The Sky People

by S. M. Stirling

  Tahyo looked up at him, thumped his tail on the ground, and quickly gulped down a last bite of giblet with a slightly guilty look. The greatwolf looked relieved when the human made no attempt to take the savory morsel, and then sighed with resignation when Marc rose with the bundle of meat on his back and a tumpline to bear the weight across his forehead, took up his rifle again, and trotted back towards the anchor point by the lake.

  "Gar ici, I'm glad to have you along," he said to the animal running beside him. "Keep a nose out for anything that might like to snack down, eh? We're smelling of blood and meat, us."

  Animals were beginning to filter back into the area, losing their initial fear of the shape of the aircraft when nothing particularly bad happened. Besides small game like a tiger-striped looks-like-a-rabbit, he spotted half a dozen varieties of antelope, a troop of man-sized tailless baboons, wild hogs four foot at the shoulder and stripped with patterns of tan and yellow, and once something huge raised its head over a fifty-foot tree for an instant and then crashed away, invisible save for the heaving of the vegetation. Farther in the distance came the appalling squall of a saber-tooth, either celebrating a kill or working off frustration from missing that last infinitely satisfying leap-and-plunge-in-fangs.

  The rest of the crew had completed their inspection and were making a temporary camp. That meant mainly doing their laundry, digging a fire-pit, and bringing down some cooking equipment; they'd spend the night in the Vepaja, a safe two hundred feet above the bugs and beasts. Marc silently rubbed the 'saur with the spice mix and set it to roast over coals already giving a nice white glow. Things burned faster on Venus.

  And from the silent, troubled looks Cynthia is giving me, that's not all that heats up quickly. Mais, get over it, boug. It's her life, and if she doesn't feel the same way about you, that's just the luck of the draw. Thinking otherwise, that's obsession and madness country. So what if there are only a hundred and thirty of us locked up together on the same planet? You're supposed to be the pick of ten million volunteers. Act like it!

  It was still intensely frustrating, if you were a healthy twenty-five-year-old.

  Maybe I should take up that offer of a housekeeper. He grimaced. I'm not prejudiced. I just think that sex with the locals is… creepy. Weh, weh, they're human beings, or near as no matter, but… and you can get the fleas out of their hair… but can you get the ghoulies and ghosties out of their minds? I'm not sixteen anymore. The thought of sleeping with a woman I can't really talk to puts me off.

  After the cooking was started, he headed down to the water with soap and a towel, after giving it a careful checking-over. These upland lakes were usually pretty free of parasites, but that didn't mean there weren't other predators. When he'd waded out, dried off, and switched to some clean fatigues, Cynthia came over.

  "Marc—," she began.

  He grinned and shrugged. "It's okay, Cyn. I'm a big boy and I know how things work."

  She smiled, though with a wince-inducing amount of relief, and changed the subject. "I'm glad we had time to check things over before we got impossibly far from base."

  Marc picked up his rifle and they walked back towards the fire; a mouthwatering smell was coming from it as wafts of blue smoke drifted skyward.

  "Me too," he said. "I'd be even happier if we'd found what went wrong and knew we could fix it—or not."

  "Passe,passe!" Marc mumbled in his sleep.

  Tahyo whined again; he understood get lost, dog! quite well by now. He still stuck his nose—cold, wet, healthy, startling—in his master's ear once more.

  Marc threw off his light blanket. The interior of the Vepaja's gondola was an oval about a hundred feet long, with a lower level half that length fared into the middle for the ballast and reserve-gas tanks. The interior partitions were shamboo wicker covered with coarse cloth on both sides, enough for privacy—if your hearing wasn't very good. Their merit was that they could be easily rearranged to suit a specific mission. For this one the central corridor had the galley and head opposite each other right behind the control chamber, then five small rooms, each with a narrow bunk and not much else.

  Marc yawned and stretched in the stuffy dimness, lit only by starlight through the round porthole, open now for fresh air. Even that wasn't much, with the usual high haze and no moon. Nights on Venus were darker than on Earth.

