Strider's Galaxy

by John Grant

  Strider nodded to him. "Yeah, better to kill people than to let billions of others be killed. Easy enough as a mathematical calculation. A bit more difficult in real life."

  "This is my reasoning," said Lan Yi. "I am pleased that the final decision will be yours."

  "Listen to your advisors," said the translated voice of Kortland.

  "I am. Pinocchio, cue in those co-ordinates."

  4

  "Destroy, Destroy," the Bellboy Said

  F-14 didn't know what hit it until very much later. At one moment it was the most securely defended planet in The Wondervale with the exception of Qitanefermeartha itself and at the next a comparatively small warcruiser had somehow glided through the defenses and was raining down a torrent of fire on to the surface. The enhanced Santa Maria now contained as much weaponry as the Helgiolath fleet had been able to give it. Here within the planetary atmosphere it was running on jets. What it couldn't maintain within the atmosphere was the full gamut of defensive shields: that was a cause of continuing worry to her.

  Strider tapped away at her Pocket's keyboard, knowing that she was dealing out death but trying not to think too hard about the individual deaths. Pinocchio was alongside her, manning the next Pocket and operating even more ruthlessly than she was. He seemed to be treating it all like some kind of holo game. She was grateful to him, but was also aware that, every time she pressed a key and one of those little factory-blips on the ground blew into pieces, hundreds or perhaps thousands of sentient beings were losing their lives. It didn't make any difference that those beings had been constructing crueller weapons than even humanity had been able to devise. She fed in another co-ordinate at Pinocchio's instruction, watched another factory explode. She just hoped that everyone there had died instantly. The thought that some of them might live on for a few hours, a limb or two blown away, waiting for medical help that would never come, was more than she could bear.

  Nevertheless, she hit another factory and gave another cry of triumph.

  Between the factories there were constructions that she could recognize as residential complexes. Kortland had told her that she ought to target these as well, but she'd refused. This might be a necessary massacre, but there was no need to make it worse than it had to be. The children of the technicians might indeed grow up to be creators of weapons of mass destruction, but at the moment they had to be given the benefit of the doubt.

  Small fighter craft began to rise from the planet's tormented surface. O'Sondheim, whose designated job this was, picked them off easily with phasers. There were no missiles or beams from the ground as yet: the people on F-14 were restrained by the fact that the Santa Maria was operating in the world's stratosphere, well beneath the defensive shield. Any missile or beam that failed to hit the warship might do damage to the shield, making the planet yet more vulnerable to attack.

  Another factory erupted. This one must have contained particularly sophisticated weaponry, because the entire massif on which it had been built began to melt and then flowed like lava, albeit much more swiftly, down a long valley to engulf a residential complex. The Santa Maria was moving fast enough that all that Strider could see was the start of the carnage. She shut her eyes momentarily, trying not to imagine what was going on down there.

  The Santa Maria jerked. The techs on F-14 had at last found some way to hit it. Nelson fell away from his Pocket and collapsed heavily to the floor, his hands over his face. Strider retained her balance with difficulty.

  "What the hell was that?" she snarled at Pinocchio.

  "I don't know. We have suffered no structural damage." The bot was concentrating most of his attention on the destruction below.

  "Yeah, but the next one could hurt us badly. Find out what it was."

  Her lover caused his torso to open so that a small metallic spine emerged, reaching its way unsteadily towards the glowing Pocket. The entire command deck lit up as the wire entered the Pocket. Pinocchio himself seemed to be jolted by the contact. Through the Pocket he was interfacing with the Main Computer. The connection couldn't last long. If there was no response fairly soon . . .

  Another shock ran the full length of the Santa Maria. This time the damage felt more serious. The Pocket in front of Strider began blinking away, every few seconds, from the scene on the ground to show the exterior of the ship. A big chunk had been taken out of one of its tail fins.

  "The fighters are firing energy-seeking ballistics capable of—" the bot began.

  "Forget the command, Pinocchio," Strider said. "We're getting out of here."

