The Queen of Space, page 20
“Better get some sleep,” she told him. “I’ll wake you if we need—”
The ship had not been equipped for free fall. Turning back from the mike, she reached for a hold-rope that didn’t exist and found herself floating off the seat. Snatching for anything, she caught empty air.
“Jil!”
One hand on the console, Star caught her ankle with the other. His chuckle relieved her instant of alarm, and she was laughing at herself as he hauled her toward the deck. Suddenly, his arm tight around her, they were both adrift again.
She clung to him. They spun together very slowly, afloat beside the conning screen. His rough-stubbled chin scratched her face till she found his searching lips. Nothing mattered then, until he pushed her abruptly away.
“Forgive me, Jil!” he whispered. “I never meant—”
“Kynan!” She tugged him toward her. “I love you.”
“Jil?” His tired eyes searched her own. “Are you—are you sure?”
She kissed him.
Fulfilled at last, they rested together in the air until she felt a soft collision with a bulkhead. Nudging them toward the conning screen, she searched again for the shadowflasher fleet.
“Still coming,” she whispered. “But toward Ultima. Not toward us. We have more time.”
Again they swam together, far from pain and danger.
She kissed him and clung while she looked for the fleet. “Passing us now,” she told him. “Nineteen blips, spaced far apart so the fields don’t interfere. Nearly a billion kilometers away and flying on toward Ultima. No sign they’ve seen us.”
“Jil, Jil! You can’t realize—” Gently he kissed her. “You’ve made me whole.” He held her away from him. Caressing her, his eyes filmed with tears. Wryly, he grinned. “My mind still says we’ll never win, but somehow I’ve caught your hope.”
“Anybody!” Giles Habibula’s forlorn whine came out of the intercom. “Anybody there? Kynan? Lass? Can’t anybody bring a mortal crust to a poor old man before he dies of fearful famine?”
“Giles,” Star answered. “You know what’s in the galley—”
“Anything!” he wheezed. “Any mortal crumb. Lass! If you’re listening, lass, take pity on me. For all the mortal months I’ve been drifting in this deadly dark, waiting for that fearful fleet to catch us, without a human voice to cheer me or a blessed bite to eat. Even that foul slave swill would be a blessed banquet to me now.”
“The fleet is moving on,” she assured him. “And Kynan can relieve you.”
Star went down to take his place. She stayed to watch the shadowflasher fleet creeping on toward Ultima. Feeling safer as the purple-seeming blips diminished, she asked Star to energize the drive field. At minimum power, they crept on to search for the triple sun.
“A morsel for you, lass.” With the internal field still minimal, their feet just brushing the deck, Habibula shuffled very carefully out of the elevator with another pan of mush. “Stinking swill, but we must eat. I know you need it, because I was famished to a bag of mortal bones before that fearful fleet was gone.”
“Thank you, Giles.”
It tasted better than she expected. The space ahead almost clear again, she let Lord Archy take the console and lay down on the metal deck. The minimal field made it soft enough, and she woke from a dream of swimming with Kynan off a tropical beach her grandfather had spoken fondly of, back on old Terra.
“Information, Miss Three,” Lord Archy pealed. “The craft remains on course. We encountered no emergencies, and Pilot Star instructed us not to disturb you.”
Oddly, it seemed to her, the alien chronometer ran on Legion time. Ten hours had passed. The last purplish fleck of the enemy fleet was gone when she searched. Back at the console, she pushed up their effective velocity.
Gamma was already lost in the dust behind, and Ultima had become a fading fleck of haze. A crimson-seeming halo had begun to burn around the nebular core. Hard radiation, most of it came from that slow-drumming pulsar, itself the spinning remnant of the most recent supernova.
Its steady flash had grown more and more intense. Though its hot point looked blue to her eyes, the radiation throbbing into the cosmic chaos around it seemed red as waves of blood to her special sense.
“Permission, Miss Three?” Lord Archy came skittering to the deck. “Information, rated significant. We detect increasing gamma radiation from pulsar ahead. Warning, rated urgent. Such radiation rated inimical to human survival. Rated extremely inimical to mutant pilot sense.”
