Omega к-4

by Джек Макдевитт

  He saw lightning ahead and thick dark clouds.

  “Hang on,” Julie said. “It’s going to get a bit rough.”

  “Can we go around it?” asked Whit.

  “If we had time to spare, sure.”

  They got hit before they even got into the storm. Digger heard things sizzle, lights went out, an alarm sounded, and it was free fall, grab the arms of your chair, and hang on. Julie fought the yoke and stabbed at her panels, and the lamps blinked on and off. He smelled something burning. The sea spun around them, and Julie damned the spacecraft to hell. Then he was rising against his harness. They continued dropping toward the sea, but she finally gained control, more or less. Digger started breathing again and looked out the window, and the ocean looked very close.

  She leveled off just over the waves. “Room to spare,” she said. “Everybody okay?”

  We’re fine. Whit laughed and commented he’d never been so scared in his life. Thought it was over.

  Digger’d had a few bad moments himself, but he wasn’t admitting it. Didn’t want Julie to think he didn’t have confidence in her. The cabin seemed extraordinarily quiet. He couldn’t hear anything except heartbeats.

  “It hit the tail,” she said.

  “Are we okay?” asked Digger.

  Her fingers moved across the status screen. “Yes. We’re okay. We can stay in the air. Some of our sensors are out. Long-range communications are down.”

  “That’s not good,” said Whit.

  “Doesn’t matter. We haven’t been able to talk to anybody anyway. I can jury-rig something later.”

  “Okay.”

  A frown creased her forehead. “But I think we’ve lost Bill.”

  A large sea animal surfaced near them, a thing that seemed mostly tentacles. Then it slipped back beneath the surface.

  “Bill? Do you hear me?”

  More lamps blinked.

  Digger realized what a good thing it was to have a human pilot along. “Can you fix him?”

  More fingers across the screen. “No. He’s gone.”

  Digger felt a wave of remorse.

  “It’s only a software program,” she reminded him.

  “I know.”

  “When we get to one of the other landers, he’ll be there.”

  “Can we still find the mission?” asked Whit.

  “That shouldn’t be a problem.” She went back to her status screen, changed the display, and made a face. “There is one thing, though—”

  The moment stretched out. She continued poking at the screen while Digger waited, holding his breath.

  “We’ve lost Bill’s memory banks. I should have realized.”

  “Why’s that a problem?” asked Digger.

  “That’s where Lykonda was stored.”

  “Are you saying we can’t use her?”

  Julie nodded. “She’s kaput.”

  Whit looked over at him, having assumed his most reassuring face. “We’ll have to talk to them directly.”

  “Won’t work,” said Digger. “We’ve had experience with that.”

  “What else do you suggest?” Whit was wearing a bright green shirt, as close as he could get to the styles favored by the Goompahs, and a coffee-colored vest.

  “What do you think would happen if they saw the lander?” Julie asked.

  “Don’t know,” said Digger. “They’d probably panic. Jump overboard.”

  Another bolt hit nearby. They were passing over an island chain. “Pity,” said Whit. “A whole world to explore. The ultimate odyssey, and they run into one of these clouds.” He gazed at the islands. There were eight or nine of them, big, covered with forests. Rivers cut through them. As they passed overhead, hordes of birds rose from treetops.

  Digger was more concerned that they’d take a second bolt up the rear end and wind up fried or in the drink.

  “Odyssey,” said Whit.

  Digger looked at him. “Pardon?”

  He was opening his notebook. “I have a thought.”

  THE THREE SHIPS were moving steadily, if slowly, south. Trees and shrubbery pushed down to the water’s edge and spilled into the ocean. The sun was approaching the horizon.

  The Regunto was immersed in a sense of foreboding, a conviction that the thing in the sky was on top of them, that it would come for them that night. Krolley was on deck constantly, strolling about as casually as if there were nothing to worry about. Telio had to concede he feared nothing. But under the circumstances, courage and defiance were not virtues.

