“This stake could have supported many more families if only those who had said they’d join us had kept their promises,” Kimmer went on bitterly. Then, with an imperious gesture, he waved the guests to the table and offered each a glass of rich, fruity red wine.
“Well come, men and woman of the Amherst!” Kimmer toasted, and he touched glasses with each of them.
Benden noticed, as Ni Morgana did, that the others were served a paler red by Meishun. Watered, Benden thought. They could at least be equal to us, today of all days! Shensu hid his resentment better than his two brothers did. The women seemed not to notice as they passed dishes of cheese bits and tasty small crackers to everyone. Then Kimmer gestured for the guests to be seated. Benden gave a discreet hand signal to the two marines, who took the end seats at the long table and remained watchful, taking only small sips of the celebratory wine.
“Where to start?” Kimmer began, setting his wineglass down deliberately.
“The beginning,” Ross Benden said wryly, hoping that he might learn what had happened to his uncle before disclosing his identity. Something about Kimmer—not his anger or his autocratic manner, but something less obvious—made Benden instinctively distrust him. But perhaps a man who had managed to survive so long in a hostile environment had the right to a few peculiarities.
“Of the end?” And Kimmer’s spiteful expression served to increase Benden’s dislike.
“If that is when you and the botanist Tubberman sent that homing device,” Benden replied encouragingly.
“It was and our position was then hopeless, though few were realists enough to admit it, especially Benden and Boll.”
“Could you have gotten back up to the colony ships then?” Ni Morgana asked, nudging Ross Benden when she felt him stir angrily.
“No way.” Kimmer snorted with disgust. “They used what fuel the gig had left to send Fusaiyuki up to reconnoiter. They thought they might be able to divert whatever it was that brought the Thread. That was before they realized that the wanderer planet had dragged in a tail that would shower this wretched planet with Thread for fifty frigging years. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they let Avril steal the gig, and that was the end of any chance we had of sending someone competent for help.” The recital of that forty-year-old memory agitated Kimmer, and his face became suffused with red.
“It was definitely established that the organism had been carried from the Oort cloud?” Ni Morgana asked, her usually calm voice edged with excitement.
Kimmer gave her a quelling glance. “In the end that was all they discovered despite their waste of fuel and manpower.”
“There were only three shuttles left at the landing site. D’you suppose some people managed to escape in them?” Ni Morgana asked in a deliberately soothing tone. Benden could see the glitter of her eyes as she sipped calmly at her wine.
Kimmer glared at her with contempt. “Where could they escape to? There was no fuel left! And power packs for sleds and skimmers were in short supply.”
“Barring the lack of fuel, were the shuttles still operational?”
“I said, there was no fuel. No fuel!” He banged his fist on the table.
Benden, looking away from the man’s deep bitterness, noted the faint look of amusement on Shensu’s face.
“There was no fuel,” Kimmer repeated with less vehemence. “The shuttles were so much scrap without fuel. So I haven’t any idea why there’d be only three shuttles at Landing. I left the settlement shortly after the bitch blew the gig up.” He glared impartially at the Amherst officers. “I had every right to leave then, to establish a stake and do what I could to preserve my own skin. Anyone with any sense, charterer or contractor, should have done the same. Maybe they did. Holed up to wait out the fifty years. Or maybe they sailed away into the rising sun. They had ships, you know. Yes, that’s it. Old Jim Tillek sailed them out of Monaco Bay into the rising sun.” He gave a bark of harsh laughter.
“They went west?” Benden asked.
Kimmer favored him with a contemptuous glance and made a wild gesture with one arm. “How the hell would I know? I wasn’t anywhere near the place.”
“And you settled here,” Ni Morgana asked blandly, “in the dwelling built by Kenjo and Ito Fusaiyuki.”
Her phrasing was, Benden thought, a little unfortunate, for the question angered Kimmer even more. The veins in his temples stood out, and his face contorted.