“Thank you, Lord Archy.”
“Gratitude not required, Miss Three.”
“I know the risk,” she told him. “I’m trying to steer us around the pulsar, but that triple sun’s closer to it than we are now. We’ll have to take the radiation, and hope we can all endure it long enough.”
“Computing, Miss Three.”
He danced on the deck, soundless for a time.
“Reporting, Miss Three.” He soared higher. “Referential data on term ‘hope’ lacks precision required for exact computation. Question, Miss Three. Can you define term ‘hope’ in present context?”
“I’ll try.” She reflected, searching for his language. “Hope’ refers to direction of action, subject to effect of outside factors. Our direction of action is to find Miss William and stop the shadowflashers. Outside factors include effects of pulsar radiation.”
He paused in the air.
“Information, Miss Three. Outside factors rated critical. Computed probable duration of your own useful survival time rated inadequate. Advice, Miss Three. Action should be planned to limit or avoid exposure to gamma radiation.”
“I’m afraid it can’t be.”
“Comment, Miss Three. We compute diminishing probability of successful rescue missioin. We compute increasing probability that pulsar radiation will destroy your ability to pilot the starcraft.”
The little image of her head shook slowly in his bright bubble.
“We’ll keep hoping.”
Silent, he dropped and rose again.
“Continued exposure to pulsar radiation rated inevitable,” he pealed at last. “Data held for analysis and possible reference to extended definition of term ‘hope.’ ”
Holding hard to that uncertain term, she kept the starcraft on a long spiral curve around and into the nebular core. Though no normal human sense could detect gamma radiation, she began to feel a vague discomfort. Faint at first, it grew sharper, hotter, until it had become a dull, oppressive pain that seemed somehow inside her head.
She wanted to talk to Star about it. But he was always standing straighter now when he was with her on the deck, his gaunt face grinning easily, his hollowed eyes almost happy. She decided not to shatter his brighter mood.
She found the triple sun.
A close double, both components seeming greenish to her. A fainter single star, distant from the two, blood-red as she perceived it and all but lost in the pulsar’s crimson-seeming blaze. Giles Habibula was appalled when she tried to tell him their position and direction.
“Lass, lass! You’re flying us to dreadful death. For sweet life’s sake, think of me. The medics warned me long ago against the nebula’s fearful heart. Their blessed serum can do no good against that mortal radiation. I’ll die, lass!
“We’ll all die!”
“Perhaps,” she told him. “But most of us never even hoped to live forever.”
“Jil—” Star came out of the ladder well, bent again and worry-bitten. “Lord Archy says you’re hurting from the pulsar radiation.”
“I feel it,” she told him. “A reddish glow, as I seem to see it. Flashing out of the pulsar.”
“Painful?”
“More and more.”
His bleak face tightened as if he shared the pain.
“Lord Archy says it will kill my pilot sense,” she added. “I can’t guess when.”
“Jil, I wish—” He checked himself and tried to grin. “At least we have your Gyrel luck! Perhaps, with that, we’ll last long enough.”
Searching for planets as they neared the triple star, she found none about the close double. The single sun had one.
Power cut, she steered toward it slowly until her eyes could find it on the conning screen, a dim and tiny-seeming disk. It had no moon.
“It’s larger than it looks,” she told Star. “Though without instruments I can’t get specifics. Its rotation is almost locked, its day and year nearly the same. A long day—with no way to measure, I’d guess ten or twelve Legion years.”
“No place for life.” Star frowned at the faint flicker of its image. “For our sort, anyhow.”
As they drew nearer, Habibula came up to squint at the planet.
“A wicked world, by its looks.” His wheezy voice turned foreboding. “A fearful problem for us, lass. The whole mortal world to search, and we don’t know what we’re looking for.”
“The laser-maker—”
“Lass!” His bald head shook in sad reproof. “The shadowflashers have the precious laser-maker.”
