by John Barnes
Riveroma tried a big jolt of pain, like a roaring flame, through the urinary catheter, first. Jak managed not to roll forward into the chasm nor sideways into his friend.
Abruptly it stopped hurting. He sucked in a good, sweet lungful of air before his chest exploded with pain; Riveroma must be messing with the cardiac stabilizers. Another interval of almost-comfortable almost-sanity; then his guts roiled in brutal cramps.
Uncle Sib said you could always sow some confusion—“Do it to Jak,” Jak said.
Riveroma laughed. “Oh, Sibroillo, Sibroillo, Sibroillo, the stuff you teach your nephew. Jak, I know where the transmission comes from, it’s right there on my display. If you were trying to save your friend, which I very much doubt, it was a nice little thought, I suppose, but I would bet you were just trying to sow confusion because that is what your uncle taught you to do whenever the situation was hopeless. He always had such faith in—What?”
The “what” was shouted on the general channel, probably in response to something Riveroma had heard, but Jak couldn’t stop to analyze yet; he was too relieved by the sudden, complete cessation of pain. After a few deep breaths, without thinking, he triggered his face wipe. To his surprise the soft sponges moved across his face in the familiar, comforting way. He could hear Riveroma and the others all shouting at each other as he scanned frequencies.
His face and faceplate were clear and, since no one seemed to be paying any attention to him, he stood up, moved away from the cliff, and looked around.
Dujuv raced past him. Obviously no one was watching them.
Still trying to get oriented, Jak looked in the direction Shadow and the boys had gone. Motion in the shadows all along that side of the crater—a vast rockslide, at least two kilometers wide, was pouring down the inside of the crater. The dead man switch had turned on the slagger. Shadow’s group had been captured too—or they had lost their tight-beam link to the Spirit of Singing Port—or for some reason they had decided to let it happen. There was no way of knowing which.
Jagged rock along the crater edge began to tumble inward; the slope itself exploded with puffs of steam from frost deposits, which had lain under boulders for gigayears, vaporizing as the positrons heated the rock around them.
Half a kilometer of the upper crater rim glowed dull red, then sagged like butter in a microwave. The glow turned orange, and a white line appeared at the base of the bulge. Along that half-kilometer section, the upper third of the crater rim fell inward, and white-hot magma was now pouring over the still-tumbling slide and flooding onto the crater floor. The wide pool was already half a kilometer beyond the edge of the slide, racing across the crater floor.
Jak’s scanner was overloading as it hopped from channel to channel, picking up various radio alarms, artificial intelligences giving warning, people calling for help, and sheer terrified jabber. Jak turned off his radio, just to be able to think.
Men were rushing around the top of the pinnacle like hornets around a burning nest. A long tongue of the magma had raced ahead of the swelling flood on the crater floor, and was now lapping around the base of the pinnacle. The surface carts parked there exploded as their fuel and oxygen tanks melted and mixed. Even with his faceplate set for 95% darkness, it was getting painfully bright out here, and when Jak checked his faceplate display he saw that his surplus cooling capacity was dropping rapidly toward zero.
Something moved beneath his feet. The men around him, still rushing from one side to the other of the great stone tower, stopped and raised arms over their heads, as if trying to balance on a tightrope. In the heavy heat-resistant pressure suits, it looked like a sacred dance of bears.
The ground moved again, hard enough to knock him to his hands and knees. For no reason, as he got up, his rocable went off; perhaps the heat, or perhaps an environment in which so many machines were screaming their deaths over the radio, had set it off.
He didn’t suppose it would hurt anything; not much could hurt or help now. Jak realized what the motion of the central pinnacle had to be; the pinnacle had been hollowed out to make it into a combined office building and fort, and though its walls were thick rock, there were doors and openings everywhere along ground level, closed only by ordinary steel doors. Those were now giving way. Air was rushing out, magma was pouring in, internal walls were dissolving, heat was setting off explosives in the magazines and flammable materials everywhere. The violent thuds in the ground were explosions and collapses below.
