by John Grant
Drawing a lazgun from her belt, she tongued her suit radio to the general frequency.
"Look, you bastards," she said, "here's what's going to happen. Anyone who objects"—she waved the lazgun—"is going to be breathing vacuum about one split second from now. Got that?"
#
"You pilot this damned thing damned carefully now," said Strider.
There was no reply. Ten Per Cent Extra Free had returned to more urgent duties with Pinocchio, promising her that he and the bot would give her people another half-hour to get clear. If the Trok pilot directly beneath her had heard what she had said at all it was obviously just gabble to him.
A Trok fighter is designed to carry a crew of between one and four Trok, who between them probably mass no more than a quarter of a kilogram, plus their personal equipment, food, essential supplies and so forth—perhaps another couple of kilograms. This is, in terms of the fighters' capabilities, the unimportant part of their payload. What they are designed to lift is an extra ton of weaponry, including at least two ballistics that are rather larger and heavier than the fighter itself. The fighters on Qitanefermeartha no longer had to carry ballistics—they'd used them all to devastating effect against the Autarchy's warcruisers.
Trok fighters come in various shapes and sizes, but most of them have the approximate form of a domed lozenge some three meters long and some two meters wide. The only way a human being would be able to get inside one would be by transforming herself or himself into toothpaste. But the craft is easily capable of lifting and transporting the mass of a human being.
The rocketry is concentrated at what would be the corners if the fighter had been a rectangle rather than a lozenge. There are upthrusters there, and downthrusters; forward and retro-rockets. It doesn't really matter in this instance what the purpose of each of these rockets is in moving the spacecraft around: if you're in the direct line of fire of one of them you're very soon going to be toast. So attaching a belt-rope to the bottom of a Trok fighter and hoping to tag along behind is a very bad idea indeed, because sooner or later some part of your body is going to get burnt off. This would be painful. If you were lucky—or unlucky, depending on your personal tolerance of pain—the flare would fuse your spacesuit to the cauterized stump of your limb, so you might just survive.
Until the next time you flailed into the path of one of the rockets.
But there is one safe (Safe? Hah! thought Strider) way for a human being to be transported by a Trok fighter. Using your belt-rope, tie yourself tightly to the top of it, arms straight ahead and legs straight behind, tidily out of reach of all of the rocketry.
It's not pretty. It's not elegant. But it just might work.
Just might.
Strider had positioned herself so that she could see over the leading edge of the fighter to which Segrill had allocated her. If she and the Trok craft were going to end up screaming towards the surface of Qitanefermeartha at several hundred kilometers per hour she at least wanted to be able to watch—more accurately, she didn't want to spend the entire duration of the flight assuming this was exactly what was happening. As she fastened herself down she noticed that most of the rest of her party had chosen the same option—some of them, like Strauss-Giolitto, were tall enough to have very little alternative. Strider, her arms wrapped carefully around the front of the little vessel, was currently looking at one of her own footprints in the dust, only half a meter away. In every sense, Polyaggle was the odd one out. Possessing no belt-rope, she seemed quite unconcerned—although it was difficult to tell—by the fact that she was perched in a sort of upright squatting position atop the fighter she had selected, firmly gripping items of its superstructure. The pilot of that particular craft had a tricky task ahead.
The first few laden Trok fighters were already gingerly lifting off, gaining good altitude before darting off towards the pole—northern or southern, Strider didn't know. As more and more people secured themselves, assisted by busily moving Trok, lift-offs became more frequent. Through Ten Per Cent Extra Free, Strider had told Segrill that she wanted to be last: it was her duty as captain to take the greatest risk. He had pointed out acidly that the people taking the greatest risk were in fact the pilots of the fighters who were not carrying burdens, because they would be the very last to leave.
She could feel the fighter beneath her powering up. Ahead of her she could see Polyaggle being cautiously lifted into the sky—how much strength could there be in those gloved claws? Strider abruptly suspected that the answer was: quite a lot. Her own pilot was using equal skill, cutting in his upthrusters very gradually so as to minimize the chance of her being affected by splashback. The noise inside her suit, transmitted via the frame of the fighter, was almost literally deafening; she raised her helmet slightly in the hope of cutting down the din, but the manoeuvre didn't seem to make much difference.
Slowly the footprint she had been watching—had become almost fond of—began to recede from her, and then it was erased entirely as the upthrusters threw the dust into turmoil. I am never, ever going to travel this way again, she told herself.
There was a spurt of altitude. As Segrill had warned all of them most forcefully, she looked neither to right nor to left in case a close-up glimpse of the upthrusters blinded her. On second thoughts, she closed her eyes and used her tongue to blacken out her visor: time enough to look at the scenery once the upthrusters had cut out. "Above all else, keep absolutely still," Segrill had said. Strider reckoned she could have given a marble statue close competition.
There was a lessening and a change in the nature of the racket filling her head. At the same time the pressure on her belly eased. Her pilot had switched off the upthrusters. She prepared herself for the inevitable backwards drag as the main rockets came on, and sure enough it came. She felt her belt-rope cutting into the underside of her buttocks, her groin, her shoulderblades . . . too many pains in too many parts of the body to be counted. It was half a minute before she plucked up the courage to clear her visor.
