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.But some sixth sense alerted the intruder 107to her presence, and a fist smashed out at Benny, hitting her in the jaw.With a cry of pain - and a gasp of utter surprise – Benny fell to the floor.108Part TwoACEThe planet Antykhon in the year 2497 of the Great Migration109110Chapter 13Ace groaned, and rubbed more cream into the reddened skin of her face and her legs, as she had done every day for the past two months, ever since she had woken up and found herself mysteriously stranded on this goddamned planet.She squinted up through the dark reflective glasses she always wore now, up at the scorching sun in the cloudless sky.Its ultraviolet rays were too much for her pale flesh, and it was only by a regular application of hi-protection block, originally designed for colonizers of two-sun worlds, that she was able to save herself from skin cancer.The morning's first and most important task completed, she went down to the stream to freshen up: the water tasted bitter and dead, but at least it wasn't poisonous.Yet, she thought pessimistically.She looked up in the distance, beyond the few barren and straggly trees and at the enormous pyramid shape of the Hive Imperial perched on top of the white cliffs overlooking the sea.She was convinced that the effluent produced by the Hive had killed the river; a faint tang of ammonia hung in the air, and everyone knew that that was the stink of the body juices of the blasted Charrl.She looked surreptitiously about the camp.There were about thirty people in this camp, of different ages and sexes, travellers who roamed the country in search of food and fresh water.Many of them had escaped from the Shantytowns in which most of the inhabitants of this hell-pit of a planet lived.She thought fondly of Jan and his band of travellers back on Heaven: these travellers were different.Jan and the others had chosen their way of life; if these people chose to stop travelling they would die, prey to the Charrl.Most people were still zipped up into their sleeping bags, or huddled in their skins around the remains of the campfire, around which two mangy dogs poked their noses.111Ace envied them the fact that they could sleep out in the open, and not in the tent which she had been forced to set up for herself.Her friends called themselves Hairies, on account of the hair which covered a large portion of their bodies (even, to a certain degree, the women) and which also protected them from the more harmful ultraviolet rays of the sun.If not for her protective one-piece combat suit Ace would have been charred to a crisp long ago.She hardly ever took it off now.The fact that she probably stank to high heaven didn't really bother her; all the other Hairies did as well.Satisfied that no one was up and about yet, she stole out of the camp to a small clearing, where she hurriedly tapped out a seven-digit code on the mini-computer which she wore on a gauntlet on her wrist.Quickly it interfaced with the radio communicator she always kept around her neck.Ace listened, looking up hopefully into the early-morning sky.Nothing.Not even the monotonous pulse of a space beacon.All she could hear was a continuous buzz of static.Less excitement than good old Perivale on a Saturday afternoon, she thought glumly; at least there you could listen to Capital and see how Charlton Athletic were doing.Whichever planet she had landed on must be so far out of the space lanes as to be insignificant.Her communicator could pick up on a sub-space frequency from a distance of 2.34 light years, or even more, depending on the level of technology of the sender.Even in the Outer Wastes she'd heard that Draconian satellites usually kept an ear open for signals of any intelligent life.The armpit of the Universe, that's where she'd landed.She looked back at the Hive on the cliffs.No radio emissions from there either, which was hardly surprising.The 'science' of the Charrl was an organic and psychic one, and they never relied on conventional technology.That worried Ace: she liked technology, felt comfortable around it, had proved she could handle it.Three years of dirty skirmishing for various Corporations and then in Spacefleet's Irregular Auxiliaries had taught her that machines don't let you 112down; well mostly they didn't, and when they did they could easily be reprogrammed or junked.She punched out another code on her computer gauntlet, sending out a sub-etheric message to anyone who might be around to pick it up.Like throwing a bottle into the bloody ocean at Kandalinga!she thought.Don't hold your breath waiting.Christ, I have to get off this planet!A sixth sense told her she was being watched, and she quickly closed down the computer-communicator link, and spun around.Seeba was watching her slyly through narrowed eyes.'Talking to your secret friends again, Ace?' he said suspiciously.'There's no one to talk to, old mate,' she said bitterly, and regarded the bearded and burly man.'Not another sodding soul for light years.''I told you before, we're off the space lanes.We've been a closed world for centuries,' he said.'Who in their right minds would want to share this planet with the likes of the Charrl?'Ace glanced over at the Hive on the clifftop.'Is this the one then?''Must be,' Seeba said.'There's not another hive around for miles.That's where my brother, Chel, was taken.''Then when do we attack?''You're the boss now, remember,' he said darkly.'You decide.'Ace glared at the forty-year-old guerilla: she knew what he felt towards her.Seeba had been the leader of his small group of Mammals scavenging the dead countryside looking for food and occasionally attacking patrols of Charrl until Ace had arrived.After she had been accepted into their group, she had saved them all from a raiding party of Charrl, who were scouring the country looking for fresh mammal-meat to feed their grubs.For some reason, the human body provided a much better source of protein for the Charrl than the cattle which still occasionally grazed on hillsides where the grass had not been scorched away by the heat of the sun.Ace also suspected that the Charrl ingested humans' limited psychic abilities along with the protein.113The weak Charrl, unused to armed resistance, had proved no match for Ace's superior technology, and Ace had been voted in as their leader, replacing Seeba.She had protested that anyone with the right weaponry could have done what she'd done.But Ace was a fighting female, and as such considered superior to a fighting male.She had begrudgingly accepted the position, earning at the same time Seeba's constant hostility.'Tell me, Ace, what's in it for you?' asked Seeba.'You don't care less that Chel was taken from Shantytown, into the Charrl's larder.Why are you helping us?''The more Mammals that are free, and out of the Shantytowns, the more there are to fight the Charrl,' she said simply.'Isn't that good enough for you, Seeba?''And what do we do then?' he asked pertinently.'Turn yourself into an organized opposition and you'll be able to carve out enclaves for yourself; maybe even eventually determine your own existence.Prove to the Charrl that you're not going to stand meekly by while they cull you.''You know, Boss, we still know so little about you,' Seeba said.'We know you're a fighter, and a killer.A good one, at that, although I've seen cleaner, more detached ones: you enjoy it too much.But you've got spirit.That's unusual round here: most of us are happy to be warded into Shantytowns, where the Charrl pick us off as and when they need.But we still don't know where you really come from — or what you really want.''I told you,' Ace replied steelily.'I'm a fighter pilot.My spaceship crashed and I was stranded here.''We never did find the wreckage of your craft,' he reminded her [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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