“Not forever.” She tried to smile into his dismal gloom. “We can hope a hundred things. Hope she has escaped. Hope her own people have rescued her. Hope they can help us find her. Hope they know some way to fight the flashers.”
“Lass, you’re lovely!” His yellow face lit briefly. “You’ve a grand spirit, too.” His face faded then, and his head shook again. “But you’re too new to the nebula. You ask for mortal miracles.”
“If we can make them happen,” she said. “With no sign of one just now, I think we have a choice to make. Try for a landing on the planet? Or let Lord Archy try to signal?”
“Signal, lass?” The old man staggered as if she had struck him. “Here in the empire of the fearful flashers? Must we beg them to send another mortal fleet to smash us?”
“How else can we reach Miss William or her people?”
“A fearful risk—”
“We have to take fearful risks. Lord Archy does know their language?”
“He talked to her. Nothing you could hear, most of the time. They both used tach or radio frequencies. Now and then words from a primitive warrior—she rates him a spearman—words mortal hard to understand. She named herself for him.”
“I wondered.” Jil nodded. “She spoke of an armed rhinoceros—”
“An ancient Terran creature, lass. She asked to see one, but they’re long extinct.”
Star was standing watch in the generator room when she called for his advice.
“I’d opt for a landing, Jil.” His voice seemed wearily grim. “Though neither choice looks good to me. A call from space could set the flashers on us. Down on the planet, Lord Archy can scout it for flashers. If we find none there, we might risk a radio call.
“With minimum power.”
“Agreed,” she said. “We’ll land.”
“Don’t expect a picnic when we do. A bad world for us. Water will freeze and fall on the night side, piling up in ice kilometers thick. It will boil off again on the sunlight side. Deserts like we never imagined.
“Storms, I imagine, in between.
“A difficult place for organic evolution. Any intelligence evolving there would probably have to be mobile. Migrating around the planet between the desert and the ice. I’d suggest a landing near the sunrise line. The likeliest place to find organic life.
“But no paradise!”
“A wicked bitter thing!” Habibula was wheezing. “If we call, we call the fearful flashers. If we land, we could come down inside a flasher camp. A hard thing, lass, without a mortal drop of anything to brace us for the risk.”
“The choice is made,” she told him. “Please relieve Kynan and stand by to land us on geodesic power. We’re going down to the sunrise line.”
31
Jil’s space perceptions faded as they slid down into the planet’s blinding gravity, until all she could see was the visual display on the conning screen. With a blind spot beneath them, it showed the dimly blazing sky and the whole ice horizon.
“An insane place!” Kynan Star whispered beside her. “We’ll need all your Gyrel luck.”
She checked their descent at twenty kilometers, cruising toward the sunrise line. With no clouds beneath them here, all they saw was endless ice, broken here and there with a jutting mountain range. Watching for the glow of dawn, she saw a purple flickering far ahead.
“Lightning?” She looked at Star.
“A climate like we’ve never met.” He nodded. “With almost no Coriolis force, we’ll have a simple pattern of warm air rising and cold flowing under it. Which would make a permanent storm front just ahead of the sunrise line, crawling around the planet every dozen years.”
Worry furrowed his grizzled face.
“If we must risk a landing—”
“I think we must.”
The wall of storms rose ahead. Alive with lighting, its cloud towers loomed above their level. She had to climb back to forty kilometers, then to fifty. Even there, its blazing fury boiled up around them. Near thunder rumbled through the hull.
“I don’t understand.” She frowned at Star. “The storm’s coming up to meet us.”
“Leakage from our own drive field, I imagine. Lifting the clouds.”
Climbing again, into the planet’s east, they came out into a sudden dazzle of sunlight. Night and ice lay behind. To north and south, the storm wall ran as far as they could see, white towers blazing. Through broken clouds below, they saw Miss William’s world.
Oddly streaked.
A broad zone of rusty red: a jungle of rank leatherweed, Star decided, fed with meltwater. Fading eastward into orange and yellow and brown where floods had stopped and rains had failed. Edged with black where fires had swept.
