by Timothy Zahn
“So that’s what the fertilizer business is all about.” Nichols hung the binoculars around his neck. “Meredith thinks extra metal on the ground will trigger the leech effect. Should work. “
“If metal concentration is what causes it to start up,” Carmen reminded him. She glanced around the mountainside, eyes flicking over the expedition members huddling together as they gazed westward.
Hafner was missing.
She thought about it for a moment as she double-checked the group; but there really was only one place he could reasonably be. Leaving Nichols, she headed downslope toward their flyer.
Hafner was in the pilot’s seat when she arrived, forehead furrowed with concentration as he studied the controls. “Going somewhere?” she asked, sitting down beside him.
He glanced up, then returned to his study. “Be a friend, Carmen, and show me how to start this thing up,” he said. “Then get out of here.”
For a moment she stared at his profile. Then, deliberately, she reached over and flipped the switch that transferred control to her half of the board. “Where are we going?” she asked, snapping her flying harness around her.
“You can’t come,” he growled, trying to reach past her to the switch. “I’m serious, Carmen; this is too risky. Give me back the controls and disappear.”
“Tell me what you’re planning first.”
“Oh, for—” He ran his right hand through his hair. “Look, it’s obvious what Colonel Meredith is trying, but I don’t think the fertilizer alone will do the trick. We’ve got to get more metal into the ground as fast as possible.”
Her stomach knotted. “You’re going to crash the flyer?”
“Are you crazy?” He was aghast. “I’m not that desperate. I’m going to try and get the aliens to crash one of theirs.”
“Oh. Well, that’s different. For that you’ll need a decent pilot.” Flipping the ignition, she fired the underside repulsers, their low roar not quite covering Hafner’s yelp. “No argument!” she shouted as the flyer lifted. “Colonel Meredith can give me orders, Peter, but you can’t. Besides, you know perfectly well I’m right. Now, where to?”
There was a short pause, but when he spoke the argument was gone from his voice. “North and maybe a little east. I want to draw one of those flyers the aliens unloaded and make him chase us.”
Carmen nodded and cut in the main engines. Olympus dropped away behind them and she took a moment to check the radar screen. “You have some way in mind to keep them chasing and not shooting?”
I hope so. But I’m not sure. He hesitated. “That’s one reason I wanted to go alone.”
Carmen nodded grimly, swallowing all the obvious comments. “Well, get your plan in gear … because here they come.”
Hafner turned to look out his window. Carmen was on the wrong side to see, but the radar screen told her everything she needed to know. Two of the alien’s four flyers were coming in fast, one at reasonably high altitude, the other almost skimming the ground. Turning back, Hafner slipped on his radio headset. “Is this thing on?” he asked.
She hit the right switch and one-handedly got her own headset on.
“—immediately,” a flat translator voice greeted her. “Repeat: the unauthorized Ctencri flyer is to land immediately.”
“If you have any interest in the cable we’ve discovered, you’d better not bother us,” Hafner said, his voice betraying none of the uncertainties of a minute ago. “We have in our possession delicate equipment vital to the operation of the machinery. So just pull back and let us go our way.” Without waiting for a reply, he reached over and shut off the transmitter. “All right,” he said to Carmen, “double back and head southwest toward the spot where Flyer Two crashed.”
“Mind letting me in on the secret?” she asked as she put the craft into a right turn.
“No secret, just a hunch. As you pointed out earlier we’ve flown over that area several times before … but Flyer Two was heading due south when it failed, and I’m pretty sure we’ve never passed by going anywhere near that direction.”
Carmen thought it over for a long minute. It wasn’t impossible, she realized; something like a long underground solenoid or antenna could conceivably provide that kind of directional dependence. But it could just have easily have been a one-shot event. “I hope you’re right,” she said aloud, wishing she’d known all this when there was still a chance of talking him out of it. “So what do you want me to do, run an S-curve over the region and assume our pursuers will follow a straight north-south path?”
