Strider's Galaxy

by John Grant

  "How much of this did you know before we crashlanded?" The first pair of personnel were just arriving. They had secondary retinal screens across both eyes, so it was impossible for Strider to recognize them through their visors.

  Nothing. If you had not discovered this entrance we might never have known anything about the Preeae's presence. The neural camouflage they have erected is very sophisticated indeed. We had not been aware that any culture in The Wondervale was capable of creating this.

  "Bit of a long shot that we discovered them, then, isn't it?" said Strider, her eyes roaming across the wastes of sand around them. The Santa Maria looked in a way like a grounded hawk. It was the first time she had really seen the outside of her redesigned vessel except through the Pockets, and it was also the moment when she was abandoning it to whatever fate the Autarchy's forces visited upon it. She did not consider herself a sentimentalist, but a twinge of remorse passed through her, as if she had just betrayed an old and trusted friend. A captain should go down with her ship, and all that. No: she mustn't let herself start thinking like that. The Santa Maria was a collection of advanced technology, of bits of metal and circuitry. It was just an object, not a personality.

  WE EXPECT COINCIDENCES, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

  "Run that past me again."

  OUR REALITY ONLY PARTIALLY OVERLAPS WITH YOURS. THE NATURE OF THAT OVERLAP IS SUCH THAT "LONG SHOTS," AS YOU CALL THEM, HAPPEN VERY FREQUENTLY TO US WHEN WE ARE IN THE WONDERVALE.

  "Good thing we had you along, then."

  The Image quite clearly failed to recognize the tone of irony in her subvocalization. YOU WOULD ALL HAVE BEEN DEAD WITHIN HOURS OF ENTERING THE WONDERVALE HAD IT NOT BEEN FOR OUR INTERVENTION. MAGLITTEL WOULD HAVE BLASTED YOUR VESSEL TO SMALL PIECES.

  "Four hundred and fifty kilometers is a very long way to walk. Our suits have air enough for only a couple of dozen hours."

  THE PREEAE HAVE A TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM, USING A NETWORK OF TUNNELS. BUT YES, SOONER OR LATER YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO ABANDON YOUR SUITS AND TAKE YOUR CHANCES. HEARTFIRE IS ALREADY DOING HIS BEST TO ANALYZE THE LOCAL MICRO-ECOLOGY TO TRY TO DETERMINE IF THERE ARE ANY MICROBES THAT MIGHT CAUSE YOU HARM. THIS WILL TAKE HIM SOME TIME, AND IT IS POSSIBLE THAT HIS RESULTS WILL NOT BE ENTIRELY ACCURATE. BUT HE WILL DO HIS BEST.

  There was now a large cluster of suited personnel standing round the open trapdoor. Strider felt a pang as she saw the children among them. Children always looked so pathetic in spacesuits, as if the Universe should have been designed so that there was no need for such protections.

  She explained the situation tersely.

  "Pinocchio," she said, "tell me how many more people are still to get here."

  "There are three others. I am finding it impossible to contact them either by commline or by radio."

  "Is there any chance of your just physically going and getting them?" said Strider.

  "Not in time."

  "Then we leave them."

  When the volume of the shouts of protest over her suit radio grew too oppressive she turned it off. She wasn't going to sacrifice forty-odd for the sake of three. Almost as important, she wasn't going to risk losing Pinocchio, whose abilities might quite possibly make the subtle difference between the survival and extinction of the rest of the party.

  "Can you come with me inside my suit?" she said to Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

  CERTAINLY. I ALREADY AM INSIDE YOUR SUIT.

  "Good. I think I'm going to need you."

  SO DO I.

  Once she sensed that the argument had died down she tongued her suit radio back on again.

  "There will be no further debate about this matter," she said curtly. "I'll be the first to descend into the pit. You can decide among yourselves who is the next to follow me, but whoever it is must wait at least five minutes before they do so—got that? I'm going to leave an open line to First Officer O'Sondheim, and report to him exactly what I'm doing every step of the way. I don't want anyone intruding on that line—it's to be just him and me. If I meet a fatal reception you must disperse once more, under his general instructions. Clear?"

