Resurgence (31 page)

They walked toward her. She was pleased to see that Ben was awake and moving almost normally, though he was holding his right arm close in to favor his broken ribs.

She opened the car's wide front door and the two men scrambled in. Hans Rebka apparently experienced none of Darya's reverence for the dead. He examined the Marglotta sitting in the passenger seat for a few seconds, and nodded. "You're right. Just the way I remember the dead ones, back at Upside Miranda Port. Died the same way, I'd guess, though I don't know how that could be. Well, there's nothing we can do for them now."

He unceremoniously lifted the second body and dumped it over the seat into the back of the car.

"This is a lot better than spending the night outside. Darya, you keep the driver's seat. Ben, the passenger seat is yours. I'll make a place for myself in the back."

"In with the bodies?"

He gave her a puzzled look. "That's what I had in mind. Unless you think I ought to dump them outside? I wasn't going to, because if we decide tomorrow that we'd like to dissect them, by that time the rain could have ruined the bodies completely. They're falling to bits as it is."

He sounded unbelievably cold and casual. Darya had to remind herself that there was another side to the man. In crises, he seemed able to suppress every trace of emotion. All was calm logic. Maybe that's why he was such a good troubleshooter.

If you wanted empathy and feeling for others, you would take Julian Graves. If encyclopedic knowledge was the requirement, without much judgment to go with it, then E.C. Tally was the person of choice. If you needed someone who through long experience had a sense of Builder constructs and how they might and might not act, maybe you would turn to Darya herself. But if you were in such deep trouble that you thought you would never emerge alive, then you turned to Hans Rebka—and you hoped that sentiment and finer feelings would not interfere with the need for the split-second decisions and hard actions that survival demanded.

Ben was already in the passenger seat, his body turned a little to give him as much comfort as he could find. He needed real medical treatment, but he would not get it here. Hans was in the back. He was moving things around there, and Darya did not choose to turn her head and find out what they were.

She stared straight ahead, out through the car's forward window. The sun was lower yet, dipping toward the horizon with what seemed like infinite slowness. The day on Marglot was very long, and they had to be prepared to endure an equally long night.

The rain fell steadily, soaking into the springy vegetation and the tall conical growths that hid the small mummified animals. The hillside was as bleak a prospect as Darya had ever seen. Tonight they would rest as best they could, but tomorrow they must begin to ask and answer a different question: Was it possible for humans to survive on Marglot, as the food supplies of their suits ran out?

Darya's brain felt turned off. She was not thinking about anything at all as she stared at the hillside ahead. She saw nothing and was expecting to see nothing, when her trance was broken by a change in the light outside. A vertical shaft of illumination was forming, as though a second sun shone through a rift in the clouds to produce a bright column of light. The shaft was about four meters across, and it struck the ground where Darya, Hans, and Ben had been expelled from it.

"Hans!"

"What?" Incredibly, his voice sounded as though she had wakened him from sleep.

"Look outside. In front of the car. Something's happening."

"Huh?" But he was sitting up, leaning over Darya's shoulder. "That wasn't there ten minutes ago."

"No. I saw it forming. What is it, Hans?"

"I don't know. But it's changing."

The column of light no longer ran from heaven to earth. Its upper end was fading, even as the lower part lifted, solidified, and took on a definite shape. It formed a glowing oval whose lower end hung three meters or so above the soaked earth. As they watched it changed further, into a perfect sphere that slowly drifted downward.

It was three meters above the wet vegetation—two meters, one meter, and still descending. As the lowest point made contact with the wet plants, the sphere emitted a flash of light so bright that the photosensitive faceplates of the suits instantly darkened to protect their eyes.

When they could see again the bright sphere had disappeared. But it had not vanished without leaving a trace. Where the sphere had touched down, something remained. Three somethings. Three suited human figures. Three people, back to back, sitting down on the wet hillside with legs outstretched in front of them.

As Darya watched in disbelief, one figure climbed slowly to its feet. It was facing away from the car, so she could not see into the faceplate of the suit. The person within would not at once see her.

