Tessa gave her a sympathetic look.
“Of course,” Lay-Leh said thoughtfully, “there’s always the possibility that I might be swept off my feet by some gorgeous alien male!”
Tessa couldn’t help but chuckle, even though she was more than a little horrified by Lay-Leh’s preoccupation with the opposite sex. “You do realize we don’t know what the dominant species of this world is like--other than that they appear to be intellectually advanced? They could look like--lizards for all we know--or something even less appealing. And it’s very doubtful that we would be sexually compatible.”
Lay-Leh leaned close. “After two years on this tub with fifteen fifty to seventy year old men--scientists who probably weren’t even exciting when they were young, if they were ever young--if they’ve got the right kind of equipment down below, they’ll look good. And I’m willing to try anything at least once.”
“Serious--oh, you’re joking!”
Lay-Leh’s smile vanished. “Not altogether,” she said wryly. “I hate to admit it, but even the droid crew is starting to look good to me. I’ve worn my toys out and what’re the odds, you think, that they’ll have more here? Anyway, I could always close my eyes and think good thoughts,” she added, grinning.
Tessa felt a deep red blush climb all the way to her hairline. “Lay-Leh! You can’t expect to be taken seriously as a scientist if all you ever think about is sex!”
Lay-Leh’s brows rose, but her eyes twinkled with repressed laughter. “That’s not true! I think about other things.”
“Like what?” Tessa asked suspiciously.
Lay-Leh chuckled. “Men.”
Tessa gaped at her. Lay-Leh patted the bottom of her chin, lifting her sagging jaw, and then patted her cheek. “You take everything too seriously, Tessa! You’ve only got one life. Live it, for god’s sake! Enjoy what you can--and try to see if you can lose that guilt complex you carry around everywhere you go. You spend way too much time around moldy things.”
Tessa smiled with an effort. “I was hoping I’d get the chance to study something a little ‘fresher’ on this trip.”
Lay-Leh hugged her again. “You will--see you in a few days.”
She waved back when Lay-Leh strode up the gang plank and paused to wave jauntily at her, but inwardly she didn’t feel the least bit unconcerned about the expedition. Lay-Leh might be right. Maybe she did take things much too seriously, but Lay-Leh didn’t seem to take anything seriously enough. There was no telling what sort of dangers they might be facing, and yet Lay-Leh acted as if she was going on a … lark without a care in the world.
Unfortunately, she didn’t see Lay-Leh in a few day’s time. They had one communication from the landing group as they made several passes over the city they’d chosen, describing what they could see from the air. The group checked in as they reached the landing site and began their final landing preparations. After that, they heard nothing. The landing party ceased to communicate with the mother ship and all attempts to hail them resulted in nothing but dead air.
“They’re in trouble,” Tessa said to the group that had gathered around the conference table two days after the group had left. “We need to organize a rescue party.”
Sinclair, the head of the expedition, frowned thoughtfully. “We don’t know that they’re in trouble. Their communications are out. It could be anything--equipment malfunction, adverse weather conditions, interference of some kind on the ground….”
“Hostiles?”
Sinclair glared at Tessa. “We have no reason to believe that we would be met with hostility. This is a civilized world, very likely even more advanced than our own.”
“Was,” Tessa corrected. “Whatever happened here broke down the entire fabric of their civilization. If there are survivors--they are survivors, and that means they’ve almost certainly had to resort to survival by might. That also means we’re dealing with an extremely intelligent race that is, most likely, also barbaric now and considerably more dangerous than mere primitives would be. We should have considered the possibility that we might be met with a determination to take what we’ve got for their own survival, rather than a welcoming committee.”
Sinclair looked around the table at the other scientists, his bushy white brows lifted questioningly. They seemed to be more or less equally divided. Half of them were considering her suggestions, the other half looked at her pretty much the way Sinclair usually did, with a mixture of condescension and amusement.
“Mathematically speaking, with a civilization as advanced as this one appears to have been, the percentile of survivors would almost certainly be made up of rational beings.”
Tessa gave him a look. “Directly after the catastrophe--you’re probably right. As conditions grew worse from the break down, however, ‘rational’ could have boiled down to who had what they needed to survive and who didn’t and whether the ‘haves’ were strong enough to beat the ‘have nots’ off of it--look, I don’t really see a lot of point in sitting here, miles above the planet, debating whether or not our landing party met with hostile natives. We haven’t heard from them since the day they landed. They were due back yesterday. Anything could have happened to them, and I do mean anything. But we can’t help them from here. We’re going to have to go down and see if we can pull them out.”
Sinclair glared at her. “We’re scientists, not soldiers. We came to learn. We’ve virtually no weapons, and none of us know how to use what we do have.”
“How hard can it be to point and fire?” Tessa demanded in exasperation.
