Starrigger

10

Nobody spoke for a while as it sank in. We were heading straight for never-never land with exactly two alternatives: to double back on the road and confront our pursuer, or to swing out over methane-water ice and take our chances with hidden crevices, geothermal sinkholes, and occasional impact craters. I braked automatically, then wondered what I was doing, where I was going. Turn back? Give up? I saw no controls for roller supertraction and doubted that the car could negotiate a surface of metallic methane ― pure water ice, maybe, but not water caged in frozen gas. Then again, I had no justification to put limitations on this buggy.

John broke the silence. "Jake? What do we do?" All eyes were on me ― Teelie eyes, that is. Darla and Winnie were talking in hushed tones. I checked the scanner. Petrovsky was gaining on us very quickly now that I had decelerated. I goosed it a little to give me more time. The road was still perfectly straight, the terrain relentlessly flat. I kept my eyes glued ahead. Sudden obstacles would be death at these speeds.

"Jake?" John reminded me softly.

"Yeah." I exhaled, my mind made up. "John, I'm not going to stop. Don't ask me to justify the morality of it. I can't, except to say that I can't possibly give myself up. I'm going to shoot the potluck portal."

Susan gasped. John took it silently. Roland was preoccupied with the instrument panel.

"If you have a gun," I went on, "I'd advise you to pull it on me right now. The portal's coming up."

Outlined in faint zodiacal light at the horizon, the cylinders were rising above the ice like dark angels on Judgment Day.

"Let me say this," I continued. "I wouldn't shoot this portal if I thought it'd be suicide. You can believe me or not. Take it for what it's worth, but I wouldn't do it if I thought there was no chance of getting back."

Roland looked at me. "Of course, Jake. Everybody knows you'll get back ― if you believe the road yams."

"I'm grounding my belief in firmer evidence than beerhall bullshit. Again, take it for what it's worth, but I intend to get back from the other side. In fact, I know I will."

"How do you know?" John asked.

"Can't explain right now. I just know."

John looked at me intently. "Jake, I'm asking you to reconsider."

"Sorry, John. Put a gun to my head and I'll stop. I don't particularly want to shoot a potluck portal, but I will if no one stops me." It sounded crazy even to me.

Susan was quietly sobbing in the back seat.

"Threatening one's driver," Roland said acerbically, "at a little under Mach point seven strikes me as slightly absurd." He turned to John. "Can't you see that Jake's in the Plan?"

I caught quick glimpses of John's face in the lights of the panel as I shifted my eyes fleetingly from the road. Rare to see a man confronted with a literal test of his religious beliefs. John shook his head. "Roland, it isn't simply a matter of―"

"Oh, come on, John," Roland said, impatient with his leader's recent behavior, or so it sounded. "How can you be so myopic? We're in Jake's Plan, he's in ours. You can't deny that there's some kind of linkage here. Can you?"

"Maybe," John said, eyes belying his words. "Possibly." He gave up. "God, I don't know. I really don't know what to do."

"I do," Roland said emphatically. "It's obvious. No matter what we do, our paths and Jake's seem to cross. I say we let Jake take the lead. It's clear his Plan is informing ours." Darla was pounding me on the shoulder. "Look out!"

A dark pool lay across the road. I braked hard, but it was useless. In no time we shot across the spontaneous bridge over a geothermal depression and were back on solid ice again. "Sorry, Jake. False alarm." "No, keep watching. I need four eyes." Roland was bent over the scanner again. Suddenly he spun around and peered back through the oval rear window. "Merte. I should have been watching. He's back there!"

In the rearview mirror I saw the interceptor's headbeams grow.

"Jake? Are you okay?" No time to answer. I mashed the accelerator. "I've got something on the scanner!" Roland stabbed finger at the fire-control board. Green and red lights flickered. "Come on, George, whoever the hell you are!"

