Voices - Vornholt John. Страница 30

Talia screamed new nodules on her vocal cords as she felt the sudden sensation of weightlessness. At first she thought the ship had stopped until she heard the whistling of wind all around them. Deuce cut forth with a litany of swear words, and their voices were quickly drowned out by a rush of air against the Dumpster-like cargo container. They weren’t just weightless—they were plunging through planetary atmosphere! Massive gravity had its grip on them.

Then the naked bulb burst, showering them with glass fragments, and the air ventilators stopped working—and both of them were screaming! Talia hardly noticed the way the cargo boxes banged against her, threatening to crush her in the free-fall. She just spun around in the darkness, her body a rubber ball cascading from one wall into another, swiping Deuce and the boxes in the process. 

When she realized she might as well die calmly, Talia wrapped her arms around her head, tucked her legs in, and tried to still her galloping heart. Then the floor of the container abruptly rose up and crashed into her! She lay sprawling, gasping for air, as the big crate righted itself and shifted around. Now she heard groanings and creakings of a weirder sort, and air roared around the exterior of their strange vehicle.

“Damn,” muttered Deuce in the darkness, “I wish they’d warn us before they cut us loose.”

Still gulping air, Talia wheezed, “You expected that?”

“Old smugglers’ trick. They plot their trajectory over the desert in North America and slow down just enough to push us out. With a parachute. It’s not very accurate, but the federales are none the wiser that they dropped something.”

Talia listened to the air whizzing past them, and she marveled at the fact that she was taking a parachute jump, albeit inside a box with bruises and welts all over her body. Blood was running through the hair on her scalp from a nasty cut.

“The chute is open?” she croaked.

“It had better be,” mused Deuce, “or we’ll be coyote dinner. But what if they would never find our bodies. We could be legends! Everyone would think we ran off together, you and me, and are living the good life on Betelgeuse 6.”

“Yeah,” said Talia with a gulp. “So where are we, anyway?” For all she knew, it could be Betelgeuse 6.

“You’ll see,” answered Deuce. “Brace yourself. I hear the wind changin’.”

She had a second or two to curl up in a ball before the giant crate hammered onto something solid. She caught her breath, thinking they were safe, when the Dumpster began to move again. This time it tilted radically to one side and slid down an incline like a house on skis. She tried to scream, but her voice was too raw; she could only stare into the darkness and feel the rattling bumps beneath her. They thudded to another abrupt stop, and this one held, at least until Talia could start breathing again.

“Are we alive?” she rasped.

“Yeah,” answered Deuce. “Cover your head—I’m gonna shoot my way out of here. Sometimes the metal starts to melt.”

She didn’t know Deuce very well, but she had learned to heed his warnings. Talia covered her head, but she kept one eye open to see what he was doing. She gasped when several plasm streaks shot through the darkness and punched holes in the lid of the container. Using the light from the discharge to aim, Deuce worked the smaller holes into a jagged hole about half a meter in diameter, or just big enough for a smallish person to climb out.

Talia squinted her eyes, expecting blinding sunlight to flood through the hole. Instead, soothing darkness greeted her eyes, plus the sight of nearly as many stars as a person saw in space. A city girl, she wasn’t sure what all this meant.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“I told you,” muttered Deuce, “you’re gonna die here real soon if you don’t stop asking me questions. If you’re going to be useful to me, you’ve just got to obey me, and that’s it.”

“Sorry,” she answered. Talia knew she had a secret weapon in her ability to scan him, but she had a feeling that Deuce had been scanned before and would know it. Behind the rough exterior was a cagey and cool intellect, and she had every reason to believe that Deuce was as ruthless as he claimed to be. He would kill her for a slight provocation. So she opted to lie low and pick the time and place to scan him, knowing she might only get one chance.

In the dim starlight, she could just see Deuce scrounging around in his crate, the one in which he had been smuggled aboard the methane-breathers’ ship. He finally pulled out a black briefcase and a dirty duffel bag. He opened the duffel bag and took out a crowbar, which he used to pound down the ragged edges of the hole he had shot open. His pounding turned the crate into a tin drum, and Talia had to cover her ears. Deuce finally stopped and took a flashlight out of his bag to study his handiwork.

“There,” he drawled, “at least we’ll have air. Want to go out and take a look around?”

Talia shook her head worriedly. She was beginning to feel that terrible panic she had felt upon waking up after the bombing—the shock, the disorientation, the feeling that she was stuck in a nightmare.

