Stavros leaned in to look. The central darkish area was like a hole punched into the middle of a hot white waste of cloud.
“Looks like another distant mountain range from down here, but the radar imaging shows a near perfect two-thousand-kilometer circle of violently upthrust terrain.” Danforth jabbed at the screen with an eager finger. “Good place to hide a complex machine, also the best evidence for CRI’s suggestion of the ocean as an impact basin. The shock waves from the impact travel through the planet’s crust to collide at an exactly opposing point, and presto! Crustal chaos. Stop me if I’m boring you, Ibiá.”
“Nolagri means ‘Lagri’s Fortress,’ more literally, Lagri’s Rock. Lagri’s father built it for Her with a giant bolt of lightning.”
Stavros found the precise roundness of the hole in the cloud uncanny. “Stop me if I’m boring you.”
Danforth grinned. “Increase resolution, CRI.”
The darker circle swelled like a balloon, became a grainy pattern of greys, a hot white arc hugging one hemisphere, a darker shadow line the other.
Danforth traced the white highlight. “Interesting terrain. Nice sharp rise all around off the surrounding plateau, cleanly delineated. From there, the max altitude levels off, but you can see how broken up it is-all those fissures and cracking. Easy prospecting.”
“Looks like a giant’s sand castle,” offered Stavros. “The drip kind, all dried out by the sun.”
“Very scientific,” Danforth drawled.
But Stavros was eying the borderline between cloud and clear. Instinct told him he would not cross it unawares.
“Clausen’s already in there,” reported Danforth. “Doing the usual preclaim survey, by the book. He’s got CRI scanning the upland kilometer by kilometer. The terrain is unusual as I said, but so far, there’s nothing more to catch the eye.”
Stavros frowned distractedly. “You want smoke plumes, Tay? The flash of solar collectors? Something you can easily recognize?”
“Whoa, back off, man,” warned Danforth. “I’m just looking for a signpost. Take anything I can get.”
“I’m all the signpost you need,” Stavros returned stubbornly. “I’ll get you there.” He removed the comwire from his ear, letting it hang on his shoulder like an offbeat necklace. Danforth glared at him briefly, then shrugged and returned his full attention to the Sled.
The direction of the pull was the one thing Stavros was sure of.
The guar-fire had burned in quiet embers since his last tumble ill the black torrent. But the spark was rekindling. Stavros ground his thumb into the center of his palm. Incredible that the sensitive thumbpad could feel no heat. Mortal flesh and bones. No more than that. Idly, Stavros plotted the rise and fall of the guar-fire’s flame: always low after a brush with the Power, then rebuilding to a peak at the next encounter, like water collecting inside a lock, or potential energy, agitating for release.
Liphar stirred beside him, asleep against his knee.
My faithful sheepdog, or is he really my shepherd?
The young man’s unswerving devotion had been flattering when Stavros had a less clear idea of what was expected of him. Now such adoration made him nervous and pressured, sensitive as he was to failure, past and future. He admitted to relief that the potential of violent climatic side effects excused him from further attempts at contact through Weng’s music.
Once again, he questioned the wisdom of the old priest’s choice.
Why not a Sawl, after all? How can I succeed, with my offworld thoughts and ways? Or is it my alienness itself that makes me eligible?
The willing stranger? The uninvolved messenger?
The neutral current?
Kav, tell me!
He kept his plea from voicing itself and shaming him further. He was more grateful than he would ever say aloud for Danforth’s new tolerance and restraint. Though he could not keep himself from pushing at it on occasion, testing it like a naughty child, he had no real wish to abuse it.
Danforth tapped his knee and gestured to the abandoned comset. Reluctantly, Stavros slipped it back in his ear. Danforth was monitoring Clausen’s communications with CRI.
“… find no detectable center to the field, Mr. Clausen. It appears to be extremely diffuse. Shifting movements within the field itself are making accurate mapping difficult.”
“Has to be a source somewhere,” Clausen snapped. “Keep looking.”
The prospector’s voice, like raked gravel even at a distance, made Stavros shiver.
“Surface compositional analysis is showing a remarkable percentage of lithium oxides.”
