Maelstrom (6 page)

Sparta’s decision not to wait was proven sound when a few seconds later the ground began to shake, and a thousand tonnes of fresh rock poured down the cliff to dam the canyon behind them. Sparta didn’t bother to radio an I-told-you-so to Port Hesperus.

Her burden did not obscure her view. Artificial Reality is more easily adjusted than the other kind, so Sparta merely tuned her sensors to peer through and around the pressure sphere in front of her, leaving only a kind of double exposure, or ghost presence, to reassure her of the health of the bell’s inhabitants.

Cannon-fire crashes of distant lightning pursued her as she scurried down the twisting channel between walls of slickrock. When the ground waves arrived seconds later stones plunged through the thick atmosphere all around her, but she reached the canyon mouth safely. The final dash across the plain should have been easy.

Halfway to the shuttle, a massive tremor set the ground to flapping like a sheet in the wind. The sudden upward movement of rock against the crush of atmosphere flattened the rover. Sparta’s midlegs took most of the force; one bent beneath her. An instant later the trough of the wave passed, and atmospheric suction yanked the pressure sphere out of Sparta’s grasp.

She jettisoned the useless midleg and ran forward over the heaving ground. The bell bounced ahead of her, bounding over a ledge, over a broad shelf, down another ledge. Leaping, she caught it. She rolled the sphere upright and steadied it. As she was reattaching the communication couples, she noted the spurt of molten lithium from a rupture in the refrigerating coils–

She discovered that her left hindleg was also useless. She dropped it where she stood.

The bell’s passengers were piled on the floor behind the pilot’s chair. Merck’s blond hair was stained with bright blood from a cut across the top of his high forehead. Forster looked seriously perturbed, though not visibly damaged; he was massaging his chin. Yoshimitsu had been strapped in; he seemed unaffected.

“Your coils are ruptured,” she said. “We’ve got maybe ten minutes left before your coolant’s gone. Tie yourselves down. I’m going to drag you to the shuttle.”

 

Merck looked up, befuddled, holding his bleeding scalp. “Is this really essen . . . ?”

 

“Do it, Albers, if you want to save yourself!” Forster snapped at him. Forster had stripped the belt from his coveralls and was using it to tie himself to the back of the pilot’s chair.

Merck, after a moment of confused indecision, did likewise. The two passengers huddled against the floor as Sparta circled the bell, gripped it with her forearms, and started dragging it backwards across the eroded landscape.

She radioed a terse message to Azure Dragon. The space station was already sliding over the curve of the planet; when the delayed reply came back it was a simple acknowledgment.

Sparta’s progress was slow. She was short two legs and had to keep the sphere from rolling over, further crushing its refrigerating coils. The egg left a bloody track as it was pulled along–a thin bright stream of metal jetting from the ruptured coil, emerging red hot, then quickly cooling to splashes of liquid silver on the rock.

Watching the rate of loss, Sparta could estimate with great precision when the volume of lithium in the coils would drop too low to carry off the heat of the atmosphere. When that moment came, the bell’s internal temperature would rise catastrophically, baking the inhabitants black in minutes. “We’re doing fine. We’ll be inside the shuttle in five minutes,” she told the quiet men inside the sphere.

She had less than two minutes left when the squat shuttle became visible over the short horizon behind her. She knew she wasn’t going to make it, not at this dragging pace. She had to maneuver the bell over the ledge that partially blocked the shuttle’s hangar doors, close and seal the doors behind them, refrigerate and depressurize the hangar . . .

Sparta fell into a trance, but it passed so quickly no observer would have noticed. Within a millisecond her brain proposed and analyzed half a dozen possibilities and chose the least unlikely. She came out of her trance and acted upon her decision without hesitation–and without warning.

She spun violently, wrenching the sphere into position in front of her. Bracing herself on a tripod of her remaining legs, she used her fourth leg to shove the bell away from her. It rolled toward the open hangar like a massive soccer ball–

–but with a slowness that was exaggerated by Sparta’s slowed time-sense. She knew how little time they all had, but within that brief span there was leisure to do whatever could be done. She directed a tight beam of radio waves toward the waiting shuttle, instructing it to close the hangar doors and initiate emergency refrigeration and depressurization. She saw the bounding sphere’s own refrigeration coils burst and spew glowing lithium over the ground just as it sailed over the lip of the low ledge and smashed into the shuttle’s still-open maw. The doors were already beginning to close, slamming shut as an explosion of steam spewed out of the hangar–the reaction product of emergency coolant cascading from the shuttle’s tanks into the hot, dry atmosphere.