With a hard lurch, the whole pinnacle slid sideways, and Jak was flung out into space, above the boiling magma. In the low gravity, he didn’t seem to be falling at all. He had a glimpse of the crumbling pinnacle falling away below him, and of a white sea of magma, now beginning to spot with yellow-orange. It seemed, impossibly, farther below him than the pinnacle had stood above it. Probably the explosion that had taken down the pinnacle had thrown Jak upward, and so he might be saved for as much as half a minute, but falling from this height, with nothing to land on but boiling rock, he was surely not saved for long.
CHAPTER 17
An Opponent Fully Worthy of Our Considerable Skills
The pool of boiling magma receded rapidly from his feet. It must have been quite an explosion to have thrown him this high—no, to get thrown this high, even in Mercury’s low gravity, the acceleration should have mashed him into jelly.
He was now at least a kilometer above the lake of liquid rock, and apparently still rising. Surely at any moment he would begin the downward drop into it?
But the magma continued to recede, and now he saw craters beyond Hamner, then the dark ground beyond the terminator line, and finally the black curve of the horizon. He was still rising; the magma pool was now just a red eye on the planet’s face beneath him.
He became aware that he had turned his suit radio off. He jaw-clicked twice, so that his scanner would look for friendly transmissions.
“—radio must be out,” Dujuv was saying. “He looked fine to me when you grabbed his rocable.”
“His suit telemetry’s good,” Phrysaba agreed. “I guess we’ll just have to wait till we get you heets hauled in.”
“I’m here,” Jak said. “I had my radio off and forgot to turn it back on.”
“Oh, am I going to enjoy giving you a safety lecture,” Pabrino said. “Right now, we just have to reel you and Dujuv in, and then head out to rendezvous with the Spirit. Just sit tight and we’ll have you on board in about—um—”
“Seventy-three seconds,” Phrysaba said, “give or take a tenth or so.”
Not knowing what else to say, Jak said, “Thank you.”
Phrysaba laughed. “I’m doing the easy part. Just routine flying on this little tub. We took off as soon as we heard you get captured for the second time—it sounded like things weren’t going very well and sometimes it’s useful to be closer to the problem. The hard part was cracking the code so that we could go in on top of what Riveroma was doing and access your rocables. If Pabrino hadn’t done that in record time, I don’t think we could have done this. Once he did, it was really all just a textbook exercise—a little tricky keeping the lines from going down into the soup, but otherwise it was like a piloting problem in the beginner class. So no making a big deal out of it, masen?”
It occurred to Jak that he was dangling from a cable attached to a small, dodging, jinking spaceship in a low eccentric orbit, and that the pilot was spending a lot of time talking to him. “Uh, don’t let me distract you from flying.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. Soon as we had you, I put it back on autopilot. The machine flies better than I do, anyway.”
Jak looked at the serrated, rough, burning hot rocks now far below, and tried to borrow as much of her attitude as he could.
“How long have you had your radio on?” Dujuv asked.
“The first thing I heard was you saying my radio was out,” Jak said.
“Good.”
“Why?” There was a long pause while Jak turned slowly on th
e cable, and Mercury fell farther and farther away from the soles of his boots. “Why was that good?” Jak repeated.
“Because,” Phrysaba said, “your friend is still furious with you, as well he should be, about everything you said to that Mreek Sinda. But when he thought you might be dead, he was beside himself with worry about you. He didn’t want you to hear how much he cared, because he’d also like to break your neck. Which, I might add, is a very healthy impulse and one I fully support.”
“Me too,” Pabrino added. “We can discuss that once we get you both reeled in, which will be less than a minute now.”
Phrysaba added, “Pabrino is trying to get a good cable speed, ship acceleration, and trajectory match so I don’t slam you against the inside of the cargo hatch. Actually, to be fussy, I’m trying not to slam Dujuv against the inside of the cargo hatch, and I’m trying not to slam you too hard.”
“We’ll talk to you again once that’s done,” Pabrino said. “Always assuming we don’t concuss you, bringing you in.”
