All around them, people made noises and dived for the floor.
She grabbed his arm. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” But it was too late. Ignoring the hailstorm of bullets singing all around him, Wilson Ngu, pistol drawn, was headed their way at a dead run.
***
By the time Adam had labored his way to the tip of the pinnacle, a little platform about the size of a card table (even at one tenth of a gee it had been hard work, climbing and carrying the big, falsely- named “hand laser”) his brother Lindsay was already there, waiting for him.
“Absolutely exhilarating, my dear old Sherpa!” Lindsay told his brother in a bad upper class English accent, his labored breathing belying every word he spoke. “I only wish I had a little flag to plahnt.”
“Sure you do, Hillary old bean.” Adam sat down, resting the laser across his envirosuited thighs. Briefly, he considered adjusting his oxygen upward, but thought better of it. It was a bad habit to get into, and he might need that oxygen later. “We could plahnt it in the pointy top of your head—or someplace better. So what do we do now?”
Lindsay indicated his gamera. It was a long way down. From here they could also see the fire advancing at them slowly but inexorably. “So I cut across this swath,” he pointed to the plastic under his booted feet. They’d each made a pair of parallel cuttings in it with their lasers, which had more or less met here at the summit. “And Ingrid pulls it down and out of the way. Then we take the same route that you did, around the Matterhorn, here, and resume cutting and hauling. I understand that we’re pretty close to finished with the firebreak.”
“Ingrid?” Adam looked up at his brother, surprised.
“Sure,” said Lindsay, perplexed. “I thought you knew.”
“Knew what? What is there to know?” The idea of Lindsay and Ingrid together—
“That she’s been ship-handing for me all day while I was outside doing the handcutting and hooking up. She’s really good at it, Ad, an absolute natural. The construction crews have all been letting her practice with the gamera—on her own time, of course—for six months.”
Adam said, “A secretary who also drives a truck. Well I’ll be damned.”
“You probably will be. All of the good stuff always happens to you, Ad. You’re the boss here. You’ve got Ardith and the kids. The Andersson girl’s hopelessly in love with you, and you’ve never even noticed.”
Adam shrugged. “It’s not the kind of thing it’s good to notice, Lindsay.”
“Hmmph,” said his brother. “I’d notice.”
Using his laser, Lindsay cut across the canopy plastic at the peak. Without warning, both ends began sliding down the opposite sides of the pinnacle. Adam dived toward the bare ground now exposed at the top. Lindsay tried to do the same, but, burdened by his laser, fell off to his right and began tumbling down the long fire-side of the slope.
Adam watched in helpless horror.
Once or twice, it appeared that Lindsay might actually be able to stop himself, but the plastic-covered slope was far too steep and slippery. As he rolled, over and over, his grunts and curses filled the electronic “air” around him and were probably heard all the way back at the construction dome, if not on Pallas or Earth. Somehow his laser got activated, and Adam had to duck the slashing lethal beam a couple of times before it realized that it was falling and shut itself off.
Still carrying his own laser, Adam hurried downhill, trying to move quickly, following the path of the sloughed-off plastic, which was now piled in a disorderly heap at the bottom. Signaling the pilot inside, he seized a handhold beside the rear airlock door and stayed on the outside of the gamera’s hull as it slewed around, headed for Lindsay.
By the time they arrived—Ingrid got there at about the same time Adam did and had immediately begun putting on her envirosuit—Lindsay lay on his back near the creeping fireline, one booted foot intersecting it. An anklet of slow, catalytic fire now crept up the man’s lower right leg, consuming both suit and flesh exactly as it had consumed the plastic of the atmospheric canopy. The bones persisted for a moment and then they, too dissolved into a gray powder and disappeared.
Lindsay writhed on the ground, panting into his suit mike. “You’ve got to stop it, Ad! It hurts like the blazes and I think I’m losing pressure!”
