Summertide hu-1

by Charles Sheffield

  “Lean forward!” Perry threw himself flat to spread his weight and started to wriggle forward onto the fragile surface.

  But Elena Carmel was in too much pain to take any notice of his cry. He was too slow, and she was sinking too fast. He was still three paces away when the bubbling mud reached her neck. She gave a final and terrible scream.

  Perry threw himself across the breaking crust to grab at her hair and one outstretched arm. He could reach her, but he could not support her.

  She sank deeper. Far gone in burn-shock, she made no sound as the searing mud bubbled into her mouth, nose, and eyes. A moment later she was gone. The liquid surface swirled into a small whirlpool, then in less than a second became smooth again.

  Perry wriggled forward again and plunged his arms to the elbows in boiling blackness. He roared in agony, groped, and found nothing.

  The others in the party had stood rigid. Suddenly Geni Carmel gave a dreadful scream and began to run forward. Julius Graves dived after her, tackling and holding her at the very edge of the boiling quicksand.

  “No, Geni. No! You can’t help, she’s gone.” He had her around the waist, trying to pull her toward safety. She resisted with desperate strength. It was all he could do to hold her until Rebka and Darya Lang ran forward to grab her arms.

  Geni was still trying to drag herself toward the place where Elena had vanished. She pulled them to the edge of the safe area of rock. As she turned she swiveled Darya with her, forcing the other woman out onto the cracked crust. Darya’s left foot broke through and plunged in above the ankle. She screamed and sagged toward Rebka in a near-faint. He had to leave Geni to Graves while he pulled Darya clear.

  Geni tried one more time to move to the open area of mud. The surface where Elena had been sucked under spouted and bubbled like escaping breath. But Perry, his face distorted with pain, had come sliding backward across the treacherous mud to the safe region of broken rocks. His hands were useless, but he stood up and used his body weight to push Geni back.

  They stumbled together to safety. Geni was quieting. As the first frenzy ended she put her hands to her face and began to sob.

  Rebka kept one arm around Darya Lang and surveyed the group. They were all stunned by Elena’s death, but still he had to worry about other matters. In thirty seconds, their position had gone from difficult to desperate. The air was almost unbreathable, the heat was increasing, and the surface of Quake was more and more active. The one thing they could not afford to do was slow down.

  What now?

  He made an unhappy assessment of their new situation. The thunder from ground and sky was a little less, but instead of eight humans and aliens, all fully mobile, they had been reduced to four able-bodied beings: himself, Graves, J’merlia, and Kallik. It was anyone’s guess how useful the two aliens would be in a crisis, but so far they had performed as well as any human.

  What about the others?

  Perry was in deep shock — more than just physical, if Rebka was any judge — and he was standing there like a robot. But he was tough. He could walk, and he would walk. On the other hand, he could no longer help anyone else, and without the use of his hands he would have trouble scrambling up the rock face. His arms hung loose at his sides, burned to the elbows and useless as rolls of black dough. The pain from them would be awful as soon as the first shock faded. With any luck that would be after they were all in the Summer Dreamboat.

  Darya Lang would certainly need assistance. Her foot was scalded no worse than Perry’s forearms, but she was far less used to physical suffering. Already she was weeping with pain and shock. Tears were running down her grimy, dust-coated cheeks.

  Finally there was Geni Carmel. She did not need physical help, but emotionally she had been destroyed. She hardly seemed to realize that the others were there, and she would find it hard to cooperate in anything at all.

  Rebka made the assignments automatically. “Councilor Graves, you help Geni Carmel. I’ll assist Commander Perry if he needs it. J’merlia and Kallik, Professor Lang needs your aid. Help her, especially when we begin to climb.”

  And now we’ll see just how tough Perry is, he thought. “Commander, we can’t go any farther this way. Can you suggest another route to the ship?”

  Perry came to life. He shivered, stared down at his burned forearms, and lifted his right hand tentatively away from his body. He pointed to the left side of the outcrop, moving his arm as though the limb had become some alien attachment.

