Looters Of Tharn rb-19 Read online

  Somewhere not too far away, something had produced a violent shock wave. Blade doubted that it was natural. This land seemed to be as flat as a billiard table, and just about as unlikely to produce anything noisy and geological.

  So whatever had made the shock wave was probably artificial. Blade crouched low behind a bush. Anything or anybody able to make an explosion this powerful might also be able to detect a man miles away.

  Blade started to shift his position to where he could see out in all directions and no one could easily see him. Another crack-boom-rumble sounded from the direction of the city. Blade scanned the horizon and the buildings for some possible sign of where the blasts came from. No flash of flame, not even a rising and spreading cloud of smoke. What was making the explosions, and where?

  For the third time the sounds blasted their way across the plain. Watching closely, Blade saw the blast wave kick up dust and debris in the streets of the city. There was a lot of power behind those blasts, whatever they were. No doubt his view of the blast site itself was cut off by the mass of thousand-foot buildings. But why no smoke clouds rising even higher into the sky? There was something increasingly odd about those explosions, if that was what they were.

  Three more explosions came in rapid succession, then five minutes of silence and after that three more. Blade waited in concealment as the silence following the last three explosions grew longer and longer. Five minutes, ten, twenty. After half an hour, Blade crawled out from under the bush, stood up, and scanned the city again. It stood as before silent and grim. Nothing moved in its rubble-strewn streets or buildings with windows staring like the eye-sockets of bleached skulls.

  Blade headed down the ridge toward the city. He couldn’t help wishing he had something more than the sapling as a weapon. The explosions had been too powerful to think about with an easy mind. He would have felt a damned sight more comfortable walking toward the city with a couple of light antitank rockets or something like that slung on his back.

  Oh well, they couldn’t send through the computer everything he might need in a new dimension. Even if they could, they’d need to send six porters or a Land Rover to carry the whole lot! Blade smiled for a moment at the idea of seven stark-naked men tramping across some other-dimensional landscape, himself in the lead and six others following with heavy packs.

  The grass rose a yard high as Blade descended the ridge. Once again he had to plow through it like a ship through pack ice, his massively muscled legs moving up and down tirelessly. His eyes continuously scanned the city, and from time to time looked to either side and behind him. He couldn’t imagine what danger might come at him from the miles of empty, open plain. But a man in a new world seldom died from the dangers he expected.

  Blade had covered about half the distance to the city when something in the grass ahead made him stop and look more closely. Something gleamed whitely there, reflecting the sun from among the greens and yellow-browns of the waving grass. Blade took two more steps forward and saw the unmistakable glint of sunlight off metal.

  White, bleached bones lay scattered in the grass, the bones of human beings and horses all mixed together. The sunlight glinted from the unrusted portions of swords, spear heads, iron-studded belts, round helmets, the metalwork of harnesses.

  Blade picked up the most intact of the belts and tied it around his waist. Then he thrust the least-rusted of the swords into it and stood up. That made him feel better. Now he might stay alive if he ran into more of the people whose bones littered the ground around him.

  Blade crouched down again and examined the remains more closely. At once he noticed a few odd things about them. For one thing; there were clearly three different types of people among the dead. One type was short, almost bandy-legged, broad-framed and squat, with round skulls and wide faces. A second was taller, some of them six feet or over, thinner, long-limbed and graceful. A third-the most numerous-looked like the results of cross-breeding between the first two. What was even odder was that most of the tall skeletons seemed to be those of women! The lighter bones and the pelvic girdle were hard to mistake.

  There was also something odd about the armor and weapons. There was quite a lot of metal there-good but crudely finished wrought iron, most of it. Efficient but primitive. Yet some of the helmets, many of the breastplates, and nearly all of the belts were made of some pale, tough, plasticlike material.

  Blade picked up one of the belts and tried to snap it in his hands. He pulled at it until the muscles of his thick arms stood out like rocks and the sweat popped out on his forehead. But he might as well have been trying to snap a length of steel cable. He braced one of the breastplates-designed for a woman, he noticed-against a horse’s ribcage and tried to drive the sword through it. He put all his strength into the thrust, but the armor only dimpled and sprang back into shape. It took several jabs before he was able to drive his sword through it.

  Tough stuff, this, thought Blade. He looked more closely at the belt in his hands. He’d be damned if this stuff wasn’t almost identical to teksin, the ubiquitous material that the people of Tharn had made from the mani plant. Almost? He couldn’t see any difference at all!

  Could he be in Tharn?

  The thought made his pulse race and his breath come more quickly. He couldn’t help it. The idea that after all the failures he had finally returned to a particular dimension was too exciting.

  Then the excitement faded. So far he had nothing to prove that he was in Tharn except a few pieces of something that looked very much like teksin and a few skeletons of warrior women. That wasn’t enough. There was no reason why the people of some other dimension couldn’t have come up with something identical to teksin. Nor were fighting women unique to Tharn. Until he had more to go on, he would assume that this was a new world, with a whole set of new dangers.

