
guards fell back. Again mandibles clicked, were answered, though the
sense of that exchange eluded Shann. At one point in the report--if
report it was--he himself appeared to be under discussion, for the
injured Throg waved a hand-claw in the Terran's direction. But the end
to the conference came quickly enough and in a manner which Shann found
shocking.
Two of the guards stepped forward, caught at the injured Throg's arms
and drew him away, leading him out into a space beyond the grounded
ship. They dropped their hold on him, returning at a trot. The officer
clicked an order. Blasters were unholstered, and the Throg in the field
shriveled under a vicious concentration of cross bolts. Shann gasped. He
certainly had no liking for Throgs, but this execution carried overtones
of a cold-blooded ferocity which transcended anything he had known, even
in the callous brutality of the Dumps.
Limp, and more than a little sick again, he watched the Throg officer
turn away. And a moment later he was forced along in the other's wake to
the domes of the once Terran camp. Not just to the camp in general, he
discovered a minute later, but to that structure which had housed the
com unit linking them with ships cruising the solar lanes and with the
patrol. So Thorvald had been right; they needed a Terran to
broadcast--to cover their tracks here and lay a trap for the transport.
Shann had no idea how much time he had passed among the Wyverns; the
transport with its load of unsuspecting settlers might already be in the
system of Circe, plotting a landing orbit around Warlock, broadcasting
her recognition signal and a demand for a beam to ride her in. Only,
this time the Throgs were out of luck. They had picked up one prisoner
who could not help them, even if he wanted to do so. The mysteries of
the highly technical installations in this dome were just that to Shann
Lantee--complete mysteries. He had not the slightest idea of how to
activate the machines, let alone broadcast in the proper code.
A cold spot of terror gathered in his middle, spreading outward through
his smarting body. For he was certain that the Throgs would not believe
that. They would consider his protestations of ignorance as a stubborn
refusal to co-operate. And what would happen to him then would be beyond
human endurance. Could he bluff--play for time? But what would that time
buy him except to delay the inevitable? In the end, that small hope
based on his momentary contact with Thorvald made him decide to try that
bluff.
There had been changes in the com dome since the capture of the cap. A
squat box on the floor sprouted a collection of tubes from its upper
surface. Perhaps that was some Throg equivalent of Terran equipment in
place on the wide table facing the door.