John Dalmas - Return to Fanglith

PART ONE ESCAPE FROM EVDASH

I scrambled out of the scrub onto the open, moonlit crest and straightened, gasping for breath. Then I heard hooves and turned. A rider had been coming along the crest in my direction and, seeing me, had spurred his horse into galloping attack. Ignoring his lance, he drew his sword, leaning sideways to strike. My hand seemed to move in slow motion – drawing my stunner, raising it, pointing, thumbing. His horse nose-dived, hitting the ground so heavily I swear I could feel it through my feet. The Saracen hurtled over its head in a billow of robe, moonlight flashing on sword. I zapped him too, as he skidded. He stopped not ten feet from me.

He was dead of course. On high intensity at such close range, I'd really curdled his synapses. I took his shield; I'd need one when daylight came.

I wasn't actually undernourished, but we'd been on tight rations, and more or less hungry, for fifty-seven days. Which is something you can get used to, but not what I think of as ideal. In space you can't stop off at a friendly nearby restaurant or food store. The nearest planets are likely to be parsecs* away, and have a couple of Imperial frigates flying sentry around them, with chase craft ready for launch. We'd had more than enough of those.

Now Fanglith lay beautifully blue and white, primitive and savage, only 40,000 miles off our starboard window with, so far no sign of a picket ship on our instruments. Which were good ones, as you'd expect on a stolen naval patrol scout.

I wasn't sure what we could hope to accomplish there; we had no plans. But just then, food was what I was mainly interested in.

"I never expected to see this place again," I said, more to myself than to Deneen or Bubba or Tarel. We'd been lucky to get away alive the first time. But sometimes fate-whatever "fate" is-hits you when you're least prepared. And when it does, it can be with three or four punches, one after another.

We'd been 646 parsecs* from Fanglith, on a wilderness trek in the Snowy Range Preserve, when the first punch hit. Bubba was the first to notice. At that point, all that the rest of us noticed was Bubba. His big wolf's head raised, alert, attention fixed, looking off west.

*A parsec equals 3.258 light-years.

Deneen, my sister, put down the seared hind leg of a burrow pig. "What is it, Bubba?" she asked.

He didn't make a sound; didn't look at her. His attention was all on what he heard, or maybe what he was receiving telepathically.

Then the rest of us began to hear it, too. It was so low-pitched, it was as if we felt it before we heard it-a deep bass thrumming, barely audible. Yet somehow it seemed very loud-loud but far away. Uncle Piet and Bubba got to their feet, the rest of us a half second behind, and we all trotted through the trees to the edge of the cliff a hundred feet away. From there we could see southward across the foothills, toward the Valrith Plain.

"So it's happened," Piet said softly, as if talking to himself.

What we'd heard was a Federation battleship. Make that an Imperial battleship-things had changed. I stood there in my moccasins, staring. It must have been more than a quarter mile long, cruising across the clear morning sky two miles or so above the foothills, and maybe three miles south. It answered a question we'd been talking about a few days earlier.

"Let's go home," Piet said.

It took us very little time to break camp and leave, all without conversation. We had almost nothing to carry-no sleeping bags, no cooking gear, no tent. Each of us, except Bubba of course, carried a small blanket, a heavy belt knife, a spark wheel for starting fires, a tinder box, a sharpening stone, a self-made backpack, woven at Piet's instructions from the inner bark of a tree, and a water bag made the previous butchering season from the boiled-out gut of a fatbuck. We were being as primitive as we knew how-or as Piet knew how.

I doused the fire with a minimum of water-it was a small one-then stirred the coals, wet ashes, and dirt with a stick to make sure it was out. Tarel wrapped what was left of the burrow pig in its flayed-off pelt and stashed it in his pack. Jenoor untied the cords we used to set up shelters, and put them in hers. Like the packs, the cords were inner bark, cut into thin strips. They'd be hard to replace if we lost them, because it was late summer now, and the bark wouldn't strip off the trees anymore.

We were ready for the trail in about two minutes, maybe three. No one needed to ask what next. We'd go down to Piet's floater and fly home, hopefully to mom and dad and Lady and the pups. After that… We'd see.

The Snowy Range is beautiful, but hiking out, I didn't pay much attention to aesthetics. The country was rugged and mostly forest, there was no established trail where we were, and we were hurrying. When my attention wasn't on picking the route-I was the pathfinder that day-I had things on my mind. All of us did, I guess.

We'd been three weeks in the Snowy Range on a survival-training trek-part of the training Piet was giving us. Piet isn't really our uncle; he's more of an "honorary" uncle. He'd worked with our parents back when dad and mom had been members of the underground on Morn Gebleu, the executive planet of the Federation. Dad and mom had taken Deneen and me away from Morn Gebleu when we were little, to bring us up on Evdash, a world that was safer and a lot more democratic-an old colony world, well outside Federation boundaries.

They'd started training us seriously for the resistance after we'd come back from our crazy, unintentional- adventure, I guess you could call it-on the forgotten prison planet, Fanglith.

Piet had come to stay with us about a year later. He'd been a lot of places and done a lot of things, and became another trainer. One of the places he'd been-he'd hidden out there a couple of years-was a world where the intelligent species was a two-legged felid type with a primitive hunting/fishing culture. He'd learned things there about living in wilderness conditions that the known human worlds had lost long before, and he'd been teaching us the basics. By Bubba's standards, our wilderness skills were still pretty poor, of course. Espwolves had been pack hunters before their planet banged heads with a comet. Only a few dozen of them got evacuated with the human colonists there. Bubba had been pretty much grown already-old enough to have learned the skills of an adult wolf.

Espwolves are more than just telepathic. They're intelligent, with mental processes a lot like humans'. You kind of half forget that sometimes, because they look so much like any large canid species, and because they don't say much.

That's right-some of them can talk. Bubba had taught himself to speak Evdashian, more or less. By combining telepathy with intelligence, he'd analyzed words and speech patterns, and their meanings. Then he'd substituted certain sounds he could make for the human speech sounds he couldn't.

His approximation of Evdashian wasn't easy for him, though, so he wasn't much for small talk.

Because he belonged to a telepathic species, his brain probably didn't even have a speech center, and his mouth and throat weren't built for talking. His grammar was adequate, but rough-anything to keep it brief-and he usually avoided words that were hard for him, but with practice you could understand him. Our family had no trouble at all.

Anyway, a month earlier, the news had come that the Federation had declared itself "The Glondis Empire." That wouldn't make a lot of difference on Federation planets. Since the Glondis Party had taken over the Federation government, a few years before I was born, they'd run it more and more as a Party dictatorship.

But the declaration of empire would make a big difference to us. Our parents and Piet talked a lot about politics in front of us and to us; it was part of our continuing education. And they'd agreed that if it was now formally calling itself an empire, then the Party must feel about ready to start taking over the outlying independent planets. It would be just a matter of time before they got to us.