In fact, she told herself, she was stuck in a nightmare of the worst sort—reality. There was no waking up, so she might as well deal with it. She was in a shot-up Dumpster in the middle of the desert, chased by everyone, in the company of a murderer. No matter where they were, she was dependent upon this criminal for the time being, and it might get worse before it got better.

One thing Talia knew would never be the same—she would never again be smug about her life. Right now, being the lone human telepath on an out-of-the-way depot for aliens sounded just fine, the dream job. She would never again knock it or quest after anything higher. And if she could get back to that life, she would be eternally grateful. Right now, she wondered if it was even possible to recapture any shred of that past.

While she was musing in the dim light given off by a holeful of stars, Deuce turned on his flashlight again and began searching for something else in his duffel bag. He drew out a small electronic device, checked to see that it hadn’t been damaged, then pulled out its antenna. He pressed a button on the device, and a red light began to blink on and off.

Talia was about to ask him what it was, but then she remembered: No more questions. Perhaps she should just stop talking altogether. Hobnobbing, being charming and gregarious, had only gotten her into trouble in the last few days. And when it had mattered, when she kept telling everybody the truth, nobody would listen to her. Maybe she should adopt Deuce’s motto: Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies. If she said nothing at all, she couldn’t say anything wrong.

She was startled by a thud as Deuce turned one of the crates on end. Then he proceeded to climb up and peer out the hole. He made a low whistle.

“We are really in the middle of nowhere. I hope my boys have some decent coordinates.”

Talia started to ask if this was really Earth, then she remembered not to talk. That device was some kind of homing beacon, it was clear, so somebody was out there, looking for them. She suddenly had a strong instinct to get out of the crate, and she pounded on Deuce’s calf.

“Hey!” he shouted down. “What’s the deal?”

She tried an experiment and told him telepathically to get off the crate.

He blinked at her and smiled. “All you had to do was ask.”

Deuce climbed down and Talia climbed up. By standing on her tiptoes, she could just get her head, the top of her shoulders, and one arm out through the hole, but she was glad she had made the effort. Their little vessel was parked at an angle at the bottom of a dry wash, buried halfway under the sand, and surrounded by scrubby desert. Trailing behind them like a tattered bridal veil was the parachute that had saved their lives. It was ripped and streaked with dirt from the tumble down the wash.

In the blue starlight she couldn’t see very far, but she could see gnarled trees at the rim of the wash and other ghostly shapes. Mesquite trees, Joshua trees, chollas, yuccas, prickly pears—she tried to remember all the spiny, weirdly shaped flora that grew in places like this. She was glad this desert wasn’t just sand dunes but had some vegetation to it, even if the plants did appear stunted and misshapen.

She suddenly had an overwhelming desire to stand on the ground. After the nightmarish events of the last three days, she just had to get out and stand on firm ground. She began to squirm out, and Deuce put a hand underneath her foot to give her all the leverage she needed to get her hips through.

Talia screamed as she slid down the tilted side of the crate and plummeted into the sand. It got into her mouth and hair, but its grittiness felt wonderfully real, and the air smelled like perfume after that stifling container. After her scream, the desert was silent, but as she sat without moving for a few minutes, the twitters and chirps came back. She heard a distant howl. Unaccountably, Talia felt relaxed and unafraid for the first time since that awful morning of the conference.

The telepath was startled a moment later when a black briefcase landed in the sand not far from her. She reached over to open it, but the clasps were locked; it was a solidly built case. She pushed the briefcase away and ducked when the dirty duffel bag came flying out of the hole a moment later. The bags were followed by Deuce himself, squirming through the small opening. Like Kosh, he was an unlikely savior, she thought, but if she would ever end this nightmare and get her previous life back, she needed him. She would leave him his blood money in the briefcase. He had probably earned it.

She scrambled out of the way as she saw Deuce getting ready to slide down the crate and hit the sand. He rolled athletically off the edge of the crate and landed on his feet never losing his grip on his PPG.

“Ah,” said Deuce, “that’s better. If we haven’t been found by midday, we’re going to regret getting out of there. But maybe we can crawl under it for shade.”

He plopped down in the sand and fished a hat out of his duffel bag. “So,” he drawled, “know any good jokes?”

She looked at him intently for several seconds, and he nodded. “You’re not going to talk anymore, huh? Are you, like, suffering from some kind of trauma?”

Talia nodded, and it was the truth.

“So, when my friends show up, you’re a mute, right? And you ain’t no telepath.”