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Authors: Ben Bova

Battle Station (27 page)

BOOK: Battle Station
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It was three months before they landed.
Rassmussen was thorough, patient, and stubborn. Unmanned landers sampled and tested surface conditions. Observation satellites crisscrossed the planet at the lowest possible altitudes—except for one thing that hung in synchronous orbit in the longitude of the spot where the first humanoid had been found.
That was the only place where humanoid life was seen, along that shoreline for a grand distance of perhaps five kilometers. Nowhere else on the planet.
Lee argued and swore and stormed at the delay. Rassmussen stayed firm. Only when he was satisfied that nothing more could be learned from orbit did he agree to land the ship. And still he sent clear word back toward Earth that he might be landing in a trap.
The great ship settled slowly, almost delicately, on a hot tongue of fusion flame, and touched down on the western edge of a desert some two hundred kilometers from the humanoid site. A range of rugged-looking hills separated them. The staff and crew celebrated that night. The next morning, Lee, Charnovsky, Hatfield, Doris McNertny, Marlene Ettinger, and Alicia Monteverdi moved to the ship's “Sirius globe.” They were to be the expedition's “outsiders,” the specialists who would eventually live in the planetary environment. They represented anthropology, geology, biochemistry, botany, zoology, and ecology, with backup specialties in archaeology, chemistry, and paleontology.
The Sirius globe held their laboratories, workrooms, equipment, and living quarters. They were quarantined from the rest of the ship's staff and crew, the “insiders,” until the captain agreed that the surface
conditions on the planet would be no threat to the rest of the expedition members. That would take two years minimum, Lee knew.
Gradually, the “outsiders” began to expose themselves to the local environment. They began to breathe the air, acquire the microbes. Pascual and Tanaka made them sit in the medical examination booths twice a day, and even checked them personally every other day. The two M.D.s wore disposable biosuits and worried expressions when they entered the Sirius globe. The medical computers compiled miles of data tapes on each of the six “outsiders,” but still Pascual's normally pleasant face acquired a perpetual frown of anxiety about them.
“I just don't like the idea of this damned armor,” Lee grumbled.
He was already encased up to his neck in a gleaming white powersuit, the type that crew members wore when working outside the ship in a vacuum. Aaron Hatfield and Marlene Ettinger were helping to check all the seams and connections. A few feet away, in the cramped “locker room,” tiny Alicia Monteverdi looked as though she were being swallowed by an oversized automaton; Charnovsky and Doris McNertny were checking her suit.
“It's for your own protection,” Marlene told Lee in a throaty whisper as she applied a test meter to the radio panel on his suit's chest. “You and Alicia won the toss for the first trip outside, but this is the price you must pay. Now be a good boy and don't complain.”
Lee had to grin. “
Ja, Fräulein Schulmeisterin.
”
She looked up at him with a rueful smile. “Thank God you never had to carry on a conversation in German.”
Finally Lee and Alicia clumped through the double
hatch into the air lock. It took another fifteen minutes for them to perform the final checkout, but at last they were ready. The outer hatch slid back, and they started down the long ladder to the planet's surface. The armored suits were equipped with muscle-amplifying power systems, so that even a girl as slim as Alicia could handle their bulk easily.
Lee went down the ladder first and set foot on the ground. It was bare and dusty, the sky a reddish haze.
The grand adventure
, Lee thought.
All the expected big moments in life are flops.
A hot breeze hummed in his earphones. It was early morning. Sirius had not cleared the barren horizon yet, although the sky was fully bright. Despite the suit's air-conditioning, Lee felt the heat.
He reached up a hand as Alicia climbed warily down the last few steps of the ladder. The plastic rungs gave under the suit's weight, then slowly straightened themselves when the weight was removed.
“Well,” he said, looking at her wide-eyed face through the transparent helmet of her suit, “what do you think of it?”
“It is hardly paradise, is it?”
“Looks like it's leaning the other way,” Lee said.
 
They explored—Lee and Alicia that first day, then the other outsiders, shuffling ponderously inside their armor. Lee chafed against the restriction of the powersuits, but Rassmussen insisted and would brook no argument. They went timidly at first, never out of sight of the ship. Charnovsky chipped samples from the rock outcroppings, while the others took air and soil samples, dug for water, searched for life.