When she did so, she was entranced.
They were travelling only about ten kilometers up, at a guess—high enough to clear all but the highest of Qitanefermeartha's sharp mountains. A crater-strewn landscape was rapidly unfolding beneath her. Most of its variations in color were created purely by shadows, but it was fascinating nevertheless. Whatever had happened during the planet's geological and meteorological past, various forces had conspired to produced every possible shape and form of pockmark, impact ray, lava spread and sinuous rille. She was reminded of the way the surface of Mars had looked before humans had got around to starting to terraform that planet, but all of this was on a smaller scale: it was a finely detailed miniature rather than a portrait that covered half the wall. She wished she could tell the pilot to go down a bit lower—although that would have meant she could make out less of the surface, because now they really were picking up speed.
Earlier she had promised herself should would never do this again. Now she wondered if she wasn't in at the birth of a great new leisure industry.
The chronometer display at the upper right of her visor told her that by this time Pinocchio and Ten Per Cent Extra Free must have launched the programmed shuttle. With luck the bot would for some while now have been legging it away from the city of Qitanefermeartha as fast as he could. Assuming the Helgiolath cruisers didn't start bombarding the city for another hour, he should be safely distant.
She tongued her suit radio to the general frequency. The static was abominable.
"Has anyone else survived this so far?" she said.
There was a confusion of voices.
"Quiet!" she shouted.
After a few moments the babble died down.
"I thought I might have been the only one," she said into the comparative quiet. "I guess we won't be able to count ourselves until we get to wherever it is the Trok are taking us. But, if you can all attain what is politely called radio silence, I want to check on one person."
&nbs
p; There was stillness.
It was impossible for her to mimic the notes of the Spindrifter language using the various tonalities available to Argot, but, very slowly and deliberately, she did her best.
"Poll. Eee. Aaag. Ull."
Just above the static she could hear something that sounded halfway between a chirrup and a whisper. It didn't matter what the detail of the message was, as Polyaggle must have realized even as she spoke—because in a different sense the message had a very precise meaning.
Assuming their luck kept up, not just one but two of the species currently extant in The Wondervale had been saved by the Trok from possible extinction.
To hell with whether the Helgiolath got round to coining all those little medals: Strider was going to do it herself—with her bare teeth, if necessary.
#
From the outset Pinocchio had known that, whatever Strider might think, this was a venture from which he was not going to return; now that he was in virtual symbiosis with the Image, the knowledge was an integral part of his make-up. And Ten Per Cent Extra Free—or, rather, the part of the Gestalt that could be conceptually partitioned off as Ten Per Cent Extra Free—had conspired in keeping the truth from her. She might have done something foolish and typically human like countermand her earlier instructions to the bot. Pinocchio could disobey direct orders, especially if he believed that by doing so he was acting in Strider's best interests, whether she knew it or not—he wouldn't be down on Qitanefermeartha had that not been the case—but even then it was very difficult for him.
He watched, with Ten Per Cent Extra Free also watching through Pinocchio's photoreceptors, the ships of the little Trok fleet lift off one by one and then speed away overhead. From here even Pinocchio's acute vision could not make out anything more than the flares of the rockets. He wondered which of them bore Leonie—knowing her, it would be the last to leave. He felt something inside him which, after a millisecond's thought, he identified as sorrow. Farewell, Leonie. There was still that other of those things called emotions inside him—the one which as yet he had been unable to identify, though it had been increasingly affecting his behavior in minor ways for some time.
The main body of the Trok fighters lifted off now, much more quickly, and streaked towards the pole.
He/they waited a further two minutes.
Time, he/they thought.
There is a limit to the accuracy with which a shuttle's course can be pre-programmed, especially a shuttle that is lifting itself from a slightly sloping, treacherously soft plain of dust: a tiny subsidence beneath it can throw all the calculations off by a crucial few meters. There is also a limit to the number of actions even an Image can manage to perform simultaneously.
Strider had imagined that the bot would be able to leave the shuttle before it flew on its final, deadly mission. In fact, his puter was required to assist the ship's own rudimentary puter make all the small adjustments that would be necessary during the flight. The Image would have been able to do this, of course, except for the fact that the Image was going to be otherwise employed.
I WILL REMAIN IN CONSTANT MENTAL CONTACT WITH YOU, said the Ten Per Cent Extra Free fragment of the Gestalt, BUT NOW I MUST RELOCATE TO THE INTERIOR OF THE CITY.
Pinocchio knew this, for the thought was in part his own. He nodded his head—a human reaction that had been written into his software. Perhaps it would be the last human reaction he would ever display. His inheritance.
He/they triggered the launching procedure, and rockets struggled to raise the vehicle off the plain. It weaved slightly as it ascended, and he/they reflexively made a trivial alteration to the program. The dust roiled beneath the shuttle. The stars were very bright—they seemed brighter even than Qitanefermeartha's dim red sun, which was lying just above the horizon. All were outshone by the occasional brief flares of destruction still continuing above him/them. The Autarchy's defenders were putting up a better fight than expected.
