The Ship Who Saved the Worlds

by Anne McCaffrey

  A hundred meters away, the lead globe stopped and spun in place. The water inside sloshed upward. Tall Eyebrow made a few signs quickly and with authority toward the other globes. Keff was reminded abruptly that the insecure visitor to the Cridi homeworld was also the leader of the exiled Ozran-born Cridi, who kept his population together, alive, and sane in the most dangerous and deprived of circumstances. He admired the way TE threw in a tactful sign or two that alluded to the difficulty of using a travel globe, but added staccato chops for "absolute necessity." Reluctantly, Big Voice and the others lowered the spheres to the ground. The lead globe rotated 180 degrees, and the party set off again more slowly, but more loudly. Keff flattened himself down so that he could no longer see them. He studied his target.

  There appeared to be little activity, but Carialle had detected at least four life-forms in the building. She had a hard time finding body-heat traces. The planet's surface was cold, but it was dotted with hot spots where volcanoes and geothermal vents broke through. Structures placed over these took advantage of the natural heat.

  Most of the population had to be below ground, with only a few exits to the open sky. It was impossible to pick out individuals. Ammonia/oxygen flares ignited occasionally, and as swiftly, blew out. Carialle cursed as one trace after another that she was tracking suddenly vanished. Gravity was approximately one and a half times Standard norm; bearable for short periods. The "spaceport" was a ridge, the edge of a huge crater filled in over eons with dust and debris that had solidified into a flat plain. Architects had bored into, or more likely, out of the side of the hill overlooking the plain, and built onto it. Carialle reported that heat traces from inside the building registered at least 35 degrees C. That sounded much nicer than the surrounding landscape, which was bare and dusty where it wasn't covered with discarded junk from hijacked spaceships.

  "What do these people eat?" Keff wondered out loud, his voice sounding hollow in his survival suit.

  "Look at those domes, built to catch every meager ray, even magnify it," Carialle said. "Perhaps our ammonia-breathers photosynthesize, and live on water."

  "Or the cities below ground are full of hydroponics," Keff said. "I don't see enough domes to support a breeding population of mitochondroids." In spite of the peril and the anger he felt at the pirates, he and Carialle had dropped back into the game they loved to play, anticipating the facts about an unknown race. "Is it possible this planet was a lot warmer once? Or do you suppose we've discovered silicophages?"

  "It wouldn't be the first discovery of mineral-eaters," Carialle said, after running through her memory banks, "but it would be the first one that attained sentience and space travel."

  "In stolen ships," Keff said, flatly. "What do we know about them so far?"

  "From the emissions of the ship Tall Eyebrow damaged, body temperatures in range tolerable by humans, between twenty degrees C and forty degrees C. Size, from my readings in the structure ahead of you, they are larger than humans, but smaller than lions. Anything else, I must await data from you and our party of rolling frogs."

  "Add to that, intelligent and dangerous," Keff said, nodding, but keeping his eyes pinned on the dome. "Well, I can't wait here forever. TE, I'm moving. Watch the building and stop anything that comes in after me."

  "I hear," the small voice said in Standard over the helmet speaker.

  Staying flat on his belly, Keff crept over the rise. On the other side was a steeply sloping valley. Long-departed rivers or perhaps the celestial pressures of planetary formation had crazed the plain with shallow canals. Keeping low enough to remain out of sight to occupants of the largest structure, Keff crawled on hands and knees. Fine silt, undisturbed for eons, rose briefly around him, then settled out in the heavy gravity, burying his tracks.

  Parked a dozen kilometers away beside the Cridi spaceship in a lonely valley, Carialle watched his progress simultaneously on her charts and through the body-cam he wore on his tunic.

  "You're coming to a T-intersection," she said, as Keff paused and reared up on his knees so she could see his precise location. "Take the left branch. No, the left one. The right one leads straight into a deep thermal vent."

