Lewis & Glark | Time Traders | Book One | Chapter 14
Lewis lost his footing and bounced against the wall, as the Bulkon shouted words he couldn’t understand. A determined roar from the scarred man brought a semblance of order. But it was clear that they had not been expecting the preceding thunderous boom and quake.
Lewis was hustled out of the room back to his cell. The guards were opening the cell door when a second shock occurred. He was thrust into the cell, the door locking with a clank behind him.
He crouched against the questionable security of the wall, waiting through two more twisting earth waves, both of which were accompanied or preceded by dull sounds. Was the outpost being bombed? And if so, who was doing the bombing?
Lewis found himself lying on the floor, feeling tremors rippling along the earth. His stomach knotted convulsively with a fear unlike any he had known before. His sense of safety and security was crumbling, just like the world around him.
But that last explosion — if it was an explosion — appeared to be the end.
After several long moments during which no more shocks moved the floor and walls, Lewis sat up. A line of light marked the door, showing cracks where none had previously existed. Not yet ready to try standing up, he was crawling toward the door on his hands and knees when a sharp noise behind him brought him to a stop.
He was certain that the scrape of metal against metal sounded from the back wall. He crawled back and put his ear to the surface. Now he heard not only that scraping, but an undercurrent of clicks.
Suddenly, a foot from his head, there sounded a rip of metal. It sounded like the wall was being breached from the other side!
Lewis caught a flicker of very weak light, and moving in it was the point of a tool pulling at the smooth surface of the wall. It broke away with a brittle sound, and a hand holding a light reached through the aperture.
Lewis wondered if he should grab the wrist of whoever was holding the tool. But the hope that the digger might possibly be an ally kept him motionless. After the hand with the light whipped back beyond the wall, a wide section of wall gave away with the roar of ripping metal.
A large, hunched figure crawled through, followed by a second smaller man. In the limited light of the cell, he saw the first figure clearly enough.
“Glark!” Lewis yelled.
Lewis was unprepared for what followed his cry. The smaller man moved quickly with an agile lunge, and Lewis was forced back against the side wall. A hand on his throat cut off his airway. The muscular body topped by a bald head held him flat in spite of his struggles. The small light of a portable glowed inches beyond his eyes as he fought to breathe.
Then the hand on his throat was gone and he gasped, a little dizzy.
“Freeman! What are you doing — ?” Glark barked, his voice muffled by another explosion.
“Lewis!” said Maarn. “Sorry, I didn’t know it was you.”
“It’s okay,” Lewis replied. “It’s so good to see you — “
A sudden, closer explosion interrupted their reunion. This time, the earth tremors not only hurled them from their feet onto the floor, but seemed to run along the walls and across the ceiling.
Lewis, burying his face in the crook of his arm, couldn’t rid himself of the fear that the building was being slowly twisted into scrap around them. When the shock was over he raised his head.
“What’s going on?” asked Lewis.
“An attack.” Glark replied. “But why, and by whom, we don’t know. You are a prisoner, I suppose, Freeman?”
“Yes, sir,” Lewis replied. “But I don’t understand. Have you been here all the time? Are you trying to dig your way out? I don’t see how you can cut out of this glacier that we’re under.”
“Glacier!” Glark’s exclamation was as explosive as the tremors. “We’re inside a glacier? Well, that explains it. Yes, we’ve been here — ”
“Freezing our asses off,” Maarn commented with a laugh.
“We’re collaborating,” Glark continued. “Supplying our friends here with a lot of information they already have, and some misinformation designed to throw them off track. However, they didn’t know we had some covert tech and gadgets under our kilts and hidden away. It’s amazing what the staff back at the operation can pack away in a belt, or between layers of hide in a boot. So we’ve been engaged in some research of our own.”
“Gadgets? But I didn’t have any gadgets,” Lewis replied, stung by the unfairness of that. He could have used something — anything — when he was trapped out in the cold, or trapped on the bridge of the sphere ship.
“No,” Glark agreed, his voice even and cold. “That tech is not entrusted to those on first runs. You might slip up and use it at the wrong moment. However, you appear to have done fairly well.”
The heat of Lewis’ rising anger was chilled by the noise which cracked over their heads. It was an explosion bigger, louder and closer than all the ones that had come before. He had thought those first shocks the end of this ice burrow and the world. He knew that this one really was.