“Exactly. I’m hoping they’ll be smart enough to realize that if they just stay with us we’ll eventually run out of fuel and have to land. That may keep their trigger fingers steady long enough—yipe!”
Carmen twitched violently, the flyer’s automatic systems smoothing out the effect on their motion. Bare meters away, flanking them on both sides, the alien flyers had suddenly appeared. Close up, she realized for the first time just how big they really were.
“Carmen!” Hafner’s cry was half agonized expletive, half bewildered question.
“I don’t know,” she shook her head, feeling her own nerve sliding away. “Twenty seconds ago they were fifteen kilometers away—I never even saw them move.” She broke off, forcing her mind back to the task at hand. For all their superior equipment, she told herself firmly, we know something they don’t. But how to use that knowledge, now that their opponents would be watching their every move?
She thought of a way. Maybe.
“Take a deep breath, Peter,” she ordered, “and brace yourself. Here goes nothing.”
Ahead, Olympus was sweeping toward them like an inverted tornado. Pulling back on the stick, Carmen shoved the throttle to full power, sending the flyer arcing toward the clouds. The alien craft matched the maneuver without the slightest trouble that she could detect; matched it again when she turned the flyer to point due south. Olympus’s cone flashed past, far beneath and to her right. Somewhere along here Flyer Two had lost all power—
Gritting her teeth, she shut down the repulsers.
The sudden silence seemed to roar in her ears. She spared a quick glance to the side, found Hafner tight-lipped but with the look of understanding in his eyes. Giving her full attention to flaps and elevons, she tried to remember every scrap she’d ever learned about gliding. The review, unfortunately, didn’t take long.
“Any idea what our range is like this?” Hafner asked, his voice studiously casual.
“None.” She tried to match his tone, but her performance wasn’t nearly as good as his. “We were still climbing when I cut power and we’re just leveling out now. It all depends on the glide characteristics of this thing, and I have no idea what those are. I think we’ll be past the crash site before we have to restart the engines, but I don’t know how much farther than that we’ll get.”
Hafner turned and gazed out the window. “Staying right with us, aren’t they? I wonder how we’ll be able to tell if—hey! He’s dropping below us a bit.”
Carmen shot a glance out her side. “This one, too.” Could it have happened already? Without so much as a flash of light or crackle of radio static to mark the event? “Hang on,” she told Hafner. “We’re going to gamble.”
Pulling back on the stick, she brought the flyer’s nose up sharply, killing their forward momentum in a standard stall maneuver. If the aliens still had power, they would have no trouble staying with her … and with most of their speed gone, she would have no choice but to give up and abort the whole plan—
“They’re still going down!” Hafner called, his fist slamming excitedly onto the edge of the control board. “They’re gliding, too. We did it!”
Carmen’s reply was a long exhalation of a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. Pulling out of the stall, she sent them into a lazy starboard turn. Only when they were heading west did she risk starting the engines again. They caught at once, and as she started them back toward Olympus she flipped on the radio
once more. “Attention, invaders,” she said. “Your aircraft, which we ordered to back off, have been dealt with. If you value your lives you will leave Astra immediately.” Switching off, she gave Hafner a tight smile. “If nothing else, that should confuse them.”
But Hafner was still staring out the window. “Carmen, can you take us back toward where the aliens just went down? I’m not sure, but I think it’s started.”
It had indeed started.
Unnoticeably at first, of course. Aboard the huge M’zarch landing craft the only indication was a slight vibration, unexplained but not especially worrisome; the troops outside, their attention turned outward, never noticed as the skids melted silently into the ground. The giant ships sank down to rest on their bellies and continued further … and by the time the hull-breach alarms began their clanging, it was too late. The underside repulsers, already being eaten away, could not be fired.
