Andre Norton - [Time Traders (Ross Murdock) 07]

by Atlantis Endgame (epub)

  Linnea winced.

  Ross and Stavros were already busy at the simple sheet-ropes and braces that controlled the single sail. And there was a breeze, if a fitful one, stirred by the hot air coming south meeting the western flow. The water currents were also fitful, probably due to steam vents opening in the ground below the sea.

  As Linnea watched, the men finished sheeting the sail home, and the ship began to pick up life. She realized she could not hear the engine adding its contribution to their speed; she could only feel its vibration.

  "Now," Ashe said, his voice rasping with evident exhaustion. "Konstantin. Tell us what to do to help fix that time-gate, if you can."

  "We must generate light on deck," the man replied, making motions with his hands. "I must disassemble the rods and lay out the pieces so that I can examine the damage."

  "That's a clear order," Eveleen murmured. "Our part is to clean up the deck, then." She sent a humorous look Linnea's way, hoping to ease the woman's stricken expression.

  Linnea nodded, gave her a perfunctory smile, but it was a polite smile, and did not mask the inner turmoil that Eveleen could so plainly see.

  They worked quickly, and in silence, shifting all the decorative "trade goods" belowdecks—those that they'd gotten for the scientists, that is. The fake things they threw over the side, figuring every bit that lightened the boat's load increased speed. And in the blast to come, no one was ever going to find those floating plastic jars or fake furs.

  The blast to come—maybe it had even started. Eveleen saw that she was not the only one glancing often over her shoulder at the north. The scary thing was, they didn't seem to be moving at all, yet she was able to feel the wind and saw little rippling waves slapping up the bow and passing, with oily-looking foam, down the sides. The current did not seem to be setting north, so what was the problem?

  When they got the last items clear, and the men began bringing up the big metal rods that were the frame of their time-gate, she stood on the taffrail and stared northward.

  No, the familiar outline of Kalliste had diminished. But what had steadily grown was that red glare in the north. In fact, it had grown so much that it seemed to have come closer; the red now climbed high into the sky, tentacles of glowing smoke straining toward the horizon. Dawn was near: a greater light glowed in the east, but underneath it spread the violent reddish-brown cloud, reaching horribly outward in snaking fingers. Some even stretched westward, writhing upward like a monster out of the worst nightmare. Eveleen made out house-size chunks of matter spewing high into the sky and coming down with fiery force into the sea.

  The sound, she realized, had grown steadily, a rumbling, rushing roar.

  "It's as I thought," Kosta said.

  Eveleen turned around and saw that he had laid out the portal rods on the deck. She'd thought of them, from the name, as being simple rods of metal; instead, they were hollow cylinders, now open like elongated clam shells and packed with circuitry and bizarre metallic shapes.

  "The shunts in several rods were overloaded somehow by the Baldy weapons. I suspect they actually are a combination of laser and plasma fire, carrying quite an electrical punch."

  "Did we pack enough replacements?" Ashe asked in an equally loud voice, his tone superficially calm, but there was a hard snap to his consonants, the question that is not quite an order.

  "Of course, a full set," Stav shouted. "More than we need."

  Everyone heard that, and Eveleen saw the hope in their faces.

  Ashe said, "But will it take longer to replace the bad ones and test them all, or just replace them all? I assume we'll have to check the calibration of every one of them, whether or not we replace them."

  "Exactly, especially under these circumstances," Stav said, after a short colloquy with Kosta during which they both glanced at the island slowly falling away behind them.

  "Then let us not risk any weakened ones. Let's replace all the shunts. That, any of us can handle," Ashe said. "Stav and Kosta are the only ones who can handle the calibration; that leaves two rods for each of us remaining."

  Stav nodded once and then knelt down to explain how to install the shunt cradled in his hands.

  But before he could speak, a deep, ripping clap spun them all around. As they watched in horror, flame jetted upward from that distant island far into the sky, followed by a cloud of hot steam.

  Moments later heat smashed at them, and the boat surged over the top of a big, warm, green wave that raced outward at unimaginable speed.

