Transvergence (33 page)

"What's the holdup? Let's get outa here."

"I'd love to. If
that
would let me." Rebka nodded to one of the displays. "I'm trying to open the connecting door to the outer hold. But the command set is being ignored."

"It shows the outer door won't cycle. That means the lock's in use."

"I know what it means—but that lock was
empty
when we came in through it." Rebka was switching to a camera that should provide a view of the lock area. "So how could it be in use now?"

Louis Nenda did not need to attempt an answer. While they watched, the air-pump sequence had ended. The outer lock now possessed a balancing atmosphere with the inner hold, and the door between the chambers could at last slide open. Both men stared at the scene shown on the displays.

"It's the
seedship
," Nenda said. "How come it's arrivin' here now? Where's it been all this time?" Before Hans Rebka could do anything to stop him Nenda ran back to the hatch, flipped it open, and within a second was free-falling through the open interlock door toward the smaller vessel.

Rebka followed at a slower pace. He could fill in a line of logic, and it made almost complete sense. He and his party had gone to Genizee on the seedship, but on their return to their landing place it was not there. They had been forced to return on the
Indulgence
. Darya Lang's party had gone to Genizee on the
Indulgence
, but it had gone when they needed it. So they must have managed to locate the missing seedship on Genizee's surface, and were now returning in it.

Almost
complete sense. The mystery component was again J'merlia. He had vanished into a column of incandescent blue plasma on Genizee, and reappeared on the
Erebus
. But how had he come here, if not on the seedship?

Louis Nenda was already over at the ship, cycling the lock. As soon as it was half-open he was squeezing through. Rebka followed, surprised at his own sense of foreboding.

"Darya?" he said, as he emerged from the lock. If she was not there . . . But Louis Nenda was turning to him, and one glance at his face said that he did not have the news that Hans Rebka wanted to hear.

"Not Darya," Nenda said. "Only one person on board. I hope you got an explanation, Captain, because I know I don't. Take a peek."

He moved to one side, so that Hans Rebka could see the seedship pilot's seat. Lolling there, breathing but unconscious, was the angular stick-thin figure of J'merlia.

Hans Rebka could find no trace of a wound on J'merlia's body. He had watched the Lo'tfian fling himself into that roaring pillar of plasma so hot that it had instantly seared off the pursuing Kallik's leg. Now that wiry limb was just beginning to grow back, but on J'merlia's whole body there was no slightest trace of burn marks.

Rebka and Louis Nenda carried J'merlia back to the bridge of the
Erebus
. There Atvar H'sial was able to perform an untrasonic scan on the unconscious Lo'tfian's body and confirm that his internal condition was apparently as intact as his exterior appearance. "And the brain seems to be no more damaged than the body," the Cecropian said to Nenda. "The source of his unconsciousness remains a mystery. One suspects that it arises more from psychological than physical causes. Let me pursue that approach."

She crouched by J'merlia and began to send powerful arousal stimuli to him in the form of pheromonal emissions. Rebka, to whom Atvar H'sial's message was nothing but a complicated sequence of odd and pungent odors, looked on for only a minute or two before he lost patience.

"She can do that all she wants to," he said to Louis Nenda, "but I'm not going to sit and sample the stinks. I've got to get down to the surface of Genizee. You come or stay, it's all one to me."

Nenda glared at him, but he did not hesitate. When Rebka headed back to the
Indulgence
, Nenda was hurrying at his side. "I'll tell you another thing," he said, as they prepared to soar free of the
Erebus
for the first phase of descent from orbit. "J'merlia may not want to wake up, but At says he
feels
better to her than he did the last time she saw him. She says he's all there now."

"What does that mean?" Rebka was aiming the scoutship for exactly the same spot on Genizee's surface from which they had taken off, and only half his attention was on Louis Nenda. It was not just a question of navigation. At any moment he was half-expecting a saffron beam of light to spear out of the sky and carry them willy-nilly to some random place on the surface of Genizee. It had not happened so far, but they had a way to go before touchdown. He was losing height as fast as he dared.

