by John Grant
The Santa Maria was going to be left with a skeleton crew, she thought dourly. Not the funniest of her jokes, in the circumstances.
Going down in the elevator she felt herself shaking all over. Way back when they'd been in orbit around Ganymede she'd done all the practices a shuttle pilot should do, but that had been several years ago. Before that she'd shuttled between Phobos and Mars, as part of her training. It seemed a very long time in the past. Did she still have the reflexive speed of reaction that she'd developed then?
There was only one way to find out.
First stop off: Nelson.
Second stop off: Leander.
Third stop off: Strider herself. She hoped Pinocchio had lined up someone good for the fourth shuttle.
Four suited figures turned to look at her as she burst through the lock into the bay where Shuttle A awaited her. Their visors masked their faces entirely, so that she could recognize none of them—except one, the alien design of whose suit betrayed her identity.
"No, Polyaggle!" yelled Strider as she raced across the floor of the blister towards the shuttle. "If you die your whole goddam species dies."
The Spindrifter made no sign of having heard her. Dammit—the Images seemed always to be deserting her at the wrong moments. What to do? Leave it—that was the best thing. If the bloody alien wanted to kill herself that was her own affair. At least she was wearing a lazgun, so maybe she could take out a few of the enemy before they got her.
"Into the shuttle!" Strider shouted unnecessarily. The four were already following her.
She waited impatiently while the shuttle's outer lock door operated. The Images had made modifications here as well, and the whole cycle was very much shorter than it had originally been, but it still seemed to her to be taking forever. She just hoped the modifications hadn't been so dramatic that she no longer knew how to fly the craft at all.
Finally the five of them were permitted by the automatics to enter the lock. There was barely enough room for Strider to fit on her helmet as they waited for the inner door.
Helmet on, she tongued her suit radio. Shit—she should have remembered to plug in a commlink. Too late now. There'd be some on the shuttle—probably in the first-aid box. You're a creature of a different era, Leonie my gal, and sometimes you shouldn't be.
"If you want to back out, this is your last opportunity," she said.
There were assorted mumbles of dissent. No one was backing out. She felt atavistically proud of them.
The lock's inner door opened—at last.
The Images had made the interior of the shuttle roomier, but hadn't thought to add any extra seating. Strider threw herself into the pilot's chair and pointed Polyaggle towards the other. The remaining three personnel would have to fend for themselves as best they could in the space behind the seats.
She tongued her radio to the command deck's frequency, hoping O'Sondheim would have the sense to be listening in.
He had.
"Shuttle A is loaded and ready," she told him as she strapped herself into her restrainer belt and surveyed the console in front of her. Not too much seemed to have changed except that, where before there had been an array of keyboards, there was now just a single, massively elaborate one. As when the keyboards had first been introduced to the Pockets, she found herself recognizing the symbols and functions on this. She wondered how many other minor alterations the Images had made to her . . .
"Shuttles B, C and D are likewise," O'Sondheim responded.
"Who's piloting D?"
"Pinocchio."
Strider would have surged up out of her seat had it not been for her restrainer belt.
"For fuck's sake! I explicitly told him he wasn't to . . ."
"It's a bit late now." O'Sondheim sounded laconic. "He's an independent-minded bot."
"He's going to get an independent-minded hole lazzed right through his head next time I see him," muttered Strider. Louder, she said: "Better start counting us down, Danny."
The blister portal directly in front of her slowly opened to reveal bleak space with just the thinnest of crescents of Qitanefermeartha cutting across the bottom left. Hearing O'Sondheim's countdown as just a reassuring drone in her earphones, she twisted around in her seat to see how the three people behind her were getting on. They'd moored themselves, using their belt-ropes, to the rears of the seating. Strider nodded. It was as good a way as any of keeping themselves secure.
She returned her attention to what O'Sondheim was saying just in the nick of time.
." . . one . . . now!"
She pressed what she knew to be the right combination of two buttons on her keyboard and the shuttle shot forward. She was jammed back into her seat by the abrupt imposition of gees as the shuttle was suddenly on its own above the disc of the planet.
