The Witch Goddess Page 3

  But where all the men held their weapons ready to fire, butt at shoulder, hand on pistolgrip, forefinger caressing trigger, Erica's was laid aside within easy reach while she used both hands to hold a pair of large, heavy binoculars to her eyes. Without removing the glasses, she spoke to Corbett.

  "Well, whatever godforsaken sty they crawled out of, they are certainly not Ahrmehnee. Compared to those ragged, shaggy wild men, the worst of the Ahrmehnee would look like twentieth-century executives. And if they keep to the direction they seem to be headed, they'll be no danger to us.

  "Moreover, they're running like the devil himself is on their tail. Quite a few are afoot, and several appear to be wounded, too."

  "How many, would you say, Erica? How many, so far?" asked Corbett, adding, "Don't take time to count, estimate."

  "No way of knowing how many came off that plateau before we got here, of course," the woman replied, "but I've seen a good six hundred hotfoot it southwest."

  Corbett pursed his lips, slipped the safety catch back on his rifle, then rolled onto his side to face her. "Then I think that it might be a good idea if we stay where we are long enough to see just what it is that has sent above six hundred wild mountaineers stampeding off that plateau."

  "You're right, of course." She nodded once, the glasses still at her eyes. "Thank goodness for a military mind. My apologies for the row I raised when Dave Sternheimer assigned you to this mission."

  She lowered the binoculars, turned to face him and laid a sweaty, grubby hand atop his own none-too-clean one. "And, Jay, double apologies for what I said back up the trail, when the big boom failed to materialize on schedule. More than likely, it's actually Harry's fault. All you did was prepare and lay the charges based on Harry's calculations."

  Corbett shrugged his solid, muscle-packed shoulders. "No matter, Doctor, there's been no pursuit, anyway… knock on wood." He tapped his knuckles once on the polished butt of his rifle. "And the blame could lie anywhere—I could have goofed as easily as Dr. Braun, or the fuses could have been faulty, or the timing mechanism, for that matter. Yes, we took extra precautions in protecting them, but even so, some hundreds of miles on muleback could easily screw up delicate devices like that.

  "But if blame must be laid, leave the onus on me; as long as I get you and this pack train safely back to Broomtown, I don't give a damn about those charges, Doctor."

  The woman tightened her fingers on his hand and parted her dark-red lips to smile lazily. "Why can't it be 'Erica', Jay, as it was last night? Or do you forget so quickly?"

  The massive black-haired man grimaced."No, I've not forgotten you… or last night, Doctor. But there's a time and a place for everything, and that is something I should have remembered last night; had I, Dr. Braun wouldn't be pouting on rearguard right now."

  The olive-skinned young woman snorted derisively. "Harry Braun is a pompous, conceited, supercilious, oversensitive ass, Jay. And I know, believe me—we were married once, very briefly, five or six hundred years back. I took his possessiveness and his professional jealousy as long as I could, and when he reached the point of trying to beat up on me, I injured his then-body so seriously that he had to transfer, that night.

  "Ever since then, David—Dr. Sternheimer—has been trying every sneaky, underhanded way that he knows of to get us back together. Why, I have no idea. That's the real reason, I'm sure, that he picked both of us to transfer to these Ahrmehnee bodies for the initial part of the mission, before I found out what those lesbians had in their valley.

  "But this dark, sexy body would have died virginal—and not one of the bodies I've spent any time in over the years has—before I'd have coupled with Harry Braun… and he knows it, too, Jay. It's not you he's pouting at, it's me."

  Corbett opened his mouth, but before he could speak, the small, short-range transceiver lying on the slope between them crackled into life and a tinny voice demanded, "Well, what are we going to do, Erica? I hope we aren't going to camp here. According to the map, there's a sizable creek only a few kilometers farther on, and I need a bath… you most likely could use one too, after humping that damned Corbett all last night."

