by Larry Niven
Cadzie sat on a makeshift cot in a makeshift cell. The door opened.
He couldn’t remember the guards’ names, and privately called them Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Tweedledum was shorter, and wore sergeant’s stripes. Tweedledee was tall and handsome, and he thought he’d see him with that imposing female Major Stype. “You have guests.”
The guards watched the door close.
“Ever have a cord-cutting?” Meadows asked the sergeant.
“One, yes.” Sergeant Cubbin’s face pinched. A painful memory. “Three years before we left Earth. It stung.”
“Wonder if he’ll—” The sergeant’s body spasmed and dropped. Meadows reacted fast, snatching for his side-arm and saw—
Toad Stolzi, the little bastard, grendel gun leveled in the instant before firing.
When the girls had appeared at Cadzie’s door, he’d almost wondered if he was dreaming. The makeshift cell had been more than merely cheerless, it had been a harbinger of another, colder confinement to come, one from which he might not emerge as the person who called himself Cadmann Sikes. The thought of that was almost more painful than death: to wander the earth a mere shadow of what he had been.
That Joanie and Trudy had put themselves in peril to rescue him, had displayed the trust and love to take such a risk . . it touched him more than he could possibly say.
“What’s the plan?” Cadzie asked when they emerged onto the eastern shore, still not quite believing.
“Shaka is taking the skeeter,” Joanie said. “We’re taking a zodiac to the mainland. We’ll get picked up there.”
“Won’t Cassandra track us?” That seemed a perfectly natural question.
“She has to know where to look,” Trudy said. “We’ve got a dozen other zodiacs that will travel to different points on the mainland, crossing paths with us. And skeeters traveling to the interior and the mainland.”
“Everything we have,” Joanie said. “Needles and haystacks.”
The night had deepened by the time the guards began to stir. Captain Meadows, the tall one Cadzie had called “Tweedledum” rolled over onto his side. “What happened?”
The second could see the open door to the danger room, a reinforced “safe space” in case of grendel escape, common around Blackship, and useful as a cell.
“He’s gone. Someone sprang him.” Tweedledee’s name was actually Sergeant Cubbins.
“Contact home base.”
They checked their equipment, and found every bit of it smashed, their skeeter’s rotors crippled.
“Damn! They’ve destroyed the radios.”
Captain Meadows brooded, then brightened. “When we don’t check in at midnight, we’ll get help. Meanwhile . . what if the skeeter is a feint?”
A pause. “What do you mean?”
Meadows shook his head as if to clear away the last wisps of confusion. Together they searched the section, coming to conclusions about what precisely had happened to them. It was Sergeant Cubbins who had the brainstorm. “They came in through the caverns. What if they went out that way, too?”
“It’s possible, yes. What do we do?”
“There’s training apparatus,” Meadows said. “And I’ll bet they didn’t think about that. Let’s go get them.”
♦ ChaptEr 40 ♦
the caverns
Blackship Island’s caverns and its subterranean river were accessible through a natural cave opening beneath the main storage silo. Captain Meadows and Sergeant Cubbins hauled their equipment down into the rocky chill then suited up and plunged into the cold fresh water.
It took a moment to orient to the darkness, and just as he did his suit lights clicked on, sending a cone of golden light out into the murk.
“Are you seeing anything?” Meadows asked through his throat mic.
“We have a sign of passage, yes.”
Meadows examined some odd looking glassy substance lining the walls. “What is this stuff? On the walls?”
It was a glaze, obvious now that they examined it, and not the result of volcanic action.
“I don’t know,” Cubbins said. “I don’t know. Something made by underwater termites might look like this.”
“What’s that?”
At the very end of their twin golden beams, where the light died into darkness, writhed squidlike shadows.
“What in the world are those?”
“Are those . . these cthulhu things?”
“Didn’t Sikes say these things have stingers?”
“Oh . . now you believe him, huh?”
At first he thought the cthulhu were moving aimlessly, but then a circular pattern emerged, faster and faster, creating a vortex in the confined space. The water plucked at them, pushed at them, transforming into a reverse whirlpool, driving Meadows and Cubbins back. Others were doing something to the tunnel itself.
“Get back!” Meadows screamed into his throat mic.
The very walls around them began to collapse, creating a nightmare but the guards noticed that the cthulhu slowed their vortex as they retreated, sped up as they advanced.
“I think they’re trying to tell us something.” Captain Meadows said.
“Yeah,” Cubbins replied. “That we aren’t going out this way.”
“What do we do?”
“Get back. Report, if anyone’s come for us,” Captain Meadows said.
♦ ChaptEr 41 ♦
the mainland
For the two previous days, there had been movement from Camelot to the mainland, and from various groups of Grendel Scouts on the mainland to positions expanding in starfish formation, centered on a spot parallel to Blackship Island but fifty klicks east.
Within minutes of the escape, skeeters had begun flying in haphazard fashion, concealing intentions not with the cover of night or useless stealth tactics, but in a maze of conflicting destinations.
The game had begun.
