Reunion

by Alan Dean Foster

  Noting that it was nighttime in the projected landing zone, he added the additional instructions that the forthcoming touchdown was to be carried out without external lights or power. Automatically trimming and adjusting the little vessel’s delta wings to account for local climatic conditions, the shuttle would glide to a landing in virtual silence. With luck, its arrival would not be noticed by those on the surface. Obviously, this would greatly enhance his chances of approaching their camp unnoticed and on foot. It was and had always been his favored means of approaching the unfamiliar.

  Should it prove possible to do so, he would much prefer to steal what he had come for.

  The shuttle’s engines fired, attitude control rotated the craft eighty-five degrees, and as steady acceleration pushed him back into the command chair, it began to move out from behind the shadow of Pyrassis’s nearer moon. Very quickly, the familiar bulges and lines of both the Crotase and the Teacher fell behind. Ahead loomed a lambent beige and rust-red world against which white streaks and tufts of cloud appeared even starker than they did against the blue-brown backdrops of planets like Earth and Moth and Alaspin.

  As soon as the shuttle’s AI assured him they were on course for arrival, he reached down to release the increasingly uncomfortable survival suit’s seals. Conducted to his ears by the suit’s pickups, a faint hissing stopped him in midreach. Frowning, he glanced down to where his lower body lay secured in the seat’s harness.

  The hissing sound was not coming from his suit.

  “I’m hearing what sounds like an atmospheric precipitance.” His fingers moved away from the suit’s seals. “Confirm and identify.”

  There was a pause. It was brief, and might not have been noticed by others less sensitive than Flinx. But he did notice it, and the hackles went up on his neck. Instantly, Pip poked her head out from within her brightly colored coils. The small, bright-eyed, triangular green shape rose up into his headpiece, obscuring a small portion of his vision. He was too busy and too anxious to admonish her. This was not a problem in which, however well-meaning, she could assist.

  “I sense no disturbance,” the shuttle’s AI responded. “There is nothing to identify.”

  The hiss continued. He was not imagining it. “There is a barometric anomaly present. Confirm and identify.”

  The voice of the shuttle did not change. “I sense no disturbance.”

  Reaching out and over, Flinx activated a heads-up display. It appeared in front of him, frozen in midair. A few taps on manual controls brought forth the information he sought. It was chilling in its contradiction of the AI’s declaration. Very plainly, with numbers as well as words, it indicated that atmospheric pressure within the shuttle was down to less than 0.5 PSI—and continuing to fall steadily.

  The leak would have to be located later. Right now he was far more concerned with the AI’s seeming incognizance. “Instrumentation indicates we are bleeding air. Confirm, and if possible, identify the source of the leakage.”

  “I sense no seepage of the kind you imply. Hull integrity is sound. All systems are operating normally.”

  It did not take long for the hissing sound to cease. According to the manual sensors, this did not come about because corrective measures had been applied to recalcitrant instrumentation. It occurred because there was no longer any breathable air within the shuttle. He could quickly confirm this by unsealing and removing any part of his survival suit. He elected not to do so because if the instrumentation was right and the AI wrong, he would perish quickly and unpleasantly.

  Which is exactly what would have happened to him if, as was normally the case, he had been sitting confidently in the shuttle’s command chair clad in nothing but his daily coveralls.

  Something had caused the supposedly fail-safe shuttle to inexplicably vent its internal atmosphere. A check revealed that the AI’s response had been at least partially correct: hull integrity had not been violated. Which meant that something had directed the ship’s systems themselves to void the air. Only a command delivered directly to the AI could induce that kind of reaction. He had given no such command. It was inconceivable that it could have come from the now distant Teacher. Where could it possibly have originated? The shuttle had received only two recent external directives. One from him, ordering it to program in a touchdown proximate to recently acquired planetary coordinates. The second from the AI of the Crotase, providing those coordinates.

  And just possibly, he realized with a sudden chill, supplying something else along with them.

  No wonder he had been allowed free and easy access to the freighter. No wonder nothing had been denied to him, including access to the vessel’s main AI. No wonder no door had been programmed to seal itself behind him, no explosive device to go off beneath his booted feet or at his approach. There was no need. Whoever had programmed the freighter’s response to intrusion had done so with exquisite subtlety. The booby trap it had been trained to plant was designed to go off only after an intruder departed. While he had been tunneling into the Crotase’s AI, it had silently been doing the same thing to the controlling intelligence of his shuttle.

  He ought to have anticipated something of the sort. The Shell blowback at Surire should have habituated him to the mind-set of the kind of people he was dealing with.

  Lamenting the oversight now would do him no good at all, and would only waste time. “You are experiencing a malfunction,” he announced solemnly. “Your cortex has been invaded. I direct you to execute all emergency clear, cleanse, and nullification programs and restore your system to health. If required, temporary shutdown of all functions may be permitted.” A risky command, but no less so than allowing whatever had burrowed deep within the AI to continue to do damage with impunity.

