F. A. Javor - The Rim-World Legacy.pdf - F. A. Javor - widez2

The Rim-World Legacy

by F.A.Javor

Version 1.0

A #BW Release

PROLOGUE

I'm six-feet-four, weigh two hundred pounds, and swim

about as well as a porous rock. All the same, I pressed

myself down into the black water the sparse weeds sprang

from, listening.

Listening. Straining my ears in the heavy darkness until I

thought the skin on the back of my neck would pop. Know-

ing that the rise and fall of the sounds those who were after

me were making was not in their nearness or distance, but in

me.

Warily, swearing inside at the way the strength in my

hands was coming and going, I started working away at the

base of a tall reed.

Bending it. Pulling it down to me slowly, slowly, all the

time aware to the point of torture that in the night-vision

glasses the men tracking me were sure to be wearing, a

movement, unless it be heartbreakingly slow, would show as

a sudden flaring of bright yellow against the dull red of the

overall background stillness.

"Pike," someone shouted, his voice coming at a low point

in my hearing, but I could make out my own name well

enough.

"Pike. Come out. Give yourself up. Don't make us come in

after you."

Give myself up. There were children's and women's voices

mingled with those of the men after me, and the sound of

them added that thin frosting of urgency to my predicament

that had me fighting to hold at bay the unreasoning tempta-

tion to break and run. Break and run and evade my pursuers

by sheer animal speed.

Sheer animal speed against the animal thing after me. The

thing that brought its women and children with it to the

hunt. The thing that by this act revealed itself to me to be no

policeman's posse that might be content to capture and to

hold me. The thing that cried out to me to give myself up to

The thing that was a howling mob.

Panic tried to force its treacherous way into the racing of

my mind.

I fought to hold it in check and kept pulling the reed down

slowly, fearful that it would slip from my weakening hands

and the motion of its snapping erect betray my location as

surely as if I'd sent up a flare.

Fighting, for the same reason, the urge to shake my head

to ease the prickle of the old scar I could feel throbbing on

the top of my balding head. The scar that was a souvenir of

the Second Police Action. Thin, almost invisible, it seemed to

have a sensor of its own that made it tingle when it thought I

was about to head into something that, if I was lucky, I'd live

to regret.

And now at last I had the reed flat in the water and

hidden, close to my body.

I began twisting it Slowly, slowly, but hurry, before they

can rig and bring up the heat detectors that will use the

warmth of your own body as a beacon to home in on.

Twisting the reed. Swearing silently at my hands and their

unsure grip that was making of so simple a task so formida-

ble a project. Fighting to keep my lungs from gasping their

air and make tremble the high grasses around me. Make

them tremble and the motion betray me to my pursuers.

I felt the reed weakening and now it was free in my

grasp.

I strangled my gasp of relief and, forcing myself to wait

until I felt my grip on it firming, I broke off the tip. Then,

raising one end to my mouth, I blew into it

I blew, feeling my cheeks puff out and straining until the

pinpoints of light danced red and yellow in my eyeballs and

the strength of my lungs ebbed away.

Nothing.

The reed was plugged. Membranes crossing its diameter.

Pressed down in the chill water but sweating, I groped in

the darkness for another reed. Thin, but sturdy.

I found one, pulled it down and worked it free as carefully

as I'd done the first one even though now I could hear,

dimly, and more clearly, and dimly again as my hearing

phased in and out, the unmistakable beat of approaching

hover-craft.

Hover-craft, heat-detecting units jerry-rigged on long ca-

bles to hang below them and sweep close to the water in

their search for the warmth of my body. My head, my face

would be enough.

Hover-craft, more than one from the sound, and sooner

than I'd expected. They must be units commandeered from

the spaceport that was the chief reason for Poldrogi's exis-

tence. The planet's city police could not have been cleared to

move outside their jurisdiction so quickly. The men in those

hover-craft would be as free of official control as the mob on

the ground.

Hurry now, hurry, but do not move with anything but

agonizing slowness lest your motion flare brightly yellow in

the night-vision glasses of your hunters.

Using the thinner reed as a reamer, I poked into the larger

one, first from one end and then from the other.

Again I blew into it and this tune my breath was unob-

structed. The inner passage of the long reed was clear.

Carrying my newmade tube, and stopping only when the

drag of the water threatened to wrench it from my fingers, I

groped in the darkness for deeper water. Oddly enough, even

though no one, not even the SpaceNav experts back in my

service days, had been able to teach me to swim, I had no

particular fear of deep water. And even if I had, the racket

of hover-craft, now clear in the night behind me, would have

given me reason enough to press on.

From the sound of things, it was plain to me that I'd just

about had all the tune I was going to get to find out how

deep the semi-swamps that were the lakes of Poldrogi could

become.

I found a clump of weeds that felt a little thicker than the

rest and, blowing through my reed to clear it, put one end

among them so that it might the better escape the notice of

my pursuers.

The other end of my reed I put into my mouth and,

pinching my nose between my fingers as best as their phasing

strength would let me, I let myself settle down, the black

water closing over my head, plugging my ears with its char-

acteristic roar, until I sat on the silted and treacherous-

feeling bottom.