The bone-colored curve of Mercury, with its brightly lit sprawling cities and black ore roads between them, fell farther beneath him, the planet rapidly becoming a sphere rather than a plane. The dark shadows of the cuts and ravines between the scarps of Caloris turned into a mere pattern of irregular black razor-cuts, and the scarps themselves blurred together into a thick dark curve. Jak hung high above the little planet, suspended between the launch over his head and the ground far below, and waited while Phrysaba gently accelerated the launch and Pabrino slowed the winch.
He saw a suited figure near him in the sky, drawing ever closer—Dujuv. It had taken a long time for the lines to bring them together, after snatching them out on slightly different trajectories. The suited figure folded its arms and twisted to face away.
They drew closer, moving in odd arcs, whirls, and tugs that must mean they were now being guyed and snatch-lined, to keep them from banging into each other.
The cargo bay doors slid past them, and for an instant, Jak was blind in the dim of the cargo bay. When his face-plate adjusted, he saw Dujuv swaying beside him. The doors slid closed.
With a click and whir, the rocables uncoupled and retracted, leaving them floating free in the empty metal box of the cargo bay. They pushed off and glided into the airlock.
Emerging, Jak managed, but only just, not to say “You look like hell” to Dujuv, whose slick, hairless face could not have been more drenched if he had just plunged his head into a bucket of sweat. The dark circles under his eyes looked as if he’d been on the losing side of a brawl, and his lips were tinged blue—the panth gasped the relatively clean, cool air of the ferry through his open mouth as if he’d just run ten kilometers in high grav.
Dujuv looked at Jak. “You really look like hell.”
“I thought I might,” Jak said. “Did you know anything about getting rescued, in advance?”
“I had no idea. You?”
“Not a clue.”
“Are you telling me the truth?”
“Yes.”
Dujuv nodded, warily, but appeared to accept it.
The door to the crew space slid open, and the two of them airswam through it. Phrysaba was sitting at the control chair, leaning over toward Pabrino in the second seat. He had just set up the vector for a quick burn to put them on the minimum-energy ballistic back to the Spirit of Singing Port. Checking it through local traffic control, Phrysaba waved distractedly.
Pabrino said, “System communications dialing through— we’re going to put you in touch with Shadow on the Frost. He’s been worried about you.”
“And we’ve been worried about him,” Dujuv said.
Shadow appeared on one of the cabin screens; some of the feathers on his face looked charred. “Jak! Dujuv! You’re alive! This spares me the effort I might otherwise have had to put into avenging you!”
“I’m glad to see you alive, too, Shadow on the Frost,” Jak said.
Dujuv blurted out, “Are you all right?”
“Better for knowing you’re all right, and still better for your asking, my oath-friend. I will recover. After the magma started to flow, I fled to high ground. We had a close one as we were running; Narav fell and slipped back. I got there and pulled him back, but his foot touched the molten rock. I guess they will grow him a new one, or so the doctors say. Kyffimna is absurdly grateful, but truly, it was something anyone would have done. One does not leave a friend in danger of pain and death.”
Jak said, “So, where are you now and what are you doing?”
“I’m at the Uninsured Charity Hospital at Bigpile. After I was able to reach high ground and call in an ambulance for the two boys, I tried to locate you and Dujuv and could find no beacon for either of you. I was very sorry for the loss of an oath-friend and contemplated scarring myself. I am glad I waited.
“There is also news which is bad for our cause but good for our honor. Riveroma found a rocket to grab his rocable. My purse traced him as far as the Chaudville loop station, and since several ships are passing in the next few hours, I have no doubt Riveroma will get away. That’s sad on the one thumb, but the thumb that meets it makes me overjoyed. We’re not done with him, Jak Jinnaka. He is an opponent fully worthy of our considerable skills, I have great faith that he will be back to do battle with us again, and we may yet taste his blood in our mouths and claim his corpse as trophy. It would have been such a pity to lose him to the magma; he merits a far better finish, for he is a fine enemy indeed.”
