The Gripping Hand Read online

  "Nobody cares if we go toward Zion, except Boynton gets disgusted at how candy-ass I am, wanting to go to a town instead of hunting a ghost. I told him if there was an opal meerschaum source, there had to be people nearby. So I'm looking for a town bigger than it should be.

  "But when we start to go much more than forty kilometers south of Zion, the Scott brothers start to twitch. That's where we found that interesting fissure in the Hand Glacier. Could be just my imagination, of course."

  Renner put the computer back in the pocket of his parka and gunned the snow buggy to catch up closer to Darwin Scott. The wind was cold on his face. He pulled the parka up tighter around his nose, adjusted the goggles, and wondered if he'd ever be warm again despite the electric heaters in his boots and gloves.

  His suspicions were starting to feel silly, and he didn't know why. Attitude problem. So what if it's a blind alley? Keep smiling, pretend you're having fun. Get yourself a fur. Impress Commander Cohen.

  They drove south for another fifteen minutes, then Scott slowed to a stop. When Renner pulled alongside, Scott took out snowshoes.

  "We take it slow from here. And no talking." Scott pointed to the forest edge a kilometer away. "Maybe in there. Good ghost country."

  "Wouldn't they hear us coming?"

  "They heard," Scott said. "They'll be watching. Most will run away from two guys with rifles. They'd all run from four."

  "They can tell we're armed?"

  Scott shrugged. "Some say so. I believe it."

  "You said most will run."

  "A hungry one might not. Now, no talking. They don't like talk. Don't know why."

  It took Renner a few minutes to get the hang of snowshoes. These were shorter and wider than skis. Renner learned to walk with a shuffle, using the poles to help push along. James Scott tried to help him, but he couldn't suppress the grin. The weight of the heavy rifle slung on Renner's back was some comfort when they went past a bloody patch of snow strewn with bones. Big bones, larger than a cow's. Or a man's.

  Renner thought enviously of Ajax Boynton back in the tent with tea and brandy. Boynton hadn't believed there were any ghosts in this area.

  They reached the edge of the woods and Scott gestured Renner off to his left, briskly.

  They'd been making good time. That was his problem: James and Darwin weren't holding back anymore. Maybe his impression had been wrong. Maybe they'd simply decided to indulge the greenhorn. Maybe they weren't hiding anything at all.

  They moved farther into the woods. It was a strange place, dotted with bare-limbed maples from Earth, and bumbershoots, and a tall whippy thing with fuzzy bark that grew twenty meters above the snow, then drooped again, some drooping so far that their tops were beneath the snow. As they moved farther in, the trees were spaced closer, some only three meters apart. Whatever underbrush there might be was buried under snow.

  His snowshoes kept trying to plunge through. It would be easy to break a leg.

  Darwin Scott stopped at intervals to thrust a long pole into the snow. The top of the pole had meters and a jack for earphones. Darwin listened, then waved them onward.

  Snow mounded on underbrush could be snow mounded on a ghost, Renner thought. He'd seen a holoflick of a ghost in action; he knew its shape. But he kept seeing shapes that might be ghosts . . . and he'd point, and James would shake his head and grin.

  Four two-chamber hearts the beast had. The explosive bullets were pointed, to do less damage to the fur. A bullet in the torso might kill. One in the head would kill, but would damage the trophy, and the head was harder to hit.

  James stopped. Pointed. Darwin nodded vigorously.

  The mound was quite shallow. Kevin Renner stared (his gun not raised, not yet), but the shape wouldn't . . . yeah, you could find symmetry there, and if the ground dipped beneath the beast and its legs were folded along the torso . . . then . . . James and Darwin were both aiming at the mound, but they waited. Which end was which? Kevin swung his rifle forward and fired twice into the center of the mound.

  The head came up, three feet off the ground on a thick neck. It wobbled, turned to look at him. Kevin's peripheral vision caught both Scott brothers running full out, while Kevin backed away, ready for the charge. Darwin shouted, "Run!"

  The beast reared to its feet. Lumbered toward him.

