Dragons Dawn

by Anne McCaffrey

  Ongola put his hand on the comm unit, about to dial administration. Then he heard someone tapping hesitantly at the door.

  “Come!” he called.

  Catherine Radelin-Doyle stood there, her eyes round, her face pale.

  “Yes, Cathy?”

  “Sir, Mr. Ongola . . .”

  “Either will do.” He mustered an encouraging smile. Considering the amount of trouble Cathy could get into, from stumbling into caves at an early age, to marrying the most feckless joat on the planet, he wondered at her shy demeanor. She was, poor child, just one of those people to whom events tended to occur with no connivance from themselves at all.

  “Sir, I’ve found a cave.”

  “Yes?” he encouraged when she hesitated. She was constantly finding caves.

  “It wasn’t empty.”

  Ongola sat up straight. “It had a lot of fuel sacks in it?” he asked. If Catherine had found it, would Avril? No, Avril did not have the same sort of luck Catherine had.

  “However did you know, Mr. Ongola?” She looked faint with relief.

  “Possibly because I know they’re there.”

  “You do? They are? I mean, they weren’t put there by ‘them’?”

  “No, by us.” He wanted to make as little fuss about Kenjo’s hoard as possible. He had been counting the dwindling numbers and wondering why Kenjo seemed so complacent after each trip. Ongola flicked a glance at the corner of the shadowed shelving where the guidance chips were hidden in their darkfoam case.

  Catherine suddenly sank to the nearest chair. “Oh, sir, you don’t know what a fright it gave me. Thinking that someone else was here because everyone knows there’s so little fuel left. And then to see . . .”

  But you saw nothing, Catherine,” Ongola told her crisply. “Nothing whatever. There’s no cave worth noticing down that particular crevasse and you won’t say a thing about it to anyone else. I will personally tell the admiral. But you will tell no one.”

  “Oh no, sir.”

  “This information cannot – I repeat, cannot – be divulged to another person.”

  “That’s right, Mr. Ongola.” She nodded solemnly several times. Then she smiled winsomely. “Shall I keep on looking?”

  “Yes, I think you’d better. And find something!”

  “Oh, but I have, Mr. Ongola, and Joel Lilienkamp says they’re going to be excellent storage space.” Her face clouded briefly. “But he didn’t say for what.”

  “Go, Cathy, and find something . . . else.”

  She left, and Ongola had barely returned to brooding over the first serious losses to their defense when Tarvi came storming up the stairs.

  “It’s been staring us in the face, Zi,” he said, swinging his arms in one of his expansive gestures. His face was alight with enthusiasm, although his skin looked a bit gray from the excesses of the night before.

  “What?” Ongola was in no mood for puzzles.

  “Them! There!” Tarvi gestured extravagantly out the northern windows. “All the time.”

  It was probably the headache, Ongola thought, but he had no idea what Tarvi was talking about.

  “What do you mean?”

  “All this time we have been slavering away at mining ore, refining, molding it, adding weeks to our labors, when all the time we’ve had what we need in front of us.”

  “No puzzles, Tarvi.”

  Tarvi’s expressive eyes widened in surprise and consternation. I give you no puzzles, Zi, my friend, but the source of much valuable metals and materials. The shuttles, Zi, the shuttles can be dismantled and their components used for our specific purposes here and now. Theirs is done. Why let them slowly decay on the meadow?” Tarvi emphasized each new sentence with a flick of long fingers out the window and then, exasperated with Ongola’s incomprehension, he hauled the man to his feet and pointed a very long, slightly dirty forefinger directly at the tail fins of the old shuttles. “There. We’ll use them. Hundreds of relays, miles of the proper flex and tubing, small mountains of recyclable material. Have you any idea of how much is in them?” In an instant, all the exuberance drained from the volatile geologist. He put both hands on Ongola’s shoulders. “We can replace the sled we lost today even if we cannot replace those marvelous young lives or comfort their stricken families. The parts make a new whole.”

  Work dulled the edge of the sorrow that hung over Landing at the loss of four young people. The two survivors reluctantly admitted that the Jepson twins, toward the end of that Fall, had indulged in some fatal foolery. Ben’s sled had been scheduled for servicing after the Fall because its previous pilot had reported a sluggish reaction to port side turns. The sled had been considered safe enough for what should have been a monitoring flight.