The silence that followed was as threatening as the clamor of the explosion had been.
Following a few long moments of quiet, there was a shout, a shriek. The space of light near the cell door was widening as that barrier, broken from its lock and frame, swung open slowly. The fear of being trapped in the cell sent all three of them toward the door.
“Move!” Glark yelled.
Lewis was ready enough to respond to that order, but they were stopped by a sound that could be only one thing — laser gun blasts. Somewhere in the outpost, a fight was in progress.
Recalling his experience aboard the sphere ship, Lewis wondered if this was not an attack of the aliens against the Ones who were looting their ship and technologies. If so, would the aliens distinguish between them and the devious Ones? He feared not.
The room outside the cell was clear, but not for long. As they crouched in the cell watching, two men backed into the room, then whirled around to face them. A voice roared from the hallway beyond as if ordering them back to some post. One of them took a step forward Glark in reluctant obedience, but the other grabbed his arm and pulled him away. They returned to the hallway and ran off, followed by laser blasts that flashed by the open door.
They expected to see those who had fired the laser guns run by the door down the hallway, but no one came. From the direction of the hallway, there was a crescendo of noise — explosions, shouting, cries of pain, and an unidentifiable hissing.
Glark produced a small laser gun from under the belt of his kilt, one of the gadgets he had mentioned before. Lewis didn’t have time for his anger to rekindle. With a jerk of his head, Glark motioned them toward the door to the hallway. He stuck his head out the door, and based on what he saw, ran off in what Lewis supposed was the direction most likely to get them to safety.
Lewis and Maarn followed Glark down the hallway, the lights above flickering.
“I don’t understand,” Maarn commented as they reached an intersection of hallways. “What’s going on? Mutiny? Or have they sent more of our agents through to confront the Ones? Or through to rescue us?”
“It must be the aliens from the ship,” Lewis answered.
“I really hope that they’re here to rescue us,” Maarn continued.
“Ship?” Glark snapped, looking back at Lewis. “What ship?”
“The sphere ship about half a kilometer from the portal door, “Lewis replied. “The ship that the Ones have been looting.”
“Ship?” echoed Maarn. “And where did you get that suit?”
In the flickering light of the hallway, Maarn and Glark looked at Lewis as if for the first time, standing there in his shimmering metallic suit and boots, which were decidedly alien and in stark contrast to the rustic Boreal clothing they expected to see. Maarn fingered the material with wonder.
“From the alien ship,” Lewis returned impatiently. “But if the aliens are attacking, I don’t think they will notice any difference between us and the Ones .”
There was a burst of earsplitting sound and a rumbling explosion. Glark stumbled and Maarn and Lewis were thrown to the floor of the hallway. This time, the lights in the hallway flickered, dimmed, and went out.
“Well, shluck,” Maarn said bitterly in the dark.
“The transfer platform,” Lewis offered from the dark, clinging to his own plan of escape. “If we can reach that — ”
The portable light which had served Glark and Maarn in their tunneling lead them forward. Since the earth shocks appeared to be over for a while, they moved on, with Glark in the lead and Maarn bringing up the rear. Lewis hoped Glark knew the way. The sound of fighting had died out, so one side or the other must have gained victory. They might have only a few moments left to pass undetected.
Lewis’ sense of direction was fairly acute. He followed Glark, who he assumed was leading them to the room with the transfer platform. Lewis stifled a protest as they came instead to what looked like a small data center filled with mainframes, screens and some other equipment that was foreign to Lewis.
Glark, however, seemed to know what he was looking at. The Bulkon surveyed the mainframes and quickly dislodged three small drives from their slots, thrusting two into his kilt pocket, and passing the third to Maarn. He then tried pulling open the doors of several metal cabinets. Even with his bulk and strength, the heavy metal doors wouldn’t budge.
With a deep sigh, Glark returned to the door where Lewis waited.
“The transfer platform?” Lewis prompted.
“If we could have just ten more minutes here,” Glark said, surveying the room once more.
“Listen,” Maarn spoke up. “You might want to be the filling in an ice sandwich, but I don’t. Another explosion and we’ll be buried so deep even a drill couldn’t find us. The kid it right — let’s get out now, if we still can!”
