Summertide

CHAPTER 19 Summertide minus two

Noise meant inefficiency. So did mechanical vibration. The motors of an aircar in good shape were almost silent, and its ride was silky smooth.

Darya Lang listened to the wheezing death rattle behind her and felt the floor tremble beneath her feet. There was no doubt about it, the shaking was getting worse. Getting worse fast, noticed easily above the buffeting of the wind.

“How much farther?” She had to shout the question.

Hans Rebka did not look up from the controls, but he shook his head. “Fourteen kilometers. May be too far. Touch and go.”

They were churning along no more than a thousand meters above the surface, just high enough to escape added dust in the intake vents. The ground below was barely visible, ghostly and indistinct beneath a fine haze of swirling powder.

Lang looked higher. There was a thin vertical strand far off in front of them. She cried out, “I can see it, Hans! There’s the foot of the Stalk!” At the same moment Rebka was shouting, “No good. We’re losing lift.”

The aircar engine began to sputter and gasp. Spells of smooth flight at close to full power were followed by grinding vibration and seconds of sickening descent. They dropped into the dust layer. The silver thread of the Umbilical vanished from Darya’s view.

“Six kilometers. Four hundred meters.” Rebka had taken a last sighting before they entered the storm and was flying on instruments. “I can’t see to pick the landing site. Check your harness and make sure your mask and respirator are tight. We may be heading for a rough one.”

The aircars were sturdy craft. They had been designed to fly in extreme conditions; but one thing they could not guarantee was a soft landing with an engine worn to scrap by corundum dust. The final gasp of power came when the instruments showed an altitude of twenty meters. Rebka changed flap setting to avoid a stall and brought them in at twice the usual landing speed. At the last moment he shouted to Darya to hold tight. They smacked down hard, bounced clear over a rock outcrop big enough to remove the car’s belly, and slithered to a stop.

“That’s it!” Rebka had hit the release for his own harness and was reaching over to help Darya while they were still moving. He took a last look at the microwave sensor and turned to give her a grin of triumph. “Come on, I’ve got the bearing. The foot of the Umbilical’s less than half a kilometer ahead.”

Ground conditions were much better than Darya had expected. Visibility was admittedly down to a few tens of meters, and wind sounds were punctuated by the boom of distant explosions. But the ground was calm, flat, and navigable, except where a row of house-sized boulders jutted up like broken teeth. She followed Rebka between two of them, thinking how lucky they were that the engine had failed when it did, and not a few seconds later. They would have flown on and smashed straight into those rocks.

She was still not convinced that Quake was as dangerous as Perry claimed, and she had a lingering desire to stay and explore. But having flown so far to reach the Umbilical, it made sense to use it. She peered ahead. Surely they had walked at least half a kilometer.

Not looking where she was going, she slipped on a thick layer of powder, slick and treacherous as oil. Rebka in front of her fell down in a cloud of dust, rolled over, and staggered to his feet. Instead of shuffling onward he halted and pointed straight up.

They had emerged into a region shielded from the wind. Visibility had improved by a factor of ten. A circular disk, blurred in outline by high-level windblown dust, hung above them in the sky. As they watched, it lifted higher and shrank a fraction in apparent size.

His cry coincided with her understanding of what she was seeing.

“The foot of the Stalk. It’s going up.”

“But we got here earlier than we expected.”

“I know. It shouldn’t be doing that. It’s rising way ahead of time!”

The Umbilical was fading as they watched, its club-shaped bottom end receding into the clouds and blown dust. Around its rising base stood the apron supporting the aircars. She knew their size and tried to judge the height. Already the lower end must have risen almost a kilometer above the surface.

She turned to Rebka. “Hans, our car! If we can get back there and take it up—”

“Won’t work.” He moved to put his head close to hers. “Even if we could get the car into the air, there’s nowhere to land on the base of the Umbilical. I’m sorry, Darya. This mess is my fault. I brought us, and now we’re stuck here. We’ve had it.”

He was speaking louder than necessary — as if to make nonsense of his words the wind had dropped completely. The dust in the air began to thin, the surface was quiet, and Darya could see right back to their aircar. Above them the foot of the Umbilical was visible, hovering tantalizingly close.

