[Weapons of Chaos 01] - Echoes of Chaos

by Robert E. Vardeman - (ebook by Undead)

  “Which would you want?” Leonore asked.

  In answer, Bernssen turned, pushed her away from the remote control panel, and began changing the settings. “I’m better at this than you are. More practice. And I’ve been here longer to learn to really hate the mud.”

  His words were drowned out by the sound of ultrasonic diggers working their way through the roof of the alien museum. In less than five minutes the diggers had chewed away a hole large enough to lift the entire diorama onto the rainy surface.

  “Shouldn’t we protect it from the rain?” asked Leonore.

  “Being done now. The electrostatic field is being scrambled by the lightning and upper atmosphere ionization, but it ought to repel most of the rain.” Bernssen played the remote like an organ, producing whines and hisses and hums from the toiling robots.

  The robots in the corridor had been working on the dioramas to either side of the one where Ralston stood frozen, his eyes wide and his throat trembling as if he sub vocalized. Another ten minutes passed before the robots demolished the dioramas around their target. Leonore cringed at the wantonness of that work, but she knew it was necessary.

  Ralston’s life might depend on it.

  “We’re ready to lift it now,” said Bernssen. Leonore couldn’t tell if sweat beaded his forehead or if raindrops blew through the roof and ran down his face. “Here it goes.”

  Leonore clapped hands over her ears and twisted away. Torn metal screamed as the robots lifted the entire scene. Bernssen worked constantly now, adjusting, making certain that the robots did not apply torque to the floor of the diorama.

  “Get to the surface,” Bernssen yelled over the whine of machinery pushed to its limits. “Make certain the robots aren’t getting mired down.”

  Leonore raced to the stairs and hurried to the surface. The rain had slowed, leaving veils of fog intermixed with the sporadically falling drops. She began working as hard as any of the metal servants. The mud caused them to slide and turn out of position. She used manual overrides to correct, shouted instructions to Bernssen, worked as hard as if she lifted Ralston’s diorama on her own back.

  It finally slid away from the hole. The shrieks of tortured metal died. One robot fell to its side, treads spinning in opposite directions. Leonore turned it off. She felt as if she buried a friend. Patting it on the side of its block circuit case, Leonore quietly said, “Thank you,” then turned her attention to the others.

  “I’ll use the main panel now,” came Bernssen’s voice. He had shut down the remote and worked directly from the master supervisor. The entire diorama began sliding over the mud flats and toward the spot where the exhibit might be loaded into the shuttle.

  Two hours later, Bernssen and Leonore hugged one another, their job finished. “He’s still in the diorama,” Leonore said. “I put an analyzer in with him to monitor heart rate and respiration.”

  “Ralston’s alive?”

  “So far he’s not showing any different response than in the other dioramas.”

  Bernssen began laughing. And the laughter soared to heights beyond his imagining, out of control, past human redemption. He heard Leonore’s shouts as if they came from the end of infinity. Then the world went dark around him.

  Nels Bernssen screamed and thrashed about. Disoriented, he struck out and found nothing.

  “Calm down, Nels. Please!” Leonore’s anguished voice returned a semblance of control to the physicist, and convinced him he hadn’t suddenly died. He forced open one eye, then the other. For a few seconds he didn’t recognize his surroundings.

  It slowly penetrated. Weightlessness. He was in orbit. In a starship. Not his expedition’s—Leonore’s. Webbing held him so that he couldn’t float off and hurt himself.

  “What happened?” he asked. His voice turned gravelly in his throat and his mouth felt like a desert, complete with rocks and sand and slithering reptiles.

  “You went a little crazy.”

  “Am I all right?” Fear welled within him. He panicked as much as Ralston had at the idea of the psychologists rehabilitating him.

  “The ship’s automedic says so. Some evidence of synaptic disorder, but that’s beyond its capacity to diagnose.”

  “The chaos?”

  Leonore nodded.

  Bernssen flexed his fingers and toes, moved slowly, and decided he had full control of his extremities. He unfastened the web restraints; Leonore didn’t try to stop him. He took that as a good sign.