  Both of them reached for the transceiver, but the woman's hand reached it first. "Dr. Braun, Major Corbett is the commander of this expedition, militarily speaking, and his is the decision regarding where we camp, how far we go each day or when and why and for how long we halt on any occasion. But you know the facts, I don't need to repeat them to you. And what I do in my tent at night is my affair, not yours. I nearly killed you once; I can improve upon that effort if you press me too far with your spite and your unjustified jealousy, Doctor.

  "Now, Doctor, for good and sufficient reasons, Major Corbett has elected to stop where we presently are to wait until one group of armed men pass across our route and to see if any others will follow them. So halt the pack train, Doctor. Major Corbett or I will notify you when he feels it safe to march again. End of transmission, Doctor!"

  With a sigh, Harry Braun turned off his own transceiver and rehung it on the pommel of his mule's saddle. Erica got bitchier toward him every year. Surely she was aware that he had never stopped loving her, not even when she had undercut him^ while they were still married—taken unjustified credit for the success of what had been a joint project—not even when she had flagrantly humiliated him by sleeping around with half the adult males in the Center, not even when she had very nearly ended his existence permanently by almost killing that fine young body he had had for only a few years.

  He set his jaw, his lips forming a thin, hard line. Yes, she knew. Erica-the-Bitch knew that he still loved her and used the fact to torment him ceaselessly, giving whatever body she owned to anybody but Harry Braun. She—

  "Mighty One… ?" The man forking the mountain pony at his side spoke diffidently.

  Harry shoved his righteous rage far back in his mind and turned to the Broomtown man. "Pass up the word to halt in place, Vance, then take over the rearguard. Don't shoot unless you're attacked; otherwise, lie low and pass the word up to the van. That's where I'm headed now."

  So saying, Braun nudged his well-trained mule into a smooth, distance-eating trot. He headed south, along the outer verge of the narrow track skirting the low cliffline of the plateau, occasionally deigning to acknowledge the deeply respectful greetings of the Broomtown packers and guards.

  Broomtown was in that area once, long ago, known as Tennessee—or so stated David Sternheimer. But Harry privately disagreed with the senior director of the J&R Kennedy Research Center; he thought that it was actually located farther south, in the former state of Georgia. Not that the actual geographic location or their disagreement over it really mattered a rat's ass anyway, thought Braun.

  Broomtown had been established some century and a half earlier, when the settling of the formerly chaotic Southern Kingdom of Ehleenee under the direction and aegis of Milo Morai and his Confederation had made the base in central Georgia untenable.

  "Damn that meddling mutant, anyway!" Braun muttered to himself. "If not for him and his western nomads we'd control most of the East Coast by now. The damned Greeks had become so weak and decadent that anyone could've taken them over with fucking little effort."

  As Braun trotted past a small group of guardsmen, their leader reined his pony about, drew his saber and saluted with a flourish. Half smiling, Harry raised a hand from his own reins and gifted the Broomtowner a curt nod in return.

  Rough and hopeless as they had seemed at the start, each succeeding generation of the Broomtown folk was turning out better and better. To begin with, they had been only a small group of mountaineers—all related in one degree or another—living in miserable hovels behind a hilltop palisade and scratching out a meager existence from farming played-out land and raising a few skinny animals. In the leaner years, they raided smaller, weaker groups, and they lived constantly in dire fear of raids by larger, better-armed folk.

  But the decision of the directors of the Center had ra
dically changed all of that. Broomtown was now a village of some thousands of souls, living safely, securely, peacefully in rows of neat, well-built houses, some of which boasted as many as five rooms.

  The technology of the Center had brought Broomtown the awe and respect of all its neighbors, and raids now were a dim fear of the past. That same technology had enriched the townspeople's lives in other ways, as well—advanced methods of farming and scientific stock-breeding had given them far more food for far less labor, carefully selective breeding of the Broomtowners themselves was, Braun and his colleagues felt certain, the principal reason for the quantum advances of intelligence and abilities in the last few generations.

