Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [90]
A preflight check of the weather indicated the presence of a small storm to the northwest. What he wanted was a hurricane, or some severe thunderstorms. Anything to help mask evidence of his liftoff. The modest rain event would have to do. Programming the shed’s roof and the boat’s navigation to the best of his ability, he tightened the harness as much as his body would tolerate, then waited.
Even if he was detected lifting off, nothing but a shuttle that happened to be in the immediate vicinity stood a chance of intercepting the vertically ascending lifeboat. Not that it mattered. Once out in space, drifting free, he could be tracked down and eliminated by an orbiting shuttle. Or, if he was extremely lucky, a warship might actually have to bestir itself for a moment or two to chase him down. If nothing else, he might at least inconvenience a few of the invaders.
Or having analyzed his craft and realizing it had no space-plus capability, they might simply decide to ignore him, letting him float aimlessly in the vastness of space until his supplies and atmosphere ran out. He suspected that was a forlorn hope. Having already witnessed evidence of their thoroughness, he did not expect that the Pitar would leave anyone alive, not even a lone soul adrift between worlds without any hope of returning to one. He might be found, and that they could not permit.
He had to try, though. Anything was better than sitting and waiting for death to come knocking. Better to kick back and keep on kicking for as long as was possible.
A pleasant feminine voice announced that departure was imminent. He had taken special care with reprogramming the boat’s methodical, businesslike tone. Now he was glad that he had. It might be the last voice besides his own he ever heard. A loud whine permeated the air, and the cockpit began to vibrate around him. There was no port, but the forward viewscreen showed the roof of the shed parting like a pair of flat, featureless hands. Beyond, black sky and scattered stars became visible in the lucent night of Treetrunk. The whine became an irritation, the vibration in his seat and harness almost soothing. A final massage, he mused. The solicitous attentions of a mechanical undertaker.
Something shoved him hard in the chest, and he gasped sharply. The receded roof panels disappeared, and the stars rotated wildly. In minutes he had punctured roiling cloud—the storm that was drenching the forest to the northwest. Minutes later he burst free, like a fist punching through stuffing, to find that the stars had multiplied beyond counting. The pressure on his chest lessened; the hand that had shoved him gradually withdrew. Small unstowed objects began floating about the cockpit. His stomach churned, and his inner ear insisted he was falling. And so he was—falling up.
Free of Treetrunk’s gravity, he was still alive, the embracing lifeboat still intact around him. Loosening his restraints, he hastened to check the readouts. Designed to locate and skew a vector for any nearby ship, the lifeboat was already searching for presumptive help. Prior to liftoff he had thoroughly disabled the automatic beacon designed to signal the lifeboat’s presence to other vessels. There was no help to be found here, and he did not want any nearby craft to pick him up. He would blow the lock first and die cleanly in the emptiness of the void.
The relevant readouts made no sense. Testing for malfunctions, he found none. There were no ships within detection range, which meant that it was possible there was nothing to detect him as he raced, silent and small, away from the surface of Argus V. That was impossible. Where were the Pitarian starships, their transports and shuttles? They could only be one place, he realized.
On the other side of the planet. For the moment, Treetrunk was screening him from detection.
It was not how he would have conducted an invasion. But the more he thought about it, and he had time for nothing else, the more he realized that his extraordinary