  Faster than it looked, and Renner turned to run, but the beast's foreleg collapsed and it skidded through the snow. It tried to rise again, and Renner had a clear shot past its shoulder into the torso. He fired again.

  The snow ghost stayed down. Its head was up, weaving. Trying to focus its eyes. Then the head dropped into the snow.

  They built a frame to hang the beast. James and Darwin skinned it, carefully, while Renner followed his footprints back to the snowmobile. He got back dead tired. The brothers had the beast open and were cleaning out the abdominal cavity. He'd have been interested in the makeup of the alien beast, but the brothers' knives had chewed its innards into unrecognizability.

  He rested while the Scotts relayed back for the other vehicles.

  It was the last rest he got that day. He helped roll up the fur, bloody side out, and roll plastic around it. They cleaned the carcass and dressed the meat and packed it into two snowmobiles. The roll of fur rode prominently on top of Renner's buggy.

  Darwin clapped Renner on the back. "Now we can go back. Good shot, man. Looks like you blew one of the hearts and the hydraulic shock took out the rest."

  "I want a long rest in a spa." Renner felt wiped out.

  Darwin looked concerned. "Can you drive? We can leave one buggy and come back for it."

  "No, I'm all right." There wasn't enough room left in either snow buggy for two people and the remains of the bear. Renner felt pride washing back his fatigue. They hadn't planned on this big a kill!

  "You'll get your spa in Zion," Darwin said. "Tomorrow."

  "Hey, why so soon? We could take another ghost tomorrow. And I'm still wondering where the opal meerschaum—"

  "Mr. Renner, that rug should be treated before it starts to rot. The meat should be sold before it rots. You don't hang snow ghost meat, or any other red meat animal native to the Purchase. Has to be eaten fresh."

  "Oh."

  They covered five or six miles before the snowmobile came back for them. Renner wondered why they hadn't

  simply camped . . . and didn't ask. Walking was something he did to let his mind get organized; and he'd had a number of interesting thoughts.

  Boynton swore at: the size of the carcass. "I still don't believe it. This place was hunted five years ago. How would it have time to grow so big?"

  The brothers had only grinned and kept working. There was certainly work enough for four. They'd laid a fire; they'd cut wood and built a platform to hang half the carcass over it. The sunset afterlight was dwindling and the cooking meat smelled wonderful, and Renner was going to hurt tomorrow.

  It was a matter of pride. You ate the meat when you killed a ghost, they'd told him. You opened cans when you'd failed.

  "It feels like I've been diddled, and I don't know how or why," Renner told his pocket computer. No way of knowing if it was getting through. "There should be more to it. But we're going back to Zion tomorrow unless I see some way around it."

  He closed the computer. He was ravenous. The meat would take another hour to cook through. Would it taste as good as dinner at the palace?

  Less well seasoned, maybe, less well cooked, but fresher. And there was the "sauce": exhaustion and hunger. Four men would be hard put to make a dent in that much meat.

  That much meat. He flipped the computer open. The ship would be halfway to the horizon, dammit. "The ghost was well fed. Why didn't it attack like the one we watched at the palace? I didn't blow a heart open. It lived too long. It acted . . . drugged. The Scott brothers didn't seem weary enough, either. If I'm not seeing mirages . . . there'd have to be a lot of men involved. This is big."

  They collapsed the tent and loaded it with the fu
r and the snow buggies into the cargo compartment of the plane. The snow ghost meat was lashed to the struts holding the landing skids. Boynton climbed in and sat in the pilot's seat.

  "Hey," Darwin Scott said.

  "Oh, hell, I'll fly," Boynton said. "I didn't do anything else to earn my keep. Son of a bitch, I'd never have believed that big a ghost would be in here. Farther south, yeah, but not just here."

  "Why didn't we land farther south?" Renner asked.

  "Lakes are too big," Boynton said. "Lots of warm streams from the volcanoes. Most lakes don't even freeze, and they're all deep. You want to go down there, you land here and take a long trip on a snow buggy." He spat through the window. "Which I had intended to do. Son of a bitch."