  "Come on!" Ashe shouted. "Get to work!"

  Eveleen saw everyone force his or her attention forward again.

  They listened, with desperate focus, to Stav's explanation and demonstration—the process a simple mechanical one— and a brief systems check. Then the rest of them began work on the other rods while Stav and Kosta installed and began to calibrate the first one.

  Soon there were fewer rods unrepaired than waiting, freeing some of them to assist.

  Stav motioned Eveleen into the bow, where she crouched, looking back along the length of the ship. She couldn't help herself. She had never been able to turn her back on danger, and this was the worst danger she had ever confronted in her life. Thick globular shapes rose high into the morning sky, spreading out; as yet most of the eruption pushed into the east, carried by the higher streams of wind. In those globes incandescent ash could be seen darting about like gigantic fireflies from hell.

  Eveleen hoped the fleet had not gone east; any of those clouds of burning ash touching ships would convert them into instant gas.

  "Is that it?" Linnea cried, working next to Eveleen, who could only shake her head. The noise pounded her ears, her skull, her teeth, her bones.

  Stav appeared next to them, handing a completed rod to Linnea and motioning so they put their heads close to his. His breath smelled absurdly of coffee, Eveleen realized, which added to the surreal aspect of the terror gripping them all. One part of her gibbered in weird laughter; the other apparently took in his rapid flow of instructions, though when she looked down, her hands lay there like a pair of spiders, unconnected to her, unable to move.

  "Here, help me push it down," came Linnea's urgent voice, her lips just next to Eveleen's ear. She'd already placed the portal rod in its bracket. "This one first, and then that one," she said, motioning to the wire harnesses and jacks.

  Ah. This thing first and then that.

  Simple directions seemed to be what she needed. Another clap, even louder than the first, caused them all to jump, but everyone worked fast. Eveleen knew that the unmeasured tons of rock being spewed into the sky would be coming down soon, bringing with it a killing downblast that would send out lateral shock waves of volcanic glass shards to shred whatever wasn't being burned by the ash clouds.

  They were running out of time . . .

  "Next."

  They moved along the hull to the next position. Linnea again settled the rod. Now Eveleen's hands worked quickly, independent of her mind; her eyes tracked Linnea's small hands, with their thin skin stretched over tendons and age spots, but fast hands, expressive hands.

  Yellow light, weird yellow light, cutting weakly through the red-shot darkness slowly enveloping them, made Eveleen realize that the day had been banished by a volcanic night.

  The air was hot; another surge lifted the ship, passed beneath, and set them down, bringing even hotter, thicker air, more difficult to breathe . . .

  Someone slapped a mask over her face. She did not look up, but kept working. As she breathed in gratefully, she realized how close she had come to fainting.

  But they were done. She looked up, her head pounding, her thoughts thick as the lava spewing into the stratosphere overhead.

  Linnea motioned; no one could hear voices anymore. The roaring had taken over the world.

  Eveleen crouched where she was as Stav, with a face of pain, reached down and triggered the gate. She looked over the side of the boat, but the sea was so frothy and filthy with ash
that she couldn't tell if it was boiling along the portal rods, as it had when they had first passed through the gate. How would they know when they were synced?

  A third clap, this one so loud they could only feel it as it tried to scour their bones, and Kosta smacked the engine into high. Hot wind blew into their faces as the ship shuddered, racing fast over the churning water.

  Eveleen's imagination jammed into overdrive as well. As vividly as though she were somehow there, like a god proof against the violence, she saw the magma exploding upward, vaporizing the pre-Kameni Island, billions of tons of white-hot rock and searing gas punching up through the atmosphere almost to the edge of space, spreading out in a choking cloud that would bring killing winters to the Earth for years to come. And below, the sea racing in, exploding into super-pressurized steam as it raged against the liquid rock.

  Another surge, the greatest one yet, raced under them; they braced for the murderous shock wave of steam that they knew would be following behind—

  And air and earth and sky began to rip apart in an explosion of noise and light and power. Her bones shuddered as the night around them flared with light and ahead the strange straight-line vortex of the gate manifested, sucking in the violence rushing past them.