The shuttle continued to vent high-pressure steam for half a minute after the hangar doors sealed themselves. Sparta studied the scene with the senses remaining to her. Sight could tell her little, and radar bounced off the curved metal skin of the blunt cone; while she had radio contact with the shuttle’s robot systems, she had none with the men inside the bell. Sonar was her only good source of information, and she listened carefully to the bangings and hissings, the whistles and pump-throbbings that would tell her whether any of the shuttle’s vital systems had been ruptured, whether the men inside the bell were alive and conscious and able to release themselves from their cramped prison. . . .

Finally she heard the unmistakable sound of the pressure bell’s hatch opening.

 

“Shuttle, this is Rover Two. Put me on commlink, please.”

 

“Done,” the shuttle’s robot voice replied.

 

“Yoshi, can you hear me?”

 

“Mr. Yoshimitsu is momentarily indisposed,” replied a gruff voice, unmistakable by its British accent; Professor Forster was still firmly in charge–of himself, if not of events. “You may be interested to learn that all of us have survived without serious injury.”

 

“Glad to hear it, Professor. Now would you and your companions clear the hangar so that I can come aboard– before another earthquake does me in?”

 

“We’ll see to it.”

 

When the hatch of her rover opened into the steaming, repressurized hold of the shuttle, Sparta found the kindly-sad face of Albers Merck peering down at her. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said, hoisting herself through the narrow hatchway with the aid of his helping hand. Standing next to himon the catwalk, she studied his mournful face and noted the dried blood in his hair and the purple bruise along one cheekbone. “Is there more?”

“Besides this?” He touched long fingers to his scalp and cheek. “Some very sore ribs, but nothing broken, I think. Mr. Yoshimitsu had the worst of it. His wrist is badly sprained. I’m afraid I kicked him. Or perhaps fell on him.”

Sparta looked around the hangar. The remains of the Rover One pressure sphere, scorched and dented, rested against the leg of the overhead crane. Rover Two, its reactor powered down, sagged crookedly on four offcenter legs. Pumps were sucking puddles of emergency coolant back into the tanks.

“Quite a mess. It’s a shame we couldn’t salvage anything from your dig.”

 

“No material artifacts, of course, and that is unfortunate,” Merck said. “But we have chemical analyses and holographic records stored in the rover’s computers. Enough to keep us quite busy.”

 

“Would you give me a hand locking this machinery down? I’ll feel safer when we’re back in orbit.”

Minutes later they climbed onto the shuttle’s makeshift flight deck. Yoshimitsu lay in his acceleration couch with his left arm in a sling. Forster was bent over the disabled pilot, expertly taping the arm tightly across the man’s chest.

“You okay, Yoshi?”

 

“Slightly bent,” he said, grinning. His long black hair hung down across his dark eyes. “I scoffed at those stories they tell about your luck, Ellen. Not anymore.”

 

Forster straightened and studied her. “The inspector does not seem the sort to depend on luck.”

 

“Only when all else fails,” Sparta answered. “I’d say we’re
all
lucky.”

“Why did they send you instead of one of the regular pilots?” Forster asked. “Because I insisted,” she said. “Your expedition is going to owe Azure Dragon a pile of money for this manned-shuttle trip. They figure you can’t pay. They thought it would cost them less to dig you out with HDVMs and bring you up in a robot shuttle.”

“I’ll have to speak to them sternly. Our expenses are underwritten by the Cultural Heritage Committee, not to mention the trustees of the Hesperian Museum. . . .”

 

“I didn’t argue with them,” Sparta said. “I invoked interplanetary law.”

 

“I see. But why are
you
here, Inspector? That is, your job is detection, is it not?”

“In addition to the many other courtesies Azure Dragon has extended to your expedition, they have donated the services of Mr. Yoshimitsu, one of their best shuttle pilots. Neither of the two other persons trained in the use of these old rovers were available for this trip.”

“I think you mean that neither of them volunteered,” Yoshimitsu said quietly. “And the bosses wouldn’t order them.”