  James laughed. "Renner? I wanted to see how you moved before we got into real danger. I didn't expect any snow ghost, not there."

  The Scott brothers climbed in. James took the right-hand seat next to Boynton.

  "I'm a pilot," Renner said.

  "Next time," James Scott said. "This is tricky, with the plane loaded down . . ."

  "He's right," Boynton agreed. "You ever fly one of these things? . . . Didn't think so. I'll check you out in Zion. Right now we ought to get that fur somewhere it'll be properly treated. That's a good fur."

  Renner strapped in behind James Scott and waited until Boynton had the plane airborne. "Hey, Ajax, take us over the woods where I shot the ghost."

  Boynton grinned. "Right. Want to have a look myself."

  "We really ought to be getting in," Darwin Scott said.

  "Hell, the man wants to see the place," James said. "Would myself. Good shooting, Mr. Renner."

  "We'll just circle and go on," Darwin Scott said. "That's a good fur."

  "It is that," Boynton agreed.

  There had been light snow that night, but Renner could still make out their snow buggy tracks in places. The area where they had stopped was clearly marked, and so were some of their snowshoe tracks.

  "Must have been a lot of wind through here," Boynton muttered.

  Renner frowned. Boynton was right. There was very little snow caught in the trees here. In the woods near the

  lake where they'd landed, there had been a lot more. Here there was less in the trees, more on the ground. Mmm?

  "Right down there," James Scott said. "Here, I'll take it a moment." The plane banked and turned in a tight spiral so that Renner could see down to the scene of his triumph.

  Boynton was on the high side of the plane. He craned up and looked off to the left. "What the hell . . . ?"

  "What?" Renner demanded. He craned past Boynton.

  "Tracks?"

  South of the forest the snow looked chewed. Snowmobile tires, men's footprints, the blurred circle where a helicopter must have come down and taken off. A hell of a lot of activity. Renner said, "Okay, take us—"

  Darwin Scott drove his elbow into Renner's stomach. Renner gasped, and a sickly sweet smell filled his lungs. He sat back with a sappy grin on his face. "Peace . . . Sam," he said.

  "What the hell?" Boynton demanded.

  "Gentile friend, you have seen nothing," Darwin Scott said.

  "Gentile. Church business?"

  "He is not a gentile," James Scott said. "Lapsed, but he was born to the Church."

  "I must think on this," Darwin said.

  A part of Renner's mind told him that Boynton was acting strangely, and so were the Scotts, but he didn't really care. When the plane banked slightly so that his head rolled, he saw that Darwin was holding a pistol. Renner giggled.

  "Use the spray," James Scott said. "I have the controls."

  "Hey, I don't want to be no giggling idiot," Boynton said. "Look, if this is Church business—hell, give me the skin and my share of the gear, and it's quits for me. I'll say we got a ghost, and the dude wanted to hunt some more, so we split up. You took the dude off to a place you didn't want me to know about. After that it's up to you."

  "It would even be true," Darwin Scott said. "We must think on this."

  "While you're thinking, where the hell are we going?" Boynton demanded.

  "Outside Zion there is a small lake," Darwin Scott said. "Land on that."

  5

  The True Church

  Come, come, ye Saints, no toil or labor fear; but with joy wend your way;

  Though hard to you this journey may appear, Grace shall be as your day.

  'Tis far better for us to strive, Our useless cares from us to drive;

  Do this, and joy your hearts will swell—All is well, all is well!

  —Hymns of the Church of Jesus Christ

  of the Latter Day Saints

  A tiny red light danced in Ruth Cohen's eyes, then the massive door opened before she could touch the bell. The butler was dressed in a traditional manner. Ruth hadn't seen anyone in that costume except in Government House and tri-vee shows. "Welcome, Commander. His Excellency has been expecting you."

  Ruth glanced down at her best civilian dress and grinned wryly.

  The butler took her overcoat and handed it to another servant. "His Excellency is in the library," he said, and ushered her down the hall.