  The sergeant who had just saluted him and that noncom's elder brother, Sergeant Major Vance, were excellent examples of the sagacity of the Center's breeding program for their base-cum-colony. Not only could these two read and write— something which all Broomtowners had been able to do for the last three generations—they and many of the once simple and primitive natives were now quite competent in the understanding and use of Center technology.

  Broomtown now included small shops and factories, even a small foundry. Practically all of the Center's firearms and ammunition were products of Broomtown, as were the large and the small transceivers and powerpacks. Moreover, the younger Broomtowners were becoming quite inventive and otherwise talented, constantly developing ways and means to render their products smaller, lighter in weight and yet still more effective than the Center-produced models they copied.

  But there were many needful items of high technology that Broomtown could not produce at all and that the Center turned out only with immense difficulty and hideous expenditure of energy. That was precisely why the packloads of ancient machines and spare parts for them were of such unheralded potential value to the Center, why acquisition of them had been felt to be well worth the cold-blooded murder of hundreds of men, women and children, not to mention the expense of fitting out and dispatching this packtrain and the necessary armed guards to accompany it.

  Nor were the refined metals to be sneezed at; gold, silver and copper, in both coins and bars; bars of tin, lead, zinc, nickel, chromium, tungsten and aluminum; spool on spool of wire of differing materials, gauges and degree of resistance. And too there were quantities of tools and technical equipment of varying sorts.

  There had never been any sure way of ascertaining just how and where those strange, savage women had gotten the combined trove, how long they had had it or why they had transported it from place to place—if, indeed, they had, for some of the devices looked to Braun as if they had been in place for far longer than the Hold of the Maidens had been occupied.

  Had matters been different and the decision been entirely his to make, Braun would have preferred to extirpate the population of the hold, use the big copters to fly up equipment and personnel both from Broomtown and the Center, then observe and study the functions of the devices in their places, before beginning to dismantle them. That, he knew, would have been the proper, scientific way to do it, but the discovery that the hold lay directly atop a volcano on the verge of erupting had precipitated the Board's decision to proceed as they had.

  Some of the devices were unfamiliar to Braun and Erica Arenstein, not to mention Corbett, who was not and had never been a scientist, only a professional soldier; but from what little he had had time to skim from the ancient, crumbling books, charts, servicing manuals and blueprints, Braun could assume that most of the equipment was from a communications and/or tracking installation—a military or NASA facility, he surmised—although why a partially natural cave in the southern reaches of the Appalachian Mountains had been chosen and enlarged to contain it was beyond his imagination.

  When he at last came within sight of the low, brushy ridge which twisted and turned across the track at a more or less right angle to the line of cliffs, Braun dismounted, removed his rifle from the scabbard and slung it diagonally on his back, clipped a pouch of spare magazines to his belt, then, after hesitating for a moment, added his binoculars to the load, before hitching his mule's reins to a small pine.

  The Broomtown trooper on the other side of Erica yielded Braun his place with alacrity, when the scientist came bellying up the incline.

  "Now, goddammit, Harry," Erica hissed venomously, "what the hell are you doing up here? You were supposed to be in charge of the train and the rearguard."

  She might have said more, but Corbett quickly interposed, "Oh, don't make an issue of it, Dr. Arenstein. Since there's been no pursuit by now, I doubt very much there will be any. Besides, Sergeant Major Vance is a competent professional, I'd make him and several others commissioned officers if Dr. Sternheimer would agree."

  "But Dr.

  Braun deserted his post," snapped Erica hotly. "He willfully left the place to which he'd been assigned. Under conditions like these, I thought that that was punishable by death, Jay."

  Corbett sighed tiredly. "Doctors, you are both in charge of the scientific aspects of this mission, I am in charge of the military aspects, and, militarily speaking, you both are rankless supernumeraries. Neither of you has any assigned posting, as you both lack the ability and experience to satisfactorily fill a military command capacity. The commander of the rearguard is Vance; his brother, Sergeant Major Vance, and Sergeant First Class Cabell are each in charge of one segment of the train, and Master Sergeant Gumpner commands this vanguard, here.

