Ammonite Stars (Omnibus): Ammonite Galaxy #4-5

by Gillian Andrews

  As he watched, two more of the creatures pushed past underneath him, and he was horrified to see the transparent ice which separated him from them splinter into a white network of cracks. There was a sound loud enough to be heard several hundred feet away, and the whole slab he was lying on reared up into two separate pieces. He felt himself begin to slide into the deadly waters.

  Then the rope around his wrist tightened and he felt a huge tug on his whole body. It dragged insistently at him, trying to overcome the inertia, and then yanked him away from the rearing break in the ice. He closed his eyes, felt as if he were flying through the air, and finally hit something solid with a force large enough to knock the breath out of him. There was a moment when everything went blank, and then he was being hauled bodily across the ice. He was faintly aware of being unable to breathe, and then he knew no more until he woke up to find his head in Diva’s lap, and the comforting solidity of the metallic floor of the shuttle under his legs.

  “Wh-what happened?” he asked, still feeling very groggy.

  She gave a ferocious frown. “Do you realize that I thought you were DEAD?” she demanded.

  “Did you? I’m sorry, I—”

  “Do you HAVE to go around scaring the living daylights out of people?” The warning tooth was jutting out over her lip now. “What on Sacras made you stop to sightsee?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Of all the knuckleheaded, stupid, crass things to do!”

  “Here! There’s no need to—”

  “—You needn’t think I am going to put up with things like that every day.”

  “No, I—”

  “Because I’m not! If you are going to be so dumb as to—”

  At that moment Six gave a theatrical wince and shut his eyes, a tactic which proved temporarily effective, because she stopped in mid sentence and demanded to know where he was hurting.

  “You were unconscious,” Tallen informed him. “We dragged you off the floe that was breaking up just in time and managed to get you to the shore. But you weren’t breathing. We thought we had lost you – until I realized that your mask pack had been violated and had gone into autoblock. You had passed out from lack of oxygen. Once we figured out what was wrong, we had another mask-pack on you in seconds, although Valhai Diva had to give you cardiac massage.”

  Six grinned at him over Diva’s shoulder. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  Diva straightened up. “Appreciate it? APPRECIATE IT? We saved your LIFE, you silly noodle! Next time you want to stop and commune with the local fauna you might remember that.”

  “Look, Diva, I know you have a strong character, and it is one of the things I admire most in you, but don’t think you are going to take me over and tell me what I can and can’t do all the time. Because you’re not. We Kwaidians can be pret-ty stubborn, too, when we want to.”

  Diva stared at him. It struck her that, at that particular moment, her husband’s face bore a remarkable resemblance to that of a Cesan mule. He looked about as malleable as a steel post.

  He regarded her with understanding. “You need to relax; take it easy.”

  “RELAX?” Diva put both hands on her hips and regarded him darkly.

  “Only ... sitting like that ... shouting at me, you look a bit like a Cesan fisherwoman.”

  Her eyebrows touched in the middle. “I look like a WHAT?”

  “Just saying.” He lowered his head, so that his eyes wouldn’t give him away. “I mean, you probably wouldn’t like people to think you were a shrew, would you?”

  “I ... I ... I ...” For once in her life, Diva was speechless.

  “That’s all right. No need to thank me. After all, that is what husbands are for, isn’t it?”

  There was a deathly silence. Diva reminded him of one of the lava vents on Kintara, about to erupt.

  He struggled a bit until he was supporting his own head on one elbow, and assumed a righteous tone. “Anyway, I just wanted to see what was moving under the ice. You’re the one who is always telling me I should practice my first contact skills.”

  Diva pushed him back down, much more firmly than was necessary. His arm slipped and his head hit the metallic floor with a distinct bump, causing him to look at her reproachfully.

  She ignored him. “Stay where you are. I will take us back up to the New Independence. Tallen, look after him, will you?”

  Tallen nodded hurriedly, and Six grinned at him, miming pulling a forelock. They both burst out laughing, which made Diva mutter to herself as she went through the pre-flight check routine. She was feeling extremely cross with the world, for some reason. She pushed at the controls of the shuttle with rigid fingers, her stiff back ample warning to the other two not to mess with her anymore.

  Tallen moved closer to Six. “She went white when she saw you weren’t breathing. I thought she was going to faint.”

  “Diva? Never!” But Six was secretly pleased. He looked at the expressively rigid back in front of them with understanding. He knew how much Diva hated to show her feelings.

  Chapter 18

  THE SHUTTLE CAME down through the hydrogen atmosphere of Yttrea with extreme caution, Ledin listening carefully to the visitor, who was directing the landing. He could see nothing through the greenish-tinted clouds.

  They were in the centre of a dip of about twice the height of the shuttle, and they could see nothing over the edge of this. Their lights allowed them to see for perhaps ten metres before being reflected back to them by the clouds. Overhead was completely black, except for the greenish tinge. The hydrogen mix above them was blocking out any stars.

