Summertide hu-1

by Charles Sheffield

  A calm voice pulled her up from tired despair.

  “Get ready in the back there.” Hans Rebka sounded far from doomed and defeated. “We’re too low, and we’re too slow. At this rate we’ll run out of power and we’ll run out of time. So we have to get above the clouds. Hold on tight again. We’re in for a rough few minutes.”

  Hold on to what? But Rebka’s words and his cheerful tone told her that not everyone had given up fighting.

  Ashamed of herself, Darya tried to wedge more tightly into the luggage compartment as the car buffeted its way up through the uneven lower edge of the clouds. The textured glow outside was replaced by a bland, muddy light. More violent turbulence began at once, hitting from every direction and throwing the overloaded vehicle easily and randomly about the sky like a paper toy. No matter what Rebka and Perry did at the controls, the car had too much weight to maneuver well.

  Darya tried to predict the motion and failed. She could not tell if they were rising, falling, or heading for a fatal downspin. Bits of the car’s ceiling fixtures seemed to come at her head from every side. Just as she felt certain that the next blow would knock her unconscious, four jointed arms took her firmly around the waist. She reached out to grasp a soft, pudgy body, clinging to it desperately as the car veered and dipped and jerked through the sky.

  Kallik was pushing her, forcing her toward the wall. She buried her face in velvety fur, bent her legs up to her right, and pushed back. Braced against each other and the car’s walls, she and Kallik found a new stability of position. She shoved harder, wondering if the rocky ride would ever end.

  “We’re almost there. Shield your eyes.” Rebka’s voice sounded through the cabin intercom a moment before the swoops and sickening uplifts eased. As the flight became smoother, blinding light flooded into the car, replacing the diffuse red-brown glow.

  Darya heard a loud, clucking set of snorts from her right. J’merlia wriggled around in his seat to face the back of the car.

  “Kallik wishes to offer her humble apologies,” he said, “for what she did. She assures you that she would never in normal circumstances dare to touch the person of a superior being. And she wonders now if you might kindly release her.”

  Darya realized that she was clinging to soft black fur and crushing the Hymenopt in a bear hug, while still pushing her toward the far wall of the car. She let go at once, feeling embarrassed. The Hymenopt was far too polite to say anything, but she must recognize blind panic when she saw it.

  “Tell Kallik that it was good that she took hold of me. What she did helped a lot, and no apology is needed.” And if I’m a superior being, Darya added silently, I’d hate to know what an inferior one feels like.

  Embarrassed or not, Darya was beginning to feel a bit better. The flight was smoother, while the whistle of air past the car suggested that they were moving much faster. Even her own aches and fatigue had somehow eased.

  “We’ve just about doubled our airspeed, and it should be smooth sailing up here.” Rebka’s voice over the intercom seemed to justify her changing mood.

  “But we had a hard time coming through those clouds,” he went on. “And Commander Perry has recalculated our rate of power use. Given the distance we have to go, we’re right on the edge. We have to conserve. I’ll slow down a little, and I’m going to turn off the air-conditioning system. That will make it pretty bad here up front. Be ready to rotate seats, and make sure you drink lots of liquid.”

  It had not occurred to Darya Lang that her limited view of the sky might be an advantage. But as the internal temperature of the car began to rise, she was glad to be sitting in the shielded rear. The people in the front had the same stifling air as she did, plus direct and intolerable sunlight.

  The full effects of that did not hit her until it was time to play musical chairs and move around the car’s cramped interior. The change of position was a job for contortionists. When it was completed, Darya found herself in the front seat, next to the window. For the first time since takeoff, she could see more than a tiny bit of the car’s surroundings.

  They were skimming along just above cloud level, riding over individual crests that caught and scattered the light like sea breakers of dazzling gold and crimson. Mandel and Amaranth were almost straight ahead, striking down at the car with a fury never felt on the cloud-protected surfaces of Opal and Quake. The two stars had grown to giant, blinding orbs in a near-black sky. Even with the car’s photo-shielding at maximum, the red and yellow spears of light thrown by the stellar partners were too bright to look at.

