by Ben Bova
Woorunmarra ignored her, his attention fixed on something moving just above the horizon. The object circled back toward them and as it got nearer Woorunmarra began sprinting silently across the landscape toward it. In spite of his surprising speed, he was still several meters away when the thing hit the ground, tumbling crazily as it bounced along the surface. He scooped it up on the run, laughing giddily at the top of his lungs, and doubled back to stand before her again.
"Nah," he said, barely winded, "it feels just like home." He looked around him as if trying to decide which direction to throw the boomerang again, then added, "It's just a lot greener."
Adela followed his gaze. The surrounding countryside near station 67 was, despite the intense heat, lush with vegetation. There was a low, grassy ground cover, and clumps of large bushes were scattered everywhere. Barrel-shaped, branchless trees with leafy crowns dotted the landscape in groups of two and three, while to the west where the land became more hilly the edge of a large evergreen forest could be seen. The area around the station itself was mostly level, with only occasional hills or outcroppings interrupting the almost plainslike topography, but to the east a horizon-spanning ridge rose in the distance. A few kilometers beyond the ridge, belying the peaceful nature of the topography, lay the violent Arroyo fault.
There was a slight rise about a hundred meters on the other side of the station where a temporary shelter had been set up, housing a dozen members of the Congressional Guard that Niles had assigned to them. There were several parked vehicles—ground effect machines, or GEMs, as the soldiers referred to them—clustered nearby. Seated beneath a parasol-like canopy atop one of them, an armed soldier kept watch, glancing only occasionally in their direction. From where she stood she couldn't be sure which one of the soldiers it was, nor could she see any of the others. They were most likely beneath the protective covering of the shelter, out of the heat—just as the two of them should have been. "Let's go inside before you give yourself a stroke."
"Not yet," he replied, oblivious to the blazing sun. "I almost had it that time. A few more throws and I'll have a fair go at adjustin' to one point two g. Care to try?" He teasingly extended the gently curving piece of wood to her, before turning away with a laugh and whipping it into the air so fast that she barely followed the movement of his arm.
He tracked it with his eyes, his body rigid and unmoving. He wore only his khaki shorts—having dumped the rest of his uniform unceremoniously atop his discarded boots and socks—and she saw the smooth muscles rippling beneath his dark skin, glistening under a film of hard-earned perspiration.
The boomerang sailed out and slowly began angling upward, then at the very top of its flight arced gracefully to the left before beginning to circle back. As it came out of its arc, it glided downward at nearly the same angle at which it rose before leveling off for its return. "Watch now." Woorunmarra took one step to his left, studying its flight path, then another. Adela thought for a moment that the spinning blur would hit them, but at the last second Woorunmarra leaped nearly a meter off the ground and snatched it smoothly from the air. "Not bad, ay?"
Adela crossed her arms in front of her, pretending to be unimpressed. "I thought it was going to take my head off."
He grinned. "Nah. I weren't aimin' for your neck."
Adela smiled at the way his accent thickened and his speaking patterns changed whenever he was at ease and enjoying himself, as he obviously was now. In the time they'd been here at the station he seemed, almost literally, at home. "You can't really aim that thing, can you?" she asked dubiously.
"Course not." He turned again, looking away from the station. "See that tree there?" he asked, pointing at a fat-boled growth about sixty meters distant. She nodded and he handily flipped the boomerang away at a sharp angle that appeared to be taking it nowhere near the tree. It sailed out in a level arc this time, curving gently across the landscape until it impacted the tree, neatly impaling itself into the fleshy pulp of the cactus-like growth. Adela raised an eyebrow and noted that it had hit the tree at a point which, had she been standing in its place, would have been at her eye level.
"Nice." She tried to insert a tone of annoyance in her voice, but found herself smiling at him.
He laughed again and trotted off to retrieve the boomerang.
"I'm going inside," she called after him, then turned for the coolness of the station.
The pressure-tap station was well appointed and comfortable, if spartan, in its furnishings. The two-person crew had been informed by Speaker Niles himself that once the process of taking the station off-line had been completed, the station was to be used as guest quarters for the two Imperial visitors. They had cleaned the place thoroughly, even going so far as to put fresh linens in each of the small bedrooms.
Guest quarters, Adela thought sourly as she poured herself a glass of cold water. More like a holding cell.
She had refused to return to the ship and had attempted to convince Montero that it would be better if she and Woorunmarra were closer at hand. After all, she had reasoned, with more than a hundred Levant crew members helping the Westland techs in their efforts to isolate the Leeper control grouping, this whole thing just might be over before anything serious happened.
With warring factions squaring off along the length of the fault line, and with Westland troops now surrounding Leeper at a discreet distance, Montero was not nearly so optimistic. Still, with Woorunmarra echoing Adela's concern that immediate negotiations would be imperative should an agreement be reached, the Commander reluctantly agreed that the two of them should remain accessible, but safely away from any potential hostilities.