“Yes, I settled here when Ito begged me to stay. Kenjo was dead. Avril killed him to get the gig. Ito’d had a difficult birth with Chio, and his kids were too young to be useful then. So Ito asked me to take over.” Someone’s breath hissed on intake, and Kimmer glared at the three sons, unable to spot the culprit. “You’d all have died without me!” he said in a flat but somehow cautionary tone.
“Most assuredly,” Shensu said, his surface courtesy not quite masking a deep resentment.
“You have survived, haven’t you? And my beacon brought us help, didn’t it?” Kimmer banged on the table with both fists and sprang to his feet. “Admit it! My homer and my beacon have brought us rescue.”
“They did indeed lead us to you, Mr. Kimmer,” Benden said in a tone he barefacedly borrowed from Captain Fargoe when she was dressing down an insubordinate rating. “However, my orders are to search and discover any and all survivors on this planet. You may not be the only ones.”
“Oh yes, we are. By all the gods, we’re the only ones,” Kimmer said, an edge of panic in his voice. “And you can’t leave us here!”
“What the lieutenant means, Mr. Kimmer,” Ni Morgana put in soothingly, “is that our orders are to search for any other survivors.”
“No one else survives,” Kimmer said flatly. “I can assure you that.” He splashed wine into his glass and drank half of it, wiping his mouth with a trembling hand.
Because Ross Benden was not looking at the old man just then but at the three brothers seated across the table, he caught the glitter in the eyes of Shensu and Jiro. He waited for them to speak up, but they remained silent and inscrutable. Clearly they had knowledge that they would not communicate to their rescuers in front of Stev Kimmer. Well, Benden would see them privately later. Meanwhile, Kimmer was coming across as a somewhat unreliable opportunist. He might assert that he had the right to set off and establish a stake when the colony was obviously in terrible straits, but to Benden, it sounded more as if Kimmer had fled cravenly. Was it just luck that he had known where to find Ito, and this Kenjo’s stake?
“My sled had a powerful comunit,” Kimmer went on, revived by the wine, “and once I’d erected the beacon on the plateau here, I listened in to what was broadcast. Not that there was anything important beyond where the next Fall was. How many power packs had been recharged. If they had enough sleds able to cover the next Fall. A lot of the stakeholders had come back to Landing by then, centralizing resources. Then, after the volcanos blew, I heard their messages as they scurried away from Landing. There was a lot of static interference, and transmissions got so fragmented that I couldn’t hear most of what was said. They were frantic, I can tell you, by the time they abandoned Landing. Then the signals got too weak for me to pick up. I never did find out where they planned to go. It might have been west. It might have been east.
“Oh,” he said, waving one hand helplessly, “I tried when the last signal died. I only had one full power pack left by then. I couldn’t waste that in futile searches, now could I? I’d Ito and four small kids. Then when Ito got so ill, I went back to Landing to see if they’d left any medicines behind. But Landing was covered in ash and lava, great rivers of it, hot and glowing. Damned near singed the plastic off the hull.
“I checked all the stations on the lower Jordan. Paradise River, Malay, even Boca, where Benden lived. No one. Fierce waste of matériel, though, piled as storm-wrack along the coast at one point. Looked to me as if they’d lost the cargo ships in a storm. We got bad ones blowing in from the sea—or maybe the aftermath of a tsunami. We had one of
those after some sea volcano blew up to the east somewhere. Missed us, though, on Bitkim Island.
“Last message I ever heard, and only parts of it at that, was Benden telling everyone to conserve power, stay inside, and just let that frigging Thread fall. I guess it got him, too.”
Ni Morgana’s thigh deliberately pressed against Benden’s, and he took it as sympathy. Though the old man’s rambling had been confused and sometimes he contradicted himself, his statement had the ring of truth.
For a few moments, Kimmer sat silently contemplating his wineglass. At last he roused, raising a finger to bring Chio to his side. She refilled his glass. Then, with an apologetic smile, she offered wine to the other guests, whose glasses were barely touched.
“We had eight good years on Pern before disaster struck,” Kimmer said, casting farther back in his memory. “I heard that Benden and Boll swore blind that they could lick Thread. Except for Ted Tubberman and a few others, they had half the colony behind them, too entranced by the great reputations of the admiral and the governor”—the titles were pronounced disparagingly—”to believe they could fail. Tubberman wanted to send for help then. The colony voted the motion down.