  She leaned her head back into the Pocket and issued the necessary instructions.

  The Pocket refused to respond. Instead, the 3D display vanished and she saw a graphic representation of a tract of landscape.

  "What the—?"

  "We're going down," said Pinocchio.

  "Who says?"

  "The laws of physics. We've lost one of the jets."

  "Can't we just run on the other three?" She knew the question was stupid as soon as she asked it. With the latest redesign the Images had carried out, the Santa Maria was by no means an aerodynamic craft. It was supposed to be out in empty space, not dodging around in an atmosphere. The Helgiolath, when installing the weapons systems, had given the ship just enough jet propulsion to enable it to survive in such circumstances. As Kortland had made perfectly obvious, it wasn't particularly important to him whether or not the human beings aboard the Santa Maria survived this mission. There were thousands of spacefaring civilizations in The Wondervale: the disappearance of one, here or there, didn't make much difference.

  "Are we going to be able to make a landing?" said Strider to both the bot and the Pocket. "Or are we just going to make a crater?"

  "Assuming we're not hit by another ballistic, we ought to be able to land, if we can find somewhere big enough and flat enough," said Pinocchio.

  Strider looked at the schematic display of landscape in her Pocket. There was a large expanse of desert right at its center.

  "I think the Images have taken over control of this part of the mission from us," she said.

  WE HAVE INDEED, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

  "But can you get us off again?" Strider asked.

  Possibly. Unlikely. We will almost certainly require help.

  "Time until impact?"

  Forty-two point one three seconds.

  "Everybody get down!" she screamed. "Pinocchio, intercom and commline the rest of the personnel! Move it!"

  The whole craft seemed to be trying to pull itself to pieces. Strider threw herself to the floor. It seemed odd that the view-window was ahead of her rather than above—one of these days she must instruct the Images to finalize their revampings of the Santa Maria. Assuming there were going to be any more days, of course. She could see a grayish sky streaked with even greyer clouds. There was a wallop of deceleration as the retro-jets cut in, and she felt as if she were likely to shoot straight out of the view-window to arc downwards on to the snow-covered peaks of a mountain range that appeared momentarily, dizzyingly, and then was gone. She could hear Pinocchio talking urgently into the intercom, making a loop chip, and then he was on the floor beside her. His face looked entirely tranquil. It was at times like these that one remembered most piquantly that he was not a human being, not a living creature at all. But he was a sentient one—that was the important thing.

  THREE POINT SIX ONE SECONDS, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free. The Images would certainly get out of this alive, and Pinocchio almost certainly would. Strider was not so sure about the human beings, herself included, but with luck at least a few of them might . . .

  For a split second Strider's stomach was at least fifty meters above her prone body. The Santa Maria bounced and rocked away over towards the right. Leander swore loudly as the crew on the command deck began sliding across the floor. Then the Santa Maria righted itself again, bounced again. Strider wished she had something to hold on to. She felt as if she were a marionette under the co
ntrol of some insane puppeteer who was taking sadistic pleasure in pulling all her strings at once. Her chin slapped the floor and she bit her tongue hard enough that she could taste the blood. The noise of the retro-jets was deafening, but at least the surface beneath her seemed to be more stable. She took a glance towards the view-window, but all she could see was the same grey, rain-heavy sky. There was a chance that the atmosphere of F-14 was poisonous to humans. What cocktail of chemicals would the rain in those distant clouds be composed of? At least the Santa Maria was headed for desert, where the rain wouldn't be an immediate problem. But what about the planet's micro-ecology? Ideally, she should keep everyone locked up in the Santa Maria until the Helgiolath or the Images or both engineered some way of getting the ship back up off this world, but she wasn't too certain that Kortland and his kind would make the effort and anyway the defense forces of F-14 were bound to get here first. No, the best thing to do was to get everyone out of the Santa Maria as quickly as possible and disperse them, hoping that there was nothing too lethal in the atmosphere. The Images could come along with Pinocchio; she would keep the bot beside her. Of course, a sand-desert wasn't going to offer too many hiding places, but . . .