Ingrid threw a big emergency blanket she’d brought over it, but the blanket, too, made of synthetic organic materials, began to burn. Adam grabbed a corner and flipped the blanket over the fireline where it was gradually consumed. He then scooped up a heaping double handful of loose soil and piled it atop Lindsay’s smoldering leg, but as the fire manufactured its own oxygen, that had no more effect than the blanket.
The line of fire was now above Lindsay’s knee. Adam reached a decision. Unfastening the carrying sling of his laser, he fastened it around Lindsay’s thigh, pulled it through the ladder buckle as hard as he could, and then fastened it firmly. He stood and motioned Ingrid away.
“Hold still, Lindsay. I’m sorry, but I’ve got to do this.” And without another word, he triggered the laser and cut his brother’s leg off. That, too, went over the firebreak and into the area already burnt.
The break was complete in another hour; two thirds of the canopy survived.
Lindsay had died of shock and decompression on the way to the dome.
***
Ardith regarded the new sample in the tightly-sealed glass bottle she held up to the light before her eyes. Her laboratory magnifiers had slipped down off her forehead again, as they always seemed to do. She pushed them back in place without being completely conscious of it.
This was only one of several samples she had taken herself this morning from the gigantic Drake-Tealy Object now standing in orbit above Pallas, apparently of its own accord. The individual who usually did that kind of work for her, the pilot R.G. Edd, had flatly refused to go, or to have anything at all to do with the damnable Object ever again.
The man’s feelings in that regard were more than understandable—the thing had whisked him a hundred million miles in a couple of hours—although since then, it had demonstrated nothing but exactly the same physical properties as any other Drake-Tealy Object she was aware of.
Except, of course, for its size and terrifying mobility. Every other Drake-Tealy object known was inert and little larger than a human fist.
The air here, in her personal facility, at the Asteroid Materials Laboratory, was highly filtered and kept as clean as humanly possible. Its pressure was a little higher so contaminants would blow out, not in.
At the moment, consistent with standing “clean room” protocols, Ardith wore a ridiculous plastic shower cap over her hair, a pair of disposable plastic booties over her shoes, a light filter mask, and rubber gloves. She also wore a tie-dyed laboratory jacket her daughter had given her for her birthday. It was very silly, but it helped her feel closer to Llyra, whom she hadn’t seen in person for more than a year.
Now she must be especially careful. It had been more than a little arduous collecting these samples, beginning at the break of dawn with a hurried ionopter ride to Port Peary, another ride, this time aboard a high-speed individualized capsule that took her through the polar ring mountains, then a leaky, rattletrap maintenance jumpbuggy out to the orbiting Drake Tealy Object, and finally a couple of uncomfortably claustrophobic hours trapped within an old-fashioned suit of space armor, the previous owner of which had been overly fond of garlic and cigars.
Six hours going, two hours there, six hours back.
No, she didn’t want these samples spoiled.
The simple taking of them, cutting into the substance of the thing with her little palm-sized laser, had been something of an emotional workout, since she couldn’t know, from moment to moment, if the Object would stay in the place it had chosen, blow up, take off for the Oort Cloud—prudently, she had not attached herself to it in any way—or simply start singing “Hello My Baby! Hello My Honey! Hello My Ragtime Gal!”
> At the end of the day, however—such a particularly long, hard day, during which, with Llyra no longer around to remind her, Ardith was unable to remember whether she had eaten anything or not—she wasn’t entirely certain how much good all this sample-taking was going to do. She suspected that the active source of the Object’s alarming behavior would ultimately prove to be buried somewhere deep inside it, beyond her present reach, or possibly even somewhere else, on the outside.
Now she unscrewed the bottle top, but left it in place until the bottle was over the collecting nozzle of the pulverizer on the bench before her. Quickly flipping it over, she let the sample fall into the machine, screwing the now-empty bottle into place at the mouth of the intake.
Next, she punched instructions into the pulverizer for granule size desired and sample divisions. She called for six small plastic packets of the stuff, finer than powdered sugar, but probably not as sweet. Her assistants often threatened to use the pulverizer to make espresso.