Allowing them to use one of the vacated stations had been Speaker Niles' idea. Located more than a hundred kilometers south of Leeper, they would be safe from anything occurring at the control station, and yet close enough to organize a settlement between the factions should their presence be needed on short notice. Montero had wanted to station a combat shuttle there, but Adela argued that the presence of the Imperial vehicle at an out-of-the-way spot like this was just asking for the Eastlanders to consider the station a target. The Commander had agreed with her reasoning—again, with reluctance. Besides, she argued, there were dozens of combat shuttles on standby at the Westland capital at Newcastle, and one could be sent if the Congressional Guard Captain in charge of this squad thought it necessary.
As it had turned out, the most dangerous things they'd experienced in the seven days they'd spent here so far had been boredom and the heat. And only she seemed bothered by the latter.
The centrally located control room, where Adela now stood, was dominated by a wall screen displaying a large overlay of the surface structure surrounding the station. Like the overlay they had watched in Niles' office, this one also showed the location of each station to which it was linked and extended in a four-hundred-kilometer-wide circle. The pressure tap itself was located below the station and, even though off-line from the network, she felt a humming vibration coining from below. The screen display fascinated her. While she had felt nothing since arriving on Pallatin, she knew that minor tremors occurred almost constantly on the planet, and the screen seemed to confirm that fact: Dim flashes of color appeared here and there as the automatic monitors showed even the slightest tectonic activity whenever it occurred.
The flashes came and went randomly, with no set pattern, and yet occasionally followed minor fault lines as they flickered out. The effect reminded her of the way lightning teased the distant sky on Gris whenever a thunderstorm formed. She remembered once, back home, how she and her father had sat on a hillside and watched an approaching storm sweep angrily across the de Parzon valley. The storm itself had never reached their settlement and remained in the distance, too far even to hear the thunder as the flashes played over the horizon. As a child she had always been afraid of the frequent storms on Gris, but remembered how, on that day when her father had called her up from their underground home to watch the silent lightning
in the safety of his arms, she had overcome her fear.
She smiled, feeling herself becoming lost in the memory when the screen suddenly winked out, along with all lighting in the station except a dully glowing emergency lamp mounted above each doorway.
There was a low rumbling coming from outside, crossing overhead. The sound carried with it an odd presence that confused her for several long seconds until it struck her why the sound was so clear inside the station: The pressure tap beneath her feet had fallen silent. There was no reassuring vibration, no hum coming from below to indicate the station was alive at all.
Her eyes grew accustomed quickly to the dimness and she found the exit with little trouble, flinging the door wide. A wall of heat hit her in the face as she left the sheltering coolness of the station, and within seconds Adela found herself perspiring beneath the glaring sun as she sought out Woorunmarra.
He and the commanding officer had climbed atop the GEM the guardsman had used for a lookout post, and the three of them, their arms raised to shade their eyes, stared into the sky. He had put his boots back on and retrieved his shirt, tucking it into his belt. The others had come out of the shelter and were likewise trying to follow whatever it was that had attracted the lookout's attention.
"What is it?" Adela called out, trotting up to stand alongside the GEM. She leaned against the side of the machine, but pulled quickly away from the hot, sun-baked surface. "What happened?"
"Don't know," Woorunmarra replied, still gazing skyward. "An aircraft with Eastland markings circled us once at low altitude, then headed in that direction. Didn't do much, though. Captain Radaker's already called it in."
"Could it have had anything to do with the power shutdown inside the station?"
Woorunmarra and Radaker looked at each other, then scrambled down from their perch. The guardsman remained atop the GEM while Adela and the two men headed for the station.
It was still deliciously cool inside, but by the time the three of them finished an inspection of the station searching for the cause of the outage, they could tell the air was beginning to warm considerably. Unfortunately their search turned up nothing that might have been responsible for the power failure; at least, nothing that could be detected and repaired on the site. Whatever the cause of the outage, it didn't seem to be located here.
"I don't know what it is," Radaker said once they were back outside. He stared into the sky in the direction the aircraft had disappeared. "Maybe it did have something to do with it. A magnetic pulse, maybe, tuned to the frequency of the receiving dish—but there should be a buried cable backup." He cupped his hands over his mouth and called to the lookout on the GEM. "Tell Wyand to get her kit. Tell her to pick four of the others to help her do a complete check on the circuitry." A young woman, a compact electronics case tucked under her arm, and several of the others came up and, after speaking briefly to the Captain, hurried inside the station.
"Can we contact our people?" Woorunmarra sounded worried. "With the power down we can't use the station's comm terminal."
"Of course, at the shelter. The portable's voice-only, but help yourself."
"Thanks."
Radaker nodded, then followed the others inside the station.
"What's wrong?" Adela asked once they were alone. "Specifically, I mean."
"I'm not sure. Just want to call in." He picked up his step, outpacing her. Clearly, if he suspected something, he didn't want to discuss it until he'd had a chance to check it out. Adela let him go and remained outside the shelter. She wondered if she might be able to help inside the station, but decided against offering. Radaker and the others had been very friendly and courteous to both of them, but it was clear they weren't pleased with the duty they'd drawn. Best to stay out of their way, she realized.
