Beowulf's Children

by Larry Niven

  “Justin. Can you read me. Testing. Justin.”

  “Static clearing up now.” Justin’s voice crackled and then clarified.

  “Cassandra. Interference originating from the house? Please track my message to Justin, and its rate of reception, and give a probable epicenter for disruption.”

  Cassandra barely paused. “The main house.”

  “Thank you very much. Justin, get down to the colony. Pick up Zack, and get someone on skeeter repair. We need shock rifles. Meet me at the beach.”

  They aimed the skeeter into the wind, and flew northward. The distant mountains laughed at him.

  Jessica looked back toward the mountains as if expecting that any moment they would part, and her father would appear.

  Aaron’s hand touched her shoulder. “Jessica. It’s time to go.”

  The loading was done. Radio messages from the main colony were sheer chaos. It would be hours before any effective force could be mounted against them. They had prefabricated huts, weapons, and a year’s worth of food for twenty people. They had all of the instruments and apparatus needed to found a research station. There was mining equipment on the mainland.

  Jessica carried her bags up the gangplank. Robor was theirs, by stealth and by subterfuge. She had planted the disrupter in her father’s house. By the time anything could be done, they would be far from land. Any negotiations could be carried out by radio.

  It was bad. In some deep sense it was even wrong. But the Earth Born had left them with no options.

  The door slammed behind her. On the roof of Robor, the skeeter engines whirled to life. Robor lifted from the ground.

  “Edgar,” Cadmann mused. “He set it up before we took him off watch. He’s got them monitoring the lines. All right. Cassandra. Code Beowulf. Are personal code lines corrupted?”

  “Code Beowulf acknowledged. Voice pattern Cadmann Weyland acknowledged. Request second password.”

  “Ragnarok.”

  “Acknowledged. Your line is secure. Standard emergency frequencies are not under my control.”

  “Thank you. Secure the message to Justin Weyland.”

  “Can you trust him?” Carlos said nervously. “He might be a mole.”

  “Not in him,” Cadmann said darkly. “This is Jessica’s doing. And Aaron’s. But Justin’s not involved. I know it.”

  They swept in through the mountain passes, and looked down onto the half-deserted village of Surf’s Up, the rain-drenched swept thatch roofs glistening in the clouded moonlight.

  Some small figure pointed up at them, but then they were over the water and swinging south to the dirigible dock.

  “What are you going to do?” Carlos asked nervously.

  “Talk some sense into them, I hope.” He cleared the ridge of coast, and saw what he feared—a black emptiness where Robor had once nested. Waves crashed against the sand, and the concrete pad was completely empty.

  “Damn.” Cadmann swung the skeeter north. Carlos cleared his throat. “Cadmann—we’re low on fuel,” he said. “We need to go back and get a new cell.”

  “We can’t,” he said grimly. “We don’t have time. We’re the only ones, Carlos. If we turn around, by the time we get to the colony, and switch batteries, and get back out here—they’ll be out of skeeter range, and that’s our only link to the mainland. It’s now or never.”

  “And to the mines,” Carlos said absently. “But is it worth what this will cost, compadre? They are our children.”

  “They’re running without lights,” Cadmann said under his breath. “Cassandra, can we have a trace on Robor?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said coolly. “That information is not available at this time.”

  “Damn!”

  “Damn indeed, my friend,” Carlos said quietly. “We’re almost out of juice.”

  The rain pelted against their windows, and wind buffeted them. The storm might not have been Edgar’s fictional typhoon, but it was no summer breeze. Lightning flashed at the horizon. A fist of wind slammed into the skeeter, knocking them sideways, and Cadmann almost lost control. His knuckles were white on the wheel, and he cursed under his breath.

  There was nothing to be seen below them but blackness. “Getting altitude isn’t going to help us. If the engine quits, we can autorotate, but we won’t glide.”

  “Let’s do it anyway,” Carlos said mildly. “It will give me a few extra seconds to pray.”