  Ledin made sure that Tallen and Bennel had everything they needed. It was only a short trip from where he had landed to the ortholiquid, and the others had decided to let the two Coriolans effect the mission on their own. Neither Six nor Diva felt any inclination to squint through the dark clouds that made up the atmosphere, and Grace had suggested they spend the time relaxing after Tarboleus. She offered to stay on pilot duty on the New Independence. Both Tallen and Bennel were more than happy with the honour of being chosen, although there was some doubt as to who would lead and who would follow.

  Bennel peered out of the hatch into the gloom around them. He had known it was going to be pitch black, because the planet was now so far away from its sun, but he hadn’t expected these swirling, dense clouds.

  “I thought the atmosphere was mainly hydrogen?” he asked. “Surely that is transparent?”

  Ledin nodded. “But this is a mixture of gases and water vapour thrown up by volcanic activity,” he explained. “That is why Yttrea has retained a small atmosphere. It is the greenhouse effect. I remember Grace telling me about it.”

  Bennel nodded. The only classes he had been entitled to on Coriolis were combat training; he rather envied Grace her hours spent learning about things like this. Until he had traveled away from his own planet he had never realized how little he really knew about anything.

  He and Tallen set off towards the ortholiquid, leaving Ledin behind with the shuttle. Bennel noticed a fine ash on his bodywrap, and reached a hand up to brush it away. But the hand was covered with the ash too, and as soon as he managed to sweep the fine particles off him, they were replaced by others. The mask pack was slowly being obstructed by them too. He frowned. “What is this ash? It is all over.”

  Tallen was also examining the fine particles. He brought his hand up to the visor of the mask pack to examine the ash.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “What?” Bennel spun round.

  “Err ... These things are moving.”

  “Moving? Moving? You mean they are alive?” Bennel began to brush himself down.

  “There’s no point doing that. As soon as you get rid of some, more attach themselves.”

  “What are they? Can they harm us?”

  Tallen shook his head as he examined them further. “They look like tiny baskets with lots of little antenna coming out of the top.”

  Bennel frowned. “Wh
at do you think they are? Some kind of space flea? Where are the morphics, anyway?” He looked around and then gave a shout into the gloom. “Visitor?”

  A shape shimmered at his shoulder. “What? You don’t have to shout, you know. I communicate quantically, remember?”

  “You forgot to tell us the planet was infested by fleas!”

  “They are not fleas,” the shape quivered with indignation. “And I didn’t forget to tell you. I did tell you about the bacteria. Surely they shouldn’t bother you? You are so big, and they are so small ...”

  “They are all over us! There must be millions on each of us! Look – the layer on me is over a centimetre thick!” Tallen shook himself crossly, and a fine shower of tiny alien lifeforms fell onto the ground like a cloud of pepper. “You should have told us.”

  “How can tiny, helpless things like this protolife bother huge, complex animals such as yourselves?”

  “They are trying to eat their way through us!”

  “Yes, but they are only tiny, and your bodywraps are thick.”

  “A billion tiny organisms might do quite a lot of damage,” began Bennel, before realizing that he had allowed himself to get off track. “Anyway, that is not the point. What we need to know is if these have grown, or are they all this size?”

  The trimorph twins flashed. “We have seen some about twice this size, and some maybe triple – but those are very few and far between. We have asked Grace, and she thinks they must be metazoans, rather than just bacteria, because of their size. She says they probably eat the methanogenic bacteria. Whatever they are, they are anoxic.”

  Tallen wrinkled his brow. “What does that mean?”

  “That they live without oxygen. In fact, oxygen is probably poisonous to them.”

  “Do they eat anything else?”

  “Grace said they might eat each other. She didn’t know if they could attack anything else.”

  Tallen raised his eyebrows upwards. “Terrific.” He turned to Bennel. “We had better get a move on, before these ... things ... eat their way through the mylex and kevlon our suits are made of.”

  Bennel gave a decisive nod. He couldn’t have agreed more.

  The twins began to lead the way, chittering and flitting around each other in a weaving path. The bimorph followed them more sedately, and the two travelers even more slowly, each carrying one of the machines. The mist of metazoans was so thick around each of them now that they had to stop frequently to brush a layer of them off their visors, as they couldn’t see where they were going.

  The landscape of Yttrea, what little they could see of it, was very monotonous. The craters covered the whole surface of the planet, so that there was no flat land. You simply went down one crater, up the other side, and then down into the next. From a distance, if anybody could have been able to see through the blackness, it would have looked as if the whole surface were carpeted with dimples, laid one after another around the entire planet. Some of the craters held small amounts of water, which the thick swirling atmosphere stopped from evaporating. All were strangely hardened, frozen into place in rock. There was no sand on the surface; it was all sharp, volcanic rock.

  Finally, the twins made their way back. “The ortholiquid is just over the next edge,” they said. “Not far now.”

  But not far was nearly more than enough for the two travelers. The problem was not so much moving on the planet, not even the fear that their protective clothing might be compromised by the metazoans, but the sheer danger of changing their mask packs.

  They were about to make the first change, and it wasn’t easy. As soon as they removed one mask pack, the tiny creatures swarmed all over their exposed flesh, and it was hard to rub them away before covering up with a fresh mask pack. Luckily, the metazoans died very quickly under exposure to oxygen, but they still had time to attack the travelers’ faces before dropping inertly down into the base of the mask pack.