She tongued her suit radio.
"Status aboard Shuttle A?" she said.
There was a brief cacophony from Polyaggle, which presumably meant that the Spindrifter was all right. "Uncomfortable," said another voice, which Strider recognized as Strauss-Giolitto's; so now she knew who at least two of the personnel with her were. "OK," said a third voice: Strider couldn't immediately identify it.
There was no fourth voice.
"Can you two check . . .?" began Strider. She didn't need to finish the question.
"It's Bartleby," Strauss-Giolitto said a few seconds later. "His neck's broken."
So the arrangement with the belt-ropes hadn't been so good after all. Strider swore under her breath. There was nothing she could do to save the man—whom she recalled as a rather jovial, amiable ecologist.
The gees faded away as the shuttle ceased accelerating.
"Get the oxygen and recycling units off his suit, then," she said. "They might come in handy. And pass his lazgun forward to me."
Before anyone could protest she had called up O'Sondheim. "Patch me through to the other three shuttles, will you, Danny. We've had a casualty here—guy called Bartleby. Sam, I think his first name was. I want to get the status of the other crews."
There had been no further casualties. Strider decided she would administer Pinocchio's rollicking later—there wasn't time right now for everything she wanted to say to him.
"How are the Trok making out, Danny?" she said.
"Better than you would ever believe."
He began to cite figures, but just as he started she realized they were being displayed on one of the screens in front of her: what she had assumed was just some kind of interference pattern was in fact a perfectly comprehensible list of statistics. She glanced sideways at Polyaggle and saw that the Spindrifter was leaning forward, reading them intently. So the display worked in two entirely unrelated languages? Maybe the Images had been making a few minor adaptations to Polyaggle as well. Quite how much had they done to everyone?
Strider decided not to answer her own question in case she frightened herself.
She looked at the screen again. Somebody somewhere in The Wondervale had surely realized before that it could be a good idea to deploy the minuscule Trok fighters, but they must have forgotten. Segrill and his people had so far taken out twenty-seven of the defending warcruisers and themselves lost only three craft: if Kortland ever got to Qitanefermeartha he was going to have to get a lot of extremely small medals made. Most of the Trok fighters had now divested themselves of their complement of missiles, and were beginning to move either towards space rendezvous with Strider or downwards to the planetary surface.
"Give me those co-ordinates, Danny," she said.
He fed them direct into the four shuttles' puters.
"And now tell Ten Per Cent Extra Free that I want him here," she said. "Ask him nicely."
A few moments later the familiar voice trilled in her ear. I AM ABOARD THE SHUTTLE, CAPTAIN LEONIE STRIDER.
She tongued off her radio. "You know what I'm about to do, don't you?"
Of course.
"You've said your goodbyes to Heartfire and Angler?"
> BUT WE'RE NOT GOING TO BE SEPARATED, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free, EXCEPT IN THIS REALITY. IN OUR OWN WE ARE STILL INTERMINGLED, AS WE ALWAYS SHALL BE.
Strider abandoned the line of questioning. Later, maybe.
She tongued her radio back to the Santa Maria's frequency once more.
"'Bye, Danny," she said. "Get the Santa Maria the shit out of here as fast as you can. If you get back to the Solar System give it my love. Maybe I'll join you someday."
A second later the monitors indicated to her that the Santa Maria had shifted away via tachyon drive—it could be anywhere in The Wondervale by now. But Strider didn't need the monitors to tell her this. She had felt her ship go.
Her ship.
#
The shuttles had been originally designed for landing on planets that had atmospheres: they had retro-jets and air-brakes to slow things down. The new-style, heavily armed versions the Images had tailored were a bit more versatile than that, but Strider was still virtually suicidal by the time the craft came to rest halfway up the side of a small crater.
"If I ever say anything bad about you again, Umbel," she said raggedly, "you have my permission to smite me."
"Little lady, I wouldn't smite you unless you asked me real nice," said a voice in her earphones.
Damned radios. No privacy.
"Umbel!" she said. "You're down safely?"
