Joslyn knew the hull simply wasn't built to take this kind of abuse. Her every pilot's instinct was to get them down test, now, anywhere, to wait out the storm. But the crew of the Moose was going to be stranded on Outpost, and their chances for survival rested with the Refiners. They had to hang on, travel as far as they could in the Moose. Joslyn held onto the stick and swore through clenched teeth as a hailstone smashed into the pilot's window, starring the viewpoint, making it that much harder to see.
"Maddy! Kick in the look-down radar and get me some hard numbers! If the Guards can spot our radar emissions through this bloody great storm, they deserve to win."
"Yes, ma'am." Maddy started flicking switches. "Give it a second to get some returns back—nowl Airspeed, altitude, range and bearing to beacon and descent rate on your panel."
Damn! Those numbers weren't good. They were going to land a good fifty kilometers short of the beacon. Joslyn dragged back desperately on the stick, pulling the wallowing Moose's nose up as far as she could, risking a stall to try and drag some more range out of her. With no consciousness of what she was doing, Joslyn felt an updraft in the thrumming of the wings and the tricks of the wind. She grabbed at it, rode it as far as she could, felt the ship wallow back down into still air. The updraft might have bought them a kilometer, maybe two. Joslyn prayed for a tailwind, and got it, and then wished she didn't have it, a roaring, wailing banshee of a gust that almost knocked the Moose off her tail and into a fatal spin.
In the crash and the roar of the storm, Joslyn wrestled with the elements of air and wind and water, battling to keep her craft on course and in one piece.
They were getting lower now. They broke through the base of the cloud deck and looked upon the rain-soaked, wind-torn face of Outpost.
They were very low and too damn slow now—almost out of airspeed, headed for a stall. Joslyn swore and pushed the Moose's nose down, trading altitude she could ill afford for the airspeed she needed to keep her bird in the air. The ship seemed to wallow in the air, felt clumsier than ever, if that was possible. The damn porous ceramic hull must have soaked up the rainwater. And water was heavy. The added weight was dragging them down.
At least here, below the cloud deck, the winds had steadied down. No gusts or air pockets, just a hard, steady cross wind that did her no good, but no great harm, either. Joslyn turned into the wind and held her nose as close as she could to where it should be.
Now they were really coming down. Nothing fancy, just keep this thing in the air as long as it would stay there. Nothing but unbroken forest land below, no cozy meadow to set down in, just hope the local equivalent of trees had soft branches. How far from the beacon? Seventy kilometers. Sixty-five. Sixty. Still slowing. Come on! Fifty-five.
0Fifty! And they were still a few klicks up in the air. Forty-five. Every klick was a gift from the gods of the air, now. Forty. There came the ground straight up for them. Thirty-five. What was that in miles? Never mind, figure it on the ground. They were only a thousand meters up now.
The wind came about to their nose, blowing them back against their course. Joslyn pulled the Moose's nose down and to port, trying to avoid a stall and maybe still make some headway. She kept it level, trying to pancake it down, spread the shock evenly—
—and the Moose ran out of sky.
She plowed into the treetops with terrible force, a roaring, screaming, keening crash of branches breaking and wings snapping off and shouts of frightened people and the horrible whistle of air screaming out of a broken hull. The Moose slammed on and on through the trees, far longer than seemed possible, tree limbs whipping past the cockpit windows, until finally a tree trunk stood its ground and the Moose shattered her nose square against it. The ruined ship tilted over to port and fell the last ten meters to the ground on its side.
Suddenly, the world, which had been so full of noise, was silent, or nearly so, with nothing but the creak of tree limbs, the patter of the rain, and the moans of people to be heard.
"Everyone still with us?" Mac called out, and got a ragged chorus of yes's. "Good. That was some kind of flying, Joz."
Joslyn shook herself and forced her hands to peel themselves away from the stick. "Thanks, Mac. Though that has to be the least covert landing I've ever made." She felt herself trembling. Perhaps no one else would ever realize it, but she would always know just how close it had been.
Mac took a few minutes to check again that everyone was all right. They had all taken some bumps and bruises, but no one seemed much the worse for wear. All the pressure suits were behaving themselves, and that was a blessing. There was one spare aboard, but getting anyone into it with the Moose's hull cracked and breached would have been a challenge, to say the least.