  Heads nodded. Enough heads to assure Strider she didn't have a revolution on her hands.

  "He and Pinocchio will be the last to follow down."

  She locked her radio on to O'Sondheim's.

  "Got that, Danny?"

  "Loud and clear."

  She fumbled her hand free of Strauss-Giolitto's and, not allowing herself too much time to think, dropped to her knees and hoisted herself in through the dark opening. She fastened the end of her belt-rope to the uppermost rung, though she didn't think the precaution would do her much good if she fell. It felt to her as if there were a very long drop beneath. She could hear the pulse in her temple beating more swiftly than it should be. What Ten Per Cent Extra Free had told her had been less than entirely reassuring. This might be a long climb down to disaster.

  "How are things going with the Preeae?" she subvocalized to him.

  THE NEGOTIATIONS ARE STILL . . . DELICATE.

  "That bad, huh?"

  THEY COULD BE VERY CONSIDERABLY WORSE.

  "What do you think my chances are?" She was moving smoothly down the ladder now. After the first couple of dozen rungs it began to take on a helical form, which oddly enough she found less vertiginous than if it had continued straight downwards. However different the Preeae might be physically from human beings, there was obviously some psychological similarity.

  She tried to stop her breathing sounding so loud. Although O'Sondheim seemed to have discovered his own inner strength since the terror to which he'd succumbed when the Santa Maria had fallen through the wormhole, she still wasn't sure quite how reliable he would be under pressure. He had refused her orders when she'd told him they had to flee from Spindrift's outer moon. If he picked up from her breathing quite how frightened she was, he might be infected and spread the fear on to others. She wished she could have asked Nelson or Leander or Pinocchio to take on the task of ushering the personnel into the pit, but that would probably, besides destroying his belief in himself, have created even more panic among the personnel than anything O'Sondheim could do. With luck, Pinocchio would cope with any problems.

  She looked up. The square of skylight above her seemed very small and a very long way away. She tongued on her suit lights, and kept going downwards. In front of her, between the rungs, the lights reflected off a slightly damp-seeming stone surface. The rungs themselves were rusted with age; she told herself not to think much about how fragile some of them might be.

  Strider looked upwards again. Perhaps there was a mote of daylight visible above, perhaps not.

  "I'm still going down," she said. "Nothing to worry about so far, Danny. The ladder starts twisting after a while, which might faze some people."

  "Message received and understood, Leonie," said O'Sondheim's voice inside her suit. "There aren't any signs yet of hostile forces. We're lucky. Keep your fingers crossed."

  "Ever tried crossing your fingers when you're climbing down a ladder in a spacesuit?" It was all right to breathe more loudly now; O'Sondheim would simply assume it was because of the physical exertion.

  "Well, you could try crossing your eyes instead." He was sounding perfectly confident. She hoped he stayed that way.

  Strider became aware that there was a source of light beneath her. Pausing for a moment, she looked downwards and saw a yellow glow. It seemed improbably far away, as if she were crawling backwards down towards the core of the planet.

  "Still there's been no contact," she reported to O'Sondheim. "The ladder has so far been in reasonably good repair, although the rungs are a bit rusty in places. Tell folk it might be wise not to try doing any acrobatics as they descend. Oh, yeah, and any kid big enough to climb down alone should do so rather than be carried. The less weight anyone puts on this ladder the better. But it seems OK to me."

  She briefly tongued off her suit radio.

  "How much further am I going?" she said.r />
  YOU WILL REACH THE BOTTOM WITHIN ABOUT FIVE MINUTES, AT YOUR CURRENT RATE OF PROGRESS, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

  "I'm shit scared."

  THIS IS EVIDENT TO US FROM THE INCREASED RATE OF MUCH OF YOUR METABOLISM.

  "I haven't had any ziprite in years, but I sure as hell could do with a jolt of it right now."

  She tongued the radio back on again. "Ten Per Cent Extra Free thinks I should get to the foot of the ladder in a few minutes, Danny. Stop anyone else coming down until I get there."

  "Understood."