  "That you two doctors have been at murderous odds for centuries has been common knowledge at the Center and at our various bases. Who is or was or will be right or wrong in your feud is unimportant to me just now, nor would I particularly care if the two of you killed each other here and now. But Dr. Sternheimer impressed upon me the critical necessity of bringing the cargo of this train safely into Broomtown, and I gave him my word of honor that I would assuredly do so.

  "So, Doctors, I hereby serve you both a warning: If any more of your ongoing hostility seems to me to be disrupting or even demoralizing my command, I shall have you both disarmed and bound to your mounts, or I shall personally shoot you, whichever seems the best course to me at the time. Do I make myself clear, Doctors?"

  When neither answered immediately, Corbett went on in a lower but intense tone, "Please recall who and what you are. No matter how adult and sophisticated our Broomtowners may seem, from day-to-day contact, remember than in many respects they still are as primitive and childlike as were their ancestors of a century and a half ago. They all bear a degree of respect that borders upon veneration toward the Center and toward any of us from the Center, but especially for you scientists.

  "Such spiteful, petty behavior as you two have evinced on this return trip has upset them more than you, or even they, realize. Dr. Sternheimer has great plans for Broomtown, you know, and intends to start to implement them soon after we get back, using some of the very men who are with us. So, for the sake of the Center, for the sake of all that we have worked for and suffered for over the centuries, for the sake of the United States of America—which we still are serving and which we can soon begin to rebuild—I beg of you both not to show these Broomtowners any more of your feet of clay. Save your mutual hatreds until you're back at the Center, among your own kind. Otherwise, Doctors, I'll find it a necessity to place my duty ahead of friendship."

  When a full hour had passed with no more of the shaggy fugitives coming down from the plateau and no appearance by whoever or whatever had put them to such panic-stricken flight, Corbett dispatched his subordinate, Sergeant Gumpner, and a small mounted patrol to scout out the route of march. Within another half hour, the noncom radioed back that no living mountaineers were anywhere in sight, only a couple of dead ones and a few stray ponies, which he and his men had rounded up. At that, Corbett mounted the rest of the van and signaled the bulk of the train to resume the march.

  As they proceeded on, he kept both of the scientists with him, placing Braun ahead of him on the narrow track and Erica behind. They had
ridden on without incident or spoken word for the best part of an hour when suddenly the air seemed filled with birds. Birds of every description soared aloft from nests and perches, all screeching, crying and whistling insanely.

  Then, just as suddenly, it was all that the men and woman could do to control their riding and pack animals, which not only gave the appearance of unnatural edginess—even the placid, dependable mules—but were being driven to near hysteria by the hordes of small leaping, crawling, slithering and scuttling wildlife with which the ground suddenly seemed alive.

  Corbett halted atop a hill and reined about to ride back and see if he and his men could help with the screaming, rearing, kicking pack beasts. But before he could make another move or speak a single word, the rocky ground beneath his mule's hooves seemed to shift. Shrieking and thrashing, the mule staggered and fell, Corbett managing to clear leather barely in time to avoid going down with the animal.

  Braun was not so quick or fortunate. His big, powerful mule fell with a thump on the heaving ground, pinning his left leg, movements of mule and ground serving to further mangle the crushed limb. He screamed once, then, mercifully, lost consciousness.

  Erica's mule, though it kept its feet, proceeded to buck her off to land, winded, stunned and gasping, in a thick clump of thorny brush. Freed of its rider, the once-docile saddle mule went savagely berserk, attacking ponies and men indiscriminately, before Sergeant Gumpner drew his sidearm and shot the murderous beast.

  The near pandemonium which had earlier engulfed the pack animals was now complete, total, affecting not just the ponies and mules but many of the men as well. And Major Jay Corbett could not bring himself to blame those men anymore than he could fault the frantic animals, for few were as stolid and stoic as Master Sergeant Gumpner and fewer still had the benefit of his own centuries of self-discipline.