  Keff made his way along the turnings, wrinkling his nose against the clouds of dust even though he knew they couldn't penetrate his protective suit. His heads-up display told him the half-meter-high bank of fog into which he crawled at a low point in a ditch was heavy with ammonia and traces of other gases reduced to liquid. He gulped. One breach in suit integrity, and he was a green icicle. Never mind; he was committed to his mission. In some small way, he was helping Carialle to lay the ghosts of her past, as well as ridding the Cridi of a menace and avenging the deaths of the Central Worlds diplomatic personnel. A moon in its second quarter rose on the horizon and crept up the sky, throwing a little more light on his path. His canal dipped sharply as he crawled another ten meters, then light from the moon was cut off. In the blackness his suit-lights went on. He paused, waiting for the prickle between his shoulder blades that would tell him he was being watched. Nothing.

  "You're almost underneath the building now," Carialle was saying. "If you go around to the right, you'll be in front of that hatchway."

  Keff's back began to ache from the heavy gravity. He paused with hands on knees.

  "It looks a long way up," he panted, staring at the black shape above him, picked out by distant pinpoint stars. His lungs dragged in oxygen.

  "What are you building up all of those muscles if not for an effort like that?" Carialle asked dryly.

  When she started making ironic comments, Keff could tell she was the most worried. He just shook his head. In an instant the aches in his lower back and thighs went away. "Just oxygen-starved," he said. "Just a moment." He reached into the gauntlet of his right glove for the control pad, and turned up the nitrox mix slightly. The faint hissing sound was a comfort.

  In the gloom the building over his head looked ominous. The slab on which it was built had been slagged out of a lip of the ridge, so the people inside had at least stolen, if not evolved, heavy pyroconstruction equipment.

  Keff heaved himself up. The domes began at a meter above the platform, giving him an expanse of blank wall against which he could conceal himself. Ahead of him, the platform widened out away from the domed windows to an apron that bore scorch marks from repeated launches and landings. Limp, metal-bound hoses lay on the ground in skeins. They led from the putative fuel tank, which stood on pylons around a fold of the ridge from the domes. To protect the glass from explosions, Keff thought, with an approving nod to the designers. A dusty accordion-pleated hood was bunched up around the entrance to the building. It seemed to be long enough to extend all the way to the edge of the platform. Not at all sophisticated, but it would scarcely ever need major repairs. He took the video pickup off his suit and held it up against the bottom margin of the clear wall.

  "Can you see anything, Cari?" he whispered.

  "Aqua foliage," Carialle replied. "Spiky, like evergreens—no, more like fan coral. I can't see anything moving, even on infrared. My sensors are still picking up those same four body traces. No one much seems to come up to the surface."

  "If they're anything like us, it's too cold for them up here. I'm ten meters from the entrance. Where are you, TE?" Keff asked his suit mike.

  "We see you, other side of edge," the globe-frog's voice piped. "Under-by tank-container."

  "Back me up. I am going to try and enter. If I am not out in fifteen minutes from the time of my entrance, come in and help me. At that point, revealing we have Core technology will be moot."

  "Sir Frog waits," the small voice said. Keff grinned.

  He crawled the rest of the way to the rough plascrete arch. The entrance resembled an airlock, devoid of any security devices Keff could recognize. The pirates must have been very confident that no one knew they were here.

  "Where are the guards, Cari?" he asked.

  "All four are deep inside," she said. "It lo
oks like your best chance."

  Keff nodded to himself. "Here goes."

  He stood up against the inside edge of the arch, hidden momentarily from sight of anyone in the dome. Carefully, he turned around. Inside a metal frame, two flat bars jutted out from the wall.

  "I've only got a fifty-fifty chance of cocking up," he said, and a childhood singsong bubbled up from memory. He waggled his finger playfully between the two bars. "My mother said to pick the very best one, and you are it." With that, he stabbed the upper bar. It moved easily under his finger, depressing flat to the wall.

  Immediately behind him, something heavy and soft dropped to the ground. Keff spun. He was now curtained into the enclosure by a metal and plastic mesh. Hissing erupted from the wall side. In a few moments, a door, large enough to admit a cargo container, slid upward.

  Keff listened before he stepped inside, turning up his external mikes to the maximum. No alarms. No one seemed to have heard the airlock open.

