Great North Road (129 page)

Angela’s inertial guidance module warned her they were closing on the waterfall. Confirming the proximity of the canyon, the snow was churning as the updrafts flowed over the edge. She told her e-i to ping Ravi again. He hadn’t responded to her last few attempts to contact him.

“If you’ve got any Jupiter sensor technology, now would be the time to use it,” Angela said. “We’re kind of vulnerable on the lip like this.”

“Yeah, Mother, got that.”

Angela admired the tone—it was pitch perfect her own. They edged forward carefully until they found the top of the waterfall, where the ice curved down sharply and the wind began its mournful whistling. She got down on all fours and peered over, trying to keep the feeling of vertigo suppressed, and not really succeeding. All she could see was the frozen water dropping away and the snowflakes fluttering away to a roseate infinity.

Her e-i told her Ravi was answering her call. “Why do you keep dropping out?” she asked.

“Bit difficult staying awake. Sorry.”

“Okay, switch on your bodymesh. I need to get a fix on you.”

Her e-i reported a full lock. He was about forty meters away.

Angela and Rebka shuffled along the rumpled ice until they were directly above him. His bodymesh emission was coming from seven and a half meters directly down the ice face. Angela lay flat on the ice and stared over the edge. The massive frozen watercourse plunged away below her. It wasn’t smooth like the river that fed it; there were folds and snarls in the ice, like a churning whitewater rapid captured in midflow. Straining against the pink gloom and skipping snow Angela could make out a silvery blob on one of the flatter seracs. It was a miracle he hadn’t slipped off.

“Gotcha,” she said. “Is that a thermal bag?”

“Yes,” Ravi said. “Only reason I’m still alive.”

“Okay. I’ve got a mini winch with me. You’ll have to clip it onto your belt. Can you do that?”

“Yes. I’ll try. Thank you, Angela.”

She used the self-anchoring pitons to secure the little spool on the rock-hard ice. The tape unwound, and Angela guided it down. Watching the clip twirl around, swaying about in the wind, was like a bizarre version of fishing. Every time she moved her arm, trying to put the clip near Ravi, it would bob away. And Ravi didn’t seem to be able to move his arm much. She had the alarming thought that she’d have to climb down and help him.

“Got it,” Ravi said.

The mini winch whirred smoothly, pulling Ravi up the undulating wall of sharp snags. He hit a few of the prominences as he came, making Angela wince. Then he was level with the top, and she and Rebka grabbed hold, pulling him onto the river.

“For fuck’s sake, Ravi!” Angela exclaimed. The thin silvery survival bag was down around his waist so he could fix the tape to his belt. In the pink Sirius light his parka was almost black, it was soaked with so much blood. The sleeves were torn, showing blue nuflesh foam that had been sprayed on wounds. He was shaking badly, though she suspected it wasn’t entirely from the cold. Bruised eyes flickered open, and he gave Angela a gracious grin. “Thank you.”

“Get him back into the bag,” Rebka said. “We’ll have to drag him back to the doc.”

“Angela?” Ravi asked weakly. “Who’s that?”

“It’s all right, it’s only me,” Angela said. She hurriedly pulled the bag back up to Ravi’s collar, and tugged his parka hood into place. “You need to vanish before we reach the convoy,” she said softly to Rebka. “I don’t want us to have to explain why you’re out here.”

“Okay.”

“But for crap’s sake keep alert for the creature.”

They took hold of Ravi under his shoulders and started dragging him along. He moaned at the pain then quickly lost consciousness again.

“So why did you come out here alone?” Rebka asked.

“Ravi asked me to, he said he didn’t trust anyone else. I was the one who survived the monster once before.”

“Ah. That’s something I definitely want to hear about.”

“You will. Later.”

When they were fifty meters from the circle of vehicles, Angela gave Rebka another too-brief hug. Then Rebka’s clothes morphed into armor again. Angela watched the girl walk off into the heavy snowfall, feeling incredulous and elated in a way she had no right to be, given where they were and what they still faced. But … her daughter was alive and knew her. The sensation of relief was phenomenal.

She started dragging Ravi again. He’d shut down his bodymesh so she couldn’t access his suite of medical monitor smartcells, but she didn’t really need a grid display to know he was in a bad way.

When her guidance module put her thirty meters from the convoy vehicles she linked to the net. Her e-i switched off her cache identity, then called Elston. A last instruction wiped the restrictor program in the remote gun on Tropic-2.