His lips thinned. “You’re suggesting we go down and attack anything that moves?”
“I’m not suggesting anything of the kind! I’m only saying we go armed. If it looks like the landing group was attacked and captured by hostile aliens, we do what we have to to get them back.”
“Thank you for your input, Dr. Bergin,” Sinclair said tightly. “We’ll take it under advisement. I’d like to hear from the rest of you what your views on this are, and whether or not we should delay the second landing….”
Tessa gaped at him in disbelief for several moments and finally stormed out of the room. It was all very well to say that they’d all known that there were risks involved in taking on such a mission, but she at least, had assumed that they would watch each other’s back since they couldn’t count on rescue from any other quarter. She’d thought that was why they’d taken the precaution of only sending part of the scientific team down. Now, instead of immediately going to check out the danger of the landing team, Dr. Sinclair had waited until they didn’t return as expected and then called a meeting.
She was waiting impatiently in front of the starboard viewing port when the meeting finally broke up and the men began to emerge. She turned to study their faces, trying to figure out what had been decided. Her stomach tightened when Sinclair emerged, glanced at her and then pointedly turned in the other direction and strode off toward his quarters. She realized then that few of the men had actually met her questioning gaze at all.
Lee Harris approached her. “They’ve agreed to do a fly over tomorrow.”
Tessa blinked at him in shock. “Excuse me?”
He shrugged, gesturing out the viewing port. “It would be dark on the side where they landed before we could ready a lander to go down. We’ll go down tomorrow and see if we can tell anything about the condition of the other lander. If it looks like it was attacked, we won’t land--we’re just not prepared to launch an aggressive rescue, Tessa. I’m sorry. I know you were fond of Dr. Lehman.”
A wave of nausea washed over her. Were--past tense. Apparently she’d been more convincing than she’d thought. They weren’t taking any chances that she might be right, but it had never occurred to her that she was convincing them not to go. She should’ve just kept her big mouth shut. “But … they could still be alive. We can’t just abandon them!”
“And they could be dead. Will it help them if we’re dead, too?”
She went to her quarters when he’
d left, too sick at heart to feel like looking at her fellow crew members. She wanted to try reasoning with them. She wanted to scream and curse and raise total hell, but she might just as well beat her head on the bulkhead for all the good it was likely to do.
She paced the room for a while and finally flung herself down on the bunk, staring up at the ceiling. She knew, in her heart, that if it was her down there, Lay-Leh would have managed to get a rescue team together. Lay-Leh was good with people. She could always manage to talk them into doing what she wanted them to do.
She also knew that if, when they went down, they saw that the lander had been attacked, Sinclair would scrub the mission right then and there and turn tail for Earth.
A totally insane thought drifted through her mind.
She dismissed it, but not only would it refuse to stay banished, each time it flitted through her mind again, it grew stronger.
What could she accomplish, alone, she asked herself?
What could you accomplish if you had that pack of spineless white meat at your back, her inner self countered?
The answer seemed inarguable. She’d be no worse off, and no less likely to be successful if she went alone.
She was either going to have to find her spine and do what she knew she should do, or figure out how she was going to live with herself when she did nothing at all but tuck her tail between her legs and run with the rest of the craven pack.
Chapter Two
Tessa realized that fear was not an emotion she’d ever truly experienced in her entire life before. She hadn’t realized how absolutely insulated she had been from real life. She’d been nervous. She’d been anxious. She had even been spooked more than once, but sheer terror was a totally new and very unwelcome experience. It made her feel hot and cold at the same time, and nauseated to the point where she felt as if she would throw up … or pass out from hyperventilation.
She’d slipped a note under Dr. Harris’ door, asking him to try to keep Sinclair from abandoning them, to give her at least three days to try to find the missing party.
She knew the moment she left the docking bay, however, that she’d been lying to herself that it would make one iota’s worth of difference to Sinclair. Dr. Harris might be able to convince enough of the other members to hold him off, but the likelihood was that Sinclair would bolt as soon as he discovered she’d taken the other lander.
She decided it would probably be for the best if she just didn’t dwell on that particular scenario.
In any case, as she dropped through the atmosphere and came nearer her destination, the direction of her terror shifted. It didn’t lessen. It simply changed from the fear of being abandoned to her fear of what she would face on the planet below her. If she hadn’t become so fixated on her determination to try to find Lay-Leh that that thought prevailed even through the mindless state of terror that gripped her, she would probably have turned around and fled back to the ship. As it was, that option didn’t even occur to her.
Gradually, the fear began to subside, burnt up by its own intensity, and her body ceased to pump adrenaline through her system in sickening, knee weakening waves. Awe pressed it a little further to the back of her mind as she broke through the thick cloud covering and was met with a brilliant red and gold sunrise. From her height, the land mass below showed signs even now of what had once been cultivated fields broken by straight lines of road that crisscrossed and went off in every direction.
