Fall of the White Ship Avatar (31 page)

He smiled again, self-deprecatingly, Paloma thought, drawn to his answer against her will.

"And I haven't done much of either," Alacrity added.

"But more to the point, you're the Anointed of the Causality Harp," she shot back, with a wicked set to her jaw, eyes slitted.

That wiped the smile off Alacrity's face. "Besides," he said grimly, "that Ship means more to me than she does to
any
of them! I just—"

He looked up at the stars. "It's got to be done fairly and justly. Precursor secrets're gonna dictate what happens to this universe; they have to be used
right
!"

Paloma had moved from irritation to anger. "And that's what makes you so sure you know what's right?

Some Precursor fireworks display?"

Alacrity looked as if he was going to say something pompous and provoking; Floyt braced himself.

But abruptly Alacrity's lopsided smirk appeared. "To level with you, yeah. And nobody's more surprised about it than I am."

He shook his head, chortling, and rose to stroll back into the dusk, hands in his pockets and head tilted back to inspect the sky.

Pokesnout and the humans were looking out at a string of acre-size turbo barges being guided and bapped as needed by waterjet workboats. For the Lebensraum Company, with its aged and limited industrial and technical base, surface shipping offered substantial savings over airfreighting; Lake Fret saw a lot of use.

Clouds had closed in late in the day, giving the sky the textured grays and sepias of an old Earth platinum print. "The data says those schools of snapping whoosies and the rest of the lunch trade in the water there would tackle a human
or
a gawk," Paloma brooded. "If Hobie's idea doesn't work we're going to be turning in a very bad afteraction report on this one."

"I don't see why it shouldn't," Floyt maintained. "You read the info and the calculations yourself. They may be guesswork, but they're good, informed guesswork."

Lake Fret was a basin area formed through the solution of the underlying deposits of limestonelike file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20krui...%20-%20Fall%20of%20the%20White%20Ship%20Avatar.htm (157 of 242)23-2-2006 17:03:13

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sediments. Over the ages it had changed back and forth a number of times between a lake and a marshy prairie with areas of open water. But company documents said a vast, eroded cavern system typical of Karst topography remained beneath it. When occasional leaks developed in the limestone cap, company engineers were quick to reseal them with force-injected aquacrete composite on reinforced duralloy matrices; Lake Fret was important to the balance sheets for operation in that region.

" 'We'll walk across, ' " Paloma quoted Floyt, patting his hand. "You really yinged me with that one! I saw us pulling off some New Testament extravaganza."

"Or maybe Old Testament," Alacrity suggested, "parting the waters."

"But you'll recall I never said anything about water," Floyt reminded them. "Now, when are the drones due?" He was checking his compass.

Paloma read her proteus. "Let's see; they have fifty klicks to cover. If we programmed them right, they'll be here any time now."

The company survey station, an automated facility, hadn't figured in their plans since it offered nothing of use. Mostly it was simply a seismic monitoring post and remote-controlled launch point for seismic sounding-charge drones. Then Floyt's brainstorm made it the linchpin of their survival. And so the three had left the herd long enough to break into the station and reprogram the six drones stored there.

Company work records and maps showed them their exact targets.

"Hey; here we go." Alacrity was pointing to the east. All six drones racked for launch at the station were programmed, but only three of the small shapes hove into view out of the cloud cover.

"The rest must be on target already," Alacrity concluded. The other three objectives were closer to the station; the main one, out near Lake Fret's narrowest section, was vital and so the saboteurs were giving it double redundancy. As they watched, the chubby metal insects swung out to zero in on their objective.

The trio settled down again to wait, sharing the little remaining food. They checked insect bites, blisters, injuries, and running sores acquired along the way. They spoke little, and only Pokesnout seemed relaxed.

There was less tension among the humans, though. An elegant system had evolved among them, vectors of attraction and friendship running in different directions and balancing each other, and caution running in opposite directions, canceling each other in at least one case.

