Part 1 (2/2)

”I wonder how long they've been here. They could have taken over two weeks ago, or longer, and where we've been, we wouldn't have known it.” She turned to me. ”And if it's been that long, we won't find mom and dad at home. They'll have taken off somewhere to avoid the political police.”

That was obvious. I just hadn't looked at it yet. It was also food for thought. Whether we found our parents or not, the question was where we'd go. There was probably an Imperial flotilla guarding the planet to keep people from leaving. And the Empire would be developing an informer network, of course; they'd already had a spy network. So if we tried to lie low, we'd probably be uncovered sooner or later.

Of course, the Imperials might have just arrived, and our parents might still be safe at home. Dad knew the ropes on this world better than just about anyone- probably better than Piet. He'd operated as a business consultant here on two continents, and had a lot of underground contacts, too. He had resources I didn't know existed.

The rain lasted just long enough for Tarel to get out the burrow pig and pa.s.s it around for a few bites each. Then, not even wet, I led off again. By mid-afternoon, landmarks told me we weren't too far from Piet's floater. Bubba a.s.sured us there was no one near it-that was just one advantage of having an esp wolf-and in a quarter hour we were there.

Six of us, with our gear, didn't leave a lot of room in the floater's boxy body. Piet raised her above the trees and started for home. The first thing Deneen did was turn the radio on. The programming was not the usual. For a few minutes, all we got was Federation, now Imperial, patriotic music, no matter what station we tuned to. Then some guy speaking Standard came on and gave a brief news rundown-mostly stuff on changes in laws and regulations.

That told us how the Empire figured to run things- they weren't even broadcasting in Evdas.h.i.+an. The languages were enough alike that people on Evdash could pretty much understand Standard, and I would have bet that the Empire had declared a law against speaking our own language.

When Deneen and Bubba and I, and our parents, had gotten back from Fanglith more than two years earlier, we'd resettled on the northern continent. Federation spies had found our previous home. Dad fixed up an old farmhouse, and about a year later Tarel and Jenoor had come to live with us. Their parents had joined the resistance on a Federation planet named Tris Gebleu, and had them smuggled to Evdash, where they'd been placed with us. They were twins Deneen's age-sixteen. Soon after, Piet came to live with us. Add Lady and the two pups, and you get a pretty full house.

Half an hour in the floater brought us close to home, but Piet didn't simply land in the yard and punch the hooter. He flew past about half a mile north at 3,000 feet, while Bubba scanned the place telepathically.

Someone was home all right, he said-two someones-but they weren't our parents. They were two human males, playing cards while they waited for their detector to buzz. My gut knotted. Had mom and dad escaped or been hauled away? If they had been arrested, chances were that Lady and the pups would be hanging around nearby, living in the forest. But if they'd escaped, they'd probably all have left together. Telepathically, Bubba found no sign of Lady or the pups around, so my guts relaxed a little.

Where we lived, the country was three-quarters woods. Our house was near the edge of the farm clearing, with a sod road going by it. Piet put down in the woods about a mile away. Leaving the others with the floater, Bubba and I took off at a trot, his esper senses alert. When we got near the clearing, Bubba, in his rough grunting version of human speech, suggested I stay back. I knew it was good advice, but I didn't like to leave everything to him, so we continued together to the clearing's edge, creeping on our bellies the last hundred feet, keeping to cover, until I could see the house and our big shed. The shed doors were open and the cutter was gone, but the floater was still there.

That could mean that my parents had gotten away, or it could mean that the police had impounded the cutter. My guess was that they'd gotten away. Otherwise the police, if they were smart, would have left the cutter in the shed to fool us, maybe after taking out the fuel slugs. They probably wouldn't know our can id was an esp wolf There are lots of different kinds of can ids from the known worlds, and esp wolves are rare. As far as we knew, ours were the only ones on the continent. Our friends thought Bubba was just another big exotic can id with ordinary abilities.

In a family like ours, you learn very young to keep certain kinds of things a secret. Bubba started crawling backward, and I did the same. When we were out of sight of the house, he got up and trotted off without saying anything. I knew where he had to be going, and followed him. When we'd moved here, dad had put a waterproof box in a huge old hollow tree, where messages could be left in emergencies like this.

It paid off: there was a package in the message box and a med kit on top of it. I took them out, and Bubba and I headed back to the others.

We opened the package at the floater. There wasn't a lot in it-several data cubes and a message cube.

One by one we checked the cubes in the floater's computer, the message cube first. It was dated seven days earlier. An Imperial flotilla, standing off Evdash, had demanded surrender, and a force of fifth-column commandos, with the collusion of traitors in the national police, had taken over national police headquarters. With us not due back for eight days, our parents had no choice but to leave without us. ”Well try to meet you later on Lizard Island,” mom had said, ”and leave Evdash from there.” Try.

Later. All in all not very rea.s.suring. And it didn't say where they were going or for how long-probably for good reason.

The other cubes were a mixed lot: an astrogation cube; a ”miscellaneous” cube that included, among other things, a learning program and a linguistic a.n.a.lysis program-I'd had good use of both of them before; a couple of library cubes; and a copy of the family's planetary coordinates cube with everywhere we'd ever flown on Evdash.

There was also one other: a copy of the old contraband data cube we'd used to find Fanglith. When I saw that one on the menu, I got goose b.u.mps. I also became aware that Deneen was looking at me. I wondered if it affected her at all the same way. She'd always been ”Miss Objective Practicality.”

