White Spot by Murray Leinster

Author:Murray Leinster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, adventure, space opera, spaceship, aliens, alien planet
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2011-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

SOME ten miles farther on they came to the first of the forts, a great, towering structure of rocks piled together across the road. It was a parapet sixty feet high, enclosing a square of space. In sheltered places among the rocks there was a vast amount of soot as if flames had burned here fiercely. But there was no charcoal. Here, too, were innumerable bones. There would have been thousands of skeletons in this walled area if they had been put together. But they were separate. Every bone, no matter how small, had been completely separated from every other bone.

They could be identified, however. These were the bones of people like those who once had owned this golden metal vehicle. They had died here by thousands. Weapons, bent and ruined, proved that they had died fighting. After death, each body had been exhaustively disjointed and the separate bones scattered utterly without system. And the victors had apparently done nothing else.

Borden knitted his brows as the ground car went on, having perilously skirted around the walls. Jerry seemed to feel that he had wasted time looking. He tried a higher rate of speed. The car yielded it without effort. There seemed to be no limit to the speed at which these remarkable vehicles could travel without vibration or swaying or jolting.

That first fort was perhaps fifty miles behind when Borden’s expression changed from harried bewilderment to shock. He stared ahead as the vehicle sped along the geometrically linear highway, windswept and free of dust as it was.

He said slowly, “That’s right, Jerry. Make as much speed as you can. When you’re tired, I’ll drive. We’ve got to catch Sattell before he reaches that white spot. It’s possible that more than our lives depend on it …”

They did not catch Sattell, though they drove night and day. Their speed varied from fifteen miles an hour when they crawled over occasionally drifted sand dunes which swallowed the highway, to two hundred miles an hour or better. Borden estimated grimly that they averaged more than a thousand miles per twenty-hour day.

Sattell couldn’t have kept that up, so they must have passed him, probably as he slept in some hiding place off a rocky spot in the highway where there would be no trail to guide them to him. But of course the wind might have erased his trail anywhere.

Ellen tried to rest or doze in the back while Jerry or Borden drove on, one resting while the other drove. But after the first day the actual overtaking of Sattell plainly was not Borden’s purpose. It was clear that he meant to get ahead of Sattell, to reach the white spot first.

On the second day of their journeying they found a second fort. This also was a structure across the highway, defended from attack in the direction for which they were headed. It had been more carefully built than the other one. This had been more constructed of squared stones, lifted into position by construction engines whose sand-eroded carcasses were still in place.

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