George didn't respond. Something smacked into the rear of the car with a dull thud. I couldn't see the interceptor's lights. A dark mass covered the rear window. I knew what it was, having been on the receiving end of a tackyball before. Adhezosfero. Now the sticky mess was crawling all over the back of the vehicle, fusing and bubbling, forming an unbreakable molecular bond with the metal of the hull. Though it was close to absolute zero outside, the thing wouldn't freeze, its chemical reactions providing heat long enough to do the job. Petrovsky was feeding us slack now until the bond formed. Then he'd start reeling us in.

"What happened to the antimissile system?" Roland wanted to know. "Probably read the approach as a slow projectile," I said. "Tackyball shells are fired from a mortar. Didn't worry George any." But I was worried. I kept the pedal flattened, hoping to unspool all of Petrovsky's tether line before the bond firmed up, but the boys and girls at Militia R&D had been putting in overtime. This one bonded in a few seconds. A sharp jerk, and that was it. The Russian had us hooked.

"Roland, this thing must have some beam weapons," I said. "Find 'em!"

"I'm looking, Jake. But these designations are in another language."

"The language is archaic American. Read 'em off to me!" "Okay. Tell me what 'Sic 'im, Fido' means." "Spell it!" He did, and I stopped him in the middle of it. "Christ Almighty! It must mean attack or fire or something.

Hit it!"

Roland did, and nothing happened.

"It has to have a target!" I screamed. "Find the aiming waddyacallit!"

"The what?"

The road behind lit up blue-white with the Russian's retrofire, and we slid forward in our seats. Roland and John hit the windscreen, and I took the padded steering column in the chest, but I kept my leg stiffened and drove the pedal down, finding new depths of power down there. My foot seemed to sink through the floorboards. The car lurched, then acceleration took us the other way, sending us sprawling back on the cushioned seat. I shot a look in the back. Susan, Darla, and Winnie were a tangle on the floor, Susan's bare foot sticking up comically.

A tug-of-war began, the interceptor's retro engines against the growling power of the Chevy's unfathomable motor. But the Russian had his moves down pat. He paid out line and let me pull, then cut retros and ate the slack up plus more, reeling me in like a deep-sea catch. He was out-maneuvering me and I knew it. And when he had us up close enough, he'd squirt us down with Durafoam under high pressure, spin us into an immobilizing cocoon ― one hell of an effective technique against even a vehicle that can outgun you, if you can get close enough. Roadbugs aside, when the cops want to snare you, they get down to business. No Roadbug would save us now.

I only had one countermove. The fish has sharp spines, so be careful where you touch. I considered the consequences for a second or two, then drove the brake pedal against the floor. The move caught the big man up short and he shot past us, dragging the slack length of the graphite whisker line along. It all happened very quickly. The invisible line pulled taut and yanked our ass-end around into a fishtail, but in the process the hardened glob of tackyball slid free from the back of the car. It was too late for Petrovsky. He lacked time or the presence of mind to cut the line free. His headbeams swung around to blind me, then continued the circuit into a wild spin. Something strange was happening at our end: I felt an unseen force fight against the fishtail, some kind of stabilizing inertial field. I was countersteering sharply, but it wouldn't have been enough. We were traveling broadside to the road, but something shoved us back. Petrovsky's vehicle kept spinning, trailing wisps of hot vapor from its rollers, cold gas from its yaw/antispin jets, but it was hopelessly out of control and went whirling off the roadbed, past the shoulder and onto the ice.

In the middle of it all we ghosted through a holo sign. The words were repeated cinematically over kilometers and were projected large enough to straddle the road. The Highway Department wanted no mistake.