Farther east, beneath the endless desert day, the hazy horizon was cloudless. The land looked barren. Jagged brown mountains. Vast brown plains slashed with empty canyons. Wide depressions floored with the flat and dazzling white. Lakes and seas, Star said, dried to barren salt.
“No sign of life.” He shook his head. “Unless—”
He caught his breath, pointing into the conning screen.
“See that? A long, straight line across the desert. There beyond it, those darker spots. Square-cornered spots, laid in line. They can’t be natural features.”
“We’ll land and look.”
Their poorly shielded field caught the ground as they came near. A plume of gravel and broken rock rose to meet them, sank back around the starcraft as it creaked and swayed and came to rest. She heard the muffled crash of stony debris against the hull, and then Star’s sigh of relief.
“A neat trick, Jil. I almost wish the Legion had let us try it.”
Dense yellow dust had risen all around them. Waiting for it to spread and settle, they searched again for works of the laser-makers.
“A wall?” She pointed. “A double wall?”
It ran across the lifeless, yellow, level plain as far as they could trace it, angled toward the longer wall of storms beneath the eastern sun. Rust-red against the rust-red landscape, it cast a wide black streak of shadow.
“Nothing natural.” Star studied it. “Worth a closer look.”
“We’ll send Lord Archy first.”
He was gone for an hour.
“Negative, Miss Three,” he reported. “No contact with intelligence. The visible constructions indicate intelligent activity, but not in recent time. We observed no evidence of any life since shockwave passage, except for scattered leatherweed still surviving.”
“Is it safe for us to leave the craft?”
“Negative, Miss Three. Environmental hazards rated too severe for human survival. Gravitation nearly twice Ter ran normal. Radiation intensity rated far beyond human tolerance. Excessive carbon dioxide. Free oxygen near minimum human requirements.”
“But nothing to kill us at once?”
“Affirmative, Miss Three.”
“How long could we last?”
“Computing, Miss Three.” He lay shimmering on the deck. “Results indefinite, Miss Three. Exposure period of one Legion hour rated probably survivable. Exposure period of one Legion day rated probably fatal.”
He soared toward her face and fell slowly back.
“Warning, Miss Three. Exposure to radiation causes cumulative damage to mutant pilot sense. We advise against exposure outside the hull.”
“We’ll keep it brief.” She turned to Star. “But I think we must take a look.”
“Don’t leave us, lass!” Giles Habibula’s plaintive wail came out of the intercom. “Trapped in this mortal shadowflasher wreck, down in a fearful alien desert. In air too bad to breathe, under radiation no man could endure.
“If you and Kynan don’t come back—”
“We must go,” she told him. “You and Lord Archy had better stay aboard. We mustn’t risk the secret you share.”
“Aye, lass! For the sake of the blessed Legion and the precious secret of AKKA, I’ll remain a prisoner on the fearful slaver. And fix myself another mess of that evil swill to save my precious strength and recollection.”
She and Star dropped to the lock. A hot wind met them when it clanged open, edged with the bitter reek of leatherweed. The ground for many meters out was broken stone, lifted when they landed and fallen back to form an accidental barrier.
The heavy gravity caught them. Staggering beneath it, they scrambled out across the boulders to the summit of a barren hillock. Beyond it, flame-yellow dust devils whirled here and there above an endless pain scattered with clumps of dull-red weed. The old wall crossed it half a kilometer ahead.
“Nothing here.” Star shrugged. “Shall we go back?”
“Let’s look beyond the wall.”
They plodded around a long dust dune to a gap in the wall and climbed tumbled stone toward the top. Star paused to scratch with a knife at one shattered brownish block.
“Something artificial. Harder than granite. Weathered here, I couldn’t guess how long.”
From the top they saw the second wall, parallel, two kilometers away. Both had been ravaged by time and cataclysm. The space between was clogged with broken stone and wind-drifted dust. Shading his eyes, Star squinted along them toward the line of storms.