The machine did make lots of unpleasant noise, and would take at least an hour to reduce her thumb-sized sample to rock flour. She decided to go to the trouble of desuiting and have a nice cup of hot tea. She had recently taken up smoking again and looked forward to a cigarette.
As she turned toward the airlock door, Marla, the latest company receptionist, practically flew into the corridor outside the lab and started banging on the glass. She was colorfully dressed and Ardith thought briefly that she looked like some kind of frightened tropical bird.
“Dr. Ngu! Dr. Ngu!” The girl’s voice was muffled by the air space between two layers of glass. “You’d better have a look at what’s on 3DTV!”
Ardith shrugged. Her theine and nicotine could easily wait another minute. There was a set here in the lab, tucked up into a corner near the ceiling. She used the remote that was dangling from it by a bit of string.
” … is KCUF, the eyes, ears, nose, and throat of Pallas. We’re repeating a story that we’ve just received. There has been some kind of sabotage of the Terraformation Project on Ceres, and a fire. We now have an unconfirmed report that one of the three Ngu brothers has been killed.”
“Dr. Ngu! Dr. Ngu!” The receptionist was frantic by now, and still banging on the laboratory window. Ardith had apparently heard the news and collapsed to the floor. Now she lay on it in a small, crumpled heap.
***
Krystal’s associate stood like an automated thing, firing shot after shot across the crowded concourse. The screaming all around them was deafening. Everywhere Brian’s pistol pointed, he blew huge gouges out of the polished stone pillars. The big floor-to-ceiling windows he hit shattered—showering bystanders with fragments—and ceased to work, their residual ugly grayish white reminding Krystal of a blinded eye.
Without a second thought or a moment’s hesitation, she seized both of their bags and made her way as swiftly as she could without drawing attention to herself, to the nearest exit, the same high-speed elevator they’d arrived in. A time eventually comes, she thought, to cut one’s losses, and if this isn’t one of them, then what the hell is?
Meanwhile, Brian’s pistol had run out of ammunition and its slide had locked back. A thin twist of smoke arose from the open ejection port and muzzle. Very bad tactical form, he realized from his training days. Then again, this wasn’t some Null Delta Em camp in the Georgian Caucuses, this was the real world, where he couldn’t always count his shots.
Reflexively, he thumbed the magazine release, allowing the emptied magazine to fall free from the pistol to a seat in front of him and bounce, unheeded, to the floor. He inserted a fresh magazine, holding eighteen rounds of the long, powerful nine millimeter variant, and slapped it home with the heel of his hand. In those scant two silent seconds, people around him had begun to get ahold of themselves. One daring individual, just a few feet in front of the shooter, noticed his weapon had gone dry and …
As the man rose and crouched to leap at him, Brian released the slide, chambering a round, and fired, almost in single motion. The jumper’s face exploded in crimson ruin and he fell lifeless at Brian’s feet. He could smell the iron tang of blood in the air. It was like perfume.
Somebody nearby vomited, and that was like music.
Several seat-rows further away, another individual, a tourist from West America, drew the pistol she traveled with and began to align her sights on him. Even full of adrenalin and the exultation of the open kill, Brian barely managed to fire first, killing the woman with another shot to the head. Her little gun flew into the air and she vanished behind the seats. He felt pain in his side; when he looked down, there was blood, rather a lot, soaking through his clothing. Why, that complete and total bitch, he thought. She’s probably killed me.
And where the hell had Ngu disappeared to?
“I’m right here, you asshole!”
Wilson stood a little behind him, not six feet away, his enormous automatic pistol pointed straight at Brian’s face. Brian had heard all about that gun. It had belonged to the devil himself, Emerson Ngu. Brian began to turn and raise his own weapon again, but the wound in his side hampered his movement, and everything was happening much too slowly.
He was too late. In the capable hands of his great-grandson Wilson, Emerson’s mighty Grizzly roared and a 260-grain .45 caliber magnum hollowpoint took the Null Delta Em field agent through both lungs.
