Freedom Omnibus Read online

  Chapter One

  Kristin Bjornsen wondered if summer on the planet Barevi could possibly be the only season. There had been remarkably little variation in temperature in the nine months since she’d arrived there.

  She’d been four months in what appeared to be the single, sprawling city of the planet during her enslavement and now had racked up five months of comparative freedom - albeit a parlous hand-to-mouth survival - in this jungle, after her escape from the city in the flitter she’d stolen.

  Her sleeveless one-piece tunic was made of an indestructible material, but it wouldn’t suit cold weather. The scooped neckline was indecently low and the skirt ended midway down her long thighs. It was closely modelled, in fact, after the miniskirted sheath she’d been wearing to class that spring morning when the Catteni ships had descended on Denver, one of fifty cities across the world that had been used as object lessons by the conquerors.

  One moment she was on her way to the college campus; the next, she was one of thousands of astonished and terrified Denverites being driven by force-whips up the ramp of a spaceship that made the Queen Elizabeth look like a tub toy. Once past the black maw of the ship, Kris, with all the others, swiftly succumbed to the odourless gas.

  When she and her fellow prisoners had awakened, they were in the slave compounds of Barevi, waiting to be sold.

  Kris aimed the avocado-sized pit of the gorupear she had just eaten at the central stalk of a nearby thicket of purple-branched thorn-bushes. The bush instantly rained tiny darts in all directions.

  Kris laughed. She had bet it would take less than five minutes for the young bush to re-arm itself. And it had. The larger ones took longer to position new missiles. She’d had reason to find out.

  Absently she reached above her head for another gorupear. Nothing from good old Terra rivalled them for taste. She bit appreciatively into the firm reddish flesh of the fruit and its succulent juices dribbled down her chin onto her tanned breasts. Tugging at the strap of her slip-tight tunic, she brushed the juice away. The outfit was great for tanning, but when winter comes? And should she concentrate on gathering nuts and drying gorupears on the rocks by the river for the cold season? She wrinkled her nose at the half-eaten pear. They were mighty tasty but a steady diet of them left her hungering for other basic dietary requirements. By watching the creatures of the jungle, she’d been able to guess what might be edible for her.

  Remembering her survival course gave her the clue to superficial testing on her skin. She’d had two violent reactions to stuff that the ground animals seemed to devour in quantity, but the avians had guided her to other comestibles. Her tem in the food preparation unit of her “master’ had given her other commodities to look for - though few of those grew wild in this jungle. Still, there were little yellow-scaled fish from the river that had provided her with both protein and exercise.

  A low-pitched buzz attracted her attention. She got to her feet, balanced carefully on the high limb of the tree.

  Parting the branches, she peered up at the cloudless sky.

  Two of the umpteen moons that circled Barevi were visible in the west. Below them, dots that gave off sparkles of reflected sunlight were swooping and diving.

  The boys have called another hunt, she mused to herself and, still smiling, leant against the tree trunk to take advantage of her grandstand seat. The jungle had quite a few really big, really savage creatures which she had managed to avoid, making like a jungle heroine and taking to the trees and vines. By dint of hard work and sweat, she had used the useful tools from the kit on the ffitter to tie vines to trees that led to and from her favourite food-browsing spots and to the river. Her escape routes were all aerial.

  Before she had taken absence without leave from her situation’, Kris had done her homework on more than what was edible on Barevi. She had picked up a good bit of the lingua Barevi, a polyglot language, made up from the words of six or seven of the languages spoken by the slaves and used by the “masters’ to convey orders to their minions.

  She had gleaned some information about those who had invaded Earth, the Catteni. They were not, for one thing, indigenous to this world but came from a much heavier planet nearer galactic centre. They were one of the mercenary-explorer races employed by a vast federation.

  They had only recently colonized Barevi, using it as a clearing house for spoils acquired by looting unsuspecting non-federation planets, and a rest-and-relaxation centre for their great ships’ crews.

