A Call to Darkness - Michael Jan Friedman [75]
“C’mon,” he said, grabbing the man by the shoulder. “It’s too late-let him be!”
The wounded man resisted. “No-you go. Just give me the rock.”
The drivers were getting closer. There were five or six of them-and though they moved cautiously, they were definitely headed this way.
Geordi pressed the rock into the other one’s hand.
But he didn’t retreat toward the bridge. Instead, he scurried under a wagon and came out in the open-where the drivers could see him.
Geordi waited just long enough for one of the armored ones to note his presence-to point and alert the others. Then he took off, determined to make the best possible use of the jagged formations that punctuated this high ground.
He had no illusions that he could elude these drivers forever. After all, the only reasonably sure escape route was in the direction of the bridge, and he had already forsaken that option.
But if he led them on a wild enough chase, the prisoners would have a better chance to get away. Not just the wounded one and his companion, but the ones who’d already made it over the bridge.
He would be trading their freedom for his. It didn’t make much sense from the point of view of self-preservation. But damn-it sure felt right.
At the first sizable upthrust, Geordi stopped and peered back at his pursuers. So far, they were right on his trail. And progressing pretty efficiently, despite their armor.
From hereon in, he would have to make it more difficult. Confuse them a little.
He dropped down again, trying to keep to the shadows, and scuttled straight back. There was a sheer drop no more than thirty meters away. He would have to turn before that-maybe veer off to his left, where there were a couple of squat formations he could take advantage of.
Geordi was halfway to the cliff when the terrain turned against him. The rocky surface that had appeared so solid just gave way beneath his right foot. And though he tried to take the slip in stride, he found he couldn’t.
His foot was stuck, wedged into a crevice he could barely see. When he pressed his hands against the ground and attempted to pull free, all he got for his efforts was a shoot of agony through his ankle.
Geordi set his teeth, tried to twist in another direction. This time, it hurt so much that he almost cried out.
Not that it would have mattered. The drivers were bearing down on him, their bulk blotting out the stars on the craggy horizon.
Geordi’s mouth went dry as he saw the way they held their weapons. As if they meant to use them…
No, he told himself. They would calm down once they saw what they’d been chasing: one man, unarmed and helpless.
But as the armored ones loomed above him, he could read the fury in them. The murderous fury. For no good reason, except that maybe that wrestling match had worked them up to a frenzy.
Suddenly, Geordi realized that his good deed might have cost him more than his freedom.
It might have cost him his life.
Chapter Fourteen
IT HAD BEEN A RISK, O’Brien told himself-but an unavoidable one.
After all, the transporters couldn’t work at quite the same distance as the ship’s sensors-not even under the best of circumstances.
And of course, present circumstances were far from the best. All the debris in the area made the teleportation process somewhat trickier than normal; O’Brien had had to compute an ungodly number of path-density changes. It was one thing to beam someone down through atmosphere and then, say, a known depth of bedrock. But to direct a set of molecules through metal and vacuum, metal and vacuum, a hundred times or more-before even entering the planet’s atmosphere-now that was a horse of a different color.
What’s more, their information on A’klahn surface details was fairly sketchy. Oh, sure, they had programmed in all the topographical macrocontours captured by the sensors. And they had chosen as open a place as possible. But what if the ground rose suddenly in a particular spot? Or fell? What if there was some sort of building they hadn’t detected? An animal, a