  "If you think I'm taking the basket down to the surface just for you, you're crazy, Tahyo," he said. "You can use that litter box we set up and learn to like it."

  Then he grimaced. It was a smelly, messy procedure, and the one argument that had almost persuaded him to leave the young greatwolf behind on this trip. Tahyo didn't like it, either; it offended his sense of propriety to unload in the airship, which he evidently considered their den and thus sacrosanct. Doc Feldman thought it was an instinct not to mark a lair with scents another predator might follow to vulnerable nursing mothers and pups.

  Usually Tahyo would endure a heroic degree of discomfort to wait for the morning, but this time his anxiety didn't seem to be quite the Oh-God-I-just-can't-hold-it-boss type of stress. Instead he was bouncing back and forth between the narrow cot and the door. Marc yawned and blinked and began to swing out of the bunk. Then he froze. The airship had swung out over the water during the night; all the better, security-wise. But there was just enough starlight on the still water to see it was a lot too close; and now they were down by the nose as well.

  The alarm went off just as he reached for the button by the head of his bed—it was the steady whoop-whoop-whoop of the manual override, too, not the choppier sound of an automatic warning, so someone had slapped their emergency button.

  Marc jumped for the corridor, almost tripped over the hysterically wulfing Tahyo—the greatwolf hated what the mechanical wail did to his sensitive ears. Marc plunged past the galley and into the control room, to find Blair in the commander's seat; he was on watch right now, and frantically pressing buttons and screens. The water was starting to fill the view through the slanted windows.

  "Main valves on the forward three cells open. Can't get the buggers closed from here," he said, loudly but tonelessly, without looking up from the urgent futility of his task.

  Marc whirled and flung himself at the ladder, vaguely conscious of others following him. There was no time for anything else; if they came down in the water here they'd be lucky to make it to shore naked. Trying to walk three hundred miles back to Jamestown that way…

  Up through darkness lit only by the dim red of the night-lights, with the gas cells of the airship looming around him like monstrous, pillowy giants from a child's nightmare. A turn and twist, and he scrambled lizard-style over the upper surface of the donut, the net-covered surface feeling palpably looser and less taut under his body than it had earlier in the day. Then he was at the top, where a short tube joined the cell to the valve in the hull surface above. His hand slammed at the switch there to close it; he could hear the hiss of escaping gas.

  "Shit! he screamed, as nothing happened. "Use the manual override! Use the manual override!" he shouted, to whoever was… please God… on the second and third cells.

  That was an aluminum lever. He grabbed, pulled… and felt the servo working against him, keeping the valve open to the alien night. He reached across without hesitation and pulled the power connector. It might spark and blow them all to the afterlife, but that was an acceptable risk right now.

  There. The heavy three-pronged plug came loose; his hand flashed back to the manual lever and yanked. A clung from above, and the rubber-edged rectangle thunked closed.

  "Number One cell secured!" he called.

  "Number Two secured!" Jadviga Binkis' voice.

  "Number Three secured!" Cynthia.

  Just then a rumble came from far below them; the emergency ballast was dropping hundreds of gallons of water a second into the lake—the same water they'd expended precious time and power to pump up that very day. The fabric beneath him began to bulge and grow resilient once
more as emergency hydrogen from the tanks flowed through.

  "Pouponer, old girl," Marc gasped. "Make yourself nice, eh?"

  He lay for a moment in sweating exhaustion on the top of the cell. Much as he loved the Venusian wilderness, he had no desire to die in it trying to fight off a 'saur or a saber-tooth with an improvised wooden spear.

  Then he forced himself to swing back to the ladder and down into the control deck. Captain Tyler was back in his seat, though, like Marc, he was wearing nothing but his boxers. Cynthia and Jadviga came through an instant later, nearly as undressed. Only Blair was still in his uniform, looking white-faced. Outside, the water of the lake receded with smooth grace as the Vepaja regained buoyancy; they could see it clearly now, since one of the prow searchlights had been switched on.

  After a moment Tyler nodded and turned the swivel chair to face the rest of them.

  "There wasn't any alarm until Wing Commander Blair noticed what was happening—," Tyler began.

