The Spheres of Heaven

32: ESCAPE TO NOWHERE

It was possible to sleep in a space suit; the manufacturers even claimed comfort in repose, asserting that the universal flexible joints and air cushions made their suit as relaxing as any bed.

Perhaps they were right — in free fall, where thermal balance was perfect and contact with walls or floor was gentle and infrequent; but for someone on a planetary surface, on a rock-hard floor sloshing in icy water that seemed every few minutes to become a little deeper and colder …

Chrissie switched on the tiny visor display and looked at the time. Half the night was gone, which was good; but also bad, because it meant that dawn still lay half a night away. She activated the shielded spotlight in her helmet and used it to stare enviously at Tarbush. He lay flat on his back, helmet open and snoring softly. Big ugly bruiser. It was tempting to wake him up, just to tell him how lucky he was.

She turned off the light, lay back, and stared into the darkness. Even the glitter of the ceiling had faded to nothing. The creatures beyond the inner wall had ceased their clatter and chatter. That at least was welcome. Except that when morning came they would waken, and the horrors would start all over again. The jungle of Limbo, which only a day ago had been filled with the alarms of a dangerous unknown, now felt like a sanctuary. Given a chance to escape from this building, Chrissie would fly to it in a bare moment. Up, outside, through the open gate of the fence …

Pure wishful thinking. She and Tarbush had poked and pried and hammered for three hours. The walls vibrated and boomed like a giant drum, but they remained impenetrable and they gave not a millimeter. They were sounding now, a low hum that rose and fell in pitch like a mournful siren. It was a rising wind, calling aloud as it swirled around the outside of the building. Back on Earth, in a childhood that seemed like a forgotten dream, she had always loved the sound of the surface wind. It soothed and calmed and sustained her.

Not tonight, though. Now she felt as pent and chained and restless as a trapped wild beast. Now the strengthening wind was finding its way into the building’s narrow air ducts, where it sobbed and wailed and cried as if it were a trapped animal itself.

She heard another noise, a low mmm — mmm — mmm. This one was closer. She concentrated, and at last realized that it was Tarbush muttering to himself in his sleep. Dreaming. Pleasant dreams, probably. He was far too placid in temperament for nightmares. Damn the man. He would sleep through Armageddon. How come they got along so well? The attraction of opposites? People had a phrase for everything.

The muttering stopped. Chrissie heard movement next to her and opened her eyes. Tarbush was awake. His helmet spotlight was on, and he was sitting up. Chrissie said, “What’s wrong?” and sat up herself.

“Listen.” He turned his head from side to side. “Where’s it coming from? It woke me up.”

“It’s the wind outside the building. I think another storm is on the way.”

“Not that. Higher pitched.”

“I don’t hear it.”

“You’re not tuned in the way that I am. Shh.” He held his hand up to silence her. “There. That.”

Chrissie heard all the same noises as before. “What?”

“It’s Scruffy. Whining. Can’t you hear her? But where is she?”

The high-pitched keening? Was that what he meant? “It’s coming from an air duct. I heard it when you were asleep.”

“You should have woken me. Which duct?” He was on his feet, moving to peer into the pipe from which they had cut the coarse covering mesh. “She’s not in here. It must be the other one.”

He went splashing away into the darkness, his progress marked by the bobbing beam of light from his helmet. “Damn.” She heard him grumbling to himself. “Covered with a filter. Have to cut it. Hold on, girl.” A remark not addressed to Chrissie. The beam of light steadied. A few seconds of silence, then, “Come on, sweetheart. Easy goes. You don’t want to be on the floor, you know how you hate getting your feet wet.”

Tarbush sloshed his way back toward Chrissie. She shone her own helmet light, and saw the ferret nestled against his chest. “Didn’t I tell you Deb and Danny would find us?” he said. “I’m sure they sent Scruffy here. She followed my scent as far as she could, then looked for another way to reach me. Isn’t that great?” He sat down, sending a surge of cold water over Chrissie.

She wiped her wet face. “Tarb, my dear, I hate to spoil your fun and your reunion, but we don’t really need Scruffy inside with us. We need ourselves outside with her. If Friday Indigo or the Malacostracans find her they’re more likely to kill her than appreciate her. Tell her to go back the way she came. Then she can lead the others to us.”

