Deepsix

by Jack McDevitt

  He could see Canyon’s image seated on a log facing Kellie. He was asking his questions, and she listened attentively, sometimes nodding, sometimes growing thoughtful. “Oh, yes,” she might be saying, “we’re confident we can get the lander working once we get there.” Or: “No, we really haven’t discussed that possibility. We don’t expect it to happen that way.” Although there was no logical basis for jealousy, Chiang was irritated anyhow. There was something in Canyon’s manner that seemed like a clumsy attempt at seduction.

  In addition, Canyon couldn’t hide the fact that he really had no idea what the people on the ground were feeling. And he also revealed that his primary concern in all this was to ring up high numbers back home, to please his bosses, to move up the food chain. Taking pictures of a collision between two worlds had been precisely the right assignment for him. He could have delivered himself of a few generalities, It looks as if it’s going to be an incredible smash-up, call in, say, a couple of the astrophysicists on Wendy for color commentary, and it would all have worked fine.

  But he just wasn’t the person to talk to people in trouble.

  This was Chiang’s last thought. He’d been standing at the edge of the firelight, surveying the surrounding darkness, occasionally flashing his lamp into the night. And suddenly the world vanished, as if someone had folded it up and put it away.

  MacAllister was also bored with Canyon. The previous night’s interviews had been transmitted a few hours later to Earth. It was a long ride, even at hypercom, and they would not appear on anybody’s screen for another day and a half. By then, probably, they would have found Tess, and the issue of survival would have been resolved. In their favor, he hoped. He imagined them spotting the abandoned spacecraft, hurrying toward it, climbing inside, pumping power into it, and flying back in the luxurious comfort of its passenger cabin to the tower. He could see them setting down and recovering the capacitors. Hutch and Kellie would install them with a minimum of fuss. Then they’d cheer as Tess lifted off and soared into orbit.

  The trees sighed in the wind, and the fire crackled. He watched Kellie talking with Canyon, saw her pause, saw Canyon ask another question. He knew precisely what it would be.

  “What are your thoughts when Morgan’s World rises every night, and you see that it keeps getting bigger?” (Tonight it would, he suspected, look like a Chinese balloon.)

  “Is there anything you’d like to say to the folks back home?”

  Yes, thought MacAllister. In spades, there is. Life is sweet.

  The image of the newsman appeared solid, and even a trifle back-woodsy by firelight. He leaned toward Kellie, apparently listening intently, although MacAllister knew he was formulating his next question.

  And in the middle of this pacific, sleepy scene, there came a sudden shriek.

  Something sailed past MacAllister’s head. A few days earlier he’d have sat dumbfounded, wondering what was happening. But his reflexes had improved considerably. He shouted a warning and threw himself on the ground.

  Rocks whipped past them. One hit his shoulder, and another struck his skull. There were more screams, high-pitched, rather like those of angry children. He was fumbling for his cutter. Somebody’s laser blazed out, and bushes erupted in fire. A tree, ripped through by a cutter beam, crashed to the ground.

  A dart thunked into one of the fire logs. MacAllister saw movement in the trees; then crickets in furs charged into the camp. They were impossibly ugly savages, not at all like the robed figure who’d occupied the country chapel.

  He got his weapon up just in time. Two of them were after him, with javelins. He cut them in half, the crickets and the javelins. He took out another, who was about to stab Kellie from behind. Hutch directed them to back into a tight circle, but MacAllister was too busy defending himself to try to get into a formation. Everything was utter confusion.

  The crickets never stopped shrieking. Somebody cut one in two, from skull to sternum. Nightingale stepped into the middle of a charge and swung his cutter left and right. Limbs flew and the attack disintegrated. As suddenly as they’d come, the crickets broke and melted back into the forest.

  Several bushes were ablaze. Something fell out of a tree and crashed beside him. It was carrying a javelin. It tried to get up and run, but MacAllister, enraged, slashed it anyhow, and the creature screamed and lay still.