It was the worst possible time for such a thought, but Darya decided that a little anguish in Hans Rebka’s voice made him nicer than ever. Self-confidence and competence were virtues — but so was mutual dependence.

She pointed. “It’s not going any higher, Hans. Who’s controlling it?”

“Maybe nobody.” He was no longer shouting. “The control sequences can be preset. But it could be Perry and Graves — they may have taken it up just to get clear of the surface. Maybe they’re holding it there, waiting to see if we show up. But we can’t reach them!”

“We’ll have to try.” While he was still staring at the Umbilical, Darya was already slipping and sliding across the layer of talc, heading toward the aircar. “Come on. If we can make our car hover next to the apron on the bottom of the Stalk, maybe we can jump across onto it.”

She listened in amazement to her own words. Was it really Darya Lang proposing that? Back on Sentinel Gate she had avoided all heights, telling friends and family with a shiver that she was terrified by them. Apparently everything in the universe was relative. At the moment, the prospect of leaping from a moving and malfunctioning aircar to an Umbilical, a kilometer or more above the ground, did not faze her at all.

Hans Rebka was following, but only to grip her arm and swing her around. “Wait a minute, Darya. Look.”

Another aircar was cruising in from the northwest, just below cloud level. It was in a descent pattern, until its pilot apparently saw the Umbilical. Then the car banked and started to ascend in a slow and labored spiral.

But the foot of the Stalk had begun to rise again, and more rapidly. The two on the ground gazed up helplessly as the Umbilical gradually vanished into the clouds, the pursuing aircar laboring upward after it. As they both disappeared it seemed that the car was losing the race.

Darya turned to Hans Rebka. “But if Graves and Perry are up there on the Stalk, who’s in the aircar?”

“It must be Max Perry. I was wrong about him and Graves being on the Umbilical. The Stalk ascent is performing its automatic Summertide retraction, but it’s taking place ahead of time. It has been reprogrammed.” He shook his head. “But that doesn’t make sense, either. Perry is the only one who knows the Umbilical control codes.” He saw her stricken look. “Isn’t he?”

“No.” She stared away and would not look at him. “Atvar H’sial knew them. All of them. I told you, that’s how we got over from Opal. This is all my fault. I should never have agreed to work with her. Now we’re stuck here, and she’s safe up there on the Umbilical.”

Hans Rebka glared up at the overcast. “I’ll bet she is. That damned Cecropian. I wondered as we were flying here if she was still on Quake. And J’merlia will be with her. So the aircar up there has to be Perry and Graves.”

“Or maybe the Carmel twins.”

“No. They didn’t have access to an aircar. Anyway, we can stop speculating. Here it comes again.”

The car was spiraling down from the clouds, searching for a good place to touch down. Darya ran toward it and waved her arms frantically. The pilot saw her and carefully banked closer. The aircar flopped to a heavy landing no more than fifty meters away, creating a minor dust storm with its jets of downward air.

The car door slid open. Hans Rebka and Darya Lang watched in astonishment as two identical and identically dressed humans climbed out, followed by a Lo’tfian and a dusty-looking Hymenopt. Last of all came Julius Graves and Max Perry.

“We thought you were dead!” “We thought you were on the Umbilical!” “Where did you find them?” “How did you get here?”

Perry, Rebka, Lang, and Graves were all speaking at once, standing in a tight inward-facing group by the aircar door. The two aliens and the Carmel twins stood apart, staring around them at their desolate surroundings.

“No active radio beacons — we listened all the way here,” Graves went on. He stared at Darya Lang. “Do you have any idea what has happened to Atvar H’sial?”

“I’m not sure, but we think she’s probably up there on the Umbilical.”

“No, she isn’t. No one is. We couldn’t catch it, but we could tell that no capsules are in use. And it’s out of aircar altitude range now. But what about you? I thought Atvar H’sial left you behind on the surface.”

“She did. Hans Rebka rescued me. But Atvar H’sial must have intended to come back for me, because she gave me supplies and a signal beacon.”