“All in good time.” He was fiddling with Scruffy’s collar. “Here we are. I thought there would be one.”

“Would be what?”

“A message from Deb and Danny. Hmm.” He had removed from the collar a broad silver ring a couple of inches across. He inspected it in the light of his helmet lamp. “Doesn’t look like a message. What is it?”

“Let’s have a peek. Maybe the ring opens up.” Chrissie held it close to her nose. “It’s from Deb all right — see the little entwined DB on the side? But I don’t think it can be a message. It’s a — I think—” There was a soft click. “The outside opens up. Not a message, though. A reel of twine? But this is so thin — you can only see it from really close up when the light is right. Oh!”

“What?” Tarbush craned forward.

“It’s a monofilament strand. Deb used one of these once to cut the head off a man who was trying to rape and kill her.”

“I remember. But why send this to us? If she knew we were in trouble, a gun or a batch of explosives would be more useful.”

“She had to send something small. Something that Scruffy could carry. She tried to give us a weapon, and she has. The problem is, we don’t know how to use it the way she would. And there’s hordes of Malacostracans, we could never take on all of them.” Chrissie was twisting the ring, which suddenly split in two. The thread, almost too fine to see, stretched between two matching circlets of silver. Chrissie took one ring carefully in each gloved hand and spread her arms.

“How long a length do you have?” Tarbush held Scruffy firmly, making sure that the ferret could not get near the danger zone between the two silver rings.

“I don’t know. But the thread is ratcheted inside the rings. I can make it longer or shorter, as I want. Hold something out to me — something we don’t need.”

“I’ll have to put Scruffy down. Do we want to keep her here?”

“I told you, we should let her go.”

“Then hold on a minute.” Tarbush stood and walked over to the air duct. “Go on, Scruff. Find Deb Bisson and Danny Casement.” The ferret hesitated, reluctant to enter the dark, narrow passage. “I said, go on. You found us, that was your job. It’s not safe here for you.”

He held the animal forward again toward the duct. She nuzzled his hand, then vanished in a sudden blur of brown fur.

“Hope she’ll be all right,” Tarbush said as he splashed back toward Chrissie. “Listen to that wind! It’s not nice out there.”

“Tarb, it’s not nice in here.” While he had been gone, Chrissie had removed the compass from the sleeve of her suit. The instrument had provided nothing but nonsense readings since their arrival on Limbo, and now she balanced it on the top of her boot and brought the silver rings carefully down, one held in each hand, so that the thread lay across the compass.

“Careful!” Tarbush said. “Don’t ruin your suit, you may need it again.”

“I know that.” Chrissie bent forward. All her attention was concentrated on the filament, thinner than gossamer, that spanned the distance between the rings. She was exerting hardly any pressure, but the thread was sinking effortlessly through the hardened plastic and metal of the compass. When she paused and delicately lifted the rings, the compass fell into two neat halves.

“Now I’ve got the feel of it. The question is, will the monofilament do the same thing to the wall?”

“Even if it can, how does that do us any good?” Tarbush picked up the halves of the compass. “To cut something apart, you have to place the rings on both sides of it. We’re inside the wall.”

“So we have to be tricky.” Chrissie stood up and went across to the closer of the ventilators. “Before I waste any time, let’s see if there’s any point in even trying.” She reached far inside the duct, her hand still holding its silver ring. She brought the other hand around in a semicircle, so that the monofilament met and cut into the perimeter of the duct. A crescent slice, carved from around the wall, silently slid free and splashed into the dark water at her feet.

“Principle established,” Chrissie said softly. “This will cut anything. Now for the tricky bit. I have to widen the hole more and more, and hope I can get one hand all the way to the outside.”

“Chrissie, let me do it.” Tarbush held out his hand. “My arm’s longer than yours, and stronger. I can reach outside easily.”

“You could — if you could get that great ham fist into the duct at all. Which you can’t. Stand clear, sweetheart. Keep your light focused on where I’m cutting. I don’t want to start slicing pieces off my own arm.”

She was moving one hand in a wider arc, excising from the wall a circular cone half a meter across. As it came free, Tarbush lifted it clear. “Hm. This is warm ,” he said. “That thing you have isn’t just a monofilament. I wondered how it could cut so easily. There must be nanos inside the thread, freeing molecular bonds.”