  The perspiration ran in rivulets down Darya’s face and soaked her clothing. As she watched, the positions of Mandel and Amaranth changed in the sky. Everything was happening faster and faster. She sensed the rushing tempo of events as the twin suns and Dobelle hurried to their point of closest approach.

  And they were not the only players.

  Darya squinted off to the side. Gargantua was there, a pale shadow of Mandel and its dwarf companion. But that, too, would change. Soon Gargantua would be the largest object in Quake’s sky, sweeping closer than any body in the stellar system, rivaling Mandel and Amaranth with its ripping tidal forces.

  She looked out and down, wondering what was going on below those boiling cloud layers. Soon they would have to descend through them, but perhaps the hidden surface beneath was already too broken to permit a landing. Or maybe the ship they sought had already vanished, swallowed up in some massive new earth fissure.

  Darya turned away from the window and closed her aching eyes. The outside brightness was just too overwhelming. She could not stand the heat and searing radiation for one moment longer.

  Except that she had no choice.

  She looked to her left. Kallik was next to her, crouched down low to the floor. Beyond her, in the pilot’s seat, Max Perry was holding a square of opaque plastic in front of his face to give him partial shielding from the sluice of light.

  “How much longer?” The question came as a feeble croak.

  Darya hardly recognized her own voice. She was not sure what question she was asking. Did she mean how long until they could all change seats again? Or until they arrived at their destination? Or only until they were all dead?

  It made no difference. Perry did not answer. He merely handed her a bottle of lukewarm water. She took a mouthful and made Kallik do the same. Then there was nothing to do but sit and sweat and endure, until the welcome distraction of changing seats.

  Darya lost track of time. She knew that she was in and out of the torture seat at the front at least three times. It felt like weeks, until at last Julius Graves was shaking her and warning, “Get ready for turbulence. We’re going down through the clouds.”

  “We’re there?” she whispered. “Let’s go down.”

  She could hardly wait. No matter what happened next, she would escape the roasting torture of the two suns. She would dream of them for the rest of her life.

  “No. Not there.” Graves sounded the way she felt. He was mopping perspiration from his bald head. “We’re running out of power.”

  That grabbed her attention. “Where are we?”

  But he had turned the other way. It was Elena Carmel, in the rear seat, who leaned forward and replied. “If the instruments are right, we’re very close. Almost to our ship.”

  “How close?”

  “Ten kilometers. Maybe even less. They say it all depends how much power is left to use in hovercraft mode.”

  Darya said nothing more. Ten kilometers, five kilometers, what difference did it make? She couldn’t walk one kilometer, not to save her life.

  But a surprise voice inside her awoke and said, Maybe only to save your life. If young, bewildered Elena Carmel can find a reserve of strength, why can’t you?

  Before she could argue the point with herself, they were plunging into the clouds. And within a second there was no time for the luxury of internal debate.

  Hans Rebka thought he might need the dregs of aircar power late
r, and he was not willing to give up any merely to cushion the ride. In its rapid descent, the car was thrown around the sky like a bobbing cork in a sea storm. But it did not last long. In less than a minute they plunged through the bottom of the cloud layers.

  Everyone craned forward. Whatever they found below them, they could not go back up.

  Was the starship still there? Was there a solid surface around it that they could descend to? Or had they escaped Mandel and Amaranth’s searing beams only to die in Quake’s pools of molten lava?

  Darya stared, unable to answer those questions. Thick smoke blanketed the ground below. They were supposed to be above the slopes of the Pentacline Depression, but they might have been anywhere on the whole planet.

  “Well,” Hans Rebka said quietly, as though talking to himself, “the good news is that we don’t have to make a decision. Look at the power meter, Max. It’s redlined. We’re going down, whether we want to or not.” He raised his voice. “Respirators on.”

  Then they were floating into blue-gray smoke that swirled and eddied about the car, driven by winds so powerful that Rebka’s voice quickly came again. “We’re making a negative ground speed. I’m going to take us down as quick as I can, before we blow back all the way to the Umbilical.”

