Keith Laumer: Thunderhead

The impact against drifted snow drove the air from his lungs. Darkness shot through with red fire threatened to close in on him; he fought to draw a breath, struggling in the claustrophobia of suffocation. Loose snow fell away under him, and he was sliding. With a desperate lunge, he caught a ridge of hard ice, pulled himself back from the brink, then groped, found Terry, lying on his back under the vertically rising wall of rock. The boy stirred.

“So… tired…” he whispered. His body arched as he struggled to draw breath.

Carnaby pulled himself to a position beside the boy, propped himself with his back against the wall. Dimly, through ice-rimmed eyes, he could see the evening lights of the settlement, far below; so far…

He put his arm around the thin body, settled the lad’s head gently in his lap, leaned over him to shelter him from the whirling snow. “It’s all right, Terry,” he said. “You can rest now.”

Supported on three narrow pencils of beamed force, the Fleet interceptor slowly circuited the Djann yacht, hovering on its idling null-G generators a thousand feet above the towering white mountain.

“Nothing alive there,” the co-pilot said. “Not a whisper on the life-detection scale.”

“Take her down.” Vice Admiral Carnaby squinted through S-R lenses which had darkened almost to opacity in response to the frost-white glare from below. “The shack looks all right, but that doesn’t look like a Mark 7 Flitter parked beside it.”

The heavy Fleet boat descended swiftly under the expert guidance of the battle officer. At fifty feet, it leveled off, orbited the station.

“I count four dead Djann,” the admiral said in a brittle voice.

“Tracks,” the general pointed. “Leading off there…”

“Put her down, George!” The hundred-foot boat settled in with a crunching of rock and ice, its shark’s prow overhanging the edge of the tiny plateau. The hatch cycled open; the two men emerged.

At the spot where Carnaby had lain in wait for the last of the aliens, they paused, staring silently at the glossy patch of dark blood, and at the dead Djann beside it. Then they followed the irregularly spaced footprints across to the edge.

“He was still on his feet—but that’s about all,” the battle officer said.

“George, can you operate that Spider boat?” The admiral indicated the Djann landing sled.

“Certainly.”

“Let’s go.”

It was twilight half an hour later when the admiral, peering through the obscuring haze of blown snow, saw the snow-drifted shapes huddled in the shadow of an overhang. Fifty feet lower, the general settled the sled in to a precarious landing on a narrow shelf. It was a ten-minute climb back to their objective.

Vice Admiral Carnaby pulled himself up the last yard, looked across the icy ledge at the figure in the faded blue polyon cold-suit. He saw the weathered and lined face, glazed with ice; the closed eyes, the gnarled and bloody hands, the great wound in the side.

The general came up beside him, stared silently, then went forward.

“I’m sorry, Admiral,” he said a moment later. “He’s dead. Frozen. Both of them.”

The admiral came up, knelt at Carnaby’s side.

“I’m sorry, Jimmy,” he said. “Sorry…”

“I don’t understand,” the general said. “He could have stayed up above, in the station. He’d have been all right there. What in the world was he doing down here?”

“What he always did,” Admiral Carnaby said. “His duty.”