 

“Gomen nasai, Yoshimitsu-san.”
She inclined her head sharply in a respectful bow. Strapped into his couch, he tucked his chin to his collar bone, trying to reciprocate.

 

“I see.” Forster was quiet, ruminating. “And when did you receive your training in the use of these specialized vehicles?”

 

“For God’s sake, Forster, stop interrogating the woman,”

 

Merck said, his face pink with embarrassment. “She’s just saved our lives.”

 

“I’m well aware of that,” Forster shot back. “And indeed I am grateful. I simply want to understand what’s going on here, that’s all.”

 

“I have a . . . talent for this kind of thing,” Sparta said.

 

“We ought to discuss it later,” Yoshimitsu suggested. “Our next launch window is coming up fast.”

Half an hour later the bullet-nosed shuttle blasted away from the surface of Venus, climbing swiftly into the clouds, forcing its way through hurricane gales of sulfuric-acid rain, sparking vicious lightning bolts by its passage, driving steadily upward through thinning layers of sulfur-dioxide smog, until at last it won free into clear space and closed on the shining rings and green-gleaming garden sphere of Port Hesperus.

IV
It came swirling out of the darkness, a catherine wheel of shadow, not fire, and with it the voices:

 

She could be the greatest of us
She resists our authority
William, she’s a child
To resist us is to resist the Knowledge

 

As the wheel spun, the voices reverberated upon themselves, increasing to a howl. Sparta’s heart thudded violently, shaking her ribs and the mattress beneath her.

 

Her face was crushed into the pillow; she opened an eye. A peculiar stench filled her nostrils, a bold vegetable smell turning sour, becoming the odor of a cat.

 

Bits of black curve, bits of black slash, bits of black spot, moving and changing . . . a tiger moving through the tall grass

 

She sat up, terrified, and opened her mouth to call out, then choked back the unvoiced cry. Her skin was slick with sweat. Her heart chugged like a dry pump.

She got control of her breathing; her pulse rate slowed. The vision in her right eye stopped zooming dizzily in and out, and the spinning catherine wheel collapsed in on itself. Then the imaginary stench vanished, and she was left with the familiar odors of her cabin. Overlaying the ubiquitous space-station stink of rustcoat, lubricating oil, and human sweat was the perfume of hoya flowers.

The hoya flower, a pompon of pink velvet stars, emitted its odor only at night. Night was arbitrary here, but for Sparta, now was the middle of the night. The hoya vine clung to the ceiling above her in intricate whorls, a product of the weightless topiary for which Port Hesperus was famous; the vine had been grown in microgravity under a constantly moving, programmed light source.

In her A-ring cabin the vine’s weight, and Sparta’s, was Earth normal. If the heart of Port Hesperus was a fantastic garden, the rest of the space station had about as much charm as a battleship. Main ring A, starside of the garden sphere, housed most of the station’s maintenance workers, dock hands, interplanetary traffic controllers, and other service personnel. Sparta’s temporary quarters were in the Visiting Officer’s Quarters of the patrol barracks. Barring another emergency like the one that had drawn her to the surface of Venus, this would be her last night in the cheerless room of plastic and steel.

With that realization came another, unbidden, one that had come often in the past months. She missed Blake Redfield, missed him with something bordering on obsession, missed even more because she had not heard from him for so long. And then a trivial, teasing message, unsigned and enclosing no hint of deep affection. “Let’s play hide-and-seek again. . . .”

Exhausted, but with no hope of sleeping, she threw back the tangled sheet and walked to the center of the windowless room. Something had happened; the nightmare had not come out of nowhere. For a moment she stood and
listened
. . . .

The vibration of the steel walls brought her the electric hum, the metallic screech, the hydraulic plunge and suck of the endlessly turning station; her inner ear easily filtered these to retrieve the human coughs and moans and chuckles, the voices raised in complaint or enthusiasm. The life of Port Hesperus was stumbling along normally. Most of the workers who bunked in Sparta’s sector were sound asleep; their day shifts did not begin for three more hours. The rest were working as efficiently as they ever did.

Close overhead, the spacecraft controllers in the traffic control dome kept track of the hundreds of small craft and robot satellites that crowded surrounding space. Only one interplanetary vessel was nearby, a Space Board cutter due to reach the radiation perimeter in six hours. Sparta’s replacement was aboard it, and she herself would be on it when it burned for Earth.