"As safe as we can be," said Nelson, "in a shuttle that's never going to lift off this planet again unless you use a crane. That was . . . well, put it this way: they ought to fit out suits with dispose-alls."
"Is there a problem?" Vomiting inside a suit could very easily be fatal.
"No, we all held it down. Or, rather, up. This here shuttle's lying on her back just at the moment. Only a few bruises are all we've got to worry about." Nelson sounded relaxed—but then he usually did.
"Stop hogging the air, then," said Strider. "Leander? Pinocchio?"
"We have landed in perfect safety," said the bot into her ear. "Not the finest of lan—"
"Yeah, fine," said Strider brusquely. Bloody bot—too good at everything. "Leander?"
"Maloron Leander has broken her nose," said Lan Yi's prim voice. "Fortunately Shuttle C was not structurally damaged during the landing, so we have been able to remove her helmet and are now administering first aid."
"How is she otherwise?"
"Swearing very considerably."
Strider smiled. So Leander was all right.
"Rendezvous as you can," she said. "Shuttle D sounds as if it's best placed. Pinocchio, give us something we can triangulate on."
#
Nelson's shuttle was certainly a write-off—Strider could see that as soon as she crested the rim of the crater—but the other three might one day be reclaimed. Who would do the reclaiming was a different issue. Probably not humans: the prospect of nineteen humans—no, there were only eighteen of them now—a Spindrifter and a bundle of Trok bringing down the might of the Autarchy seemed much more remote than it had when she'd been up on the command deck of the Santa Maria, surrounded by the reassuring glow of her Pocket. Still, look what the Trok had managed to do to the Autarchy's warcruisers . . . Maybe small was beautiful after all.
The sky was beautiful as well, studded with more stars than it seemed could possibly exist. Here and there a sudden flare of light appeared—a new nova, as another warcruiser met its doom—and then very swiftly vanished. But nobody was paying any attention to the sky.
Their planned landing site had been some twenty kilometers towards the equator from the city of Qitanefermeartha, and despite the hazards they had all come down within no more than a few kilometers of each other. The only thing that anybody wanted to look at from here was the impossibly vast dome of the city. It seemed more like a landform—some inspiration that had occurred to plate tectonics on a day when it had nothing else to think about—than anything which had been constructed. It dwarfed any mountain range in the Solar System—even Mars's Olympus Mons would have looked merely plaintive beside it. The dome itself was difficult to discern clearly because of the motley of forcefields coruscating around it: it looked as if all the electrical storms in The Wondervale had come together for a convention.
It was little wonder that the Autarchy's defenses had not been much concerned by the arrival of four shuttles; they probably hadn't even noticed the Trok fighters.
"This is going to be a tough nut to crack," said Strauss-Giolitto.
"That's an understatement," said Strider drily. Early in the mission she had been tempted to have the teacher bounced out of it, but something had happened to Strauss-Giolitto on Spindrift that had changed her. Quite what it had been Strider had never been able to discover, although she knew that Pinocchio had played a part in it. It hardly mattered. Now Strider found herself able to place her full trust in Strauss-Giolitto as a comrade in arms. It was a good feeling to know that the woman was here.
"Well," said Strider after a few moments had gone by, "shall we get going?"
The question was an order.
She began to leap forward. The surface gravity of Qitanefermeartha was about half Mars-standard, so progress was quick: twenty kilometers here was the equivalent of only a few kilometers at home. The little Trok spacecraft leapfrogged around the humans every once in a while, waiting like land-mines on the dusty surface until the jumping, lumbering figures had passed them by before lifting briefly into the sky again.
Strider's plan had been to get down on to Qitanefermeartha and then attack. Her thinking had gone no further than this. Everything had gone fine so far, but now her head was empty of ideas. All she had was the conviction that the Helgiolath had got it wrong: Qitanefermeartha had been constructed to be able to repel huge space armadas rather than a few people in suits.
They skirted the edge of a small crater. Off to their left they could see a huge spaceport, although even this was dwarfed by the size of the domed city, which now seemed to crowd the sky. Still there had been no reaction from the city's defenses. Strider felt as if they were a few ants crossing a floor: who bothers to stamp on the ants when someone is firing a lazgun in through the windows?