  “If you want to confess all the sins on your conscience, you should have started last Tuesday. Nevertheless . . . ”

  Cadmann started to climb.

  ♦ ChaptEr 18 ♦

  robor

  Nothing except a battle lost

  can be half so melancholy as a battle won.

  —Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington

  It was a power relay switch. One piece, carefully removed. The problem had to be diagnosed, and new parts brought from Electronics. No real vandalism, just a twenty-minute stall.

  Justin was airborne, with Zack and Hendrick beside him. He was almost blind with anger. The entire camp was in a frenzy, and there was just no telling what could come of this.

  Zack looked at Justin for the tenth time. “And you knew nothing about any of this.”

  “Not a goddamned thing, Zack.”

  “According to Cassandra, someone placed a very powerful disrupter in your father’s house. More delay tactics. Who could have done a thing like that?” Zack’s voice was cracking.

  Jessica.

  “I don’t know, Zack. And I won’t make irresponsible guesses.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you would.”

  They headed into the mountain passes.

  The alarm buzzer sounded. They had only a minute or two of juice left in the fuel cell.

  Cadmann flicked on the radio. “This is Cadmann. Skeeter Twelve, calling Robor. We are almost out of fuel and cannot return to land. Please advise us of your position for emergency landing.”

  Nothing. He repeated his message, and then sat back, arms rigid against the wheel, listening to the static.

  Jessica heard her father’s voice, and then heard it cut off. She ran down the corridor, just in time to see Trish turn away from the controls. “What was that?”

  “A bluff,” Trish said. “And not a very good one, at that.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said that his skeeter was almost out of fuel, and asked for permission for an emergency landing.”

  Jessica’s mind spun. It was a bluff. It had to be. A freshly charged skeeter had more range than that. But what if it wasn’t freshly charged? Christ . . .

  “Trish . . . ” she began.

  “Aaron ordered radio silence,” Trish said flatly. “And that’s what we’re going to have.”

  A shockwave hit Skeeter XII, and they jolted to the side. Wind and rain and an ugly laboring in the engine all mixed together. They plunged about three hundred feet before Cadmann managed to regain control. Carlos wiped his hand against the windscreen, clearing away condensation, peering out. It was hopeless. There was nothing to be seen.

  “I’m sorry,” Cadmann said.

  A flash of lightning, very close by, too close. It split their universe, blinded them, and Cadmann let some inarticulate sound of effort and anger and fear escape, and they plunged so low that they were momentarily out of the clouds. Another flash of lightning and—

  “I see it!” Carlos yelled. “Damn it! Two o’clock. There.”

  An arc of fire rolled along the underbelly of the cloud, lightning swelling in its belly. And there, gliding like a great dark predator, was Robor.

  Cadmann gritted his teeth, and took the skeeter up into the cloud again. “We can make it,” he said.

  “If we don’t, can I quote you?”

  They rose up above the flat top of Robor and Cadmann hit the lights. They were dim, all emergency power draining to the batteries, but enough to illumine the top. There were docks for four skeeters up there, and three of them were in plac
e.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m setting her down. You take the right-side mooring cable, I’ll take the left. If either of us makes it, we’re safe.”

  The engines quit.

  “See?” Trish said, laughing. “No SOS. It was a bluff.”

  Jessica stared at the control panel, and then looked out at the storm. A bluff. She hoped it was a bluff. She freezing prayed it was a bluff. Otherwise . . .

  They slammed into Robor’s landing deck just as another lightning flash tore a hole in the sky. Robor jolted, and then stabilized. Its gyros would compensate and keep the deck level. It was slick, though. They skidded for three feet before coming to rest.

  Cadmann wrapped a mooring cable around his arm and reeled it out. He hopped down to the deck. The wind slammed into him, and Carlos was out the other side with the right-hand cable. There were docking rings countersunk in the deck in numerous locations. The trick was finding one.

