Summertide

CHAPTER 21 Three hours to Summertide

Hans Rebka was not happy, but it would be fair to say that for the past few hours he had been content.

Since his assignment to Dobelle he had been unsure of himself and his job. He had been sent to find out what was wrong with Commander Maxwell Perry and rehabilitate the man.

On paper it sounded easy. But just what was he supposed to do? He was an action man, not a psychoanalyst. Nothing in his previous career had equipped him for such a vague task.

Now things were different. At the Umbilical he had been thrown in with a helpless group — all aliens, misfits, or innocents, in his mind — and given the job of taking an overloaded, underpowered aircar halfway around Quake and a toy starship up into space, before the planet killed the lot of them.

It might be an impossible task, but at least it was a well-defined one. The rules for performance were no problem. He had learned them long ago on Teufel: you succeed, or you die trying. Until you succeed, you never relax. Until you die, you never give up.

He was tired — they were all tired — but what Darya Lang had seen as new energy was the satisfying release of a whole bundle of pent-up frustrations. It had carried him so far, and it would carry him through Summertide.

As soon as the aircar touched down, Rebka urged everyone onto the surface. It made no difference how dangerous it might be outside, the car was useless to take them any farther.

He pointed along the blistered downslope of the valley. “That’s where we have to go. The direction of the starship.” Then he shouted above rumbling thunder to Max Perry, who was staring vacantly about him. “Commander, our group was here a few days ago. Does it look familiar?”

Perry was shaking his head. “When we were here this area was vegetated. But there’s the basalt outcrop.” He pointed to a dark jutting mass of rock, forty meters high, its upper part obscured by gray smoke. “We have to get over there and climb on top of it. That’s where the ship should be.”

Rebka nodded. “Any nasty surprises in store for us?” Perry, whatever his faults, was still the expert on conditions on Quake.

“Can’t say yet. Quake is full of them.” Perry stooped to set the palm of his hand on the rocky floor. “Pretty hot, but we can walk on it. If we’re lucky, the brush fires will have burned off the plants around the bottom of the outcrop and we’ll have easier going than last time. Things look all different with the vegetation gone. And it’s hotter — a lot hotter.”

“So let’s go.” Rebka gestured them forward. The thunder was growing, and their surroundings were too loud for long conversations. “You and Graves lead. Then you two.” He pointed to the twins. “I’ll tag along last, after the others.”

He urged them on without inviting discussion. The aircar trip had been an exhausting trial by fire for everyone, but Rebka knew better than to ask if they could scramble their way over a kilometer or two of difficult terrain. He would learn what they could not do when they collapsed.

The surface had been at rest when they landed, but as Perry and Graves started forward a new spasm of seismic energy passed through the area. The ground ahead broke into longitudinal folds, rippling down the side of the valley.

“Keep going,” Rebka shouted above the grind and boom of breaking rock. “We can’t afford to stand and wait.”

Perry had halted and put his hand on Graves’s arm to stop him. He turned to shake his head at Rebka. “Can’t go yet. Earthquake confluence. Watch.”

Ground waves of different wavelength and amplitude were converging fifty paces ahead of the party. Where they met, spumes of rock and earth jetted into the dusty air. A gaping trench of unknown depth appeared, then contracted and filled a few seconds later to vanish completely. Perry watched until he was sure that the main earth movements were over, then started forward.

Rebka felt relief. Whatever Perry’s problems, the man had not lost his survival instinct. If he could hold on to that for another kilometer, his main job would be done.

They scrambled on. The ground shivered beneath their feet. Hot breaths rose from a hundred fissures in the fractured rock, and the sky above became one rolling tableau of fine ash and bright lightning. Thunder from sky and earth movement snarled and roared around them. A warm, sulfur-charged rain started to fall, steaming where it touched the tide-torn hot ground.

Rebka eyed the rest of the group speculatively from his vantage point at the rear. The Carmel twins were walking side by side, just behind Graves and Perry. After them came Darya Lang, between the two aliens and with one hand on J’merlia’s sloping thorax. Everyone was doing well. Graves, Geni Carmel, and Darya Lang were limping, and everyone was weaving with fatigue — but that was a detail.

So they needed rest. He smiled grimly to himself. Well, one way or another they would find it, in the next few hours.

The big problem was the increasing temperature. Another ten degrees, and he knew they would have to slow down or keel over with simple heat prostration. The rain showers, which should have helped, were becoming hot enough to scald exposed skin. And as the party moved lower into the Pentacline Depression, further heat increase seemed inevitable.

But they had to keep descending. If they slowed or went back up, for rest or for shelter, the forces of Sumemrtide would destroy them.