  She tried to increase the pace of her descent as much as she could without doing anything dangerous. The sooner she met with the Preeae and they either killed her or didn't kill her the happier she'd be. She couldn't imagine the state of a technology that could construct something as advanced as the trapdoor and at the same time relied on a simple ladder for the rest of the ingress. And yet, she reflected again, there was something pleasingly human about it—a neat mixture of the simple and the complicated. Over the centuries, humanity had made considerable technological changes in some areas but had wisely left other things alone, or reverted to the earlier models. For example, a door on hinges could be relied upon to open almost all of the time; a photosensitive door that nictated as people approached it was a pretty neat gadget, but if something should go wrong with it . . .

  She was letting her mind wander.

  "I've lost track of the time," she said to O'Sondheim.

  "It's three and a half minutes since last you spoke to me," he said. "We were beginning to get quite worried. At least we could hear you breathing."

  "Sorry about that." She looked downwards. "There's a very brightly lit area beneath me. I should be there very soon. Still no problems at all, except a touch of muscular fatigue. Send the fittest people down first. Yeah—send Polyaggle down first of all. Kids and fatties can follow later. I want to get the most possible people down here as soon as we can."

  "Present company excepted," remarked O'Sondheim drily.

  Despite her terror of what she was about to encounter, she managed a chuckle. "Never been able to work out whether you're a kid or a fatty, Danny," she said.

  "Both," he replied. "But don't tell my girlfriend."

  "I didn't know you had a girlfriend. This should have been reported to me. You should have reported it."

  There was silence from the other end. Strider realized that O'Sondheim's remark hadn't been as flip as it had sounded, and wished she'd kept her mouth shut. After the first year out from Mars her First Officer had stopped making doe eyes at her, but he hadn't formed any kind of relationship with any of the other women on board, either. She'd seen the way that he'd tried to woo Strauss-Giolitto, and smiled; then had smiled with a bit less conviction once she'd deduced the kind of personal misery Strauss-Giolitto had taken on herself in order to be a part of the expedition. They were both very lonely people—lonelier than even she herself was. At least Strauss-Giolitto had Lan Yi's shoulder to weep on. As far as Strider could tell, O'Sondheim's mental maturity had never evolved beyond the idea that if you wept on a woman's shoulder you ended up screwing her and that if you wept on a man's you were betraying some obscure macho code.

  She wasn't sure that her own solution—weeping on a bot's—was perfect, but it was obviously better than anything O'Sondheim had come up with.

  She tongued off her suit lights. The yellowness beneath her was very close now. Glancing down yet again, she caught her first sight of the Preeae.

  She took a sharp breath. The aliens were somewhat less aesthetically pleasing than the Images had described—not as bad as the Helgiolath but . . . no, maybe they were worse, because they had a vaguely humanoid form. They looked as if they had somehow evolved to wear their more vulnerable bodily organs and their blood vessels on the outside, rather than sealed away carefully beneath decorous folds of flesh. They were bipedal, and had two arms, although from this lofty angle she couldn't work out their physical proportions.

  Like the Spindrifters, they wore no clothing. All of the ones staring up at her as she descended, her hands and feet moving more uncertainly now, were, however, wearing things that looked suspiciously similar to lazguns slung around their necks.

  "I'm about to make contact with the Preeae," she said to O'Sondheim. "Anyway, I hope I am."

  At least they had eyes that from this distance were fairly like human ones. It made the aliens a bit easier to contemplate. The trouble was, reflected Strider, that one gets so used to gauging people's reactions by their eyes that she could all too well completely misread what one of these Preeae was actually thinking.

  She flipped off her suit radio.

  "I'm going to need a lot of help here, Ten Per Cent Extra Free," she said.

  THEY ARE PREPARED TO TALK WITH YOU. THAT IS A GREAT ADVANCE ON THE SITUATION EARLIER. THE VERY WORST THEY WILL DO IS SEND YOU BACK UP TO THE SURFACE.

  "Which is a long way away." She was sweating unpleasantly in her suit just from the descent. What would she be like if she had to climb all the way back up to the top? Like a stranded whale floundering on the sand of the desert until the Autarch's people came along to put an end to her misery, that was what.

