Colsec 02 - The Caves of Klydor by Douglas Hill

Author:Douglas Hill [Hill, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci Fi
Publisher: Argo Books
Published: 1984-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

9 The Rescue

They did not have far to go. The Crushers, with their prisoner, had moved only a short distance beyond the edge of that tangled area of ravines which, as the Streeters had found, was riddled with interconnecting caves and tunnels. The blue-uniformed men had stopped in a broad, shallow basin, thick with dense patches of the dry brush that grew in the badlands. But some of the brush had been destroyed, over a wide area, so that only charred black stumps remained. And in the centre of the burnt area lay the huge, gleaming shape of the Crushers’ spacecraft.

It was roughly the shape of a flattened hemisphere, and more than four times larger than the spaceship that had brought the teenagers to Klydor. The shiny hull was decorated with a huge “CD”, the insignia of the Civil Defenders. And on one side of the hull, a large opening, the airlock, stood open. Near the airlock Captain Warreck and one of the Crushers lounged, stolidly eating from containers of food concentrate. Now and then there were glimpses of blue uniforms through the airlock, where the other men—or some of them—were moving around inside the ship.

Cord lay on the crest of a low cliff, overlooking the basin where the ship rested. More of the brush screened him, and the sun-gun was steady in his hands as he gazed down at the enemy—and at Bren Lathan, lying on his side near where Warreck was sitting.

Lathan appeared to be breathing, but his eyes were still closed, and he did not move. Cord wondered if the man had been hit too hard. The wound on the back of his head seemed to have stopped bleeding, but he could have a fractured skull, Cord knew, or some other internal damage.

But whatever shape Lathan was in, Cord reminded himself, it made no difference. The battle would still have to begin. The easiest thing would have been to use the sun-gun on the Crushers—but that was impossible while some of them were in the ship. So Cord and the others had worked out a plan of sorts. Samella and the Streeters were waiting, not too far away, in safety, and it was up to Cord to get things started.

I could be dead in the next few minutes, Cord thought. But the idea had no effect on him. He felt calm, emotionless. The only signs of the flow of adrenalin within him was in the clenching of his jaw and the brightness in his eyes.

Carefully, seeking to make no sound among the grey-green foliage, he eased himself forward, closer to the edge of the cliff, as if to find a clearer view.

And with that motion, and the shift of his weight, the cliff edge collapsed beneath him.

The flimsy overhang at the edge would not have been visible from where Cord lay. Countless years of erosion had carved away the cliff, leaving only a thin layer of soil—barely held together by the roots of the brush—jutting out from the top.

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