  Eveleen felt hands seize her roughly, throwing her violently down on the deck, and Ross's body on top of her. Moments later the gunwales burst into flame sleeting violently forward under the impetus of the hell wind chasing them; the sail vanished in a flare of light and the mast burst into flaming splinters. A thunderclap smashed at her ears, clamping her skull in a vise of silence while the devil played his organ music through her bones. Eveleen squeezed her eyes shut and shouted with pain as a whip of fire flayed her and the nausea of the transition was lost in a world of pain—

  —and the shaking roar ceased abruptly, the fire cooled. The boat rocked violently for a moment, then calmed.

  She squirmed out from under Ross and slapped at her smoldering clothing and then at Ross's. He'd been more exposed than she. She barely noticed the pain of her burns; what she did notice was the pressure in her ears and a total absence of sound.

  Around her the others did the same. It appeared that everyone had come through. They were alive.

  After a moment she stood up and looked around. The still-smoldering gunwales of the boat were burnt almost to the deck; all around them, she could see sparks falling gently down upon the sea like a benediction.

  Eveleen ripped off her half-burned mask, and sucked in the cold air, still tainted with the breath of hell that seemingly had tried to follow them through the gate. She wondered what it had looked like from the Russian ships, now faithfully veering in toward them.

  They were alive, and home.

  She turned her face into Ross's shoulder and wept.

  CHAPTER 30

  IT WAS JUST over a week before Ross heard his wife's voice.

  Until then, he could see her lips move, and he could see her changes of expression, and feel her arms around him, but his ears seemed stuffed with cotton batting. That was all right. Cotton batting was far preferable to that head-slamming blast back in the past.

  Then sounds started coming in. Their first conversation was about their hearing; Eveleen complained that a bosun's twee had been set off in her brain, and she couldn't find the off switch.

  They joked; they rested aboard the unmarked ship the Project had had standing by. They slept a lot. When they were awake, doctors ministered to them, at first patching up their burns, clearing out their lungs and sinuses, prescribing food, rest, and lots of water. Ross had no arguments with that.

  Milliard came in by helicopter; Ross woke up one night to the whup-whup-whup of the blades, which he could feel more than hear, and next morning at breakfast there was the big boss, looking like the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, except maybe tougher.

  His lips moved, but Ross couldn't hear him. So they began communicating on-line; there were terminals all over the ship.

  At first Ross didn't want anything to do with their questions, with debriefing, even with remembering. But the memory will not be denied: if one fought hard enough against it all day, it popped out again at night, taking control of one's dreams with such a vengeance one awoke, sweating, thinking they were all back in Kalliste again, and the pre-Kameni Island was going up maybe a hundred yards away.

  So Ross gave in, answered one or two questions, then Eveleen started sending him playful e-mails, and before he knew it he spent those soft, summery days sitting out on the deck with a keyboard in his lap, typing away.

  When he could hear again, the interviews started: Milliard, Project heads from various departments, and of course the medical teams, including psychologists.

  They were interviewed separately, though no one made any attempt to keep them apart. Their own hearing functioned well enough to do that, had there been any urgent need for individual testimony.

  Memory gave way to thought, and thought eventually produced questions—the foremost ones fueled by anger.

  It was some time after the main battery of interviews was over that the entire group found themselves sitting out on the deck under an awning. All around them the sky softly wept, clear, clean rain, sky, air, and sea all a silvery gray.

  The gentle drumming of raindrops on the roof merely served to make it seem warmer somehow underneath, as they helped themselves to a fresh pot of coffee brought out by the steward.

  Gordon Ashe sat forward and gave them what Ross recognized as his scan look. "So, any thoughts?" he asked, sipping coffee.

  They obviously weren't going to hear his thoughts first. Ross had no problem with that. He had no problem with leading off, either.

  "I'll tell you what fries my butt," he said.