  He gave the Englishman a glare. Marc did, too; he hadn't noticed too damned much, since he was supposed to have been awake and alert. Tahyo had turned out to have more on the ball.

  "Sir, as you said, there wasn't any alarm from the automatic systems. And all the gauges remained steady—I did keep an eye on them, I assure you."

  "—and as he says, there's something amiss with the computer," Tyler finished. "Miss Whitlock?"

  "I'll check it, Captain," she said. "But offhand I can't think of anything spontaneous that would cause precisely that cascade of errors."

  "Of course is not spontaneous," Jadviga Binkis said.

  Marc started slightly; she was usually so quiet you could forget that she spoke at all. She went on:

  "Is sabotage, wrecking. As was crash of Riga. There is conspiracy at work here."

  "Perhaps," Blair said. "But a conspiracy by whom, and to what end? I can think of any number of motives—for example, having lost their shuttle, the EastBloc might wish to see our base suffer a corresponding loss."

  The others looked at one another, dismayed. Captain Tyler nodded slowly. "They say the third time it's enemy action. I'm not inclined to wait that long." He looked around. "It's my decision, but I'd like to consult. Who's for returning to base?"

  Oh, that's a toughie, Marc thought unhappily. On the one hand, I don't want to miss this trip—and Jadviga's husband and his crew may be alive. On the other hand, I'm not real eager to die, either. Difficult enough just making the trip, but what if the next bit of sabotage is a fire?

  His hand twitched; then he pressed it firmly down by his side. Stillness held for a second; then Blair's hand went up and, more slowly, Cynthia's.

  Tyler smiled grimly. "Well, I say we're going on, but it's nice to be in the majority."

  A pause, then: "And here's how we're going to do it from now on. Obviously, single watch-standers are out… except for me. I'll set up a roster. For starters, since you were so alert, Lieutenant, you and Wing Commander Blair can share the rest of the night watch."

  "Captain," Cynthia said. "I'd like to get to work right away on the computer's programs."

  "Can you tell who did what?"

  "Ummm… no. I mean, I may be able to find out what's been f—screwed up in the program, but code doesn't carry fingerprints."

  "The morning will do, Ms. Whitlock," Tyler said calmly. "After losing so much gas and ballast, we're not going anywhere tomorrow. And I want to consult with General Clarke."

  Suddenly Jadviga spoke: "You assume saboteur is among us, Captain?"

  Tyler nodded. "From the non-fatal nature of the sabotage, yes," he said. "Whoever he or she is, they'd want a chance of getting out. Which is why I've decided on continuing with the mission. The further we get from Jamestown, the less likelihood of whoever it is acting again. Unless they're not just nasty but suicidal."

  He spoke calmly, but Marc was glad he wasn't the saboteur. He suspected whoever it was wouldn't live long after Captain Tyler found out their name.

  And no suicide will be needed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Venus, Gagarin Continent—Far West

  "Run! Run!" Teesa shouted.

  Her sister, Zore, scampered by, burdened by her fluff-tail. The little spotted animal had its claws fixed in her shoulder, hard enough to draw beads of blood, but the girl scrambled on, clutching it to her and her blowgun pumping in her other hand. The last few of her people followed, out of the village that had been their home since her mother's time; some had bundles in their arms, many nothing, not even a loincloth. An old woman knelt, singing her dying-song, then thrust a long shamboo knife up under her ribs and collapsed, kicking.

  Smoke blew in, hot, acrid clouds of dusty-black smoke, from roofs set alight before they fled—nobody would leave more than they must to the beastmen.

  The crack… crack… sound of the new weapons echoed from the northward, firing in the slower way. Teesa moved the little lever ahead of the handgrip to the bottom position that launched one dart every time you squeezed the lever.

  But I have so few of the darts! she thought desperately.

  Taldi limped up, blood streaming from a cut on his leg. "We cannot stop them," he croaked.

  Teesa took down a section of shamboo pipe and gave it to him. He knocked out the bung and let the water run over his face, gulping and coughing. Then he unhitched a leather bandolier full of the boxes-of-loud-darts and tossed it to her.

