Chapter 5
I stopped and waited as the red-headed woman approached. She had incredibly clear, green eyes, but they weren't welcoming.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
She had an air about her of control and authority as if she wasn't used to being denied. I found this a challenge but realized that she'd undoubtedly met this attitude from a lot of men in the past. She'd probably developed a mechanism to deal with the rebellious male ego, so I took a different approach from the one that I'd been planning on. If I read her correctly, she was intelligent and intensely curious about the lander.
I smiled and explained why I had come down from the mountains.
“I saw the fireball caused by the spaceship the other night and I realized that I had to come down here and see if I could stop the aliens from attacking us again.” There was a gasp of collective amazement from the group.
The woman drew back a bit and then stepped forward, “How do you know this thing?” She pointed at it and asked in a testing manner, “Do you think it's something that 'the aliens' sent?”
“It's a long story, but I'm sure they're trying to come back and finish the job they started. Their goal is to kill all of us and take over the planet.”
“That's not very likely, Mister! We know them better than that! They came here to try and help us elevate our civilization,” she put her hands on her hips.
That was new! I had to know where it was coming from. “What do you mean, they're here to help us? How do you know that?” I asked.
“We rescued one of the big ones and he's told us everything,” was the amazing answer.
“How does he talk to you?” I was coming to a surprising conclusion, but wanted more information before I decided what to do.
“With his mind, of course!” She tossed her head and her hair shifted, spilling over her right shoulder.
I carefully probed her mind and encountered no barrier at all! It was shocking at first, but I realized that extended contact with an intelligent Pug-bear could result in a lack of normal mental barriers. Taking a chance with her, I formed a mental statement and sent it into her mind, “So, he talks to you like this?”
She staggered back, making a warding motion with her arm. There was a general stir and clicking of safety's coming off as the men pointed various weapons at me. I held up my hands in a non-aggressive way.
“No!” she recovered quickly and motioned them to put their guns down. “We're not going to kill this one, not yet, anyway.”
That wasn't very reassuring, but it promised me some kind of opening for discussion.
“Take his weapons away and bring him over to my tent,” she ordered.
Rather than fight a useless fight, I handed one of my captors my rifle and my forty-five. I hated to let the Sig go, but there was no choice at the moment. I looked the man in the face and with a mental emphasis that let him know I was dead serious, I said, “I expect them back in good condition. I'm pretty attached to both of them.”
He took them in a moderately respectful manner. I judged that was the best I could hope for. A couple of the fellows that had been standing near the woman stepped forward. They were both wearing football helmets and they looked like NFL players. Both were huge, towering over my six foot two with inches to spare.
One of them cracked an astonishing bright smile which lit up his dark face, “You-all best come along with us with no trouble. It'll be alright, you'll see.”
I appreciated the reassurance. He seemed friendly, but his friend had a frown on his face that drew his blond eyebrows together in a threatening manner. I held up my hands to show that they were now empty and followed them through the crowd to the far side of the fire.
There were several tents set up in a more level area there and they led me to the largest. The white man held open one of the flaps and I walked into the large tent. Their red-headed leader had composed herself on a portable camp chair, sitting as if she were a queen on a throne. I stepped through the door and stopped, waiting for her to speak.
“How..., how did you do that?” she was plainly nervous about my mental communication. “No one but the Master can speak that way.” She paused, then continued, “What are you? Are you one of them?”
She looked at me closely and then answered her own question, “No. You're just a man. How can you do that? Did they train you?”
Projecting a reassuring energy field cautiously, I answered her question with a question of my own, “Do you worship the Master?”
She jumped up, her eyes flashing, “No! He needs our help and we help him...”
Her voice trailed off as if some memory was trying to come to the fore in her mind.
Sensing that her thoughts were open, I inserted my mind into hers again, “You help him because you can't help yourselves. You find that you want to do what he says, correct?”
She didn't notice that I was communicating mentally now. Her thought stream filled with images of the Pug-bear. It lived in Denver and was a kind of second leader to their tribe. They looked up to it and, here I shuddered mentally, they fed it prisoners found guilty of capital offenses.
The Pug-bear was working to guide the tribe's leader, the Eastern Slope Warlord, in a quest to dominate as much territory as possible. She was in awe of the creature but disliked its intrusions into her mind.
I thought it over and realized that the alien had to have acquired its symbiont while on Earth. That's the way it worked. The symbionts couldn't travel through the transporters without dying. A Pug-bear could, but it would come out the other side without its passenger. That meant that Pug-bears had to come to Earth in a lander in order to preserve their intelligence or they had to eat symbiont eggs while here. One out of several thousand eggs would hatch and embed in their brain, eventually yielding a high level of an alien sort of rationality to the creature. The one that her people had saved must have arrived as a feral Pug-bear that gained its rationality on Earth. That would mean that it didn't have the complete set of knowledge about their culture that an older one might have. It very well may have decided to assist the Warlord, not knowing about its species' invasion plans and goals for dominating planets.