  He turned back to examining the skeletons. They lay scattered every which way, and wind and time had broken some of them apart. But all the bones were intact, none of them broken or gouged. Some of the skeletons looked as though the people had simply lain down to sleep or fallen off their horses and never got up again. To Blade, those bones didn’t look like those of people and horses who had died in battle. What had killed them, then?

  Blade knew he could only guess for the moment. Meanwhile he would watch his step and his back even more carefully. He rummaged through the remains until he found a helmet and a breastplate that more or less fitted him. Then he tied two or three of the belts together at his waist as an improvised loinguard.

  He looked toward the city again. He was armed and armored now. If any of the three peoples still lurked in the city, he felt he could give a good account of himself. But what then? None of these people could be the ones who had built the city. That was the relic of an advanced civilization. None of these people seemed much beyond early Iron Age.

  But there was still that damned teksinlike stuff they used!

  How did an Iron-Age people get that? Tharn had been a land of advanced if decadent science. These people—

  Blade shrugged. Speculating in advance of facts was never a very good idea. It seemed even less a good idea in this dimension, which seemed to be throwing four or five mysteries at him all at once.

  However, multiple mysteries didn’t bother Blade. They just made him more curious and more determined to satisfy his curiosity. Hitching his sword into position for a quick draw, he strode on toward the city.

  Closer to the city the grass seemed shorter and the ground firmer. Blade plunged along with long, powerful strides. In another twenty minutes he was more than a mile closer to the city, and stopped again.

  Now there was more than that teksinlike material to make him wonder if he was back in Tharn. Seen closer up, a good many of the city’s buildings were beginning to remind him of Urcit, the capital of Tharn. Urcit was gone now, destroyed by the final explosion of its Power. But parts of this city might have been Urcit’s ghost-if a city could have a ghost.

  Again, this could
be coincidence. But two coincidences between this dimension and Tharn? Blade couldn’t help wondering. He also couldn’t help moving forward even faster than before, until be was almost trotting. He covered the next mile at that pace, then stopped again.

  No, the resemblance to Urcit was just a coincidence, startling as it was. Blade couldn’t see a single case of the phallic theme that had dominated art and architectural decoration in decadent Urcit, with its people of beautiful, sex-starved women. Several of the buildings bore large, complex designs in red. They looked to Blade more like three or four large snakes having an orgy than anything else. Definitely they weren’t the magnificently explicit phallic themes of the people’s art.

  He felt almost disappointed. He remembered Zulekia’s face hovering before him as the computer worked on his brain, thrusting him into this dimension. He would have liked to see the changes made in the time since he left Tharn. He had broken the mold in which both the people and their barbaric enemies, the Pethcines, had been trapped. He had given them-call it their freedom, for want of a better word. What had they done with it?

  He doubted that he or anybody else from Home Dimension would ever find out.

  He rose to his feet again and started forward. Then in the next moment he stopped, stared, and threw himself flat on the ground.

  Out from behind a building on the edge of the city slid a gleaming metal machine. It rode some thirty feet off the ground, and the air blurred under it. With one glance Blade could see that it was a machine built for one purpose, and one purpose only.

  War.

  Chapter 4

  The machine was so ugly that Blade couldn’t imagine it being used for anything but war. It was swinging back and forth across a narrow arc as it moved cut from the building. The movement reminded Blade of a hunting dog in the field, casting about for a scent. Blade watched it move steadily closer, noting details as he made them out.

  The machine must have been a good forty feet long, twenty feet wide, and ten feet from its flat silver belly to the domed turret on top. It looked like two half eggshells, flat side down, a smaller one perched on top of a larger one. At the rear of the main body was a railed platform.

  From the front of the turret a long silvery tube stuck out, ending in a glowing purple lens. Seven antennae sprouted in all directions from the top of the turret. On either side of the turret were streamlined but featureless bulges. Four other bulges projected near the front of the hull, two on either side. At the bow itself were four circular ports. As the machine drew closer still, Blade could see four more bulges on the otherwise flat bottom of the hull. The polished metal of the hull and turret shimmered and gleamed in the sun.

  The machine closed to within a hundred yards of where Blade crouched in the grass. He stayed totally motionless. But he never took his eyes off the machine. It was obvious that whoever had built it was advanced enough to use antigravity. That meant comparably advanced weapons of some sort. Blade didn’t want to find out the hard way just what they were.

  At fifty yards the machine came to a stop, then sank until it was only a few feet above the grass. The four bulges on the bottom split open and four articulated metal legs unfolded, reaching for the ground.

  The broad metal plates at the end of each leg touched the ground. Instantly the shimmering in the air under the machine faded away. With an audible creaking and clanking the machine settled down. Blade saw that the metal finish was not as polished and flawless as it had appeared. The underside was stained and discolored, and the upper hull and turret showed pitting and scarring. This was an old machine. As old as the city and built by the same people? Possibly. But the machine’s age didn’t necessarily mean that its weapons would be useless.

  Slowly the machine’s turret began to turn. The two projecting bulges on either side of the turret also split open. From one rose a blinking yellow white light. From the other rose a round metal disc. Both wobbled upward on jointed metal arms until they, were some twenty feet up.