With no objection from Glark, Lewis took the lead and led the group off down the hallway. They were already close. They wove through only two more dark hallways and arrived at what must have been the heart of the outpost — the transfer point.
To Lewis’ relief, the room was empty and the platform was glowing. He had been nagged by the fear that when the lights blew out, the transfer platform might also have been affected. He jumped onto the platform.
Neither Glark or Maarn wasted time in joining him there. As they clung together there was a cry from behind them, underlined by a laser blast. Feeling Glark sag against them, both Lewis and Maarn held Glark’s arms from ether side to stabilize him and keep him standing.
By the reflected glow of the platform, Lewis saw the scarred man, the One leader, standing in the doorway of the transfer room. Behind him was a sight that startled and surprised Lewis…
Staring back at him was the long, triangular face and bulbous eyes of the alien. So, these two weren’t enemies, they were allies?
Before Lewis could ponder their relationship and the situation any more, the glowing spin of time and space surrounded him, and the rest of the room faded away.
Lewis glanced up from his grip on Glark’s massive forearm to the Bulkon’s shoulder. A stream of blood from a hole in his bare shoulder soaked the upper edge of his Boreal tunic. As he and Maarn steadied Glark between them, Lewis regained some measure of awareness and moved his feet as they pulled Glark off the platform.
Lewis gave thanks silently for two small favors — they were free, if only for a few seconds, and there was no enemy reception committee waiting for them.
But now that they were back at the Boreal village, they were still in One territory. With Glark wounded, the odds of all three of them getting out of here alive were very high.
Working quickly with strips torn from Maarn’s kilt, they managed to stop the flow of blood from Glark’s shoulder wound. Although he was still groggy, he was fighting. Time was one of their foremost enemies now. Lewis, Glark’s small laser gun in hand, kept watch on the transfer platform, ready to shoot at anything that appeared there.
“That will have to do!” Glark said, pulling his shoulder away from Maarn. “We must move.”
Glark then pulled the small data drives from his bloodstained tunic and passed them to Maarn.
“You’d better carry these,” Glark said.
Maarn took the drives and put them in his tunic pocket without objection.
“Let’s move, before someone else comes through,” Glark barked.
The force of the order sent them back into the hallway. Lewis noted that they must have returned to the proper time, for the walls around them were the logs and stone of the Boreal village he remembered.
Lewis couldn’t have found the door to the outside, but again Glark guided them, and only once did they have to seek cover. At last they faced a barred door. Glark leaned against the wall, Maarn supporting him, as Lewis pulled free the locking beam. They let themselves out into the night.
“Which way?” Maarn asked.
To Lewis’ surprise, Glark did not turn toward the main gate in the outer stockade. Instead he gestured at the mountain wall in the opposite direction.
“They’ll expect us to try for the valley pass,” Glark responded. “So we had better go up the slope there.”
“Looks like a tough climb,” ventured Maarn, concerned more for Glark than himself.
“When it becomes too tough for you,” Glark declared with a smirk, “let me know and I will carry you.”
Glark started out with some of his old ease of movement. But Lewis and Maarn closed in on either side, ready to offer aid.
Lewis often wondered later if they could have gotten free of the village on their own efforts that night. But their escape would have depended upon an amount of luck people seldom encounter.
They had just reached a pool of shadow beside a small hut some two buildings away from the one they had fled, when the commotion began. From the roof of the building at the center of the village, a beam of glowing green light pointed straight up into the sky. And around that spear of radiance, the roof sprouted tongues of more natural red-and-yellow flames. Figures shot from doors as the fire lapped down the peak of the roof.
“Run!” Glark yelled.
The three sprinted for the outer wall of the village, mingling with bewildered men and women who ran out of the nearby cabins.
The waves of fire washed above and over the village, providing light, too much light. Glark and Maarn could pass as part of the crowd, but Lewis’ curious metallic clothing might be easily draw unwanted attention.
Other villagers were also running for the wall. Despite his injury, Glark easily pulled himself up and over. Maarn followed. Lewis was just reaching to pull himself up when he was enveloped in a beam of light.
A high, screeching call, unlike any shout Lewis had ever heard, pierced the clamor.
Frantically, he tried for a hold, knowing that he was presenting a perfect target for those behind. He reached the top of the wall and looked down into a black block of shadow, not knowing whether Glark and Maarn were waiting for him or had gone ahead.