“Deb specializes in tricky weapons. But now for the hardest part.” Chrissie had her arm in the enlarged hole up to the shoulder. “I can reach all the way through, but I have to enlarge the duct at the outside edge because unless I do that we have nothing useful. I’m going to work one hand outside, hold the ring against the outer wall, then slide both hands in unison to slice a cylindrical section. Don’t breathe.”

“I’m not sure it’s necessary to go to all that trouble.” Tarbush had been examining the conical wedge removed from the wall, and now he moved forward.

“We want to get out, don’t we?” Chrissie, her hands encumbered with the rings, could not easily push at him. She said sharply, “Get your hand out of the way. If you stand like that you’ll lose some fingers.”

“No. Back off, Chrissie. I need to try something.”

“Tarb!” But he was dangerously close to the monofilament, and she was forced to pull her hands clear. “What are you playing at?”

“Just watch. We haven’t used my strongman act for years, but let’s see how it plays on Limbo.” He stood in front of the ventilator pipe, took a deep breath, and punched his fist deep into the expanded hole that she had made. Chrissie heard nothing, but she saw a cloud of powder fly out around his arm.

“What did you do?”

Tarbush was pushing his shoulder and then his head into the hole. “Take a look at the piece you cut out.” He was grunting at some great effort, interspersing his words with gasps. “Push your finger in it — you can, it’s soft as cream cheese. This whole building must have an — integrated structure. Very strong when it’s complete, forms a single unit, but if any part is — destroyed — the rest is ready to crumble. We’re lucky that Deb’s — monofilament cutter didn’t bring — the whole place down on top of us. But we have to move fast — it’s self-repairing, and it’s starting to adjust. Going to be touch and go. One more push — hah! — I’m through! My arm’s outside. Now for the big push. Look out back there.”

He emerged from the hole, coated in gray powder and coughing and choking. “Should have closed my suit — up my nose — going to sneeze.”

He did, in a vast explosion of air loud enough to hear above the sounds of the storm. Then: “Follow me! Close your suit. It’s a mess outside.”

A mess inside, too. Chrissie imagined that she could see the room starting to sag and melt around her. She heard sounds — not the storm — from beyond the wall to the inner chamber. She closed her helmet and followed Tarbush. His head and torso had vanished, and his wriggling legs and kicking feet sent back prodigious clouds of disintegrated wall. The hole, barely wide enough for him, should have been easier for her. It wasn’t. Already it was starting to seal. She snaked through, fast as she could, and felt the closing wall begin to squeeze tighter. She gave a desperate kick and plunged headfirst forward. Her helmet cracked against a hard, slick surface.

“No time for acrobatics.” Tarbush was lifting her easily, setting her on her feet, shouting in her ear. “Can you stand up?”

Chrissie was about to shout back “Of course I can!” when the wind caught her. Inside the building she had never dreamed that it would be so strong. She felt herself sliding away sideways, down a wet and slippery incline. Only Tarbush’s invisible grip on her arm saved her from being blown away.

While she stood braced against him, the darkness was suddenly dispelled by strong light. She turned, and saw a green globe of luminescence drifting across the sky. Tarbush shouted, “They’ve got us,” and pulled her close. The globe lengthened to become a tall cylinder, a vortex column that stretched toward earth and sky. When it touched the ground it vanished. Chrissie felt her skin prickle.

“Not the aliens,” she screamed at Tarbush. “Some local sort of electrical activity caused by the storm. But the wind!” She could feel her feet slipping. “I can’t hold — it’s too strong.”

“Let yourself go. We can’t travel upwind, but if we can reach the forest—”

He released his hold. Chrissie went slithering and skating away into the darkness. She could see nothing. She felt nothing, too, until with a teeth-loosing jolt she hit the boundary fence. A moment later, Tarbush crashed into the mesh wall a few feet to her left.

“Damnation!” His howl of rage carried over the wind. “We have to try to drag ourselves around to the gate — but which way? I have no idea.”

“It may be guarded anyway.” Chrissie lay spreadeagled on the fence. “Can you shine your helmet light over here? I ought to have turned mine on before I started.”