Jak had enough trouble specking his own species; Rubahy esthetics were likely to be forever beyond him. “I am glad my oath-friend is pleased.”
“And I am sorry that he is crazy,” Dujuv whispered. They closed up after some pleasantries; Shadow would be joining them back on the Spirit of Singing Port within a few days, as soon as he was sure that Narav was out of danger and would be taken care of. “I have heard too much about doctors and insurance companies,” he explained.
“Will you be able to do anything about it if they do mess around with Narav’s treatment?”
“All I need to do is find the right person to bite,” Shadow said confidently. “I will talk to you again soon, oath-friends.”
When they turned back from the screen, the ferry was in free fall, headed on its intercept course to the Spirit, and Phrysaba and Pabrino at last had time to talk.
“I don’t suppose this gadget has a kitchen?” Dujuv asked.
“No, but I packed a big lunch,” Phrysaba said, “knowing I’d be feeding a panth who’s been working too hard.” She opened a storage compartment and pulled out a hot-cold box, then passed it to Dujuv like a basketball. “Didn’t know exactly what you liked, and the ship’s galley records said ‘everything’, which wasn’t very helpful, so there’s a couple kinds of soup, five kinds of juice, and about a dozen sandwiches, all different kinds.”
“Perfect,” Dujuv said. “And your ship’s records are fine. ‘Everything’ is my favorite flavor.”
When Dujuv had finished off a few of everything, and therefore was slowing down, he paused to ask, “Are you all still flying off cargo? Can I take a longshore capsule down to get back to Mercury?”
“We’ve got several days of loading yet to do,” Pabrino said. “You can be back to Mercury within a day. Set it up for you then?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“You can be there for eight days, if you like, before the last scheduled cargo flight, and even then you could come up with a load of construction materials for another few weeks; we’ll be here for a while during refit.”
There was a brief pause while Dujuv folded a whole sandwich into his mouth and swallowed it the way a boa does a hamster. After a gulp of juice, Dujuv said, “Naw, I’m going to be staying over for a year or so.”
Everyone stared at him. He looked back calmly and said, “Well, those people trusted me. Someone has to make sure that there’s nobody left from MLB. And you might recall we slagged a big share of their mining gear—it migh
t help them to have me there to testify to insurance investigators, or even get it covered out of some Hive or Greenworld gray budget. But one way or another, they shouldn’t lose half the machines they make their living with, just because they happened to get in the way while we were chasing malphs. And I do care about them. So there’s all kinds of reasons. Really, nothing’s done, down there, yet, if you see what I mean. It might take a year to straighten it all out and do the job right.”
“What about the slamball team?” Jak asked.
“They can get along without me for a year; they did before I got there, they will after I go. This is more important.”
“Duj,” Jak said, “you can write them a letter! They were lucky that you turned up and helped out! The insurance company will only need some recorded testimony to justify paying for the slagged equipment! I don’t understand.”
Dujuv shrugged and went on eating; after a moment he said, “I don’t speck that whether you understand, or not, is going to be very important to me, anymore.”
Jak asked, “So … do you think I should go back too, and take care of things there until everything’s all right? Do you think that I owe that to them too—I mean, do you expect me to do that?”
Dujuv thought for such a long time that Jak thought he had just decided to ignore the question, but then he said, “No, I wouldn’t expect that of you. I guess I never should have expected anything of the kind of you.”
Phrysaba pulled herself back into the pilot’s chair and said, “Strap down, boosting in forty seconds.” Jak hastened to fasten his lap belt; Dujuv managed to do his one-handed without letting go of the food; Sib and Pabrino checked theirs. The engines thundered and boomed, there was briefly gravity toward the back of the ship, and then silence again. “Next boost in about fifty minutes,” Phrysaba said, to no one in particular, unstrapping and letting herself float up for a better view out the front window.
None of them spoke to Jak again for the rest of the flight back to the Spirit of Singing Port, and Jak was afraid to try to start a conversation.
