Summertide

CHAPTER 20 Summertide minus one

As the aircar lurched from the ground and struggled upward, Darya Lang felt useless. She was supercargo, added load, a dumb weight unable to help the pilot or navigator in front of her. Helpless to contribute and unable to relax, she took a new look at her fellow passengers.

This was the group who would live or die together — and soon, before the rotating dumbbell of Quake and Opal had completed one more turn.

She studied them as the car droned onward. They were a depressed and depressing sight. The situation had turned back the clock, revealing them to Lang as they must have been long years earlier, before Quake entered their lives.

Elena and Geni Carmel, sitting cheek to cheek, were little girls lost. Unable to find their way out of the wood, they waited to be saved; or, far more likely, for the monster to arrive. In front of them Hans Rebka was crouched over the controls, a small, worried boy trying to play a game that was too grown-up for him. Next to him sat Max Perry, lost in some old, unhappy dream that he would share with no one.

Only Julius Graves, to Perry’s right, failed to fit the pattern of backward-turning time. The councilor’s face when he turned to the rear of the car had never been young. Thousands of years of misery were carved in its lines and roughened surface; human history, written dark and angry and desperate.

She stared at him in bewilderment. This was not the Council member of Alliance legend. Where was the kindness, the optimism, the crackling manic energy?

She knew the answer: snuffed out, by simple exhaustion.

For the first time, Darya realized the importance of fatigue in deciding human affairs. She had noticed her own gradual loss of interest in deciphering the riddle of Quake and the Builders, and she had attributed it to her concentration on simple survival. But now she blamed the enervating poisons of weariness and tension.

The same slow drain of energy was affecting all of them. At a time when thought and prompt action could make the difference between life and death, they were mentally and physically flat. Every one — she was surely no exception — looked like a zombie. They might rise for a few seconds to full attention and alertness, as she had at the moment of takeoff, but as soon as the panic was over they would slump back to lethargy. The faces that turned to her, even with all the white dust wiped off them, were pale and drawn.

She knew how they were feeling. Her own emotions were on ice. She could not feel terror, or love, or anger. That was the most frightening development, the new indifference to living or dying. She hardly cared what happened next. Over the past few days Quake had not struck her down with its violence, but it had drained her, bled her of all human passions.

Even the two aliens had lost their usual bounce. Kallik had produced a small computer and was busy with obscure calculations of her own. J’merlia seemed lost and bewildered without Atvar H’sial. He swiveled his head around constantly, as though seeking his lost master, and kept rubbing his hand-pads obsessively over his hard-shelled body.

Perry, Graves, and Rebka were wedged into the front row, in a seat meant for two. The twins and J’merlia sat behind them, probably more comfortable than anyone else, while Darya Lang and Kallik had squeezed into an area at the rear designed only for baggage. It was tall enough for the Hymenopt, but Kallik had the reflex habit of shaking like a wet dog to remove residual powder from her short black fur. She had Darya sneezing and bending her head forward all the time to avoid contact with the car’s curved roof.

Worst of all, those in the back could see only a sliver of sky out of the forward window. Information on progress or problems had to come from the warnings and comments of those in front.

And sometimes they arrived too late.

“Sorry,” Perry called, two seconds after the car had been slewed, tilted, and dropped fifty meters by a terrific gust of wind. “That was a bad one.”

Darya Lang rubbed the back of her head and agreed. She had banged it on the hard plastic ceiling of the cargo compartment. There would be a nasty bruise — if she lived so long.

She leaned forward and cradled her head on her arms. In spite of noise and danger and sickening instability of motion, her thoughts began drifting off. Her previous life as an archeo-scientist on Sentinel Gate now seemed wholly artificial. How many times, in assembling the Lang catalog of artifacts, had she placidly written of whole expeditions, “No survivors”? It was a neat and tidy phrase, one that required no explanation and called for no thought. The element that was missing was the tragedy of the event, and the infinite subjective time that it might have taken to happen. Those “No survivors” entries suggested a clean extinction, a group of people snuffed out as quickly and impartially as a candle flame. Far more likely were situations like the present one: slow extinction of hope as the group clutched at every chance and saw each one fade.

Darya’s spirits spiraled down further. Death was rarely quick and clean and painless, unless it also came as a surprise. More often it was slow, agonizing, and degrading.

A calm voice pulled her up from tired despair.

