Warlord of Kor Part 11

"So Mara's against you too?" Rynason said.

"She made a few remarks earlier," Manning said calmly. "She may regret it soon enough."

Rynason looked at the man through narrowed eyes for a moment, then strapped on a gunbelt and loaded one of the stunners. He snapped it into the holster carefully, wondering just what Manning had meant by his last remark. Was it a threat in any real sense, or was Manning just letting off steam? Well, they'd see about that too ... and Rynason would be watching.

Within half an hour close to sixty men had collected outside Manning's door. They were dirty and unshaven; some of them were working in the town, a few were miners, but most of them were drifters who had followed the advance of the star frontier, who drank and brawled in the streets of the town, sleeping by day and raising h.e.l.l at night. They stole when they could, killed when they wanted.

The drifters were men who had been all over the worlds of the Edge, who had spent years watching the new planets opened for colonization and exploitation, but had never got their own piece. They knew the feel of these planetfall towns on the Edge, and could talk for hours about the worlds they had seen. But they were city men, all of them; they had seen the untamed worlds, but only from the streets. They hadn't taken part in the exploring or the building, only in the initial touchdowns. When the building was done, they signed on to the s.p.a.cers again and drifted to the next world, farther out.

Rynason looked at their faces from where he stood in the doorway, listening to Manning talking to them. They were hard men, mean and sometimes vicious. Nameless faces, all of them, having no place in the more developed areas of the Terran civilization. And maybe that was their own fault. But Rynason knew that they were running, not to anything, but from the civilization itself. Running ... because when an area was settled and started to become respectable, they began to see what they did not have. The temporary quarters would come down, to be replaced by permanent buildings that were meant to be lived in, not just as places for sleeping. Closets, and shelters for landcars; quadsense receivers and food integrators. They didn't want to see that ... because they hated it, or because they wanted it? It didn't matter, Rynason decided. They ran, and now they were here on the Edge with all their anger and frustration, and Manning was ready to give them a way to let it out.

At the side of the mob he saw a familiar grey shock of hair--Rene Malhomme. Was he with them, then? Rynason craned his neck for a better view, and for a moment the crowd parted enough to let him see Malhomme's face. He was looking directly toward Rynason, holding a dully gleaming knife flat against his thick chest ... and his lips were drawn back into the crooked, sardonic smile which Rynason had seen many times. No, Malhomme at least was not part of this mob.

"We already know which direction they went," Manning was saying.

"Lessingham will be in charge of the main body, and you'll follow him.

If he gives you an order, _take it_. This is a serious business; we won't have room for bickering.

"Some of us will be scouting with the flyers. Well be in radio contact with you. When we find out where they are we'll reconnoiter and make our plans from there."

Manning paused, looking appraisingly at the faces before him. "Most of you are armed already, I see. We have some extra stunners here; if you need them, come on up. But remember, the men who carry the shockers will be in front; and their business will be simply to down the horses--any killing that's to be done will be left to those of you who have knives, or anything lethal."

There was a rising wave of voices from the crowd. Some men came forward for weapons; Rynason saw others drawing knives and hatchets, and a few of them had heavy guns, projectile type. Rynason watched with narrowed eyes; it had been a filthy maneuver on Manning's part to organize this mob, and his open acceptance of their temper was dangerous. Once they were turned loose, what could stop them?

There was a sudden shouting in the back of the mob; men surged and fell away, cursing. Rynason heard scuffing back there, and sounds of bone meeting flesh. The men at the front of the mob turned to look back, and some tried to shove their way through to the fight.

A scream came from the midst of the crowd, and was answered by an excited, angry swelling of voices around the fighting men. Suddenly Manning was among them, smas.h.i.+ng his way through with a stunner in his hand, swinging it like a club.

"Get the h.e.l.l out of the way!" he shouted, stepping quickly through the men. They grumbled and fell back to let him by, but Rynason heard the men still fighting in the rear, and then he saw them. There were three of them, two men and what looked like a boy still in his teens. The boy had red hair and a dark, ruddy complexion: he was new to the outworlds.

The two older men had the pallor of the Edge drifters, nurtured in the artificial light of s.p.a.cers and sealed survival quarters on the less hospitable worlds.

The larger of the two men had a knife, a heavy blade of a type that was common out here; many of the men used them as hatchets when necessary.

This one dripped with blood; the smaller man's left arm was torn open just below the shoulder, and hanging uselessly. He stood swaying in the dust, hurling a string of curses at the man with the knife, while the boy stood slightly behind him, staring with both fear and hatred in his eyes. He had a smaller knife, but he held it loosely and uncertainly at his side.

Manning stepped between them. He had sized up the situation already, and he paused now only long enough to bite out three short, clipped words which told these men exactly what he thought of them. The man with the knife stopped back and muttered something which Rynason didn't hear.

