The Shadow and Night (102 page)

As he surveyed his men, the
Emilia Kay
made a small course adjustment, and the rays of the setting sun shone into the packed compartment, throwing a weird, ruddy light on the men and machines.
Like blood,
Merral thought unhappily.

The soldier nearest the door looked up, saw Merral, and with a tense smile on his face, tried to salute.
Philip Matakala,
Merral thought, remembering his name.

“Oh, forget it, Philip,” Merral said more strongly than he had intended as he squatted down next to him, feeling a sudden revulsion for the whole business of orders and rank.
What do I really know of this man?
Philip was the sergeant and sled pilot with Frankie's team, so Merral had had more contact with him than with many of the other men. But even so, all he really knew was that Philip was an agriculture graduate, a sailor, and a single man from Caranat, one of the smaller coastal settlements. And the thought came to Merral with no pleasure that he was in some way accountable for this amiable but retiring man's safety.

“You're ready?” he asked him, trying to say something to cover his feelings.

“I suppose so, sir,” Philip replied, then looked up inquiringly with thoughtful eyes. “Are you?” He paused. “Sorry, am I supposed to ask that?”

Merral, bracing himself against the doorway, thought hard. He realized that he faced Corradon's dilemma.

“Why not? Am I ready? A good question. I vaguely feel—from the depressing ancient stuff I've read—that I should be confident and so fill you with confidence.”

“And you aren't?” Philip asked, his words tinged with sympathy.

Merral hesitated. “I don't feel confident. I simply don't know enough to know whether we are good enough. I think we—especially the teams—have worked wonders to get so far, but how good we really are is something hard to determine. Especially when we don't know what the opposition is like. I wish we had some old soldiers here.”

“Old soldiers?”

Merral laughed. “I'm getting like Vero. It's an expression. Veterans. In the Dark Times, wars were so frequent that when an old one ended they seemed to start a new one. So there were generally soldiers in the ranks who had fought in the last one. It gave continuity.”

“Yes. I remember. But it sounds like a crazy way to run a civilization.”

“Well, it was. But we don't have any veterans. I'm the nearest we've got. So we just hope and pray and stay prepared for anything.”

Philip winked reassuringly at him. “We'll do our best, sir.”

“Yes. I have no doubt about it.”

Merral patted him on the back and rose to his feet. The hold was too full for him to walk around in, and he knew he ought to get back to the passenger cabin. He looked around, catching thumbs-up gestures from the men and noticing Lorrin Venn grinning at him. He forced a smile back in response.
I suspect he's going to see his action. I only hope he likes it.

He saw Chaplain Luke and Dr. Azhadi squeezing their way through the press of men as they did their rounds. They had more defined and easier tasks, and for a brief moment, he felt utterly overwhelmed by what he faced. He was aware of Lucas Ringell's identity disk around his neck, and he felt that somehow it mocked him. He found himself wondering why he had accepted this whole monstrous task.
It's too late to argue. I'm here, I have been called to be here, and I must do my very best.

Full of thought, Merral returned to the cabin, which seemed surprisingly roomy after the hold. Anya, who seemed to have been watching for his return, gestured him over to a seat next to her.

“Merral,” she said in a soft tone as she leaned over toward him, “I need to talk to you.” Her eyes were wide and bright.

“Go ahead,” he answered, realizing again that the urgency of the hour could not suppress his feelings of a growing attraction for her. In fact, he realized that, in some bizarre way, the impending action seemed to heighten his feelings for her.

Anya put her diary on her knees, bending closer to him so that her words would not carry beyond the two of them. “I suppose I really need to talk to you about that creature. Whatever we call it.” She looked up at him with a strange concentration as if trying to read his mind.

“I have no name for it. A flying sheet? A two-dimensional dragon?” Merral said, tearing his mind away from other, more pleasant things.

“A two-dimensional dragon? A sheet-dragon?” She seemed to weigh the words. She tapped her diary and a still image of the creature came on the screen. She looked at it and seemed to shudder.

“Anya,” Merral suggested, “you don't have to talk about it if you don't want to.”