Captain Sven Meadows had made love to Major Patricia Stype for the second time that day, only an hour ago. They hadn’t had time to shower before the news came of a possible Cadmann Sikes sighting, just a hundred and thirty-five klicks from coastal base. They’d chosen not to wash, so that the faintest perfume of their intense embrace still hovered in the air just below the threshold of conscious awareness.
No one else knew. But they knew, and that knowledge simmered in the air between them, a combination of sex and the joy of the hunt to come.
They didn’t need to speak of it, but a decision had been made.
They had met in the GSF, the Godson Security Force, ten years before the planned date of departure from Earth. Seeing in each other something that they had never found before, they believed that their love could survive a multitrillion-mile journey, that they could begin life on a new planet, beneath a new sun . . but not the passage of time while waiting for the journey to begin. Stype was already almost forty, and even with the very best medical treatment, the idea of beginning a family with fifty-year-old ovaries was out of the question.
Messenger certainly had hundreds of thousands of starchildren, fertilized embryos which could then be implanted once they arrived at their destination, but that still depended on a womb far beyond its optimal reproductive years.
What about raising the baby in a creche? Certainly possible. And they were prepared to provide precisely that service to most of the contributors to Messenger’s funding. But inner-door teaching among the Godsons spoke of the flow of life force along the threads emanating from the God Knot, the hormonal communication between mother and child, a sort of prenatal spiritual education. While unspoken, the preference was natural childbirth whenever possible.
Major Stype liked that idea just fine. There was a very old-fashioned aspect to her nature, a desire to be taken by a strong man beneath alien stars, on a homestead created with their own hands, to feel new life blossoming within her, to give birth as her ancient ancestors had, and to raise her children on a new world, to be inheritors and conquerors.
Captain
Meadows felt the same, and that had sealed their bond.
They were a mated pair of predators who had found a home in the Godsons, and intended to embrace the new adventure wholeheartedly.
With that intention in mind, they had entered cold sleep voluntarily, ten years early, knowing that they would not awaken again until they reached Hypereden.
That had gone wrong.
They had awakened a week before orbiting, spent those seven days training five hours a day and making love when they could, and had kept up that same enjoyable schedule once they had descended to Avalon.
At first they had been enthralled by the new world, a rioting cacophony of alien sights and sounds and smells. And been politely impressed by the efforts of the colonists who had made it home. But as twenty-three-hour days passed, they began to understand that these former Earthlings, who now called themselves Avalonians, had much to learn.
And after the murder of the one called Tragon, they had waited to see how justice might be done. When it was not, they realized the real reason Messenger had diverted from its original path: to bring civilization and purpose to these wayward children. In its search for the origins of life, Messenger would bring human civilization to the galaxy, but that new civilization would start here on Avalon.
So forty minutes after leaving the base, they were closing in on Sikes’ last known location. Whether the Starborn had used some sort of camouflage, or there was some natural coverage in the rocky area, had yet to be seen.
Stype dropped off Meadows and nine support troops, hovering as they swept through a field of jagged rocky spikes, each two and three stories high, perhaps the result of some freak windstorm here at the edge of a desert that stretched almost to the North Pole, fifteen hundred klicks away.
She sat at the window in the copilot’s seat (she was an excellent autogyro pilot), watching the security sweeps. For ten minutes their efforts bore no fruit, but then someone fired a shot. It was never determined who, whether Starborn or Godson. Each, of course, claimed the other had committed that deadly sin.
Major Stype did know that she saw a bullet strike rock chips a hand’s breadth from Meadows’ head, and that the next thing she knew her hand was on the firing controls.
And unsummoned, a voice raged in her head: They tried to kill my mate. Slaughter them! and that deep red thing inside her was alive in the chopper, and when she came back to her senses, her hands were shaking, and she wasn’t quite certain what she had done.
Cadzie and his allies arrived at Camp Three, a hunting lodge tucked into a mountainside twenty miles from the closest grendel-infected water source. Far enough for safety. Grendels were water-cooled engines and without that coolant, were as dangerous to themselves as others. “I’ve never been here,” he said.
“That’s deliberate, Cadzie. We didn’t want any connection to your previous movements. If they try to backtrack all our movements, that’s thousands of different places to search, and we can stay on the move. They can’t check us all.”
Cadzie counted eleven Grendel Scouts in the camp. All there for him. He felt proud and sick at the same time.
“Isn’t this a little dangerous?” Cadzie asked. “They’ll track the skeeter if we aren’t careful.”
“But we are,” Joanie said. “Very.”
Footsteps behind them. Toad Stolzi, holding a vidsheet. “We have problems,” he said. As he came closer, the firelight silvered the tears streaking his cheeks. “Big problems.”
“What?”
“They just killed three of our people.”
Enraged, the Speaker forced himself to speak in measured tones. “I do not like what I see happening here. I think our people may not have the experience to deal with this situation. We may need a clearer, more experienced mind.”
“Is it time to wake the Russian?” Dr. Mandel asked, pushing up the wire-rimmed spectacles perched on his angular nose.
“Not yet. But bring the colonel up to second level. Warm him up enough to begin brain activity.”
“We’ll need to run cranial blood through a circulator, not start up his heart.”