  Even though they brushed as many of them as possible away first, the remnant heap of dead creatures was a danger in itself. Any brusque movements dispersed a cloud of them inside the mask pack, and meant that they were breathing the microscopic bodies into their lungs. This made them cough unstoppably, which disturbed the pile of inert metazoans more, which made them inhale more of the bodies, which made them cough even more, until after about ten minutes the system seemed to stabilize.

  “Try to breathe through your nose,” Bennel told Tallen, between bouts of choking. “That should help a little.”

  “Surely these things are too big to get into our lungs?”

  “It’s not the ones we can see that I’m worried about, so much. There must be many others, much smaller, that we can’t.”

  At last they could put the machines on the ground in front of the ortholake, their eyes streaming so much that they could hardly see anything at first in the light of the lanterns.

  Then, as the paroxysms passed, their eyes cleared. They saw two medium-sized craters, one of which was superimposed on the other. This formed a basin shaped like a figure of eight, and it was here that the ortholiquid lay, black against black on this peculiarly dark planet.

  Bennel took the first of the lasers over to the southern side of the figure of eight. Tallen took the western side. They fiddled at the machines, cursing the fine dust of animals which impeded any movement.

  Then the two lasers shone out in the gloom, two tight, piercing beams of light which left them all momentarily blinded. They shaded their eyes against the brightness, and waited. Even the morphics hovered in silence now, waiting to see if they had found one of the right planets.

  At last they were rewarded by the growing radiance which was coming from the stygian crater in front of them. Slowly, it was beginning to glow, and it seemed to Tallen that he could hear a humming sound. He looked at the morphics.

  “It is working. This is what happened on Tarboleus.”

  “Then we are about to have our memories examined,” said Bennel. It was not something he had been looking forward to. He turned to the visitor. “The two twins had better go away.”

  The trimorphs and the visitor exchanged some sort of complicated pattern of light, and the two twins disappeared.

  “I will stay,” said the visitor proudly. “They cannot enter my mind.”

  There was a short silence, and Tallen grinned to himself. Six would have had something to say, if he had been with them.

  As on Tarboleus, the animas appeared first as tiny dancing flickers of light, before forming an amalgam and converting into the diamond star shape. This then slowly encompassed the two travelers.

  There was a feeling of impotence as the diamond shape latched onto the two Coriolans. Bennel’s burnished pewter mixed with the feldspar and rain of Tallen, and they both staggered as the memories were slowly drained out of their minds. Despite their struggles, it was soon over. They found themselves on their knees at the edge of the crater, and the star of diamonds in front of them dissolved. The box Bennel was carrying opened, and the tiny flames sank inside the polished wooden sides. It closed.

  They waited, but no voices entered their heads.

  Tallen shrugged. “I suppose they don’t think we are worth talking to.”

  Bennel tried to answer, but couldn’t. When he had fallen to his feet a cloud of dead metazoans had been agitated in front of his face, and he seemed to have breathed half of them into his lungs. He didn’t have any air left over for talking.

  They dismounted the lasers, and Tallen lifted his machine onto his back, with the box firmly on top. “Let’s get back as fast as we can, shall we?”

  Bennel couldn’t argue with that. They set off as fast as the sharp volcanic rock would let them. They knew they would have to change their mask packs again before they got back to the shuttle, and that was worrying, because their lungs seemed to react progressively more strongly to the invasion.

  “You know,” he said to Tallen as they pulled the sled along. “I never intended to work for the meritocrats. I ca
me from a long line of farmers, up towards Mount Palestron. I was supposed to take over the farm.”

  “Then why didn’t you?”

  Bennel gave a reminiscent smile. “I met my wife.”

  Tallen didn’t see what that had to do with it. He shifted the weight of the machine on his back behind him, and then raised one eyebrow. “Didn’t she want to be a farmer?”

  Bennel thought back to when he had met his wife. His face softened. “She was the prettiest thing you could ever imagine. She was as slight as a young rowan tree, and I thought she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.”

  “But why did you give up farming?”

  Bennel sighed. “She is allergic to vaniven. And we were a cattle farm.” He thought back along the years to the beginning of his marriage, and shrugged his shoulders. “At first, she insisted that she would be all right. We moved in to our own quarters, and I fenced off the whole area, so that none of the animals would get too close to her.”

  Tallen was looking more interested now. “What happened?”

  “She still got sick. I used to arrive back home to find her gasping for breath. Her face would puff up, and her eyes would redden. She still didn’t want me to give up farming, though.”

  “That was silly of her.”

  “She didn’t want me to lose something she knew I loved.”

  “But you enlisted?”

  Bennel nodded. “I enlisted. As soon as you enlist with the meritocrats they give you and your family a small house, wherever you choose. I chose the slopes of Mount Palestron, the rocky part, where no vaniven could graze. It has the most beautiful view of the rest of Coriolis that you can imagine, and the mountain backdrop is stunning. The air is so fresh it almost hurts your lungs.”