The Lawgivers: Gabriel (41 page)

Lee Harris approached her. “They’ve
agreed to do a fly over tomorrow.”

Tessa blinked at him in shock. “Excuse
me?”

He shrugged, gesturing out the viewing
port. “It would be dark on the side where they landed before we
could ready a lander to go down. We’ll go down tomorrow and see if
we can tell anything about the condition of the other lander. If it
looks like it was attacked, we won’t land--we’re just not prepared
to launch an aggressive rescue, Tessa. I’m sorry. I know you were
fond of Dr. Lehman.”

A wave of nausea washed over her.
Were--past tense. Apparently she’d been more convincing than she’d
thought. They weren’t taking any chances that she might be right,
but it had never occurred to her that she was convincing them not
to go. She should’ve just kept her big mouth shut. “But … they
could still be alive. We can’t just abandon them!”

“And they could be dead. Will it help
them if we’re dead, too?”

She went to her quarters when he’d
left, too sick at heart to feel like looking at her fellow crew
members. She wanted to try reasoning with them. She wanted to
scream and curse and raise total hell, but she might just as well
beat her head on the bulkhead for all the good it was likely to
do.

She paced the room for a while and
finally flung herself down on the bunk, staring up at the ceiling.
She knew, in her heart, that if it was her down there, Lay-Leh
would have managed to get a rescue team together. Lay-Leh was good
with people. She could always manage to talk them into doing what
she wanted them to do.

She also knew that if, when they went
down, they saw that the lander had been attacked, Sinclair would
scrub the mission right then and there and turn tail for
Earth.

A totally insane thought drifted
through her mind.

She dismissed it, but not only would it
refuse to stay banished, each time it flitted through her mind
again, it grew stronger.

What could she accomplish, alone, she
asked herself?

What could you accomplish if you had
that pack of spineless white meat at your back, her inner self
countered?

The answer seemed inarguable. She’d be
no worse off, and no less likely to be successful if she went
alone.

She was either going to have to find
her spine and do what she knew she should do, or figure out how she
was going to live with herself when she did nothing at all but tuck
her tail between her legs and run with the rest of the craven
pack.

Chapter Two

Tessa realized that fear was not an
emotion she’d ever truly experienced in her entire life before. She
hadn’t realized how absolutely insulated she had been from real
life. She’d been nervous. She’d been anxious. She had even been
spooked more than once, but sheer terror was a totally new and very
unwelcome experience. It made her feel hot and cold at the same
time, and nauseated to the point where she felt as if she would
throw up … or pass out from hyperventilation.

She’d slipped a note under Dr. Harris’
door, asking him to try to keep Sinclair from abandoning them, to
give her at least three days to try to find the missing
party.

She knew the moment she left the
docking bay, however, that she’d been lying to herself that it
would make one iota’s worth of difference to Sinclair. Dr. Harris
might be able to convince enough of the other members to hold him
off, but the likelihood was that Sinclair would bolt as soon as he
discovered she’d taken the other lander.

She decided it would probably be for
the best if she just didn’t dwell on that particular
scenario.

In any case, as she dropped through the
atmosphere and came nearer her destination, the direction of her
terror shifted. It didn’t lessen. It simply changed from the fear
of being abandoned to her fear of what she would face on the planet
below her. If she hadn’t become so fixated on her determination to
try to find Lay-Leh that that thought prevailed even through the
mindless state of terror that gripped her, she would probably have
turned around and fled back to the ship. As it was, that option
didn’t even occur to her.

Gradually, the fear began to subside,
burnt up by its own intensity, and her body ceased to pump
adrenaline through her system in sickening, knee weakening waves.
Awe pressed it a little further to the back of her mind as she
broke through the thick cloud covering and was met with a brilliant
red and gold sunrise. From her height, the land mass below showed
signs even now of what had once been cultivated fields broken by
straight lines of road that crisscrossed and went off in every
direction.

The landing party had opted to land
near one of the greater metropolitan areas, certain that if there
were still survivors, they would be found near the remains of their
civilization.

Apparently, they’d been
right.

A stab of fresh fear went through her,
but despite that, Tessa was so overawed at her first sight of the
alien city that she was momentarily distracted from her fears. Like
the people of Earth, as their population had grown, they’d begun to
build higher instead of continuing to spread outward. Unlike Earth
people, however, they’d never, apparently, lost their love for
beautifying their surroundings. The buildings were already showing
signs of decay, but from the oldest to the newest, each building
seemed to vie to be the most graceful, the most ornate. Arches
dominated most of the structures--windows and doors were round, or
arched, but never square or rectangular. Ornate columns abounded,
as did decorative cornices and friezes. Sculptures--like ancient
gargoyles, perched on every available ledge and rooftop.

The similarity of much of the
architecture to more ancient Earth creations pulled at the
anthropologist in her and it was with a pang of regret for lost
opportunity that she focused once more on her objective as the
lander cruised past the city and dropped lower as it approached the
landing area.

When she reached the coordinates the
computer had used for the first landing, she didn’t see the other
lander. She circled, dropping a little lower with each pass. Her
first thought when she finally did spot the lander was that they
must have crashed--but that had to be wrong. The landing party had
radioed back that they were landing. If there’d been any sort of
problem with the equipment, they would’ve reported it
then.