She gave him a stern smile. “I was shaken when I saw it. And I don't want to talk or think about it, but I have to. It's my job. I'm a biologist, and I am supposed to be your expert. So I've looked at the images and cleaned them up.”

“So what is it?”

“I don't know. This ‘sheet-dragon' is, I presume, a vertebrate; there's got to be a skeleton under that. But what sort of a skeleton . . . ? Ah,” she sighed, “I think it's very lightly built. The feature on the underside is, of course, a mouth—there are teeth visible on the enhanced images—and it has these members around it, feeding palps, claws, limbs, mandibles; whatever you want to call them. Two small eyes inset on what my sister would call the leading edge. It's like no creature that we know of.”

“Is it made of other things? Like the other creatures? A bit of bird, a bit of lizard?”

“I can't see it.” She shook her head. “I just think it has a sort of elemental quality.”

“By which you mean . . . what?”

She grimaced. “It seems quantitatively different from the cockroach-beasts and ape-creatures. They can be considered as bits and pieces of different organisms put together. This is something else.”

“Could this sheet-dragon be a genuinely alien creature?”

“Maybe . . .” She stared at him, her eyes wide in the darkness of the cabin.

“Any advice if we meet it?”

“Fire first. No, I have a few thoughts. Size, first: We think the wingspan is just below two meters; say the width of your outstretched arms. And the way the mouth is structured, it's not going to be a great biter. The gape isn't that wide. But if it got a chance at exposed flesh . . .” She shivered.

Like the back of a horse or a human face.

Anya stared at the images again. “What else? Oh, and the tail could be nasty; it might be able to use it as a whip.”

“Ah . . . In other words, keep your distance.”

They exchanged glances, and Merral felt that there was more being transmitted between them than just thoughts about this strange and dreadful creature. Silently, she tapped the screen off.

“I see,” he said after a while. “But you are worried, aren't you?”

Merral received a confiding glance. “Yes, yes I am. I have no idea what is in that ship. I hope we can immobilize it, seal it up, and deal with what's in it at our leisure.” She glanced around the cabin, and Merral, following her gaze, saw that no one was looking at them. She reached out, touched his hand briefly and shyly, then withdrew it.

“And, my Tree Man,” she said, with an affection that was no longer concealed, “I'm concerned that something may happen to you.”

“I see,” Merral answered, his mind already clouded with all sorts of strange thoughts. Suddenly, finding Anya's unmistakable expression of affection too overwhelming, he realized that he needed to focus on other things. He could not afford to be distracted, and anyway, the unresolved matter of Isabella still hung over him. With a flustered apology, he got up and went forward into the cockpit.

There the lighting had been turned down so low that it was hard to see anything at first other than silhouettes of the three people in the cockpit outlined against the multicolored lights of their screens. Merral was trying to regain his composure when he saw Perena's head turned toward him.

“Okay, Captain?” he inquired.

“Yes . . . ,” she said, turning back to look ahead. “The ship's fine. Fully laden and we are flying too low for comfort, but we are in good shape.”

“Where are we?”

She gestured to a glowing map nearby. “Still going north, well over the horizon from the most northern coastal settlements. In fifteen minutes, we cut due west toward the coast and come in just north of the Nannalt Delta. So we will have the first landing in about an hour.”

There was a catch in her voice. He bent his head forward so that he could talk to her without the others hearing. “Are you all right?” he whispered.

“Yes,” she murmured back. “I suppose so. . . . I'm just in a strange mood. Am I worried? Is that it?”

“Understandable. I mean—”

“No,” she interrupted, apparently realizing something. “It's not worry. Or not entirely. It's a feeling—I suppose—of awe. That we are, somehow, on the edge of something immense. Something momentous? Is that the word?” She paused. “Sorry, I guess I'd better focus. This is not the time for reflection.”

She fell silent, and Merral decided to take the small spare seat at the extreme back of the cockpit. He tried to run through everything in his mind to be sure that he hadn't overlooked anything. Had he done everything that he had to? There was so much to manage. The idea nagged him again that he had forgotten something, that there was something that he should have done but hadn't. But what was it?