  Hutch and Kellie pursued the fight to the edge of the trees. Nightingale stood among those he’d killed, legs spread, cutter raised, like a modern Hector. The heroic stance was a bit much, but MacAllister was nonetheless impressed by his behavior. Well, put a man’s life on the line, he thought, and most of us can perform at a fairly high level.

  The attack had disintegrated, and the sounds of battle seemed to be receding. Through it all, unfazed, Canyon remained seated in his armchair. He couldn’t see beyond the narrow range of the link, which had been set up on a stump. He simply kept demanding over and over to be told what was happening.

  Universal News Network on the spot, thought MacAllister.

  Nightingale finally explained they were being attacked.

  Canyon kept talking, asking for details. Attacked by whom? Had anyone been hurt? MacAllister shut off the sound feed from the newsman and rubbed his head. It hurt, but he couldn’t tell through the field whether he was bleeding. Otherwise, he thought he was okay. Couple bumps, nothing more.

  Marcel was back on the circuit, asking the same questions. “Crickets,” Kellie responded, although he couldn’t see her. “Talk in a minute.”

  MacAllister was swept up in a curious combination of horror and exhilaration. By God, that had felt good. We’re all savages at heart, he thought.

  Hutch came back into the camp, looked at him, and glanced around. “Everybody okay?” she asked.

  Nightingale signaled he was fine. He was shining his lamp into the trees, assuring himself they were gone. “I guess we just met the locals.”

  “How about you, Mac?”

  “Alive and well,” said MacAllister. “I don’t think those little sons of bitches will be back soon.”

  “Where’s Chiang?” she asked.

  MacAllister stared down at one of the bodies. It had sickly pale skin with a greenish tint and a hairy ridged skull. Its eyes were open, but it seemed dead.

  It would have stood not quite as high as his hip. When he poked it, the creature stirred and made a sad mewling sound.

  Kellie’s voice broke in, subdued. “Over here,” she said. “I found him.”

  Chiang lay still. Blood poured down inside his e-suit, leaking out of half a dozen wounds.

  “Kill the suit,” said MacAllister.

  “No.” Kellie had thrown herself on the ground beside him. Her voice was low and strange. “It’s all that’s holding him together.”

  Hutch knelt and picked up his wrist. “Mac,” she said, “get the medkit.”

  MacAllister turned and hurried over to Hutch’s backpack. “No pulse,” Hutch said.

  “He’s not breathing.” Kellie’s voice was thick.

  Reluctantly, they punched off the suit and Hutch tried direct administration of his air supply.

  Somebody must have spoken Embry’s code because her voice came on the circuit. “Don’t move him,” she said.

  And Marcel: “Put out guards. They may come back.”

  “I got it,” said Nightingale.

  Kellie said, “Burn anything that moves.”

  “Do you have the kit yet?” Embry again.

  “Mac’s getting it.”

  “Mac, hurry up. What’s the bleeding look like? Let me see it.”

  MacAllister returned with the medkit. Hutch took it and signaled for him to help Nightingale. Kellie pulled out a couple of pressure bandages and began applying them. Mac stood for a moment, staring down at Chiang. Then he turned away.

  Nightingale was checking another dead attacker. MacAllister hoped Chiang’s assailant was among the corpses.

  They stayed together and circled the campsite
. The exobiologist looked drained. MacAllister wondered for the first time whether he might have been unfair years before to Nightingale. “You’ve been here before, haven’t you, Randy?” he said.

  “Yeah.” Nightingale made a face like someone who’d just bitten into bad fruit. “There’s a little bit of déjà vu about this.” He paused and took a deep breath. “I really hate this place.”

  MacAllister nodded. “I’m sorry.” He wasn’t sure what he meant by the phrase.

  “Yeah. Me too.” Nightingale’s features hardened. He looked as if he were going to say more. But he only shrugged and looked away.

  MacAllister listened to the conversation on the allcom.

  “Give him the R.O.”

  “Doing it now.”

  “Kellie, you need to stop the blood. Clamp down tighter.”

  “It’s not working, Embry.”

  “Stay with it. Any pulse yet?”