“What are you doing? How did you get outside the vehicles?” Elston demanded.

“I’m bringing Ravi in,” Angela replied, smiling at the anger she knew would be gripping him. “He’s badly hurt. Warn the doc.”

“Ravi?”

“Yes. He’s alive. Just. Now are you going to help or just sit there and shout a lot?”

Vance Elston had personally led Sergeant Raddon and Leora Fawkes out past the vehicles. Sure enough, they’d found Angela dragging Ravi Hendrik along in a survival bag.

Even Dr. Coniff had given the injured pilot a worried look when she and Juanitar pulled the thermal survival bag off him. “Fluid” was all she said for the first five minutes as they went about appraising the extent of his wounds.

Juanitar applied a collar of intravenous shunts around Ravi’s neck, pumping plasma and artificial blood directly into his depleted circulatory system. Then he sprayed a solvent on the nuflesh patches. As the artificial scabs peeled off, blood began to pump out of the wounds on his upper arm. Juanitar clamped them, and started to repair the muscle and veins.

“The spine has received some significant damage,” Coniff announced. “The armor saved him from the worst, but what the hell did this do to him?”

“That was the trees,” Angela said. She was pressed up against the wall of the biolab’s cabin, watching intently as the two medics set about tending Ravi.

“What do you mean, trees?” Elston asked sharply.

“He told me before he lost consciousness. The trees attacked him last night, specifically the bullwhips. The monster controls them somehow.”

“Ridiculous,” Vance insisted automatically. As he said it he knew the dread of doubt, that such a thing might very well be possible in such a vast strange universe that the Lord had created for His children to live in.

Angela just laughed and pointed to where Dr. Coniff was extracting a long fragment of the armor vest from the livid flesh of Ravi’s back. “So apart from being hit by a bullwhip branch, what else do you know can do that?”

Vance glanced at Coniff for help, but she simply raised an eyebrow and returned to the blood oozing from the wound. “You said you found him on a ledge of ice on the waterfall. He could have landed on his back.”

Angela simply shook her head, a smug smile on her face. She’d won and she plainly knew it; even he was giving the possibility serious consideration. Something had struck the MTJ, knocking it off the ravine. Something had knocked Mark flying. And the others, the ones they’d lost, had they been consumed by the forest? If the creature was truly the planet’s guardian, anything was possible. “I’ll walk you back to the Tropic,” he said.

“Sure.” She stepped into the door chamber, wrapping the damp scarf back around her head.

Outside the snow had stopped; wisps of high cloud drifted slowly northward, entwined with the ribbons of the aurora borealis. Red Sirius shone from the zenith of the sky, a pink dazzle speck with radiative stipples so that to the human eye it appeared to be a sink point, consuming the light from the atmosphere.

“Okay,” Vance said. “So how did you get out there without me knowing?”

“Just a net glitch.”

“You know that means I can’t trust you now.”

“Did you ever?”

“It broke our net again last night.”

“Wasn’t me. I’ve just risked my neck bringing Ravi back.”

“Yeah, about that: Why? Why you, and why go alone?”

“He didn’t trust anyone else. I’m the one who survived it before, so I’m the one he turned to for help. Ask him if you don’t believe me.”

“How did he call you?”

“A secure link. I tried to locate its origin, but Ravi knows his black patches.”

He stared at her with mounting exasperation. “Didn’t you consider the risk? Going out there by yourself?”

“There were only three options: It was Ravi, it was the saboteur, or it was the monster itself.” Her hand came up to pat the carbine in its chest holster. “Either way, I was ready.”

“I should take that away from you.”

“Really? I think Ravi made a smart call. Who else in this convoy can you really trust? Seriously? Karizma?”

“Don’t.” Vance held up a warning finger. “You know you should have called me.”

“Whatever. Are you going to keep on denying the monster can control the trees, too? That piece of news has already flared down our little net.”

“We will take adequate precautions from all possible threats.”

“Stop talking corporate bullshit. You have to warn people very clearly that the jungle is extremely dangerous, especially to anyone outside a vehicle. You also have to launch a comm rocket.”

Vance looked past the Tropic they were approaching, seeing the ice-cased trees standing tall at the top of the bank. His perspective played traitor for a moment, showing him an army of native elementals poised ready to charge down on his besieged command. “I know how to handle this.”