“So be it,” Speaker said. “How long will it take?”
“Twenty hours to wakefulness.”
“Start the dream conditioning as soon as you have mental activity. There will be no time to waste.”
“Five hours,” the doctor said. “That’s time to encode the information in audiovisual tracks.”
“So be it.”
Night had fallen at the hidden campsite. And with the shrouding of Tau Ceti, and the realization that yes, people had died, the atmosphere of bravado had begun to thin.
Joanie went by herself, back to a rock wall (Mei Ling, who loved geology, had been very careful to be sure that the rock was common enough to provide no clues to their location) and recorded a message. After she did, she gave it to a skeeter pilot who flew it to the center of that imaginary starfish, and broadcast it from there.
For days now, Marco Shantel’s sleep had been thin and troubled. As a result he was sleeping late, and was half-dozing when a knock shivered the door of his hutch.
“Marco. Have a message for you.” Sergeant Greg Lindsey said, and handed him a data card.
“Why didn’t you just put it on the net?”
The sergeant shrugged. “It was marked personal. Just assumed you’d like the privacy.”
Plus, he wouldn’t be surprised if Lindsey simply wanted an excuse to talk to the (formerly) great Marco Shantel. In a few months, the glamour would wear off, but right now a bit of limerence remained. “Where did it come from?”
“It was rerouted, at least that’s what Trevanian said. I don’t know if anyone can find the point of origin.”
“All right. Let’s have it.” He closed the door, weighing the flat flexible plastic card on his fingertips, then plugging it into his console. It started automatically. Joanie appeared. Oh, good. He pushed pause.
“Thanks,” he said with a brief hard handshake. Ushered the man out. And then started the vid again.
“Marco, this is Joanie. I’m sorry I can’t talk to you . . . with you, but it wouldn’t be safe. I have to assume you’ll share this, so don’t worry, there’s nothing in it that can’t be shown. We did what we did because we believe in Cadzie. I’m sure you consider it a betrayal, but . . . we can both live with that. I don’t think I can live with these old sins ruining another life. We have a plan, that’s all you need to know. That . . . and that I love you.”
The image began to fade, and Marco paused it before it disappeared, so that a translucent Joanie hovered in the air, like a frozen ghost.
Marco shook his head. “Joanie,” he whispered. “What have you done?”
The campfire was one of dozens across the continent, timed to mask a single heat signature in a plethora of possibilities, a needle hidden in a stack of needles.
But in the foothills west of the new dam, a small crew of desperados were making the most of their peaceful evening, possibly the last they would enjoy for a long time.
“Have you had enough to eat?” Joanie asked.
“Yes,” Cadzie replied. “And Joanie?” He scanned the circle, his eyes stinging. It was the fire. That was what it was. “Thanks. Thanks all of you. And now . . we’re kind of stuck.”
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“I’ve been thinking about that.” He paused, not certain he really wanted to say the next thing. “I have one advantage that no one else has.”
“Your knowledge of the planet . . ?” she offered. “You had Sylvia as your grandmother, Cadzie. She taught you a lot of things . . .”
“No,” he answered, and reached to squeeze her hand.
“You’re so close to it that you can’t see it, and I love you for it.”
“What’s that?” she asked, now genuinely mystified.
“I know I didn’t kill your father. I don’t need faith. I know you had faith, and it means the world to me.”
She looked down shyly.
“I . . um . . maybe I got to know you better. On Geographic. You aren’t a user, Cadzie. You don’t see people as things, not even when they kinda ask to be treated like it. If you’d hated my father enough to kill him, I can’t believe you could have treated me with . . real caring.” Something shone in her eyes when she looked back up. Tears? He wasn’t sure. It was possible.
“So what are you thinking?” Evie Queen asked.
“Something killed Aaron and his grendels, leaving physiological traces similar to those left by a grendel gun. Adrenal overload. Triggering the nervous system.”
“These cthulhu couldn’t have been unaware of grendels . . .” Jaxxon said. “Might have even domesticated them. They would know how to hurt them. We’re saying what? That their technologies were magnetic and maybe biological? What if they evolved a mechanism for protecting themselves.” He turned. “Shaka?”
The big man’s brows furrowed. “Hard to say, but they might have enough generating capacity.”
“So . . what? We bring a grendel into their home, or a place that used to be a home, and there’s hell to pay.”
Shaka nodded. “I say that our only real play is to understand the cthulhu better.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Well . . .” the big man said, stretching time. For almost thirty seconds, he was silent, then very slowly he said: “One option is to go someplace they plausibly congregated.”
“For instance?”
“Well . . we found that temple by following a magnetic anomaly. The largest such anomaly in this hemisphere is less than two hundred klicks from here.”
Cadzie perked up. “That’s in the alpine meadow? West of the Snowcone uranium mine?”
“Under the meadow, actually. Halfway to the North Pole.” He seemed to turn the idea over in his mind, liking it more the more he considered the notion. “The advantage is that they’ll never expect that. They think you’re guilty. They can’t consider you wanting more information about your alibi without asking themselves if you are innocent.”