The interceptor began to break up as it spun, wrapping itself in a deadly cat's cradle of the trailing line, the ultrastrong, superthin fiber slicing through hull metal like fine wire through cheese. Pieces flew in all directions, some skittering across the road into our path. I couldn't dodge them, too busy counter-counter-steering against the return fishtail to the left, again Being helped by the strange force. We straightened out, then re-rebounded to the right again, not as far this time, the oscillations damping with each cycle. A big chunk of stabilizer foil tumbled across the road, just missing us. I caught sight of the shapeless mass of tackyball bouncing along behind the cop car like a useless anchor dragged over frozen sea, its weight pulling the line into a lethal snarl. As I fought for control I saw the flashing red commit markers ahead. Blind spots, burned in by the cop car's intense headbeams, swam in front of my eyes, and I wasn't sure where road ended and ice field began. The interceptor was pacing us, spinning and sliding over close-to-frictionless surface, heading straight for the portal but wide of the commit markers. I finally regained control and found that we were on the shoulder near Petrovsky's vehicle, with our left rollers on the ice and the right marker dead in our path. I wheeled to the left as sharply as I dared. The interceptor was a rotating pile of junk now, throwing off pieces of itself with abandon…. Then it exploded, or seemed to, but I knew it was Petrovsky's ejection seat. He'd never make it, was too near the markers, doomed to be sucked in by the cylinders. Across the glossy hood of the Chevy, sudden highlights flared, reflections of Petrovsky's descent-rockets igniting. We shot past the right commit marker, missing it by a hair.

Now the real race began. We had to beat the wreckage of the interceptor to the cylinders, get through the aperture before the horrendous implosion that would happen as the mass of the wreck was torn atom-from-atom by the portal's tidal claws. The wreck was veering outward now. There was a chance it could move far enough out to miss hitting the right lead cylinder directly, make a wide looping geodesic before it spiraled into the zone of destruction, before it flashed to filaments of plasma falling into the ultracondensed mass of the cylinders. The delay might be only a fraction of a second, but it might be enough.

It was all happening within seconds, but to me the flow of things was gummed up into a languid slow motion. Endlessly, the wreckage wheeled in the icy night, the sweep of its head-beams like some haunted lighthouse on an arctic shore. I looked for the guide lane, the white lines marking the safe corridor through the aperture, but couldn't see them. Red lights blared from the instrument panel.

"Jake? Jake, what's happening?" Sam's voice was faint, far away.

The guide lane was suddenly under me and we weren't dead center. Our left wheels were over the white line. I corrected sharply, thinking this was the end, we've had it, you just don't do this and live, and then felt the car rising on its right wheels as greedy fingers of force closed over us. We were up on two wheels, the car riding diagonally to the roadbed… and somehow in those few fractions of a second I reacted unthinkingly, wheeling hard right and tramping on the accelerator….

And then time jarred back to normal flow and it was wham! back on four wheels, shooting down the dark corridor of the safe lane, the cylinders black-on-black beside us, and then a brilliant flash that blinded me, followed by an explosion of sound as we hit air and the car's engine shouted in my ears. I saw light, pure and golden and warm; then my pupils contracted and the field of vision split into an upper band of light blue and a lower one of blue-green. Someone was leaning over my shoulder, and I felt hands over my hands on the wheel.

"Jake, slow down!"

Darla was helping me steer. I braked, trying not to panic-stop to avoid skidding. I was half-blind now but could see the road, a strip of black over blue-green. The Skyway was suspended over water and there were no guard rails. A few seconds later and I could see that the elevation was minimal. We were on a causeway crossing shallow water.

But our speed was still fantastic. Land ahead, an island or a reef, coming up fast. The road looked like it ended there, but I wasn't sure. I could see other vehicles parked on the island. I mashed down on the brake and the tires wailed like hellhounds, the back end floating from side to side. We began to drift toward the shoulder and I let up on the brake to straighten out, then started pumping the pedal, but the shore was coming at us fast. I quit pumping and stood on the brake, the sounds of the tires splitting my ears, the sky, sea, and land heaving around us. Darla was no help now ― I was fighting her as well as the wheel. I pushed her back and took over, my vision nowhere near normal but adequate in the bright sunlight. We were down to a mere 150 miles per hour, but the shore of the island was upon us. We shot past a wide beach, still on the Skyway, and blurred through a narrow strip of land until we reached the opposite shore and another beach. The road picked up the causeway again and headed out to sea.