  "Looks like I'm all right," he whispered.

  "For pity's sake, be careful," Carialle said in his aural implant.

  He nodded, knowing she would pick up the physiological signs of the small movement. A blinking light on the other side of the threshold urged him forward into another sealed pocket of air. Keff stepped through just as the heavy door slid downward. It closed silently, which surprised him more than a solid bang would have. He heard more hissing, then the curtain and its fender rose, revealing the interior of the dome. A few spotlights stabbed their beams down at the floor, but mostly the arboretum was lit by the faint, distant sun. Bristly growths sprang out of flat, low dishes made of black ceramic on the shiny floor. The plants themselves—if they were plants—were a riot of neon blue, ultramarine, teal, acid yellow, and interplanetary-distress orange. Keff winced.

  "Gack," he said quietly. "Their taste in horticulture is nightmarish."

  "I told you so," Carialle said. "The colors suggested to me that the atmosphere inside was ammonia-heavy, like the outer atmosphere, but it isn't nearly as saturated as I thought. My spectroanalysis shows that it's much more dilute. Less than one-tenth. You could almost breathe it."

  "How'm I doing?"

  "You're still alone," Carialle said.

  "That's strange," Keff said absently, peering around. "Look, could that be furniture?"

  He turned so the video pickup on his chest was facing some metal and fabric constructs in a group amid the riot of spiky, sea-colored plants.

  "I would say yes." Carialle studied the forms, and ran projections on an ergonomics program in her memory banks. "Something that prefers a sling to a seat—there's no back—so possibly not upright in carriage. It lies supported. A quadruped? Then why wouldn't it simply lie down on pads on the floor?" She drew image after image of arrangements of torsos and limbs, and rejected them all.

  "Here are some divan pillows," Keff said. He turned to face fuzzy, covered pads the size of his bunk. "They're huge!"

  "Whew!" Carialle whistled in agreement. "Keff, sit on one so I can see how much a body of your weight compresses the material. I need an estimate on what made those dents."

  Keff complied, plumping down on one as if exhausted, which indeed he was beginning to be. He sat and gasped for a moment. The heavy gravity was telling on him. He hoped the Cridi were faring all right.

  "Let me see," Carialle said. Keff rose and gave her a good view of his impression from different angles. "My estimate stands. I think they weigh about two hundred kilos apiece."

  "I am not staying long," Keff said, positively.

  Beyond the seating arrangements was an arched corridor. Like the platform outside, it had been slagged through the mountain with a melter drill of some kind. Down the passageway, Keff spotted the reflected flicker of blue and white lights. It looked familiar. He listened carefully at the entrance for a long time, then tiptoed toward the source of illumination. He passed closed hatchways with the same framed control bars in the wall beside them. At the sudden sound of escaping air, Keff flattened himself into the nearest door frame and held his breath. The noise stopped with a wheeze and a bang.

  "Probably a compressor," Carialle commented. "Primitive." Keff nodded, the back of his helmet tapping against the wall. The echo bounded off both ways down the empty hall, sounding like water dripping into a pool.

  He waited a moment, then slipped noiselessly into the corridor once again. His heads-up display told him it was three degrees warmer in here than it had been in the atrium. He was undoubtedly already under the lip of the excavated mountain. He looked forward to exploring the labyrinth of caves that underlay this building, but with a suitable escort of CW militia for backup.

  "Here's your glow," Carialle said, as he counted the eighth doorway.

  "Computer screens," Keff breathed, peering around the frame. On a low table that had once been a galley counter in a Central Worlds ship sat antique CPUs and square monitors. Boxes of jumbled chips and tapes and datasolids sat on the floor beside the table. He edged in so the camera eye on his chest would send the image back to the ship.

  "More salvage," Carialle said, severely. "That is a year-old Tambino 90-gig unit. Those are CW special issue screens, and those input peripherals are from half a dozen different systems reaching back a thousand years. And yes, some of that discarded junk is Cridi."

  Keff glanced around, wondering how far away the guards were. "Could you crack the data storage system?"

