“Eydis!” he shouted, using both radio and audio. “Tiklik! The cruiser, the cruiser—”
The hurricane ship slammed down hard, and then slammed down again, throwing him from his crouch. He sprawled. The shaking stopped suddenly as the ship dove. Water sheeted down again through the edge of the hatch. Tarkos rolled over. There was a lot of water inside now. Would the ship still float if it flooded? he wondered. A small icon in his ambient suit diagnostics told him the water was cold. Eydis, dressed in the simple one-piece atmosphere suit, might be in danger of hypothermia, if they stayed in this ship much longer.
“The cruiser is coming!” he finished. “We’ll need to drop the sail, and open the hatch.”
“The sail is long gone!” Eydis shouted. “Torn free.”
He nodded. “I’ll take Bria first, then Eydis, then you, Tiklik. Using a winch line.”
They surfaced again. The ship listed, and slapped again at the waves. He bounced on the hull. Eydis lay flat, not even trying to lift herself. Tiklik seemed unaffected, its three legs pointing out and anchored hard against opposing points of the hull.
The slap of the waves became regular. The ship listed, slammed down, rose up, listed, slammed down, the nose rose up…. Although still violent, Tarkos could predict the motion enough to unsteadily stand.
The cruiser pinged him with a brief message of its location: it hovered directly above. He told it to open the starboard hatch, and drop two winch cables connected to a single air drone. He frowned at the hurricane ship’s top hatch. Water only dripped from the seam, but the hatch was higher than he could reach, and he could not afford to struggle to lift it in this violent tossing while also trying to hold onto the beam. He snapped a laser from his suit, and aimed upwards. He tried to cut a circle, but ended up cutting an irregular hole. He had to cut several times before a steaming disk of wood toppled inside. Wind and water roared down through the opening, letting in the gray light of the storm.
The lights of the cruiser swayed in the rain and fury above, sliding back and forth as it struggled to maintain position over the hurricane ship. Cruiser diagnostics reported the wind gusted well over 120 klicks an hour. But the starboard hatch was open, and the bright glow of the interior lights illuminated the horizontal gray rain. Tarkos could not see the cables in the rain, but as he watched the drone shot past his narrow view. He called to it, but it struggled to come back toward him, unable to maintain control in the shifting wind.
He instructed the drone to target his suit, and dive. He saw it pass over again, a black bird with two dark jet engines under its wings. It dove and then thudded against the deck, just missing the hole he’d cut in the hull. Tarkos cringed, expecting it to break. But in a second it wobbled again into view. It dove toward him again. Tarkos leapt. He grabbed the drone out of the air as it dipped through the hatch. A wave slammed into the ship, and water washed over him. He held tight to the line, and as the ship dropped over the back of a wave, the line lifted him up. Another wave hit him. He thought for a moment that he was underwater, pulled free from the hurricane ship. Then he slammed into the side of the hatch, and fell back inside.
He still clutched the drone, now broken in his grip. He told the cruiser to pay out the two lines on the winches. He took big, uneven steps toward Bria. The Sussurat’s armor still glowed brightly, shimmering because she lay now half submerged under water. He interfaced with her suit, calling up her diagnostics.
Bria was dead.
Tarkos stood there a moment, swaying, the crushed drone vibrating in his hand, the two cables slapping against his shoulder. He stared at the huge Sussurat’s glowing armor.
Dead. Bria was dead.
“No way in hell!” he screamed. He jumped forward, not caring that he fell across Bria’s armor. He unclipped one of the ship’s lines and linked it through an eye-hole on his armor, and then clipped it to Bria’s. He took the other line and wrapped it twice around the hull beam behind her, then clipped it to itself.
Using one of his suit’s lasers, barely bothering to turn down the wattage, he cut the ropes binding Bria to the hull. Then he sent the message: emergency winch on this line.
He took two steps toward the door, dragging Bria, the power assist on his armor protesting under the strain, and then they shot upward, smashing through the narrow hole he’d cut, splintering the hull. Several long seconds passed while they climbed through howling wind. He screamed, his voice loud in his helmet, the only possible response to the storm, as they reeled toward the blazing light of the airlock.
