Chapter 33
Whistle had looked over the transporter mechanism carefully by the time night fell. We'd set up a temporary camp in one of the vacant buildings. It was a simple box-like structure with a sliding door and no amenities, but it gave us some shelter from the incessant wind. We, the humans, I mean, were just about worn out by that wind. It was hot and blew almost continually. Even here in the jungle and inside the walls of the Pug fort, the moving air managed to curl down over the waving trees and gust across the grasses and weeds.
Kasm had come into the hut but let me know that he didn't like the feeling of being confined. He said that as long as the wind was blowing, he wanted to enjoy it. I guess the old adage that “One man's meat is another man's poison” goes double when the other is an alien.
I was trying to put a good face on things, but failing miserably. Whistle's report hadn't been favorable. He'd first thought that the transporter might work. There was some power stored in the accumulators that had caused it to flicker and attempt to sync up with the transporter on the station, but then the power was exhausted and the mechanism became inert once again.
When he looked more closely, he found that the transporter power supply was completely burned out. The reactive pile had overheated and melted through the bottom of the containment structure. The damage was minimized somewhat since they had built in some form of damping material that stopped the reaction. It had worked, but too late. There was no fixing the unit.
He did mention that the Sunnys on the station would know that someone had tried to link the transporters together. There had been enough power to start the linkage, and the electronics on the station would record the attempt.
“Maybe dis will be enough of a signal for them to come and get us,” he hopefully suggested, ignoring the fact that they didn't have another shuttle-craft available unless Frazzle showed up.
By nightfall, there had been no response from the station. It looked as if we were indeed stuck on the planet. We settled down in the hut while Kasm prowled somewhere outside. Frank immediately went to sleep, and Whistle went into his sleep-like trance state. The Sunnys didn't exactly sleep, according to what Frazzle had told me. They slowed their metabolism, and it looked as if they were sleeping, but their minds continued to work. They used this state to concentrate on problems, and it was one of the reasons their race was so technologically adept.
I had been sleeping for some hours but then had wakened mulling over my problem. I was still suffering from the vision-beast's attack, and my memory hadn't gotten any better, nor had my psychic senses. There were large foggy areas in my mind, and I was still struggling with them, hoping that I could find a clue or clues that would lead me back to myself as I'd been before the mental injury.
It was funny that I could communicate with Kasm, yet none of my other abilities were active. I could remember being able to sense other minds, but I couldn't do it now. What was worse was the selective damage to my ordinary memories. I could remember having a wife and, I thought, a child, but I couldn't picture them and even had difficulty remembering her name at times.
I'd gradually gotten sleepy again. I was lying there on the edge of sleep, drifting lightly in a hypnogogic state and almost ready to drop off, when Erin slid over to me and pressed against my side with her arm around me. That woke me immediately.
Erin's body felt warm through her thin shirt, and I found myself inadvertently responding. I tentatively placed my arm around her and wondered, as I did, if I'd encouraged her or had some kind of relationship with her before my injury.
She whispered to me, her head held slightly over mine as she leaned on her elbow, “Dec, we're stuck here on this planet. I'm afraid that we'll never get back to Earth. Our past lives are gone, and we have to make our way forward as best we can together.”
She made some sense, at that, but I hadn't given up yet. We might be able to figure a way to use the shuttle or perhaps Whistle could rebuild the power supply. I had a habit of never giving up. As I thought that, I realized that it was a memory from before. Some things just popped through the fog. I looked up at Erin's outline and realized that her hair was brushing across my face. She'd lowered her head, and we were face-to-face. I could feel her breath on my lips as she whispered, “I don't want to live and die here alone. Together, we can find a way to survive, and I want you – ” She lowered her face, and our lips met for the first time.
It was not unpleasant, and my breathing accelerated, but then the fog in my mind cleared. It was because the arousal I was feeling put me in touch with a memory of Liz bending over me in much the same way. It was confusing, and I turned my head away.
Erin sighed in frustration and then said softly, “You'll come around to my way of thinking eventually. We're stuck with each other, and that's the truth, even if you don't like it.”
I pulled my arm off of her and rolled slightly to my right. As I did, I answered, “You may be right. I'm not sure how we're going to get out of here, but I haven't given up yet.” I was redirecting the conversation. I didn't want to hurt her feelings, and somewhere in the back of my mind, I realized there was a possibility that I might have to give up on getting back into space. That meant that I'd have to live with her one way or another; the prospect could be far worse, I reasoned. Then something hit my mind, and I asked, “What about Frank?”
She shook her head, “He's always been there for me, but I don't think he has a romantic bone in his body. All he thinks about is fighting.” She paused and then drew closer, “No. You're the one I want!”
She moved to kiss me again. I indecisively moved my head away and then turned back toward her. If we were stuck here, I – Kasm's thought hit my mind suddenly, “Quit whatever you're doing in there and get out here! Some of my people are entering the fort now! I must greet them and I want you with me so there will be no mistakes.”
I jumped up and grabbed my weapons. Erin sat up and scooted on her behind up against the wall, drawing her rifle across the floor from where it was lying by her pack. Frank and Whistle both woke and in an instant, Frank was up with his sword in his hand, ready to fight.
“What is it?” he hissed.
“Kasm alerted me that some of his people are outside. You stay in here! He only wants me to come out,” I explained in a low voice.
“Dec, it could be a trap!” Erin interjected. “Do you trust him?”