  Blade noticed that two more identical machines had slipped out of the city while he watched the first one. But these were not moving toward him. Instead they were drifting away to either side, riding their shimmering antigravity fields fifty feet above the ground. After a few minutes they came to a stop and landed. They formed a triangle with the nearest machine, a triangle more than a mile on each side.

  The patrol has deployed to survey their area of operations, thought Blade. Now-what’s the next step in their standard operational procedure?

  Gradually Blade became aware of something distinctly unpleasant filling the air around him. It was not an odor, not a sound. It was a something that his senses couldn’t register, that his mind couldn’t define precisely. But something that was gnawing away at the heart of his self-confidence, filling him with a swelling, nameless fear and dread. The machine began to seem like a fanged monster gathering itself to leap on him like a man-eating tiger. Blade felt a cold sweat breaking out on his skin and heard his teeth begin to chatter. He realized that his hands were shaking so hard that he couldn’t have drawn his sword to save his life. He knew that in another moment he was going to lose control of his bowels and stomach. He would be lying there, helpless in his own filth, when the machine came marching over to him, to crush him under those massive metal feet, or-Then, somewhere in Blade’s mind behind the mounting fear, a light dawned. A faint light that flickered at first, like a candle in a rising wind, then swelled and grew until he realized what was paralyzing him with fear.

  Subsonics.

  A modulated sonic pulse at a frequency below the range the human ear can pick up produces fear reactions. The more intense the subsonic pulses, the more intense the fear reaction.

  Blade heaved a sigh of relief. Now that he knew what he faced, he could use all of his training, all of his self-control, to fight his instincts. Part of the fear had been the deadliest, most uncontrollable sort of fear-fear of the unknown. Now that was gone. He could think and fight again.

  Blade did not relax, however. He was quite sure that the machine had nowhere near exhausted its bag of tricks yet. He crouched and waited to see what it would try next.

  He did not have long to wait. The light on the end of the other arm began blinking in a steady pattern. Flick-flick-flick-flick. It was becoming monotonous, boring, almost hypnotic.

  Hypnotic. That was it. The light was set to a pattern designed to have a hypnotic effect on anyone who watched it for long. Such as anybody who was already half-paralyzed with fear induced by the subsonics? Probably.

  It was certainly a waste of time to try that trick on Blade. He wasn’t half-paralyzed with anything. The subsonics were only making him mildly nervous now, like a man sitting in a dentist’s waiting room. He was also nearly impossible to hypnotize. This wasn’t a boast, it was a fact, tested by many psychiatrists over many years.

  So far so good. The war machine hadn’t come up with anything Blade didn’t think he could handle. But he was quite sure there was still more to come. Again he settled down to wait for the machine to show its hand-or whatever else it used for finishing off its victims.

  The turret kept turning as the subsonics and the blinking light went on. Blade noticed that it turned not only slowly but irregularly, as though, it were badly lubricated or had an unreliable power source.

  Blade lay motionless in the grass until he felt one foot beginning to go to sleep. Cautiously he shifted position until the foot was comfortable again. The machine paid no more attention to his movement than if he had been a mosquito whining about the turret.

  Blade realized that if he had been carrying that antitank rocket or even a hand grenade, he could have hit the machine easily. It seemed to have nothing except the subsonics and the hypnotic light to keep somebody from lying in wait and attacking it. But this war machine was too big, too powerful, too complex to be so weakly armed. It must have other weapons.

  But what the devil were they? Blade realized that at the present rate he and the machine mig
ht sit here on the plain outside the city until winter came and covered them with a foot of snow, without his finding out anything. He was going to have to move into action, and find out what the machine’s other weapons might be.

  He reached down and cautiously pulled off the belts he had tied into an improvised loinguard. Lifting one that was all strips of leather and teksinlike plastic, he gathered his legs under him. Then he exploded upward in a mighty leap, throwing the belt as hard as he could toward the machine. It soared thirty feet into the air and halfway to the machine before dropping into the grass. Before it hit, Blade dropped down flat on his stomach, once again not daring to move and hardly daring to breathe.

  The turret swung toward the place where the belt fell, the long tube jutting out like an elephant’s trunk feeling the air. The turret swung like the head of a man with a bad case of arthritis in his neck. Blade realized that if things got really tight, he could probably run faster than the turret could turn.

  The turret swung until the tube was pointing at the spot where the belt had fallen. The purple lens at the muzzle lit up and blinked three times. Blade waited for something to shoot out of the muzzle-laser beam, death-ray, rocket, shell, whatever. But nothing happened.

  For a moment Blade wondered if the weapon in the turret had stopped working. The machine looked old enough. But he wasn’t going to make that dangerous assumption on the basis of one test. He would try again.

  This time he picked a belt of teksin with a number of iron discs tied onto it. Again he leaped, again his arm whipped out, again the belt soared through the air. Being heavier, this one flew a good deal farther. Blade was back flat on the ground before it even reached the peak of its flight. The machine’s turret was turning even as the belt hit. The light blinked again. Then the tube sank down until it was aiming at the belt, and a solid bar of searing, glaring purple light stabbed out of it. Blade buried his head in his arms and listened to the angry sizzling noise as the beam stabbed out, again and again.