  A few of Telio’s shipmates were gathered aft, talking idly. A couple were in the rigging, getting ready to come down. No one was supposed to be up there after dark, unless specifically ordered.

  The night before, when they’d passed beneath the cloud, the sky had been black and threatening and streaked with lightning in a way he had never seen before. He would not be on duty again until morning, and he thought it would be a good night to spend in his bunk, belowdecks, away from the spectacle.

  The Hasker was still running behind them, shoreward; and the Benventa was off to starboard. But the three ships had uncustomarily pulled closer together as night approached.

  There was a sudden commotion near the rail. Several crewmen were jabbering and pointing. Toward the Hasker. He joined them and was surprised to see that the other ship had put up a signal and was engaged in turning toward shore.

  The signal consisted of three pennants, two red, one white, the white on the left, signaling a turn to port and requesting the other vessels to follow. As Telio watched, they dropped anchor, and began preparations to put a boat over the side.

  That was extraordinary behavior since the fleet commander was on the Regunto.

  One of the officers went after the captain, who’d just gone below.

  There was a harbor coming up ahead, and the Hasker had anchored in its mouth.

  Then Telio saw what appeared to be a canoe, a couple of canoes, running alongside the Hasker.

  “What’s going on?” demanded Krolley, who appeared on deck like a summer thunderstorm. He was not happy.

  Everyone pointed.

  Three young females sat in each of the two canoes. They were half-naked, despite the coolness of the evening. But incredibly, they wore the green-and-white colors of Savakol!

  He stared.

  “We’re home,” said one of the crew. And a cheer went up. They’d done it. Completed the mission.

  But it wasn’t true. Telio wasn’t the only one there who knew the home coast too well to mistake it for this wilderness. But how then did one account for the Korb females and their Savakol colors?

  He scanned the shore and saw nothing but forest and hills. The canoes were turning into the harbor and apparently making for shore. Beyond it, atop one of the ridges, he saw flames begin to flicker. Someone was building a campfire.

  “Hard to port,” said the captain. “Bekka, signal the Benventa. We’ll lay up alongside the Hasker.”

  The sailors cheered again.

  A second fire started near the first, and Telio heard distant voices singing. Young females again. Doing one of the mating chants from back home.

  “We’re obviously not the first to reach here,” said the captain, sounding disappointed. If he was, he was alone.

  “I think it’s from up there,” said one of the officers, indicating the fires. A drum began to beat. And then several more joined in.

  Barbar Markane, who found trouble with everything, shook his head and said they would be prudent to stay away. Stay on the ship, he advised. It’s Shol’s work. “Don’t go there.”

  THE CREW OF the Benventa had to run for their lives. They had just reached shore when someone spotted the blue line on the horizon, just visible in the encroaching twilight. At the top of the ridge, the crews of the Hasker and the Regunto were trying to figure out why someone had made a pair of large fires, then abandoned them and, stranger still, where the females had gone, and how they had managed to hide their canoes. The drums and the
voices had fallen silent, and except for the fires, it was as if none of this had happened.

  It was hard to say how the seamen and their officers might have reacted to so unsettling an event, had their thoughts not been instantly diverted: The Benventa crew was scrambling desperately up the side of the ridge, yelling at the tops of their lungs about the ocean.

  The ocean. Telio turned and looked in its direction and watched in horror as the sea rose up, swallowed their three ships, roared inshore, crashed into the harbor, and surged up the ridge. Some of the crewmen tumbled down the other side in a desperate effort to get away from it.

  The top of the wave boiled over the crest. It knocked Telio down, put out both fires, and then, exhausted, began to recede.

  The chief mate, who’d thrown himself behind a small boulder, got unsteadily to his feet and looked around. Some of his mates were on the ground; others clung to trees. “A miracle,” he said.

  “But the ships are gone,” cried the sailors.