They would not come after me, I hoped, once they'd lost

me in their night-vision glasses, until there was daylight

enough to see me by.

I was lucky, I suppose, that this was Poldrogi and not

Linedo or Parsi or any one of the more fashionable tourist

planets that made of their scenery a feature, flooding it with

lights that came on automatically at the approach of a

human.

But Poldrogi was, after all, only a transit world. A place to

transship cargoes or wait out starship connections and aside

from the anticrime lights in the spaceport city itself, its

Council of Peers was not one of waste power on lighting up

the countryside.

All I could do for now was wait, knowing that the hover-

craft, their heat detectors dangling beneath them, were

crisscrossing over my head. Wait in the pulsing water and

hope that my breath, traveling the length of the reed I'd

selected, would emerge in a wisp cool enough to escape

discovery.

A search robot, I knew, would not be commandeered, like

a hover-craft, and sent in after me. They were designed to

keep the starships and their cargo holds clear of stowaways

and other unwanted visitors and would not function in deep

water. But someone might think to search over their bills of

lading in the hope that there might be in one of the ship-

ments an android hunter on its way to a sporting world. And

I could not hide from myself the knowledge that if it were

activated and sent to ferret me out, I would stand no chance

against a thing that only looked like a man.

I pushed the unsettling thought out of my mind. To give it

play now, when I was over my head in water, trying to

ignore the unseen things that bumped and slithered against

me in the blackness, could only build the panic that would

destroy me.

No. For now the only thing to do is to wait. Wait and try

to think of how you got into this predicament in the first

place. Then, maybe you will be better able to figure out what

to do when you get out and away from here. If you get out

and away from here. If....

Stop. Stop thinking along those lines. Think of the girl.

The girl. She had been by the open transhaus window

when I stepped in through the corridor door.

CHAPTER ONE

POLDROGI.

I came awake to the sound of a pounding on the panel at

the side of my head and the sight of a sterile blue-green

surface so close to my face as to seem to be pressing down

upon me.

Bunk. I'm in my bunk, but I feel heavy; planet heavy. The

grav units ... something wrong with the ship's grav units.

Trouble . . . the pounding in my ear. . . .

And then I knew where I was. I shook my head and

blinked, trying to clear my sleep-clogged nose and throat of

the acrid chemical bite of the disinfected wash of air.

There were no grav units for something to be wrong with.

The pull on my body was a natural one. I was not in my old

bunk aboard the SpyEye IV, but in a Poldrogi transhaus

sleep cubicle, and the pounding was being done by someone

in the corridor outside my coffinlike enclosure.

I slid back the thin plastic panel. "What?" I said. "What do

you want? My time's not up." I fumbled in the wall pocket

behind my head for my wrist-chrono. "I've got two ...

maybe three hours. .. ."

The fat man standing in the corridor showed me his

handmade Poldrogi teeth. "Lady to see you," he said, giving

the first word the local accent that made it sound like

"lead-y."

"Upstairs. My office," he said full into my face.

Lord. Do they even make their transhaus managers eat

those miserable disinfectants?

I stared at his fat face peering in at me. Who knew I was

here? Who even knew I was alive? Lady, he'd called her, and

I knew transit-world locals well enough to know that if that's

what he called her, then that was what she was, and not

some corridor-walker trying to drum up a little trade with an

ex-SpaceNav serviceman.

And with starship passage rates being figured not by the

person but by the pound, anyone with his heft couldn't be

anything but a local. Space warp technique or no, it still took

power and money to move a weight from one place to

another. It would take plenty of both to move him.

"A lady?" I said. "For me? Are you sure?"

"She ask for pho-tographer. You it."

Photographer. Then she'd asked for me, not by name, but

by business. It could mean she had a job she wanted done

and it could also mean that she wasn't too sure how simon-

pure an assignment it was. A lady with a clean photo job in

mind didn't go down into a spaceport transhaus to find

someone to do it for her.

She wasn't too sure about it, and she was looking for a

photographer who needed the money.

I was a photographer ... and I needed the money. Lord,

did I need the money. I could at least listen to what she had

to say.

I pushed the panel all the way back and slid out of my

cubicle. "Thanks," I said to the fat manager. "Thank you for

calling me."

He showed me his hand-carved teeth again. "No thanks.

You only one here. I tell lady you come."

I watched him shuffle away from me. He was broad, but

then the corridor wasn't any wider than it needed to be and

he just about filled it with his beam. The scuffs, the crushed

shorts, the T shirt he had on may have had some color to

them once, but the constant washing, the sterilizing that

transhaus regulations called for had long ago bleached it out

until now they looked to have been dipped in drying and

faded blood.

It was clean, all right. It was cheap. But it wasn't fancy.

I snaked my travel jumpsuit out of the mesh bag at the

back of the cubicle, shook it to free it of the wrinkles it had

picked up, stepped into it. The zipper was stiff, its tab

skimpy, but I managed to work it closed and stood for a

moment wondering if it would look better if I took my

cameras with me or left them until I'd heard what the

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