“No, she didn’t. That was J’merlia’s doing.” Graves gestured at the Lo’tfian. “He says that Atvar H’sial did not forbid him to help you, and so he did. He was very worried about your safety when they left you behind. He said that you seemed poorly equipped for survival on Quake. But then he thought you must be dead, anyway, because when we listened there was no sign of your beacon. I feel sure that Atvar H’sial didn’t intend to go back for you. You were supposed to die on Quake.”

“But where is Atvar H’sial now?” Rebka asked.

“We just asked you that question,” Perry said. “She must be with Louis Nenda.”

“Nenda!”

“He came here on his own ship,” Graves said. “And did you know he can talk to a Cecropian directly? Kallik told J’merlia that Nenda had a Zardalu augment that lets him use pheromonal communication. He and Atvar H’sial left J’merlia and Kallik behind, and went off somewhere by themselves.”

“We think they came here. Atvar H’sial had help. Somehow she obtained the control sequences, and she must have set the Umbilical for earlier retraction from the surface.” Hans Rebka gave Darya Lang a “say-no-more” look and went on. “She wants us all dead, stranded on quake at Summertide. That’s why she left J’merlia and Kallik behind — she didn’t want witnesses.”

“But we heard their distress signal and picked them up.” Perry nodded to the silent aliens. “I think Nenda and H’sial may have intended to come back for them, but they would have been too late. The landing area was molten lava. We had to keep J’merlia and Kallik with us.”

“But if Nenda made it back to his own ship,” Graves said, “he and Atvar H’sial can still leave the planet.”

“Which is more than we can do.” After his earlier depression, Rebka had bounced back and was full of energy. “The Umbilical is gone, and it won’t be back until after Summertide. We only have one aircar between the lot of us — ours died as we arrived here. And they can’t achieve orbit anyway, so they’re no answer. Commander Perry, we need a plan for survival here. We’re stuck on Quake until the Umbilical returns.”

“Can I say it one more time? That’s impossible.” Perry spoke softly, but his grim tone carried more weight than a bellow. “I’ve been trying to impress one fact on you since the day you all arrived at Dobelle: Humans can’t survive Summertide on the surface of Quake. Not even the usual Summertide. Certainly not this Summertide. No matter what you think, there’s no ‘survival plan’ that can save us if we stay on Quake. It’s still pretty quiet here, and I don’t know why. But it can’t last much longer. Anyone on the surface of Quake at Summertide will die.”

As though the planet had heard him, a distant roar and groan of upthrust earth and grinding rocks followed his words. Moments later a series of rippling shocks blurred the air and shook the ground beneath their feet. Everyone stared around, then instinctively headed for the inside of the aircar and an illusion of safety.

Darya Lang, the last one in, surveyed the seven who had preceded her.

It was not a promising group for last-ditch survival schemes. The two Carmel sisters had the look of people already defeated and broken. They had been through too much on Quake; from this point on they would act only as they were directed. Graves and Perry were filthy and battered, clothes torn and rumpled and covered with grime and dust and sweat. They both had bloody and inflamed scratches on their calves, and Graves had another set of scabby wounds along the top of his bald head. Worse than that, he was acting much too cheerful, grinning around him as though all his own troubles were over. Maybe they were. If anyone could save them, it would be Max Perry and not Julius Graves. But after Perry’s gloomy prediction, he had returned to a brooding, introverted silence, seeing something that was invisible to everyone else.

J’merlia and Kallik seemed fairly normal — but only because Darya did not know how to read in their alien bodies the signs of stress and injury. J’merlia was meticulously removing white dust from his legs, using the soft pads of his forelimbs. He seemed little worried by anything except personal hygiene. Kallik, after a quick shiver along her body that threw a generous layer of powder away from her and produced protests from the rest of the aircar’s occupants, was stretching up to full height and staring bright-eyed at everything. If anyone was still optimistic, maybe it was the little Hymenopt. Unfortunately, only J’merlia could communicate with her.

Darya looked at Hans Rebka. He was obviously exhausted, but he was still their best hope. He had deep red lines on his face, scored by his mask and respirator, and there were owlish pale circles of dust around his eyes. But when he caught her look he managed a grin and a wink.