  "These are cursed, but you wanted them," he said. "Take them and go—give me your blowgun darts first. I will hold them as long as I can. You are our people's guardian."

  Her eyes prickled, but there was no time for tears. Instead she touched his shoulder.

  "I hail you, brother of my mate," she said formally.

  Then she took down the Cave Master and set it around her brow. The familiar shiver ran over her skin; she looked south through a hundred eyes, felt the fury and fear and pain of men and beastmen fighting and dying. And…

  A mind. Not a beastman—true-man, but of a kind she had never met before. And familiar in another way; it was a mind that had been touched by the Mystery, as she had.

  But it was mad.

  Her world swam about her, and she almost fell to her knees with her hands clutched to her temples. That brought the loud-death against the Cave Master with a cold clink that startled her back to awareness. She pushed with her thoughts, and the babble receded to a background gabble. She pushed again, and saw from Taldi's eyes that he could not see her. He smiled grimly, hefted the pouch of blowgun darts she'd given him, and settled himself behind a stone wall. The Cave Master told her of parties of Cloud Mountain warriors falling back southward, harrying the beastmen to keep them off the fleeing females and children.

  And every little while, one would flare and die, making her wince.

  She took a piece of burning thatch and set it to the weathered, tinder-dry wood of the spirit-poles before the house where she had been born and where her mother lay buried beneath the hearth, then turned and trotted southward herself.

  There was good ground a few miles from here. There she could use the loud-death and stand revealed.

  We can live in the mountains, she thought.

  It would be hard, without their stocks of tools and stored food, but it could be done—her folk were skillful hunters, and they could gather acorns and leach out the tannins with water, if nothing else.

  But what can we do there but live from one kill to the next, without houses, without the graves of our kin or the company of our spirits? Will we be any more than the beastmen themselves?

  Then she shook her head. Time enough for such questions later. Now was a time to kill.

  "Ca va, Christophe?" Marc asked idly.

  "Comme ci, comme fa," Blair replied, in faultless Parisian, not looking up from the recorder and laptop. "C'est la Venus, eh?"

  Marc laid down his load of firewood by the stack he'd built and raised a brow, rubbing fragrant resin off his sweaty arms and then pulling up a swatch of
tall grass to clean his palms.

  "Didn't know you spoke French," he said.

  Blair shrugged and frowned. "My dear fellow, give me credit for a certain degree of education," he said.

  Marc grinned. "Funny, where I come from, people consider speaking French the mark of a swamp rat."

  "If you can call that patois French," Blair said.

  "Well, Texans claim that what they speak is English," Marc said equably. "When it isn't Spanish."

  Cynthia gave a subdued groan. She and Jadviga were spreading the reserve mats of solar-power sheeting on the hillside just inland of the Vepaja's anchor point. The material was a thin, flexible backing supporting foot-square tiles of the actual accumulators; those were flexible, too, but less so, and they were about the thickness of a sheet of cardboard. The combination was only about as heavy as a blanket of the same area, but there was a lot of area, and her ebony skin shone with the sweat that made her halter and shorts cling. Lacking nature's sunblock, the Lithuanian woman had kept to long sleeves and looked even more uncomfortable.

  Marc and Blair had muscled the rolls to the locations, but the two women were in charge of opening them out and attaching them to the power cords that climbed up the airship's anchor cable. The expedition carried the spare sheeting to make repairs if the layer on the upper hull was damaged, and for making up the loss if they were forced to valve gas in quantity. Tyler wanted all storage back up to maximum before leaving, and Clarke had backed him up. Marc didn't blame them, but it was a lot of work, and he could see that Jadviga was itching to get going.

  Well, if I was married to someone lost out there, I would be, too, he thought charitably.

  Tahyo looked up hopefully as Marc stretched and worked his arms; he'd been rather crushed since the women forcefully rebuffed his attempts to "help" with what they were doing. Marc ruffled his ears as he went by, then snapped the connectors onto the sheets and the power cable.

  The handset at Cynthia's waist buzzed. She put it to her ear, nodded, and waved at the windows of the control chamber.