  The shuttle’s reply was not encouraging. “All systems are functioning normally. There is no need for shutdown, or to perform cleansing procedures.” Thoughtfully, it advanced a time frame for touchdown.

  Safe within the self-contained environment of the survival suit, he and Pip could ignore the insidious evacuation of air from the shuttle’s living quarters. The trouble was, given the blithe, blissful, persistent ignorance of the craft’s AI, he had no way of knowing if that was the only problem he could anticipate having to deal with. Sure enough, within a couple of minutes, others began to make themselves known with unnerving regularity.

  Most disconcerting of all was the unsettling realization that as it entered Pyrassisian atmosphere, the shuttle was making no attempt to moderate its velocity. Well after deceleration ought to have begun, the little craft was doing nothing to brake itself preparatory to landing.

  “Teacher! Priority override!” Silence shouted back at him from the suit’s speakers. “Teacher, acknowledge! Shuttlecraft emergency failure, all systems unresponsive. Acknowledge!”

  Uttering an uncommon epithet, he found himself admiring the skill with which the pathocybergen had been implanted in the shuttle’s shell, even as he fought to identify and disarm it. A major complication manifested itself when he realized that trouble was spreading through the system as fast as he could isolate individual components. Working furiously with manual directives, he managed to segregate and fix the command string that had caused the internal atmosphere to be evacuated from the shuttle. That proved easier than his frantic attempts to reestablish communication with the Teacher. If he could just make contact, he could direct its far more advanced AI to correct the problems the shuttle’s shell continued to insist did not exist. All such attempts, however, came to naught.

  Meanwhile, one onboard system after another continued to shut down, or fold into cross-purposes, or otherwise defeat every attempt by him to disentangle it from whatever treacherous pathogen the Crotase had cunningly inserted into supposedly safeguarded depths. And all the while, the shuttle continued to plunge surfaceward at an acceptable angle but at a decidedly inappropriate velocity on a vector designated for death. During which frenzied time the onboard AI continued to cheerfully insist that nothi
ng was wrong, all systems were functioning normally, and that touchdown would occur within the specified time. That was not what troubled Flinx. What concerned him was the specific celerity with which the scheduled landing would take place. An efficacious touchdown was one in which everything involved, both animate and otherwise, retained its individual integrity. The long-sought-after sybfile would not do scattered shreds of him any good.

  It struck him with brutal, indifferent force that if he could not effect some significant changes to his present situation within the next couple of minutes, he most assuredly was going to die.

  Chapter 7

  The shuttle’s AI stayed as calm as Flinx was frantic, blissfully ignoring all evidence of an increasingly desperate reality. When Flinx pleaded for it to reestablish communications with the master AI on the Teacher, the shuttle confidently assured him that such communications were active. When he tried everything to persuade it to increase deceleration, it insisted that all touchdown modes were operating on optimal, refusing to be dissuaded by the increasingly dense, increasingly heated atmosphere outside. When ordered to perform a thorough internal check-and-clean of its command systems, it promptly agreed to do so—only to conclude that everything was fine, nothing was the matter, and that they would be landing gently in a matter of minutes.

  Meanwhile, the venting of critical fluids commenced, monitors began to fail, screens grew dark, and the shuttle gave every indication of shutting down section by section around its single human occupant. Fighting one system collapse after another as the unstoppable pathogen propagated throughout the shuttle, Flinx realized he had to set down quickly, while he still retained some semblance of control over the rapidly descending craft. Despite the desperation of his circumstances, the irony of it did not escape him. How fast would be too fast? How exacting an impact could he tolerate and still survive?

  At least, if his remaining instruments could be believed, the shuttle was still on course for the chosen landing site. And why not? There was no reason for the crippling intruder to alter the path of descent. It could crash the ship as thoroughly on target as anywhere else.

  Manual controls existed, but were a novelty to Flinx. Lacking time for a leisurely perusal of the relevant manuals, he set about fighting to disengage control of the vessel from its supervising AI. He had played with and practiced manual landings only a few times. Now he was going to find out what, if anything, he remembered.

  He could not argue directly with the addled AI, but he could disconnect it. When he initiated the suspension sequence, there was some resistance, but nothing that drive and desperation could not overcome. Now in complete control of what remained of the craft’s operating systems, he began by bypassing the host of monitors that governed the engines. He celebrated a small accomplishment when he succeeded in shutting down the main drive. A larger triumph was achieved when the braking drive sprang to life. Descent velocity proceeded to degrade precipitously.

  Would it be enough, and in time? He would know all too soon. Bursting forth from the underside of the inert cloud cover, Flinx set the shuttle’s delta wings to deploy to maximum. Screaming surfaceward, the trim little craft scattered a host of indigenous flying creatures from its path. The ill-defined blurring of beige and brown, blue and green that comprised the surface began to resolve itself into individual features. Flinx shot over canyons and badlands, defunct river deltas and eroded mountains. Somewhere in the jumble of anguished geology, he importuned, there had to be a suitable place to land.

