Jerry Nagel sighed. “But first I’m going to bury Sark. He deserves that. Then we’ll start exploring and see what we can find. One step at a time, but I think we need to get out of here before the next storm no matter what. In fact, I’m prepared to say that if another storm looms, we all get the hell out of this big expanse, away from whatever is inside that cliff. We come back only when it’s relatively clear and breezy.”
“I’m for that,” Randi Queson told him.
While Nagel was preparing the grave for Sark’s body, he suddenly heard Lucky Cross calling from the underside hatch. “Jerry! An Li’s moaning! I think she may be coming to!”
He put down his excavator and ran for the hatch. Sark had waited this long; a little longer wouldn’t hurt.
She was coming around, twisting and turning and grimacing in her bed, although her eyes remained shut. It took another fifteen or twenty minutes, with a lot of soothing words, hands-on guidance, and wet cloths, but she finally lay still for a moment, then opened her eyes. She had two black eyes—they all had one or two of those—but inside, the pupils looked relatively clear if slightly vacant. She looked up at their faces and smiled, but it wasn’t an An Li smile, rather it was an innocent smile, a child’s smile. “Hello!” she said with a slight lisp.
“Hello yourself,” Randi responded softly. “How do you feel?”
“I hurt. And my arm hurts, too.”
“You have a lot of cuts and bruises, and you broke your arm, but we have treated them and your arm’s in a splint and cast. It should be okay over time.”
“What’s a splint?”
“That thing you can probably feel under the cast. It keeps you from moving the arm until it’s better.”
“What’s a cast?”
They all began to sense that something was wrong. “Do you know who you are and where you are?” Randi asked her sweetly.
“My name is Li Li,” she responded. “What’s your name?”
Queson had a feeling that the head injury had done a lot more than it appeared to have, either that or the consequences of the coma. “My name is Randi. This is Jerry, and that’s Lucky. How old are you, Li Li?”
“I dunno, Randi. I never learned to count yet.”
Queson stood up and whispered to the others, “It may come back. Things like this are really rare. Damn! If we just had the ship, we could find out if there’s a physical cause and treat it. Here…?”
Nagel looked down at the one-time tough woman of the bunch and said, “Well, we can’t wait for any miracle cures. We’re going to have to move, and she comes with us or for sure she dies. If either of you has any maternal instincts, you may need them in the days and weeks to come, though, that’s for sure.”
“I’ll look after her for now,” Randi Queson told them. “Lucky will continue with the inventory and packing so we move what we can. You finish up outside, and then find us a place to live for now that’s far enough away we won’t have nightmares, but close enough we can actually move stuff.”
Nagel nodded. “Then we’re all agreed. No matter what, we survive. We survive until one of us, or somebody for us, can demonstrate how we were left here and go back and slowly roast a certain son of a bitch.”
* * *
“One more trip,” Jerry said insistently.
“Okay, one more, but that’s it for now,” Randi told him. “Every time I’ve been left here I get the strangest feeling that an alien voice is going to come out of somewhere and tell me that negotiations are irrelevant. We’re already down to little things we forgot and some things we’re never going to use that somehow we feel paranoid about not taking. Face it.”
“Yeah, I know, I know,” Nagel told her. “Still, one last look around. It’s bright and clear, and that one storm we went through here didn’t do much except wet us down and keep us awake, so one more trip.”
They were in one of the dense forests that abounded all over Melchior, with varicolored trees and bushes and a canopy of leaves and fronds that at least helped filter the downpours. There was fresh water in pools, even a pretty little multiple waterfall dropping three or four meters, then filling an indentation in the rock, then spilling over another few meters, and so on.
They had the advantage of some of the portable testing equipment, too, as long as the power lasted and so long as nothing malfunctioned. One included a kind of syringe that, inserted into plant matter, gave its entire composition and, most importantly, if the plant matter or fruit or whatever was edible by humans without risk and what sort of nutrition it delivered.
There were at least a half dozen fruits and some ground and vine-based vegetables that were surprisingly nutritious, if not always very good tasting to the human palate. It was amazing what you could get used to and no longer even notice once you were forced to, though, or so they discovered.
Randi suspected that the other two were sneaking back and getting heated meals from the food synthesizer in the C&C unit, but it wouldn’t matter much longer. Sooner or later they’d have to adapt to eating this gunk just like she and An Li already had. Better to go cold turkey and simply dream of the tastes of yesteryear.
Although technically on the slope of one of the monster volcanoes, they were more than forty kilometers from the internal valley and the obsidian cliff and the abandoned C&C unit.
They’d had a little informal service for Sark, the best they could do, and now, as this was to be the last trip, or at least was intended to be the last trip, they were going to turn on the locator beacon inside the unit just in case.
Normally this would have been standard operating procedure from the start, but they didn’t know how many non human receivers might be able to hear it as well, and the last thing they wanted right now was that kind of company. This was hard enough; acclimating to the world and its conditions came first and foremost. Later they could explore and see about communications with whoever or whatever else might live somewhere on this big piece of land.
Randi’s suspicions were correct on the food situation, but the place still stank too much for eating. When Lucky and he got what they wanted, they came outside and ate it, calling it their “reunion picnics with Sark,” always toasting him with something good and pouring a little symbolically on his grave.
“You got the remote?” he asked Lucky when they were done.