She called a halt a couple of kilometers short of the flickering forcefields. Even though running was comparatively easy on Qitanefermeartha, her own breath was coming in rough gusts, and the rest of the party, Polyaggle excepted, seemed similarly exhausted.
She tongued off her radio and said: "I could do with a little inspiration here."
DAWDLE, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.
"Say again?"
Dawdle.
"No, what I meant was that I'd be grateful if you could amplify on your advice."
YOU WERE PERFECTLY CORRECT TO ASSUME THAT THE CITY'S DEFENSES ARE GEARED TO WATCHING OUT FOR BIG THINGS RATHER THAN SMALL THINGS, CAPTAIN LEONIE STRIDER, JUST AS THE AUTARCHY'S WARCRUISERS WERE INCAPABLE OF DEALING WITH THE TROK CRAFT. Ten Per Cent Extra Free paused, then continued. QITANEFERMEARTHA'S DEFENSES ALSO EXPECT ANY THREAT TO MOVE SWIFTLY—LIKE A BALLISTIC OR A BEAM, OR POSSIBLY EVEN JUST A POWERED VEHICLE. THEY WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY FAIL TO REGISTER SOMETHING THAT IS MOVING SLOWLY. SO I SUGGEST THAT YOU DAWDLE THE REST OF THE WAY. I SHALL ASK THE TROK TO DO THE SAME.
"Strolling along isn't going to help us much when we hit those forcefields," she said.
NO. BUT I AM.
#
Reaching back through the layers of reality.
In the embrace of Heartfire and Angler.
Wrongness: Nightmirror missing. Not for ever. Knowledge that Nightmirror will return.
Holding on to Heartfire and Angler. They the anchors that moor Ten Per Cent Extra Free to The Truthfulness as he re-enters The Wondervale.
Extending himself until he becomes the finest filament that can connect universes.
Within the domed city of Qitanefermeartha. Some here can see me. Pink, crystalline walls are safety. Shift electromagnetic charge within one crystal and so spring to next. Becomes easier very soon. Now at optimum rate
down the tunnel of emf. Spreading out, rippling through the structure until a mote of oneself everywhere.
Become Qitanefermeartha.
Power centers. Some here, some there. Focus on the larger power centers first. Some immediate allies: willingly accept demise. Others reluctant: require debate. Radiant energy absorbed as each dies, adding to strength, to bliss. Hard, now, to retain oneself within walls—so much to give to the charged molecules of Qitanefermeartha's atmosphere—but self must restrain. One only power center recalcitrant. Concentrate self on it. Hold pattern around it. Very pretty pattern: surely power center want to be a part of it. Colors of life and of light.
Temptation.
Final and largest power center submit, although only temporarily—not to die. Self agree it not die.
At last self is able to swallow forcefields and become so mighty. Too mighty for Wondervale. Release all into Truthfulness, where Heartfire and Angler receive it, and instantly begin to multiply.
Immediate glory.
Ten Per Cent Extra Free is the mighty father. Joy is throughout The Truthfulness.
Now smaller power centers. Nip one here, nip one there. Lasers die. Holos die. Cabbles die. All for the added greatness of The Truthfulness.
One day The Wondervale die . . . all for the added greatness of The Truthfulness.
#
No messenger was required to tell the Autarch Nalla that something . . . undesirable had happened. As soon as the lights dimmed he had called up a display of the status of Qitanefermeartha and seen that the screens were down. What had happened to make them so he did not know, and his interest was not great. Then the monitors themselves had died. The city seemed to have been drained of all power.
The most important thing for him now was self-preservation. It was the task of his guards and courtiers to defend the city. If they succeeded in doing so, he would return as their acknowledged ruler. If they did not—well, there was a galaxyful of replacements to draw upon.
Another Qitanefermeartha could be built, somewhere far across The Wondervale.
He lumbered from his throne-room through a concealed door and into a darkened corridor. The door slid shut behind him, but the lights did not come on, as they should have.