  “Last time we were here, we came down a watercourse. It was all rocks, no muddy surface. If we can find that maybe we can follow it back up.”

  “Good. You lead the way.”

  As they skirted the deadly patch of boiling mud, Rebka looked up to the top of the rock. It was no more than forty meters above them, but it seemed an impossible distance. The watercourse was not steep. A fit man or woman could scramble up it in half a minute, but Perry would take that long to ascend the first few feet. And that was too slow.

  Rebka moved forward from the back of the group and put his hands on Perry’s hips.

  “Just keep walking. Don’t worry about falling, I’ll be here. If you need a push or a lift, tell me.”

  He took one backward glance before Perry began to move. Julius Graves was coaxing Geni Carmel along, and they were doing well enough. J’merlia and Kallik had given up the idea of helping Darya Lang to walk. Instead they had seated her on Kallik’s furry back, and the Hymenopt was struggling up the incline with J’merlia pushing them from behind and encouraging Kallik with a selection of hoots and whistles.

  The surface beyond the outcrop was shaking with new violence. Rebka saw the aircar that they had arrived in tilt and collapse. A pall of black smoke swallowed it up, then came creeping steadily toward them.

  One thing at a time, he told himself. Don’t look back, and don’t look up.

  Rebka focused all his attention on helping Max Perry. If the other man fell, they would all go with him.

  They struggled on, stumbling and scrabbling over loose pebbles. There was one critical moment when Perry’s feet slipped completely from under him and he fell facedown toward the rock. He groaned as his crippled hands hit the rough surface and their burned palms split open. Rebka held him before he could slide backward. Within a few seconds they were again scrambling up the uneven path of the watercourse.

  As soon as Perry came to the easy final steps, Rebka turned to see what was happening behind. Graves was wobble-legged, close to collapse, and Geni Carmel was supporting him. The other three were still halfway down and making slow progress. Rebka could hear Kallik clicking and whistling with the effort.

  They would have to manage on their own. Rebka’s top priority had to be the starship. Was it in working order, and did it have power for one final flight to orbit? Perry had moved over to the Summer Dreamboat, but he was simply standing by the closed door. He raised his hands in frustration as Rebka came up to him. Without working fingers he had no way to get inside.

  “Go tell the others to hurry — particularly Kallik.” Rebka jerked open the port, suddenly aware of how small the ship was. Perry had told him it was more like a toy than a starship, but the size was still a nasty shock. The interior space was not much more than that of the aircar.

  He went across to study the controls. At least he would have no trouble with those, even without help from Kallik or Geni Carmel. The board was the simplest he had ever seen.

  He turned on the displays. The power level was depressingly low. Suppose it took them only halfway to orbit?

  He looked at the chronometer. Less than an hour to Summertide. That answered his question. It was damned if you do, damned if you don’t. As the others came squeezing into the ship, he prepared for liftoff.

  Darya Lang and Geni Carmel were the last ones in.

  “Close the port,” Rebka said, and turned back to the controls. He did not watch them do as he said, nor was there time for the long list of checks that should have preceded an ascent
to space. Through the forward window he could see a sheet of flame running steadily across the surface toward them. In a few more seconds it would engulf the ship.

  “Hold tight. I’m taking us up at three gee.”

  If we’re lucky, he thought. And if we’re not… Hans Rebka applied full ascent power. The starship trembled and strained on the ground.

  Nothing happened for what felt like minutes. Then, as the firestorm ran toward them, the Summer Dreamboat groaned at the seams, shivered, and lifted toward Quake’s jet-black and turbulent sky.

  CHAPTER 22

  Summertide

  Ten seconds after her foot plunged into that boiling black mud, Darya Lang’s nervous system went into suspended animation. She did not feel pain, she did not feel worry, she did not feel sorrow.

