“Like messages,” Susannah noted.
“Or like the word in English that carries a surprisingly similar double meaning: ‘conduit.’ ”
“Conduit for what?” asked Susannah.
“Or apprentice,” Ghirra repeated pensively to the tiles, then raised his eyes. “This does not surprise, ’TavrosIbia.”
“No?” Stavros met the Master Healer’s even gaze. “No. I suppose not.”
He flexed his left hand experimentally. Thanks to a harmonious combination of Sawl healing and Terran medicine, he could now move his arm from the elbow without gasping audibly. The guar-fire was like liquid warmth in his palms, pain no longer, but a promise of returning strength and a reminder that something beyond mere survival was expected of him.
“Time for me to try out these legs again,” he declared. He rolled onto his knees and grasped Susannah’s shoulder. “Help me up.”
“Oh no. You’re in no shape to go walking around.”
He eyed her wickedly. “I was in shape enough to…”
Susannah touched a finger to his lips. “Hush. I know. But right now, you’re not going anywhere.”
He realized she was serious. “Susannah, please, you must understand. I have to talk to the Kav, and he’s obviously not coming to me. Please. Help me up.”
“This Kav cannot talk now,” said Ghirra flatly.
Stavros frowned, a flash of temper reminiscent of his former petulance. Susannah put it down to exhaustion but Ghirra rose onto his haunches, contriving to look vaguely threatening.
“Ibi,” he insisted. “No.”
Stavros slumped, eased himself back against the wall. “The medical profession of two worlds, conspiring against me,” he grumbled.
“Ket-shim Ghirra?” The soft summons came from the doorway. Phea appeared in the blue glow of Valla’s fountain, and hurried across the hall to announce that the hastily set-up field hospital at the foot of the cliff was being threatened already by the encroaching brushfires.
“Lord. We’ll have to get them all up to Physicians’!” Susannah gripped Ghirra’s arm. “Don’t worry. We’ll find room somehow. Can we use the winches?”
“Yes, but we must hurry.” Ghirra rose abruptly, then gazed sternly down at Stavros. “You will rest, ’TavrosIbia?”
Stavros nodded, faintly sullen but already too worn out to resist any further. “Go on, both of you. I promise to stay put. But the minute the Kav wakes up, I want to hear about it!”
30
A young Foodguilder gestured Megan to raise her dust mask against the smoke, then slapped a wooden shovel into her hand. Megan joined the diggers frantically working to cut off the fire’s advance on the terraces. Along the westernmost edge, three fields of dry red stalks were already aflame. The FoodGuild had agreed to sacrifice the next field for a fire break.
The amber sun was a hot, baleful eye in the malachite sky. The cliff face shone hard-white through the smoke. Troops of apprentices fanned out across the relinquished field to pull the crop up by the roots. The obscuring dark billows made it hard to tell what was burning and what was not.
Megan spotted Weng and McPherson, white-suited against a background of soot and fire, tossing armloads of uprooted stalks onto waiting hakra carts. The dry root clumps shed their soil as gritty dust. The fire’s draft pushed hot clouds of ash into the diggers’ faces. Megan coughed, eyes streaming, and put her mind to shovelling as fast as she could manage.
She was quickly winded in the suffocating heat. As she stood back for a moment, panting, to wipe away the stinging mixture of sweat and tears, a strong hand snatched the shovel from her hand.
“Not enough tools to go around, Megan. Take a break.”
Megan backed off reflexively. The few Sawls who noticed him did the same. Clausen stepped up to the swath of raw earth and bent briskly to work, the holstered laser prominent on his hip.
The Sawls stared, confused, frightened, but unwilling to reject the labors of any able hand. They decided to ignore him. They left him ample room and continued digging beside him.
God help us all if Aguidran finds him here, thought Megan.
She freed her canteen from her sash and allowed herself a restrained gulp. Clausen had shaved the neat beard grown during his wilderness ordeal. He looked composed, if not relaxed. He fell immediately into an easy digging rhythm, his body no stranger to physical labor. She could only envy his machined efficiency, and hate him the more for her envy.