The last thing Brian saw was Wilson stepping forward, standing over him where he’d fallen, aiming the huge Grizzly so Brian could actually see the hollowpoint bullet up in the chamber, and pulling the trigger.
Brian never heard or saw the shot.
Blackness became nothingness.
Without a second glance, Wilson turned on his heel and made his way back to where he’d left Fallon. Oddly, he couldn’t see her now. Instead, he saw Fallon’s father, kneeling on the floor, cursing and crying.
When Wilson finally arrived at his side, Fallon lay on the granite floor, her head and shoulders resting in her father’s lap, motionless and silent, with a nine millimeter bullet hole neatly through her heart.
Before he was consciously aware of it, there were also individuals in uniforms, bearing medical equipment. Holding some kind of scanner in his hand, the paramedic kneeling at Fallon’s side looked across at Wilson and Terence. “I’m afraid there isn’t any hope. She was gone before we got here. She was also pregnant—about three weeks—probably didn’t even know it herself. Do you want us to try and save it?”
His chest filling with anger, grief, and … he didn’t know what else, Wilson looked across Fallon’s lifeless body and caught her father’s eye. In that instant, there was suddenly an understanding and commitment between the two of them. “Yes, do it,” both men told the paramedic.
“Tieve,” Terence said abruptly, tears streaking his face.
So much was happening. Wilson didn’t understand. “What did you say?”
“Tieve,” Terence repeated the word, making two syllables of it, “tee-EV”. “I know she’d have wanted me to tell you. Fallon’s middle name was Tieve.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: CONSULTATIONS
Religious people often maintain that a proof of their god’s existence is the marvelous way the world and all of its wonders are perfectly suited to us. What a miracle! Of course they refuse to understand that it is we—through four thousand million years of evolution—who are suited to the world, not the other way around.
If we had evolved—because environmental circumstances compelled it—to belly-squat on fourteen fat legs, in a ten gee field, breathing sulfur dioxide and excreting sulfuric acid, eyeless and blind in the Stygian darkness, but sensing the area around us through long, sensitive bristles on our paddle-shaped tails, they would still be burbling about how miraculous it all is, when it would only be another example of evolution-by-natural selection at work. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu
Her eyes opened. The first thing she saw was her mother-in-law’s face.
“Morning, sleepy-hea
d,” Julie smiled down at her. “How do you feel?”
The place, Julie observed with a certain proprietary approval—she and her late husband had paid for a good deal of it—was bright and cheery, much more like a bedroom at home than what it really was. For the most part, medical equipment, supplies and appliances, had been kept out of sight. A high, wide window looked out across Lake Selous.
It was one of those bright, cloudless, mercilessly sunny days, with a little white chop. As usual there were lavishly colored sails far out on the water. People on flying belts hovered overhead. Girls in bikinis were water-skiing. It reminded Julie of how much she missed fishing.
Ardith said, “It isn’t morning, and I’ve been awake several times already. You know how the bastards don’t like to let you sleep in the hospital.” Her voice was little more than a croak, and her eyes were dark and sunken. Julie had never seen her looking so ill and old and tired.
But she laughed. “They’re worried about you, dear, that’s all. You’re the Great Lady of Pallas, and they don’t want to lose you. But they tell me you’re not eating, and you’re refusing the drugs they’ve prescribed.”
“‘Great Lady of Pallas’ my fat freckled—they want me to take happy drugs, Julie, or at least anti-unhappy drugs. And they summoned you all the way from Mars … ” Ardith interrupted herself with a kind of sigh. Inside, she felt ancient, and all used up. “To help them nag me?”
Julie shook her head. “I came all the way from Mars for the most selfish of purposes, to be with as much of my family as I can. Just now, you’re it, kiddo, until Ad and Arleigh get here for the—you know. I’m usually satisfied to be something of a solitary individual, as you know, but I didn’t think that I could bear being alone with this … ”
“You’ve lost your son, your child.” Ardith paused for a breath. “I’ve often wondered—morbidly, I guess—what that might be like. It isn’t right. Our kids are supposed to bury us, not the other way around.”
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