I wasn't actually undernourished, but we'd been on tight rations, and more or less hungry, for fifty-seven days. Which is something you can get used to, but not what I think of as ideal. In space you can't stop off at a friendly nearby restaurant or food store. The nearest planets are likely to be parsecs* away, and have a couple of Imperial frigates flying sentry around them, with chase craft ready for launch. We'd had more than enough of those.
Now Fanglith lay beautifully blue and white, primitive and savage, only 40,000 miles off our starboard window with, so far no sign of a picket ship on our instruments. Which were good ones, as you'd expect on a stolen naval patrol scout.
I wasn't sure what we could hope to accomplish there; we had no plans. But just then, food was what I was mainly interested in.
"I never expected to see this place again," I said, more to myself than to Deneen or Bubba or Tarel. We'd been lucky to get away alive the first time. But sometimes fate-whatever "fate" is-hits you when you're least prepared. And when it does, it can be with three or four punches, one after another.
We'd been 646 parsecs* from Fanglith, on a wilderness trek in the Snowy Range Preserve, when the first punch hit. Bubba was the first to notice. At that point, all that the rest of us noticed was Bubba. His big wolf's head raised, alert, attention fixed, looking off west.
*A parsec equals 3.258 light-years.
Deneen, my sister, put down the seared hind leg of a burrow pig. "What is it, Bubba?" she asked.
He didn't make a sound; didn't look at her. His attention was all on what he heard, or maybe what he was receiving telepathically.
Then the rest of us began to hear it, too. It was so low-pitched, it was as if we felt it before we heard it-a deep bass thrumming, barely audible. Yet somehow it seemed very loud-loud but far away. Uncle Piet and Bubba got to their feet, the rest of us a half second behind, and we all trotted through the trees to the edge of the cliff a hundred feet away. From there we could see southward across the foothills, toward the Valrith Plain.
"So it's happened," Piet said softly, as if talking to himself.
What we'd heard was a Federation battleship. Make that an Imperial battleship-things had changed. I stood there in my moccasins, staring. It must have been more than a quarter mile long, cruising across the clear morning sky two miles or so above the foothills, and maybe three miles south. It answered a question we'd been talking about a few days earlier.
"Let's go home," Piet said.
It took us very little time to break camp and leave, all without conversation. We had almost nothing to carry-no sleeping bags, no cooking gear, no tent. Each of us, except Bubba of course, carried a small blanket, a heavy belt knife, a spark wheel for starting fires, a tinder box, a sharpening stone, a self-made backpack, woven at Piet's instructions from the inner bark of a tree, and a water bag made the previous butchering season from the boiled-out gut of a fatbuck. We were being as primitive as we knew how-or as Piet knew how.
I doused the fire with a minimum of water-it was a small one-then stirred the coals, wet ashes, and dirt with a stick to make sure it was out. Tarel wrapped what was left of the burrow pig in its flayed-off pelt and stashed it in his pack. Jenoor untied the cords we used to set up shelters, and put them in hers. Like the packs, the cords were inner bark, cut into thin strips. They'd be hard to replace if we lost them, because it was late summer now, and the bark wouldn't strip off the trees anymore.
We were ready for the trail in about two minutes, maybe three. No one needed to ask what next. We'd go down to Piet's floater and fly home, hopefully to mom and dad and Lady and the pups. After that… We'd see.
The Snowy Range is beautiful, but hiking out, I didn't pay much attention to aesthetics. The country was rugged and mostly forest, there was no established trail where we were, and we were hurrying. When my attention wasn't on picking the route-I was the pathfinder that day-I had things on my mind. All of us did, I guess.
We'd been three weeks in the Snowy Range on a survival-training trek-part of the training Piet was giving us. Piet isn't really our uncle; he's more of an "honorary" uncle. He'd worked with our parents back when dad and mom had been members of the underground on Morn Gebleu, the executive planet of the Federation. Dad and mom had taken Deneen and me away from Morn Gebleu when we were little, to bring us up on Evdash, a world that was safer and a lot more democratic-an old colony world, well outside Federation boundaries.