Darya squeezed in and had just enough room to slide the door closed. She had never expected to see so many beings, human or alien, in one small aircar. The official capacity was four people. The Carmel twins had managed to fit into one seat, but J’merlia was crouched on the floor where he could see or hear little, and Darya Lang and Max Perry had been left standing.

“What’s the time?” Rebka asked unexpectedly. “I mean, how many hours to Summertide?”

“Fifteen.” Perry’s voice was expressionless.

“So what’s next? We can’t just sit here and wait to die. Anything’s easier than that. Let’s look at our options. We can’t reach the Umbilical, even if it goes no higher. And there’s no place on Quake that we can go to be safe. Suppose we fly as high as we can and ride it out in this car?”

Kallik gave a series of whistling snorts that sounded to Darya Lang very like derision, while Perry roused himself from his reverie and shook his head. “I went through all those ideas, long ago,” he said gloomily. “We’re down to an eight-hour power supply for the aircar, and that’s with normal load. If we get off the ground — it’s not clear that we can, with so many on board — we’ll be down again before Summertide Maximum.”

“Suppose we sit here and wait until four or five hours before Summertide,” Rebka suggested. “And then take off? We’d be clear of the surface during the worst time.”

“Sorry. That won’t work, either.” Perry glared at Kallik, who was bobbing up and down to an accompaniment of clicks and whistles. “We’d never manage to stay in the air. The volcanoes and earthquakes turn the whole atmosphere into one mass of turbulence.” He turned to the Lo’tfian. “J’merlia, tell Kallik to keep quiet. It’s hard enough to think without that noise.”

The Hymenopt bobbed even higher and whistled, “Sh-sh-sheep.”

“Kallik asks me to point out,” J’merlia said, “with great respect, you are all forgetting the ship.”

“Louis Nenda’s ship?” Rebka asked. “The one that Kallik came in? We don’t know where it is. Anyway, Nenda and Atvar H’sial will have taken it.”

Kallik let loose a louder series of whistles and wriggled her body in anguish.

“No, no. Kallik says humbly, she is talking about the Summer Dreamboat, the ship that the Carmel twins came in to Quake. We know exactly where that is.”

“But its drive is exhausted,” Perry said. “Remember, Kallik looked at it when we first found it.”

“One moment, please.” J’merlia wriggled his way past Julius Graves and the Carmel twins, until he was crouched close to the Hymenopt. The two of them grunted and whistled at each other for half a minute. Finally J’merlia bobbed his head and straightened up.

“Kallik apologizes to everyone for her extreme stupidity, but she did not make herself sufficiently clear when she examined the ship. The power for the Bose Drive is certainly exhausted, and the ship cannot be used for star travel. But there could be just enough power for one local journey — maybe for one jump to orbit.”

Rebka was maneuvering past Julius Graves to the pilot’s seat before J’merlia had finished speaking. “How far to that starship, and where is it?” He was examining the car’s status board.

“Seven thousand kilometers, on a great circle path to the Pentacline Depression.” Perry had emerged from his gloom and was pushing past the Carmel twins to join Rebka. “But this close to Summertide we can expect a sidewind all the way, strong and getting worse. That will knock at least a thousand off our range.”

“So there’s no margin.” Rebka was doing a quick calculation. “We have enough power for about eight thousand, but not if we try for full speed. And if we slow down, we’ll be flying closer to Summertide, and conditions will be worse.”

“It is our best chance.” Graves spoke for the first time since entering the aircar. “But can we get off the ground with this much load? We had a hard time getting here, and that was with two people less.”

“And can we stay in the air, so close to Summertide?” Perry added. “The winds will be incredible.”

“And even if Kallik is right,” Graves said, “and there is a little power still in the starship, can the Summer Dreamboat make it to orbit?”

But Rebka was already starting the engine. “It’s not our best chance, Councilor,” he said as the downjets blew a cloud of white dust up to cover the windows. “It’s our only chance. What do you want, a written guarantee? Get set and hold your breath. Unless someone has a better idea in the next five seconds, I’m going to push this car to the limit. Hold tight, and let’s hope the engine wants to cooperate.”