  Shit, that was the worst bounce yet, as if the Santa Maria were now beginning to think that it really would like to be shaken to bits, or, if not, would like to shake anyone inside it to bits. She chanced another look at the view-window and saw the desert vista wheeling at horrifying speed towards her. A sad thought occurred: presumably there were plants and animals which had somehow managed to eke out an existence in this waste, and now some shrieking behemoth from the skies had descended to shred them with the force of its impact or incinerate them with its retro-jets.

  Hello, we're the human species. Don't you just like our funky sense of humor?

  Pinocchio put a heavy hand on the back of her spine, pinning her to the floor. He was trying to say something to her but she couldn't hear it over the noise of the jets. There was nothing visible through the view-window now but a blizzard of orange-red sand. She wished the bot would take his damned hand off her, and wriggled her displeasure at him.

  THOCK!

  That was the worst bounce yet, but she sensed it might be the last. The racket of the jets was gradually declining, and there was the feeling that the Santa Maria was gradually slowing its erratic career across the desert surface. Once the people on F-14 got their fighters on to the job it wasn't going to take them very long to find the spaceship: the marks on the sand, observable out at least as far as geostationary orbit if some Autarchy minion wanted to be cutesy and shut off the defensive shield for a few moments, would tell them everything. Yeah, as soon as the boat stopped it was going to be a question of abandoning like there had never been an abandonment before. Everyone for herself or himself. With luck a few people could survive this disaster, so long as everyone went in different directions. Of course, everyone would be leaving tracks in the sand that would guide the searchers to their precise location. She wished, now, she'd countermanded the Images and told them to bring the Santa Maria down in water, but probably that would have vaporized an inland sea. With luck there might be a windstorm that erased their traces, but somehow she didn't think the possibilities were all that great.

  The craft ceased shuddering. It had stopped its screaming skid.

  Strider shook Pinocchio's hand away from between her shoulderblades.

  "Right, everyone to the locks, quickest!" she yelled. "We're a sitting target here. Pinocchio—tell everyone."

  HEARTFIRE AND ANGLER ARE TAKING ACTION TO SLOW DOWN THE SEARCH FOR US, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free. UNLESS THEY ARE UNSUCCESSFUL WE HAVE JUST OVER SEVENTY-ONE MINUTES BEFORE ANY OF THE F-14 FORCES WILL DISCOVER US.

  "That's about three months too short a time for me," said Strider breathlessly, hefting Leander on to her knees and then her feet. The woman's eyes were wild. Strider shoved her in the direction of where Pinocchio was at the intercom, indicating that he should take charge. O'Sondheim was all right, although like Strider he had bitten his tongue badly, but Nelson had at some stage dislocated his hip. Strider put her foot between his buttocks and yanked savagely. He gave a cry of agony, but she felt the joint jolt back into position.

  "I love it when you treat me rough, babe," he said as he failed to get up on to his hands and knees. His second attempt was more successful.

  "Get to the locks!" she shouted. "Suit up as you go."

  Evacuating the Santa Maria took less time than she had anticipated, even though four people who had been working in the fields had been smashed to death as the ship landed. Someone wanted to give the corpses a "decent burial"; Strider ordered him to leave the bodies where they were, and backed up her argument with a wave of her lazgun.

  The air of F-14 smelt like armpits—more accurately, Strider realized, it smelt like the armpits of the person who chooses to stand too close to you rather than one's own warm fust. It was presumably packed with organic chemicals of various possibly poisonous kinds, as she'd feared. She wondered how many of them she had breathed before she'd got the helmet of her suit on. Certainly enough to kill her if she was out of luck. The same was true for everyone except Pinocchio. She should have ordered that people suited up completely before they left the ship, but it had seemed like a better idea to get them out of it as soon as possible.

  "Scatter," she said through the suit radio. "The further we are away from each other the more likely we all are to survive. Go in twos and threes." She grabbed Pinocchio's hand. "In five days' time I'll raise a commline conference if I can. If not, someone else can do it. It doesn't matter who. For now, what we have to do is get as far away from here as we can."

