by David Drake
Astor and Keyliss walked behind and to either flank of Selve. The three locals were framed within the triangle of Travelers. The group’s overall tension was much less now than in the instants after arrival. Before, the Travelers’ concern had been with what had gone mechanically wrong with the transport and with what unknown dangers were lurking nearby. Now, the immediate dangers seemed to have exposed themselves, and the need to find the missing local overshadowed the long-term seriousness of the calibration discrepancy.
“We don’t even know she went this way,” Astor grumbled. Vegetation trampled down by the herbivores was springing back in the faces of the party as they moved against the direction of the stampede.
“Arlene!” Selve shouted again. The local men did not call out themselves. The chaos of the stampede had thrown them psychically under the guidance of the Travelers, who at least might understand what was going on in an alien universe. The huge animals had appeared as suddenly as a jack-in-the-box. That shock constrained the locals as no previous warnings could have done. It would not occur to them at this moment to shout into the forest unless they were literally directed to do so.
“This is the direction the herd was spooked from, Astor,” Keyliss said from the other flank. “I’m sure she can’t have gone—” She looked down. Her foot was tangled in a creeper lifted in coils from the ground when the animals stamped across it. Keyliss raised her foot out of the loose snare and continued, “Gone very far.”
Beside Keyliss, a Vrage soldier stepped out of the foliage. The Vrage wore the usual magenta garment which acted both as atmosphere suit and body armor. In one of his hands was a raised weapon. Almost as shocking as the fact of a Vrage here was the way it acted. Instead of shooting from ambush and killing most or all of the party, the alien’s vocalizer said in English, “Halt where you are. If you move, I’ll blow you away.”
Keyliss shot the Vrage in the middle of the chest. Her weapon was still turned up to maximum aperture from being used to cremate Barry Rice. It threw a cone which glanced from the magenta armor and shriveled foliage which the stampede had scarcely bruised.
The Vrage fired back. The horizontal disk of its weapon spun. The thin, rusty beam from the handgrip was merely an aiming plane. Though Keyliss’s blast could not be lethal at its present dispersion, the shock and glare of it made the Vrage twitch his own weapon upward instead of sawing it carefully across his target.
The wand of reddish light flowed up the right side of Keyliss’s chest, her shoulder, the gun she held, and her ear. The tough material of her gun resisted, but even it shrank toward the line of the invisible discharge like polystyrene touched by a flame. Where the beam crossed only flesh and fabric, the target divided on glass-smooth margins. Bone ends gleamed as coat and flesh fell away like bark from a veneer log. The right arm and the silenced gun it had held flopped to one side while the body itself collapsed the other way. Keyliss’s ear, thrown off by muscle fibers spasming as they parted, fluttered away in a distant arc.
The air was full of blood and the sound of the Vrage weapon screaming like a saw on nails.
* * *
“They’ve got to be able to hear us,” Sue Schlicter said angrily. She banged the door again with the heel of her hand and shouted, “Mustafa!”
“I think we best shouldn’t emphasize our interest in Mustafa,” Charles Eisley said. He touched Sue’s waist and leaned past her to look through the door’s small, wire-reinforced window. “For his sake, you know, with his superiors.” Though Gustafson and his companions would certainly demand an explanation for why a pair of strangers wanted to barge in.
“Can you see anyone?” Sue asked in a subdued voice. She chewed carefully at the heel of her right hand to work out some of the bruised feeling from pounding.
The window gave a perfect view down the long aisle to the stairwell at the other end of the basement. Because of the angle, however, the closer meshes of the enclosure’s cyclone fencing were a solid wall to anyone who wanted to see through them. By craning his head to the side, Eisley got a marginally better view into the end of the enclosure. No one was in sight behind the vertical coils, either.
“Maybe,” he said aloud, “we can get in through the front of the building and find the stairs there.” He nodded to indicate the far doorway, though Schlicter was not looking through the window anymore. She stood hipshot toward Eisley. Her waist beneath his hand was as soft and supple as his mood an hour before. The touch recalled that earlier touching. The diplomat squeezed Schlicter close in amazed delight.
Schlicter gave Charles a broad smile and a cheerful pat on the rump as she disengaged herself. “I’ve got a better idea,” she said. The smile glowed wickedly across her face again. “Well, I’ve got a lot of better ideas, but right for now let’s try the far door.”
Twenty feet down the loading dock on which they stood was another metal door. This one bore the legend BOILER ROOM stenciled in red paint. There were no windows set into it. With Charles in tow by one hand, the tall woman strode toward that door.
