Strider's Galaxy (36 page)

The Preeae straddling the split directly above her made urgent gesticulations. It took her a moment to realize what he was trying to tell her, and then, clumsily, she got up on her hands and knees and turned herself around the other way. It made sense. If this conveyance system accelerated quickly up to any speed, it was best to travel head-first. She guessed that deceleration at the far end would be a bit more gradual. She hoped so.

She could see others of her personnel being urged into the coffins ahead of her. She assumed the same was happening behind, because every now and then the coffin in which she was lying rocked slightly. Some of her people were having to be forced pretty damned hard, despite the Images' reassurance. She repeated again and again over the general frequency that there was nothing to be worried about, all the time wishing that, as they'd dashed from the
Santa Maria
, she'd thought to jam a commlink into her mouth. Maybe she should have hooked up to the commline long ago, but she still disliked the thought of being invaded by technology, however useful that technology might be.

Couldn't someone get those bloody kids to shut up?

The same grinding, wrenching noise that had marked the opening of the split started up again, and the strip of light above began to narrow as the rocky edges moved towards each other. Now she started to feel real fear. She turned on her suit lights, and quickly issued an instruction to everyone else to do the same. She assumed Ten Per Cent Extra Free would repeat her instruction.

The split closed. She was staring straight upwards at what looked like a rough-hewn granite surface, not fifty centimeters from her face. They say you can get used to anything, but Strider wasn't sure she was going to be able to get used to this. Again her pulse was pounding, and there wasn't anything she could do about it. How long was it going to take them to travel the four hundred and fifty kilometers? Would their suit air last out? The vision came into her mind of a string of what were now genuinely coffins arriving at the mountain terminus. She started doing some calculations before realizing that the Preeae's system would have to be exceptionally slow for that to be a concern. Besides, the Preeae must have aerated the whole system so that they, too, could survive it. What was more worrying was that, if she was as terrified as this, how would some of the others be reacting? Would any of the kids reach out an inquisitive hand to touch the moving surface as the coffins rattled along at a couple of hundred kilometers an hour, or whatever this apparatus was capable of?

Her last anxiety was removed when a metal lid suddenly appeared over the box in which she was lying. In a way, this was even worse.

With some difficulty she manoeuvred herself around until she was lying on her stomach, and tongued off her suit lights. Better to pretend that she was just lying on a bed.

But it wasn't like that at all. There was a jolt and then, for a long—a very long—moment, it felt as if she were standing vertically but pressing herself with all her force against a wall.

Then there was oblivion.

#

It took a long while for Commander Segrill's people to work out how to get the alien spaceship open, and more than once he was tempted to tell them to go at it with lazcutters. He restrained himself. The spaceship that had destroyed half the planet's manufactories and then come gracelessly to the ground here in the desert could contain much that was of interest, and could possibly be of great use in itself. Where the aliens had gone to was no great mystery to him: from the marks they had left in the sand—milling around for a while and then converging on a single point—it was obvious that they had discovered one of the Preeae's access points, which had since been removed. If the technology aboard the spaceship proved advanced enough, he would liaise as best he could with one of his Preeae contacts—negotiations were always tricky because of the Preeae's powerful xenophobia—to see if he could track the aliens down.

This attack could be the best thing that had ever happened during his stint in charge of security on F-14. The defensive shielding of the spaceship had been pretty sophisticated, so it was likely that the rest of the technology aboard would be of a similar standard.

He was one of four of the Autarchy's occupiers of F-14 that knew about the continued existence of the Preeae. As head of security it was his duty to exterminate those survivors. As someone who wished to see the end of the Autarchy sooner rather than later, he had kept very quiet about his knowledge, as had his three co-confidants. The Preeae presented no nuisance, and might one day be helpful.

It was easy to rise to a position of minor power within the Autarchy. All you had to do was say the right things and keep very quiet about what was actually going on. Gambling for higher stakes was a much more risky business: the Autarch became aware of your existence, which meant that there was the ever-present possibility that he would decide you were a threat. Within the Autarchy, possible threats didn't last long. But a mere commander of security was beneath the Autarch's notice.