  Everyone watched the water go down. The captains stared aghast at the magnitude of the disaster and, responding quickly, assigned their officers to find out who was missing. A quick count indicated they’d lost about twenty, including Markane. It was sad, heartbreaking, but had it not been for the intervention of the Savakol females, they would all have been lost.

  How did one explain such a thing?

  While Krolley considered the implications, a voice, a male voice, spoke out of the wind. “Stay as high as you can,” it said, in an odd accent. “There are more coming.”

  BLACK CAT REPORT

  Ron, we’re watching a tidal wave approach Brackel. I’m sorry to report there are still a lot of Goompahs who elected to stay inside the city. This view is from a surveillance package that we’ve been told was inserted along the waterfront. You can see the wave in the distance. Our information is that it’ll be about three stories high when it arrives. The real problem, though, is that it’s traveling hundreds of kilometers per hour, so the chances of the folks inside the city aren’t good.

  The picture keeps breaking up because there are numerous electrical storms in the area. But we’re going to try to stay with it. If you look closely, you can see that there are a few residents who are over in the shelter of that large building at the end of the pier. They seem to be watching the wave.

  Ron, I wish there were something we could do—

  chapter 49

  On the eastern continent.

  Monday, December 15.

  BLACK CINDERS WERE falling out of the sky, trailing fire. Something ripped into the sea out near the horizon and sent yet another wave—though much less ferocious than the others—against the shore. The wind howled, sometimes from the east, sometimes cold and icy out of the south. The ocean maintained a steady roar.

  The sun disappeared into a thunderstorm, and the world got dark.

  The AV3 was on the eastern side of a ridge, shielded from the waves, across the harbor from the Goompah sailors. Julie had recommended they not try to fly the damaged craft through the storm-laden skies, so they’d lashed it down, and she’d gone outside and replaced the long-range antenna. Not that it mattered. The evening was so full of interference that they couldn’t hear anything anyhow. When she was finished, as though it were a signal, the weather got abruptly worse. They huddled in the cabin, lights out, waiting for the night to pass, hoping not to attract the attention of the omega. “I know that sounds paranoid,” said Julie, “but the one at Delta tried to destroy the lander my father was in.”

  Nobody was going to sleep well. Rain hammered on the hull and the winds howled around them.

  “In the morning,” said Julie, “when you talk to the Goompahs again, what are you going to tell them?”

  “If there are any left,” said Digger.

  “There’ll be some left. You need to figure out what you’re going to say.”

  “Why say anything?”

  “Because,” said Whit, “they’re going through a terrifying experience. When it’s over, a little reassurance wouldn’t be out of place.”

  “Hell, I don’t know.” Digger looked around the cabin. “How about, ‘My children, all is well. Come down off the hill.’ How’s that?”

  “Okay,” she said. “I was talking about their ships. About going home. Are you going to tell them the planet’s round, but it’s too big for sails? That they wouldn’t have made a successful voyage anyhow?”

  Whit’s features softened. He canted his head and waited for Digger’s answer.

  “No,” Dig said. “If the situation has calmed down, I’ll just tell them it’s over, and let them decide what they want to do.”

  She let him see she didn’t approve.

  “It’s not up to us to tell them what they’re capable of, Julie,” he continued. “How do we know they can’t make it around the globe?”

  “Well, it’s not going to happen now, anyway,” she said. “Whatever you tell them.”

  That was true. If they were able to construct a fresh set of ships, they’d go home. At least, they would if they had any sense.

  Outside, something broke and fell heavily to the ground. A tree.

  Whit took a long sip from his coffee cup. “Are we going to be able to fly this thing when the storm’s over?” he asked.

  “I’ll let you know,” she said.

  DIGGER SAT IN the dark, trying to sleep, trying to think about something else. Well after midnight, he heard a distant explosion. It blended with the continuous thunder, and the lander shook. Lightning filled the sky.

  They talked for hours while the storm raged. About how none of them had ever been through anything like this, about the Goompahs on the other side of the harbor and the Goompahs on the Intigo, about books they’d read and places they’d been, about how it couldn’t last much longer, about how glad they were to have the AV3. Whit said it reminded him a little of a rainy evening he’d spent in a cabin when he was a Boy Scout.