She sat down in the shade of one of the barrel trees a few meters up the rise, her back resting against the soft, almost spongy bole. In spite of the heat, the humidity was still very low and a soft breeze made the spot quite comfortable. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes, and had been there only a few minutes when Woorunmarra came running from the shelter.
"Captain Radaker!"
He was sprinting for the station, calling out as he ran, and was about halfway to the front entrance when Adela noted a sudden sharp hissing that filled the air. She jumped to her feet, but before she could move there was a sudden whump! and she saw the canted roof of the station crumple as if in slow motion, followed by a brilliant flash and a shock wave that threw her backward into the tree. Dazed, she tumbled like a rag doll to the ground.
She tried to push herself up, but a dizziness and nausea swept over her and she fell forward into the grass. She tried again, successfully this time, and managed to push herself up to a sitting position. The whole scene spun around her through blurred eyes. There was a throbbing ache at the back of her head and she felt blood trickling down the back of her neck. She rubbed at it gingerly, feeling a small gash in her scalp. Her hand was covered with blood when she pulled it back, but the wound felt too small to be serious. She rose unsteadily to her feet, wiping bloody fingers on her shorts, and looked at the station. Or what was left of it.
The whole building had collapsed, the jumble of twisted plastic and metal now fully engulfed in flames. The heat was intense and pounded against her face in searing waves; she found it difficult to even look directly at it. Burning sections of the station were strewn for dozens of meters in all directions; a chunk of roofing had barely missed the shelter and hit one of the GEMs, setting it afire. Halfway between the burning vehicle and the wreckage of the station, next to a twisted support beam, Woorunmarra lay unmoving.
"Billy!" Some of the men and women at the shelter had cleared the rise and were running down to the fire, reaching the perimeter of the station just as she made it to Woorunmarra. He rose shakily to his feet, stumbling to his knees with the first step he tried to take. Adela helped him to his feet and steadied him as the first of the soldiers came to their side.
"I'm… I'm all right," he said, waving them away. "The station? Anybody left?"
He turned back to the flames and made a feeble move toward the wreckage before Adela stopped him. There were several people silhouetted against the fire, but it was clear that no one inside could have survived the blast itself, much less the inferno that was raging now.
The remaining soldiers came running over the crest of the rise. Adela noted they had donned battle armor and were now fully armed. The one in the lead, a woman unusually tall for a Pallatin, was shouting as she came down the slope.
"From the south! They're coming up from the south. Tell the Captain that—" She stopped cold, seeing the wreckage and realizing the seriousness of the hit they'd just taken. She came up alongside them, doing a mental nose count. "Captain Radaker? Wyand and the others?"
One of the men who had arrived at the fire first now came running back, his face red from his proximity to the inferno that just three minutes earlier had been pressure-tap station 67. "They were inside… are inside." He turned back to the flames, the others who had run down with him immediately after the blast joining them where they stood. "They…" He didn't have to finish.
There were eight of them now: Adela and Woorunmarra, plus the remaining six guards. The tall woman, Janners, was a Sergeant and had the highest rank among them. A look of subdued anxiety crossed her face when the realization hit that she was now in command, but she immediately sized up the situation and took charge, reluctantly and uncertainly.
"The rest of you suit up. We may have company in a few minutes. Move!" Once the others were out of earshot she turned to them, her voice apologetic. "This wasn't supposed to happen. There was no indication that—"
"Forget it." Woorunmarra rubbed at his shoulder, skinned and bleeding where he'd been thrown to the concrete apron around the station. "What information do you have?"
Adela took his arm before she could answer, forcibly leading him up the rise. "Keep talking, but let's move up to the sh
elter, out of the open. Sergeant, could we get a dressing for his shoulder?"
She followed, but for a moment Janners was unsure as how to respond to Adela's overt action. So much had happened in such a short time—the attack, the loss of half her squad, assuming command—that she seemed overwhelmed. Hastily catching up with the pair from behind, she caught sight of Woorunmarra's shoulder, then her gaze settled on the blood that had run down into the collar of Adela's shirt. "Come on," she barked, as if fully comprehending the situation for the first time. Her demeanor changed suddenly and she quickened her step to lead them up the rise, calling ahead of her as they approached the shelter, "I need a medical kit. Now!" She continued talking over her shoulder. "Divisional command just called, there's an enemy unit heading up from the south. They're still east of Arroyo, but command has heat-traced the missile that hit the station directly to them. It's a sure bet that the flyover computer targeted us, then relayed the information to them, and they fired while still twenty-five kilometers out."
One of the enlisted men had brought the kit at about the same time they entered the shelter and was already spraying a skin gel on Woorunmarra's shoulder and back. The wound treated, he concentrated on the gash on the back of Adela's head. The spray stung slightly for a moment, but the anesthetic worked quickly to drive away the throbbing that had been steadily increasing since she'd gotten back on her feet. She felt her scalp tighten where the injury was, indicating the skin gel was going to work closing the cut.
Woorunmarra stretched his arm and shoulder as the gel penetrated his skin, checking his range of motion. "That fits in with what I just learned from the Levant." He stopped stretching suddenly and let his arm drop to his side. "I just wish I'd managed to find out a few seconds sooner."