  After years of the free-fall of space and lighter-gravity planets, Catteni found it difficult to return to their heavy, depressing home world. During her brief enslavement, Kris had heard the Catteni boast of dying everywhere in the galaxy except Catten. The way they “played’, Kris thought to herself, was rough enough to ensure that they died young as well as far from Catten.

  Huge predators roamed the unspoiled plains and jungles of Barevi, and

  the Catteni considered it great

  sport to stand up to a rhinolike monster with only a single spear.

  That is, Kris remembered with a grim smile, when they weren’t brawling among themselves over imagined slurs and insults. Two slaves, friends of hers, had been crushed under the massive bodies of Catteni during a free-for-all.

  Since she had come to the valley, she had witnessed half a dozen encounters between the rhinos and the Catteni.

  Accustomed to a much heavier gravity than Barevi, the Catteni were able to execute incredible manoeuvres as they softened their prey for the kill. The poor creatures had less chance than Spanish bulls and, in all the hunts Kris had seen, only one man had been injured and that had been a slight graze.

  As the flitters neared, she realized that they were not acting like a hunting party. For one thing, one dot was considerably ahead of the others. And by God, she saw the light flashes of the trailing ffitters’ forward guns firing at the “leader’ Hunted and hunters were at the foot of her valley now. Suddenly black smoke erupted from the rear of the pursued ffitter. It nosed upwards. It hovered reluctantly, then dived, slantingly, to strike the tumble of boulders along the river’s edge, not far from her hiding place.

  Kris gasped as she saw a figure, half-leaping, halfstaggering out of the badly smashed flitter. She could scarcely believe that even a Catteni could survive such a crash. Wideyed, she watched as he struggled to his feet, then reeled from boulder to boulder, to get away from the smouldering wreck.

  With a stunningly brilliant flare, the craft exploded.

  Fragments whistled into the underbrush as far up the slope as her retreat, and the idiotic thorn-bushes she had recently triggered sprayed out their poison-tipped little darts.

  The smoke of the burnihg ffitter obscured her view now and Kris lost sight of the man. The other ffitters had reached the wreck and were hovering over it, like so many angry King Kongish bees, swooping, diving, trying to penetrate the smoke.

  An afternoon breeze swirled the black clouds about and Kris caught glimpses of the man, lurching still farther from the crash site. She saw him stumble and fall, after which he made no move to rise. Above, the bees buzzed angrily, circling the smoke and probably wondering if their prey had gone up in the explosion.

  Catteni didn’t hunt each other as a rule, she told herself, surprised to find that she was halfway down from her perch. They fight like Irishmen, sure, but to chase a man so far from the city? What could he have done?

  The crash had been too far away for Kris to distinguish the hunted man’s features or build. He might just be an escaped slave, like herself. If not Terran, he might be from one of the half-dozen other subjugated races that lived on Barevi. Someone who had had the guts to steal a ffitter didn’t deserve to die under Catteni force-whips.

  Kris made her way do
wn the slope, careful to avoid the numerous thorn thickets that dominated these woods.

  She had once amused herself with the whimsy that the thorn were the gorupear’s protectors, for the two plants invariably grew close together.

  At the top of the sheer precipice above the falls of the river, she grabbed the vine she had attached there for speedy descent. Once on the river bank she stuck to the dry flat rocks until she came to the stepping-stones that allowed her to cross the river below the wide pool made by the little falls. Down a gully, across another thorn-bush-filled clearing, and then she was directly above the spot where she had last seen the man.

  Keeping close to the brown rocks so nearly the shade of her own tanned skin, she crossed the remaining distance.

  She all but tripped over him as the wind puffed black smoke down among the rocks.

  “Catteni!” she cried, furious as she bent to examine the unconscious man and recognized the grey and yellow uniform despite its tattered and black smeared condition.

  With a disdainful foot under his shoulder, she tried to turn him over. And couldn’t. The man might as well have been a boulder. She knelt and yanked his head around by the thick slate-grey hair which, in a Catteni, did not indicate age: they all had the same colour hair.