“Look, I'm a friend. I know about these creatures and learned to communicate from their greatest leader years ago. I can help you with the spaceship,” I sent, adding a reassuring emotional overtone to the message.
As I did, she took a deep breath and I could sense that she'd decided to try and work with me. Her previous hostility was gone, leaving just a sense of hardened aggressiveness, which I judged was her way of dealing with men who might challenge her position.
“I was sent up here with all of these fighters to try and open the spaceship. The Master thinks it is very important to him. He doesn't want it damaged and he wants it operational, but I don't know what to do. Nothing we've tried has had any effect on it and none of my men are any help whatsoever!”
Her attitude had ranged from querulous to angry as she went on.
“I've got to get it open and running somehow. Nobody even knows what it does, but we've got to get it going. If we don't, the Warlord will be very disappointed in us and it won't be good,” she added.
I got a quick mental glimpse of a prisoner tied to a wooden frame and being whipped. Obviously, the Warlord wasn't the patient kind.
“I know what the spaceship does and I've got an idea about why it won't open yet,” I told her. “It has got to reach a source of power and it's drilling down through the rocks to access some uranium that is buried deep in the mountainside. Once it reaches that, it will extract what it needs to power up and it will open then.” She was listening carefully and I added, “But, I might be able to open it sooner if you'd like.”
She considered, “If you can open it now and you know what it does, it would be a great help to me. But, first, how do I know I can trust you? And, how do you know how to open the thing?”
I'd broken through her normal defenses and she was being open with me. It was an entirely reasonable doubt that she was expressing, so I answered reasonably, “I'm familiar with their technology and may be able to see something you missed that will allow me to open it. As for trust, you don't know me, but I'll bet that you have a sense that I'm trustworthy.”
It was cheating, but I did it anyway. Trying not to be detected, I carefully inserted a sense of trust and friendship into her subconscious as I spoke. I didn't like to do it. I'd only previously communicated with Liz in this fashion and it felt as if I was being too intimate with this strange woman. I felt like I was somehow being unfaithful to my wife.
The tactic seemed to work. She sighed and stood up, “Let's go out and see if you can figure out how to open the thing.”
Since I'd already pushed emotions into her subconscious, I figured that I might as well go on with the exercise. I inserted a sense of foreboding into her mind and explained “I'll need my weapons. There might be one of the enemy inside. They've been known to hitch rides in the Master's ships.”
This was totally false, but I wanted my guns in case it came to a parting of the ways and also in case the transporter started and a bunch of Pugs came through. My intent was to convince her that I was watching out for the “Master” and also to convince her that there was some danger involved.
“OK, but I'm going to have Ted and Frank watch you closely,” she responded.
We stepped out and she snapped her fingers as if she were calling a pair of watchdogs, “Oh, boys! Come over here and watch him. We're going to look at the spaceship.”
The two helmeted men trotted over from the fire and we made our way to the matte-black, slightly organic-looking lander. On the way, I collected my rifle and pistol. Their weight felt reassuring.
As we approached the device, I could feel a grinding vibration coming through the rock beneath my feet. The thing was drilling down in some fashion. It had been doing so since it landed and was probably near the ore deposit by now.
We stopped and looked at the thing and I asked her, “How have you tried to get inside so far?”
“We've pushed and poked everything, but nothing happens,” she answered. “We even tried cutting and shooting it, but nothing scratches the surface, not even the biggest rifle. Everything just bounces off.”
Ted frowned darkly and added, “That's right. I hit it as hard as I could with my sword and I didn't even leave a mark.” He paused and then added, “It almost broke my hand, though.”
Frank snickered at that but said nothing.
We walked around the lander, looking at the striations and rope-like curls covering its surface. On the side away from the fire, I noticed a slight depression with a shallow slot beside it. For some reason, the slot reminded me of Liz showing me how to open one of the Pugs' door locks. As I remembered, I stuck my thumb and index finger into it and spread them apart.
There was a hiss of pressure equalizing and a bad smell as the surface in the depression slid backward into the hull of the lander. My companions jumped back in alarm and I drew my pistol, just in case. As I did, Frank pulled out a well-oiled, three-foot-long
sword. It looked small in his hand and he pointed it at me, “Don't try anything funny or I'll have to hit you with this.”
I nodded and waited for the door to finish swinging back. It was difficult to see into the shadowed opening. The matte-black of the surface blended smoothly into the shadow and I couldn't be sure that the door was completely through with its movement. Then I heard a small click indicating that the mechanism had completed its cycle. I stepped forward into the opening and waited while my eyes adjusted.
The three of them crowded in behind me as I waited. There was plenty of space in the interior, although the roof was low. The sound from the men speaking outside was muffled. Perhaps the matte-finish of the outside was used inside also and it deadened the space. I waited to be able to see.