“Where we were on Bitkim Island, we didn’t get much Thread, but I heard what it did: wiped out whole stakes down to the metal they’d been wearing. Ate anything, Thread did; gorged until it blew up too fast to live—but it could burrow down and the next generation would begin. Fire stopped it, and metal. It drowned in water. The fish, even the dolphins, thrived on it, or so the dolphineers said. Humph. Damned stuff only let up a couple a years back. Otherwise, we’ve had this frigging menace raining down on us every ten days or so for fifty fucking years.”
“You did well to survive for fifty long years, Mr. Kimmer,” Saraidh said in a flattering purr as she leaned forward to elicit more confidences. “But how? It must have taken tremendous effort.”
“Kenjo’d started ’ponics. Had some sense, that man, even with this fanatic thing he had about flying and being in the air. Space crazy he was. But I was better at contrapting the things you need to live. I taught this whole bunch everything I knew—not that they’re grateful to me.” His spiteful gaze rested on the three Fusaiyukis. “We saved horses, sheep, cattle, chickens before Thread could ooze all over ’em. I’d salvaged one of the old grass-makers they used the first year, before they’d planted Earth grass and that Altair hybrid got started.” He paused, narrowing his eyes. “Tubberman had another type of grass growing before they shunned him. I’d none of that seed, but enough to keep us going until we could plant out again. As long as I had power packs, I foraged and saved every scrap I could find. So we survived, and survived real good.”
“Then others could have, too?” Saraidh asked mildly.
“No!” Kimmer thundered, banging the table to emphasize that denial. “No one survived but us. You don’t believe me? Tell her, Shensu.”
As if making up his mind to obey, Shensu regarded first Kimmer and then the three officers. Then he shrugged.
“After Thread had stopped for three months, Kimmer sent us out to see if anyone lived. We went from the Jordan River west to the Great Desert. We did see long-overgrown ruins where stakes had been started. We saw many domestic animals. I was surprised to see how many animals had managed to survive, for we saw much devastation of fertile land. We traveled for eight months. We saw no one human, nor any evidence of human endeavor. We returned to our Hold.” He shot a single challenging look at Kimmer before his expression settled into its mask.
Benden had a stray thought: Kimmer had sent them out, not to search for survivors, but hoping they wouldn’t return.
“We’re miners, too,” Shensu continued unexpectedly. Kimmer sat up, too enraged at the bland disclosure to form words. Shensu smiled at that reaction. “We have mined—ores and gemstones—as soon as we were strong enough to wield pick and shovel. All of us, my half sisters, and our children, too. Kimmer taught us how to cut gems. He insisted that we be rich enough to pay our way back to civilized worlds.”
“You fools! You utter fools! You shouldn’t have told them. They’ll kill us and take it all. All of it.”
“They are Fleet officers, Kimmer,” Shensu said, bowing politely to Benden, Ni Morgana, and the astonished Nev. “Like Admiral Benden.” His eyes slid and held Ross Benden’s briefly. “They would not be so basely motivated as to steal our fortunes and abandon us. Their orders are to rescue any survivors.”
“You will rescue us, won’t you?” Kimmer cried, suddenly a terrified old man. “You must take us with you. You must!” And now he embarrassed Benden by beginning to blubber. “You must, you must,” he kept on insisting, pulling himself toward Benden to grab his tunic.
“Stev, you will make yourself ill again,” Chio said, coming to disentangle the grasping hands from Benden’s clothing. She gazed at Benden, mutely expressing her abject apologies for an old man’s weakness and pleading for reassurance. The other women fastened apprehensive eyes on the Fleet party.
“Our orders are to establish contact with the survivors—” Benden began, taking refuge in that protocol.
“Lieutenant,” Nev intervened, his face contorted with anxiety, “we’d have a weight problem, taking eleven more aboard the Erica.”
Kimmer moaned.