  Rather than prevent other such collisions, the next few Falls saw a rash of them even as Tarvi’s crew began to strip the first shuttle and Fulmar’s teams began to service and replace from the bonanza of salvage.

  The longest hours were still put in at Kitti Ping’s laboratory, monitoring the development of the specimens for any signs of aberration from the program.

  “Patience,” was Kitti’s response to all queries. “All proceeds vigorously.”

  Three days after the midair collision, Wind Blossom discovered her grandmother still at the electronic microscope, apparently peering at yet another slide. But when Wind Blossom touched Kitti’s arm the movement produced an unexpected result. The dainty fingers slipped from their relaxed position on the keyboard, and the body slumped forward, only kept upright by the brace that held her to the stool for her long sessions at the microscope. Wind Blossom let out a moan and dropped to her knees, holding one tiny cold hand to her forehead.

  Bay heard her disconsolate weeping and came to see what had happened. Instantly she called to Pol and Kwan, then phoned for the doctor. Once Wind Blossom had followed the gurney carrying her grandmother’s body out of the room, Bay straightened her plump shoulders and stood at the console. She asked the computer if it had finished its program.

  PROGRAM COMPLETED flashed on the screen – almost indignantly, Bay thought in the portion of her mind that was not sorrowing. She tapped out an information query. The screen displayed a dazzling series of computations and ended with REMOVE UNIT! DANGER IF UNIT IS NOT IMMEDIATELY REMOVED!

  Astonished, Bay recognized the paraphernalia on the workspace beside the electronic microscope. Kitti Ping had been manipulating gene patterns again, a complicated process that Bay found as daunting as Wind Blossom did, despite Kitti Ping’s encouragements. So Kitti had made those infinitesimal alterations in the chromosomes. Bay felt the chill of a terrible apprehension sweep through her plump body. She pressed her lips together. That moment was not the time to panic. They must not lose what Kitti Ping had been making of the raw material of Pern.

  With hands that were not quite steady, she unlocked the micro-cylinder, removed the tiny gel-encapsulated unit, and placed it in the culture dish that Kitti had readied. An agony as severe as a knife stab almost doubled Bay up, but she fought the grief and the knowledge that Kit Ping Yung had died to produce that altered egg cell. The label was even prepared: Trial 2684/16/M: nucleus #22A, mentasynth Generation B2, boron/silicon system 4, size 2H; 16.204.8.

  Walking as fast as her shaky legs would permit and gradually recovering her composure, Bay took the final legacy of the brilliant technician to the gestation chamber and put it carefully beside the forty-one similar units that held the hopes of Pern.

  “That was the second probe to malfunction,” Ezra told Paul and Emily, his quiet voice ragged with disappointment. “When the first one blew up, or whatever, I thought it a mischance. Even vacuum isn’t perfect insulation against decay. Probe motors could misfire, their recording device clog somehow or other. So I refined the program for the second one. It got exactly as far as the first one, and then every light went red. Either that atmosphere is so corrosive even our probe enamels melt, or the garage on the Yokohama has somehow been damaged, and the probes, too. I du
nno, guys.”

  Ezra was not much given to agitated gestures but he paced up and down Paul’s office, strutting and waving his arms about him like a scarecrow in a high wind. The last few days had wearied and aged him. Paul and Emily exchanged concerned glances. Kitti Ping’s death had been such a shock, following so closely on the sled collision disaster. The geneticist had seemed so indestructible, despite the fact that everyone knew of her physical frailty. She had exuded a quality of immortality, however false that had proved.

  “Whose theory was it that we were being bombarded from outer space to reduce us to submission?” Ezra asked, stopping suddenly in his tracks and staring at the two leaders.

  “Ah, c’mon now, Ezra!” Paul was bluntly derisive. “Think a minute, man. We’re all under a strain, but not one that makes us lose our wits. We all know that there are atmospheres that can and have melted probes. Furthermore – ” He halted, not certain what would suffice to reassure Ezra, and himself.

  “Furthermore, the organism attacking us,” Emily went on with superb composure, “is hydrocarbon based, and if it comes from that planet, its atmosphere is not corrosive. I favor malfunction.”