A voice said, "Well, I suppose you'd have to say that this is an improvement. When you have been nowhere at all, and sitting under a force of two and a half gees while you were nowhere, almost anywhere else qualifies as better. But as to why we were brought here . . . "

The words tailed off, but Darya did not need to hear more. Only one person in the Sagittarius Arm possessed that deep, hollow voice. The man standing with his back to the car was Julian Graves.

And with him, scrambling to their feet with expressions on their faces that suggested they were as surprised as Darya, were two others whom Darya recognized. There was no question that they were Torran Veck and Teri Dahl.

Which left only the biggest question of all. It was the one asked by Julian Graves of himself and his companions, but it applied equally well to Darya, Hans, and Ben: Why had they been brought here?

The interior of the
Have-It-All
had become a place of hushed conversations and secret meetings. Kallik, J'merlia, and Archimedes sat huddled—in so far as anyone could huddle with a creature the size of Archimedes—in the drive room of the ship.

"Master Nenda is very angry." Kallik spoke with the authority of one who knows.

"Does he blame us?" J'merlia asked. Archimedes added, "Do you think he will disembowel me?"

Kallik looked puzzled. "Is there any reason why he should?"

"It is the standard way of registering disapproval among the Zardalu."

"I would advise you not to point this out to Master Nenda. In any case, he is not angry with you, or with any one of us." Kallik's rings of bright eyes glanced in all directions to be sure that no one was approaching. "He blames Claudius, and to a lesser extent Sinara Bellstock."

"But why?" Archimedes's speech was improving fast, although he was still more comfortable with the master-slave language of the Zardalu. "Are we not in orbit around Marglot, as we wished to be? Kallik, it was your assurance that we had achieved our correct destination."

"That is true. At least, we are orbiting a world with four poles. I cannot imagine many such specimens are to be found in the whole galaxy, still less in a small region of the Sag Arm."

"Kallik, I see no poles. Yet you assert that my eyes are superior to those of everyone else on board."

"What do you expect, pointers sticking out of the ground with labels on them? Archimedes, observe. The world below shows a clear demarcation into two hemispheres. There is a daylight side facing the sun, and another side which is in night. The day-night terminator constantly advances, since the world rotates. There is a fixed axis of rotation, and two poles are located at the ends of that axis. Let us call them, for convenience and in accordance with common usage, the
North Pole
and the
South Pole
. However, there is also a second division into hemispheres unrelated to sun position. Note that we have one side of high albedo, a bright half which faces always away from the gas-giant planet around which the planet orbits. Lacking a name, we will for the sake of convenience name that gas-giant world as
M-2
. Then we also have a less bright though sometimes cloud-covered side, always facing toward M-2."

"I see those. But I do not understand their meaning."

"You require training in simple orbital mechanics. Perhaps, on some other occasion, there will be time for such a thing. Meanwhile, observe." Kallik gestured to the screen showing the planet below. "The gas-giant world M-2 is
hot
, with a mean temperature of eight hundred degrees. Marglot—for I am convinced that this world
is
Marglot—revolves around M-2. It is
tidally locked
to it, so that the same face of Marglot is always presented in that direction. That hemisphere, of course, will be warm, and its center will logically be known as the
Hot Pole
. The other face never receives any heat from M-2, and precious little from the parent star. Its brighter appearance, as spectral reflectance measurements confirm, derives from a surface covered with snow and ice. The center of that hemisphere, the coldest place on the planet, is the
Cold Pole
."

"So you believe that we are exactly where we wish to be, at the world of the four poles. Why then is Master Nenda enraged at Claudius and at Sinara Bellstock?"

"Why, because they delayed us. Had we left Pompadour promptly, we would not be the last of the expedition to arrive. Thanks to Claudius and Sinara, we have been deprived of the possible advantages of getting here first."

"Will Master Nenda disembowel Claudius and Sinara?"