  “A trace.”

  “Don’t give up. Kellie, get a blanket or something on him.”

  MacAllister looked toward the east, toward Deneb, while Chiang slipped away.

  They buried him where he fell, during a ceremony at dawn. MacAllister, whose reputation ordinarily denied him the luxury of sentiment, found a stone, cut Chiang’s name and dates into it, and added the comment: DIED DEFENDING HIS FRIENDS.

  They dug the grave deep and lowered him in. Kellie wanted to conduct the ceremony, but she kept choking up, and finally she asked Hutch to finish.

  He did not belong to an organized church, Kellie said, although he had a strong faith. Hutch nodded, didn’t try to sort it out, and simply consigned him to the ground—she could no longer bring herself to say earth—observed that he had died too soon, and asked whatever god might be to take charge of him and to remember him.

  Kellie stood paralyzed, resisting all offers of support, as they filled in the grave.

  Nightingale announced that the attackers were vertebrates, but that their bones were hollow. “Birds?” asked MacAllister.

  “At one time,” he said, “I think so.” He described filaments between arms and ribs that seemed to indicate that the species had only recently lost its flight capabilities.

  They went through the creatures’ garments. There were pockets, which contained fruits and nuts and a few smooth rocks. Ammunition.

  “Let’s get moving,” said Hutch.

  “What about these things?” asked Nightingale. “Shouldn’t we bury them, too?”

  Kellie’s face hardened. “Let their own take care of them.”

  NEWSLINE WITH AUGUST CANYON

  “Tonight we have bad news. An hour ago, the landing party was attacked—”

  Beekman was looking out from a virtual cliff top over a turbulent ocean when Marcel arrived. Snow whipped across the crest and fell into the night, but it was a ground blizzard stirred up by fierce winds, and had nothing to do with the skies, which were clear. Morgan was high overhead.

  The tides on Maleiva III were, as a matter of course, gentle. There was no moon, so the only visible effects were generated by the distant sun. But tonight, with the gas giant approaching, the sea was monstrous. Huge waves pounded the cliffs on Transitoria’s north coast.

  “Tomorrow night,” he said, without turning toward Marcel.

  Marcel sank against a bulkhead. “My God, Gunny. That’s still another day they’ve lost.”

  “There are weaknesses in the range. Fault lines, Harry tells me. Worse than we thought. They’re going to give way tomorrow night.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah. We’re sure.” He turned sad eyes toward Marcel. “There was no way we could know—”

  “It’s okay. Not anybody’s fault.” A cold hand gripped his spine. “They’re still thirty klicks away.”

  Beekman nodded. “I’d say they better get moving.”

  XXII

  Tides are like politics. They come and go with a great deal of fuss and noise, but inevitably they leave the beach just as they found it. On those few occasions when major change does occur, it is rarefy good news.

  —Attributed to GREGORY MACALLISTER by Henry Kilburn, Gregory MacAllister: Life and Times

  Hours to breakup (est): 78

  In fact, Canyon had belatedly realized there was still another big story developing: the reaction of the people on board the other ships to the plight of the ground team.

  He’d become uncomfortable interviewing Hutchins and her other trapped rabbits. It was too much like talking to dead people. So he’d switched over and done human-interest stories on the other superluminals. He’d found a young woman who’d been the traveling companion of the reporter who’d died in the Evening Star lander. She’d wept and struggled to hold back a case of galloping hysteria, and on the whole it had just made for a marvelous show. There were several people who’d been personally skewered or whose fondest beliefs had been shredded by MacAllister. How did they feel now that MacAllister was in danger of his life? For the record, they delivered pieties, expressing their fondest hope that he could be brought safely out. Even when the interview had formally ended, most said they wished him well, that nobody deserved what was happening to him, but something in their voices belied the sentiments. Only one, a retired politician who’d run a campaign on the need for moral reform, damned him outright. “Nothing against the man personally,” he’d said, “but I think it’s a judgment. We’ll be better off without him.”