Not far from the beach the road began a gradual dip until it sank beneath the deep water beyond the breakers.

My stiffened body was perpendicular to the brake pedal, and I braced myself by pulling backward on the steering wheel. The back end was fishtailing but I didn't countersteer, couldn't, counting on the mysterious force to set us aright. It did, and with a final screaming chorus from the tires we skidded to a stop a few meters from the gentle waves washing across the width of the roadway.

Nobody moved for a long while. I sat there letting warm sunlight soothe my face, not feeling much of anything else. I was numb, my arms like dead things in my lap, my body limp and useless. From outside came the strange croaking cries of seabirds and the sound of water lapping against the sinking road.

Presently, someone moaned. Susan. I made an effort and looked over the back of the seat. Susan was down there somewhere, as was Winnie. Darla was sitting up looking dazed, relieved, glad to be alive, amazed to be alive, and totally exhausted, all at once. Our eyes met and a flicker of a smile crossed her lips. Then she closed her eyes and tilted her head back. Roland and John began to pick themselves up from the floor-decking. It took time.

We sat there for a good while longer until I felt a throb of feeling return and a tiny bit of strength begin to trickle back.

Then I put my hands back on the wheel. It took time to get the car into reverse, but I finally figured it out, backed up, turned around, and headed back to land.

No one spoke.

The island was packed with vehicles of every kind, parked and waiting. We reached the end of the beach and I hung a right, going off-road over sand and scrubby rust-colored beach grass, threading through the crowd of parked vehicles. Beings of every sort were represented here, none of which I'd ever seen before. There were humans here too, sitting in their buggies with doors open or standing in groups outside, smoking cigarettes, talking. Others were picnicking on the sand. Somewhere underneath the blanket of fatigue that covered me I was surprised to see them, but didn't dwell on the implications. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something. I could guess what it was, but I didn't give much thought to that either. I kept driving around. The island was narrow but long and crescent-shaped, little more than a sandbar dotted with some suitably odd vegetation, clumps of scraggly brush that looked like land-colonizing seaweed, and a few tall shaggy trees with dull red foliage. There wasn't much else to the place. No other land was in sight.

Near one end of the island, which I arbitrarily designated as north, another spur of the Skyway came in over the causeway from the northwest. It crossed the island diagonally and plunged beneath the waterline as well, its junction with the Goliath spur submerged farther out. Traffic from the ingress point was substantial, backed up along the causeway for half a klick or so. If we had ingressed here, at our speed… well, no use to dwell on that either.

Things got congested up there, so I turned around and went back, hugging the western shore until we found a spot that was relatively free of traffic, vehicles, and people, a little knoll above the beach topped with a lone tall tree. Before stopping we passed a middle-aged man in an electric-blue jumpsuit standing by his roadster, smoking, looking at us curiously. As I drove by he tapped his nose with an index finger, signing that the air was okay here. Thank you. I rolled down the window and Goliath's syrupy stuff whooshed out and let in tangy salt air and sea smells, very Earthlike. From long experience I could tell by the sound of the rushing air that there wasn't any pressure differential to worry about. The atmosphere was fairly heavy here too. I've had a touch of the bends once or twice, and I should have checked it out first, if I could have found the readouts. But I was dreaming along, not caring, barely there at all. I stopped the car at the edge of the gentle slope down to the beach, put it in neutral and jerked up on the hand brake. I didn't shut the engine off. Then I opened the door. Took me time to get my legs moving ― pure homemade jelly. Then I got out, staggered down the hill to the flat, and sank to my knees. I fell forward and stretched out in the warm sand.

Darla came down and lay on her back beside me. She'd taken off her suit and was down to halter and briefs, golden skin exposed to whatever passed for solar radiation here. Darla could have been a blonde easily. The downy stuff on her arms and body was very light. And on the side of one shoulder, a heart-shaped port-wine mark, tiny one.