“Get ready in the back there.” Hans Rebka sounded far from doomed and defeated. “We’re too low, and we’re too slow. At this rate we’ll run out of power and we’ll run out of time. So we have to get above the clouds. Hold on tight again. We’re in for a rough few minutes.”

Hold on to what? But Rebka’s words and his cheerful tone told her that not everyone had given up fighting.

Ashamed of herself, Darya tried to wedge more tightly into the luggage compartment as the car buffeted its way up through the uneven lower edge of the clouds. The textured glow outside was replaced by a bland, muddy light. More violent turbulence began at once, hitting from every direction and throwing the overloaded vehicle easily and randomly about the sky like a paper toy. No matter what Rebka and Perry did at the controls, the car had too much weight to maneuver well.

Darya tried to predict the motion and failed. She could not tell if they were rising, falling, or heading for a fatal downspin. Bits of the car’s ceiling fixtures seemed to come at her head from every side. Just as she felt certain that the next blow would knock her unconscious, four jointed arms took her firmly around the waist. She reached out to grasp a soft, pudgy body, clinging to it desperately as the car veered and dipped and jerked through the sky.

Kallik was pushing her, forcing her toward the wall. She buried her face in velvety fur, bent her legs up to her right, and pushed back. Braced against each other and the car’s walls, she and Kallik found a new stability of position. She shoved harder, wondering if the rocky ride would ever end.

“We’re almost there. Shield your eyes.” Rebka’s voice sounded through the cabin intercom a moment before the swoops and sickening uplifts eased. As the flight became smoother, blinding light flooded into the car, replacing the diffuse red-brown glow.

Darya heard a loud, clucking set of snorts from her right. J’merlia wriggled around in his seat to face the back of the car.

“Kallik wishes to offer her humble apologies,” he said, “for what she did. She assures you that she would never in normal circumstances dare to touch the person of a superior being. And she wonders now if you might kindly release her.”

Darya realized that she was clinging to soft black fur and crushing the Hymenopt in a bear hug, while still pushing her toward the far wall of the car. She let go at once, feeling embarrassed. The Hymenopt was far too polite to say anything, but she must recognize blind panic when she saw it.

“Tell Kallik that it was good that she took hold of me. What she did helped a lot, and no apology is needed.” And if I’m a superior being, Darya added silently, I’d hate to know what an inferior one feels like.

Embarrassed or not, Darya was beginning to feel a bit better. The flight was smoother, while the whistle of air past the car suggested that they were moving much faster. Even her own aches and fatigue had somehow eased.

“We’ve just about doubled our airspeed, and it should be smooth sailing up here.” Rebka’s voice over the intercom seemed to justify her changing mood.

“But we had a hard time coming through those clouds,” he went on. “And Commander Perry has recalculated our rate of power use. Given the distance we have to go, we’re right on the edge. We have to conserve. I’ll slow down a little, and I’m going to turn off the air-conditioning system. That will make it pretty bad here up front. Be ready to rotate seats, and make sure you drink lots of liquid.”

It had not occurred to Darya Lang that her limited view of the sky might be an advantage. But as the internal temperature of the car began to rise, she was glad to be sitting in the shielded rear. The people in the front had the same stifling air as she did, plus direct and intolerable sunlight.

The full effects of that did not hit her until it was time to play musical chairs and move around the car’s cramped interior. The change of position was a job for contortionists. When it was completed, Darya found herself in the front seat, next to the window. For the first time since takeoff, she could see more than a tiny bit of the car’s surroundings.

They were skimming along just above cloud level, riding over individual crests that caught and scattered the light like sea breakers of dazzling gold and crimson. Mandel and Amaranth were almost straight ahead, striking down at the car with a fury never felt on the cloud-protected surfaces of Opal and Quake. The two stars had grown to giant, blinding orbs in a near-black sky. Even with the car’s photo-shielding at maximum, the red and yellow spears of light thrown by the stellar partners were too bright to look at.

The perspiration ran in rivulets down Darya’s face and soaked her clothing. As she watched, the positions of Mandel and Amaranth changed in the sky. Everything was happening faster and faster. She sensed the rushing tempo of events as the twin suns and Dobelle hurried to their point of closest approach.

And they were not the only players.

Darya squinted off to the side. Gargantua was there, a pale shadow of Mandel and its dwarf companion. But that, too, would change. Soon Gargantua would be the largest object in Quake’s sky, sweeping closer than any body in the stellar system, rivaling Mandel and Amaranth with its ripping tidal forces.