The landing party had opted to land near one of the greater metropolitan areas, certain that if there were still survivors, they would be found near the remains of their civilization.
Apparently, they’d been right.
A stab of fresh fear went through her, but despite that, Tessa was so overawed at her first sight of the alien city that she was momentarily distracted from her fears. Like the people of Earth, as their population had grown, they’d begun to build higher instead of continuing to spread outward. Unlike Earth people, however, they’d never, apparently, lost their love for beautifying their surroundings. The buildings were already showing signs of decay, but from the oldest to the newest, each building seemed to vie to be the most graceful, the most ornate. Arches dominated most of the structures--windows and doors were round, or arched, but never square or rectangular. Ornate columns abounded, as did decorative cornices and friezes. Sculptures--like ancient gargoyles, perched on every available ledge and rooftop.
The similarity of much of the architecture to more ancient Earth creations pulled at the anthropologist in her and it was with a pang of regret for lost opportunity that she focused once more on her objective as the lander cruised past the city and dropped lower as it approached the landing area.
When she reached the coordinates the computer had used for the first landing, she didn’t see the other lander. She circled, dropping a little lower with each pass. Her first thought when she finally did spot the lander was that they must have crashed--but that had to be wrong. The landing party had radioed back that they were landing. If there’d been any sort of problem with the equipment, they would’ve reported it then.
Nevertheless, even from her viewpoint she could see that the craft had been smashed all to hell and gone. Maybe they’d crashed when they’d tried to take off again?
She saw the first body when she directed the lander to drop and hover above the downed vehicle and her heart leapt into her throat. Stunned, even though she’d told herself that she must accept that they had been attacked or met with some other misfortune, Tessa stared at the unmoving form fixedly for some moments before her brain finally kicked in again.
More accurately, her brain was kicked into functioning when an object slammed into the side of her lander hard enough it rocked it.
“Climb!” she yelled, glancing around for any sign that the impact might be weather related even while her brain screamed ‘attack’!
A face appeared in her viewing port, and then a second and a third.
Tessa screamed instinctively at the jolt that went through her, but it was not merely that she was startled by the suddenness, or even the fact that she was still a good thirty feet from the ground.
The creatures hammering at the lander were like something out of a nightmare. Their faces and bodies were more human-like than any sort of beast, but their skin was a dark reddish brown and from their foreheads sprouted a pair of small horns.
At just about the same moment that she realized the creatures were also winged, the lander began to lose altitude—either from the sheer weight of numbers of the creatures piling on top of it or because one of the creatures had damaged something vital for flight. Fleeing from the porthole, Tessa strapped herself into a chair, fighting the belts. “Computer—evade.”
“I do not understand the instructions.”
“Go fast, then stop quickly. Go up, then down. Rotate the ship. See if you can sling them off, damn it!”
“I am unable to complete the command. The guidance is damaged. The ship is losing power.”
Tessa uttered every curse word she’d ever heard. “Land the damn thing, then!”
“Assume crash position, please.”
The lander slammed into the ground so hard it jarred every cell of her body. It did not simply stop, however. It continued to skid along the ground, bumping and grinding metal at a tooth jarring pace. Despite the shock and pain, uppermost in Tessa’s mind was the fact that she’d been brought down by Hostiles. The ship had not even shuddered to a complete halt when she threw off her restraints and stumbled toward the weapons she’d collected and brought with her.
The crash had ripped holes in the lander, but she saw fairly quickly that none were large enough for the man-like creatures to fit through. Gathering the weapons up, she looked around for a solid place to plant her back so that she didn’t have to worry about being attacked from behind. Settling in such a spot also meant she had no avenue of retreat, but that was pretty much a foregone conclusion anyway. The lander was not compartmentalized. It was s
trictly utilitarian and for the purpose of carrying passengers from the orbiting mother ship to the surface of a planet. They had not really intended to collect specimens of any size and had thought the landers would work for pretty much any situation since the seats could be removed if they needed or wanted to carry anything bulky.
Unfortunately, they’d only brought two landers and both of them were now scattered all over the surface of this twice damned planet.
She wasn’t going home.
That thought jolted through her in a cold wave even as she tried to force her mind to concentrate on the moment … and survival. She didn’t delude herself for a moment that Sinclair would consider coming after her or any of the others--not that it seemed likely any of them would be in need of rescuing.
A shudder ran through her as she heard a pounding on the door of the lander and the scrape of metal from whatever it was they were using to batter at it.
Were these--creatures--the last remains of the civilization that had once thrived here? Or were they, like the ape, nothing more than humanoid seeming animals?
The Lawgivers: Gabriel Page 31