And so they were in a close partnership of adversity, with conflict very much in the background.

Moreover, as Floyt had discovered, the hardships of a cross-country odyssey left a lot less time and inclination and energy for romance than the books, films, and holos might give one to think.

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[Fitzhugh 3]-FALL OF THE WHITE SHIP AVATAR

But
he
suspected that if and when the three got to safety, the extreme circumstances of the Long Trek traded for comfort, privacy, and leisure, Paloma Sudan would let her desires come to the fore. He suspected, despondently, that her chosen lover would not be him.

"
Fancula
! I'd give anything if we could tap into the company commo nets!" Alacrity fumed. A breeze stirred the trees, and gawklegs shifted around restively, eager to feed on the foliage but unable to because the New Verities included a lot of doctrine about staying hidden from possible observers, especially aerial ones. An adult gawk could put away more than one hundred kilos of forage a day, but the herd had been on thin rations for most of the Trek.

Floyt was finishing the last of the food he'd saved, some freshwater shell creatures they'd dug from the lake's shallows with their lances. They wouldn't have appealed to him a few weeks before; now he prized at one with his survival tool, mouth watering and jaws aching in anticipation. As he did, the ground gave a distinct tremor and he nicked himself.

"Alacrity! Was that—"

"Had to be." Alacrity was on his feet, looking out over Lake Fret. Of course, there was nothing to see.

"The other shock waves'll be a while longer getting here."

He turned to Pokesnout. "We'd better move back from shore a little, just to be safe. And tell 'em they can come out from cover a little after dark to feed, as long as they don't strip the trees we're using for camouflauge."

He looked out over Lake Fret. "And tell 'em we're coming into the home stretch."

They kept lookout by turns that night, up on higher ground. The shore was in disarray, undergrowth and small trees draped with lake plants and battered by the miniature tidal waves kicked up by the blasts. It already stank of decay and death; the humans could hear small land animals moving around in the aftermath, feeding off beached lake dwellers and plants. Insects were swarming; luckily, there were no drillbugs in the area, but Alacrity opened his brolly and the three shared it as they had that first night.

Paloma woke the other two around first light. Out over the lake, some sort of aircraft moved, showing an arcade of lights, playing spots, detector-lasers, and monitoring beams over the waters. A frightened groan went up from the hiding gawks until Pokesnout belched at them for silence.

As the group looked on, the aircraft dropped some kind of tech buoy or probe robo far out over the water. Then it left.

A short time later the light showed them, bit by bit, that the face of Lake Fret had changed; a mudflat over two-hundred meters wide led out to murky waters. The mud was draining, exposing pieces of file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20krui...%20-%20Fall%20of%20the%20White%20Ship%20Avatar.htm (159 of 242)23-2-2006 17:03:14

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embedded wood, silt-covered rocks, struggling, stranded lake creatures, and decomposing plants.

A choking stench lay over everything. Flocks of flying things were gorging on the unscheduled feast, and scores of small, furtive shore animals who were predators or scavengers, as opportunity dictated, were sating themselves on the mass stranding. Insectlike life forms were out in clouds.

"And there'll be bigger things along soon, to feed on those in turn," Paloma said, alluding to the breakfast contingent. "We'd better stay close to the gawks."

"The limestone plug that gave way in that place on Terra—how long did it take to drain?" Alacrity asked Floyt as they took in the scene.

"Paynes Prairie Lake? It took a week. It stranded steamboats and so forth, much as this will do. Of course, that lake was a good deal smaller than Lake Fret, but on the other hand the holes we've punched into the underground drainage are much, much bigger than the one that did the job on Paynes Prairie Lake, which was fairly modest.

"I'd conjecture that it's just a question of how fast the drainage can handle water, and it's rather damned enormous, according to survey maps."

"Fast enough, it looks like," Paloma agreed. "I'd say shaped deep-shaker seismic charges are a lot more efficient than a little chunk of stone giving way."

