The force field tingled as I pushed through it. My collar gave off a single weak spark. I tugged it away from my neck as I looked around the tiny hollow in the cliff. It was open all the way up. The force field kept the rain out. It was dry underfoot.
Three tiny lights set into the cliff face in front of me glowed a faint green. I stepped closer, running my fingers across them. It had to be a door of some sort. Where else had the robed figures gone? The rock under my hands was polished to a smooth gloss. My fingers slid over the lights without detecting any break in the surface.
I put both hands flat on the surface and pushed. Nothing happened.
I ran my hands over the door until I encountered the rougher stone around it. I traced the edge. I could just feel the top if I stretched. It was only as wide as my armspan. I could touch both sides at once. I didn’t find any kind of controls to either side.
I crouched down and ran my hands along the bottom of the door. The smooth surface of the path ran right up to it. The door fit tightly. I sat back on my heels and stared at the three glowing lights in the door. They faded, growing dimmer by the second.
I stood and pressed them again. They were spread out far enough that I could only reach two at a time. I tried several different combinations, pressing them one at a time and two at a time. Nothing happened.
I moved back, studying the door. It had to open. Maybe it was activated by the lights they’d been carrying. If that was true, I wasn’t going anywhere except back to my thorny prison.
I kicked the door in frustration. This had to be the place, this had to be where the generators were. But what if it wasn’t? Maybe I was wasting my time. But that really didn’t matter, did it? I had all the time in the universe to figure this out, I was going to be here until I died if I didn’t.
The lights faded completely, leaving nothing to indicate the smooth door was anything other than polished rock. I closed my eyes and ran my hands over the entire door and the frame, as high as I could reach. Maybe in the dark, I’d feel something I’d missed earlier. All I felt was smooth stone, cool under my hands. There were no controls, nothing.
I muttered some curses as I kicked it again. I stubbed my toe. I rubbed my foot as I glared at the impassive door.
I had to admit defeat. I was running out of time to get safely back before daylight. I turned away, passing through the force field that guarded the tiny hollow.
The rain slackened to a thin drizzle. The clouds overhead were still pretty thick. Only the faintest purple glow showed. I picked my way down the smooth path to the rougher dirt one.
I almost ran into a group of golden men. I heard them jabbering just before they rounded a bend in the path. I dove into a bush, sending a shower of water over myself. I tucked myself in and tried to be inconspicuous. They carried light globes that spilled greenish light on the path. They were so intent on their conversation they didn’t notice me or the quivering bush I hid under.
I caught a few words. They complained about searching the woods at night, about being wet and tired. I shifted a branch with one shaking finger to watch them trot away. They carried a box between them. It looked a lot like the black box they’d used to try to drive me out of the ship but this one had different knobs sticking out of the sides.
I stayed in the bush for a long time after the greenish glow of their globes had faded. Two other groups slogged past, dripping and muttering. Each group had one of the boxes.
I hooked a finger under my collar. It hadn’t itched at all since I’d fallen in the stream. The shower of sparks might have been the mechanism inside shorting out. If that was true, then their wands wouldn’t do anything to me unless they were right on top of me.
I wiggled into a drier spot under the bush. The rain fell in a steady dripping. The bush concentrated it, sending large drops to splash at irregular intervals. It slowly grew lighter. Morning was coming. I had to move soon.
I waited, watching the trails. No groups had passed for some time. I squirmed out of the bush. The trail still held puddles. The clouds dripped steadily. I turned north and picked my way up the path which wound out of the trees, running along the base of the cliff. Water ran from the cliff in thin streams.
I had to get under cover soon, and the bushes weren’t going to work. The brown lumps of fur would give me away again. I had to find the compound.
Footsteps sounded on the path behind me, a regular thumping that belonged to the golden men. I picked up my pace, searching frantically for the wall of thorns. It had to be around this next bend, or was it the one after that?
I ran faster. The men behind me argued, complaining again about the wet. I ran around a thick tongue of rock from the cliff overhead. I heaved a sigh of relief when I saw a wall of thorns across the path ahead.