  Everyone on the Wendy Jay had been hit by Chiang’s death. There was, he reflected, nothing like losing one of-your own to bring home reality. Now they were worried about Kellie, and several of the younger males seemed stricken at the possibility of losing her, too. Her boss, Marcel Clairveau, regretted that he’d allowed her to go down to the surface. Occasionally, when he spoke of her, his voice trembled. That also made good copy.

  He’d interviewed the physician left on Wildside about Nightingale. She expressed sorrow, of course, but it was a perfunctory response. He was quiet, she said, very reserved. Never got to know him. Canyon had done his homework and knew Nightingale’s background. There was a dark irony, he thought, that every time Nightingale touched down on this world, people died.

  Canyon hadn’t said anything like that, at least not for public consumption. But the observation would show up in his broadcast after the situation had sorted itself out. He was putting a great deal of time into writing the spontaneous observations that he would make in the wake of the event.

  Canyon knew the right questions to ask, and he was able to work most of his subjects up to a state of near hysteria. If Hutchins and her friends came out of this, he thought, they’d be heroes of the first order.

  His own career prospects looked brighter than ever. What had begun as routine coverage of a planetary collision that was of interest primarily because the event was so rare and people liked fireworks, was instead turning into one of the human-interest stories of the decade. And it was all his.

  “Marcel, you need to get some rest.” Worry lined Beekman’s eyes.

  “I’m all right,” Marcel said. Too many things were happening just then.

  “There’s no point exhausting yourself. Do that and you won’t be there when we need you.” Marcel had slept only intermittently during the past few days, and it had always been a jumpy kind of rest. “There’s nothing more for you to do at the moment. Why don’t you get off the bridge for a while? Go lie down.”

  Marcel thought about it. The various elements of the extraction were going forward, and maybe he’d become little more than a kibitzer anyhow. “Yeah,” he said, “I think I will.” He propped his chin on his hands. “Gunny, what have we overlooked?”

  “We’re in good shape. For the moment, there’s nothing more to be done.” He folded his arms and stood waiting for Marcel to retire.

  Embry was sitting up front in the pilot’s seat, listening to the occasional crackle of conversation between the ground, Marcel, and Augie Canyon, who was interviewing Randy Nightingale. They soun
ded, she thought, in surprisingly good spirits, and she wondered how that could be.

  Wildside had completed its movement, with the other three vessels, to a rendezvous near the assembly. Sitting in an empty ship while it fired thrusters and changed course had underscored her solitude. AIs were AIs and God knew she worked with them on a regular basis, as any practicing physician did. But somehow the voices that diagnosed a spinal problem or suggested a rejuvenation procedure were fundamentally different from an intelligent superluminal that made all its own decisions and on which she was the only passenger.

  The message light blinked and an unfamiliar female face appeared on one of her screens. “Embry?” She was wearing an Academy arm patch.

  “Yes. What can I do for you?”

  “Embry, my name’s Katie Robinson.” Her diction was precise, and Embry wondered if she’d had theatrical experience. “We’re about to leave Wendy. We’re coming over and will be there in a few minutes. I’d like you to pack a bag. Get all your belongings. We’re going to bring you back with us.”

  “May I ask why?” said Embry.

  “Because we’re going to remove your life support.”

  They arrived within thirty minutes and went directly to work. There were eight of them. They went down into the storage bay and stripped most of the metal from the bins, containers, cabinets, storage units, and dividers. Then they came topside and went through the compartments and the common room, doing much the same sort of thing.

  Katie helped her clear out her own quarters. When she was finished they repeated the process, taking most of the metal: the bed panels, the lamps, a foldout table, a built-in cabinet. They thanked her, apologized for the inconvenience, loaded everything into their shuttle, including her, and left.

  The trank hadn’t worked. Kellie listened to the sound of distant tides—they had finally camped near Bad News Bay—and watched Jerry Morgan, a vast swollen moon, sink toward the hills. The eastern sky had already begun to lighten. Hutch was their sentry, and her slim form leaned against a tree, just beyond the fire’s glow.