“Register exact coordinates of all locations at or above standard field percentages and prepare claim forms. I expect it will be a nice long list.”
Danforth closed the channel on Clausen’s satisfied chuckle, then flew wrapped in total concentration for a while. Stavros stayed on the com, sensing in the big man’s abrupt silence an unvoiced concern.
Finally, Danforth commented casually, “Haven’t heard Ronnie on the wire at all.”
“Long as he needs her,” said Stavros, “he’ll keep her healthy.”
Danforth nodded glumly. “Then I guess she better stay useful, eh?”
Susannah took her shift at the stick while the sky’s pink tinge deepened into amber. When Danforth woke to resume his seat. Nolagri was in clear view. An arc of hot green sky cut into the thinning white cloud with a broad horizon-to-horizon sweep From the Sled, the sun was still a bright patch of amber burning through the cloud cover, but the looming upland was already stained orange by late afternoon light.
Danforth urged the Sled higher, riding the thermals coiling up from the desert plateau. Rising, they skimmed the first sharp slopes of Nolagri’s rubbled flank.
“Hardly any erosion softening at all here,” he noted. “Looks like the impact could have happened yesterday.”
Stavros watched the edge of green sky zoom toward him like the blade of a knife. “Lagri’s idea of local climate control,” he joked tightly. “No weather at all.”
The three Sawls bunched along one windscreen until Danforth made them spread out to disperse their weight. Liphar’s stunned awe said he had never expected to visit the dwelling place of a Goddess in his lifetime. He grasped the blue-green bead on his wrist and muttered a luck-chant.
At the top of the slope, the air was still, the sky a clear, hard green. Stavros stifled a gasp as the Sled passed out from under the faint remnant of cloud and white heat flared suddenly in his palms. Resisting the impulse to curl inward around the pain, he fought to breathe evenly and deeply, determined this time to control it and the swimming disconnection that accompanied it.
“Lifa?” he called thickly.
Liphar was enrapt in his chant at the windscreen, clutching his bead. A torn and silent wilderness stretched before him, an eruption of raw pink rock, the private strata of the planet’s crust sundered and ripped open, entrails of mineral and crystal and stone strewn without ceremony. The low sun etched the rough waste with a web of hard shadow, cracks, fissure lines, the shade-sides of vast rift systems whose bottoms were lost in darkness.
The roar of the Void built inside Stavros’ brain. “Lifa!”
Liphar started, flicking worried eyes at him, and was beside him in the space of a breath. Stavros hovered half in, half out of II space far removed from the cockpit of the Sled, struggling to explain his summons. But Liphar murmured at him soothingly and slipped back into his cramped spot against the hull, offering him the light anchor of a hand on his knee. Stavros’ dizziness ebbed, though the black torrent still echoed in the distance and the pain remained.
“No taboos about trespassing on sacred ground?” Susannah asked Ghirra.
Ghirra did not seem to understand the concept.
Stavros strove for a semblance of normal speech. “How can we he trespassing when our very existence isn’t even recognized?”
Danforth rechecked Clausen’s position. “Heading straight for the center.
Two hours away, maybe three. At least he’s on the scope now. All the easier for us to tag along.”
“No.” Stavros massaged his palms fitfully, but it did nothing to relieve the exploding heat. “Don’t need him anymore.”
“Stav, we came out here to try to stop him.”
“Can, if we get there first.”
“Okay, then.” Danforth eyed him neutrally. “Where to?”
Without a moment’s doubt, Stavros pointed off to the right.
Danforth banked the Sled gently. “CRI, let me see your map of the field.” An abstracted contour diagram filled the little monitor. “Uh-hunh. Okay, Stav. A slight spike in the graph, off in your direction. Not as high as these others, but…” His finger circled several contour values, then one nearly at the geographic center of the field. “This one here’s the one Emil’s going for. You sure of your head?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. CRI, give me high-res again, the terrain ahead.”
“Maybe the real hot spots are decoys,” ventured Susannah.
Danforth snorted. “For what against whom? Pictures, CRI.”