The technicians on F-14 hated the fact that they were there. Most of the people within the Autarchy hated what they were doing, but they had very little choice about it: on the average planet even an ill timed fart could lead to a painful death. The power of the Autarch's forces was almost absolute, because it was built from the top downwards. Only a comparative few were loyal to the Autarchy itself, but those few had the power of life and death over those below them. The same principle applied all the way down, until finally the pyramid's base was formed by the vast mass of ordinary people, who didn't give much of a curse about the Autarchy but just wanted to live from day to day without the threat of being butchered.

Where the Autarchy had made its mistake was in gathering a very large group of such people on F-14. The technicians did what they did because they were forced to, and almost without exception they loathed the war machines they were having to create. For all they knew, that particular item of weaponry was going to be used to annihilate their own species.

Segrill had slowly, cautiously worked his way up through the system until he had been posted to F-14. If there was a single planet that could threaten the Autarchy, this was it.

There was a yell of triumph as someone managed to open the spacecraft's outer lock.

Maybe the aliens had booby-trapped their abandoned vessel. He had to take the chance that they hadn't.

Segrill, who was about the size of Strider's thumb, flew across the desert so that he could be the first to investigate.

#

Strider opened her eyes and switched on her suit lights. Directly beneath her face was a rather dirty metal surface; she was glad she was in her spacesuit because the surface looked as if it stank. She felt as if she had had a claustrophobic dream, then remembered that it had been really happening.

There was very little room in the coffin, but she was able to shuffle over on to her back.

"How long have I been out?" she subvocalized.

ABOUT TWO HOURS,
said a voice which she recognized as Heartfire's.
YOU WILL BE RELEASED FROM CONFINEMENT VERY SOON NOW.

"Where's Ten Per Cent Extra Free?"

CLOSE BY.

"How much are we at risk from contamination?" said Strider, wriggling to try to make herself more comfortable. Her back was aching. Ideally she would have liked to stand up and flex herself.

AS FAR AS I CAN ESTABLISH, NOT AT ALL.

"How far are we from the mountain escape-way?"

WE ARE THERE ALREADY. THE PREEAE ARE PREPARING TO RELEASE YOU ALL FROM YOUR CONTAINERS.

"How many of us are still alive?"

TWO ARE DEAD. ONE TORE HIS EYES OUT AND BLED TO DEATH INSIDE HIS SUIT. ANOTHER DIED WHEN THE MAJOR PUMPING ORGAN OF HIS CIRCULATORY SYSTEM CEASED TO OPERATE. IN EACH INSTANCE WE DID OUR BEST TO ASSIST THEM, BUT IT WAS BEYOND OUR CAPABILITIES.

"Who are the dead?"

THEY ARE NOBODY ANY LONGER.

Strider kept her anger under control. Over time she'd built up a relationship with Ten Per Cent Extra Free, so that he generally understood what she was saying rather than just the literal meaning of the words she spoke. Heartfire and Angler were rather more of a problem. She wondered how many basic errors there were in the interpretations they offered when translating between herself and other species.

"What were those dead people called?" she said.

THE PERSON WHO DIED THROUGH CIRCULATORY MALFUNCTION WAS NAMED MARCIAL HOLMBERG.

Oh shit. A man whom she had begun to like.

THE PERSON WHO DIED BECAUSE HE RIPPED HIS EYES OUT WAS CALLED KHAN RAVI, AND WAS THREE YEARS OLD. ONLY A CHILD WOULD HAVE HAD ENOUGH ROOM IN HIS SPACESUIT TO REACH HIS EYES WITH HIS HANDS.

That was worse, a lot worse. Holmberg had led a reasonable adult life and then had experienced a few moments of agony before, boomf, he was gone. Young Ravi, by contrast, must have reached the outer extremities of terror and died in a loneliness that no one living could imagine.

She kept herself in check.

"How many of us are still sane?"

IT IS DIFFICULT FOR ME TO ASCERTAIN. WE IMAGES ARE NOT ENTIRELY CAPABLE OF TRACKING THE THOUGHT PROCESSES OF PEOPLE WITHIN THE WONDERVALE AND DECIDING WHETHER OR NOT THEY MAKE SENSE WITHIN YOUR OWN SPHERE OF REFERENCE.

"At a guess?"

MOST. PROBABLY ALL.

"You can't be more accurate than that?"

NO.

"What exactly did the Preeae do to us?"

