Resurgence hu-5

by Charles Sheffield

  Sinara did not join them; nor, after the first hour or two, did she watch them closely. She had her own preoccupation. Her suit, like every decent suit designed for use by humans, contained information on the species’ physiology and medical treatments based on ten thousand years of theory and practice. Of course, only a tiny fraction of that volume of data applied to Ben, but Sinara studied that fraction as intensively as she could. Sometimes sheer fatigue made her close her eyes for a few minutes, but each time that she awoke she at once checked Ben’s condition and ran a new prognosis.

  Her task was made more complicated by Ben’s suit. It was not sitting idle. It monitored his condition second by second, and provided appropriate medications. Sinara could override it at any time, but she did so only once. She drastically reduced the narcotic dose, in the hope that it would return him to consciousness. When after twenty minutes it did not, she fed that information into her own suit and received confirmation that Ben had suffered a severe concussion. There was also edema, a brain swelling that was being controlled by anti-inflammatories. The cause was probably that same concussion.

  Sinara’s actions absorbed her completely. She was more irritated than interested when Teri came floating over to halt on the other side of Ben.

  “We need your opinion.”

  “I’m looking after Ben.”

  “He doesn’t seem any different now than he was when we first found him. He’ll be fine for five minutes. That’s all we need.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “A little disagreement. Come and look at something.”

  As a result of Teri and Torran’s continued labors, the barrier of protective rock fragments had steadily become more complete. Teri led Sinara to six great overlapping basalt wedges that offered between them only an irregular narrow slit through which to see beyond.

  Torran was waiting a few meters away from it. “Take a look,” he said, “but don’t get too close. Sometimes little bits and pieces fly in—though we’ve not had anything with much speed.”

  Teri added, “Tell us what you think. Torran and I don’t agree.”

  “No hints, Teri.”

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  Sinara approached within arm’s length of the ragged barrier of rocks. There was no such thing as a safe distance. Any second, a high-speed fragment could fly in through the slit and hit her. She peered cautiously out past one of the slabs.

  The same kaleidoscopic litter of debris, large and small, near and far, filled the sky. It was a little less densely packed than before, thinning out as their distance from the sometime planet increased.

  Nothing out there seemed worthy of a second look. Had Sinara not in effect been told to expect something, she would have returned at once to her vigil at Ben Blesh’s side. Instead, she scanned the scene before her a second time, focusing on each area of the sky in turn before moving on. Her attention finally returned to one small region. Something was different there, some oddity that was difficult to pin down.

  She used her suit’s image intensifiers and narrowed the field of view. She made out a small disk, an oval shape brighter than its surroundings. As she stared, it thinned and dwindled. It lost width until it was no more than a bright line, then vanished completely.

  She stared and stared, but now she could find nothing unusual. “That’s strange,” she began. “I thought there was—”

  She paused. Here it came again, a thin bright line that slowly expanded to a fat silvery oval. Just as steadily, it then thinned and disappeared.

  This time Sinara had some idea what to expect. She waited patiently for another half minute. Right on cue, the silver line appeared and swelled.

  “I see it,” she said. “Or at least, I see something, over in the upper right quadrant.”

  “That’s the place,” Teri said eagerly. “What do you think it is?”

  “Well, it could be just a flat rock, a lot brighter on one side than the other. It’s rotating, so sometimes we see it edgeways and sometimes we don’t see it at all.”

  “Exactly what I told her. See, Teri, Sinara agrees with me.”

  “Except that it’s nothing like any of the other rocks,” Sinara went on slowly. “One side is really bright, like silver. We could be looking at one of the beetlebacks. They would have been thrown out into space with everything else when Marglot disintegrated.”

  “Told you!”

  “So what if it is?” Torran was defensive. “I hate to quote Julian Graves to you, but getting back alive to the Orion Arm is our main concern. Saving Ben was one thing, we were right to insist on that. But worrying about some dumb beetleback is another matter entirely.”