  “Where’s the ship?” That was Julius Graves, sitting behind Darya in the cramped luggage compartment.

  “Two kilometers ahead. We can’t see it, but I think it’s still there. I’m picking up an anomalous radar reflection. We can’t reach the outcrop where the ship was sitting, so we have to land on the valley slope. Get ready. Twenty meters altitude… fifteen… ten. Prepare for landing.”

  The gusting wind suddenly died. The smoke around them thinned. Darya could see the ground off to one side of the car. It lay barren and quiet, but steam was emerging like dragon’s breath from dozens of small surface vents scattered across the downward slope of the Pentacline’s valley. The dense vegetation that Darya expected to see in the depression had gone. It was nothing but gray ash and occasional withered stems.

  “One and a half kilometers.” Rebka’s voice sounded calm and far away. “Five meters on the altimeter. Power going. Looks like we’ll have to take a little walk. Three meters… two… one. Come on, you beauty. Do us proud.”

  Summertide was just three hours away. The aircar touched down on the steaming slope of the Pentacline Depression, as gently and quietly as an alighting moth.

  CHAPTER 21

  Three hours to Summertide

  Hans Rebka was not happy, but it would be fair to say that for the past few hours he had been content.

  Since his assignment to Dobelle he had been unsure of himself and his job. He had been sent to find out what was wrong with Commander Maxwell Perry and rehabilitate the man.

  On paper it sounded easy. But just what was he supposed to do? He was an action man, not a psychoanalyst. Nothing in his previous career had equipped him for such a vague task.

  Now things were different. At the Umbilical he had been thrown in with a helpless group — all aliens, misfits, or innocents, in his mind — and given the job of taking an overloaded, underpowered aircar halfway around Quake and a toy starship up into space, before the planet killed the lot of them.

  It might be an impossible task, but at least it was a well-defined one. The rules for performance were no problem. He had learned them long ago on Teufel: you succeed, or you die trying. Until you succeed, you never relax. Until you die, you never give up.

  He was tired — they were all tired — but what Darya Lang had seen as new energy was the satisfying release of a whole bundle of pent-up frustrations. It had carried him so far, and it would carry him through Summertide.

  As soon as the aircar touched down, Rebka urged everyone onto the surface. It made no difference how dangerous it might be outside, the car was useless to take them any farther.

  He pointed along the blistered downslope of the valley. “That’s where we have to go. The direction of the starship.” Then he shouted above rumbling thunder to Max Perry, who was staring vacantly about him. “Commander, our group was here a few days ago. Does it look familiar?”

  Perry was shaking his head. “When we were here this area was vegetated. But there’s the basalt outcrop.” He pointed to a dark jutting mass of rock, forty meters high, its upper part obscured by gray smoke. “We have to get over there and climb on top of it. That’s where the ship should be.”

  Rebka nodded. “Any nasty surprises in store for us?” Perry, whatever his faults, was still the expert on conditions on Quake.

  “Can’t say yet. Quake is full of them.” Perry stooped to set the palm of his hand on the rocky floor. “Pretty hot, but we can walk on it. If we’re lucky, the brush fires will have burned off the plants around the bottom of the outcrop and we’ll have easier going than last time. Things look all different with the vegetation gone. And it’s hotter — a lot hotter.”

  “So let’s go.” Rebka gestured them forward. The thunder was growing, and their surroundings were too loud for long conversations. “You and Graves lead. Then you two.” He pointed to the twins. “I’ll tag along last, after the others.”

  He urged them on without inviting discussion. The aircar trip had been an exhausting trial by fire for everyone, but Rebka knew better than to ask if they could scramble their way over a kilometer or two of difficult terrain. He would learn what they could not do when they collapsed.

  The surface had been at rest when they landed, but as Perry and Graves started forward a new spasm of seismic energy passed through the area. The ground ahead broke into longitudinal folds, rippling down the side of the valley.

  “Keep going,” Rebka shouted above the grind and boom of breaking rock. “We can’t afford to stand and wait.”

