Guido rolled his eyes and groaned at Sparks’ weak pun, but nodded agreement.
“So how do we get there?” Tom wondered. A blue portal shimmered to his left.
“Ask and ye shall receive,” Sparks said with a wink.
We stepped through the portal. As I emerged, I noticed a difference in the atmosphere, a feeling of electricity, of excitement, of wonder: that first-thing-Christmas-morning feeling we get as children and lose as adults. Yet, as I looked around, I couldn’t see any reason for it. Except for the five of us, there was no one else around, and nothing moved.
“Do you feel that?” Sparks asked.
“Yeah,” Tom replied. “I thought I was imagining it.”
Cap asked, “Do you suppose it’s artificial, to pump up the crowds?”
“I wouldn’t put anything past the Progenitors,” I replied.
“So what’s so wonderful about this place?” Guido wondered.
We looked around us. Fifty meters ahead of us, beyond the garden we were standing in, there were numerous capsules and gondolas and other types of seating arrangements resting on the ground in various places, but no sign of equipment—no Ferris wheels, carousels, roller coasters or anything recognizable as an amusement park ride.
Seventy meters to either side of us, the city ended in a sheer drop. Presumably there were invisible walls there to prevent people from falling off, but from where we stood it looked like we could step out onto a cloud. On the far side of the park from us, beyond another fifty-meter garden was a tall, soaring building, similar to the one adjacent to the terminal. I couldn’t help wondering who tended the neatly manicured lawn, plants and shrubs. Knowing the Progenitors’ talents, perhaps the plants tended themselves.
“Maybe all the good stuff was taken from here, too,” I suggested. We walked through the park towards the rides.
“Or maybe their rides are so much more advanced than ours that we wouldn’t recognize them,” Sparks countered.
“You may be right,” I conceded. I was embarrassed by the naïveté of my previous comment. Hadn’t I just said that I wouldn’t put anything past the Progenitors?
There’s only one way to find out,” Cap declared. He headed briskly for something that looked vaguely like a hammock tilted at a forty-five degree angle. As we approached, I realized that it wasn’t quite as simple as that: it hovered just off the ground. Cap leaned back in the hammock, arms at his side.
“It’s quite comfortable, if nothing else,” he said.
Within seconds, the hammock became a cocoon, completely encasing Cap in a brown mesh. He opened his mouth, as if to cry out in alarm, but the cocoon turned transparent.
“Well, this is certainly an odd sensation,” Cap reported. “I’m completely immobilized, yet I can’t see a thing holding me in place.” Indeed, to the rest of us it looked like Cap was reclining at an impossible angle centimeters off the ground.
Cap rose slowly into the air. The higher he went, the faster he rose until he was a good sixty meters overhead. Then he began to whirl and swoop and soar.
From far above us we heard “Whee!” and “Woot!”
“Woot? Did I just hear Cap say ‘woot’?” Guido asked, wide-eyed.
I just grinned.
After a minute or two, Cap began to slow and then he returned to the spot where he’d entered the cocoon. When it stopped, the cocoon turned opaque again and then opened. Cap stepped out looking a bit flushed, but with a light in his eyes I had never seen before.
“Wow!” he exulted. “That was incredible! I haven’t felt anything like that since flight school, many years ago.” He had a far off look in his eyes for a moment, then it was gone. “I take it back. Flight school was nothing like this. I was flying! No aircar, no starship, just me! And I was up so high I could see forever. You have to try it!”
And try it we did. Each of us took a turn and I have to say, if anything, Cap understated the experience. At first I felt a bit claustrophobic as the cocoon closed, but once it turned invisible, it was like I was frozen in place for no particular reason. Then I began to rise. I was reminded of my youth when I dreamt of being a crime-fighter with superhuman powers, able to fly over cities and swoop down and catch the overmatched villains below. Although I had no control over where I was going, it somehow seemed as if I did. And as Cap said, I had a bird’s-eye view from horizon to horizon. What an experience! When I exited the cocoon, my heart was racing and I must have been grinning from ear to ear.