  “My opinion, too,” Paul said, nodding his head vigorously. “Fardles, Ezra, let’s not talk ourselves into more problems than we’ve got.”

  “We’ve got” – Ezra brought both fists down on the desk – “to probe that planet, or we won’t know enough to combat the stuff. Half the settlers want to know the source and destroy it so we can get back to our lives. Rake up the debris and forget all this.”

  “What aren’t you telling us, Ezra?” Emily asked, cocking her head slightly and regarding the captain with an unflinching gaze.

  Ezra stared back at her for a very long moment, then straightened from his half crouch over the desk and began to smile wryly.

  “You’ve been sitting in the interface booth long hours, Ezra, and you weren’t playing tiddlywinks while the programs were running,” Emily went on.

  “My calculations are frightening,” he said in a low voice, glancing over each shoulder. “If the program is in any way accurate, and I’ve run it five times now from start to finish, we have to put up with Thread for long after that red planet crosses out of the inner system.”

  “How long will that be?” Paul felt his fingers gripping the arm rest, and made a conscious effort to relax them while he tried to recall some reassuring facet of planetary orbits.

  “I get between forty and fifty years!”

  Emily grimaced, her mouth forming an O of surprise before she slowly exhaled. “Forty or fifty years, you say.”

  “If,” Ezra added grimly, “the menace originated from that planet.”

  Paul caught his eyes and saw the ineffably weary and discouraged look in them. “If? There is another alternative?”

  “I have discerned a haze about the planet, irrespective of its atmospheric envelope. A haze that spreads backward in this system and swirls along the eccentric’s path. I cannot refine that telescope enough to tell more. It could be space debris, a nebulosity, the remnants of a cometary tail, a whole bunch of things that are harmless.”

  “But if it should be harmful?” Emily asked.

  “That tail would take nearly fifty years to diffuse out of Pern’s orbit, some into Rukbat – the rest, who knows?”

  There was a long moment of silence.

  “Any suggestions?” Paul asked finally.

  “Yes,” Ezra said, straightening his shoulders with a wrench. He held up two fingers. “Take a trip to the Yokohama, find out what’s bugging the probes, and send two of ‘em down to the planet to gather as much information as we can. Send the other two along the line of that cometary dust and use the Yoko’s more powerful space scope with no planetary interference to see if we can identify its source and components.” Ezra then locked his fingers together and cracked his knuckles, a habit that always made Emily shudder. “Sorry, Em.’

  “At least you can recommend some positive action,” Paul went on.

  “The big question is, Paul, is there enough fuel to get someone to the Yoko and back? Kenjo’s already made more trips than I thought possible.”

  “Good pilot,” Paul said discreetly. “There’s enough for what we need now. Kenjo will pilot, and did you wish to go with him?”

  Ezra shook his head slowly. “Avril Bitra has the training for the job.”

  “Avril?” Paul gave a harsh bark and then shook his head, grinning sourly. “Avril’s the last person I’d put on the Mariposa for any reason. Even if we knew where she is.”

  “Really?” Ezra looked at Emily for an explanation, but she shrugged. “Well, then, Kenjo can double. No,” he corrected himself. “If something’s wrong with the probes, we’d need a good technician. Stev Kimmer. He’s back, isn’t he?”

  “Who else?” Paul jotted down names rather than worry Ezra with more suspicions.

  “Kenjo is a very capable technician,” Emily insisted.

  “There should be two on the mission, for safety’s sake,” Ezra said furrowing his brow. “This mission has got to give us the results we need.”

  “Zi Ongola,’’ Paul suggested.

  “Yes, the very one,” Ezra agreed. “If he runs into any trouble, I can have Stev at the interface for expert advice.”

  “Forty years, huh?” Emily said, watching Paul underline the final choices on the pad. “Rather longer than we’d bargained for, my friend. Let’s start training replacements.”

  Inevitably their thoughts went to Wind Blossom, so obviously a frail vessel to continue the work her grandmother had begun.