"No. Could you perhaps cease this obsession with disemboweling?"

"I will try. But still I do not understand. When we first arrived, Master Nenda seemed pleased. He reported that there were no signal beacons from other ships, and therefore we were ahead of everyone else."

"That was my fault." J'merlia hung his narrow head in a human gesture of remorse. "I was operating the communications console, and I reported to my dominatrix, Atvar H'sial, that no ships' transponders or signal beacons were active in this stellar system."

"Was that a false statement?"

"No. But it was an insufficient one. I failed to search for the much weaker signals from individual suits, which transmit on different frequencies. To my shame, it was Master Nenda himself who thought to look for and discovered such suit signals, emanating from the surface of Marglot. Worse than that, all but one of the other members of the original expedition now appear to have found their way there. The signal from the suit of Lara Quistner alone is missing."

"How can that be?" Archimedes stared out of the observation port, scanning the planet with his great luminous eyes as though an individual suit might be visible to him even from a distance of five hundred kilometers. "If they are on Marglot, they must somehow have been brought there. Yet you found no ships' transponder or signal beacons. Kallik, where are the ships?"

"You ask me the same question that Master Nenda asked. To my shame, I could provide no answer. He is very angry."

"With reason. We have failed him." Archimedes wrapped his great midnight-blue tentacles protectively around his mid-section. "He will surely disembowel all of us. Perhaps he will gut Claudius and Sinara Bellstock first, but then it will be our turn. Kallik, you have worked longest for Master Nenda and you know him best. Please speak to him on our behalf. Seek to take the edge off his anger and impose on us a lesser penalty. My bowels are very dear to me."

Louis was indeed angry. Angry at Claudius, who had made a Bose transition when his brains were fried to a crisp. In doing that the Polypheme had endangered Nenda's precious
Have-It-All
, not to mention everyone inside it. Chism Polyphemes were all liars. You could not trust one when he swore that the navigators of his species practiced their art best when they were on a radiation high.

The Polypheme lay on the floor of the middle cargo hold, a limp and wailing mass of cucumber-green misery. He had, he swore, the worst hangover that any living being had ever endured. That generated no sympathy in Louis. He kicked Claudius hard on the back of his blubbery head as he left.

Louis was just as angry with Sinara Bellstock. What she had swallowed, sniffed, injected, or inserted while down on Pompadour was her business. But it was certainly Louis's business when Sinara, after offering a display of physical affection so enthusiastic and vigorous that Louis was willing to keep going while the
Have-It-All
disintegrated around them, had suddenly and completely passed out.

Nothing could wake her. Louis could have continued and she wouldn't even have noticed. But he had tried necrophilia before, and he didn't like it.

He had rolled Sinara to her own cabin and left her there to sleep it off. Then he went to find his clothes, ready to roam the interior of the ship looking for something to kill.

That was when he became really angry. Not with Claudius, and not with Sinara. With Louis Nenda.

How had he so badly misjudged the rest of the crew of the
Pride of Orion
? Darya Lang, quite apart from being a sexy piece, understood the Builders and their works better than anybody. Hans Rebka was a weaselly little runt, but he had been in trouble often and always found a way out of it. Those two might well have hopped and wiggled their way to Marglot. They had headed off to the big dead world in the system where they first arrived, hoping to do just that.

But what about the other witless collection? What about Julian Graves, so stupid that he considered the life of a pea-brained Ditron as important as the life of a human being? What about dinglebrain E. Crimson Tally, who if he had been a human would have died twice already. As for the "survival specialists" . . . 

Sinara was a romantic nympho who put pleasure ahead of everything. All right for fun, but for
survival
? And she was the best of them. But they had all, Ressess'tress knew how, beaten Louis, Atvar H'sial, and the
Have-It-All
to Marglot. Sure, one of them was missing, but she might pop up any time. Maybe she was underground. The rest were on the surface, six of them near the Hot Pole and the other—E.C. Tally, from the suit's identification—sitting near the Hot Pole/Cold Pole equator.