  Maybe he was dead?

  No such luck. He was breathing. A bruise mark on his temple showed one reason for his unconscious state.

  For a Catteni, he was almost good-looking. Most of them tended to have brutish, coarse features but this one had a straight, almost patrician nose - even if there was a lot more of it than an elephant would want to claim - and a wide well-shaped mouth. The Catteni to whom she had been sold had had thick blubbery lips, and she’d known that Catteni were developing a sexual appetite for Terran women.

  A sizzling crack jerked her head around in the direction of the wreck. The damned fools were shooting at the burning craft now. Kris looked down at the unconscious man, wondering what on earth he had done to provoke such vindictive thoroughness. They sure wanted him good and dead.

  The barrage pulverized what was left of the ffitter, leaving the fire no fuel. The wind, laden with coarse dust, blew an acrid stench from the wreckage. The man stirred and vainly tried to raise himself, only to sink back to the ground with a groan. Kris saw the ffitters circling to land on the plateau below the wreck.

  “Going to case the scene of the crime, huh?” It was completely illogical, Kris told herself, to help a Catteni simply because there were others of his race out to get him. Rut. . . She backtracked his route, just in case he had left any marks for them to follow. She went as far as she could on the bare rock. Where dirt began, ash had settled in a thick layer, obliterating any tracks he might have made.

  After all, the Catteni might stumble on her if they did a thorough search, thinking their victim had escaped the crash.

  He had got to his feet when she returned to him, dazed, heavy arms hanging by his sides as he tried to get his eyes to focus. She attempted to guide him but it was like trying to direct a mountain to move.

  “Come on, Mahomet,” she urged softly. “Just walk like a nice little boy to the river and I’ll duck you in. Cold water should bring you round.

  A sharp distant gabble of voices made her start nervously. God, those Catteni had got up that rock-face in a hurry. She’d forgotten they could take prodigious leaps on this light-gravity planet.

  “They’re coming. Follow me,” she said in lingua Barevi.

  He groaned again, shaking his head to clear his senses. He turned towards her, his great yellow eyes still dazed with shock. She would never get used to such butter-coloured pupils with black irises.

  “This way! Quickly!” She urgently tugged at him. If he didn’t shake his tree-stump legs, she was going to leave him. Good Samaritans on Barevi had better not get caught by Catteni.

  She pulled at his arm and he seemed to make a decision.

  He lurched forward, one great hand grasping her shoulder in a vice-like grip. They reached the river bank, still ahead of the searchers. But Kris groaned as she realized that the barely conscious man would never be able to navigate the stepping-stones.

  The shouts behind them indicated that the others were fanning out to search the rocks. Urgently she grabbed several fingers of his big hand, leading him to the base of the falls.

  “If you can’t float, it’s just too damned bad,” she said grimly.

  She dropped his hand, stepped back and leaping forward again, shouldered him into the water.

  She dived in, right beside him, and when he continued to sink, she grabbed and caught him by the thick hair.

  Fortunately, the water made even a solid Catteni manageable.

  Exerting all her strength and skill as a swimmer, she got his head above water and held it up with a chinlock.

  By sheer good luck, they had surfaced in the space between the arc of the falls and the cliff, the curtain of water shielding them from view. As the Catteni began to struggle in her grasp, the five hunters leapt spectacularly into view in the clearing by the pool. Her “Mahomet’ was instantly alert and, instead of struggling, began to tread water beside her.

  The Catteni were arguing with each other now and each seemed to be issuing conflicting orders to the others.

  Mahomet released himself from her chinhold, his yellow eyes never leaving the party on the bank. They watched, hands making as little movement as possible although the falls would conceal any ripples their motions made.

  One Catteni, after a heated debate, crossed the wide pool in a fantastic - to Kris - standing leap. He and another began to move downstream, carefully examining both banks and casually surmounting up-ended barge-sized boulders with no effort. The other three went charging back the way they had come, still arguing.