Manning raised the stunner coldly and let him have it. The blast caught the man in the shoulder and spun him around, throwing him into the crowd; several of them went down. The long knife fell to the ground, where dirt mixed with the blood on it. There was silence.

Manning looked around him, swinging the stunner loosely in his hand.

After a moment he said calmly, but loud enough for all to hear, "We won't have time for fighting among ourselves. The next man who starts anything will be killed outright. Now get these men out of here." He turned and strode back through the mob while the boy and a couple of the other men took the wounded away.

Malhomme had moved further into the crowd. He was strangely silent; usually he went among these men roughly and jovially, cursing them all with goodnatured ease. But now he stood watching the men around him with a frown creasing his heavily lined face. Malhomme was worried, and Rynason, seeing that, felt his stomach tighten.

Manning faced the men from the front of the crowd. He stared at them shrewdly, holding each man's gaze for a few seconds. Then he grinned, and said, "Save it for the horses, boys. Save it for them."

Rynason rode out to the field with Manning, Stoworth, and a few of the others. It was a short trip in the landcar, and none of them spoke much.

Even Stoworth rode silently, his usual easy flow of trivia forgotten.

Rynason was thinking about Manning: he had handled the outbreak quickly and decisively enough, keeping the men in line, but it had been only a temporary measure. They would be expecting some real action soon, and Manning was already offering them the Hirlaji. If the alarm turned out to be a false one, would he be as easily able to stop them then?

Or would he even try?

The flyers were ready when they got to the field, but Mara was gone. Les Harcourt met them at the radio office on the edge of the field; he was the communications man out here. He led them into the low, quick-concrete construction office and shoved some forms at Manning to be signed.

"If there's any trouble, you'll be responsible for it," he said to Manning. "The men can look out for themselves, but the flyers are Company property."

Manning scowled impatiently and bent to sign the papers.

"Where's Mara?" Rynason asked.

"She's already taken one of the flyers out," Harcourt said. "Left ten minutes ago. We've got her screen in the next room." He waved a hand toward the door in the rear of the room.

Rynason went on back and found the live set. The screen, monitored from a camera on the flyer, showed the foothills of the southern mountains over which Mara was flying. They were bare and blunt; the rock outcroppings which thrust up from the Flat had been weathered smooth in the pa.s.sage of years. Mara was pa.s.sing over a low range and on to the desert beyond.

Rynason picked up the mike. "Mara, this is Lee; we just got here. Have you found them yet?"

Her voice came thinly over the speaker. "Not yet. I thought I saw some movement in one of the pa.s.ses, but the light wasn't too good. I'm looking for that pa.s.s again."

"All right. We'll be going up ourselves in a few minutes; if you find them, be careful. Wait for us."

He refitted the mike in its stand and rose. But as he turned to the door her voice came again: "There they are!"

He looked at the screen, but for the moment he couldn't see anything.

Mara's flyer was coming down out of the rocky hills now, the Flat stretching before her on the screen. Rynason could see the pa.s.s through which she had been flying, but there was no movement there; it took him several seconds to see the low ruins off to the right, and the figures moving through them.

The screen banked and turned toward them; she was lowering her alt.i.tude.

"I see them," he said into the mike. "Can't make out what they're doing, on the screen. Can you see them any more clearly?"

"They're entering one of the buildings down there," she said after a moment. "I've counted almost twenty of them so far; they must all be here."

"Can you go down and see what they're doing? The sooner we find out, the better: Manning's got a pretty ugly bunch of so-called vigilantes on the way out there."

She didn't reply, but on the screen he saw the crumbling buildings grow larger and nearer. He could make out individual structures now: a wall had fallen and was half-buried in the dust and sand; an entire roof had caved in on another building, leaving only rubble in the interior. It was difficult to tell sometimes when the original lines of the buildings had fallen: they had all been smoothed by the wind-blown sand, so that broken pillars looked almost as though they had been built that way, smooth and upright, solitary.

At last, he saw the Hirlaji. They were slowly mounting the steps of one of the largest of the buildings and pa.s.sing into the shadows of the interior. This building was not as deteriorated as most of the others; as Mara's flyer dipped low over it Rynason could see its characteristic lines unbroken and clear.

With a start, he sat up and said hurriedly, "Mara, take another close pa.s.s over that building, the one they're entering."

In a moment she came in again over the smooth stone structure, and Rynason looked closely at the screen. There was no mistaking it now: the high steep steps leading up to a colonnade which almost circled the building, the large carvings over the main entrance.

"You'd better set down away from them!" he said. "That's the Temple of Kor!" But even as he finished speaking the image on the screen jolted and rocked, and the flyer dipped even closer toward the jumbled ruins below.

"They're firing something!"

He saw that she was trying to gain alt.i.tude, but something was wrong; the buildings on the screen dipped and wavered, up and down, spinning.