  The prospects weren't good. She'd scanned the horizon, and all she could see were dunes—except for the parts where there weren't even dunes. The F-14 techs were going to be able to blast the grounded Santa Maria to pieces without any difficulty and then simply follow the foot-trails of her people through the sands to whatever pathetic hiding places they'd managed to discover for themselves. Strider reckoned that the future of the human species in The Wondervale had about an hour to run.

  "Time to go," she said.

  Strauss-Giolitto took Pinocchio's other hand.

  "Lay off him," said Strider.

  "We're going in twos and threes, and this is a three. I want to survive. Pinocchio is my best probability of staying alive."

  Strider watched her personnel as they moved away across the desert. The surface offered at best a treacherous footing. A kid fell, making a fountain of sand. Two adults dragged it to its feet. The entire manoeuvre was so incompetent that Strider wouldn't have bet a penny on the family's chances of survival.

  "How are we—how is anybody—going to find water or food?" she said as the three of them began to run. It was like wading through the shallows at the edge of the sea.

  "Cut down your suit radio," said Pinocchio. "This is a question that is very soon going to occur to everyone else. They are less likely to survive if they worry about this than if they simply get as far away from the Santa Maria as they are possibly able."

  "None of us have much chance at all," said Strauss-Giolitto.

  "Things could be a whole lot worse," said Strider.

  "Tell me another one," said Strauss-Giolitto as the three of them leapt cumbersomely over a . . .

  "Stop," said Strider. "Have you just seen what I just saw?"

  They hurried back to take a better look. The thing hovering centimeters above the surface of the sand was camouflaged, so that from even a few meters away it was hard to spot unless you knew it was there. About a meter square, it looked rather like a trapdoor—in fact, very like a trapdoor, with a hinged metal ring on it to aid opening. Strider nervously ran her glove just under its edge, making grooves in the sand there, to reassure herself that the artifact was indeed floating—that there was no mere optical illusion involved. Then, even more nervously, she hooked a finger of her glove through the metal ring, and pulled.
<
br />   Pulled harder.

  The trapdoor opened smoothly, although with some resistance, as if on hydraulics. Gazing down through the opening it revealed, the three of them could see what looked like nothing more exotic than a metal ladder, reaching far beneath them into darkness.

  "Get working on the general suit-radio frequency, Pinocchio, and tell everyone to come over here. We're going down."

  "Is this wise?"

  "It's got to be a better chance than milling around in the desert just waiting to be picked off before we die of thirst. Do the message on the commline as well, in case people have their suit radios switched off, or have moved on to personal frequencies."

  Strider looked at Strauss-Giolitto. Even through the slightly darkened glass of the tall woman's visor, Strider could see that she looked terrified. She reached out a gloved hand and Strauss-Giolitto clumsily took it, as if she were a young child needing reassurance from her mother.

  Strider could see, in the distance, pairs and trios of suited figures turning towards them. A few, however, were still trudging resolutely in the other direction.

  "Images," she subvocalized, "contact the rest. Then tell me what's actually at the bottom of that pit?"

  A REASONABLE CHANCE OF ESCAPE, fluted the voice of Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

  "Can you be a bit more precise than that?"

  The Preeae.

  "I thought they were extinct."

  Everybody does. That's why they're not. A few of them survived the torching of their planet, and they've built up an underground culture. We've already started speaking with them on your behalf, but for reasons that can be imagined they are virulently xenophobic. It is hard to persuade them that you are allies, but it seems likely that they will afford you safe passage through their tunnels.

  "Where do the tunnels go to?"

  The nearest other exit is in the foothills of a mountain range some four hundred and fifty kilometers from here. I should add that the Preeae are not best pleased by the fact that you have drawn attention to this ingress. As soon as you are all through it they will have to move it, so that the Autarch's people do not discover it. This will cause the Preeae logistical difficulties in the future, because it was placed precisely here for very good reasons.