“Doing penance, Clausen?” she shouted over the fire’s roaring. “Why not just let it all burn?”
He turned, leaning on his shovel, and nodded balefully at the improbably tilted silver tower of the Lander, wreathed in smoke. “And the Sled and the dish and the Lander, too, Meg? I still have a job to do, and though the chances of my escaping this planet with my life are slimming fast, I see no sense in cutting the odds back any further.”
His bleak honesty took her aback. Tanned and freshly shaven though he was, she could see he was fighting exhaustion. She tried to revel in grim satisfaction, but when he reached out, requesting her canteen, she gave it to him. He took a swig and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, watching Megan with his chill hawk’s eyes.
“I didn’t lay a hand on the boy,” he offered wearily. “Just scared him. Kid has stamina.”
Megan’s lip curled. “And Edan?”
“The girl?” He shrugged. “Honest self-defense, Meg.” He loosed his collar to show off dark parallel welts across the side of his throat. “Quite a hand with a leather thong, that one.”
He drank again and handed back the canteen. Megan took it but he held on briefly, commanding her direct attention. “Don’t you go playing the horrified innocent on rue like the rest of them, Meg. Whatever it takes to do the job, we both know that, eh? I’d figured you were too smart to get involved in this stuff, but hey, you shove your man out there, and green or not, I have to go after him. You expected no less from the beginning, surely.”
Megan snatched back the canteen, blinking into the blowing ash. Her open antagonism had not been the best cover after all. He’d detected her more experienced hand in what was supposed to appear to be conspiracy of one. She wondered what he was looking for now, companionship in his cynicism or a full confession.
Green. His insinuation stung her. Had she taken advantage of Stavros’s innocence? If so, Stavros was a willing victim and she thought her cause far more justifiable than the prospector’s.
Clausen rested from his digging to squint at the approaching fire.
“I don’t suppose you’d care to enlighten me on one small point?” he asked lightly, then chose to take Megan’s sullen grunt for assent. “What in the world has Ibiá done for these folks to make them apparently willing to die for him?”
“He loves them, Emil. Nothing more, nothing less. Something you wouldn’t understand.”
Clausen mimed a dagger thrust into his chest, “Is this the famous Levy wit and venom? Surely you can strike closer to the heart than that.”
“Maybe yours is on the other side,” she returned sourly.
“How about the drone? Your idea?” He cocked his bullet head suddenly and smiled.
Megan tensed. In this confusion of smoke and noise, she could be dead in a ditch before anyone would notice. Like Edan…
Clausen’s smile died into a hollow laugh, “Not to worry, dear icon of the Left. You’re safe until I get truly desperate. Punks like Ibiá can come and go invisibly, but the recidivists get too much martyr-mileage out of folks like you. Besides, who’d be left for me to talk to?” He shook his head disgustedly. “There’s so much righteous indignation flowing around here, it could make you puke! Do they think this is the first world to be forcibly welcomed into the twenty-first century?”
“The legal argument is strong, Emil,” countered Megan impulsively, then instantly regretted her need to justify. She told herself again how lazy it was of Susannah to think this man merely mad. He’s smarter than any of us.
&
nbsp; Clausen nodded benevolently, hugely satisfied. “I’m sure it is. Too bad no one will listen. So I gather from your general subtext that I do have you to thank for that clever but toothless ploy, but that I haven’t yet managed to remove young Ibiá from the scene. Amazing, that. He bled all over kingdom come. Why not call him off, before it’s too late?”
“He’s not mine to call off, like some dumb animal!” She was angrier at herself for being so easily manipulated than at him for doing it. “Hey, do you like being paid to kill people?”
He turned and spat into the dust. “No.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe what you like, my dear Megan. I much prefer coming in, making my claim and going home to my fur-lined burrow with a nice fat bundle. Killing people usually means someone’s going to try to kill me, and that gets tiresome.”
He hefted the shovel to return to his digging, then paused. “And therefore, preferences aside, there’ll be no more mercy misses, Meg, that I promise you.”
“Bad shots, you mean?”