I shut my eyes and stopped thinking. Seabirds, or whatever they were, croaked above. I wasn't looking, wasn't thinking of looking. I just listened to their calls, heard combers wash the beach, an occasional engine sound, the distant rumble of the Skyway. My closed eyelids glowed red-orange. Gradually, I started to feel very warm in my leather jacket. I lay there for as long as I could stand it, then sat up and shed the jacket, took off my shoes (I still had no shirt), then turned around to lie down with my head next to Darla's. The sky was hazy, very light blue, hung with streamers of soft gauze. I saw the flying things. They were fish. Looked like fish, anyway, with flat silvery bodies and huge winglike pectoral fins made of thin translucent membrane stretched over a frame of sharp spines. They were soaring, really, not flying. I watched one ride an air current directly above, unmoving with respect to the ground, gliding on the stiff ocean breeze. It hung there for a minute or so, then lost lift and started a dive toward the water. Halfway down it folded its wings and stooped, plunging head first into the depths beyond the breakers. I heard the splash and lifted my head. Not far from where it went in another one launched itself from the water straight into the air, shooting up a good ten meters before it unfolded its wings with the sound of a parasol suddenly opening. It caught a good updraft and began to rise.

Then I noticed the wrecks. Hulks of abandoned vehicles awash in the breakers, all kinds, some with Terran Maze markings. More of them up and down the beach half sunk in the sand, some so covered-over and sprouting with beach grass mat I'd mistaken them for dunes. Apparently this planet had been a dead end for some time. Those without flying vehicles had been stranded here, left either to swim for it, bum a ride, or die. Surely there was some way off now. Or was there?

I let my head fall back. Of course there is. What's all this traffic about then? Everybody doomed? Stop thinking.

But I didn't stop thinking, and wondered about Sam. He was an hour behind us, at least. Would he shoot the potluck portal? Did he know I had? We might have been well out of scanner range, but then he must have tracked us to the Ryxx Maze cutoff and seen us go beyond it. I lifted my head again. I could see the ingress causeway from Goliath. We'd wait and see. I lay back again. I had fussed over everything of immediate concern, seen all there was to see, and right then I didn't care about Reticulans or cops or treasure hunts or even Teelies. Not at the moment, because a breeze was carrying cool salt air to lift some of the heat from my baking skin, Darla was beside me, things were quiet, and I didn't give a merte.

A shadow fell over my face, and I opened my eyes. It was Darla, looking at me. She smiled, and I smiled. Then she giggled, and I did too.

"Let George do it," she said. It was like repeating the punchline to a very funny joke. We couldn't stop giggling.

"Sic 'im, Fido," I managed to say between waves of mirth.

We broke out laughing, all the tension exploding away in an instant. Darla collapsed over me, helpless as I was, convulsed, two complete idiots on the shore. We were like that for five minutes. It was overreaction, an undertone of hysteria to it, the terror of it all hitting us, tearing out shrieks of laughter.

And when it was all gone it left us spent, breathless, and sober. We looked at each other, and for the first time I saw a hairline crack in that smooth, cool shell, saw vulnerability in Darla's face. Her mourn was half open, her lower lip quivering the slightest bit, eyes widened and searching for something in mine, looking for a cue. I'm afraid. Is it okay? Will you let me? I wanted to say. Yes, love, it's okay, you can let go, don't be afraid to feel fear when it's justified, and. yes, I'll be strong for you, just so that next time you let me have a turn… but suddenly she was wrapped up safe in my arms and there was nothing more to say.

Very quickly we were naked, her briefs and halter materializing in my hand somehow. Flimsy things they were, scraps of soft cloth, and the next thing I knew we were making love without a thought as to who was around. It was sudden, a little desperate, and more than a physical bonding. We needed to tell each other that we were still alive, still here, still able to feel, to touch, needed proof that we still had bodies all of a piece, warm and pulsing, bodies that lived and moved and tingled and glowed, that could feel pleasure and pain, exhilaration and fatigue. We had to convince ourselves that we weren't bits of lifeless stuff squashed up against some unimaginable object, that we weren't plain dead. And as it is after all brushes with death, there was a sense of the precious-ness of every moment, of every sensation, an awareness of the miraculous nature of life. We celebrated that, and celebrated ourselves.