His thoughts were interrupted a few minutes later when a low bell tone chimed, and then he heard Perena's voice on the speakers. “Captain Lewitz here. Just to say that we are nearly as far north as we get and very shortly I'm going to start flying due west to put us toward the northeastern edge of the crater. From now on, we will be at a very low altitude, and I want to reduce the possibility of us being seen by dimming the interior lights even further. I should warn you that as we go overland, the ship is going to bounce around. So be prepared. Fifty minutes to Landing Site One. All being well, my next message will be just before the landing maneuvers.”

Behind him, Merral saw the corridor lights fade out, and a moment later the ship started to drop in height and began a leisurely turn. Out of the small window to his side, Merral peered into darkness.
I should go back to the passenger cabin.
But if he went there, he had to choose to sit next to Anya or not. Part of him badly wanted to sit next to her, but he was somehow uneasy about what might happen between them.
There seems to be the potential for things to happen between us that I ought to think hard about. There are matters too that I must sort out with Isabella first.

There were footsteps beside him, and he looked up to see Vero, bracing himself unsteadily against the wall. Vero bent down so that he could speak to Merral and not be heard by anyone else.

“Merral,” he whispered in a strained, hesitant voice, “I just want to say that I am sorry about the business with Felicity. I really am.” His unsteady tone suggested an intense unhappiness. “I am very worried that I may have jeopardized things. At the time, it seemed a good idea. . . .”

“Oh, Vero, stop it!” Merral whispered back, clapping him on the shoulder. “Have I blamed you?”

“No, but I blame myself,” he murmured.

“Well, better not to,” Merral answered. “I need you with your mind alert here. We are entering unknown territory. All our actions have a risk.”

“Yes, you are right,” he said a few moments later, a renewed resolve apparent in his voice. “Sorry . . . But I was just shaken by what we saw earlier.”

“Me too. But it may have done us a service. We have learned a lot more about the intruders. We know there is another type.”

“Yes. And it is carnivorous. Each new thing unsettles me more,” Vero responded. “I can only hope and pray that we have not gotten involved in something too big for us to manage.”

“That's out of our control now. We must just do what we have to do.”

“I guess so.”

Perena turned her head toward them. “Coastline coming up,” she called out in a low voice.

Vero tapped Merral on the shoulder. “Many thanks. I'm going to get strapped in. See you when we land.”

Merral stared out of the window into the darkness, and a few minutes later, he was rewarded by seeing a faint line of starlit white breakers and then a pale ghostly strip of the seastrand. Then they were flying over ground, low enough for him to sense the rough fabric of the forests racing away underneath and to distinguish the raw, ash-colored rocks around. They were so low—perhaps barely five hundred meters above the ground—that although he knew Perena had slowed the speed down, they still seemed to be going appallingly fast.

As Merral peered down, seeing starlight glimmering on dark lakes, the ship began to sway laterally and vertically in a sickening motion.
It's the computer, nudging us over and around the oncoming landscape.
In the cabin ahead, he could make out the crew scanning their sensor screens, trying to detect anything unusual. This far north there would be no one to see them. At least, he thought ruefully, that was what he had once believed as a certainty. Now though, that—as so much else—was in doubt.

Time passed as the
Emilia Kay
swayed this way and that and the shadowy landscape slipped by underneath. Suddenly Perena was talking to him, her voice terse. “Captain D'Avanos, no anomalies ahead at Site One. Do we go for landing?”

“Yes,” he said, “or rather, affirmative.”

Seconds later Perena's voice came over the speakers. “Landing maneuvers starting in thirty seconds. Brace yourselves. On my command, Lieutenant Larraine's team begin to disembark.”

The
Emilia Kay
started to reduce speed even more, and a new whispering whine indicated the vertical thrusters were firing. As Merral watched out of the window, they sank down into a river valley and then in a series of fierce turns began to veer from side to side as they followed the meanders. Outside in the darkness, he could now see silhouettes of crags above him. There was a hissing and a soft clanking noise as the landing gear was extruded, and the speed dropped to what he judged was little more than walking speed.