Clausen grinned wolfishly. “You really believe that? Don’t. Or when next you chance to conspire with our brash young hero, you just give him my fond regards, and tell him from me that he’s a dead man.”
31
The frenzied last-minute effort paid off. The flames raged up to the line of firebreaks, lunged like chained beasts at the fresh-dug band of wasteland, and could not cross. The fire burned itself out in frustration.
All motion of the air died with the flames.
A stillness settled over the fields and terraces, as suffocating as the thick pall of smoke that hovered like smog along the cliff face. The plain was a plate of hard-fired ceramic, blackened to the limits of sight. The amber sun shone greenly through the haze. The heat sucked the last trace of moisture from the fire-cracked earth and the becalmed air. Messenger of an angry goddess, it bore down with crushing weight.
112°. Getting hard to think.
Danforth let his hand fall limply from the keypad. “Are you ready for this, Commander?” he called. “Along with her recent storm data, CRI’s reporting systematic disturbances in the planet’s supposedly negligible magnetic field!” He pulled at his tight curls. “I’m having her plot the pattern of those disturbances to match against the weather patterns… if you can call anything this wacko a pattern.”
Weng stood in conference with McPherson over a soot-stained electrical schematic. Dust drifted with every movement, clinging in fine powder to every surface. Clausen waited a few paces away, hands on hips, listening, whistling some pointedly silent melody.
“Emil thinks the break’s on this circuit here,” McPherson explained. Her forefinger traced across the diagram with elaborate care. “I’m gonna go in there and take a look. We’re pretty sure we got power enough.” She tossed an ambivalent glance at the prospector, who nodded without looking at her, still whistling to himself. “So if I can get the loop closed again, we should be able to raise the field.”
“Taylor? You alive?”
Megan’s quiet summons startled him. Where does my mind go these days…?
“Asleep with your eyes open?” She stood over him with a fistful of papers and tape cassettes. “Don’t blame you in this heat. Listen, I’ve got the supply inventory for CRI and I’d like to feed her some of my trip data for photoprocessing.”
“Snapshots of the ruins?” Danforth eased his chair away from the console.
“What ruins?… oh. A joke, Taylor? Didn’t know you were into jokes.”
He gave her a dark and bitter smile. “Cripple’s gotta do something to amuse himself.”
Megan dumped her stack of cassettes down beside the keypad. “Not much to tell by way of supplies, CRI. Food is okay for two months yet, and with proper rationing, we’ll manage for water now we’ve got the recycler working again. We can’t count on much of anything from the Sawls. In fact, I’d like to know what the Orbiter could provide by way of an emergency drop, should the need arise, so pass that request on to Newman. I’ll give you my tapes to chew on while I enter the list.” She fit the first tape into the feed slot.
“I am not currently able to provide hard copy,” CRI reminded her.
“So you can give us a show-and-tell later, if Taylor’ll grant me the screen time.”
“Be my guest,” Danforth rumbled. “I’m sick and tired of my own data. Maybe somebody else’s will break the logjam.”
Clausen and McPherson humped the mirrored entry cylinder into place, half into the shadow of the Underbelly. The giant tube was awkward to move but surprisingly light for its size. Clausen rocked it back and forth on the uneven ground, calling instructions to McPherson at the other end, until he was satisfied with its positioning. He walked through it, stood in the middle shifting his weight from side to side.
“The field’ll break around it right at midpoint.” He came out dusting soot from his hands. “Give her a try, Tay.”
At the console, Danforth murmured to CRI. Megan put down her papers. Weng waited silently.
CRI chattered a reply. The air shimmered faintly around the Lander.
Could be just another heat mirage, Danforth warned himself.
The air thickened. The silver cylinder thrummed faintly. The view of the blackened plain shivered into a splintered dancing image. The distant wagon rattle and the cries of the winch men on the cliff died to a muffled echoing along the entry tube. McPherson let out a cheer, setting aside her grievances with Clausen long enough to throw a victory punch at his shoulder. Clausen smiled.
“Well, thank god,” Megan declared. “Now we can get a little cool air in here!”