It was tempting to sit tight and wait for the rain to end, but Lucy warned them just how long the rains could last—there was nothing for it but to get moving. Within a half hour of landing, they had their carrypacks strapped on, rifles and other weapons at the ready, and the direction finder pointing twenty-nine kilometers that way to the beacon.
The six of them stepped from the wreckage of the Sick Moose, their hearts and spirits as gloomy as the dismal, rainswept forest that surrounded them. Lucy's helmet started to blur over with rain, and she switched on the wiper arm. The others followed her lead, turned to her. She was the only one who could guide them on this trek. She looked to Mac, and he nodded.
"You're our native guide, Lucy. We follow your commands on this leg."
"Right, then. Everyone make sure your external mikes are up, so you can hear them coming. You've seen what a Z'ensam—an Outposter looks like. If you see anything else move, kill it. I don't care if it looks like a sweet little baby fawn that only wants to nibble the grass. Kill it! There are no harmless wild animals on this planet. Any creature that spots us will try to eat us. So kill them, without hesitation. And make sure it stays dead. Don't worry about offending the locals either—it's the same way they deal with the wildlife. Is all that grimly clear?"
No one said anything.
"Mac, you take the rear. I’ll lead. Lieutenant Madsen, you're behind me with the direction finder. Joslyn, you watch her back while she's watching our route. Mr. Sisulu, Mr. Gesseti, if you would follow Joslyn. Let's go."
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Outpost
Charlie Sisulu didn't like the odds. He was sweating, not from exertion, but from fear. The forest was a grim, gloomy, wet and dismal place, claustrophobic—the vegetation shaded in livid greens that seemed horrid parodies of Earth's lovely plant life. His suit's external mikes picked up no birdsong, no musical calls of one beast to another, but instead an endless screaming, roaring challenge of defiance and death, set to the refrain of staccato, bone-rattling bursts of thunder. The rain came on and on, pouring down off his pressure suit, the wiper blade on his helmet barely able to keep his helmet halfway clear. And Charlie Sisulu had never been in a pressure suit before in his life. He felt trapped, sealed up, entombed in the clumsy suit.
This Lieutenant Lucy Calder led them on at a reckless speed, crashing through the thick underbrush, using a laser pistol or machete to hack down anything she couldn't get through. Twice she had dropped the laser, unholstered a heavy machine pistol and fired at something before Char-He had even seen whatever it was. Twice she had reholstered the heavy gun, scooped up the laser, and pressed on before whatever she had killed had finished falling to the ground. Twice he had stepped over shattered corpses that seemed nothing but teeth and claws.
And they had only gone about one kilometer.
He was scared, scared of drowning in the endless rain; scared of getting his foot mired in the ankle-deep mud they seemed to stumble into constantly; scared of some pocket-sized monster leaping out of the lurid greed fronds and weeds that hung down to brush against his suit with every step; scared of encountering some wild-living relative of the foam worm that might already be gnawing its way through some part of his suit where no one would notice it until it was too late; scared of his faceplate
shattering; scared he might die of a carbon-dioxide reaction, his lungs hyperventilating, panic setting in—he forced himself not to think of such things. His breath was growing short, his heart was pounding. He felt himself close to vomiting, and that was a real nightmare in a pressure suit. Claustrophobia. Xenophobia. Did giving it names make it easier? He forced himself to look up, forced himself to watch more than the slogging feet and lumbering backpack of the figure ahead of him, forced himself to look around, told himself that this was a whole new world of life to explore, that his tutors in a new universe of biology, themselves a wondrous find, were just a few kilometers ahead.
It seemed to help. A little. It felt like his heart rate was down.
A rifle slug screamed past his helmet and splattered the muzzle of a brightly colored, fox-sized flying beast that was diving straight for him, keening for his blood in a high-pitched shriek. It fell out of the air and landed at his feet. That Captain Larson was a good man to have at your back.
Charlie had never seen a flying animal that size. It was a whole new taxonomy, a discovery of the first importance. Time for that when they were safe. He stepped on the ruined, lovely little body rather than break stride, and kept on.