For many aboard the ships it was too late in another sense as well. Trapped inside their attack-resistant rooms, their minds and reflexes slowed by shock, they found themselves inexorably crushed to death as ceilings were brought down by disintegrating walls and combat armor dissolved into the sandy ground like spun sugar in water. And since these were precisely the people who were considered too valuable to risk outside, the ground troops suddenly found themselves on their own, without senior officers, tacticians, or clan liaisons … or heavy weapon support, intersquad and long-range communications, or defensive sensor cover.
“We have destroyed your landing craft,” the Human commander’s flat voice came from the translator at the High Command’s Chosen’s elbow. “You will order your troops to abandon their weapons and surrender or they will likewise be destroyed.”
The Chosen’s fingers twitched with reaction. It was impossible—M’zarch armored landers couldn’t be neutralized so quickly by anything short of nuclear weapons. But neutralized they had been, and the troop carrier’s own sensors had picked up no sign of a nuclear blast. Had the alien Spinneret technology included weaponry? If so, it was more vital than ever that the M’zarch people gain control of this world.
The S’tarm Clan Liaison behind him might have been listening to his soul. “You must not let such technology exist outside M’zarch possession,” he said.
The Chosen controlled his temper. “I am listening for suggestions as to strategy,” he said, directing his words to all the clan liaisons and High Command officers on the bridge. “I have one-way communication with my ground troops; I can order them to attack and even direct their actions, though at low efficiency. But it is not reasonable to assume the Humans will not use their weapon against the troops if an attack is ordered. “
“It is the purpose of troops to give their lives to advance M’zarch holdings—” someone began.
“It is not their use to be wasted for no purpose,” the Chosen shot back. “Or do you believe their armor can withstand this weapon long enough to accomplish any practical objective?”
“You hold yet one landing craft in reserve,” the Chief Tactician murmured, thinking aloud as tacticians were supposed to. “But without more information you cannot expect to add effective countermeasures to its equipment. It is also impossible to predict the weapon’s range.”
It took most of the clan liaisons a moment to catch the full implications of that. “Impossible!” the S’tarm snorted. “Surely this ship is beyond danger, and if not, the warships certainly are. We still hold the threat of total annihilation over the Humans.”
Again the Chosen held his tongue. If the S’tarm continued such stupid comments one of the Command officers would eventually challenge the fool and save him the trouble. One never made threats one was unwilling to carry out, and wanton destruction of such a prize as this would draw the perpetrator death for both himself and his entire clan.
“Threats of destruction against the planet are useless,” the Chief Tactician said, dismissing the S’tarm’s suggestion with a gesture that was just short enough of contempt to avoid drawing a challenge. “However, you may be able to realistically make such threats against their spacecraft.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when the three-tone alert twitter rendered them moot. “Chosen,” the Defense Officer called over the alarm, “we’ve picked up the shift mark of six vessels, on intercept vectors: By configuration … Rooshrike corvet-class warships.”
The Chosen made an acknowledging sign, the sound of crumpling status loud in his soul. To have failed in such a task would topple him back to the low echelons from which he had so laborously risen … but to have failed and to have thrown away lives for nothing would be worse. His own two warships could easily handle six corvets, but that would be only the leading edge of the wave, and he had neither the ability nor the desire to challenge the entire Rooshrike military. “Steersman,” he called to the pilot, “raise us to geosync orbit. Speaker: inform the Humans my ground forces will surrender if they will then be permitted to leave the planet. Broadcast like instructions on the troops’ local frequency. Then order my warships to stand ready to submit to the approaching Rooshrike force.”
“You are surrendering?”
The Chosen turned back to face the S’tarm. “Yes,” he ground out between clenched teeth. “You object?”
“Yes! The glory of the M’zarch people—”
It wasn’t precisely a formal challenge, but the Chosen was fairly certain the S’tarm got the point sometime before he caromed off the far bulkhead, his chest already bruising from the blow. The Chosen waited, hands ready for combat, but the other—perhaps recognizing that zero-gee fighting was too far outside his experience—slunk off the bridge instead. At least, the Chosen thought, I won’t have him under my eyelids for the return trip.