“Tylor,” I whispered as I hurried close to the bushes. “Open it up!”
I tugged the thorn bushes, looking for the one they’d worked loose to let me out. I didn’t stop to wonder why no one answered me. I found a bush that gave and pulled it out. I squirmed through the hole and turned quickly to pull the bush back into place. I turned around, sucking on my thumb where a thorn had torn a hole.
“Who are you?”
I faced a group of very surprised people, not the group I was looking for. I’d wriggled through the wrong wall of thorns. I could also hear the golden men approaching.
“They’re here,” I whispered. “Where can I hide?”
“Back here,” one of the men said and waved me behind him.
The golden men tugged the thorns that walled us in. I scrambled to my feet, darting to the cliff face. I stopped dead when I caught sight of Clark standing at the back of the crowd.
He grinned and shook his head. “Why am I not surprised? In there. Quick.” He motioned to a very small, shallow cave. The whole bottom of it was a puddle. Water bubbled from a spring at the back of the hollow to fill it.
I squeezed in, trying to stay to one side and out of the water as much as possible. I tucked my arms and legs in and hunched down. If the men searched the clearing, I didn’t stand a chance. I hoped they were as lazy and stupid as they seemed.
The golden men shouted at those in the pen to line up. I scrunched back farther, trying to stay out of sight. They tramped around in the wet sand. One of them stopped right in front of the hollow. I stared at the backs of his knees. I could have untied his sandals without stretching. I held my breath.
They stomped out. I watched the backs of the hairy legs move away and dared to breathe again. They hadn’t looked down, they hadn’t seen me. I leaned back and tried to stop shaking.
“They’re gone,” Clark said, ducking his head into the hollow. He gave me his hand and pulled me out of the now muddy water hole.
“They’re looking for you,” a woman said, staring at me.
“So what are you doing, Dace?” Clark asked.
“Hiding. You aren’t wearing collars.”
“What are they?” Clark flicked a glance at mine.
I tugged it. I wanted it off, whether it still functioned or not. “I’ve been running most of the night. Can we sit down?”
“What’s going on out there?”
I plopped down on the damp ground. The others settled around me. The woman who had spoken I recognized, Captain Esslen, of the Tommy Ruiz.
“We heard the signals the other night,” Clark said. “But no one here knows it well enough to understand what’s going on.”
“That explains why you didn’t respond,” I said. “Jasyn was worried about you.”
“You saw her? Where is she?”
“She’s fine, Clark. She’s with alpha group.”
I explained what I knew. I told them about the other groups and our plans. I told them that one of the groups had gotten a wand and they were working on a way to neutralize it. I told them about the ships.
“Commander Hovart is planning most of it,” I said. “With the supplies from my ship and the Tommy Ruiz, we’ve got half a chance of getting out of here.”
Captain Esslen had a wry smile on her face. “I didn’t think shutting the door would stop them. It was habit.”
“It worked,” I said. “Your pilots did an incredible job landing, if it was half as bad as what we went through.”
“I’ll tell them, if and when I see them again,” Captain Esslen, Joli, said.
“So now what?” Clark asked.
The others in the group watched me.
“We can’t go out until night,” I said. “Then I find my group again. There’s a meeting two nights from now.”
“You’re saying we actually have a chance to leave?” The small, dark haired woman in pale blue watched me intently as I talked.
“I’m not going to stay here,” I said. “If the others got through last night, they now have several com units, tools, and quite a bit of other stuff. If they can’t figure a way out of this with that, then no one can.”
They asked me questions, about the other groups, about the ships, about the planet. I answered what I could. They shared what they’d figured out. The pieces of the puzzle were coming together into a very strange picture.
Someone had colonized this world, for a reason I couldn’t figure out. It had to have happened about four or five hundred years ago. Longer than that and the radiation storms would have killed them by now. Their trap that lured ships in had only started working about three hundred years ago. The Kumadai Run itself had been mapped over six hundred years ago. Initially anyway. It was remapped regularly. The storms and everything else kept moving and warping the gravity fields into new configurations.