  “What about Ralston?”

  “Still in the hold. I didn’t want to disturb him until you could help get him out.”

  “You trust me not to go spacy on you?” He only half joked. He saw her expression and knew she trusted him with her life.

  “Got to check in with Justine. She’ll think I ran out on her.”

  “No need to worry over that. Here’s a com unit. The pilot’s been talking with your expedition pilot.” She handed it to Bernssen.

  “Call through to Justine Rasmussen, please,” he said. Heavy static caused Bernssen to jerk the unit away. His ears rang from the onslaught. “You there, Justine?”

  “We’re off planet, Nels. You get away?”

  “Verd. What’s happening with our star?”

  “It’s got indigestion bad,” came the answer. “We’ve sent out probes toward Novo Terra via rocket with automatic trips to shift them back as soon as the first wavefront hits. Don’t know if it’ll work, but we’ve got no choice. Our pilot says leave now or not at all. His equipment is showing anomalous readings due to radiation levels.”

  “What of our probes?”

  “The ones into the star have all failed. No reason. They died long before they should have.”

  “Like Chen’s did on the 1054,” mumbled Bernssen, remembering what Ralston had told him.

  “What?”

  “Never mind, Justine. I hate to leave, but I think you’re right. Alpha 3’s ready to go bang.”

  “See you back on Novo Terra,” the project leader said.

  “Good luck, yourself.” Bernssen turned off the com unit, glad to be rid of the incessant background static. To the pilot he said, “Get us back to Novo Terra. We may not have much time.”

  “Got to boost for at least a day. You know that, Doc. We got the time?”

  “We’d better. There’s no way of outrunning the wavefront from a nova. It’ll be coming at us at the speed of light.”

  The pilot began his preflight preparations.

  “Can’t we just shift from here?” asked Leonore. “I know you’re not supposed to do it within a half-dozen planetary diameters, but this isn’t going to hurt anyone below.”

  “We need the proper velocity to start the shift,” said Bernssen. “If we hit shift speed but aren’t aimed right, we’ll end up in some out-of-the-way spot; if we aren’t up to speed but are aimed right, we’ll fall short. So velocity is very important.”

  “The latter sounds better than going out in a flash,” said Leonore.

  “Not if we ran out of air before we could recompute and shift a second time. These are precise calculations.” He snorted. “That’s why the pilots stay so aloof. They don’t want to get involved with their passengers and maybe miss something. That’s just superstition, of course, but they believe it—so it’s true.”

  Bernssen felt better putting his arms around Leonore and holding her close.

  “Let’s get Dr. Ralston out of the diorama,” she said finally. “I don’t like the idea of just leaving him there. Something might happen when we star back.”

  “There’s no telling where that projector’s power comes from,” agreed Bernssen. “Hate to permanently imprint him with the alien history lesson and burn out everything else in his head. That’d be as bad as rehabbing him.”

  They floated through a door and down the central axis to the cargo bays. At Leonore’s request, the pilot had kept them at the same pressure as the rest of the ship. When they got Ralston out, the pilot could reduce pressure to only a fractio
n of a bar and give them that much more fresh air.

  “Madre de Dios,” murmured Bernssen. “He looks just like one of the statues.”

  Leonore moved around the hold, looking at Ralston from different angles. She hated to admit how close Bernssen’s description came to reality. Ralston stood with that strange set to his jaw. His throat muscles still worked, as if he swallowed constantly, and his gray eyes were glassy and unfocused. But Leonore felt a sense of life within the man, as if he understood he had achieved all he’d hoped.

  “How do we get him free?” asked Bernssen.

  “I’ve never just walked in and pulled him out. I don’t know if the field would affect me, too.” She longed to try it, to experience what only Ralston—and Yago de la Cruz—had. The life of an alien unfolded for her intimate perusal pushed archaeology past the traditional boundaries and into unexplored territory. And Leonore wanted to be a part of that exciting pioneering effort, to feel the alien thoughts slide into her mind, take her back centuries, and instruct her as the young of Alpha 3 must have been.