  WE WILL ASSIST YOU AS FAR AS WE ARE ABLE. WE HAVE ALREADY BEEN ARGUING VERY HARD ON YOUR BEHALF.

  "I'm switching back to general frequency now," she said, tonguing the control as she did so. She wished her voice sounded less apprehensive.

  IT SOUNDS FINE TO ME, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

  Yes, thought Strider, but you're not a rather vulnerable human being called O'Sondheim standing Umbel knows how many hundreds of meters above me wondering how long he's got to live. My voice might sound a bit grim to him, huh?

  The Image waited until her right boot was on the final rung of the ladder before it commented. WE WILL REMOVE ALL TRACE OF FEAR FROM YOUR VOICE AS WE INTERPRET BETWEEN YOURSELF AND THE PREEAE.

  "Thanks," she said, reeling in her belt-rope.

  "For what?" said O'Sondheim anxiously.

  "I was speaking to Ten Per Cent Extra Free," she said. "Now, Danny, keep listening in, but leave me alone to do one of the things I do best: act like a diplomat."

  He laughed.

  "Thanks for the vote of confidence," she said.

  Several of the Preeae had drawn their weapons from their neck holsters—the aliens' arms were triple-jointed, Strider saw, so that it was as easy if not easier for them to reach to their necks as to their waists—and were directing them at her. She found the prospect of the weaponry less worrying than the physical appearance of the Preeae. She hoped that none of the personnel who with luck would be allowed down here to join her would do anything stupid—the children especially.

  One of the Preeae took a step forwards. Presumably he was the leader of the contingent. Strider decided to address herself directly to him and leave the rest out of consideration.

  "Look, dammit, let's get this straight: all we want to do is wipe out those bastards who very nearly fucking annihilated your entire species," she said, hoping that she was hitting the right diplomatic note. "That means we're on the same fucking side, so could you piss off with this super-defensiveness?"

  The room around them was an empty box with various dark exits leading in various directions—some off to the side, a couple upwards, and quite a few downwards. Strider found it almost offensive that there were no technological artifacts on view—not even so much as a chair. This room was just a way-station into what she assumed was the system of tunnels Ten Per Cent Extra Free had told her about.

  "We haven't got very long. There's going to be a few hundred Autarchy warships hitting the fucking desert above us pretty goddam soon."

  "We are aware of that," said the Preeae. His voice sounded as though it tasted of metal. "But we did not bring this antagonism down upon ourselves: it was you things that lured the Interlopers to this place. If you had left them alone they would have continued in ignorance of our existence."

  I SHOULD WA
RN YOU THAT WE ARE MAKING AMENDMENTS TO SOME OF YOUR REMARKS, CAPTAIN LEONIE STRIDER, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

  "So your species could spend the rest of eternity living in hiding?" she said to the Preeae spokesperson.

  "Living." The single word made the point.

  "Can I tell my people it's safe for them to come down here?" Much longer standing around like this and it'd be too late to get everyone in through the trapdoor. "The Spindrifters thought it would be all right for them to carry on just living in quiet, but the Autarchy killed all of them except a friend of ours, who is here with us. You yourselves kept your heads down, but the Autarchy attempted to annihilate you. We human beings aren't any kind of saints, but we want to help stop these things happening."

  "And the Helgiolath?" said the Preeae.

  "I'm not sure what their agenda is, but at this moment I think they're the best chance this part of The Wondervale has."

  "You will all need to be decontaminated," said the Preeae.

  Strider's heart leapt as she heard the translated word "will."

  "You mean you'll allow my personnel to escape down here?" she said.

  "For a short time only. Your Images have been very persuasive."

  "Start it off, Danny," said Strider. "We're provisionally welcome."

  "I was listening," said the First Officer. "Polyaggle's already on her way down, followed by a bundle of others. Still no signs of enemy action."

  "Good."

  Strider didn't know if Ten Per Cent Extra Free had interpreted any or all of this for the benefit of the Preeae. It seemed not, because the individual was still speaking.

  "We will escort you to our nearest escape-way and release you back to the surface of Preeat. More than that we will not do. After that you will be on your own. We will be glad to be rid of you as soon as is possible. You have already seriously risked our security."