After we’d all had a turn—Cap went a second time—we tried some of the other rides, each of us getting a chance to go first. One of them shot around and around the park like a huge centrifuge, but without any visible support. Another twirled like a pinwheel. After at least a dozen such rides, I stopped counting. Then there was one that looked like a cross between a chair and a bucket. We had been in the park for more than an hour by then, perhaps two, and we were thoroughly giddy.
Guido went first this time. He sat in the chair-bucket, rose slowly, and almost immediately began to spin and tumble—a perfect recipe for motion sickness. It didn’t look like much fun to me, but I guessed some people might enjoy it; Guido certainly seemed to. Then the chair-bucket hurled up and out into the air over the side of the sky city, as if for skeet-shooting practice. In an instant, Guido’s peals of laughter turned into shrieks of terror, his voice fading away as he fell. We rushed to the edge of the platform in time to see Guido disappear into a cloud hundreds of meters beneath us.
“Guido!”
The cry issued from multiple lips, from multiple shattered souls. We watched for a minute, an eternity, helpless, straining our eyes for some sign that he’d miraculously survived.
Nothing moved below but eddies in the clouds.
How could it all happen so fast? One moment he was vibrant and alive and laughing, and the next he was dead. Cap, Tom, Sparks and I backed away from the edge and stared at one another in a horrified silence that seemed like it would never end.
I couldn’t think; I couldn’t move. The universe seemed to have frozen in place. How—?
“My G—” Sparks began at last, and then choked up. He put his hand to his mouth as if to hold in his grief, eyes wide in shock.
“Wha-what happened?” Tom asked, his normally olive complexion gone pale. “How? These things have been operating for billions of years. Why now?”
I shook my head, still trying to understand, myself, what went wrong—still trying to come to grips with what had just happened. “I don’t know. I-I guess everything breaks eventually, even Progenitors’ stuff.”
“Goddamn it!” Sparks shouted. “It’s not right! We survived everything the universe threw at us, and he gets killed by a stupid amusement park ride? It’s just not right!” He clenched his teeth until I thought they would shatter.
“Sparks—” I began.
“Never mind why!” Cap interrupted. “We have to get down there! Maybe he survived the fall. Let’s go!” He turned and ran back toward the terminal.
For a man his age, he could really move when he wanted to.
“Cap!” I shouted, trying to call him back. There was no way Guido could have survived that fall.
Cap either couldn’t hear me or chose not to. He kept running.
The rest of us followed; we were hard-pressed to catch up. Within seconds, we arrived at the blue portal leading to the terminal and stepped through.
“Computer!” Cap ordered. “Show us the portal to the planet below this city.”
“There is no portal below.”
“Fine. Then whichever is the nearest portal to this area.”
“There are no portals on the surface of Celentis.”
“None? Anywhere? Are you serious?”
“There are no portals on the surface of Celentis.”
“Shit!” He turned to the rest of us. “Now what?”
Tom was frantic. “Computer! What about aircars? Are there any aircars in the city?”
“There are no aircars r
emaining in this city.”
“Damn it, there must be some way down to the surface from here!”
“There is no access to the surface of Celentis from this city.”
“How about from another city?”
“There is no access to the surface of Celentis from any city.” Tom screamed his frustration, a deep guttural cry.
“Christ! This is getting us nowhere.” Cap tried again. “Computer how can we get down to the surface of Celentis? There must be some way.”
“The surface is accessible only by aircar or spaceship; however there are no landing facilities on the surface, which was maintained as a nature preserve.”
“Look,” Tom suggested. “Let’s just go back to Shamu. We can fly here and take a pod down!”
“Tom,” I said, sighing. “It would take us months to get here—assuming we have enough food. And then, even if Guido were still alive, the pod isn’t designed for landing on a planet. You know that. The engine isn’t powerful enough and there’s no heat shielding. It just wouldn’t work.”
“But…but…we can’t just leave him.”