At the rear of the column, Mac wasn't in much better shape. He devoutly wished for someone to be at his back. That fox-bat thing had gotten too damn close. He decided to shift to heavier firepower, unloaded the slugs from the rifle and slapped in a long clip of mini-rocket rounds with explosive warheads. Those should stop damn near anything.
He got the chance to find out almost immediately. A low-slung lizard with two cruel, grasping arms that reached up for Joslyn burst from the shadows and Mac blasted it into bloody confetti. Lucy didn't even look back, she just shouted "Come on!" over the suit radio and upped the pace to a dogtrot. Even for Mac, that wasn't easy in the armored suit, carrying equipment. It must be real hell on Pete, but the middle-aged diplomat made no protest.
They slogged on and on, not going a kilometer that some nightmare beast didn't burst out at them to die under their guns. It was a grueling, mind-numbing nightmare, Lucy setting an arrow-straight course toward the beacon, Maddy just behind her, dividing her attention between the direction finder and putting one foot after another. The relentless pace ground them down into automata, capable of nothing but marching on, and gunning down anything that moved. The rain never ended, the morbid forest never ended, the cacophony of animal cries never let up. All there was left to life was the simple act of marching on.
None of them knew it had happened until it was over, and of course Madeline Madsen never knew it happened at all. Or perhaps she did, because she threw the direction finder clear, unless the herd of whatever they were simply knocked it from her grasp as they plummeted past.
One moment they were alone in the forest, just stepping out onto an empty game trail, and the next, they were watching the backs of some tawny-colored, fleet-footed herd flashing back down the pathway, carrying Madeline's new-made corpse away.
They had moved so fast! Mac had seen just the slightest flicker of movement, and then a single, moment frozen in his memory—a long, lanky body, its claws already raking open the armor of the pressure suit as if it weren't t there, life's blood already gushing from her chest, her death scream cut short, and then hunter and prey alike were gone, followed by a small herd of the fleet killers, and Pete was down, the arm of his suit torn up, and he was bleeding.
Before Mac could bring his rifle up to fire, they had vanished into the forest. Too fast! The five remaining humans stood frozen to the ground in shock, and the fear grew in all of them. Mac shook his head, came to himself, and suddenly knew that, Pete injured or no, it was death to stay near that trail. He scooped up the older man over one shoulder, and shouted "Joslyn! The finder! Lucy! Go! Go—Maddy's dead, for God's sake—before they come back! Sisulu—get your gun out and stop playing tourist. Move it!"
Lucy took off again, full tilt, and they didn't stop again until they had another five klicks between themselves and Maddy's killers. Mac called the halt, and carefully set Pete down. The three military people surrounded Pete and Charlie and stood a frightened watch as the biologist tended the wound.
Charlie did the best he could for his patient. Pete was semi-conscious, and the injury itself was pretty ugly. The claws of one of those fiends had ripped clear through the armor of the suit and torn up Pete's arm. He was bleeding, had already lost a lot of blood. Worse, Pete was already in carbon-dioxide shock, his face gray, his breath fast and shallow. Charlie used the chest panel on Pete's suit to up the oxygen flow and set up a positive pressure flow, flushing the CO2 out of the suit through the torn-up sleeve. Charlie pulled the first-aid kit off his backpack, cut away as little of the suit arm as possible, slathered an antiseptic/local anesthetic on the wound, and bandaged it up as best he could.
He hesitated, then used the kit's jet hypodermic to give
0Pete heady doses of anti-shock drugs and a stimulant. With the loss of blood, the drugs were risky, temptation to a heart attack. But if the group was to keep any sort of pace through this nightmare world, Pete would have to be on his feet. Mac was the only person big enough to carry Pete more than a few meters, and if Mac was crippled by exhaustion, that would put everyone else at greater risk.
The first-aid kit included pressure-suit patches, and Charlie slapped the largest one on the hole. Charlie worked the suit s chest panel again, backing off the pressure setting but keeping the oxy count high. Pete's color already looked better, and his breathing seemed easier. "That's all I can do," Charlie said carefully. "He should be all right if the blood loss wasn't too bad. Let him rest easy for just a few minutes before we go on. The patch on the suit needs to set."