A grainy black-and-white image replaced the field map: the white, the pockmarked ground; the black, the jagged diagonal slice of a huge sheer-sided canyon.
Gazing into that bottomless black, Stavros heard the far off whisper of flood waters.
“Decrease resolution,” said Danforth.
The canyon dwindled to a mere side branch among many side branches of a vaster, blacker chasm.
“Again, CRI.”
The chasm shrank into a minor offshoot of a stupendous rift that split the ravaged upland in a ragged serpentine grin. Its hundred lesser canyons with their thousand tributaries and subtributaries fanned out to the four points of the compass, writhing through the bedrock like the roots of an ancient tree.
“Well, damn, look at that,” said Danforth. “That main crack’s got to be six hundred long and a good twelve across.”
“And straight down,” breathed Susannah.
“Looks like someone pried the rock apart with a goddamn crowbar. Is that where we’re headed?”
Dizzy again, Stavros looked away from the screen and nodded.
“Excuse me, Dr. Danforth. You asked to be informed when Mr. Clausen landed.”
“Yeah. What’s it look like where he is, CRI?”
The image showed a finely shattered terrain shaped by a series of concentric uplifts rising toward a central broken peak.
“Check that out, Ibiá. That I’d believe was some giant’s castle. Dead center in the magnetic field, I’ll bet.” Danforth could not hide his enthusiasm. “Oh, he’ll love it in there-lots of deep layers nicely exposed. Prospector Heaven.”
“The surface presence of lithium oxide is highly indicative of additional subsurface deposits in this area,” offered CRI helpfully.
“I should be proud of myself,” Danforth said mordantly. “I found this bloody planet for him!”
Clausen’s mocking laugh suddenly flooded the cockpit. “A little off the beaten track, aren’t you, Taylor?”
Liphar stared at the control panel as if it had grown teeth. Ghirra and Aguidran turned from the windscreen with identical narrow-eyed frowns.
“Well, now we’re going to get down to business,” the disembodied voice declared. “Start turning the ground a little. CRI, register this site as C-9, priority one.”
“Here we go,” Danforth muttered.
“Charge A, serial number 57460-U867.46, activated,” CRI reported.
The silence in the cockpit held for the length of a heartbeat.
“Shit, that sonofabitch doesn’t waste a second!” growled Danforth.
“He’s really going to do it,” Susannah murmured unbelievingly. “How powerful are those charges?”
“Make a nice crater out of a small city when tuned to full strength, though the point is to plant them real deep, to shatter the bedrock for the machines to pick through. Standard preliminary procedures, though legally he’s supposed to wait until the claim is validated. They rarely do. If the claim is contested, the Courts are more likely to accept a fait-accompli… it’s an old strategy. He probably dropped the charge at the bottom of a likely canyon and kept going.”
“Won’t work, Clausen,” swore Stavros under his breath.
“You listening, Ibiá?” Clausen’s voice goaded. “If you were hoping for the hand of God to reach out and snatch me from the sky, forget it. And the honored doctor’s weather machines are a fiction as well. There’s nothing here, boy. Not a damned thing, living or dead, except all this lovely money lying all over the ground, free for the taking. The richest lithium strike I’ve ever had the privilege to…”
Stavros reached to cut the connection. “If he’s so sure there’s nothing there, why’d he make a beeline for the center of the field?”
“Hedging his bets,” Danforth replied. “If there was anything, he’d be killing two birds with one stone.”
Susannah leaned forward. “CRI, do you have control of that device? Can you disarm it?”
“Under normal circumstances, yes, Dr. James. But Mr. Clausen has…”
“He’s fenced it,” supplied Danforth. “Damn. He must have done it ahead of time. Couldn’t have managed it through the terminal on his Sled.”
“That means we can’t…”
Danforth shook his head. “These terminals aren’t smart enough to give us access to mainframe programming. Not much more than a grown-up radio.”
“Then we have to close down the com,” said Stavros suddenly, slapping at the switches nearest him.
“What? Wait! Hold it!” Danforth swatted his hand away.
“We’ve got to shut down everything we can!” insisted Stavros. “Com black out, so he can’t follow us!”