Hearing that strange cry again, Lewis leaped blindly out into the darkness.
He landed badly, but thanks to the skill he had learned for parachuting, he broke no bones. He got to his feet and blundered on in the general direction of the mountain Glark had picked as their landmark.
There were others coming over the wall of the village and moving through the shadows, so he dared not call out for fear of alerting the enemy.
The village had been set in the widest part of the valley. Behind its stockade, the open ground narrowed swiftly, like the point of a funnel, and all fugitives from the settlement had to pass through that channel to escape. Lewis’ worst fear was that he had lost contact with Glark and Maarn, and that he would never be able to pick up their trail in the wilderness ahead.
Thankful for the metallic suit he wore, which was warm and protective covering in the night, he twice ducked into the brush to allow parties of fugitives to pass him. Hearing them speak the guttural, clicking speech he had learned from Ulffa’s people, Lewis deduced that they were innocent of the village’s or the Ones’ real purpose. These people were convinced they had been attacked by night demons.
Lewis pulled himself up a hard, rocky climb. Pausing to catch his breath, looked back.
He was not surprised to see figures moving leisurely about the village examining the cabins, perhaps in search of the inhabitants. Each of those searchers was clad in a shiny suit that matched his own, their bulbous heads with fleshy crests gleaming white in the firelight.
Lewis was astonished to see that they passed straight through walls of flame, apparently unconcerned and unsinged by the heat.
The non-alien beings trapped in the village wailed and ran, or lay on the ground, passive before the invaders. Each captive was dragged back to a gathering of aliens near the main building. Some were hurled out again into the dark, unharmed. A few others were detained. A sorting of prisoners was clearly in progress. There was no question that the aliens had followed through into this time, and that they had their own arrangements with the Ones.
Lewis turned away and started climbing again, finding the pass at last. Beyond, the ground fell away again, and he went forward into the full darkness of the night with a vast surge of thankfulness to have escaped the village and the aliens.
Finally, he stopped simply because he was too weary and hungry to keep on his feet without stumbling. A fall in the dark at these heights could be costly.
He discovered a small hollow behind a stunted tree and crept into it as best he could. He made a conscious effort to slow his beating heart, and in the process fell asleep.
He awoke startled, a hand warm and hard over his mouth, and above it his eyes met Maarn’s. When he saw that Lewis was awake, Maarn withdraw his hand. The morning sunlight was warm around them. Moving clumsily because of his stiff, bruised body, Lewis crawled out of the hollow.
He looked around, but Maarn stood there alone.
“Glark?” Lewis asked.
Looking haggard and defeated, Maarn nodded his head toward the slope. Fumbling inside his kilt, he brought out something clenched in his fist as an offering. Lewis held out his palm and Maarn covered it with a handful of coarse-ground grain. Just to look at the stuff made Lewis long for a drink, but he dumped it into his mouth and chewed. It wasn’t the mouthful of delicious roasted hare from the fire he desired, but it was at least something.
Lewis rose slowly and followed Maarn down into the tree-grown lower slopes.
“It’s not good,” Maarn said, using Boreal speech. “Glark is delirious some of the time. That hole in his shoulder is worse than we thought it was, and there’s always the threat of infection. The forest here is full of people flushed out of that blasted village. Most of them — all I’ve seen — are natives. But they have it firmly planted in their minds now that there are demons after them. If they see you wearing that suit — ”
“I know, and I’d strip out of it if I could,” Lewis agreed. “But I’ll have to find some Boreal clothing first. I can’t run around naked in this cold.”
“That might actually be safer,” Maarn half-jested. “I don’t know what happened back there in the village, but we were lucky to make it out alive.”
“You have no idea,” Lewis replied, swallowing another dry mouthful of grain followed by a scoop of some leftover snow in the shadow of a tree root. “You said Glark is delirious. What do we do to help him? And what are your plans now?”
“We have to reach the river,” Maarn replied. “It drains to the sea, and at its mouth we can wait and make contact with the whale on its next scheduled round.”
The proposal sounded impossible to Lewis. But so many impossible things had happened lately that he was willing to go along with the idea — until a better one came along.
Scooping up more snow, he stuffed it into his mouth before he and Maarn slowly made their way down the slope.
© 2024 Zen Brazen — All rights reserved
Based on Andre Norton’s Time Traders (public domain)