They'd started training us seriously for the resistance after we'd come back from our crazy, unintentional- adventure, I guess you could call it-on the forgotten prison planet, Fanglith.
Piet had come to stay with us about a year later. He'd been a lot of places and done a lot of things, and became another trainer. One of the places he'd been-he'd hidden out there a couple of years-was a world where the intelligent species was a two-legged felid type with a primitive hunting/fishing culture. He'd learned things there about living in wilderness conditions that the known human worlds had lost long before, and he'd been teaching us the basics. By Bubba's standards, our wilderness skills were still pretty poor, of course. Espwolves had been pack hunters before their planet banged heads with a comet. Only a few dozen of them got evacuated with the human colonists there. Bubba had been pretty much grown already-old enough to have learned the skills of an adult wolf.
Espwolves are more than just telepathic. They're intelligent, with mental processes a lot like humans'. You kind of half forget that sometimes, because they look so much like any large canid species, and because they don't say much.
That's right-some of them can talk. Bubba had taught himself to speak Evdashian, more or less. By combining telepathy with intelligence, he'd analyzed words and speech patterns, and their meanings. Then he'd substituted certain sounds he could make for the human speech sounds he couldn't.
His approximation of Evdashian wasn't easy for him, though, so he wasn't much for small talk.
Because he belonged to a telepathic species, his brain probably didn't even have a speech center, and his mouth and throat weren't built for talking. His grammar was adequate, but rough-anything to keep it brief-and he usually avoided words that were hard for him, but with practice you could understand him. Our family had no trouble at all.
Anyway, a month earlier, the news had come that the Federation had declared itself "The Glondis Empire." That wouldn't make a lot of difference on Federation planets. Since the Glondis Party had taken over the Federation government, a few years before I was born, they'd run it more and more as a Party dictatorship.
But the declaration of empire would make a big difference to us. Our parents and Piet talked a lot about politics in front of us and to us; it was part of our continuing education. And they'd agreed that if it was now formally calling itself an empire, then the Party must feel about ready to start taking over the outlying independent planets. It would be just a matter of time before they got to us.
Evdash had been colonized by refugees the last time the central worlds had been an empire, four centuries ago. Most of the so-called colony worlds had been settled by refugees at one time or another. The central worlds have a tendency to go imperial now and then, and an empire usually became a dictatorship after a while, if it wasn't one to start with.
Our way out of the wilderness was mostly downhill- about four thousand feet downhill-but that didn't mean it was fast or easy. We hiked through old forest with lots of blown-down timber to pick your way over or around, arid down ravines littered with boulders and fallen trees. Toward noon a thunderstorm came through, booming and banging, and we stopped to wait it out in a thick dense glaru grove that would keep us dry if it didn't rain too long.
As we crouched there, Deneen looked at Piet. "The Empire didn't wait long, did it?" she asked.
It was a statement more than a question. A few evenings earlier, around the cook fire, Jenoor had asked Piet how long he thought it would be before the Empire took over Evdash, He'd said probably within two or three years.
"You don't suppose there's been much fighting, do you?" Jenoor asked, looking at me.
I looked at Piet. He was leaving it to me. "I doubt it," I told her. "A few skirmishes, maybe. Fly a million-ton monster like that over the largest cities on Evdash, and ideas about defending the planet evaporate in a hurry. That battleship has got more firepower all by itself than the whole Evdashian navy. I'm just glad it's down here in the atmosphere and not out a few hundred miles bombarding the surface."
The rain had begun-fat drops in myriads assaulting the leaves above, overlaying the swish of wind-ruffled treetops with sibilant rustling; intermittent rolls of thunder drowned them all. Occasional shattered droplets touched my face with mist, and the air smelled of ozone.
"Tell us what you're thinking about, Deneen," Piet said.
I turned to look at her. She was frowning, more grim than thoughtful.
"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 pass 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 assured us there was no one near it-that was just one advantage of having an espwolf-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 Evdashian. 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 canid was an espwolf. There are lots of different kinds of canids from the known worlds, and espwolves are rare. As far as we knew, ours were the only ones on the continent. Our friends thought Bubba was just another big exotic canid 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 medkit 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 reassuring. 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 analysis 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 bumps. 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.