“Lads,” Cap began, his ebony face gone ashen. “Swede’s right. Even if we could get down there, there’s no way he could have survived the fall. And there are hundreds of square kilometers where his body could be.”
We all stepped outside the terminal to once again look over the side, hoping to see some trace of Guido below. Nothing. The cloud obscured our view of the ground.
“So what are we going to do?” Sparks asked. There was a tremor in his voice. “What are we going to tell his wife—and his baby? We can’t even bring his body home.”
I was numb inside. “We tell them the truth. We tell them that we got him killed. He was the one who always worried about being killed by aliens. We teased and cajoled him into coming along, and look what happened: he was killed by an alien device on an alien world.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Sparks said under his breath. Tears ran down his face, unheeded.
I thought I saw a moist glint in Cap's eyes as well, but I couldn’t be sure. I had my own problems seeing clearly at that point.
Tom half-sat, half-fell to the ground, much like a rag doll dropped by a child. “What do we do now?” he asked softly, echoing Sparks’ earlier query.
We all looked to Cap, our leader, for direction.
Cap took a long, deep, ragged breath and exhaled sharply. “We go home,” he said with a steady voice and shoulders squared.
It might have sounded uncaring to someone else, but we all knew the depth of Cap’s loss. He turned and walked slowly back into the terminal. I watched his neck muscles tighten as he appeared to fight the temptation to look back one last time.
The rest of us—minus one—trailed behind him with heavy hearts and a cargo hold full of regrets.
CHAPTER 21
The four of us trudged slowly back into the terminal, silently contemplating what had just happened. I don’t think the others were having any more success coming to terms with Guido’s death than I was. Was there anything we could have done to prevent it? I couldn’t imagine what, but I kept torturing myself with thoughts of “what if?” My mind turned repeatedly to memories of Guido—his boundless energy, his quick wit, his stories of home and family in Palermo. How could he be gone? What were we going to do without him?
My mind was unable to focus, jumping from thought to illogical thought. One moment I mentally inventoried his personal effects, which would have to be packed up and delivered to his wife, Serafina. The next, I thought irrationally of the food aboard Shamu, and wondered who was going to eat all that damn Veal Scaloppini that Guido loved so much. I knew there was no way I could bring myself to eat it again.
The others were likewise consumed with their own thoughts as we stood inside the terminal. Tom, incredibly, chuckled once at what I assumed was a memory of a happier time together. Tom was probably closer to Guido than to anyone else aboard Shamu. It’s perhaps trite to say, but nevertheless true, that we were closer than most families. We’d served together for nearly seven years, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for months at a time. We each had saved one another’s lives on more than one occasion. Guido’s death was devastating to all of us, but it must have hit Tom the hardest of all.
“He can’t be gone,” Tom said, shaking his head. “He just can’t be. He was laughing, having fun. He—” Tom choked to a halt.
I wanted to comfort him, but I had no soothing words to offer. What could I say? I felt just as responsible for Guido’s death, just as empty inside. The best I could manage was a hand on Tom’s shoulder. He nodded his thanks for the gesture, meager as it was.
Our grand adventure, our galactic jackpot, had gone bust. I would have given everything I had—all the tesserene in the universe—to get Guido back.
We stepped through the portal and back into the terminal. “Computer,” Cap called out. His voice was utterly devoid of inflection. “Open the portal back to our ship.”
A purple portal appeared. We were a thoroughly dispirited bunch as we plodded through the portal into the hub through which we’d passed earlier.
Just as before, there were two Stromvik already there, but this time, oddly, they appeared to be waiting for us. When Tom appeared, the fourth and last one through the portal, one of the Stromvik growled, “We told you to stay away from us, but you did not listen. Now you will suffer!”
Huh? Before we could react to such an unexpected statement, the two Stromvik attacked.
Despite their size they were quick, and they had the element of surprise on their side. One immediately grabbed Cap; the other charged at Sparks. He went down with a series of parallel gashes across his chest from the Stromvik’s claws. I dove for the nearer Stromvik, the one holding Cap and straining to bite his throat. Cap was barely holding him off and didn’t look like he would last much longer. Tom went for the other one. Despite our two-to-one advantage over the attackers, we were hopelessly outmatched. They were stronger, heavier and had the kind of teeth that would give a shark hunter nightmares.