“Our thanks, Lieutenant, Mr. Clausen,” said Weng stiffly.
And wipe that smug grin off your face, asshole. Danforth ground his teeth symbolically.
“Congratulations, Emil,” he said as Clausen gave the cylinder a last inspection and strode over to the console.
“Our deal, Tay!” Clausen reminded him gruffly.
“Right. You bet, massa! It’s all yours.” Danforth wheeled away from the console with exaggerated dispatch. Clausen hauled over a crate and sat.
“CRI. This will be a Section G, Priority One message, by my authority. I want it droned out as soon as I’m done transmitting.” The prospector paused, then spoke for the benefit of all within earshot. “To follow will be a file of charges against certain expeditionary personnel on various counts of theft, both government property and private, economic subversion, conspiracy and treason.”
“Economic subversion?” Megan repeated blandly. “That’s rather creative, Emil.”
“The first charge will name Dr. Megan Levy, Mr. Stavros Ibiá and Commander Weng Tsi-Hua…”
“… for conspiring to prevent the capture of a dangerous fugitive, Commander Weng Tsi-Hua.” Clausen sat back from the keyboard, considering.
A hot draft stirring in the entry cylinder brought in the rolling basso call of the priesthorns. A full-throated chanting answered them. From the mouth of the cylinder, Megan counted the sad discrete plumes of smoke rising along the cliff top, so black against the hot malachite sky. The sight too easily recalled ranked columns of dust roaring across a parched salt-flat. Megan shuddered.
“Thirty-four,” she sighed, and retreated into the coolness of the Underbelly. “Funerals are starting,” she reported gloomily to whomever might be listening.
McPherson snored gently on a tarp-cushioned crate. Weng slept more quietly within her curtained cubicle, driven into seclusion by the outrage of Clausen’s list. Danforth lay on his bed working a sheet of calculations by hand, but not so intently as to prevent him from glancing over at Clausen’s back and remarking, “How about failure to pray five times daily in the direction of Company headquarters? You could get me on that one.”
Megan eyed the planetologist speculatively. She was still sprinting to catch up with the shifts of alliance that had occurred while she was away. It did seem that Clausen hadn’t an ally left to his name, thoug
h McPherson remained confirmed in her admiration for his general do-anything-well competence. She didn’t approve of him shooting her friends, but her loyalties were not ideological. Spacer loyalties rarely were. Megan decided that the little pilot found Clausen’s aura of menace exciting.
“Or how about conspiracy to consider science more important than corporate interests?” Danforth suggested.
“Feeling left out?” Megan ventured with a smile.
“A little.” He returned her smile. Megan could not recall him smiling much in the past. But Danforth, so aloof and arrogant before, too self-involved to mingle much with his colleagues, now made a mocking face at her across Clausen’s back and laughed silently, bitterly, his teeth a bright arc in his dark handsome face.
“I’m sure I could think of something for you, Tay,” said Clausen without looking up.
Danforth’s silent laughter blossomed into a mile-deep chuckle edged with loathing.
Clausen turned to stare at him coldly. “I could. Don’t push me.”
The chuckle expanded. Danforth laid his notes down, let his head roll back on his pillows, and laughed a long, booming laugh.
Megan worried for him. Was this contempt news to Clausen? She thought it unwise of Danforth to exhibit it any more than necessary. She conjured up an elaborate shrug, shook her head, even tried on a knowing grin, though the fit was tight at best.
“Round the bend at last. The climate control, you know-too much cool, breathable air all of a sudden.” She moved to the console to provide further distraction. “Listen, whenever you’re done crucifying the Commander and myself, I’d like to have a word with CRI.”
“Done? My dear Megan. I’ve only just begun. However…”
“Hello, everybody.” Susannah stopped just inside the entry cylinder, her medikit slung over her shoulder. She was soot-streaked and coated with a powder of yellow dust. She took a deep breath of cool, fresh air. “Lord, that feels good! It’s like breathing molten metal out there!”
“You’re not at the funerals?” Megan stepped forward guilty. “I thought at least one of us…”
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