The questions we couldn't answer were why and who. The men looked human, but none of us had ever examined one up close. We sat and speculated while the rain continued to mist from the clouds. I fell silent, only half listening as my eyes slid closed. They drifted in smaller groups, whispering to each other.
Clark waited until most of the rest had drifted away. “Are you sure you’re all right, Dace? You look like you’ve been dragged backwards through a bush.”
“And I thought I looked pretty normal,” I answered through a yawn. “You don’t look too good yourself. Who gave you the black eye?”
He touched his eye gingerly. It was half swollen shut and a deep shade of purple. “Misunderstanding the other day. Tell me how Jasyn’s doing.” He tried to hide his deep worry. He wasn’t successful.
“I only saw her for a moment, Clark. It was dark, she looked about as good as the rest of us. Fewer bruises, though.”
“You were right, Dace,” he said, leaning back against the rock and closing his eyes. “I was an idiot about her.”
“You’ll get your chance to fix it, Clark.”
“Sooner or later.”
“Sooner, I hope.”
Enuri crossed back to us, her face creased into a frown. She knelt beside Clark, followed by a man introduced as Wade. They both wore Exploration uniforms and the same ship patch.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Enuri said to me. “It fits, that this is a colony that wasn’t supposed to happen. The planet can’t support the diversity you need for a viable settlement. Not to mention the radiation and everything else. What I can’t fit in is how a group of people that stupid could set this up.”
“You noticed it too?” Clark asked her.
“Not all of them are stupid,” I said. “I met one that was a bit more intelligent when they first caught me. Maybe they just send the dumb ones out to guard us.”
Enuri shook her head. “There can’t be that many of them. I’ve watched what we plant, I’ve seen what grows out there. It can’t support more than five hundred people at the most.”
“We estimated at least three hundred prisoners,” I said. “Could there be that few?”
“What if most of the colonists were killed when their ship landed?” Wade put in. “Small gene pool and interbreeding could account for the similar looks and lack of intelligence.”
“Then how could they have set it all up?” Clark asked.
Wade shrugged. “If we could find their ship and see what runs it, then we might be able to guess.”
“Ship?” I’d been stupid again, as thick headed as the golden men seemed to be. “That’s where they were going.” I explained what I’d seen during the night. “I bet that doorway leads into their ship, or at least the original shelters.”
“Can you show me where?” Wade asked.
“You can’t go out there,” Enuri protested.
He turned to her. “Why not? Dace did it.”
“What if they catch you?” She frowned, wrinkling her forehead into deep ridges.
“Catch who doing what?” Joli asked as she joined our conversation.
“Tonight,” Wade said to me. “Take me to that doorway. We’ll slip in and maybe get some answers.”
“The generators are probably located there,” I said. “I don’t know enough to dismantle them, though.”
“I’m not an engineer either,” Wade admitted.
“Is anyone here an engineer?” Clark asked Joli. “I never thought to ask. It didn’t seem relevant.”
Joli shook her blond head. “No engineers. Not in our group.”
A plan was hatching in my head. “What specialty do you have?” I asked Wade.
“Computer tech, I kept all the research equipment running on our ship.”
“Sounds useful to me.” A grin pulled at my face. “Tonight we can go collect a couple of engineers and then we’ll get that door open.”
“I’m going,” Clark said.
“You’re going to go to as many other compounds as you can,” I said. “We need someone to spread the word. We break in tonight and get those generators shut down. At sunrise day after tomorrow, you start them moving. We have to get to the ships before the force shield charges at sunset.”
“Day after tomorrow?” Enuri smiled a vicious smile. “One more day.”
I returned her smile. “That gives us one day to break in and disable the tractor beams. Most of the ships will fly with a few minor repairs. There’s only one problem left.”
“What?” Clark asked.
“Convincing Commander Hovart to move tonight on my plan.”