The line swung under the cruiser, and Tarkos hit the belly of the ship hard with one shoulder. Then the line yanked them around the edge and flipped them both into the airlock. They sprawled in a rough tumble. Tarkos sent the message to stop the winch, and open the inner door without delay, not waiting for the outer hatch to partially close. He unclipped the winch cable and clawed at the walls to get to his feet. He stumbled into the cruiser. The airlock’s outer door slowly closed and stopped when it just pressed against the winch’s extended arm, the door open a hand’s width. The storm’s howl reduced down to a whistle, the sound of the wind cutting through the open crack.
Tarkos told Bria’s suit to walk to the autodoc. The huge armor stood awkwardly, its motions obviously not Bria’s own. It stepped through the door and into the ship. Tarkos backed away before it, into the shocking quiet and calm of the cruiser. He stopped the armor before the autodoc.
“Open!” he screamed at Bria’s armor. He braced himself. The armor parted, and Bria fell onto him. Three hundred kilograms: he almost stumbled, even with his powered armor. Servos whined under the load. He grunted and half lifted, half threw Bria into the autodoc. She fell into it limply, with a thud, one leg and one arm dangling over the side. Tarkos shoved them both inside. Slowly, impossibly slowly, the door to the autodoc closed down over Bria.
Tarkos stood back. Blood covered the floor, covered his armor, covered the front of the autodoc. He put a hand on the glass, leaving a smear of the dark Sussurat blood. Bria’s eyes were open. The four eyes, usually so expressive, now seemed empty and meaningless. Suddenly, Bria appeared truly dead.
“Emergency resuscitation!” he shouted. But the autodoc did not need the command. Small medibots spilled out of cracks in the back of the enclosure. Thin robot arms reached forward and dug roughly into the flesh of her left leg. Dark wires snaked across her chest, and then dove through fur and into her heart. In moments she was covered with seething machinery.
Tarkos could not look away. He knew he should go down, save Eydis and Tiklik, but he could not look away. He stood, shaking with exhaustion inside his dirty, chafing armor, and watched as Bria’s body jerked once, twice, three times. The autodoc hummed. The diagnotics seemed to sputter, before settling on a jumble of rhythmic spikes. Bria’s heart had started again.
She closed her eyes.
“Stay alive, dammit,” Tarkos whispered. “Stay alive, old girl. The war has only just started. We have devils to fight, all across the spiral arm.”
He went back through to the airlock, and opened it on the howling wind.
_____
Tarkos held the taut secondary line, still linked to the ship below, as the cruiser played the cable that lowered him from the winch. The hurricane ship was half submerged now. The ancient Ulltrian antique was sinking. The cruiser shifted in the air, trying to maintain its place over the hull, and Tarkos swung from the motion and the wind. It took several passes before he crashed into the ship, feet smashing into the hull, and then he leapt forward and dropped through the hatch. He splashed down inside, into water up to his chest.
“Eydis!” he called. It was dark inside, without Bria’s armor. He set his own armor ablaze. Eydis stood by Tiklik, one hand on the line Tarkos had tied up, and the other clutching the ancient Ulltrian book to her chest. She had managed to strap it again to herself. She looked at him, seemingly too exhausted to speak. Her lips were blue, her skin pale gray. The icy seawater had flooded her jumpsuit. He
hurried forward and past her, dove into the water, and untied the line to the ship. Eydis still wore the harness she had made in the Library. He tied the line onto that, wrapped it twice around the book, and told the winch to lift her very slowly.
“When you get inside, turn off the winch, go inside, and then untie yourself! Wait for me!”
She nodded, shivering. She opened her mouth to say something, but only emitted a chatter of her teeth.
He walked backwards, hands on her hips, to be sure she went through the hole in the hatch without hitting the sides. When she was dangling free, he sped up the winch slightly, and then walked back to Tiklik. He grabbed the robot.
“Wrap around me,” he radioed. The robot did not reply, but it did as he asked. Water poured through the hatch. The ship was nearly completely underwater now. He backed under the hatch, which was like stepping into a waterfall. He sent the winch command.