An astrogation cube and the contraband data cube! Huh! The knot returned to my gut. ”Well,” I said, ”if they don't meet us, it looks as if they expect us to leave the planet on our own, somehow or other.”

Although, how we could do that without a cutter .. . ”Let's sit here till dark,” I suggested. ”It'll be safer traveling then. With the coordinates cube, we won't have any trouble finding Lizard Island at night.”

I could feel part of my attention stuck on the contraband data cube. On Fanglith, actually. And from Deneen's expression, hers was too. ”I'm not going to be surprised if they don't get to Lizard Island for a month or more,” I went on. ”Obviously, they've got something to do first, or they'd have gone there already, not 'later.” And they'll need to wait until things quiet down, because a cutter's a lot more conspicuous than a floater and a ton more likely to attract trouble.”

Of course, they might not get there at all.

The floater's main door was open, letting in the late sun. I was sitting in front, with Deneen and Piet.

Tarel was in back, looking sober and saying nothing. He was generally pretty quiet and serious. Beside him, Jenoor was quiet, too. She wasn't generally quiet like he was; in fact, she was often pretty animated.

But just now she was worried.

Jenoor tended to look up to me because I was older and had the Fanglith experience under my belt, which was fine with me. We'd told people that she and Tarel were our cousins, so of course it hadn't been okay for me to take her around. But I had it in mind to propose to her after she reached legal age, and when I could support her. Looking up to me the way she did, it seemed to me she'd probably say yes. Anyway, she hadn't shown much interest in other guys, although they'd been pretty interested in her.

Meanwhile, living in the same house with her hadn't always been the most comfortable thing in the world. She was too good-looking.

Deneen considered her pretty special too-had even asked me once if I'd ever thought of Jenoor as a future wife. When I admitted I had, she said she was glad to see her brother showing good taste. Deneen was more critical than our parents about whom I took out. She didn't issue her seal of approval very often, even though they were just dates. And as for getting serious-she said that considering the kind of future I could expect, I needed ”a wife of similar purposes and comparable ability.”

She was right, of course. But how could we know for sure what someone's purpose was-one of our friends at school for example. I was sure no one there knew ours.

At the floater we sat around or napped for a couple of hours, until it got dark. I thought a little about Lizard Island. That was our family name for it; all the chart said was ”Great Central Shoal,” and showed a string of dots along it to indicate little islands. Lizard was inconspicuous, all right. I wondered what it would be like in a hurricane; hopefully I'd never find out.

I was in the pilot's seat. Piet sat in the seat next to mine. He was like dad-ready to let me handle things myself if it was something I could.

”Let's go,” I said. I keyed the Lizard Island coordinates into the computer, and we took off. At 3,000 feet, I put her on automatic pilot and we headed southeast for the broad, shallow Entrilias Sea, keeping track of the radio and the traffic monitor, which was on high sensitivity.

The knot was gone from my gut. For whatever reason, I felt as if everything was going to come out all right.

TWO.

The floater didn't have an infra scanner-it wasn't intended for anything more than family-type use-but the stars give more than enough light to see Lizard Island when you're right above it at 200 feet. It appeared to be about two hundred yards long and half as wide, but it wasn't really, because part of what looked like island was a fringe of mangrove trees that stood in the water around its edges.

”It's little, isn't it,” Jenoor said.

”Small enough that no one pays any attention to it,” I answered. ”Small and out of the way. It's one of the biggest in a string of low islands like this, and they're a navigation hazard-the high points of a long shoal-so s.h.i.+ps stay well away.”

”How do we land?” asked Tarel.

”Carefully and by daylight. There's no clearing, so we'll have to slip down between trees.”

I could feel that Tarel and Jenoor had more questions but were holding off, hoping someone else would ask them. Questions like, how do we live down there? Deneen knew, of course. Our family had been here once before, not long after we'd gotten back from Fanglith, establis.h.i.+ng a refuge in case we ever needed one. We'd stayed for several days, getting a feel for what it would take to live there.

We definitely hadn't set up a vacation home or anything like that, but we'd hidden a plast.i.te chest with a shovel, hammocks, fis.h.i.+ng Sines, hooks and spears, a pair of books on edible fish and plants of the Entrih'as region, a little water still and a good-sized pail, a couple of insect repellent-field generators, a pint-size geogravitic power tap (very expensive), and Rigidite plastic sheeting that was highly flexible to start with but would get semi-stiff once it was wetted. There was also a small beam saw.

Nearby we'd buried a lightweight skiff about eight feet long and three feet wide, for fis.h.i.+ng. Meanwhile we had an hour or so before dawn-longer than that before it would be light enough to land-so I got in back to catch a nap. I hadn't been sleepy, so I'd stood pilot watch most of the way. I still didn't feel sleepy, but I was willing to bet I'd go to sleep, once I lay down.

I was right. I lay down and closed my eyes, and it seemed like only a minute later when I woke up. We were moving, settling downward. It was already light, almost sunup, and Deneen was at the controls.

Tree-tops were rising past the windows. A couple of light thumps and brus.h.i.+ng sounds marked our pa.s.sage through their branches; then there was one last little b.u.mp and we were on the ground. Everyone else piled out, but I closed my eyes again, ”just for a few minutes.” When I opened them next time, the chest had been uncovered and the shelter built. I got out of the floater all sleepy-eyed, and Deneen looked at me.

”Well, brother mine,” she said, and handed me the shovel. ”You're just in time to dig up the boat for us.”

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