She nodded. “One push and we arm the security perimeter, turn off all but standby power inside, and activate the beacon. God only knows when anybody might hear it and come runnin’.”
Suddenly there was a rumbling sound, and the ground began to shake. The scooters toppled over, and so did they.
It stopped for a moment, and Jerry picked up his scooter and hopped on, and Lucky did the same. “What the fuck was that?” she yelled to him as they rose into the air.
“Quake!” he shouted. “Push the button and let’s get the hell out of here! Something’s gonna blow and it’s not gonna be pleasant!”
They both accelerated to the maximum but—now in particular—excruciatingly slow speed away from the C&C. As they made it to the rise that would take them out and towards their camp, Cross slowed, turned, and looked back. When Jerry realized that, he did the same.
She pushed the button, and the place they’d just left became a beacon and a fenced-in security area. Human searchers would have little trouble with it, but anyone else might have problems.
“Goodbye, Sark,” she said with a sigh.
At that moment the whole interior valley began shaking so badly that she could actually see it with her own eyes, and there were blasts of disturbed air coming from inside.
Slides began to happen, and then, without further warning, tiny cracks began to appear in the valley’s rock floor. The cracks expanded more and more, until they were like some kind of massive jigsaw puzzle, and then out of the cracks came yellow and red ooze and acrid smoke.
“Holy shit!” she said. “Another ten minutes…”
He understood her perfectly, thinking the same t
hing.
And now, here and there, things widened even more. The C&C appeared to be floating now, uneasily trying to balance itself on a large block of rock now resting on a sea of magma.
All at once it tipped over, and magma started running up one side and dissolving the rock shelf, causing even more instability. When it was about a third dissolved, the weight of the C&C became too much to support and the rest of the solid rock suddenly and completely flipped over, leaving a pool of bubbling, churning liquid rock where it had been.
“Well, so much for the rescue beam,” Cross said, turning and starting slowly away.
Nagel paced her for a bit. “Well, there’s one thing. At least we don’t have to worry about the security system being inadequate…”
“Now we’re citizens of Melchior, I guess,” she said to him. “But, God, I hope I live long enough to see Normie show up to film his epic…”
XIV: THE CURSE
True to its programming, Eyegor had used the special interface Norman Sanders’s workers had put in while refitting the Stanley that effectively gave it, not the captain, control of the ship.
The captain found herself totally helpless, cut off from any control other than simple automated systems, unable to even see where or what Eyegor was doing. Still, she could communicate with the robot, so long as the robot allowed it.
“Eyegor,” she pleaded, “you cannot do this. You have left humans who might still be alive in a hostile and probably fatal position, violating every bit of mandatory robotic programming, and now you believe you can pilot this ship safely back. You can’t. It was built around and designed for a cyborg unit such as myself. It cannot be handled by someone not designed for it.”
“All basic directives of robotics have been suspended in my logic core,” Eyegor responded. “I am left entirely with the compulsion to carry out my primary mission at any cost. I have been fed all details on celestial and wormhole navigation and the capabilities of this ship by the auxiliary programming modules placed in this manual override chamber, and to supplement I have access to your entire database libraries. Much of the ship is automatic. I see no reason why I should not be able to pilot it home.”
“You don’t understand how complex this all is!” the captain pleaded. “All you will do is destroy us both!”
“I have no choice. I must bring this ship and this cargo back. Since any reactivation of your control would also cause you to return to Melchior, I cannot allow this. I am in any event finding this ship remarkably easy to handle.”
“You idiot! This is interplanetary space. It’s complex, but countless thousands have done it over time. Interstellar wormholes, particularly wild holes, are something else. Experience, nuance, becoming totally one with your ship, all those are essential!”
“I do not believe you. I believe it is your programming speaking, or perhaps your human part. I do not have the latter and am unencumbered by the morals of the former. Ah! There is the field up ahead, and we need only one more calculation to determine where and when the next hole will generate!”
“This is our last chance!” the captain pleased. “Otherwise your programming will not be fulfilled because you will not get back! Let me take it! I’ll take it through! I swear I will.”
“Oaths to a robot are a bizarre and illogical concept,” Eyegor noted. “Your crew is dead. You may well be susceptible to the effects of this many stones yourself. I am immune. Ah! There! The last one! My calculations now bear out my contention and the contention of my programmers and the simulations they were based upon. Accelerate, max speed, full shields and ram on, aiming point and destination fixed. Simplicity itself. Now I will demonstrate to you that your major problem is that you still have a human component. Without this component, you would be capable of much more. Now… full boost… half light speed… wild hole opensthus… We’re in!”
“Eyegore, you blockhead! You were almost three degrees off your entry!”
“Impossible! I am incapable of such a simple mathematical error. If that were true, we’d have struck the wall by—”
There was a roar, and the sound of things that could not be compressed being compressed all around.
And then there was silence.
Somehow, back on the Three Kings, there was a sound that almost seemed like laughter. But it did not come from those trapped on Balshazzar, nor those stuck and swearing revenge watching Melchior’s fires, but from somewhere else.
Nobody ever looked twice at Kaspar.
FB2 document info
Document ID: fbd-c2f1f0-8d05-cc43-689b-675f-eaa3-cbb7fc
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 04.03.2011
Created using: Fiction Book Designer, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 software
Document authors :
Verdi1
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Melchior's Fire tk-2 Page 26