“Wait a second.” After a moment’s silence, he shouted back. “The damn thing’s not working. I hit the fence face first. But if—”

Before he could finish, another ball of light began to form behind them. Tarbush turned, and saw every building of the Malacostracan encampment glowing with its own halo of electrical discharge. The area around the buildings was — thank God — deserted. While the globe was extending toward earth and sky, he turned back to Chrissie and realized what she was doing. Pinned in place by the wind, she had taken a short length of the monofilament thread and was stretching out to slice through the fence wires that she could reach. As she cut further, the section she lay against began to sag under her weight. In half a minute the left-hand side gaped open.

“Go on.” She inclined her head. “Through.”

“What about you?”

“Go!”

Tarbush obeyed her cry. As he passed through the hole in the fence he grabbed at the cut edge. It opened farther under his weight.

“You now!” he shouted, but she was already through and sailing past him. The bright circlet of the monofilament ring glittered with green light and spun away from her hand. He made an instinctive grab and missed. Good thing, too. The invisible thread could easily have severed his forearm. Forget it. Deb surely had more, and the little ring would be hard to find even in calm conditions.

As the wind caught him from behind and the green light vanished he ducked his head forward and followed Chrissie. He had little choice. Although it was no longer raining, trying to walk on the slick surface was like skating on ice. He managed to keep his feet, but he went wherever the wind pushed him.

Toward the forest, or away across many bare kilometers of rock? He could not tell where he was going, until something grabbed him at knee-level and tipped him over. He sprawled headlong forward into a tangle of tight-knit bushes. His visor was still open, and thorny twigs scratched his nose and mouth.

“Chrissie?” He shouted as loudly as he could.

“Right here.”

He could see nothing. He closed his helmet and began to crawl blindly in the direction of her voice. The suit protected his body, but the vegetation resisted his progress like something alive. While he was still struggling forward a faint light shone ahead. The lamp in Chrissie’s helmet? She had managed to get it working; but it was moving away from him.

“Stay there! I’m coming.”

“I can’t. I have to keep going. Follow me.”

As he came closer he understood why. Chrissie had been blown into a thin stand of stalky reeds, and they were not close-grown enough to provide shelter from the wind. She was tunneling on, deeper into a denser thicket. He flattened as low to the ground as he could and butted his way along until he was at her heels. He grabbed her legs and inched forward until his head was next to hers.

“What now?” For the first time since they left the building he didn’t have to shout.

“We have to find our way back to the camp. I’m sure Deb and Danny are wondering what happened to us.”

“We can’t go anywhere while this storm lasts. But neither can they. We’re all stuck until the wind dies down.”

“What about the Malacostracans?”

Tarbush sat up for a moment, felt the thresh of the wind across the top of the plants, and lay back down. “If they can move around and find us on such a bad night, they’re entitled to do what they like with us.”

Chrissie opened her visor. “At least it’s not raining. If we can’t go anywhere I’m going to try to sleep. I didn’t get any sleep earlier — not like some people.”

She was looking for a response, maybe an argument. But he said only, “You do that. You need your rest. I won’t talk any more, but I’ll stay awake and keep watch.”

Tarbush settled in at her side, one arm around Chrissie and his face close to hers. Within ten minutes she knew from his steady breathing that he was asleep. It was tempting to nudge him, but she didn’t.

She lay, listening to the wind. Was it her imagination, or had it eased, just a little? The canopy of plants above her head became faintly visible. Another ball of lightning must be drifting through the atmosphere of Limbo. This one was far off, and Chrissie watched and waited until the moment of its sudden extinction.

She closed her eyes. If Tarbush could sleep, why couldn’t she? She deliberately turned her mind back two months, to a time when the embargo against stellar travel seemed permanent, with no chance of ever meeting again the members of the old team; to the time when she and Tarbush had toured with her bag of magic tricks and his animal-talking act, to amaze the colonists of the wide-scattered mini-worlds of the Oort Cloud; to the time — God, why didn’t a person know when she was well off? — the time when a “bad night” meant only a poor audience for the second performance of your magic act, and not being pursued by malevolent aliens across the scarred surface of a lost world in an alternate universe.

Chrissie felt herself being shaken, and tried to curl into a ball.

“Sorry, love, but we can’t have that.” It was Tarbush, shaking her again. “The early bird catches the worm, and we don’t want the early Malacostracan catching us.”