  Minutes later, it loomed in front of him: a broad, sandy plain bordered by dunes whose height he was too busy to estimate. Entering by way of the open seals, scalding hot air shrieked unimpeded through the cockpit. The survival suit he had so providentially donned prior to exiting the Teacher kept him from boiling in his own body fluids.

  Landing skids deployed, nose up, braking drive blasting deafeningly, he continued to surrender altitude and hope for the best. A cliff riven with the intense blue and green of luxuriant copper mineralization materialized unexpectedly in front of him, forcing him to skew the shuttle sharply to the right. The hard surface leaped abruptly into view, an unforgiving, tawny terminus. Then it turned black, accompanied by a single overpowering, echoless banging in his ears . . .

  Something was tickling his eyelids. Blinking, he found himself staring into slitted reptiloid eyes. Fearing dissecting AAnn, he jumped. Then Pip drew back, her head and upper coils blocking her master’s view of much of what lay beyond.

  Wincing, he struggled to sit up. It required several attempts before his damaged harness reluctantly released him from the command chair. His neck throbbed, and his chest felt as if it had recently served as a temporary resting place for a tired elephant. Intense, buttery yellow sunlight made him blink. Pieces of the polarizing port that ought to have minimized the glare lay strewn throughout the cockpit, fragmented by the force of impact. Something gripped his feet.

  Glancing down, he pulled them free of the grasping sand that now filled much of the shuttle’s forepart. Experiencing a sudden, uncharacteristic attack of claustrophobia, he hurried to remove the survival suit’s headpiece. As the shuttle’s instrumentation had originally confirmed when it had been functioning properly, the atmosphere of Pyrassis was safe to breathe. It was hot, incredibly dry, and smelled faintly of desiccated myrtle. Freed from the confines of the suit, Pip unfurled her pleated pink-and-blue wings and soared through the shattered foreport, out into the alien sky. He made no attempt to restrain her. She would not stray far, and he envied her the freedom. Should he feel threatened, she would come back to him in an instant.

  Struggling to move in the clinging sand, which like the cliff he had barely managed to avoid was electric with blue and green ores, he took stock of his situation. Reflecting the confusion that had afflicted its AI, the interior of the shuttle was a useless mess. The fact that he had survived with little more than a few bruises was a tribute to the sturdiness and design of the Ulru-Ujurrian—installed harness. As bad as the shuttle’s unflyability was the destruction of all internal communications facilities. Those built into his survival suit would also allow him to exchange basic commands with the Teacher, to let it track him, perhaps even to let him instruct it to send out a second shuttle to pick him up—except that his ship was concealed behind the planet’s near moon to forestall just that kind of interactive communication with the Pyrassisian surface.

  Eventually, the Teacher’s highly sophisticated AI might wonder at his continued absence, deduce that something was amiss, and initiate a search without having to be prompted. That would take time, and would require a decision on the part of the AI to countermand Flinx’s instructions to remain where it could not be observed from the world below. Presently then, his best hope lay in that portion of the Teacher’s programming that allowed for cybernetic initiative. He was not sanguine.

  What he was, not to put too fine a technological point on it, was stuck. On an alien world he knew next to nothing about. He did know, however, the approximate last location of the landing party from the Crotase. Several options were open to him. One was to try and contact his fellow humans—openly, now—while using the time prior to making such contact to invent a plausible excuse for being in the improbable place where he was. Another was to wait for the AAnn to find him, in which case he was unlikely ever to see a humanx world ever again. A third was to do his best to stay alive until the Teacher’s AI decided it was incumbent upon it to disobey directives and contact its owner, if only to seek clarification of those same prohibitions.

  Eventually, he decided his best chance lay in combining the first and third of his alternatives. He would commence a search for the Crotase landing party. When contact was made, he would keep his distance until he could no longer survive on his own, in the hope that the Teacher would come for him before his endurance was exhausted and he was forced to throw himself on whatever mercies his fellow humans might deign to visit upon him. Meanwhile he could try to locate and appropriate the
personal recorder containing the long-sought-after sybfile.

  It sounded like a workable course of action. Provided, of course, that the crew of the Crotase were not already preparing to depart, having carried out and completed whatever plan they had come to fulfill. Provided that the local AAnn, sparse and scattered though they might be, did not first discover the humans who were prowling illicitly in their midst and irately obliterate them. Provided he could survive the harsh climate, difficult terrain, and unknown inimical life-forms that might inhabit this underpopulated, out-of-the-way speck of grit.

  Yes, it was a workable plan—if one disregarded all the provideds he had not provided for. The survival suit would help. Having come through the crash landing with all its functions apparently intact, it could distill water from air even as low in humidity as that presently surrounding him. Its integrated storage compartments contained food bars and supplements that could keep him alive, if not sated, for a while. The tools that filled the sturdy service belt that formed an integral part of the suit’s waistband were marvels of miniaturization. One leg pouch held a potent endural pistol that fired small but satisfyingly explosive pellets, on the theory that where caliber might prove inadequate, a loud enough noise might be sufficiently disconcerting to the unsophisticated to discourage attack.