He urged them on, peering ahead as he did so to study the approach to the basalt outcrop. With no more than a few hundred meters to go, the path looked pretty easy. In another hundred paces the jumble of rocks and broken surface that were making walking so difficult would smooth out, providing a brown plain more level than anything that Rebka had seen in the Pentacline. It looked like a dried-out lake bed, the relic of a long, thin water body that had boiled dry in the past few days. They could move across it easily and fast. Beyond the narrow plain, the ground rose with an easy slope to the base of the rocky uplift on whose top they should find the ship.

The two leaders had advanced to within twenty paces of the plain. The hulking, flat-topped rock seemed close enough to touch when Max Perry paused uncertainly. While Rebka looked on and cursed, Perry leaned on a large, jagged boulder and stared thoughtfully at the way ahead.

“Get a move on, man.”

Perry shook his head, lifted his arm to halt the others, and crouched low to examine the ground. At the same moment, Elena Carmel cried out and pointed to the top of the rock outcrop.

The sky had turned black, but near-continuous lightning gave more than enough light to see by. Rebka could detect nothing where Perry had been staring, except a slight shimmer of heat haze and a loss of focus in the lake bed ahead. But beyond that blurred area, following Elena Carmel’s pointing finger to the top of the rock where the dust clouds rolled, Rebka saw something quite unmistakable: the outline of a small starship. It sat safely back from the rock edge, and it seemed undamaged. The line of ascent was an easy one. In five minutes or less they should be up there.

Elena Carmel had turned and was shouting to her sister, inaudible above the thunder. Rebka could read her lips. “The Summer Dreamboat,” she was shouting. Her face was triumphant as she went running forward, past Graves and Perry.

She was already onto the dried-mud plain and heading toward the bottom of the outcrop when Perry looked up and saw her.

He froze for a second, then uttered a high-pitched howl of warning that carried even above the thunder.

Elena turned at the sound. As she did so the crust of baked clay, less than a centimeter thick, fractured beneath her weight. Spurts of steam blew pitch-black, steaming slime into the air around her body. She cried out and raised her arms, trying to hold her balance. Under the brittle surface, the bubbling ooze offered no more resistance than hot syrup. Before anyone could move, Elena was waist-deep. She screamed in agony as boiling mud closed around her legs and hips.

“Lean forward!” Perry threw himself flat to spread his weight and started to wriggle forward onto the fragile surface.

But Elena Carmel was in too much pain to take any notice of his cry. He was too slow, and she was sinking too fast. He was still three paces away when the bubbling mud reached her neck. She gave a final and terrible scream.

Perry threw himself across the breaking crust to grab at her hair and one outstretched arm. He could reach her, but he could not support her.

She sank deeper. Far gone in burn-shock, she made no sound as the searing mud bubbled into her mouth, nose, and eyes. A moment later she was gone. The liquid surface swirled into a small whirlpool, then in less than a second became smooth again.

Perry wriggled forward again and plunged his arms to the elbows in boiling blackness. He roared in agony, groped, and found nothing.

The others in the party had stood rigid. Suddenly Geni Carmel gave a dreadful scream and began to run forward. Julius Graves dived after her, tackling and holding her at the very edge of the boiling quicksand.

“No, Geni. No! You can’t help, she’s gone.” He had her around the waist, trying to pull her toward safety. She resisted with desperate strength. It was all he could do to hold her until Rebka and Darya Lang ran forward to grab her arms.

Geni was still trying to drag herself toward the place where Elena had vanished. She pulled them to the edge of the safe area of rock. As she turned she swiveled Darya with her, forcing the other woman out onto the cracked crust. Darya’s left foot broke through and plunged in above the ankle. She screamed and sagged toward Rebka in a near-faint. He had to leave Geni to Graves while he pulled Darya clear.

Geni tried one more time to move to the open area of mud. The surface where Elena had been sucked under spouted and bubbled like escaping breath. But Perry, his face distorted with pain, had come sliding backward across the treacherous mud to the safe region of broken rocks. His hands were useless, but he stood up and used his body weight to push Geni back.

They stumbled together to safety. Geni was quieting. As the first frenzy ended she put her hands to her face and began to sob.

Rebka kept one arm around Darya Lang and surveyed the group. They were all stunned by Elena’s death, but still he had to worry about other matters. In thirty seconds, their position had gone from difficult to desperate. The air was almost unbreathable, the heat was increasing, and the surface of Quake was more and more active. The one thing they could not afford to do was slow down.

What now?

He made an unhappy assessment of their new situation. The thunder from ground and sky was a little less, but instead of eight humans and aliens, all fully mobile, they had been reduced to four able-bodied beings: himself, Graves, J’merlia, and Kallik. It was anyone’s guess how useful the two aliens would be in a crisis, but so far they had performed as well as any human.

What about the others?

