Resurgence (32 page)

How come Tally was so far from all the others? There was no evidence from the radio signals of a ship, pinnace, or aircar anywhere on Marglot. How had Tally traveled such a distance, many thousands of kilometers? Louis could think of only one answer. The Marglotta must have provided transportation. Here was something to make him madder yet. You responded to a call for help across thousands of lightyears, and when you were stupid enough to respond, they were sitting cozy at home and apparently doing fine.

Louis stormed off to find Atvar H'sial. The Cecropian was crouched at her ease before an instrument panel of her own devising.

"Have you been following all this?"

"To the best of my humble abilities."

"At, modesty don't become you."

"I have also received a detailed briefing from Kallik, by way of J'merlia."

"Then you know we've been screwed. We're arrivin' last of the party, and if we can take anything at all with Julian Graves watchin', it will be scrapings."

"You and I agree on the facts, Louis. However, we draw different conclusions."

"At, they're ahead of us and down there—every one of 'em."

"Correct. Six in one location, the seventh in another. But through J'merlia, I commanded Archimedes, whose optical powers are amazing and perhaps even unparalleled, to seek movement on the cloud-free portions of Marglot. He reports numerous small moving objects, all on the frozen hemisphere, but has detected nothing that could be a substantial piece of airborne or ground transport equipment."

"We've got our pinnace, At. We don't need none of the Marglotta's junk."

"True. But Julian Graves and his cohorts need it. Without it, they are confined to a tiny portion of the planetary surface. All the rest—" Atvar H'sial waved an articulated limb toward the window. Marglot hung in the sky beyond it, although with the Cecropian's echolocation vision she could only be inferring the looming presence of the planet from other sensors. "All the rest, Louis, is ours to explore and exploit.

"Consider the options. Are the Marglotta alive? Then we have responded to their call for help, and we are ready for their thanks and willing to begin negotiations—on our terms. Are the Marglotta dead? Then the whole of the planet, except for an insignificant area where the rest of our original party is located, is ours for the taking. We will of course rescue Julian Graves and the others and be prepared to receive their gratitude—eventually."

There was no justice in the universe, and a man had no right to expect any. Louis had known that long before he was a man—before he was weaned, probably, though his memories didn't go back that far.

Even so, it was never pleasant to have your nose rubbed in injustice one more time.

He was sitting in his own quarters, at his desk and working on the difficult question of the landing party, when Sinara walked in.

No, she didn't walk in; she
waltzed
in. The laws of morning-after said that she should be feeling like hell and looking as green as Claudius. Instead she was rose pink and bright-eyed, with a spring in her step. The bottom of her mouth ought to feel as though bats without toilet-training had roosted all night on her upper palate. But when she said, "Good morning—and a great morning it is," she leaned over and gave Louis a kiss on his unshaven cheek. Her breath was as sweet, fresh, and perfumed as the spring violets on Sentinel Gate.

A woman without a trace of conscience, who showed no signs of guilt for anything she had done? That was Sinara. The thought brought back memories of Glenna Omar. What was Glenna doing right this minute, back on the garden world of Sentinel Gate? Louis didn't know, but he had his suspicions.

He gestured to the seat at the other side of his desk. "Sit down."

"Over there? Not over here?" She was standing by him and breathing into his ear.

"Not now. We got work to do. We're heading down to Marglot. Question is, who goes and who stays here?"

"Everyone should go. It maximizes our chances of survival."

"What makes you think so?"

"In our survival training classes on Persephone, we were provided logical proofs, based on long-established game theory results, that the probability of survival in an unknown environment is proportional to the size of that party."

"That's fine, if you happen to regard survival as a game. In our case, I can see three or four things wrong with the idea that everybody should go. First, whoever we send may need backup. If the
Have-It-All
went down to the surface and somehow got smashed up, that would be it. There's no sign of another ship anywhere in the Marglot system. That means we gotta send the pinnace down, and keep the
Have-It-All
up here and out of danger in case it's needed for a rescue mission. It could make it down easy enough on autopilot, but I'd rather have somebody at the controls who can make the right decision if things get hairy."