"Beats me." Nenda could not hide his frustration. "I tried to get her to tell me what she meant, an' she said you don't
explain
things like that. If you don't feel the difference in J'merlia, she says, you won't know what she means even if she tells you." He rubbed his pitted and noduled chest. "She comes up with that, after all I went through gettin' this augment put in just so I could gab Cecropian!"

The
Indulgence
was finally at two thousand meters and still descending fast. Already the screens revealed the familiar curve of the shoreline, with the spit of land to the north jutting out into blue water. Inland, the dark scars in a carpet of gray-green moss showed Hans Rebka just where the seedship and Dulcimer's scoutship had landed. Those scars looked subtly different from when he had left. But how? He could not say. At seven hundred meters he took complete manual control and brought them in to hover over their previous landing site.

"See anything?" His own eyes moved to the cluster of buildings where their party had first been trapped. Nothing had changed there. No sign of disturbance in the calm waters. It was Louis Nenda, scanning the broken masses of rock and scrubby vegetation a couple of hundred yards farther inland, who grunted and pointed.

"There. Zardalu. Can't see what they're doin' from here."

There were scores of them, clustered in a circular pattern around a dark chasm in the surface. They were in constant motion. Rebka flew the
Indulgence
across to hover directly overhead, where the downward display screens under high magnification showed upward-turning heads of midnight blue and staring cerulean eyes.

"Full-size adults, most of that lot." Nenda moved to the
Indulgence's
weapons console. "Let's give 'em somethin' to think about."

"Careful!" Rebka warned. "We don't know who else is down there in the middle of them."

"No worries. I'll just tickle 'em a bit." But Nenda selected a radiation frequency and intensity that would fatally burn a human in ten seconds. He projected it downward, choosing the spread so that it covered the whole group below them. There was an instant reaction. Zardalu jerked and jumped in pain, then fled in flurries of pale-blue tentacles across the shore, heading for the safety of the water.

Nenda followed them with the radiation weapon, pouring it onto the stragglers. "Don't die easy, do they?" he commented thoughtfully. He was burning them with a higher-intensity beam, yet every Zardalu managed to reach the water and swim strongly before plunging under. "Tough beggars, they eat up hard radiation. They'd be right at home with Dulcimer in the Sun Bar on Bridle Gap. Or maybe not. I guess they can take it, but they sure don't seem to like it."

The last Zardalu had vanished underwater. Hans Rebka hesitated. The easy piece was over, but what now? Was it safe to land the
Indulgence
, even with its sophisticated weapons system? He had learned the hard way an old Phemus Circle lesson: It's a poor civilization that can't learn to defend against
its own
weapons. The trouble starts when you have to defend against
somebody else's
.

The last Zardalu Communion had at one time extended over a thousand worlds. They could not have maintained their dominion without
something
to help them.

He brought the
Indulgence
to a hover thirty meters up, exactly above the scar in the moss left earlier by its mass. When all continued quiet, he cautiously lowered the ship to the surface. If Darya and any other survivors of her party were trying to escape from the surface of Genizee, there was no more logical place for them to seek. And if there were no survivors . . .

That was a thought that Hans Rebka did not care to pursue.

"Steady. Somethin's going on." Nenda's gruff voice interrupted his thoughts.

"What?"

"Dunno. But don't you
feel
it? In the ship?"

And Hans Rebka did. A minor tremor of the planetary surface, changing angles slightly and sometimes imparting a faint jitter to delicately balanced items of the ship's interior. Rebka instinctively lifted the ship to hover a couple of feet clear of the mossy ground cover, but further action on his part was overwhelmed by another input.

He had been watching the screens that displayed the seaward view, but now and again he switched his attention to one showing the land side. What he saw there filled him with strong and unfamiliar emotions.

It took a second to recognize them. They were relief and
joy
.

Running—staggering—across the uneven surface came Darya Lang. Right behind her was E.C. Tally, moving with the gait of a drunken sailor. And behind him, bounding along with a horde of dwarfed and apricot-colored young Zardalu snapping at his corkscrew tail, came a miserable, cucumber-green Dulcimer.

