Space Pioneers by Anthology

Author:Anthology [Anthology]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

WHAT HAPPENS when those who have been bred and trained for a single path of duty rebel against bureaucratic supervision and demands? Once there was a picked team of experts, conditioned to explore—but they decided to become settlers instead. But they had been forced to carry with them the one danger to their plan for personal freedom, and only their commander, Grevan, could go to battle with it for the future of his crew.

The End of the Line

JAMES H. SCHMITZ

The spaceship dropped near evening towards the edge of a curving beach. A half-mile strip of grassy growth stood tall and still behind the beach; and beyond the jungle smoothly marbled prows of pink and gray cliffs swept steeply upwards for nearly two thousand feet to the northernmost shelf of a wide, flat continent. The green-black waters of the planet’s largest ocean stretched away in a glassy curve ahead, broken by two narrow chains of islands some thirty miles out.

The sleek machine from beyond the stars settled down slowly, a wind thundering out below it and wrinkling the shallows near the beach into sudden zigzag patterns. It fell through explosive sprays of dry sand, sank its base twenty feet deep into the rock below and stopped. A sharp click announced the opening of a lock a third of the way up its rounded flank; and seven of the nine members of Central Government’s Exploration Group 1176 came riding out of the lock a moment later, bunched forty feet above the beach on the tip of their ship’s extension ramp.

Six of them dropped free of the ramp at various points of its swooping descent. They hit the hard sand in a succession of soft, bounceless thumps like so many cats and went loping off towards the water. Grevan alone, with the restraint to be looked for in a Group Commander, rode the ramp all the way down to the ground.

He stepped off it unhurriedly there: a very big man, heavy of bone and muscle, though lean where weight wasn’t useful, and easy-moving as the professional gladiators and beast-fighters whose training quarters he’d shared in his time. A brooding, implacable expression went so naturally with the rest of it that ordinary human beings were likely to give him one look and step out of his way, even when they weren’t aware of his technical rank of Central Government Official.

It was a pity in a way that the members of his Exploration Group weren’t so easily impressed.

Grevan scowled reflectively, watching five of the six who had come out of the ship with him begin shucking off weapon belts, suits and other items of equipment with scarcely a break in their run as they approached the water’s edge. Cusat, Eliol, Freckles, Lancey, Vernet—he checked them off mentally as they vanished a few seconds later, with almost simultaneous splashes, from the planet’s surface. They were of his own experimental breed or something very near it, and physically, though not quite adults yet, very nearly as capable as Grevan was himself.

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