She looked out and down, wondering what was going on below those boiling cloud layers. Soon they would have to descend through them, but perhaps the hidden surface beneath was already too broken to permit a landing. Or maybe the ship they sought had already vanished, swallowed up in some massive new earth fissure.

Darya turned away from the window and closed her aching eyes. The outside brightness was just too overwhelming. She could not stand the heat and searing radiation for one moment longer.

Except that she had no choice.

She looked to her left. Kallik was next to her, crouched down low to the floor. Beyond her, in the pilot’s seat, Max Perry was holding a square of opaque plastic in front of his face to give him partial shielding from the sluice of light.

“How much longer?” The question came as a feeble croak.

Darya hardly recognized her own voice. She was not sure what question she was asking. Did she mean how long until they could all change seats again? Or until they arrived at their destination? Or only until they were all dead?

It made no difference. Perry did not answer. He merely handed her a bottle of lukewarm water. She took a mouthful and made Kallik do the same. Then there was nothing to do but sit and sweat and endure, until the welcome distraction of changing seats.

Darya lost track of time. She knew that she was in and out of the torture seat at the front at least three times. It felt like weeks, until at last Julius Graves was shaking her and warning, “Get ready for turbulence. We’re going down through the clouds.”

“We’re there?” she whispered. “Let’s go down.”

She could hardly wait. No matter what happened next, she would escape the roasting torture of the two suns. She would dream of them for the rest of her life.

“No. Not there.” Graves sounded the way she felt. He was mopping perspiration from his bald head. “We’re running out of power.”

That grabbed her attention. “Where are we?”

But he had turned the other way. It was Elena Carmel, in the rear seat, who leaned forward and replied. “If the instruments are right, we’re very close. Almost to our ship.”

“How close?”

“Ten kilometers. Maybe even less. They say it all depends how much power is left to use in hovercraft mode.”

Darya said nothing more. Ten kilometers, five kilometers, what difference did it make? She couldn’t walk one kilometer, not to save her life.

But a surprise voice inside her awoke and said, Maybe only to save your life. If young, bewildered Elena Carmel can find a reserve of strength, why can’t you?

Before she could argue the point with herself, they were plunging into the clouds. And within a second there was no time for the luxury of internal debate.

Hans Rebka thought he might need the dregs of aircar power later, and he was not willing to give up any merely to cushion the ride. In its rapid descent, the car was thrown around the sky like a bobbing cork in a sea storm. But it did not last long. In less than a minute they plunged through the bottom of the cloud layers.

Everyone craned forward. Whatever they found below them, they could not go back up.

Was the starship still there? Was there a solid surface around it that they could descend to? Or had they escaped Mandel and Amaranth’s searing beams only to die in Quake’s pools of molten lava?

Darya stared, unable to answer those questions. Thick smoke blanketed the ground below. They were supposed to be above the slopes of the Pentacline Depression, but they might have been anywhere on the whole planet.

“Well,” Hans Rebka said quietly, as though talking to himself, “the good news is that we don’t have to make a decision. Look at the power meter, Max. It’s redlined. We’re going down, whether we want to or not.” He raised his voice. “Respirators on.”

Then they were floating into blue-gray smoke that swirled and eddied about the car, driven by winds so powerful that Rebka’s voice quickly came again. “We’re making a negative ground speed. I’m going to take us down as quick as I can, before we blow back all the way to the Umbilical.”

“Where’s the ship?” That was Julius Graves, sitting behind Darya in the cramped luggage compartment.

“Two kilometers ahead. We can’t see it, but I think it’s still there. I’m picking up an anomalous radar reflection. We can’t reach the outcrop where the ship was sitting, so we have to land on the valley slope. Get ready. Twenty meters altitude… fifteen… ten. Prepare for landing.”

The gusting wind suddenly died. The smoke around them thinned. Darya could see the ground off to one side of the car. It lay barren and quiet, but steam was emerging like dragon’s breath from dozens of small surface vents scattered across the downward slope of the Pentacline’s valley. The dense vegetation that Darya expected to see in the depression had gone. It was nothing but gray ash and occasional withered stems.

“One and a half kilometers.” Rebka’s voice sounded calm and far away. “Five meters on the altimeter. Power going. Looks like we’ll have to take a little walk. Three meters… two… one. Come on, you beauty. Do us proud.”

Summertide was just three hours away. The aircar touched down on the steaming slope of the Pentacline Depression, as gently and quietly as an alighting moth.