  Eventually it dissipated. The night grew quiet, the winds subsided, and there was only the steady beat of the rain.

  Julie came to attention. “Listen,” she said.

  He heard a burst of radio interference and then Kellie’s voice: “—breaking up—when you can—clouds—”

  It was her standard professional tone. Level, unemotional. “—storm—”

  Dawn was about two hours away. That meant it was a bit after midnight on the Intigo. The cloud was directly over the cities.

  “—total—”

  “We were lucky,” Digger said.

  “How do you mean?” asked Whit.

  “The lightning strike. If we’d used Lykonda to warn the ships to go to deeper water, they might have survived the waves, but they wouldn’t have gotten through the storm.”

  Whit passed his cup forward for a refill. “No luck involved. You and Julie made the right decision.”

  THERE WAS NO dawn. The sky stayed dark. Sometimes the wind and rain slacked off completely, and the night became still, but both inevitably came back with a rush.

  He sat with his eyes closed, dozing, but still aware of his surroundings. Julie had put her seat into its recline position and had finally drifted off. Whit was busily tapping on his notebook. Eventually, he too slept.

  Digger listened to the weather and the sea. If the storm was bad here, in this out-of-the-way place, he wondered what it would be like to be in the crosshairs. Not a stone upon a stone, he suspected.

  THE INTENSITY OF the storm decreased after sunrise, but weather conditions remained too severe to attempt a flight. So they sat it out through the daylight hours and into another night.

  At dawn on the second day, the winds finally abated, the rain slowed and stopped, and the sun came up.

  “I think we’re over the hump,” Julie said.

  They were too washed out to congratulate one another. Julie went outside to inspect and repair the lander, while Digger and Whit slogged over to see how the Goompahs had managed. They were scattered across the r
idge, squatting exhausted and frightened in the mud. Some were injured. A few had descended to the lower levels and were fishing. Others were scavenging for fruit or small animals.

  He would have liked to tell them it was all right to abandon their refuge, but the ground was so muddy he couldn’t approach without making large footprints. In the end he cornered his old friend Telio and stood behind a fallen tree. “Telio,” he said, “it is over.” He’d planned to say no more, but decided on the spot that Julie was right. “Rebuild your ships and return home.”

  The Goompah looked for the source of the voice. “Who are you?” he asked, frightened.

  Might as well play it through. “I am sent by Lykonda,” he said.

  Telio fell to his knees and Digger was stuck, unable to move without giving himself away. He waited, and finally Telio asked in a low voice whether he was still there and, getting no answer, muttered his thanks and returned to his comrades.

  “And God bless,” Digger added, uncharacteristically.

  The three ships lay shattered and covered with mud. Two were on their sides in shallow water; one had been jammed into the trees. They were so badly wrecked that he wondered whether the Goompahs could tell them apart.

  Trees were down everywhere, some from the waves, some blackened by lightning.

  Later, when he told Whit what he’d done, the older man frowned. “They’ll go back with the idea their gods don’t want them to leave the isthmus.”

  “Maybe,” said Digger. “But they’ll have a much better chance to go back. Right now, it’s all I care about.”

  At the lander, Julie told them she’d been in touch with the Jenkins. “The channel’s down again,” she said, “but it should only be temporary. Roka and Kulnar are pretty well destroyed. T’Mingletep took a major hit. But Kellie says the rest of the Intigo looks pretty good.

  “Marge said there was a substantial storm surge, as well. Seven, eight meters of water across much of the isthmus.”

  “How about the Goompahs?”

  “They can’t tell for sure. It looks as if a lot of them should be okay. The ones who were smart enough to do what the goddess told them.” She smiled, nodded at Digger, and broke out a bottle. Drinks all around. “Gentlemen.” She raised her glass. “To the defenders of the weak.” It was a French cordial. Where had she been hiding it?