  Perry had halted and put his hand on Graves’s arm to stop him. He turned to shake his head at Rebka. “Can’t go yet. Earthquake confluence. Watch.”

  Ground waves of different wavelength and amplitude were converging fifty paces ahead of the party. Where they met, spumes of rock and earth jetted into the dusty air. A gaping trench of unknown depth appeared, then contracted and filled a few seconds later to vanish completely. Perry watched until he was sure that the main earth movements were over, then started forward.

  Rebka felt relief. Whatever Perry’s problems, the man had not lost his survival instinct. If he could hold on to that for another kilometer, his main job would be done.

  They scrambled on. The ground shivered beneath their feet. Hot breaths rose from a hundred fissures in the fractured rock, and the sky above became one rolling tableau of fine ash and bright lightning. Thunder from sky and earth movement snarled and roared around them. A warm, sulfur-charged rain started to fall, steaming where it touched the tide-torn hot ground.

  Rebka eyed the rest of the group speculatively from his vantage point at the rear. The Carmel twins were walking side by side, just behind Graves and Perry. After them came Darya Lang, between the two aliens and with one hand on J’merlia’s sloping thorax. Everyone was doing well. Graves, Geni Carmel, and Darya Lang were limping, and everyone was weaving with fatigue — but that was a detail.

  So they needed rest. He smiled grimly to himself. Well, one way or another they would find it, in the next few hours.

  The big problem was the increasing temperature. Another ten degrees, and he knew they would have to slow down or keel over with simple heat prostration. The rain showers, which should have helped, were becoming hot enough to scald exposed skin. And as the party moved lower into the Pentacline Depression, further heat increase seemed inevitable.

  But they had to keep descending. If they slowed or went back up, for rest or for shelter, the forces of Sumemrtide would destroy them.

  He urged them on, peering ahead as he did so to study the approach to the basalt outcrop. With no more than a few hundred meters to go, the path looked pretty easy. In another hundred paces the jumble of rocks and broken surface that were making walking so difficult w
ould smooth out, providing a brown plain more level than anything that Rebka had seen in the Pentacline. It looked like a dried-out lake bed, the relic of a long, thin water body that had boiled dry in the past few days. They could move across it easily and fast. Beyond the narrow plain, the ground rose with an easy slope to the base of the rocky uplift on whose top they should find the ship.

  The two leaders had advanced to within twenty paces of the plain. The hulking, flat-topped rock seemed close enough to touch when Max Perry paused uncertainly. While Rebka looked on and cursed, Perry leaned on a large, jagged boulder and stared thoughtfully at the way ahead.

  “Get a move on, man.”

  Perry shook his head, lifted his arm to halt the others, and crouched low to examine the ground. At the same moment, Elena Carmel cried out and pointed to the top of the rock outcrop.

  The sky had turned black, but near-continuous lightning gave more than enough light to see by. Rebka could detect nothing where Perry had been staring, except a slight shimmer of heat haze and a loss of focus in the lake bed ahead. But beyond that blurred area, following Elena Carmel’s pointing finger to the top of the rock where the dust clouds rolled, Rebka saw something quite unmistakable: the outline of a small starship. It sat safely back from the rock edge, and it seemed undamaged. The line of ascent was an easy one. In five minutes or less they should be up there.

  Elena Carmel had turned and was shouting to her sister, inaudible above the thunder. Rebka could read her lips. “The Summer Dreamboat,” she was shouting. Her face was triumphant as she went running forward, past Graves and Perry.

  She was already onto the dried-mud plain and heading toward the bottom of the outcrop when Perry looked up and saw her.

  He froze for a second, then uttered a high-pitched howl of warning that carried even above the thunder.

  Elena turned at the sound. As she did so the crust of baked clay, less than a centimeter thick, fractured beneath her weight. Spurts of steam blew pitch-black, steaming slime into the air around her body. She cried out and raised her arms, trying to hold her balance. Under the brittle surface, the bubbling ooze offered no more resistance than hot syrup. Before anyone could move, Elena was waist-deep. She screamed in agony as boiling mud closed around her legs and hips.