“The perfect landing site,” Doris complained after a hot, tedious day. “There's no form of life bigger
than a yeast mold within a hundred kilometers of here.”
It was a hot world, a dry world, a brick-dust world, where the sky was always red. Sirius was a blowtorch searing down on them, too bright to look at even through the tinted visors of their suits. At night there was no moon to see, but the Pup bathed this world in a deathly bluish glow far brighter yet colder than moonlight. The night sky was never truly dark, and only a few strong stars could be seen from the ground.
Through it all, the robot satellites relayed more pictures of the humanoids along the seacoast. They appeared almost every day, usually only briefly. Sometimes there were a few of them, sometimes only one, once there were nearly a dozen. The highest-resolution photographs showed them to be human in size and build. But what their faces looked like, what they wore, what they were
doing
—all escaped the drone cameras.
The robot landers, spotted in a dozen scattered locations within a thousand kilometers of the ship, faithfully recorded and transmitted everything they were programmed to look for. They sent pictures and chemical analyses of plant life and insects. But no higher animals.
Alicia's dark-eyed face took on a perpetually puzzled frown, Lee saw. “It makes no sense,” she would say. “There is nothing on this planet more advanced than insects … yet there are men. It's as though humans suddenly sprang up in the Silurian period on Earth. They
can't
be here. I wish we could examine the life in the seas … perhaps that would tell us more.”
“You mean those humanoids didn't originate on this planet?” Lee said to her.
She shook her head. “I don't know. I don't see how they could have …”
Gradually they pushed their explorations farther afield, beyond the ship's limited horizon. In the motorized powersuits a man could cover more than a hundred kilometers a day, if he pushed it. Lee always headed toward the grizzled hills that separated them from the seacoast. He helped the others to dig, to collect samples, but he always pointed them toward the sea.
“The satellite pictures show some decent greenery on the seaward side of the hills,” he told Doris. “That's where he should go.”
Rassmussen wouldn't move the ship. He wanted his base of operations, his link homeward, at least a hundred kilometers from the nearest possible threat. But finally he relaxed enough to allow the scientists to go out overnight and take a look at the hills.
And maybe the coast
, Lee added silently to the captain's orders.
Rassmussen decided to let them use one of the ship's two air-cushion vehicles. He assigned Jerry Grote, the chief engineer, and Chien Shu Li, electronics specialist, to handle the skimmer and take command of the trip. They would live in biosuits and remain inside the skimmer at all times. Lee, Marlene, Doris, and Charnovsky made the trip: Grote did the driving and navigating, Chien handled communications and the computer.
It took a full day's drive to get to the hills. Grote, a lanky, lantern-jawed New Zealander, decided to camp at their base as night came on.
“I thought you'd be a born mountaineer,” Lee poked at him.
Grote leaned back in his padded chair and planted
a large sandaled foot on the skimmer's control panel.
“I could climb those wrinkles out there in my sleep,” he said pleasantly. “But we've got to be careful of this nice, shiny vehicle.”
From the driver's compartment, Lee could see Marlene pushing forward toward them, squeezing between the racks of electronics gear that separated the forward compartment from the living and working quarters. Even in the drab coveralls, she showed a nice profile.
“I would like to go outside,” she said to Grote. “We've been sitting all day like tourists in a shuttle.”
Grote nodded. “Got to wear a hard suit, though.”
“But—”
“Orders.”
She glanced at Lee, then shrugged. “Very well.”
“I'll come with you,” Lee said.
Squirming into the armored suits in the aft hatchway was exasperating, but at last they were ready and Lee opened the hatch. They stepped out across the tail fender of the skimmer and jumped to the dusty ground.
“Being inside this is almost worse than being in the car,” Marlene said.
They walked around the skimmer. Lee watched his shadow lengthen as he placed the setting Sirius at his back.
“Look …
look
!”