  “Let me try this.” Bernssen swung a short length of rope and let it whip out to curl around Ralston’s leg. A swift yank staggered Ralston, bringing him to his knees. For a moment his eyes failed to focus, but wonder slowly replaced the stupefied expression.

  “I did it,” he said softly. Louder, “I did it! The diorama is still functioning!”

  Leonore helped her professor to his feet. His knees trembled and the paleness gave him the aspect of a corpse, but his triumph wasn’t to be denied.

  “We did it! Salazar will have to roll over and play dead now. The Alpha 3 find is the most significant ever!”

  “Are you sure the sideshow gadget still works?” asked Bernssen. “You might have been a sort of human feedback circuit. Take you out and it dies.”

  “No, it can’t be that way. I won’t permit it to be that way!” Ralston jerked free of Leonore and stepped back into the diorama, taking another position. The familiar rictus took control and froze him into an attentive statue. Bernssen retrieved him once more using his makeshift lariat.

  “Still works, eh?” Bernssen said.

  Ralston’s immense smile told the story. He grinned even more when he said, “I chose well. The history lesson in this diorama tells of—”

  A raucous warning alarm cut him off. Over the cacophony came the pilot’s anxious voice, “Get out of the cargo hold and into webbing. I’m depressurizing for immediate acceleration.”

  “What’s going on?” demanded Ralston.

  Neither Leonore nor Bernssen had any idea. As fast as they could, they pulled their way up the central shaft and into the lounge area. As they strapped down, Ralston flipped on the com unit. The datascreen showing the cockpit had already been turned on.

  “What’s wrong?” Ralston asked the pilot.

  “Bad radiation surges. We’re getting fried in orbit. If I try lifting us to a higher orbit before vectoring off for a shift, we’ll be exposed even longer. We just passed behind the planet. Got to blast hard for our shift point. No time to talk.”

  Ralston watched the man working feverishly. Behind him he heard Leonore and Bernssen quietly talking.

  Bernssen called forward, “I checked the remote probes I put outside on the ship. He’s not exaggerating about radiation levels. The hull’s protected us from a bad burn, but we can’t last too long. The star’s pre-nova. We may not have the time to get away.”

  “We will,” Ralston said more confidently than he felt. “Do you have an analyzer working on the star now?”

  “Of course. That supervisor getting left behind is a loss. Could have really used it, but we have enough analyzers around to gather the data I need. That Rayleigh-Taylor instability had worsened, over a fifty percent density difference in the inversion layer. That must be building up pressure internally. The sun’s going to superheat, then explode past the denser material.”

  The pilot applied even more acceleration and slammed them back into their couches. Ralston changed the screen to show Alpha 3. A catch came to his throat as he looked down on the nightside of the planet. Brilliant auroral prominences arched outward, seemingly coming from Alpha 3’s surface. Intense lightning flashes illuminated thousands of hectares of the normally dark landscape, turning it into momentary noon. Ralston imagined what the conditions must be on Muckup’s surface now. Rain storms of unending intensity, winds strong enough to slash the flesh from human bones, the lightning that almost blinded, the very air coming alive with static discharge.

  Alpha 3 died before his eyes. And along with it went virtually all of the avian civilization that had once flourished there.

  Virtually all.

  Ralston threw up his arms to shield his eyes when a hundred lightning flashes hit simultaneously.

  “Put the damned filter on,” came the pilot’s querulous voice. “There. Mark 3 polarizer on. And don’t try to get a view of the sun at all. Burn your optic nerves out all the way to your brainstem.”

  “I’ll get good enough photos,” came Bernssen’s voice. “When we get back to Novo Terra, I’ll show them to you.”

  Ralston nodded. He couldn’t take his eyes off Alpha 3. The radiation storms smashing into the sunward side must have reached titanic proportions by now. And as soon as they passed from the planetary shield, they, too, would bear the full brunt of that mad burning.

  “Keep arms and legs in tight. Here we gooooo!”