I managed to knock “my” Stromvik’s left hand loose for an instant and Cap broke free; then I was tossed aside like a throw pillow. I landed hard on my left hip and was immediately reduced to a limping shuffle. I didn’t think my hip was broken, but it hurt like the devil.
Tom and Sparks, trying to stay out of the reach of the other Stromvik, ducked beneath the reach of their much taller attackers. There was no way to win this fight unarmed. Our only chance was to escape.
“Computer!” I ordered, “Open the portal to our ship!” Instantly a pink portal opened, but the Stromvik were between it and us. “Damn it!” I cried out. “Guys, try to get to the portal!”
Although the computer didn’t translate, the Stromvik seemed to understand what we were trying to accomplish, because they maneuvered to make sure we couldn’t get around them. However, this also meant that they couldn’t pursue us as aggressively as before, otherwise we might slip past them. For the moment the two sides were stalemated. We backed away from the Stromvik and our means of escape.
“It won’t work, Swede,” Cap called out, breathing heavily. There was red staining his left shoulder where the Stromvik’s teeth had gotten him. “Once some of us get through, the others will be in even worse danger. There’s no way all four of us can slip by them.”
“Damn it! Why aren’t we armed?” Sparks growled his frustration.
“You know Company policy,” began Cap. Then he winced in pain.
“Yeah, yeah, I know all about Company policy, but that policy wasn’t written with the Stromvik in mind, now was it?” Sparks countered, with considerable exasperation.
“Be that as it may, we don’t have any weapons. Period. Crying about it won’t change anything.”
“Maybe not, but it makes me feel better,” Sparks conceded sullenly.
All this bickering distracted us momentarily, and that was our undoing. The two Stromvik attacked again, from
either side. We were trapped between them. They caught each of us by an arm before we could escape. I punched the alien who had me—square in the nose—but it only blinked and shook me like a rag doll.
Tom kicked the same Stromvik in what would be the groin of a human. A man would have fallen to the ground puking his guts out. But there was no pain reaction on the part of the alien. It snarled and then savagely tore at Tom’s face and head, sending rivulets of blood streaming down his face and ears. The Stromvik’s teeth slid off the bone, leaving a flap of scalp dangling from the side of Tom’s head, and his right eye mangled. His remaining eye went wide in shock. The Stromvik, still holding our arms, slammed Tom and me together and our heads collided in a shower of stars.
I staggered, still held in the Stromvik’s iron grip, and everything went gray for a moment. The Stromvik hurled us against the wall and I heard something snap in my right arm. As I lay there, dazed and helpless, knowing I was about to die, I saw the other Stromvik throw first Cap and then Sparks against the wall a few meters away. Both were bloody and appeared unconscious.
The two Stromvik threw back their heads and howled in victory with our blood dripping from their jaws and talons. Then they turned to finish us off. The malevolent gleam in the eye of the Stromvik coming for me dispelled any illusions I might have had that it would show us the slightest mercy. A portal opened to my right. Just as I gratefully slipped into the unconsciousness that would spare me having to feel the pain of being ripped apart, I heard a voice cry out.
“Computer! Protect!”
I barely had time to register surprise; then everything went black.
* * * *
I awoke slowly, my vision blurry, surprised that I awoke at all. I tried to push myself up, but fell back with a scream when a lightning bolt shot up my right arm. It was definitely broken.
As my vision cleared, I saw the two Stromvik pacing back and forth, only a few meters away. Why hadn’t they killed us? And why did they look mad enough to chew hull plating?
I looked to my left and saw Sparks and Cap awake but groggy; to my right, Tom was still unconscious and bleeding freely. Kneeling over him was—
The Imperative Chronicles, Books One and Two: The Mars Imperative & The Tesserene Imperative Page 56