He/they primed every ballistic on the shuttle—every weapon down to the last spare lazgun—and then programmed the drive for auto-destruct. Finally he/they set the shuttle into full forward thrust, with an acceleration of over ten gees.
Low across the plain it sped as straight as a laser beam towards the city's gloomy deadmetal airlock doors.
The Ten Per Cent Extra Free part of the symbiosis drew back from The Truthfulness some of the energy he had earlier stolen from the city.
All seventeen of the airlocks suddenly opened just as the shuttle approached. Pinocchio hardly had time to register them as the shuttle, streaming vengeful fire, shot straight through them. They closed tidily behind it as swiftly as they had opened.
Beyond, further—less substantial—barriers awaited. They shattered under the colossal impact of the howling spacecraft. Even Pinocchio's night-vision could see nothing now—the plastite forescreen was completely obscured by debris. The Gestalt of himself and Ten Per Cent Extra Free had started to use senses that, mixing machine and Image perceptions, were utterly alien to the human experiential world. Nano-trickles of electrical current within Pinocchio's and the shuttle's puters interrelated with equally tiny pulses of trans-reality energy as the vessel plowed through the flimsy walls and other structures of Qitanefermeartha, leaving thousands of dead and dying in the darkness of their wake.
The bot made a few more minuscule alterations. The impacts kept inducing trivial deviations into the shuttle's trajectory. 2.339081 seconds to go. 2.339080. 2.339079 . . .
Pinocchio made a guess at the emotion his software had serendipitously developed towards Leonie.
Ten Per Cent Extra Free drew power from The Truthfulness, expanding his being until it contained almost as much energy as he had originally taken from the city.
And then he returned it to Qitanefermeartha's main power-generating station, a vast installation right at the hub of the city.
Priming it.
Everywhere—even in the tunnel where the Autarch Nalla struggled and cursed—the lights came on.
That was of only passing interest to Qitanefermeartha's citizens, however, because just under a quarter of a second later the powerful ballistic that the shuttle had become struck the very center of the unstable bomb that the power-generating station had become.
A dome of deadmetal not only keeps things out: it keeps things in. There was nowhere for the fireball to go.
"At last, I've become a Real Boy," thought Pinocchio in the instant that he, the shuttle, the central power-generating station and everything else for a hundred kilometers around were vaporized.
It took a little longer for the entire interior of the city to be sterilized.
Oh, several seconds.
6
Losses, Gains, Reload and Aim
From where Strider was sitting she could see the disc of Qitanefermeartha. She felt as if the planet should show some sign of the premeditated act of mass murder she had perpetrated upon it. Necessary murder, perhaps, but it seemed to her like murder nevertheless.
She shifted in her seat. Once they were safe at the pole—although two people had failed to make it—Segrill had communicated with his Bredai allies, and within the hour a Bredai shuttle had arrived to lift them off-planet: it had been about the size of the Santa Maria. By that time five of the humans had died of asphyxiation, and several others had required urgent treatment. Fortunately the air aboard both the shuttle and the mother ship to which they were boosted approximated to F-14's atmosphere, so with luck it didn't contain anything toxic. Even so, everyone was now following Polyaggle's example and as a precaution refusing to eat anything but textured vegetable protein; there was anyway little temptation to eat whatever it was that the vast, clumsy-seeming Bredai enthusiastically consumed in room-sized quantities.
There had been so many losses, mused Strider, aside from among her own personnel. The Helgiolath fleet had been reduced by over one-half, Kortland himself seemingly being among the casualties. Several of Segrill's fighters had simply vanished: just becau
se the Trok were small didn't mean that their personal griefs were small. A few of Qitanefermeartha's defenders had fled into the wilds of The Wondervale, but the remainder had been destroyed in their entirety. The Autarchy had lost its Autarch, and its capital.
Everybody had lost something, it seemed.
She was annoyed with herself that only one loss seemed to count very much to her.
Pinocchio.
Lover, trusted friend, confidant, advisor. The person to whom she could confess her most intimate secrets, her most neurotic worries. The one member of her personnel whom she hadn't had to be captain of. The rock to which, in times of need, she could cling.
Bredai decontamination had made the Spindrifter version look positively subtle. Not only was Strider entirely hairless, she felt as if every follicle had been individually scoured out, and none too gently. The Bredai didn't have too much use for fabric, and so like everyone else she was naked—Umbel knew what they were going to do next time they needed to suit up. It was curiously reassuring that her physical nakedness matched her nakedness of spirit.
Pinocchio.
Which idiot back at the SSIA had thought to give the bot such an infantile, patronizing name? Again and again Pinocchio had proved himself to be at least the equal and usually the superior of the humans around him. She wished whoever it had been were in front of her, so that she could . . .
And then, as her blood cooled, she thought about the name a little further.
No, after all, the name had been perfectly apposite.
Odd how long it had taken her to realize that fact.
#
Danny O'Sondheim, leaning into the Pocket, felt as if the wormhole were actively pulling at him. He realized there was sweat on his forehead, but resisted the urge to wipe it away: to do so he would have had to pass his hand through the small green knot that the Images had created for him in the center of the Pocket.