They lifted through the hole he had cut. Tarkos looked down, and saw the ship disappear below the surface: a single foaming wave rushed over it, and then the ancient Ulltrian hurricane ship was gone. He and Tiklik turned in place, spinning on the line. Tarkos looked up.
And there, before them, a wave rose up, thirty meters high. It seemed to just stand there, a wall of water, reaching far above them, reaching nearly to the cruiser.
“Oh…” Tarkos began. But he did not even have time to curse before the wave slammed into them. A roar of bubbles filled all of Tarkos’s audio lines. He could see nothing but debris and churning gray foam. Then he jerked on the line, and the water fell away.
Tiklik was gone.
“Dammit!” Tarkos shouted. “Tiklik! Tiklik!”
There was no answer on radio. Below he saw nothing but dark water, swirling and heaving.
He reached down and grabbed the release handle for the cable that pulled him up. “Am I really going in there for a robot?” he shouted, to no one and everyone. “For a damned AI?”
He pulled at the release. He fell, heavy as a stone, into the water, and splashed through the white waves.
In a second he was surrounded by silence and stillness. It was dark, but the water barely moved. He switched to infrared, and used the suit’s minimal sonar capabilities. Below, he saw the hurricane ship, starting to nosedive for the black depths.
His radio connection to the cruiser dropped off. His suit switched automatically to hyper-radio, but this too worked only weakly in the water. His link to the ship returned, but stuttering and hissing. That scared him. Without the radio connection, he was dead, lost in these waters. He would fall into that dark till he was crushed, or until his air ran out.
“Eydis, are you in the cruiser?”
“Yes,” her voice came back hissing with static.
“Strap in!” he shouted. He told the ship to seal the doors and dive.
“Tiklik,” he hyper-radioed. No answer. He turned up the power all the way. He saw the robot then, as he dropped: Tiklik had folded up, and it softly tumbled along beside the diving ship. “Tiklik, slow yourself. Swim if you can. Spread your legs. I need to catch you.”
He despaired of the robot hearing his signal. Maybe it was harmed, unconscious, dead. But then it spread its thin legs, and opened the gecko pads on the ends, maximizing the surface area. It beat at the water. Tarkos folded into diving position, making himself a spear, and aimed for the robot. In a moment he was on it. He seized it again, gripping hard onto one of its limbs.
They fell together. Tarkos’s armor creaked from the growing pressure. He felt suddenly that it was hard to breath. An illusion, he knew. Something like panic. But he was billions of miles from home, falling into a black sea on a cursed planet, and soon it would crush him.
Some rescue, he thought. I’m just getting us both killed.
Something huge loomed below. For a moment a primordial fear seized Tarkos. What monsters dwelled in the sea of this violent world? It looked like a shark, pale, huge, rising from the black depths….
The cruiser. The cruiser rose up from the dark, the hull glowing. Tarkos turned in the water, put his feet out, and the two boots set firmly down on the cruiser’s hull. He shouted once with relief. He told his boots to magnetize, and he felt them shift down and grip. He reached over and pulled Tiklik to his chest, and told the ship to rise.
As soon as they broke through the waves, and into the roaring wind, he opened the cruiser’s dorsal hatch, and, exhausted, dropped through it with Tiklik. They fell in a clump on the deck.
Eydis stood by the autodoc, wrapped in a silver blanket. The storm winds stirred her hair as the hatch above closed. An arm from the autodoc held her wrist, monitoring her hypothermia. Small cleaning robots crawled around her feet, cleaning Bria’s blood away.
The hatch above closed out the roar of the storm. Tarkos looked at the autodoc. The vitals still read that Bria was alive. He sighed with relief.
“Tiklik?” he said.
“Harmonizer?” the robot sputtered, its voice sounding strange, as if underwater. But it functioned.
Tarkos stood. He told his armor to open, and then he stepped out of it, pulling the connections free from the thin suit liner he wore. He felt dirty and cramped. Too long he’d been in there. The ship’s air was cold and it stank of Dâk-Ull, but he felt light enough to fly, now that he moved free of his armor.
“We are getting the hell off this planet,” he said. He stumbled toward the co-pilot’s chair.