“We’ll discuss this later, Ensign,” Benden said sharply. Trust Nev to be loose-jawed. “It is time to change the watch.” He gave Nev a quelling look and gestured for Greene to accompany him. Greene looked disgusted as he fell in behind the chastened ensign, who flushed as he realized how badly he had erred.
As Kimmer kept on sobbing, “You must take me, you must take me,” Benden turned to Shensu and his brothers.
“We do have orders to follow, but I assure you that if we find no other survivors to make your continued residence viable, you will either come with us on the Erica, or another means will be found to rescue you.”
“I appreciate your constraints and your devotion to duty,” Shensu said, his composure in marked contrast to Kimmer’s collapse. He made a slight bow from the hips. “However,” he went on, with the slightest of smiles, “my brothers and I have already searched all the old stakes without success. Will you not accept our investigations as conclusive?” His dignified entreaty was far harder to ignore than Kimmer’s blubbering.
Benden tried to assume a noncommittal pose. “I will certainly take that into consideration, Shensu.” He was also trying to calculate just how to accommodate eleven extra bodies on the Erica. He had three-quarters of a tank: if they stripped unessential equipment, would that still give him enough fuel to lift and a reserve if last-minute adjustments were needed in the slingshot maneuver? Damn Nev. His orders were for search only, not rescue. One thing was certain: He trusted Shensu far more than he did Kimmer.
“This mission has another goal, Mr. Fusaiyuki,” Ni Morgana said, “if, under these trying circumstances, you could find your way clear to assist us?”
“Certainly. If I can.” Shensu executed a second dignified bow to her.
“Would you have any documentation that Thread comes from the stray planet as Mr. Kimmer intimated?” she asked, pointing to the ceiling and the system diagram. “Or was that only a theory?”
“A theory which my father proved to his satisfaction, at least, for he flew up into the stratosphere and observed the debris which the stray planet had dislodged from the Oort cloud and drawn into this part of the system. He had noticed the cloud on their way through the system. I remember him telling me that he would have paid far closer attention had he any idea of the threat it would pose.” Shensu’s well-formed lips curled in a wry smile. “The EEC report evidently gave the erratic planet only a mention. I have my father’s notes.”
“I’d like to see them,” Saraidh said, her voice edged with excitement. “Bizarre as it is,” she said to Benden, “it is plausible—and unique. Of course, this erratic planet could be a large asteroid, even a comet. Its orbit is certainly a cometary.”
<
br /> “No,” Benden replied, shaking his head. “The EEC report definitely identifies it as a planet, though probably a wanderer drawn into Rukbat’s family only recently. It orbits across the ecliptic.”
“Our father was too experienced an airman to make a mistake.” Jiro spoke for the first time, his voice as impassioned as Shensu’s was cold. “He was a trained pilot and observed critically and objectively on those missions. We have notes of thanks from Admiral Benden, Governor Boll, and Captain Keroon, all expressing gratitude for his investigation and his selfless dedication to duty.” Jim shot a contemptuous look at Kimmer, who was still sobbing, his face pillowed in his arms, while Chio tried to comfort and reassure him. “Our father died to discover such truths.”
Saraidh murmured something appropriate. “If you would cooperate, further information about this phenomenon would be invaluable.”
“Why?” Shensu asked bluntly. “There can’t be other worlds that are infested with this menace, can there?”
“Not that we know of, Mr. Fusaiyuki, but all information is valuable to someone. My orders were to find out more about this organism.”
Shensu shrugged. “You’re too late by several years to do the most valuable observations,” he said wryly.
“We saw some . . .” Saraidh fumbled for an exact description of the “tunnels” they had seen at Landing. “Remnants, dead shells of these Thread. Would there be any near you that I could examine?”
Shensu shrugged again. “Some on the plains below us.”
“How far in terms of time?” she asked.
“A day’s journey.”
“Will you guide me?”
“You?” Shensu was surprised.
“Lieutenant Ni Morgana is the science officer of the Amherst,” Benden put in firmly. “You will want to assist her in this investigation, Mr. Fusaiyuki.”
Shensu made a small gesture of obedience with his hands.
The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall Page 22