“With my life,” I snapped. I thought, how could she not trust him after what we'd gone through? Then, I drew a breath and realized that none of the others had been party to my conversations with Kasm. As far as they knew, I could be deluded into thinking I was talking with a wild animal that was setting us up as dinner guests. I guessed I couldn't blame them for worrying that we might be the main course.
“Don't worry,” I answered more calmly. “Kasm and I will meet these others and see if we can come to some sort of agreement with them. We'll need more help if we're to survive.”
They didn't say anything else, and I took that as assent. Opening the door, I slid out the crack into the wind. Kasm was waiting by the side of the hut.
“Come with me,” he commanded.
I stumbled a bit in the weeds, and he stepped closer and said, “Place your hand on my shoulder. I know you can't see well in the darkness.” He could have taken my hand with his manipulating arm, but it wasn't a gesture that he seemed to use. Together, we walked rapidly towards the gates of the fort. He slowed as we rounded the wrecked shuttle, and then I became aware that we were surrounded by a large number of slightly glowing pairs of eyes. I could make out the dim bulk of the Sim-tigers' bodies. There were a lot of them hidden in the darkness. I could sense Kasm's tenseness in the ripple of muscles along his shoulder.
The newcomers must have been silent. I could sense nothing of their thoughts, but then Kasm sent, “Greetings. This is Dec, and I am going to help him.” It was as if I was listening to one side of a telephone conversation. I couldn't hear what they said, only his responses. My lack of psychic sense was frustrating.
He sent, “No. He is the enemy of the invaders. They invaded his world also, and he came here searching for allies to fight them.”
There was a pause while they apparently discussed that concept among themselves, then Kasm answered an unheard question, “He saved my life from a vision-beast, and he and the other two of his kind have killed two night-stalkers that we encountered.”
He was stretching the truth a bit. We hadn't met him when we shot up the first one, but I guessed it made a more dramatic story. The conclave went on for nearly half an hour, with Kasm arguing that they should help us. Some of them seemed disposed to be helpful, but one group apparently didn't want anything to do with us. Harming us never came up, so I thought to myself that they were at least reasonable and realized that we were not responsible for the Pugs' attack on them. It could have also been due to the description of our weapons' abilities that Kasm gave when he elaborated on the death of the second night-stalker.
Eventually, it became apparent that some of the Sim-tigers had silently backed out of the group surrounding us and had left. I wondered if I was regaining some of my psychic abilities because the air was less heavy as if I could sense a lessening of pressure or presence as they left. I hoped that I was starting to recover, and this was a sign of it.
Shortly after they departed, the wind commenced to blow harder in its pre-dawn pattern. Kasm and I were sitting near the wrecked shuttle, and the others were sitting or lying around us in the weeds. I suddenly realized that I could make out their forms more easily. It was nearly dawn.
We'd not only survived the meeting with the Sim-tigers, but we now had secured the cooperation of a significant number of them. Kasm had actually convinced them to agree to travel back to Earth with us and fight the Pug-bears. We were ignoring, for the moment, the fact that we might not be able to return. However, during the night, as the conclave progressed, I realized that we did have access to more shuttle parts. There was our wreck, and perhaps we could salvage enough from the two crashed ships to get one going well enough to reach the space station. This idea heartened me greatly, although it would prove to be difficult to transport the heavy parts over the distance that we'd traveled. I reasoned that we could possibly do the job with the help of the Sim-tiger clan.
As the light brightened, Kasm let me know that the remaining Sim-tigers were going to hunt, and he was going with them. While they were gone, I filled the others in on the meeting, and then, after breakfast, Whistle and I went to look at the shuttle and the transporter again. He'd been thinking about our crashed shuttle also and had come to an even more feasible idea than mine. If we could remove the internal systems reactor from our crash and somehow move it over the intervening miles, it would be able to provide enough power for us to fire up the transporter for a single trip, as long as it wasn't carrying much mass.
He and I would be able to go through, and then we could, hopefully, somehow arrange to get the others up to the station and into the FTL. Whistle seemed to think that he could return along with some kind of larger power supply. It would have enough strength to allow the transporter to make several fully loaded runs. This, in turn, would let him and some of the station Sunnys come down with the parts to repair the main power reactor, and then we'd be in business. We could transport both ourselves and a large number of Sim-tigers up to the FTL ship. It would hold about fifty or sixty of them and I was intent on taking advantage of their agreeing to come and fight the Pug-bears in our solar system.
From their description of the fighting that had gone on during the attempted invasion, the Sim-tigers were more than able to destroy Pug-bears. Being accomplished telepaths, they were immune to the Pug-bears' rather primitive (by their standards) mental compulsion, and, even more wonderfully, they had proven to be completely immune to the Pug-bear venom.
They were stronger than the Pug-bears, although they weren't as heavy. They could flip the creatures on their backs, and then, ignoring the poison claws, they would claw through the lightly armored nerve plexus that was the weakest point of the creature's external anatomy. When I inquired about the Pugs, Kasm explained, “As long as you can ensure that they can't shoot at us or bomb us from the sky, we can fight them on the ground. We learned how to ambush them when they were here and it's easy. Their senses are not as sharp as ours, and our camouflage allows us to remain undetected until they are too close to avoid a charge.”
That sounded hopeful. I was beginning to believe that we might clear the Earth of the invaders if we could solve the problem of getting back to the space station. We agreed to start for our wrecked ship the next morning.