The Orphaned Worlds Read Free Page B

Nikolai said to meet him at the top of a waterfall near the eastern slope.’ He looked at Greg. ‘Are you ready?’
    ‘Well, I’ve no’ had much sleep and nothing to eat but we’re kind of short on choices so … aye, let’s go.’
    Alexei laughed and gave his shoulder a comradely punch. ‘You will be fine – Rory says you are tough and I believe him.’
    ‘Must have a word with him when we get back,’ Greg said as he clambered after his companion, heading down the other side of the craggy hill. As they approached the tree line, a flock of fowics came down to investigate, landing heavily on thin upper branches and scrambling along on all fours. Fowics were like flying squirrels back on Earth, except that their forelimb wings were more fully adapted for flying rather than gliding, and their heads, ears and snouts had a distinctly feline appearance. Alexei dug some hard tack out of a waist pouch and held out a few fragments. One of them calmly sauntered down its branch, tiny beady eyes fixed on the prize, snatched it with its teeth then leapt and wriggled up into the leafy shadows.
    Greg laughed. ‘If they can get any sustenance out of that stuff, they’re probably evolving faster than we are!’
    Not all forest denizens were as harmless. During the two-hour trudge through an increasingly swampy forest, they saw a tree nest of pepper-wasps, around which they detoured, and more than once hurried past yellow sniperviles, bulge-eyed lizards that could spit poison lethal to Humans. By the time they crossed a brook to dry, rising terrain, Greg felt edgy and twitchy and was longing to return to the high valleys of the Kentigerns.
    ‘This had better be worth it,’ he muttered, following Alexei over a fallen tree. ‘When we walk in there, Vashutkin’s guy better have, I don’t know, a vial of babble dust made especially for Kuros, or plans for that compound they’re building at Port Gagarin, or … well, something.’
    Alexei was puzzled. ‘You don’t know what this meeting is for?’
    ‘No idea, just that Vashutkin said it was so vital that I had to be there in person.’
    ‘Ah! – I know, is a surprise birthday party, perhaps!’
    Greg smiled and shook his head. ‘Not for another four months, but nice try.’
    At the crest of the slope they suddenly heard a rushing sound above the breeze that rustled through the trees. The ground ahead rose in large rocky steps, mossy stairs for a giant. Overhead, the dense canopy of the Forest of Arawn continued unbroken in all directions as Alexei led the way around a steep bluff, pointing out the rippervine which hung down it from above. Pushing through a tangle of bushes, they emerged near the rocky bank of a stream, several dozen yards from where it poured over a cliff edge, a waterfall plunging to the forest below. Then two figures stepped out of the vegetation on the other side and minutes later Greg was shaking hands with a grinning Kao Chih while Nikolai Firmanov explained.
    ‘What a pair of daruki,’ he said. ‘Some of them know their way through woods, but those two must be coastal boys. But Kao Chih? – there is more here than the eye sees.’
    ‘I was … fortunate,’ Kao Chih said. ‘I knock out one with my skull’ – he mimed with a backward jerk of the head – ‘get free, take his gun and knock out the other, then I think I will rescue you and I put on the guns and knives, then I tie up those kwai, then … Nikolai arrives and we go spying.’
    Nikolai, the older but shorter of the Firmanov brothers, smiled and patted Kao Chih on the shoulder. ‘Steady nerves, this one. All ready to go to war. So I told him that my brother had gone to fetch you and meet later by waterfall but on way here we get close to main gate to Belskirnir, at night.’ He shook his head. ‘Not good, Greg – they are watching gate, around clock. Only other way in is through one of Van Krieger’s private doors.’
    Peter Van Krieger’s father was one of the original founders