He saw Marlene pointing and turned to follow her gaze. The hills rising before them were dazzling with a million sparkling lights: red and blue and white and dazzling, shimmering lights as though a cascade of precious jewels were pouring down the hillside.
“What is it?” Marlene's voice sounded excited, thrilled, not the least afraid.
Lee stared at the shifting multicolored lights, it was like playing a lamp on cut crystal. He took a step
toward the hills, then looked down to the ground. From inside the cumbersome suit, it was hard to see the ground close to your feet and harder still to bend down and pick up anything. But he squatted slowly and reached for a small stone. Getting up again, Lee held the stone high enough for it to catch the fading rays of daylight.
The rock glittered with a shower of varicolored sparkles.
“They're made of glass,” Lee said.
Within minutes Charnovsky and the other “outsiders” were out of the ship to marvel at it. The Russian collected as many rocks as he could stuff into his suit's thigh pouches. Lee and Grote helped him; the women merely stood by the skimmer and watched the hills blaze with lights.
Sirius disappeared below the horizon at last, and the show ended. The hills returned to being brownish, erosion-worn clumps of rock.
“Glass mountains,” Marlene marveled as they returned to the skimmer.
“Not glass,” Charnovsky corrected. “Glazed rock. Granitic, no doubt. Probably was melted when the Pup exploded. Atmosphere might have been blown away, and rock cooled very rapidly.”
Lee could see Marlene's chin rise stubbornly inside the transparent dome of her suit. “I name them the Glass Mountains,” she said firmly.
Grote had smuggled a bottle along with them, part of his personal stock. “My most precious possession,” he rightfully called it. But for the Glass Mountains he dug it out of its hiding place, and they toasted both the discovery and the name. Marlene smiled and insisted that Lee also be toasted, as codiscoverer.
 
Hours later, Lee grew tired of staring at the metal ceiling of the sleeping quarters a few inches above his
top-tier bunk. Even Grote's drinks didn't help him to sleep. He kept wondering about the humanoids, what they were doing, where they were from, how he would get to learn their secrets. As quietly as he could, he slipped down from the bunk. The two men beneath him were breathing deeply and evenly. Lee headed for the rear hatch, past the women's bunks.
The hard suits were standing at stiff attention, flanking both sides of the rear hatch. Lee was in his coveralls. He strapped on a pair of boots, slid the hatch open as quietly as he could, and stepped out onto the fender.
The air was cool and clean, the sky bright enough for him to make out the worn old hills. There were a few stars in the sky, but the hills didn't reflect them.
He heard a movement behind him. Turning, he saw Marlene.
“Did I wake you?”
“I'm a very light sleeper,” she said.
“Sorry, I didn't mean—”
“No, I'm glad you did.” She shook her head slightly, and for the first time Lee noticed the sweep and softness of her hair. The light was too dim to make out its color, but he remembered it as chestnut.
“Besides,” she whispered, “I've been longing to get outside without being in one of those damned suits.”
He helped her down from the fender, and they walked a little way from the skimmer.
“Can we see the sun?” she asked, looking skyward.
“I'm not sure, I think maybe … there …” He pointed to a second-magnitude star, shining alone in the grayish sky.
“Where, which one?”
He took her by the shoulder with one hand so that she could see where he was pointing.
“Oh, yes, I see it.”
She turned, and she was in his arms, and he kissed her. He held on to her as though there were nothing else in the universe.
If any of the others suspected that Lee and Marlene had spent the night outside, they didn't mention it. All six of them took their regular prebreakfast checks in the medical booth, and by the time they were finished eating in the cramped galley, the computer had registered a safe green for each of them.
Lee slid out from the galley's folding table and made his way forward. Grote was slouched in the driver's seat, his lanky frame a geometry of knees and elbows. He was studying the viewscreen map.
“Looking for a pass through these hills for our vehicle,” he said absently, his eyes on the slowly moving photomap.
“Why take the skimmer?” Lee asked, sitting on the chair beside him. “We came across these hills in the powersuits.”
Grote cocked an eye at him. “You're really set on getting to the coast, aren't you?”
“Aren't you?”
That brought a grin. “How much do you think we ought to carry with us?”
BOOK: Battle Station
5.15Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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