"Just guessing," Alacrity said, "but it looks to me like we're due for a real low tide tonight." He consulted the holo lake charts and pointed. "Right across there. I do believe we're gonna make it."

Floyt glanced at him. "I thought you were certain all along?"

Alacrity hunched his shoulders, dropped them. "Oh, I believe it real hard, for about thirty seconds out of every hour or so. It comes and goes."

"I never thought I'd say this, but don't start doubting now," Paloma told him. "We're a long way from home free."

The mud was adhesive and deep, a sucking mire reeking with rotting microorganisms and higher life forms, still impassable to humans. But by nightfall a narrow isthmus had emerged from the receding waters. The three compared charts and depth readings and decided their chance had come.

"Another day or three and that would be baked marl, an easy walk," Paloma estimated. "But that doesn't do us much good." The cover of darkness was essential, and there was no telling what problems another day's wait would bring.

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That mud was no great annoyance to the herd; gawklegs were used to mud, built for wading when necessary, and for enjoyment, and they had excellent night vision.

The herd pushed off just after full dark. The humans couldn't do much but cling to their rides and hope; it all lay with Pokesnout and his people. One of Paloma's wilderness survival files had tipped them to a local plant, and now the three rode with all exposed skin rubbed down with leaves of cabbagelike stenchweed. It kept most of the swarmers from landing on them but not from circling maddeningly, whining and buzzing and ratcheting in the gloom.

Seldom troubled by mud above the calves' knees, often in stuff that was less than hock-deep, the herd smelled and spied out the highest ground. Then too, since most of the weak and the sick had died along the way, the herd made good time.

A few individuals got stuck, but the gawks constantly showed how adept they were at helping one another when they weren't hampered by sand devils. Every so often, as the exodus went on, Alacrity and the others heard strandees flopping and thrashing weakly in the mud. Those seemed fewer out along the isthmus, though; Alacrity reckoned that most of the lake's denizens had had time to make it to deeper waters. He was also assuming the Lebensraum Company had no intention of letting Lake Fret revert to prairie, thereby costing the company a fortune for a new air or dryland freighting system.

At least, there was a lot of sky traffic, though less than there'd been during the day. Given the relative scarcity of flying craft on Lebensraum, Lake Fret was evidently an emergency-priority crisis. Most of the effort looked like it was going into moving crews and machinery to work sites after a day of evacuations and survey overflights.

The herd forded on, dragging hooves from the clinging ooze to put them down again. Every so often an aircraft would rush by, sometimes at low altitude. The entire caravan froze then, though if the company was using detectors and looking for unusual movement there wasn't a prayer the herd wouldn't be spotted.

"I don't know; that last one seemed to slow down for a second, there," Floyt said of one flyover. "How far do we have to go?"

"Not far, I think," Alacrity said. "Pokesnout, how about it?"

"We smell land very close, Speed. Do you not?"

"I mostly smell me," Alacrity began, and heard Paloma gasp.

"They've found us!"

From the southeast came a flight of aircraft, several smaller ones and two giants, running lights blazing, file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20krui...%20-%20Fall%20of%20the%20White%20Ship%20Avatar.htm (161 of 242)23-2-2006 17:03:14

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megacandlepower spotlights playing back and forth across the water. They were bound straight for the herd.

"Not much else they could be looking for out here," Alacrity agreed. "And anyway, they're bound to see us. Okay, Pokesnout: remember what we told you. Let's go!"

Pokesnout threw his head back and brayed loudly. The other gawks had seen the oncoming airships and knew the signal. They wuffed and honked among themselves, preparing to run. Pokesnout gave a brief, stertorous sound; the herd broke into a sloppy, desperate race.

Mud was everywhere, hurled up by the broad hooves. Alacrity could only cling to Treeneck's surcingle, burrowing his head against the bull's neck. The mudflats shook to the cannonading. Almost from the first there were mishaps; gawks lost footing or collided with one another and went down, only to flail up again. They were the winnowed-out herd, consummate survivors, quick to rebound and incapable of giving up.