  Linnea Edel's eyes crinkled. Kosta grinned his pirate grin. "What's yours?" he asked.

  Ross laughed. "You, too, huh? Well, mine is this: those damned Kayu guys had the gall to judge us! I mean, look at it. They came on the radio like that, without us connecting in or anything. They obviously were listening to every stinking word we said while we sweated out those last few days. Every word. So they only speak up and tip us the clue that the whole damn island was about to blow after Gordon got his harebrained idea of rescuing the Baldies."

  "That makes you mad?" Eveleen said, her brown eyes going round.

  "Of course it makes me mad! That they could set themselves up in judgment like that, without letting us know. And if what the Baldies told Linnea is true, they don't exactly have clean hands."

  "Irrelevant," Ashe said—at his most maddening, Ross thought with unrepentant grumpiness.

  "Game playing," Kosta said. "I hate that." He grinned. "Unless I make the rules."

  The others laughed, and Kosta went on, "We never perceived the rules with those ones. They had rules as far outside our ken as automobiles, computers, and TV shows are outside of the Kallistans'."

  "In other words," Gordon said, "they made us feel stupid. Granted."

  "Not stupid," Linnea Edel murmured, looking around at them earnestly. "Stupid is ignorant and doesn't care. We knew we were ignorant and we did care. We cared passionately."

  Murmurs of agreement rippled round the group as the rain kept drumming overhead and far in the distance gulls screeched. It is good to be home, in our own time, if not our own place, Ross thought, swallowing down his coffee.

  Stavros spoke up, taking the others by surprise. He'd been so quiet during the mission, like many engineers, living mostly inside his head. "I want to know," he stated, his English very accented. "I want to know what is this entity to which they referred."

  "So did the brain boys," Ross said. "At least during my turn on the hot seat."

  Nods of agreement from everyone.

  "Well, I want to know, too," Ashe said.

  Ross shrugged. "I think they went nuts. I mean, don't try to tell me those guys suddenly started believing in fire gods." He snorted, reaching for the coffee pot to pour out some more. "Or do they mean ther
e's some kind of mysterious alien force living in the volcano? Give me a break—that's almost as bad."

  "One thing I learned while I was so briefly a prisoner," Linnea said in a slow voice, "is that, even if I were to have told the other women about my time, what vocabulary would I have used? These women were not stupid. They were thinking beings, aware of their world, involved, several of them wise—much wiser, I think, than I will ever be—about certain kinds of things. Yet I'd be forced to use the language of childhood to describe a pair of nylon stockings."

  Eveleen nodded. "That's what I thought. Entity could mean almost anything, and our mistake would be to assign our old rules to it, especially old rules we automatically distrust."

  "I figured it had to be another sort of alien, at first," Kosta said. "From what I understood on that last radio transmission, the 'entity' couldn't 'talk' to the oracle woman while the device was in place."

  Stavros nodded. "That argues for physical limitations of a sort that we can understand."

  "Unless the non-communication was not related to physical limitations but to some other set of rules, some we can't possibly imagine," Ashe said.

  "Like what? Gods playing chess with us and the Baldies?" Ross scoffed. "If you're going to start gassing about gods then Fin going back to sleep."

  "I'm playing devil's advocate," Ashe said, with a faint grin. "Probably a more comfortable post, at least in today's deterministic paradigm."

  Ross knew that Ashe was joking—and he was the butt. He sighed. "Look. I just don't know, and none of you do, either, about that kind of question. So why get into it, since we can't really know?"

  "Because it's interesting, trying to apprehend the infinite," Linnea said. "I, too, scoffed and thought myself so superior to those poor benighted women with their snake dances and their oracle, there in the dirty cave with stuffy air. But by the end, I began to see that in certain ways, I was the ignorant savage, and not they. Their perception of the universe was clear, it had moral rightness, and for all my superiority in realizing that they couldn't see the Baldies as aliens, only as priests, how many things were around me that I could not see, that they could? There is always the chance that at least Maestra, their seer, had in some way glimpsed past the shadows on the cave wall."