  Mter an endless interval, during which the icy water chilled Kris to the bone, the refugee touched her shoulder and nodded towards the shore. But when she realized that he was going to head back the way they had come, she shook her head emphatically, pointing to the other side.

  “Safe! That way,” she shouted at him over the noise of the falls.

  He frowned. “I’ve a flitter to hide in.” She jabbed her finger in the direction of her hidden vehicle.

  Stunned as she suddenly realized what she had just said, she stared at him. “Oh, God!” He raised an eyebrow in surprise, and she hoped for one long moment that he had not understood what she had said.

  But he had, and now his yellow eyes gleamed at her in the gloom with a different sort of interest.

  He’s like a great lion, Kris thought and almost choked on fear.

  “You have aided a Catteni,” he said in a deep rumbling voice in the lingua Barevi. “You shall not suffer for that!” Kris wasn’t so sure when she tried to climb out of the river and found herself numb with cold, and strengthless.

  He, on the other hand, strode easily out of the water He looked down at her ineffectual struggles, frowning irritably. Then, with no apparent effort, he curled the long fingers of one hand around her upper arm and simply withdrew her from the water, supporting her until she got her balance.

  Shivering, she looked up at him. God, he was big: the tallest Catteni she had yet seen. She had inherited the height of her Swedish father and stood five-foot ten in her bare feet. She had topped most of the Catteni she had encountered by several inches, but his eyes tilted downwards to regard her. And his shoulders were as broad as the scoop of a JCB.

  “Where is this flitter?” he demanded curtly.

  She pointed, furious that she obeyed him so instantly and that she couldn’t control the chattering of her teeth or the trembling of her body. He reached for her hand, relaxing his grip a little at her involuntary gasp of pain.

  Replace “grubby paws’ with “high-gravity paws’, she told herself in an effort to keep up her spirits as she stepped out in front of him.

  “I’ll have to lead the way through the thorns,” she said. “Or maybe thorns don’t bother Catteni hides?” s
he added pertly.

  To her surprise, he grinned at her.

  “It is perhaps fortunate for you that they do.

  As she turned, she realized that she had never seen a Catteni smile before. She noticed, too, that he was following carefully in her footsteps. It was good to know that he was no more anxious to disturb the thorn-bushes with their vicious little barbs than she was.

  They were halfway to the hidden flitter when both heard, off to the right in the valley, the staccato volley of loud Catteni voices.

  Mahomet paused, dropping to a half-crouch, instinctively angling his body so that he did not touch the close-growing vegetation. He listened, and although the words were too distorted for Kris to catch, he evidently understood them. A humourless smile touched his lips and his eyes gleamed with a light that frightened Kris.

  “They have seen movement here. Hurry!” he said in a low voice.

  Kris broke into a jog trot; the twisting path made a faster pace unwise. When they broke into the dell just before the extensive thicket, she paused.

  “Where? Are you lost?” he asked.

  “Through those bushes. Watch. And when I say move, move!” He frowned sceptically as she picked up a handful of small stones. With a practised ease and careful gauge, she threw in a broad cast to left and right, watching and counting the thorn sprays to be sure she had triggered every bush. To be on the safe side, she scooped up one more handful of pebbles and threw that in a wider arc.

  No further thorns showered.

  “Move!” His reaction time was so much faster than hers that he was hallway across the clearing before she got to the V. She dashed in front of him. “We have five minutes to cross before they re-arm.” An expression that was almost respectful crossed his face. Impatiently, she tugged at him and then began to weave her way among the bushes, following her well memorized private route through this obstacle. When she made the last turn and he saw the flitter, its nose cushioned in the heavy cluster of thorn-thicket limbs, he gave what Kris assumed was a Catteni chuckle.

  She waved open the flitter door and regally gestured for him to enter. He walked straight to the instrument panel, grunting as he activated the main switch.