Afterward, there was deep calm. Birdfish croaked their soaring song above. With my head on Darla's breast, I watched little crustacean things scuttle across the sand ― didn't look anything like crabs, more like tiny pink mushroom caps up on tripods. Not far from us, an animal with a brightly colored spiral shell popped partway out of the sand, shot a stream of water into the air in a neat arc once ― spritz! ― and screwed itself back into the beach. I noticed for the first time that the white sand under us had sparkling elements in it, millions of little glassy beads. Pure silicon tektites, probably, products of meteor hits long ago. Or maybe not so long ago. Something had altered the geology of this planet since the Roadbuilders had laid their highway here.

I heard a hum and looked up. An alien aircraft, climbing from its takeoff from the northern spur. Lucky bastard. Then I hoped for him that he knew where the egress portal was, and that the road to it was landable. Otherwise, he'd have to double back all the way here and go slumming among the ground-suckers. He probably wouldn't run out of fuel. With fusion, it's a rarity, but you do see some very primitive equipment on the Skyway now and then, belonging to races that you'd have to call overachievers.

After a long while I got up and stood over Darla, looking at her slim golden body. She opened her eyes and smiled. Then I looked up the knoll. The man in the loud blue jumpsuit was looking down at us, standing far enough away so that I couldn't tell if the curl tollis lip was a smirk or a friendly grin. I didn't care if he'd been there for the whole performance. Glad to oblige.

"How's the water?" I yelled up at him. "Safe?"

"Yeah, sure!" he shouted back. "Go ahead!"

Darla stood up, unashamed. I took her hand and we ran down to the surf, splashed in on foot a ways, then dove into the first breaker. The water was piss-warm but it was good to wash the sweat and sand off. My first bath in ― how long? Darla's too, I supposed, unless she managed to get one while I was.. -but of course she had ― at the Teelies' motel. Wait a minute. Had she gone there? She hadn't said. In fact, she hadn't gone into what had happened after she avoided getting fried out in the bush. I had assumed she went into town with the Teelies after the cops left with me, but I didn't know. She would tell me sooner or later, I guess. I ducked my head, came up sputtering, and rubbed myself down briskly, trying to get the jail smell off me. Institutional stink. The water was a buoyant, rich saline solution with a slightly slimy quality. It was like swimming in thin chicken broth. Darla was out beyond me in deeper water, backstroking lazily. Behind her and out a good distance, another birdfish rocketed from the water and took wing.

All right, let's face the question. Exactly how the hell did Darla wind up in the Militia station with Petrovsky? Did they come and get her? Did she come down to try to arrange my release? She said that Petrovsky wanted her for questioning, but Petrovsky said…

Something large and dark was moving in the deep water behind Darla. I stood up and peered out. I didn't like it, and Darla was out too far. I called to her and told her to come in. She asked why with a questioning grin.

'Wow, Darla."

She got the message and shot forward into an Australian crawl, making it to shallow water in no time. Her stroke was very strong. Then a breaker took her straight in to me. I pulled her to her feet and pointed seaward. Just then something broke water out there with a boiling splash. I saw only a huge dark mass and a gaping mouth stuffed with more teeth than could possibly fit. Then the mouth sank, closing on something below the surface. The sea churned with the struggle, fins and flipperlike appendages thrashing up from the water over a wide area. Two very large animals were going at it.

Darla hadn't really been in danger, but had she been out a bit farther…

"That bastard!" Darla said bitterly, turning toward the beach. "He said it was―"

I looked. The man was gone.

She turned to me and wrapped her arms around her ribcage, suddenly chilled. "Weird," she muttered with a sour look. God preserve us from smirking weird bastards.