Nevertheless, even from her viewpoint
she could see that the craft had been smashed all to hell and gone.
Maybe they’d crashed when they’d tried to take off
again?

She saw the first body when she
directed the lander to drop and hover above the downed vehicle and
her heart leapt into her throat. Stunned, even though she’d told
herself that she must accept that they had been attacked or met
with some other misfortune, Tessa stared at the unmoving form
fixedly for some moments before her brain finally kicked in
again.

More accurately, her brain was kicked
into functioning when an object slammed into the side of her lander
hard enough it rocked it.

“Climb!” she yelled, glancing around
for any sign that the impact might be weather related even while
her brain screamed ‘attack’!

A face appeared in her viewing port,
and then a second and a third.

Tessa screamed instinctively at the
jolt that went through her, but it was not merely that she was
startled by the suddenness, or even the fact that she was still a
good thirty feet from the ground.

The creatures hammering at the lander
were like something out of a nightmare. Their faces and bodies were
more human-like than any sort of beast, but their skin was a dark
reddish brown and from their foreheads sprouted a pair of small
horns.

At just about the same moment that she
realized the creatures were also winged, the lander began to lose
altitude—either from the sheer weight of numbers of the creatures
piling on top of it or because one of the creatures had damaged
something vital for flight. Fleeing from the porthole, Tessa
strapped herself into a chair, fighting the belts.
“Computer—evade.”

“I do not understand the
instructions.”

“Go fast, then stop quickly. Go up,
then down. Rotate the ship. See if you can sling them off, damn
it!”

“I am unable to complete the command.
The guidance is damaged. The ship is losing power.”

Tessa uttered every curse word she’d
ever heard. “Land the damn thing, then!”

“Assume crash position,
please.”

The lander slammed into the ground so
hard it jarred every cell of her body. It did not simply stop,
however. It continued to skid along the ground, bumping and
grinding metal at a tooth jarring pace. Despite the shock and pain,
uppermost in Tessa’s mind was the fact that she’d been brought down
by Hostiles. The ship had not even shuddered to a complete halt
when she threw off her restraints and stumbled toward the weapons
she’d collected and brought with her.

The crash had ripped holes in the
lander, but she saw fairly quickly that none were large enough for
the man-like creatures to fit through. Gathering the weapons up,
she looked around for a solid place to plant her back so that she
didn’t have to worry about being attacked from behind. Settling in
such a spot also meant she had no avenue of retreat, but that was
pretty much a foregone conclusion anyway. The lander was not
compartmentalized. It was strictly utilitarian and for the purpose
of carrying passengers from the orbiting mother ship to the surface
of a planet. They had not really intended to collect specimens of
any size and had thought the landers would work for pretty much any
situation since the seats could be removed if they needed or wanted
to carry anything bulky.

Unfortunately, they’d only brought two
landers and both of them were now scattered all over the surface of
this twice damned planet.

She wasn’t going home.

That thought jolted through her in a
cold wave even as she tried to force her mind to concentrate on the
moment … and survival. She didn’t delude herself for a moment that
Sinclair would consider coming after her or any of the others--not
that it seemed likely any of them would be in need of
rescuing.

A shudder ran through her as she heard
a pounding on the door of the lander and the scrape of metal from
whatever it was they were using to batter at it.

Were these--creatures--the last remains
of the civilization that had once thrived here? Or were they, like
the ape, nothing more than humanoid seeming animals?

As much as she would’ve preferred to
think the latter, she realized she already knew the answer. She’d
caught no more than a glimpse. She’d been too shocked and
frightened to really put the images together in her mind, but she’d
seen the trappings of cognition--they were wearing loincloths and
bearing weapons.

These were not animals that might get
tired and go away to look for something easier to get. These were
intelligent creatures bent on figuring out a way to get to
her.

Dismissing it for the moment, she
checked the weapons to make certain all were loaded and ready to
fire. She knew very little about weapons--as Sinclair had pointed
out--but she did know where the trigger was. She knew which end was
the business end and she could read the display that told her it
was fully loaded and ready to fire. She only had three, however,
and she had no idea whether they were powerful enough to kill a
full grown man--or man sized being.

She was very much afraid that she was
about to find out.

They’d begun hammering on the portholes
and on the hull where the crash had already weakened the structure.
She shifted her position so that she could keep an eye on every
place she could hear them trying to get in, wondering what they
thought they’d find when they did.

Food?

She felt a wave of nausea at that
thought. She was the only thing onboard that could be considered
edible.

She’d seen Dr. Boyd’s body,
though.

Undoubtedly their goal was merely to
scavenge the lander for anything useful.

She hoped that was all they had in
mind.

She frowned, trying to visualize how
many were outside. She’d seen four heads at the portal, but she
could recall that she’d heard the pounding on other areas at the
same time. Maybe a dozen?

She checked the weapon in her lap. It
had twenty four rounds. If she was right, she had enough to put
several holes in each--assuming she could hit them at all--and she
felt a little upsurge of hopefulness. Unless they managed to pry
the door open, they’d most likely only be able to attack one at the
time. Even if they did manage to pry the door open, it wasn’t big
enough for more than two to pass through at the time.

They were big.

A shiver ran through her as the image
of their faces flashed in her mind again. There was something about
them that felt threatening that went well beyond the attack itself.
She allowed her mind to pick at the puzzle while she
waited.

When enlightenment dawned, a cold
shiver raced over her.