For Love of Mother-Not - Alan Dean Foster [85]
Meanwhile, Lauren brought the skimmer around in a wide circle and set it down between the two long buildings on the west side of the camp. The camp personnel were too busy trying to escape into the forest and dodging massive horns and hoofs to wonder at the presence of the unfamiliar vehicle in their midst.
They had a fifty-fifty chance of picking the right building on the first try. As luck would have it, they choose correctly . . . no thanks, Flinx thought, to his resolutely unhelpful Talent.
The roof was already beginning to cave in on the operating theater when they finally reached that end of the building.
“Flinx, how’d ye—?” Mother Mastiff started to exclaim.
“How did he know how to find you?” Lauren finished for her as she started working on the restraining straps binding the older woman’s right arm.
“No,” Mother Mastiff corrected her, “I started to ask how he managed to get here without any money, I didn’t think ye could go anywhere on Moth without money.”
“I had a little, Mother.” Flinx smiled down at her. She appeared unhurt, simply worn out from her ordeal of the past hectic, confusing days. “And I have other abilities, you know.”
“Ah.” She nodded somberly.
“No, not that,” he corrected her. “You’ve forgotten that there are other ways to make use of things besides paying for them.”
She laughed at that. The resounding cackle gladdened his heart. For an instant, it dominated the screams and the echoes of destruction that filled the air outside the building. The earth quivered beneath his feet.
“Yes, yes, ye were always good at helping yourself to whatever ye needed. Haven’t I warned ye time enough against it? But I don’t think now be the time to reprimand ye.” She looked up at Lauren, who was having a tough time with the restraining straps.
“Now who,” she inquired, her eyebrows rising, “be this one?”
“A friend,” Flinx assured her. “Lauren, meet Mother Mastiff.”
“Charmed, grandma.” Lauren’s teeth clenched as she fought with the recalcitrant restraints. “Damn magnetic catches built into the polyethelene.” She glanced across to Flinx. “We may have to cut her loose.”
“I know you’ll handle it.” Flinx turned and jogged toward the broken doorway, ducking just in time to avoid a section of roof brace as it crashed to the floor.
“Hey, where the hell do you think you’re going?” Lauren shouted at him.
“I want some answers,” he yelled back. “I still don’t know what this is all about, and I’ll be damned if I’m leaving here without trying to find out!”
“’Tis you, boy!” Mother Mastiff yelled after him. “They wanted to use me to influence you!” But he was already out of earshot.
Mother Mastiff laid her head back down and stared worriedly at the groaning ceiling. “That boy,” she mumbled, “I don’t know that he hasn’t been more trouble than he’s worth.”
The upper restraint suddenly came loose with a click, and Lauren breathed a sigh of relief. She was as conscious as Mother Mastiff of the creaking, unsteady ceiling and the heavy mass of the surgical globe swaying like a pendulum over the operating table.
“I doubt you really mean that, woman,” she said evenly, “and you ought to stop thinking of him as a boy.” The two women exchanged a glance, old eyes shooting questions, young ones providing an eloquent reply.
Confident that Lauren would soon free Mother Mastiff, Flinx was able to let the rage that had been bottled up inside him for days finally surge to the fore. So powerful was the suddenly freed emotion that an alarmed Pip slid off its master’s shoulder and followed anxiously above. The tiny triangular head darted in all directions in an attempt to locate the as-yet-unperceived source of Flinx’s hate.
The fury boiling within him was barely under control. “They’re not going to get away with what they’ve done,” he told himself repeatedly. “They’re not going to get away with it.” He did not know what he was going to do if he confronted these still-unknown assailants, only that he had to do something. A