  A violent shudder struck Robor and the skeeter started sliding again. Cadmann backed up, slipped to his knees, slid across the deck and toward the edge. The damaged strut collapsed, and the skeeter slid across the plates, right at him. He screamed as he went over the edge, the skeeter right on top of him.

  Carlos was on his hands and knees, and his face smashed against the metal sheeting as the skeeter behind him crashed onto its side. He knew in that moment that he was going to die.

  It pulled him toward the edge, and his knee hit the anchor ring. He scrabbled for it in the darkness, and found it flipped it up, and clipped the line into place. It snapped taut in the next instant, and behind him he heard a scream and a grinding crash, and he knew that Cadmann had gone over the side.

  He was on the verge of muttering a prayer when he heard the groan.

  “On my way!” he sang. He followed the cable to the wrecked skeeter, and climbed around it, finding handholds every step of the way. He came around to the other side and heard a thump. He peered over, and saw Cadmann hanging there, the cable tangled around his arm.

  Jesus. “Cadmann!”

  His friend looked up at him. Stunned, not injured. Weyland shook his head, like a water buffalo trying to clear itself, and looked down at the ocean, black and slow, far below him, and then back up at Carlos. “Help me,” he whispered. And Carlos extended a hand to him, and helped him up.

  Trish found Aaron in the main galley, supervising as the crates were hauled up from the hold and opened. Provisions, and equipment, mostly, and he had chosen well.

  “We’ve got a problem,” she said. “We’ve lost power in engines two and three. We’re running on a single engine now.”

  Aaron’s head snapped around. “What?”

  “It’s true. Five minutes ago. We lost two and—” Her collar speaker crackled. “Trish. We just lost engine one. We have no power.”

  “What in the hell!” Aaron seemed to grow, his face reddening, and his entire body growing even as they watched. “We’ll be blown back toward land, dammit!”

  “I’m afraid so. We have the rudders and stabilizers—”

  “I’m going up,” he said. “Something is very wrong up there.”

  Carlos slapped Cadmann’s shoulder as the first trace of a human figure appeared over the side of Robor.

  The wind howled around them, and Cadmann had to scream.

  “Get back, dammit. I have a grendel gun and I’ll use it.”

  “Cadmann?” Aaron yelled back cautiously. “Damn. How did you . . . ?”

  “Power of human stupidity. Just get back down.”

  “We’ll crash if we don’t have our power, you know that.”

  “No, you won’t. I’ll give you engine one again. You are going to use it to turn around, and head back to land. And then you are going to put down.”

  “Cadmann. Your daughter died. We have to do something. We have to find out what it was, or her death will be for nothing.”

  Cadmann was tired and sore. His shoulder throbbed. “Listen to me. We can’t talk about that now. I don’t have any choice but to turn you around. Let’s not let this get any worse than it is.”

  “Worse than it is. All right.”

  There was a flicker of movement behind him, and Carlos suddenly screamed, his entire body arcing. Cadmann spun and fired at a figure against the clouds. The grendel gun bucked in his arms. He fired a dart directly into Toshiro Tanaka’s chest. Toshiro’s hair flew out in a corona, and his teeth clamped on his tongue. Blood shot from between his clenched teeth and his hands lost their grip on the port access ladder. His body arced backwards and he fell screaming and twisting, to the sea far below him.

  “Toshiro!” Aaron screamed.

  Cadmann, cursing, checked Carlos. He was fine. Damn damn damn! The children had dialed their grendel guns down to stun. He had been too damned tired, too trigger-happy.

  And Toshiro Tanaka would plunge two thousand feet to the water below. And from that height, the water might as well have been concrete.

  “One dead, Aaron,” Cadmann said. And he could barely speak. His teeth were chattering, and not just from the cold. “One dead. Let’s end this.”