  Bury was in his travel chair, not at the desk but at an elaborately inlaid game table. "You will forgive me if I do not stand? Thank you. Would you care for a drink? We have an excellent Madeira. Not from Earth, I fear, but from Santiago, which many say is not greatly inferior."

  "I would really prefer coffee."

  Bury smiled. "Turkish or filtre? . . . Filtre. Cynthia, the Kona, I believe. And my usual. Thank you." Bury indicated a chair. "Please be seated, Commander. Thank you."

  Ruth smiled. "Your hospitality is a bit overwhelming."

  Bury's expression didn't change. "Thank you, but I am certain that a vice admiral's daughter has seen better. Now, what can I do for you?"

  Ruth looked pointedly around the paneled room.

  Bury grinned mirthlessly. "If anyone can listen to me without my knowledge and consent, some very expensive experts will regret it."

  "I suppose. Your Excellency, Kevin—Sir Kevin invited me to dinner. Now I'm probably not the first girl he ever stood up, but there's a matter of his reports as well. And when I called here, no one seemed to know where he was." She shrugged. "So I came looking."

  Bury's lips twitched. "And I presume you have left messages with the Imperial Marines in case you also vanish?"

  Ruth blushed slightly.

  Bury laughed. "Renner said you were clever. The truth is, Commander, I was about to call you. I don't know where he is either."

  "Oh."

  "You put a very great deal of expression into that syllable. You are fond of my—-impetuous—pilot?"

  "I don't have to say."

  "Indeed."

  "And he was supposed to make reports—"

  "I have them. Recorded," Bury said. "Renner concocted a scheme for exploring the outback with three snow ghost hunters. He was suspicious of two. They left three days ago. I have received no coherent message since."

  "You have a ship in orbit."

  "Indeed, and Renner's pocket computer was programmed to remind him of the times when Sinbad would be above the area in which they would be hunting. At least once we received garbled signals that we assume were from Renner."

  "You didn't go look for him?"

  Bury indicated his travel chair. "That is hardly my way. What I did was invite Captain Fox to dinner."

  "Have you learned anything else about our . . . problem?"

  "A great deal, but nothing about Renner," Bury said.

  Renner was glad of the blindfold. A blindfold could mean they didn't intend to kill him. On the other hand, it might mean that they wanted him to think that.

  On the gripping hand: the snow ghost. They'd made massive efforts to keep him alive up to now.

  His mind was clearing; the drug had worn off to that extent. But he couldn't walk.

  He was strapped to a gurney and carried from the lake, where they landed to a clos
ed vehicle. The only time anyone spoke to him was when he tried to ask where he was. Then a voice he hadn't heard before said, "We understand that two doses of Peaceable Sam within a few hours produces a terrible hangover. You'd best be quiet." He decided that was good advice and concentrated on remembering everything he could.

  The snow tractor drove for about ten minutes, then he was outside briefly. They went in, and down in an elevator, and presently he felt smooth acceleration.

  Subway train? They're really organized. He had about decided he was wrong when he felt deceleration and heard the sounds of electrically operated doors. Someone started to speak and was shushed.

  They carried him to another elevator, which went down a long way, then he was rolled down a long corridor with only gentle turns, then to another elevator, and after that he was maneuvered around often enough that he lost all sense of direction.

  "So," a new voice said. "Let us see what you have brought us. Remove the blindfold and straps."

  Renner blinked. The room was large, and completely enclosed, doors but no windows. He was at one end of a long conference table. They indicated a chair and helped him sit in it. His legs still didn't want to do what he told them to.

  Four men sat at the other end of the table. Bright light glared past them into Renner's face so that he could see them only in outline.

  The Scott brothers stood next to him. One held a spray can. The other had a pistol.

  They'd dressed him in someone else's clothes and removed everything he'd been carrying. Renner felt for the alarm tooth and bit it.

  There was a chuckle from the end of the table. "If you have a transmitter that can send a message from here, I will buy it from you no matter what it costs."

  "One hundred thousand crowns," Renner said.

  "I appreciate humor, but perhaps we are short of time. Have you anything serious to say before we fill you with Serconal?"