  She knew, abstractly, that Max Perry was burned worse than she and was somehow leading the way up the rocky slope, but that much effort and involvement was beyond her. If she remained conscious, it was only because she knew no way to slip into unconsciousness. And if she traveled up to the ship with the rest of them, it was only because Kallik and J’merlia gave her no choice. They lifted and carried her, careful to keep her foot and ankle clear of the ground.

  Her isolation ended — agonizingly — as they approached the ship’s entry port. Darts of pain began to lance through her foot and ankle as Kallik laid her gently on the ground.

  “With apologies and extreme regrets,” J’merlia said quietly, his dark mandibles close to her ear. “But the way in is big enough for only one. It will be necessary to enter alone.”

  They were going to put her down and ask her to walk, just when the pain was becoming intolerable! Her burned foot would have to meet the floor. She began to plead with the aliens, to tell them that she could not bear it. It was already too late. She found herself balanced on one leg in front of the hatch.

  “Hurry up,” Max Perry urged from inside the ship.

  She gave him a look of hatred. Then she saw his hands and forearms, blistered and split to the bone from contact with rough stones and pebbles during the ascent of the rock. He had to be feeling far worse than she was. Darya gritted her teeth, lifted her left foot clear of the ground, grabbed the sides of the doorframe, and hopped gingerly inside the ship. There was hardly room for the people already there. Somehow she managed to crawl across to the ship’s side window and stood there on one leg.

  What should she do? She could not stand there indefinitely, and she could not bear the thought of anything touching her foot.

  Rebka’s announcement that he would take them up to space at three gees answered that. His words filled her with dismay. She could hardly stand in a field of less than one gee. She would have to lie down, and then three gees of acceleration would press her ruined foot to the unforgiving floor.

  Before she could say anything, Kallik’s stubby body wriggled across toward her. The Hymenopt placed her soft abdomen next to Darya’s injured foot and uttered a dozen soft whistles.

  “No! Don’t touch it!” Darya cried out in panic.

  As she tried to move her leg away, the gleaming yellow sting emerged from the end of Kallik’s body. It pierced inches deep into her lower calf. Darya screamed and fell over backward, banging her head as she went on the supply chest behind the pilot’s seat.

  Liftoff began before she could move again.

  Darya found she was flattened to the floor with her foot pressing onto metal. Her hurt foot! She had to scream. She opened her mouth and suddenly realized that the only parts of her body that were not in pain were that foot and calf. Kallik’s sting had robbed them of all feeling.

  She lay back and turned her head to rest its increased weight on her cheek and ear. A tangle of bodies covered the floor. She could see Kallik, right in front of her, cushioning Geni Carmel’s head on her furry abdomen. Julius Graves lay just beyond, but all she could see was the top of his bald pate, lying next to J’merlia’s shiny black cranium. Rebka, piloting the ship, and Max Perry, harnessed into the seat next to him, were hidden by the supply chest and the seat back.

  Darya made a great effort and turned her head the other way. She could see out of the ship’s side port, a foot away from her. Unbelievably — surely they had been rising for minutes — the ship was still below Quake’s cloud layer. She caught a vivid lightning-lit view of the surface; it had shattered into crisscrossing fault lines, over which waves of orange-red molten lava were sweeping like ocean billows. The whole planet was on fire, a scene of ancient perdition. Then the ship lifted into black dust clouds so dense that the end of the vestigial control surfaces, just a few feet beyond the port, became invisible to her.

  The turbulence and shear forces tripled. Darya rolled helplessly against Kallik, and both of them went sliding across the floor to collide with Julius Graves. Another moment, and all three were tumbling back, to crush Darya against the wall. She was still in that position, pinned by the weight of everyone except Rebka and Perry, when the Summer Dreamboat emerged unexpectedly from the clouds of Quake. The ship’s port admitted one sunburst of intolerable golden radiation before the photoshielding came into operation.

  Darya was lucky. She was facing away from the port, and she happened to have her head caught under Kallik’s abdomen when that searing light-blast hit the ship. Everyone else in the rear compartment was blinded for a few seconds.