  “You killed him, Cadmann,” Aaron said. “He’s dead, and you killed him. Why don’t you tell your people about how you did this to save lives. All right. We’re turning around.” Aaron climbed back down. Cadmann collapsed against the wet cold plate of the deck and closed his eyes, feeling the rain pelt against his skin.

  part two

  ♦

  grendels

  Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;

  And in the lowest deep a lower deep

  Still threatening to devour me opens wide,

  To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.

  —John Milton, Paradise Lost

  ♦ ChaptEr 19 ♦

  victory

  Nearly all men can stand adversity,

  but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.

  —Abraham Lincoln

  The whole colony was assembled in the meeting hall. In a few places entire families, First and Second, sat at one table, but most of the Second sat together and away from the First. By accident or design they had chosen tables on the highest tiers on the speaker’s left.

  There was no entertainment tonight. The circles of conversation went abruptly quiet when Zack Moskowitz came in from the adjacent council room. He was followed by six others: five of the First and Katya Martinez. Zack went to the podium. Katya came down from the stage, looked up at the other members of the Second, and went to sit at the table with Cadmann and her father.

  Justin barely saw her. Carlos smiled at her, then looked up at the Second. “Montagnards,” he said.

  Sylvia looked the question at him.

  “From the French Revolution,” Carlos said. “The Jacobins sat in the highest seats in the meeting hall. They called that the ‘Mountain.’ Katya, are your friends contemplating bloody rebellion? Guillotine the ancien régime?”

  “Not that they told me,” Katya sat between Carlos and Justin, across from Cadmann. Cadmann was flanked by Sylvia on one side, Mary Ann with the baby on the other. Cadzie was wrapped in a dark blue blanket.

  Cadzie blue, they were calling that color. The blanket was an exact copy of the one wrapped around Cadzie at Deadwood Pass. There were hundreds already, and more being claimed as fast as they could be manufactured. Mary Anne had wanted to keep the original, but that was being analyzed as no bit of synthetic wool had ever been analyzed in human history, and she had to settle for a duplicate.

  Invisible death had stripped every living thing at the Minehead: Avalon crawling and flying crabs, Avalon Joeys, the scrubby bushes, Earthly mammals, Linda’s straw hat, leather belts and cotton cloth; everything but one baby. Was it the blanket? The color, the scent, the texture, the inorganic origin? The cocoon geometry of a blanket encircling a baby?

  Dark blue flashed here and there in the meeting hall. Nearly every nursing mother had an Orion blanket in Cadzie blue.

 
Katya took Justin’s hand for a moment, and looked up toward Jessica. Jessica conspicuously was not with her family, but with the Second, at Aaron’s table on the Mountain. It was a large table, with room for Edgar, Trish, and Chaka, and, surprisingly, Ruth Moskowitz. Katya thought it over. She could ask Justin later.

  “What did you decide?” her father asked her.

  Katya shook her head. “Zack wants to make the announcement.” She looked from Carlos to Cadmann, then at Justin. “It’s all right.”

  Zack Moskowitz was at the podium. “This is an official meeting of the members of the Avalon Colony to hear the decision of the special commission investigating the death of Toshiro Tanaka, a member of this colony,” he said. “I call this meeting to order.”

  There was a hushed and expectant silence.

  “The commission has unanimously reached the verdict of death by misadventure,” Zack said. “For those without a legal background, this means that it was an accident. A majority of the commission has also determined that no further action is required, and the case is therefore closed.”

  There was another moment of silence. Then Carolyn McAndrews stood up. “Mister Chairman! This wasn’t a misadventure! The boy was killed as a consequence of his own criminal actions! He had accomplices. They should be punished! All of them!”

  There were a few scattered murmurs of approval, and a couple of shouts of “Sit down, Carolyn!” One of the Second said, loudly enough to be heard all over the room, “Ice on her mind.”

  “The commission considered that, Carolyn,” Zack said evenly. “The suggestion was rejected.”

  She looked around for support and found none. Her children were looking at her strangely. Sharon McAndrews had been at a second-tier table with other Grendel Scouts. Now she came down to Carolyn’s table and put her arm around her mother.