"So you have to leave Claudius here. He's the best pilot. But I don't think from the look of him this morning he's in any condition to travel."

"That's his problem, not ours. Claudius is a navigator, an' I don't know how good he pilots when he's not juiced up. Anyway, are you willin' to put that much faith in a Chism Polypheme? I'm not. Give him half a chance and Claudius would be out of here an' take the
Have-It-All
with him. He says this ship is no good, but you can see his eye roll when he looks at some of the fixtures. I don't care how bad he's feelin', he has to go down 'cause I don't trust him here.

"Which brings us to the second problem. You flew the pinnace down to Pompadour, so you know it don't have that much space on it. In principle it has a three-person limit, though you can squeeze two in the back if you have to. Archimedes can't go—he'd be bulging out of the hatch with no room for anyone else."

"That gives you one definite stay-at-home on the
Have-It-All
."

"Yeah. Trouble is, Archimedes is stronger than greed but he ain't none too smart. If it came to a rescue mission, it'd be a toss-up whether you'd trust him or the autopilot to take the right action. You need a rescue crew that's smart
and
a good enough pilot to land the ship on top of Julian Graves's bald head and be out of there before he has time to feel the pain. And there's one other thing. You need a rescue crew that won't turn and run, no matter how dangerous it gets. You need a rescue crew that would die rather than leave you behind on the surface of Marglot."

"Kallik and J'merlia?"

"You got it. Put all that together, and it's easy. Atvar H'sial and I go down in the pinnace, and so does Claudius. Archimedes, Kallik and J'merlia stay behind. Kallik is really smart, and J'merlia flies this ship better than I ever could. Both of them are so devoted to At and me they'd come after us if we were marooned in hell. In fact, they're too damned devoted—if we don't stop 'em, they'll be down there every ten minutes to check on us. I'll tell 'em to come if they get my signal, or the pinnace beacon goes dead, an' not before. That leaves only one person still to decide."

"Me? You can't possibly mean me." Sinara stood in her most aggressive hands-on-hips stance. "Let me remind you of something, Louis. I am a
survival team member
. I am trained for trouble."

"You certainly know how to start it. All right, you're the fourth. It will be a squeeze in the pinnace, but we'll manage."

"We'll do more than manage. We'll have
fun
."

"I'm glad to hear you say that. Because I'll be the pilot, and the way space inside the pinnace is arranged, either Atvar H'sial or Claudius will have to sit next to you. I'll give you the choice." Louis looked up at her scowling face. "If you want to hear the rest of it, you might as well sit down again."

"The rest of it? You had this all worked out before I came in. You didn't want me to help, you just wanted me to listen."

"Not true. A second head can help. I
think
I know what I'm doin', but suppose I'm wrong? Here's the other part. We're going down to Marglot, but where do we land?"

"Are you asking me, or are you just going to tell me?" But Sinara sat down again.

"I'm going to explain the situation as I see it. Then I'm goin' to ask your opinion. What we know isn't much and it isn't complicated. We have six people in suits in one place on the surface, near the Hot Pole. Kallik has been monitoring suit signals, and one of the people is banged up pretty good."

"Who?"

"Ben Blesh."

"I bet he got hurt trying to be a hero. That was always his ambition."

"No information on that, an' you're bein' bitchy. The others are all right. But we got one, E.C. Tally, way off in the temperate zone between the hot and cold hemispheres. How he got there, what he's doin' there, your guess is as good as mine.

"Now we come to what we
really
don't know. Who else, or what else, is down there? The Marglotta were advanced enough to commission a Polypheme ship an' fly all the way to the Orion Arm to ask for help. They must have had some spaceflight of their own. You'd expect to see satellites buzzing all over the place around Marglot. We don't. Maybe in the combined gravity field of the sun, M-2, and Marglot, orbital paths are so weird that orbital decay times stop you puttin' up anything unmanned. But that's pure guesswork.