Of course, upon their return he would no longer be the Chosen either. Perhaps then the S’tarm would take vengeance.
It didn’t matter that much. For the Chosen, life as he knew it was already over.
Chapter 14
IT WASN’T UNTIL NEARLY sundown the next day that the observers Meredith had stationed at the foot of Mt. Olympus reported the gravity beginning its high/low divergence; and the ocean was cutting almost dead center across the sun as the new cable was catapulted from the volcano’s cone.
“First sunrise, now sunset,” Hafner nodded as Andrews relayed the news to Meredith. “Must be designed to fire the cable into Astra’s own orbit, more or less. Probably makes pickup a lot easier, especially if a bunch of them drift into the Lagrange points.”
“Um,” Meredith nodded. “Though at this point I’d say pickup was already the simplest part of the whole operation.”
Hafner gave him a wry smile. “Or in other words, our progress out at Olympus has been less than remarkable.”
“Still no sign of an entrance?”
“None. However the crater opens up to let the cable out, it doesn’t seem designed to let people in.”
“Maybe you’re just overlooking it,” Meredith said with a shrug. “Three hundred square meters of cone floor plus a hundred more of interior wall around it is a pretty good-sized area to hide a secret entrance in.”
“Except that I don’t think it was designed to be especially hidden, and service doors usually are set up to be at least visible.”
“What do you mean, ‘not hidden’?” Andrews spoke up. “It’s disguised to look like a volcano, isn’t it?”
“I’m starting to think the form is accidental,” Hafner replied. “The short piece of cylinder inside the cone is relatively smooth—made of something like the cable material, I think, minus the stickum—and the outer surface really doesn’t look like igneous rock. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that the Spinners—”
“Spinners?” Meredith frowned.
“Oh, that’s the hypothetical race that built the whole thing,” Hafner explained, looking a bit sheepish. “Dr. Chang’s team calls the apparatus the Spinneret, you know, and the other just came naturally. Anyway, I’m convin
ced the Spinners just piled up the stuff they’d dug out in making their underground factory, and that heat from the central shaft gradually fused the loose stone into its present form.”
“Yes—this underground work area,” Meredith said, finally getting to the topic he’d called Hafner in to discuss in the first place. “In the report you and Miss Olivero filed this morning you state that you’d like permission to search the area around the Dead Sea for the entrance. Isn’t that going just a bit far afield? We’re talking some ten kilometers, minimum, between the Sea and the volcano cone.”
Hafner shrugged. “The spot where the M’zarch flyers lost their repulsers was nearly that far from the cone.”
“But at least a kilometer west of the Sea.”
“True. But unless the Spinners went to the trouble to put in a stage elevator in the middle of nowhere, the only convenient place to put an entrance is among the hills bordering the Sea.”
Across the desk, Andrews held his phone up and murmured something. Eyes and half his attention on his aide, Meredith said, “You have to understand, Doctor, that while I appreciate the need to learn more about this—ah, Spinneret, I also don’t have the resources to spare for the kind of long, drawn-out search you’re requesting. We’ve again lost every bit of metal fertilization and are going to have to either harvest prematurely or lay down more fertilizer. The latter would have to be done immediately and mostly by hand—” He broke off as Andrews looked back up. “Well?”
“Colonel, the Pathfinder reports two Rooshrike ships have left orbit and are moving to intercept the cable.”
Meredith nodded slowly, thinking. It was immediately obvious that he could either like it or lump it, that the chances of the Pathfinder interfering with the Rooshrike retrieval were essentially zero. Anyway, with the departure of the M’zarch ground troops still underway, it wouldn’t be a good time to antagonize the cavalry who’d come to Astra’s rescue. “Have Radford inform the Rooshrike that we’re giving them the cable in return for their timely help and all that—he can figure out how to phrase it.”