“Harmonizer Tarkos,” the ship said softly, “there is an emergency distress call being sent from two kilomeasures away.”
CHAPTER 12
Through the wind-whipped rain, they could see Kriani on the cliff head, firing lasers over the waving grass, their beams sparkling through the falling drops. Tarkos counted three dead Kriani laying near them, their black bodies slick with water, their heads missing antennae.
The cruiser shifted in the wind, a few hundred meters away from the melee. The Kriani did not see the stealthed ship, a gray blur in the gray tumble of the storm. They continued firing at something farther along the coast.
“It looks like they’re firing at nothing,” Tarkos said. “This group seems to have killed all the Kriani that were up here before.” The interior of cruiser was quiet, controlled, a different world than the tossing, freezing sea they just left. He turned the interior heat of the ship up to sauna temperatures, hoping to warm Eydis.
“There,” Eydis said, her voice an interruption in the chattering of her teeth. She sat in the chair behind his copilot’s seat. She pointed, arm resting on the seat back. “See there? The OnUnAn, I think.”
Tarkos did see it then. Dark low forms moving sluggishly through the grass. He counted only three. The Kriani seemed afraid, even though Gowgoroup was apparently unarmed. They did not approach, but kept firing from a distance of fifty meters. Only the wild storm had kept them from hitting their three targets.
The ship detected a general broadcast. Tarkos turned it on. In Galactic Gowgoroup gurgled, over the roar of wet wind, “… serve also the Ulltrians. Stop your weapons fire. I serve also….”
“These Kriani still have their antennae,” Eydis said. “They might be opposed to the Ulltrians. So, if these Kriani know Galactic and can pick up that signal, your OnUnAn might be getting itself into big trouble.”
Tarkos grunted. His OnUnAn. Well, from Eydis’s perspective, he supposed it was his. Bria and he had brought the creature along on the mission.
“There would be some justice to just leaving Gowgoroup to the fate it earned. But… it might know something.”
He turned off the ship’s stealthing, and set its hull glowing brightly. He drove the ship forward, and swung its tail around, so the starboard airlock faced the OnUnAn. The Kriani took several shots at the cruiser, the hull registering negligible harm, but then they fled, their black limbs a cacophony of motion through the waving grass. In a few seconds they were lost in the pale rain. Tarkos sent an audio broadcast out.
“Gowgoroup. I will open the airlock. Come
inside if you want to be saved.”
He looked at Eydis. “I’m not going out there. Damned if I’m going to put that suit back on again.”
The cruiser touched the ground with a slight lurch, and then settled unevenly, leaning forward. Tarkos pulled up a view of the airlock and projected it over the windows. He and Eydis watched as the outer airlock door opened, letting a sheet of water pour in.
Three OnUnAn slugs pushed through the grass and up the ship’s ramp: a black traveler, the functionary, and the leader. They hunkered down on the airlock floor, their eyes retracted so that the eyestalks were thick and wrinkled, their vertical mouths pressed closed so tightly that they seemed to disappear.
Tarkos watched as rain pooled on the white floor of the airlock. After a minute of waiting, he interfaced with the audio.
“Where is the rest of you?” he asked.
“Shot, drowned, shot,” the leader slug gurgled.
Tarkos closed the outer airlock door. But he did not open the inner door. Instead, he sent a command locking it. “You’ll stay in there, till I can lock you in your quarters on the starsleeve,” he said.
He told the ship to head for the sky. In a few minutes they broke through the storm clouds into dazzling blue and white light. The gas giant swallowed one horizon, and the sun glared angrily from the other. Tarkos told the cruiser to maintain one e-gee acceleration toward the starsleeve.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he told Eydis. He climbed from his seat, straps clattering, and walked over to the autodoc. Bria’s vitals updated continually in the virtual desktop in his brain, but those blinking colored graphs and symbols could not satisfy him. He had to look at her. He put his palm on the glass and watched Bria’s chest rise and fall rhythmically. He felt surprise to discover that he wished he could smell her, to be reassured by the scent of her presence. But the thick glass of the autodoc separated them completely.
Well of Furies Page 15