"Then there's the surface. Before you can have spaceflight, you need a pretty advanced civilization. It doesn't have to be out on the surface—Lo'tfian females run everything from their burrows, and only the males wander around above ground. But normally you expect spaceports an' stuff like that. Archimedes plotted out lots of structures that could be cities or industrial plants on the warm hemisphere, but he can't see anythin' moving near any of them. Also, we don't pick up a peep of radio signals from them. The strangest thing is that on the cold side, where Archimedes finds no trace of industrial structures, we pick up scads of radio noise all over the place. An' when I say
noise
, I mean it. The signals are junk, as though hundreds of people in suits were all jabbering at each other at once with nobody listening. One of those babble centers seems right about the place where we pick up the beacon of E.C. Tally's suit."

Louis leaned back in his chair. He would never admit it to anybody, but it was nice to have an audience—especially an audience as attentive, fair-skinned and bright-eyed as Sinara Bellstock. A man could get into lots of trouble with an attractive young woman like that hanging on his words—if he wasn't in twenty-seven kinds of trouble already.

Sinara raised her eyebrows at him. "Do you really want my opinion?"

"I'm waitin' for it."

"Well, I would say the choices are rather clear-cut. There is exactly one place on Marglot where you have a member of our party, and also evidence of surface activity. We should take the pinnace down to E.C. Tally's location and find out what's going on there."

"You got it in one. Can you be ready in two hours?"

"Louis, I'm ready
now
. For anything."

She looked it. Her cheeks were glowing.

"One other thing, Sinara. We have no idea what we may find down on the surface. We all wear suits."

"I know
that
. I'm not a raw trainee, I'm a
survival specialist
. Assume I'm good at
something
."

Louis did, but he wouldn't say what. He watched her bounce out, happy as if he'd announced they all had the day off and were going for a picnic down on Marglot. She had come to the same decision as him about a choice of destination, but there was one detail of Louis's own thought processes that he had declined to mention: of all the creatures, human or non-human, that you might find down on the surface of the planet, E.C. Tally was the one entity whom Louis Nenda could persuade into believing almost anything.

Unfortunately, others already on Marglot might be able to persuade E.C. just as easily.

One more decision had to be made. Louis had not mentioned it to Sinara, because he was still turning it over in his mind. They had not come here to see the sights, so the safest approach would be to fly to your landing point as directly as possible. On the other hand, if there were spoils to be gained on Marglot—something which Louis increasingly doubted—then a survey from a few thousand meters above the ground, and even a landing at multiple locations, would be needed.

He never made a final decision. He didn't have to, because Atvar H'sial made it for him.

"Do you anticipate that we will be obliged to wear closed suits for most of the period while we are on the surface of Marglot?"

"Dunno. Seems like there's a pretty good chance of it, 'specially when we meet Tally an' whatever goes with him."

"Then let me remind you that on similar occasions in the past, you and I have suffered because of our inability to communicate. Sealed suits prevent any form of pheromonal communication, and you have difficulties when I seek to make statements employing human speech modes."

"You're gettin' better, At."

"Do not waste both our times. Your true opinion of my efforts shows clearly as a sub-text. No matter. What is important is that, since you and I will be unable to communicate efficiently once we are on the surface and our suits are closed, we must have an opportunity to decide upon a course of action
before we arrive
. We are able to fly in the pinnace with suits open. I therefore propose that we perform a preliminary reconnaissance of Marglot and formulate our plans, before we land and close our suits to meet with E.C. Tally and whatever surrounds him."

"Got it. I'll define a full low-altitude circuit of the planet before we touch down. Anything shoots at us, naturally we'll be out of there."

Louis thought about his partner again as he took the final steps to separate the pinnace from the
Have-It-All
and begin the swoop toward Marglot. You took one look at a Cecropian and you wished you could wake up; but you were already awake, and when it came to business the pheromonal conversations between Louis and Atvar H'sial agreed point by point. Those conversations were also—Louis was very aware of Sinara, sitting right behind him and breathing down the back of his neck—unclouded by those
other
pheromonal exchanges which prevented clear-headed discussion with members of the opposite sex.