“He can home in on our power beam,” Danforth objected.
“Not as accurately as the telemetry.”
“How the hell do I fly without navigation fixes?”
“Seat of your pants. You’ll still have the cockpit instruments. I’ll be your navigation.”
“No. We’ve got to keep CRI on line…”
“Taylor, please!”
“It’s not the worst idea, Tay,” Susannah interjected.
“Dr. Danforth,” the computer broke in blandly. “Mr. Clausen asks me to say that it was unsporting of you to cut him off so brusquely.”
“Tell him he can go…”
Stavros overrode him. “Tell him we’re having trouble with the com.”
“Trouble? I can detect no problem from here, Mr. Ibiá.”
“Tell him anyway. Just say to him… for Christ’s sake, CRI, lie to the sonofabitch.”
“Mr. Ibiá, you know I cannot.” The computer sounded vaguely regretful, as if her inability to produce deliberate falsehood were a machine failing that cast doubt on her claim to full sentience.
“Tay, listen to me.” The agony in Stavros’ palms leaked more desperation into his tone than he wanted. The planetologist had always responded negatively to being shoved too hard. “Either we go in as invisibly as we can, or we turn around now. We can’t just lead him with a big brass band!”
“In where? In where?” Danforth stared back at him. “Jesus! I don’t know why I give you the time of day, you crazy motherfucker!”
“Because you know I’m right, by the same instinct that pulled Weng’s music out of the hat!”
Danforth’s jaw clapped shut. He glanced away, chewing his lip. “CRI, what’s the detonation time on that charge?”
“One hour, twenty-eight minutes, forty seconds.”
“Why so long?” asked Susannah.
“He’s probably setting a string of them to go off at once. He’s registered that whole central uplift as a primary claim.” Danforth consulted his chronometer, his lower lip caught hard between his teeth. “Okay. We run in blackout for an hour and twenty eight. Then we try to listen in quietly, see what goes. I mean, what if he’s right about the center of the field being w
here it’s at, Stav?’
“He’s not.”
“Even so. You want to know, don’t you?”
Stavros nodded faintly. “Every ounce of speed you can, Tay,” he pleaded.
Susannah noticed his clenched fists and jaw. “Is the shoulder hurting, Stav? I could give you something.”
“No!” he blurted, jerking away from her touch. Seeing he had hurt her, he added, “I mean, I have to keep alert,” and gave her his hand, while invisible fire burned at its center with the heat of a star.
Stavros held Susannah’s hand for the entire hour and a quarter that brought them to the center of the rift system. His inner senses had gone into overdrive. Like being in a noisy crowd, with everyone yelling at him at once, he was exhausted from the effort of staying coherent enough to guide Danforth across the miles of unmarked wilderness, where one twisting canyon looked much the same as a hundred others, winding through the broken rock, slicing deep into the crust.
He floated in a bubble of strange internal pressures. The reality of Susannah’s quiet murmur at his side barely held its own against the noises of the Void. When Danforth spoke, Stavros heard him as if through water, or second-hand, through some other mind’s apparatus. Liphar’s hand on his knee retained the most reality, the light steadying tug of a sea anchor.
“Now that is a major hole in the ground,” commented Danforth. He stretched forward to peer over the nose of the Sled. “And we’ve got twelve minutes to detonation.”
Stavros pointed into the vast shadows of the rift. “Down.”
“You got it.” The Sled banked and dropped through the hot late sun like a white-gold stone, dipping below the bright scarred edge of the eastern rim, past smoothly undulating walls of sunlit amber rock toward the realm of unplumbed darkness far below.
Danforth flicked an eye at the altimeter. “One kilometer,” and later, as he revved the fans to slow their rate of drop, “Two.” The rift hardly narrowed. The western rim remained a distant shade-darkened wall, every crevice a sharp-etched detail in the clear, motionless air.
“Three,” intoned Danforth as they sped south, still dropping along the eastern wall. “What the hell are we looking for?” He slowed their descent again as they passed into the shadow of a western peak, then out again. “We go down too far, we’ll lose line of sight to the power beam.”
Reign of Fire Page 38