Chrissie yawned, stretched, and sat up. Light, pale and yellow, streamed in horizontally through the leafy roof above her head. The broad fronds were moving, but gently. She heard no sound of wind.

“About half an hour after dawn,” Tarbush said. “The wind died down about the same time. I would have let you sleep, but I think we have to get moving. So far as I can tell from looking at the layout of the Malacostracan buildings, our camp lies in that direction.” He pointed through the undergrowth. “We have to get to it. Question is, do we go back to the edge of the cleared area, where travel is easy, but we risk being seen; or do we try to tunnel straight through the plants? We know from yesterday that we might come across various sorts of nasties.”

Chrissie was finally awake. “I don’t like either option. Which way is the sea?”

“If I’m right about where our camp is, and I remember correctly what we did yesterday, I’d say it’s that way.” He swiveled his body through forty-five degrees.

“I think that’s the way we ought to go. Once we reach the shore we can follow our own trail inland. I can’t imagine any reason why Deb and Danny would move the camp, but if they did they’d surely find a way to tell us where they were going. And if that doesn’t work, we can simply close our suits, go into the sea, and walk back to the Hero’s Return the way we came.”

Tarbush started crawling without another word. He went first and didn’t complain, but Chrissie could tell from their miserable rate of progress that he was having problems. It took half an hour to cut and slash and scramble less than thirty meters. She was ready to suggest that they turn around and try a different route when he paused and said, “There’s something funny ahead, a sort of long crack in the ground. Stay well back while I take a look at it.”

He fought his way slowly forward another few meters, then abruptly vanished. Chrissie waited nervously, until suddenly just his head popped into view.

“Good news.” He gestured to her to join him. “It’s a streambed, almost dry but with a trickle of water in it. All we have to do is follow the direction of flow and we’ll reach the sea.”

Chrissie eased herself down the steep bank to join him at the bottom. The bed of the stream was a mixture of mud and gravel, dry enough to provide a firm walking surface. The plants on the stream banks grew right across, so that the channel would be invisible to any overhead surveillance, and they were high enough to allow even Tarbush to stand almost upright.

A slow and arduous crawl became a slightly uneven walk. In just a few minutes they were at the place where the rock fracture along which the stream ran came out onto the shore. Chrissie heard a loud and changing roar ahead of them. Tarbush, walking slightly in front, paused and peered out from the sheltering fringe of plants.

“The wind has died, but I don’t think the sea knows it yet. Look at that.”

Chrissie, moving to his side, saw the origin of the unknown roar. The surface of the sea was covered in foam and gigantic white-capped breakers that rolled in endless array to batter the shore. The shore itself was diminished, its fifty meters of shingle reduced to a narrow strand between turbulent water and tangled vegetation. Nowhere, on sea or shore, was any sign of animal life.

“Well, with waves like that we can’t go back to the Hero’s Return any time soon,” Tarbush said. “We’d be smashed to pieces before we got beyond the line of breakers. What now?”

Chrissie pointed to the left. “That way. I wasn’t paying particular attention, but if we had landed farther to the right surely we’d all have noticed that reddish hump.”

Tarbush nodded. “I think so. Left it is, then.”

They set off along the strip of shore, alert and ready to jump for the cover of the shoreline plants if anything moved. Chrissie glanced out to sea. If she had her sense of direction right, the Link entry point that had brought their ship to Limbo lay in that direction. She could see no sign of it. That seemed to confirm what the Malacostracans had said, that the Link opened and closed under their control. So how could humans or Stellar Group members possibly escape?

She was staring to the east, and the cloudy sky in that direction glowed a lurid and unpleasant yellow. Weather on Limbo was too alien and unfamiliar for her to read its indicators. Was the storm over, or did the present calm represent no more than a lull? It was tempting to use her suit communicator and try to reach Deb, Danny, or the ship, but the rule of radio silence applied more than ever now. The Malacostracans had advanced technology, different from anything Chrissie had ever seen or heard about.

At her side, Tarbush halted. He was on the shoreward side, scanning the plants there while she looked out to sea.

“This looks like the place where we went into the jungle when we first came ashore. If it isn’t, somebody else has flattened the plants.” He had turned, to walk carefully into the waist-high growth. “Yes, I’m sure of it.”