Joslyn, watching the forest for whatever else was out there, felt a streak of moisture run down her cheek, and hoped it was a tear and not perspiration. She wanted to mourn Maddy Madsen, a bright young kid who had come a very long way to get killed, a fine young woman entrusted to Joslyn's care, who died in Joslyn's care. Joslyn wanted to feel guilt, wanted to feel sorrow, wanted to cherish Madeline's memory. But danger surrounded them still, and adrenalin coursed through her veins, and fear left no room for other emotion.
Groggy, shaky, Pete came back to himself and insisted he was strong enough to walk. He barely seemed aware of what had happened. Charlie helped him to his feet, grateful for the drugs that were holding the older man together.
They marched on.
CHAPTER THIRTY Outpost, Refiner Camp
The far sentries to the south of the camp had reported the sound of a faint far-off crash in the midst of the storm, and then an occasional ripple of rapid explosions, like many guns going off at once, and animals came charging out of the south as if pursued by something terrifying. It all brought the damnable Nihilists quite rapidly to mind. Who else would crash through the underbrush, unannounced, traveling through the hazards of the woodland instead of the relative safety of the Road?
C'astille was the only one who thought of an alternate explanation, but she did not suggest it, for she hardly dared hope it was true. She volunteered to lead the team that would venture cross-country to investigate the disturbance. Ten of them set out on foot, heavily armed, not only against the hypothetical enemy, but against the forest beasts.
C'astille led them at a good pace, and soon heard the noise of rapid-fire guns for herself. Moving cautiously, the Z'ensam let their ears guide them toward the sound. It soon became clear that not only were they moving toward the sound, but the sound was moving toward them. C'astille, for no logical reason, became more and more convinced that they were tracking something far more exciting than a band of marauding Nihilists, and urged her companions onward.
It was a miracle that humans and Z'ensam didn't open fire on each other when the two groups nearly tripped over each other toward midafternoon. But C'astille was the first to spot the humans, and fortunately had the good sense to call out "Lucy! Lucy!" instead of galloping blindly forward to gree
t her friend. If she had taken the latter course, unquestionably she would have gotten her head blown off.
As it was, the worst she had happen to her was near-strangulation, when Lucy ran to her and flung her arms around C'astille's long neck. "Oh, C'astille! Thank God! I don't know how much farther we could have gone."
C'astille returned her friend's embrace. "Lucy!" she said in English. "You did come back. Welcome!" C'astille stepped back from her friend and turned to the other humans, who looked just a trifle alarmed at being suddenly surrounded by natives bearing what were quite obviously weapons. And it occurred to C'astille that the Z'ensam must look rather large and threatening to a human. She hurriedly signaled her companions to holster their guns, and did the same herself.
She carefully addressed the other humans in English. "My name is C'astille. In the name of D'chimchaw, Guidance of the Refiners, I bid you welcome and offer our hospitality." She had rehearsed that speech a long time, waiting for the day Lucy would bring her friends back.
The largest of the humans—in fact the largest human C'astille had yet seen—came forward and bowed. The big human, indeed all the humans, seemed exhausted to the point of collapse. "My name is Terrance MacKenzie Larson. This is Joslyn Marie Cooper Larson, Charles Sisulu, and Peter William Gesseti. In the name of the League of Planets, we thank you for your welcome."
C'astille hesitated a moment, and then recalled a thing the Guards had done. She stepped forward and reached out her four-thumbed hand to Terranz Mac whatever-the-name-was. She could practice saying it later.
Mac seemed surprised by the gesture, but then he looked C'astille straight in her jet-black eyes and shook her hand in the pouring rain of Outpost's woodlands.
The weary humans were relieved beyond measure to find themselves with an armed escort through the deadly forest. There was something almost anticlimactic about their meeting with the natives. C'astille and Lucy walked side by side, chattering like two long-separated school chums in a mixture of O-I and English that no one else could follow. The other Outposters seemed curious about these new and strange halfwalkers, but they were used to seeing Lucy about and some of the novelty had worn off. Besides, none of them could speak English.
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