At the rate Darya and the others were moving they would be at the scoutship in less than thirty seconds. That was wonderful, but Rebka had two problems. The Zardalu were gaining—fast. They might catch Darya and the other two before they reached the safety of the ship.

And the shuddering of the
Indulgence
was growing. Accurate aiming of the weapons system to pick off the Zardalu was impossible.

Lift to safety, with Darya and the others just seconds away? Or wait for them, and risk the ship?

Hans Rebka placed his finger on the ascent control. Thirty yards to go, maybe ten seconds before they were inside the open hatch.

The ship lurched. He stopped breathing.

Those high-pitched, excited squeaks were the thing that had changed the Eaters from awful concept to Darya's worst reality.

The voices of the baby and adolescent Zardalu were quite different from the clicks and whistles of the parents. They had come echoing along the tunnel behind Dulcimer, rapidly increasing in volume. With those in her ears, decision-making had moved from difficult to trivial.

"Tally, are you sure you know a better way to the surface?"

"Certainly. I followed it all the way, and I even emerged onto the surface of Genizee itself. May I speak?"

"No. You may
move
. Get going."

For once, the embodied computer did not stop to give her an argument. He went scrambling up the steep incline of the duct, using the ribbed hoops of bracing material that supported the wall every few feet as a primitive set of steps.

Darya managed to stay close behind him for the first forty paces, but then she felt her legs beginning to tighten and tire. Even for someone in tip-top condition the steep ascent would be exhausting. But she had had no rest for days, no real food for almost as long, and she had spent a good part of the past few hours vomiting what little she had been able to eat. She had to stop. Her heart was ready to burst from her chest, and the muscles of her thighs were cramping into agonizing knots.

Except that the sound of the Eaters was louder. The young Zardalu were entering the duct that she was climbing. Close on her heels came Dulcimer. He was sobbing for breath and gasping over and over again, "They'll eat me, they'll eat me. They'll eat me alive. Oh, what a terrible way to go. They'll eat me alive."

Not just
you
, Darya thought with irritation. They want to eat
me
as well. And then: Irritation is meant to be
used
. Build it to anger, to fury.

The Zardalu would not get a
living
Darya. Never. She would force herself upward along the lightening tunnel until she died of exhaustion. Then, if they liked, they could have her lifeless body.

She clenched her fists and moved faster, propelling herself up the narrow tunnel until suddenly she ran into the back of E.C. Tally. He had stopped a few feet from the end of the duct and was peering upward to the brightly lit surface.

"Keep going!" Darya's voice was a breathless croak. If Tally was going to stop now and start a discussion . . .

"But there may be Zardalu—above us—I thought I heard them."

Tally was as out of breath as she was. Darya did not have the strength to argue. She pushed right past him. Possible Zardalu on the surface could not compete with
certain
Zardalu ten yards behind them.

She scrambled the final few feet of the duct, pulled herself over the edge, and sat on skinned hands and knees. The sunlight was painfully bright after the tunnels.

She blinked around her. No Zardalu, not that she could see. But her nose crinkled with their ammoniac smell. Tally was right, they had been here. But where were they now?

She stood up and turned quickly to look at her surroundings.

Tally had been right about another thing. This was much closer to the place where they had landed the
Indulgence
. She glanced that way. And saw the most wonderful sight that she had ever seen.

The ship was there, just as though it had never left the surface of Genizee. It was no more than a couple of hundred yards away, and she could see that its main hatch was open.

A booby trap?

Who cared? No future danger could be worse than what they faced here and now. Tally and Dulcimer were out of the duct, and Tally was picking up big loose rocks and hurling them down the entrance. But it was not doing any good. The approaching high-pitched squeaks of immature Zardalu were louder and angrier than ever.

"Come on. We'll never stop them with rocks." Darya began to run toward the ship, across a broken terrain of stony fragments and low, ankle-snaring bushes. She thought that progress would be easier as soon as she came to the level stretch of moss, but when she reached it her desperate dash became a dreadful slow motion. She felt as if she were running through thick, viscous air; she was so tired that the whole shoreline and the sea seemed to tilt and roll in front of her. The sky darkened. She knew it had to be her own exhaustion and failing balance.