“Should we call to them?” Chrissie was stepping close behind. “You know Deb. If we come out on them unexpectedly she might blow us away.”

“What about the Malacostracans?” But it was Tarbush who raised his voice as he moved forward. “Deb? Danny? It’s us, Tarb and Chrissie. We’re fine, and we’re alone.”

In the past few minutes the wind had died completely. His voice was swallowed up by the silent sea of vegetation ahead.

“Deb? Danny?” And to Chrissie, in lower tones, “I don’t like this. We’re not far from where we left our supplies. They’d answer if they could.”

“Do you think the Malacostracans have taken over the camp?”

“I don’t know. But maybe we should have kept quiet. You stay here.”

“While you get caught and leave me on my own? Forget it.”

They advanced together through an unnatural morning stillness, following the faint line of the onshore party’s advance. When they came to the little cleared area surrounded by waist-high ferns, Chrissie bent to examine the supply cases.

“These look the way we left them. Except that somebody took something out of this one.”

“No signs of a struggle, no signs that the Malacostracans have been here.” Tarbush was prowling the perimeter of the camp site. “It looks as though Deb and Danny just upped and left us behind. Not very nice of them.”

“Where would they go?”

“Back to the ship. Look, suppose they made a trip to the Hero’s Return , to tell the others there what was going on.”

“Both of them?”

“You didn’t want to be left on your own. They expected to come right back here, but then the storm came up. They wouldn’t have been able to come ashore, any more than we could get past the breakers this morning. I bet that’s it. If we just settle down and wait here, they’ll be back. And if they don’t come by the time the sea is calmer, we can take off ourselves for the Hero’s Return.”

“No.” Chrissie had been nodding her head to agree when she noticed a familiar shape drifting across her field of view. “Get down, Tarb. Somebody’s looking for us.”

They left the clearing and crouched together under the mat of ferns. The tri-wing aircraft passed far off to the south, heading out to sea.

Tarbush slowly stood upright as the craft vanished in the distance. “It’s certainly one of their planes. But what makes you think it’s looking for us?”

“What makes you think it isn’t ?” Chrissie stood up, too, and headed for the supply cases. “I think we made a mistake by coming here. Our plan sounded good when we thought that Deb and Danny would be waiting for us, but they weren’t and now we don’t know what’s going on. The one thing we can be sure of is that the Malacostracans will look for us. When they do, they’ll find this campsite. It’s the worst possible place for us to stay.”

“Maybe. But do you know a better place?”

“I’m looking for one.” Chrissie had been rummaging, and she pulled out of a supply case one of the maps that Elke Siry had prepared from the orbital images. “Look, here’s the Malacostracan encampment. There’s where we came ashore. So here” — she placed her finger on the sheet — “is about where we must be now. What I’m suggesting is that we go back to the shore and find the stream channel. It doesn’t show on this image, because the plants grow right across and cover it. But from our point of view, that’s good. We can head upstream , and we’ll be hidden from anybody who flies over looking for us.”

“Suppose they use radar? That sees right through a canopy of vegetation.”

“Then they’re too smart for us, and we’re cooked. But if we can get far enough into the highlands, way over to the east, we should find all kinds of places to hide. You can see that the ground looks like a great mixed-up jumble of bare screes and rocks and cliffs.”

Tarbush was bending over the map and seemed less than enthusiastic. “So we go there — uphill all the way. And then we do what?”

“Wait. We send periodic signals from our suit radios until Deb or Danny calls us back. Until that happens the only danger will be if the Malacostracans triangulate on our signal and it leads them to us.” Chrissie was digging into the big supply case. “We need to take enough food and water to last for a few days. And I want something comfortable to sleep on. I’m getting sick of living inside this suit. Medicines, too, just in case. It’s going to be quite a load.” She glanced over to Tarbush, who was still frowning down at the image. “Come on, don’t make me do this all by myself.”

Tarbush slowly folded the map, rose, and walked across to where Chrissie was picking out an assortment of boxes and packages. He looked wistfully around him. Not a sign of Scruffy, and they dared not hang around to look for her. He decided to remain silent on one other point. The decision was made, and it wouldn’t help Chrissie’s peace of mind to point out to her what she had apparently not noticed. That the region of the image where they proposed to go had been marked, in Elke Siry’s precise and careful hand, Badlands.