Freedom's Landing
- Автор: Маккефри Энн
- Серия: Catteni Sequence #1
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Freedom's Landing». Краткое содержание книги:
The alien Catteni value strength and intelligence in their slaves—and Kristin has managed to survive her enslavement while hundreds of other humans have not. But her trial has just begun, for now she finds herself part of a massive experiment. The aliens have discovered a new world, and they have a simple way of finding out if it’s habitable: drop hundreds of slaves on the surface and see what happens.
If they survive, colonization can begin. If not, there are always more slaves.
"His farm is on hill. This thing," and she kicked at its flange, "fall over," and Astrid demonstrated something losing its balance and tumbling downhill.
Joe had moved to the storage areas, hunting for something.
"They left no tools behind them. These things selfrepair?"
"We saw some working on others," Zainal said and stepped up to the face of the harvester to start removing its solar panels.
"Oh, my word, this planet's odd," Sarah said.
"You can say that again," Kris agreed. "They'll want panels and storage batteries back at the camp, or wherever. There's quite a herd of them here." She peered into the shadows of the garage to the indistinct forms parked there.
"Could we bed down here tonight?" Sarah asked with such a lack of expression that Kris almost grinned.
"I think so," she said. "I wouldn't mind being out of that wind for a night, myself."
"There're rock-squats back aways picking up her weapons.
"Kris, go with her," Zainal said when the woman started off on her own.
"I can handle myself," Sarah said indignantly.
"You go with," Zainal said. "This planet has dangers.
Kris knows dangers."
"Yeah, but I don't hear as well as Coo," Kris said, carefully setting down the comunit and the map case.
- " Sarah said, "Is he always like that?" Sarah asked Kris when they were out of earshot.
"Like what?"
"Don't bristle," Sarah said with a grin. "He's not half-bad for a Catteni. Not that I've met that many. But I heard." and she let her tone rise up, a subtle prompting for Kris to expatiate.
"As Catteni go, he's pretty good," Kris said noffcommittally.
"And he's saved a lot of folks "Oh my word! You don't need to defend him to me. I came to on the outside of that bloody field and the guy next to me was being chewed up. I would have been next but for you stomping about like a brumby. Anyway, it's only good sense to go out with someone. Believe me, you do where I come from!" They came back with rock-squats and some of the tender-fleshed little avians, brushwood and a pile of droppings from the next field over. They had spotted only distant ffiers but Kris pointed them out and told Sarah how to avoid becoming a meal.
"Are they after one now?" Sarah asked, squinting at the aerial menaces.
"Who knows?" Kris didn't particularly want to find out. "Now, if you were back on Earth, you'd probably jump into your four-by-four and go investigate."
"Probably, but we're not on Earth now, are we?" and there was a world of regret in her tone.
"Sorry," Kris said in a rueful voice. She hauled her gaze away from the distant avians and they walked on in silence for a while.
Then they reached high ground where Sarah stopped to look out over the vista of neatly squared, hedged fields and sighed.
"Oh my word! My da would go spare. And no-one is in residence?" "Haven't found any one yet. And that's why we're dismantling the garages, to sort of give notice." Sarah's eyes bulged. "You mean you want to find out who made those -. - machines?"
"Did anyone tell you about the ship that collected the harvest?" Kris grinned down at the slighter woman, the braces of rock-squats swinging from the stick she carried over her shoulder.
"I heard something - a ship as big as a city?"
"Small city," Kris said with a laugh.
"You want to go on it?" Sarah's eyes went wide again but from respect.
"Not me, personally," Kris replied, though if Zainal was involved in the adventure, she'd probably be right there with him. And he probably would be in the boarding party. "It'd be interesting to see what species set up this planet, made it self-sufficient, self-repairing, yielding so much food "FOOD?" Sarah gulped and a brief panic almost made her drop her stick.
"That's what this planet does - makes food, and we don't know for whom. Or what. Except that they're probably omnivores like us." Sarah gulped again. "I hadn't thought about that aspect of it."
"Well, it's easier to concentrate on making out day by day at the moment," Kris agreed.
"Yeah, there's that all right," she said as they came around the bend of the smooth-domed rock that housed this garage.
The others had dismantled what could be taken back to the camp for recycling. Oskar had shown himself particularly adept with the disassembly and the others had started to defer to him. As he worked, he asked for English words for various items and cheerfully muttered them under his breath, committing them to memory. Joe was almost his equal but then, he said, from the time he was old enough to lift a screwdriver he'd been taught how to do repairs on his father's sheep station.
"You're looking at a heap of future handhelds and other useful gadgets,' Joe said, gesturing to the neatly stacked things, including wires, connectors, linkages and all kinds of curious gadgetry that had been inside the mechs. "A DIY treasure-trove."
"Would you know how to make something out of this?" Kris asked.
"Depends," Joe said cheerfully, "on what's needed." Zainal came up then, her comunit in his hand. "You are asked to call home."
"ET?" Kris asked with a grin but only Sarah and Joe caught the reference.
She shrugged and tapped out 369 and a strange voice answered.
"Worry here."
"Worry?"
"Ah, I'd be speaking to Kris?"
"You are, and you'd be Worrell."
"Since I landed here, it's been worry, miss, so "elp me.
Report?" She gave it to him and he expressed pleasure in the discovery of yet another garage and its reusables.
"Mitford's all right, isn't he?" she asked before she signed off.
"Never beuer," Worry said and even over the line his voice sounded sardonic. "A truly amazing man."
"No sign of any fly-bys?"
"You'd be recalled on the double if there were!
"I can believe that!" There was a laugh at the other end and then Worrell signed off with a reminder to register the approximate location of the new garage on the map. Zainal assisted her, as he was able to give her the relative distances from their previous camp and what he called a good guess as to the contours of the day's travel. Although Kris knew her legs could testify that they'd travelled far that day, her legs only knew they'd travelled, not how far up hill and down.
The next noon, they reached the top of a high ridge and saw the unmistakable shine of sun glinting off a body of water so large that a further shore was not discernible even from their vantage point. Then, to their right on the shore line, the obvious square outlines of an unnatural formation bulked large.
"A place for boats? They fish, too?" Astrid asked, shielding her eyes with one hand.
"Could be. They'd hardly let the wealth of a sea just sit there without harvesting it," Kris said.
"Too right," Sarah murmured, also peering ahead.
"Would it be a salt sea?"
"We'll find out," Joe said.
"Zainal?" Kris asked since the Catteni had said nothing but was staring hard at the building.
"We go careful. Fishing year long."
"True, but how could a machine fish? I mean, the sea doesn't follow any programme, does it?
Storms and stuff - - - unless they can control tides as well as the rain. Not that I wouldn't put it past them," Kris said, mildly bitter.
"They do not control us," Zainal surprised her by saying.
"Tell the others."
"About the flying darts and stuff?" She did and then turned back to Zainal. "However, if there are machines, surely they'd be specialized for use in the water. That building seems to be right on the edge. I don't think we have much to worry about them charging inland at us."
"Famous last words?" Joe said, nudging her with an elbow and grinning.