“I hope so. If you don’t, we’re all dead.”

They reached Tropic-2, and Vance opened the front passenger door. Corporal Evitts was sitting in the driver’s seat, wearing one of the hats Angela had knitted, broken arm strapped to his chest. His expression was apprehensive. “She’s not to leave unaccompanied again,” Vance ordered. “You are her escort on all duties.”

“Yes, sir,” Evitts barked.

“Angela.”

She paused, half in the Tropic.

“Thank you for getting Ravi back. It’s the first time anyone has survived. That’s good for morale, no matter what else came out of this.”

She nodded. “Second. He’s the second to survive.”

“Yeah, sorry. The second.” As soon as she was in the seat he closed the door. Even now, Angela was a complete enigma to him. Every instinct he had was to assign a secret agenda as the reason for going out there by herself to find Ravi. He stared at the edge of the jungle, admitting to himself that perhaps he was just too scared to believe. If it was true, and the trees themselves were being roused to overwhelm the convoy …

His e-i told him the convoy net had just acquired Tropic-1. He saw its location slip up into his grid, and frowned. The Tropic was driving along the Lan toward them barely six hundred meters away, which was all wrong: It should still have been driving along the lip of the canyon.

“What happened?” he asked Lieutenant Botin over a secure link.

“We followed the canyon as ordered. About a kilometer after we lost line of sight on the camp we saw a route cut through the jungle. The buzz saws on an MTJ make a very distinctive trail. We drove down it, and it just looped back to the Lan.”

“They’ve gone back to Wukang,” Vance realized. “Karizma saw her chance, and left us.”

“The MTJ doesn’t have enough fuel to get that far, sir,” Botin said.

It only took a moment for Vance to figure it out. He turned to stare at the remaining truck and its sledge of bladders. Olrg, Chris, and Raddon were clambering over the truck’s framework, examining the bladders it was carrying. His e-i extended the link to include Olrg. “What was wrong with the fuel bladders?” he asked.

“Two of the bladders were empty when they were showing full,” Olrg said, looking around from the framework. “There was a glitch in their sensors. We’re checking the rest of the bladders to make sure they’re registering correctly.”

“Would the missing fuel be enough to take an MTJ back to Wukang?” Vance asked.

“Yes, sir, probably. But the MTJs weren’t carrying any bladders.”

“No,” Vance said. “But the truck and sledge we left behind was.”

“They didn’t transfer all the truck’s fuel over when we abandoned it,” Botin said.

“No, Karizma left a couple of bladders full. The truck is on her route back. They’ll strap the bladders to the MTJ and drive straight for the camp. We cleared a track through the jungle to reach the river, so it’ll be a relatively clear run back for them.” Vance had to take a moment for his rage to peak. He was incredulous that any HDA personnel would mutiny. Not only that, by taking away an MTJ with its buzz saws and snowplow blade, they’d actively put the rest of the convoy in harm’s way. Their actions verged on anti-human treason.

Vance walked over to the truck. Olrg was standing apprehensively beside it. “Is there any more fuel missing?” Vance asked.

“No sir. It looks like just the two bladders on the sledge.”

“All right.” Vance told his e-i to quest a ringlink that included everyone remaining in the convoy. “I regret to announce that MTJ-1 has mutinied and made a run for Wukang. We still have MTJ-2, which will be sufficient to get us through the small amount of jungle we need to traverse between the Zell tributary that is our target, and Sarvar. Consequentially, we are moving out in fifteen minutes. All drivers begin your vehicle checks.” Vance closed the link and stamped off to biolab-1, too furious to say anything more. He didn’t even ask the Lord for wisdom and guidance, which was remiss of him, but the Lord would understand the frailty of human reaction in the face of such outrageous provocation.

M
ONDAY,
M
AY 6, 2143

The blizzard had lasted for three days. On the morning of the fourth day, Saul Howard fed a couple of fresh logs into the stove in the center of the bungalow’s lounge. He’d been up several times in the night to add more logs, making sure the fire didn’t die out. As a result, the room was still warm enough that he didn’t really need the blanket he’d wrapped around his shoulders. But one look at the snow piled up against the big glass patio door made him want to shiver. And he didn’t like to think how much was sitting on the roof. The bungalow’s net was telling him the PV panels weren’t generating any power at all. They were living off the regen-cell store.