  "Sonny, I cut my diodes on tougher stuff than this. Hook me up, and we'll copy everything in the memory. That'll give CenCom plenty to go on."

  "What about viruses?"

  "Not to worry. I'll isolate the files in a separate section and make them 'read only' outside of that drive base. I have all that spare memory installed for our diplomatic mission. Using it for hacking an enemy system is much more interesting than using it for lists of trade goods and historical texts, wouldn't you say?" There was fierce satisfaction in her voice. "Use the port IT has been attached to. That should be sufficient. You can use the same memory later for language translation."

  "Right," Keff said, starting toward the setup. He put one knee on the hanging sling. Suddenly, the computer emitted a loud beep, then a siren wail.

  "Oh, no!" he exclaimed, leaping backward. "It's got a proximity alarm. Do they hear me? Are they coming this way?" He stared at the doorway.

  "Don't panic," Carialle said, her voice changing to a deep baritone to be heard over the shrill alarms. "I don't hear any high frequencies from motion detectors. It might be a timer."

  "It has attracted attention. I hear something." Keff's audio pickups detected a faint shuffling sound. "They're coming this way!"

  He put one eye around the edge of the door and flung himself backward when he saw a huge shadow looming toward him. "I'm trapped. TE, keep out! I'll get free if I can."

  "I hear," the Ozranian's voice said, sounding worried.

  "Right you are, Sir Knight," Carialle said, suddenly. "All four bodies are moving toward your location. We've got a visitor coming from space, too."

  "What?"

  "Looks like Ship Three," she said. "It's alone. I'm tracking . . . updates as available. You hide, now!"

  The shuffling sounds grew louder. Keff cast about frantically for a place to hide. He threw himself behind stacks of storage containers just as the feet reached the doorway. Stifling groans of pain from the ribs he bruised in his headlong dive, he flattened himself against the wall and hoped the barrier between him and the aliens was stable.

  "They're big ones, all right," Carialle's voice said very quietly in his aural canal. "Two hundred fifty, a hundred seventy, and two hundred ten kilos respectively. The fourth one has gone through to the domes. Probably to watch Ship Three land."

  "No way out," Keff said.

  "Not yet. Your respiration and blood pressure are up. Take a few deep breaths. Take a drink of water. How is your oxygen supply?"

  "Okay," Keff muttered sublingually. He heard a slight sound coming tow
ard him and held his breath. He cursed both CW Exploration and Diplomatic for not allowing their ships to carry even defensive weapons. A stun gun would be useful right now in extricating him from this place. The brutes would kill him with the same lack of pity they showed the crew of the DSC-902. The sound continued past him. The next thing he heard was dragging—one of the aliens hauling in a sling from the atrium. They planned to stay in this room, probably until Ship Three landed. It took a mental effort to restart his breathing. He dragged in a gasp of air, then held his breath again.

  "They can't hear you," Carialle reminded him, calmly. "Your helmet muffles sound effectively."

  "I know," he whispered, "but because I can hear me I think they can. I'll relax."

  Keff turned up the gain on his audio pickups. The aliens were talking. Their voices were surprisingly musical: deep, resonant, like the call of brass horns. He tried to separate the sounds into words and decided he didn't yet have enough data to go on. The hail from the approaching ship came in over the speakers faintly. Apparently Tall Eyebrow's improvised missiles had done some damage to the ship, because the transmission kept cutting in and out. He sensed concern in the voices of the ground crew.

  Minutes dragged past. His muscles cramped because of the awkward position in which he lay, but he didn't dare shift to ease them. Sweat began to trickle out of his hairline, over his face and neck, and down between his shoulder blades. It itched infuriatingly. He blinked his eyes to clear drops off his lashes. The chatter of voices, both within the room and on the distant ship, reached a crescendo of agitation. Keff thought he heard the words "Central Worlds," in passing, but decided he was trying to read too much into the meaningless multisyllabic babble. Suddenly there was a hush in the room, and he felt the ground shake. The dome made a grand echo chamber for the boom! the ship made when it landed.