Perry was in deep shock — more than just physical, if Rebka was any judge — and he was standing there like a robot. But he was tough. He could walk, and he would walk. On the other hand, he could no longer help anyone else, and without the use of his hands he would have trouble scrambling up the rock face. His arms hung loose at his sides, burned to the elbows and useless as rolls of black dough. The pain from them would be awful as soon as the first shock faded. With any luck that would be after they were all in the Summer Dreamboat.

Darya Lang would certainly need assistance. Her foot was scalded no worse than Perry’s forearms, but she was far less used to physical suffering. Already she was weeping with pain and shock. Tears were running down her grimy, dust-coated cheeks.

Finally there was Geni Carmel. She did not need physical help, but emotionally she had been destroyed. She hardly seemed to realize that the others were there, and she would find it hard to cooperate in anything at all.

Rebka made the assignments automatically. “Councilor Graves, you help Geni Carmel. I’ll assist Commander Perry if he needs it. J’merlia and Kallik, Professor Lang needs your aid. Help her, especially when we begin to climb.”

And now we’ll see just how tough Perry is, he thought. “Commander, we can’t go any farther this way. Can you suggest another route to the ship?”

Perry came to life. He shivered, stared down at his burned forearms, and lifted his right hand tentatively away from his body. He pointed to the left side of the outcrop, moving his arm as though the limb had become some alien attachment.

“Last time we were here, we came down a watercourse. It was all rocks, no muddy surface. If we can find that maybe we can follow it back up.”

“Good. You lead the way.”

As they skirted the deadly patch of boiling mud, Rebka looked up to the top of the rock. It was no more than forty meters above them, but it seemed an impossible distance. The watercourse was not steep. A fit man or woman could scramble up it in half a minute, but Perry would take that long to ascend the first few feet. And that was too slow.

Rebka moved forward from the back of the group and put his hands on Perry’s hips.

“Just keep walking. Don’t worry about falling, I’ll be here. If you need a push or a lift, tell me.”

He took one backward glance before Perry began to move. Julius Graves was coaxing Geni Carmel along, and they were doing well enough. J’merlia and Kallik had given up the idea of helping Darya Lang to walk. Instead they had seated her on Kallik’s furry back, and the Hymenopt was struggling up the incline with J’merlia pushing them from behind and encouraging Kallik with a selection of hoots and whistles.

The surface beyond the outcrop was shaking with new violence. Rebka saw the aircar that they had arrived in tilt and collapse. A pall of black smoke swallowed it up, then came creeping steadily toward them.

One thing at a time, he told himself. Don’t look back, and don’t look up.

Rebka focused all his attention on helping Max Perry. If the other man fell, they would all go with him.

They struggled on, stumbling and scrabbling over loose pebbles. There was one critical moment when Perry’s feet slipped completely from under him and he fell facedown toward the rock. He groaned as his crippled hands hit the rough surface and their burned palms split open. Rebka held him before he could slide backward. Within a few seconds they were again scrambling up the uneven path of the watercourse.

As soon as Perry came to the easy final steps, Rebka turned to see what was happening behind. Graves was wobble-legged, close to collapse, and Geni Carmel was supporting him. The other three were still halfway down and making slow progress. Rebka could hear Kallik clicking and whistling with the effort.

They would have to manage on their own. Rebka’s top priority had to be the starship. Was it in working order, and did it have power for one final flight to orbit? Perry had moved over to the Summer Dreamboat, but he was simply standing by the closed door. He raised his hands in frustration as Rebka came up to him. Without working fingers he had no way to get inside.

“Go tell the others to hurry — particularly Kallik.” Rebka jerked open the port, suddenly aware of how small the ship was. Perry had told him it was more like a toy than a starship, but the size was still a nasty shock. The interior space was not much more than that of the aircar.

He went across to study the controls. At least he would have no trouble with those, even without help from Kallik or Geni Carmel. The board was the simplest he had ever seen.

He turned on the displays. The power level was depressingly low. Suppose it took them only halfway to orbit?

He looked at the chronometer. Less than an hour to Summertide. That answered his question. It was damned if you do, damned if you don’t. As the others came squeezing into the ship, he prepared for liftoff.

Darya Lang and Geni Carmel were the last ones in.

“Close the port,” Rebka said, and turned back to the controls. He did not watch them do as he said, nor was there time for the long list of checks that should have preceded an ascent to space. Through the forward window he could see a sheet of flame running steadily across the surface toward them. In a few more seconds it would engulf the ship.

“Hold tight. I’m taking us up at three gee.”

If we’re lucky, he thought. And if we’re not… Hans Rebka applied full ascent power. The starship trembled and strained on the ground.

Nothing happened for what felt like minutes. Then, as the firestorm ran toward them, the Summer Dreamboat groaned at the seams, shivered, and lifted toward Quake’s jet-black and turbulent sky.