  “Returning to the Orion Arm alive, with information. Didn’t you hear E.C. Tally complaining during our take-off from Marglot? One beetleback, with all the data it contains, could make a huge difference to what we know.” Teri moved away from the other two. “Torran, I don’t care what you think. I’m going out there to try to snag it.”

  “Suppose it snags you?”

  “That will be my problem. I don’t expect you to come after me if I get in trouble—I don’t want you to come after me. Your priority is the same now as when we started: getting yourselves and Ben back to the Have-It-All.”

  Teri didn’t hang around for more debate. Already she was moving toward a gap in their primitive protective barrier.

  “No, Torran.” Sinara had seen his reaction. She grabbed hold of his arm. “Teri is right, and this isn’t like Ben. She’s taking a risk, but she wants it to be her risk.”

  “She’s crazy.” Torran shook his arm free.

  “If you believe Julian Graves, we’re all crazy. And if you believe E.C. Tally, one beetleback could be worth the price of this whole expedition.”

  Torran hardly seemed to be listening. His attention, like Sinara’s, was focused on the diminishing figure of Teri. He muttered again, “She’s crazy.” But his comment was drowned out by Teri’s exultant cry. “It is a beetleback. Badly damaged, with most of its legs gone. But since Atvar H’sial says it’s inorganic, that should make no difference at all to its information content. I have it, and I’m towing it. Five minutes and we’ll be back there with the rest of you.”

  Five minutes, after all the hours that had passed since they left the Have-It-All. That seemed like nothing. It was a total shock when Teri suddenly cried out, “Oh God. I’m hit!”

  Torran said, “Where?” and Sinara, “How bad?”

  “Not good. Something hit me hard, in my lower back.” Teri did not sound the same at all. “My suit sealed itself, but I have no feeling in my legs. Don’t do anything silly. I’ll still try to return with the beetleback.”

  “Anything silly.” Torran was already accelerating. “Didn’t I tell you she’s crazy? You stay here.”

  Sinara, all ready to race off after Torran, hesitated. The trade-offs were difficult to compute. Help Torran, and so improve the chances of recovering Teri and the beetleback? Or stay with Ben Blesh, to make sure that he remained alive long enough to reach the Have-It-All?

  Torran’s voice steadied her. “Sinara, Teri and I did too good a job moving rocks. I’ll be hauling Teri and the beetleback but I don’t see a gap big enough for us all to fly through. Teri is losing consciousness. Can you work from the inside? Once we’re in, I’ll help you close the hole.”

  Dragging rocks out of the way was the easy part. Much harder was looking at Teri’s chalk-white face and half-closed eyes as Torran pulled her through after him. Sinara took charge at once, moving the second body into place beside Ben Blesh. She gave the beetleback one quick glance. It was legless, one side of the scarlet head was mashed in, and the silver back was crumpled along the central line. More to the point, the creature was crippled and immobilized. That was good enough for her.

  Was it worth the effort, to capture a beetleback? Well, to Teri it had been, and Torran had gone to the trouble of finishing the job.

  He was at Sinara’s side. “I didn’t have
time to check all the suit readings. How is she?”

  “Her suit reports a problem between the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae. Her spinal column there is either cut or severely damaged. The regrowth of nerve tissue would be an easy job back on Miranda, but the robodoc on the Have-It-All was stripped out and dumped, nothing left but the bare essentials.”

  “Will she live?”

  “She will, if any of us do.” Sinara glanced at the time read-out in her own suit. “Survival training, Torran.” She gestured at the two bodies in front of them. “We all had it. But tell me the truth, did you ever imagine the real thing might be anything like this?”

  “I didn’t, but Arabella Lund pegged it exactly. Remember what she told us? ’Survival is ninety-eight percent boredom, and two percent panic.’ How many hours to rendezvous?”

  “Eighteen, if the Have-It-All is on time.”

  “Will Ben and Teri be in danger of dying during that period?”

  “Not according to all the signs.”

  Torran blew out a long, gusty breath. “Then I say, bring on the ninety-eight percent boredom. I’m more than ready for it.”