  Rebka and Perry had been protected in the front seats, but they were facing forward and trying to coax a ship to orbit in circumstances for which it had never been designed. So it was Darya alone, turning to look sideways and out behind the ascending ship, who saw everything that happened next.

  The Dreamboat was soaring over the hemisphere of Quake that faced away from Opal. The disks of Mandel and Amaranth loomed low in the sky to her left. Reduced by the photoshielding to glowing, dark-limbed circles, the twin stars showed their bright disks pocked and speckled with sunspots. Their tidal forces were tearing at each other, just as they tore at Quake and Opal. Directly overhead, Gargantua shone pale and spectral, a giant whose reflected light was reduced by the photoshielding to a faint and insubstantial ghost world.

  From a point very close to Gargantua’s edge — Darya could not be sure quite where it lay, on the planet or off it — a glittering blue beam stabbed suddenly down toward Quake, bright with controlled energy.

  Darya followed it with her eyes. It could not be a beam of ordinary light. That would be invisible in empty space, and she could see it all the way along its length. And where that pulsing ray from Gargantua struck the clouds, the dust-filled protective layer boiled instantly away. A circular area of Quake’s surface, a hundred kilometers across, was suddenly exposed to Mandel and Amaranth’s combined radiation. Already seething with molten lava, the surface started to deform and crater. A dark tunnel formed and became rapidly deeper and wider. Soon Darya could see the molten rocks of the planet’s interior thrown back in waves to form a sputtering, sharp-sided edge to the hole.

  The ship’s motion was carrying Darya away from the tunnel, and her viewing angle was too steep to see the bottom of the pit. She leaned closer to the port, ignoring the pain in her bruised body and face. As the ship’s altitude increased, Quake hung below her like a great, clouded bead, threaded onto that pencil of bright blue light. Where the ray struck, the dark hole through the bead was lit by a glowing rim of molten lava.

  The next events came in such quick succession that Darya had trouble afterward in relating their exact sequence.

  As Quake’s rotation was taking first Mandel and then Amaranth below the horizon, a second blue beam came stabbing down from open space to merge with the one from Gargantua. It did not come from any object that Darya could find in the sky, although her eye could follow it up and up, until it finally became a line too faint to see.

  The new pencil of light skewered the tunnel in Quake’s crust, and the hole widened — not steadily, but in one impossible jerk of displaced material. Narrow answering beams of red and cyan thrust back int
o space, following the exact center of the incident ones. And in the same moment, two silvery spheres crept forward from the depths of the tunnel.

  They looked identical, each maybe a kilometer across. Rising slowly clear of Quake they hovered motionless, one just beneath the other, wobbling like two transparent balloons filled with quicksilver.

  The blue beams changed color. The one from Gargantua became bright saffron, the other a glowing magenta. The pulses along their length changed in frequency. As they did so, the higher sphere began to accelerate, moving along the precise line of the magenta ray. Slow at first, then suddenly faster, it remained visible for only a split second and then was gone. Darya could not tell if it had been propelled out of sight — at huge acceleration — or had vanished through some other mechanism. As it disappeared, so did the magenta beam.

  The second sphere still hovered motionless close to Quake. After a few moments it began to inch up along the saffron pencil of light. But its motion was leisurely, almost ponderous. Darya could follow it easily, a ball of silver climbing the saffron beam like a metal spider ascending its own thread. She tracked the shining globe as it crept upward.

  And then her eyes were suddenly unable to focus. Around the bright ball the starfield had become twisted and distorted. The ball itself disappeared to become a black void, while around it scattered points of starlight converged and met in an annular rainbow cluster. The vanished sphere formed an ink-black center to that brilliant stellar ring. Still it ascended the yellow light beam.

  While she was squinting at that hole in space, the Dreamboat performed a dizzying half roll and a surge at maximum thrust. She heard Hans Rebka, in the pilot’s seat, cry out. A bright jet of violet, a starship’s drive working at high intensity, flared across the starfield and moved across the bows of the Dreamboat.