  Avril’s suspicious nature was aroused not by anything she heard, although what she did not hear was as significant, but by what she saw in the weary hours she manned the sled’s scope. It was usually trained on the Mariposa, sitting at the far end of the landing grid. The night before every one of Kenjo’s jaunts he had done exterior and interior checks of the craft. Fussy Fusi! Her use of the nickname was not quite derisive, because she simply could not figure out how he had managed to stretch the small reserve of fuel on the Mariposa as far as he already had. She had seen some activity about it last night but no sign of Kenjo. In fact, with neither moon out, she had just barely seen the shifting of shadow that indicated activity about the craft. She had been quite agitated. The only thing that reassured her was that several figures were involved. But no one entered the gig. That perplexed her.

  At first light, so early that no one was yet working the donks at the skeleton of the shuttle that had been the center of considerable activity all week she was surprised to see Fulmar Stone and Zi Ongola approaching the vessel. Her apprehension, honed by weeks of watching spurred her to remove the protective cover from her sled in preparation for a quick departure. At full speed, she could reach the landing grid in less than fifteen minutes. Early morning traffic into Landing would be sufficient to give her cover.

  She had a moment’s anxiety thinking that perhaps the Mariposa had developed a problem and they were scavenging replacement parts from the shuttle. Kenjo had flown a mission three days before with his usual economical takeoff and landing. She had to hand it to him – he was gliding in smoothly with no power at all. Only where was he getting the fuel to lift?

  The three men, moving with almost stealthy speed, slipped inside the little spaceship and closed the airlock. Well, the access to the engines was through exterior panels, so she began to relax. They remained inside the ship for three hours, long enough for a full interior systems check. But that did not presage a usual flight. Maybe the Mariposa was bollixed. Scorch Kenjo for ineptitude. The Mariposa had to be spaceworthy. Avril swore.

  Or had something happened to Kenjo so that Ongola was taking the ship up? But how? There could not be much fuel left. So why were they checking internal systems? Why were they making yet another jaunt? Displeased, Avril finished her preparations to fly.

  Sallah Telgar-Andiyar was feeding her daughter her breakfast in the shady covered porch of Mair
i Hanrahan’s Asian Square house when she caught sight of a familiar figure striding down the path. It was covered by loose overalls, and a peaked cap was pulled well down over the face, but the walk was undeniably Avril’s, especially from the rear. Never mind the greasy hands, the exhaust pipe carried so ostentatiously in one hand, the clipboard in the other. That was Avril, who only sullied her hands for a good cause. No one had seen her since she had left Big Island. Sallah continued to watch until Avril mingled in with the crowd at the main depot, where technicians jostled each another for parts and materiel.

  Ever since Sallah had overheard Avril’s conversation with Kimmer, she had known the woman would attempt to leave Pern. Did Avril know of Kenjo’s fuel dump? Irritably Sallah shook her head. Cara blinked her huge brown eyes and stared apprehensively at her mother.

  Sorry, love, your mother’s mind is klicks away.” Sallah gathered more puree on the spoon and deposited it into Cara’s obedient open mouth. No, Sallah told herself fiercely, because she wanted to believe it so badly, Avril could not have discovered that fuel: she had been too busy mining gemstones on Big Island. At least, up until three weeks before. And where has Avril been since then? Sallah asked herself. Watching while Kenjo flew the Mariposa? That would certainly set Avril Bitra to thinking hard.

  Well, Sallah was due on her shift soon anyway, and as luck would have it, the sled she was servicing was on the grid. She would have a clear view of the Mariposa and those who approached it. If Avril came anywhere near, Sallah would set up an alarm.

  There had been no talk of Kenjo making another attempt to clear Thread in the atmosphere. Then, too, Kenjo’s flights were usually plotted for the dawn window, and Sallah’s shift began well past that time.

  It all happened rather quickly. Sallah was walking toward the sled she was servicing as Ongola and Kenjo, suited for space travel, left the tower with Ezra Keroon, Dieter Clissmann, and two other overalled figures whom Sallah was astonished to recognize by their postures as Paul and Emily. Ongola and Kenjo had the appearance of men listening to last-minute instructions. Then they continued on almost at a stroll, toward the Mariposa, while the others turned back into the met tower. Suddenly another suited figure began to wander across the grid on a path that would intercept Ongola and Kenjo. Even in the baggy space gear the figure walked as only Avril did!