  “You don’t want to look at the beetleback?”

  “To hell with the beetleback. That’s Tally’s area, not mine.” Torran moved so that he was stretched out next to Teri. “I’m done. Wake me if a rock flies in and kills me. Otherwise, I’m gone.”

  Sinara could hardly believe her ears. With eighteen hours to go, and with the primitive defense of rocks around them needing constant attention, Torran Veck was proposing to go to sleep?

  Her feeling of outrage lasted less than one minute. She went across to peer in through his visor, and saw that his face was as pale and drawn as Teri’s or Ben’s. She examined the suit’s report of his vital signs. He wasn’t sleeping, he was out cold. The shoulder wound that he had dismissed so casually was far worse than she had realized. The effort to bring Teri back, and the beetleback with her, had pushed Torran past the point of exhaustion.

  Sinara examined, in turn and in as much detail as she could, each of her three companions. She was beginning to understand something else about survival training—something that Arabella Lund had not mentioned. You trusted your teammates to do whatever was necessary to keep you alive. And you in turn did the same for them. Whatever.

  Seventeen and a half hours to go.

  Sinara moved the others so that each of them would always be in her sight. Then she floated away to examine the condition of their protective shield of rocks, and began the tedious and endless task of filling in gaps as they appeared.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Starting over

  The Have-It-All had started its journey as a luxury ship. In its equipment and its fittings—even in its weapons—it served as a symbol of the best that the Orion Arm could provide. Louis Nenda had worked for many years to make it that way.

  Now the ship was a stripped-down hulk, a fleshless skeleton of a vessel barely able to support the life that travelled within it. Nonetheless, Louis Nenda whistled cheerfully as he sat in the ruined control cabin of the derelict and made final adjustments before Bose node entry.

  “Louis, I sense a contradiction.” Atvar H’sial was crouched a couple of meters away on the bare metal floor. “To one who sees as I do, your vocal utterances are extremely ugly. Yet your pheromones display an uncommon happiness.”

  “Sure I’m happy. Who wouldn’t be? We’re goin’ home.”

  “This ship is a wreck.”

  “It is. But we’re not dead. As long as you’re not dead, you can start over. Also, Julian Graves says that the inter-clade council will pay to restore the ship to the way it was.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “ ’Course not. They’re a bunch of idiot bureaucrats. We’ll be lucky if we can squeeze two cents out of ’em. But the other side of that is, while they’re jawing about what fine people we are, only they don’t have any money to reward us, we’ll have things easy. They won’t be tryin’ to kill us off or stick us in jail. Graves says we’ll get some kind of award. Even Archimedes, for hangin’ outside the ship without a suit an’ draggin’ in Sinara and the other survival team members. Graves says he’s amazed that Archie didn’t die doin’ it.”

  “You appear less confounded.”

  “Hell, it takes more than that to kill a Zardalu. Archie keeps goin’ on about how he’s afraid I’ll disembowel him, but if I did it wouldn’t do him in. He’d just go ahead an’ grow another set of guts. Graves doesn’t know any of that, though, so Archie’s up for an award along with the rest of us.”

  “Do not trust Ethical Councilors bearing gifts.”

  “At, you’re gettin’ cynical. It don’t become you.” They had passed through the node, and Nenda stared with satisfaction at the view on his one remaining display. It revealed an almost total absence of stars. The ship was floating in the empty spaces of the Gulf. “We have a few hours to spare before the next node entry. Want to go hear what E.C. Tally has to offer? He’s been workin’ non-stop with the damaged beetleback, an’ Hans Rebka says there’ll be somethin’ worth hearin’.”

  “It was always my impression that you disliked and distrusted Captain Rebka.”

  “I do. But I never said he was an idiot. If what Tally has found out is good enough to interest Rebka, it’s probably worth a listen.”

  “Do I detect admiration for Hans Rebka?”

  “No.”

  “Respect, then, which is separated from admiration by a thin olfactory boundary?”