THEY ACCELERATED YOU TO A VERY HIGH VELOCITY, AND THEN THEY SHUT DOWN ALL YOUR HIGHER NEURAL FUNCTIONS. THEY WERE TRYING TO MAKE YOUR TRANSIT AS EASY AS IT COULD POSSIBLY BE—IN THEIR TERMS.

"I'd rather have watched the rocks go by," said Strider.

BUT A PREEAE WOULD NOT HAVE. AND NEITHER WOULD MOST OF THE PERSONNEL YOU COMMAND. PLEASE DO NOT OBJECT TOO LOUDLY, CAPTAIN LEONIE STRIDER. THE PREEAE ARE DOING EVERYTHING THAT THEY CAN TO HELP YOU WITHIN THE LIMITATIONS THEY EARLIER STATED.

"Yeah, I guess that's true," she said after a second or two.

GLADNESS,
said the Image.

The lid of her coffin swiftly withdrew. A ribbon of light began to appear overhead.

She had spent almost all of the journey they had made in a state of enforced sleep. Nevertheless, what she wanted to do was to fall back into sleep. The option wasn't open to her.

A Preeae reached down, grabbed the front of her suit, lifted her, and chucked her on to a hard stone floor.

Wherever it was they'd arrived, they'd arrived.

#

Strider was the first to remove her helmet. She wasn't sure it was wise, and was slightly surprised—whatever Heartfire had said—when she didn't drop dead immediately. On the other hand, the alternative was that the small human party would plough on through the foothills until, sooner or later, they suffocated inside their spacesuits. With luck Kortland would have kept an eye out for them and would send a rescue party . . . but Strider reckoned there would have to be a hell of a lot of luck involved. Maybe, maybe, they'd be rescued: much more likely that they'd peter out, one by one, on the surface of F-14. But, just in case, she wanted to conserve what was left of her oxygen.

The air up here smelt good, unlike the fetid air of the desert: the first deep breath she took tasted like cold water, even though the surroundings were surprisingly hot. Above them the slopes of the mountain seemed to reach upwards so far that they punctured the sky. There was some kind of springy blue-green vegetation underfoot, so that Strider felt as if she were lighter than usual. With the strap of her helmet looped over her left wrist, she drew her lazgun from her waist. She and her personnel weren't far from a glacial snowline, so water wouldn't be a problem—assuming there weren't things in the snow that'd kill them—but food was going to be more difficult.

The Preeae had dumped the humans out on the surface with very little ceremony. Last to be ejected had been the suited corpses of Holmberg and Ravi. The trapdoor, the same bluish-green as the vegetation, had hovered for a few moments longer and then reared into the air—and then vanished with such speed that, had Strider not been watching it, she would never have seen it go. There was a small cave near to where the trapdoor had been: after removing the oxygen tanks from the backs of the dead people's spacesuits, Strider and Pinocchio had stuffed the corpses into it. It wasn't much of a burial—in fact, it wasn't a burial at all, although Strider had said a few pious words—but it was as much as she could give them. She'd told Pinocchio to handle the body of the child: one look at the red-specked visor of the infant was enough to convince her that this was a job someone else should do.

"We might as well go all together," she said blithely to the Images, feeling almost doped up by the air. "Tell the rest of them to get their helmets off. Please."

THIS WILL BE DONE,
said Heartfire in his normal stilted fashion. She wished that Ten Per Cent Extra Free were back with her.
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU SHOOT FOR FOOD. NOT EVERYTHING HERE IS WHAT IT LOOKS. LET US GUIDE YOU.

"If it looks like food I'm goddam going to eat it. Have you guys ever known what it's like to be
hungry
?"

But at the moment she didn't feel hungry. What she felt as she loped along on the springy vegetation was pretty good. Sooner or later, though, she and her people were going to have to find something to eat. Maybe she'd have been better off going downhill rather than up—she could see there was prolific foliage of some kind down there—but she sensed that she'd made the right decision. Certainly the Images hadn't disagreed with her, and presumably they'd have kicked up a fuss if she'd been doing something stupid. Yeah: Heartfire was implying that there'd be food animals somewhere up ahead.

There was more oxygen in the atmosphere than she was accustomed to. On board the
Santa Maria
the oxygen level had been held somewhere between Mars-standard and Earth-standard, so that no one was too uncomfortable. Here the concentration was much higher than that, which was probably why she was feeling as if she'd just given herself a fix of ziprite.