  The acceleration caused Ralston to black out. When he fought back to consciousness, he thought he’d gone blind. It took several seconds to realize that the external camera viewing Alpha 3 had burned out. He switched back to the cockpit. The pilot strained against the invisible bonds he applied to them all.

  “We’re gonna make it. We are,” the pilot said. Ralston thought he was trying to convince himself rather than his passengers. “That damned star’s a goner.” Muscles rippled across the visible portion of the pilot’s arm as he reached out to touch another control.

  The additional acceleration pinned Ralston as surely as if glasteel bonds had been applied. Through half-hooded eyes he saw the pilot cross himself. Ralston succumbed to the pressure against his chest. Mercifully, he blacked out again, his last thoughts on fierce fifty-thousand-degree Kelvin prominences from the star creeping up slowly on them.

  SIXTEEN

  Michael Ralston screamed, his world locked in a nightmare of exploding light, searing heat, and infinite falling.

  Falling?

  He fought to regain his senses. The harder he struggled, the more tangled he became. Finally forcing himself to look, Ralston saw that the restraining webbing on the couch had come loose; he had become entangled to the point where circulation in his right arm had been cut off. He clumsily pulled himself free, then floated a few centimeters above the couch and marveled that he was still alive.

  They had all survived.

  Behind him, Leonore Disa tried to restore consciousness to Nels Bernssen. The physicist hadn’t been properly strapped into his couch. From the unnatural angle of his right leg, Ralston guessed the man had one and perhaps several broken bones. Only weightlessness kept him from intense pain.

  “I’ll get the automedic,” Ralston said.

  “I sent a signal to it already,” Leonore told him. “Wait a few minutes. It’s still tending the others. We didn’t have them fastened down too well, either.”

  Ralston wiped the sweat from his forehead and his hand came away wet and red. He started, then relaxed. His head hurt like a son of a bitch, but the wounds were superficial. His vision wasn’t blurred, no ringing in his ears, and he felt… alive.

  “I’ve done what I can for Nels,” the woman said. She kicked against one of the couches and arrowed forward to Ralston. “Let me take care of that gash on your head. Something must have come flying through the lounge. I picked up a few scratches myself. We should have tied things down better.”

  Ralston winced when she applied an astringent. Leonore frowned at the wound,
took the tail of his shirt and placed it directly over the wound.

  “Press hard. Good. The automed will be done soon enough.”

  Ralston decided it didn’t matter if his shirt got any bloodier. It was ready for the disposal.

  “What about the pilot?”

  “He’s all right. He was ready for the acceleration.”

  “Are we all right?”

  Leonore laughed. “We must be. Wait a minute.” She went to the com unit and turned it on. The pilot’s off-key singing came through. Leonore arched one eyebrow, as if saying, “See? We’re fine.”

  Ralston called out, “What’s our status?”

  “That you, Doc? We made it off, right on the point. Good work, if I do say so.”

  “The star went nova?”

  “Can’t say but it sure looked like it was trying hard. We got a few fried circuits but nothing dangerous. I evacuated the cargo hold. Hope you don’t mind. Didn’t want any radiation leaking in, then ionizing the atmosphere there. Cascades like hell, you know.”

  Ralston swallowed hard. Would the airlessness affect his diorama? He hoped not.

  “We’re on course for Novo Terra?”

  “What’s wrong? You didn’t want to go there? Of course we’re on course for Novo Terra. I’m the damnedest, best pilot that ever lifted from a planet.” The pilot went back to singing his bawdy ballad about shore leave on a pleasure planet. Ralston flipped off the unit, glad for the silence.

  “We made it,” he said. “We really did.” He let the shock work its way through his body then. The danger had passed and they were on their way home.

  Back to Novo Terra. Back to the University of Ilium. And Salazar’s committee and the de la Cruz family.

  Ralston wondered if he had only traded one danger for another.

  “The automedic’s working on Nels,” said Leonore. “I’ll have it check you out next.”

  “Uh, thanks.”

  “We succeeded, Michael,” she said softly. “It’s all over.”

  “Over,” he repeated dully. All Ralston could think of was the reception he’d get from Salazar.