  “At, stop playin’ pheromonal word games. Let’s go.”

  Nenda led the way along the ravaged upper corridor of the ship. Without circulation or temperature control equipment, the air was stale, hot, and humid. At the doorless entrance of the conference room, Louis paused and sniffed. Everyone on board was packed into the chamber. This was the way that hard-worked crew members should be. Sweaty, and smelly, and with clothes that could not be changed or washed for another couple of weeks.

  Even the four survival team members looked right. The Have-It-All’s stripped-down robodoc hadn’t been able to do much more than hold the status quo. Teri Dahl wore a body cast and was clearly paralyzed below the waist, Ben Blesh had a neck brace and his face was a swollen mass of purple-yellow blotches surrounding sunken bloodshot eyes, Torran Veck’s upper body was a mass of bandages, and Sinara Bellstock was relatively intact but had the expression of someone in need of about a year’s sleep. Instead of being neat and clean and fresh-faced and enthusiastic, each one was bedraggled and filthy. Louis could for the first time believe that the group might actually be earning its keep.

  Archimedes was sprawled along one whole wall of the room. Nenda went to sit on the Zardalu’s meter-thick mid-section, and Kallik at once hurried over to crouch at his feet.

  E.C. Tally was standing at the far end of the room, next to the captured beetleback. It had been in poor shape when it reached the Have-It-All, and recent treatment had done nothing to improve that. The dark ventral body plates had been ripped open along their center line and folded back. The interior was exposed, and parts of it had been removed.

  It was now obvious to everyone what Atvar H’sial’s ultrasonic vision had seen at once. The recent evisceration had not killed the beetleback, because it had never been alive. Its innards were a tangle of wires, tubes, junction boxes, and hydraulics. When Nenda entered the room, E.C. Tally had just pulled out a valve. He was apparently in the middle of a lecture describing how the mechanism was constructed, and how it functioned. From the restless look of his audience, he had been at it for some time.

  After three more minutes, Julian Graves said, “This is all very interesting, E.C. But some of us would rather hear what the beetlebacks did, rather than how they did it.”

  “But these data are of great potential value.”

  “I’m sure they are. So why don’t you download everything—later—into the Have-It-All’s computer. Describe all that you have discovered about
the way a beetleback is built and functions. But tell us, now, what you have learned about what the beetlebacks were doing, and why.”

  “I have learned a great deal, and I conjecture even more. I will rank and present these findings in order of their estimated interest to this particular audience. First, regarding the beings who are extinguishing suns and removing all heat from them and their planets in a region of the Sag Arm: they are not, in their own terms, destroying these systems. They are rather, with the assistance of their own constructs, the beetlebacks, modifying star systems for their own use. The beetlebacks, much like Builder constructs, possess notions regarding their own creators that are of questionable validity. However, it seems clear that those creators require extremely cold temperatures if they are to survive and function. The name we have been using, Masters of Cold, appears entirely appropriate. It is my conjecture, although not that of the beetlebacks, that the Masters of Cold are some composite and sentient form of Bose-Einstein Condensates.”

  Graves objected at once, “E.C., that is nonsense and you should know it. Bose-Einstein Condensates exist only with ambient temperatures within a few hundred billionths of a degree of absolute zero. No place in the natural universe is so cold.”

  “Councilor, I of course do realize that.”

  “So there is no possible way that the Masters of Cold could ever have developed in the first place.”

  “They did not develop. Everything in the data bank of the beetlebacks points to a different origin. The Masters of Cold are themselves a creation—a creation of the Builders. They are a form of artifact.”

  Tally’s audience had been listening quietly, but this was too much for Darya Lang. Sitting opposite Louis Nenda, she jumped to her feet and burst out, “E.C., that’s impossible. You were not on Iceworld with us, so you wouldn’t know this. But a Builder construct there assured us that the coming of extreme cold destroyed both that world and a complicated transportation system established by the Builders. It’s not reasonable to suggest that constructs which are themselves Builder creations would destroy Builder works.”