“If they lock this one, the other surely’s going to be locked,” Eisley grumbled without heat or conviction. He did not really care about the business they were about. For the first time in his life, the veteran diplomat was feeling purely euphoric. The most marvelous part of the whole feeling was that it was not primarily physical. Not now, at least.
Schlicter worked the latch with her free hand and tugged the door open. “Voilà!” she said, waving Charles inward. He obeyed, wincing despite himself at what his mistress thought was French pronunciation.
The boiler room was large. It felt hollow, though it was nowhere near as big as the adjacent portion of the basement devoted to storage and experimental use. The heating plant was shut down at this tag end of summer, though stacked ladders and tools indicated that crews were working on the equipment during the regular work week.
While the boiler room was cool, it was not silent. As soon as the door opened, Charles and Sue could hear the hum and the resonances it wakened from the pipes and plates of the heating plant. For the moment, they did not connect the sound, the ambiance, with that which Bayar and Cooper had described as part of the operation of the time machine.
“Well, if this one opens,” said Eisley as he took the lead, “then we’ll see if the inside one opens, too.” Still holding Schlicter’s hand, he walked toward the door in the interior wall to their right. He was surprised to find that he had to raise his voice to be heard. The vibration was so all-encompassing that it did not seem loud.
“I wonder what they’re doing in here?” the diplomat added as the inner door also swung open to his pressure. The metal of it trembled like a sparrow’s heart in his grasp.
* * *
Selve spun toward the Vrage even before Keyliss fired at it. He cuddled his weapon down against his hip from instinct and against training. It was instinct again which froze his finger on the trigger: the locals beside him were bleating in amazement. Though they were not in the direct line of fire, they might …
Part of Selve’s mind functioned with its usual clockwork precision. That part was correlating the appearance of the Vrage here with the wandering zero of the equipment that had transported their own party. The facts interlocked perfectly in one terrifying set of circumstances.
The air was aflame with Keyliss’s shot, then tortured by the responding bolt that lopped Keyliss apart.
Unlike Selve, Astor was a dozen feet from the Vrage and could glimpse only a portion of its head through the vegetation and the bobbing locals. She made up for that deficiency with greater skill and a ruthlessness which was, in the circumstances, necessary. The spray of Keyliss’s blast hid the Vrage for the fraction of a second before the alien’s own weapon slashed through the fire.
Astor nudged her trigger. A bolt, not a cone or stream, curled and yellowed the wisps of Professor Gustafson’s white hair. The alien’s helmet gouted chlorine and gases vaporized from the body within. The Vrage’s weapon continued to
shriek and slant its marking beam up into the forest at a thirty-degree angle. The alien’s limbs locked in position so that it stood like an abstract sculpture painted magenta.
“Get away, there’ll be more!” Astor shouted. “They’ll run to here!”
Henry Layberg threw himself down, not for cover but because Keyliss had fallen. Professor Gustafson touched his left hand to the side of his head. His ear felt sunburned, and some of his white hair crumbled brittlely beneath his fingers. He and Chairman Shroyer gaped at one another, then ran together into the undergrowth as they had been ordered to do.
Now with a clear field, Astor snapped a shot at the Vrage’s weapon to silence it. There was a pop and a green flash like that of an arc across tungsten—nothing very impressive, certainly nothing to suggest that the limb holding the weapon and most of that side of the alien would disappear. A sphere a yard in diameter had been directly ionized by the uncontrolled release of energy.
“They’ve got a transport unit here!” Selve screamed as if the Vrage weapon still keened ravenously across all normal sounds. Selve’s face was distorted by indecision and fear.
“You’ve got to recall us,” Astor said forcefully but with no undertones save those of command. “Nobody could do that but you. Get a few yards away, lie low, and—”
The snout of a Vrage antigravity vehicle brushed around the tree which had briefly sheltered the party. It was a light transporter closed against the hostile environment, not a weapons platform. For all that, the vehicle was heavily armored against just such chance as this.
Astor turned while her lips were still forming words. She notched a two-second burst across the center of the vehicle’s frontal slope. The black portion was not a matter of aesthetics. Though the driver received all sensory impressions indirectly, a large portion of the frontal surface was made porous for such reception and transfer of data. This was, after all, a utility vehicle with armor, not a fighting vehicle per se. The black sheathing was resistant, but Astor’s point-blank, full intensity burst carved the material like the skin of a sausage.
The red streak from the Traveler’s weapon left spluttering fibers curling away from either side of the cut. There was a dazzling flash from within the vehicle. It was so intense that the car’s body panels glowed like the flesh of fingers held over a powerful light. The car staggered a few centimeters to the ground over which it had been floating.
“Get going!” Astor shouted to complete her thought. “I’ll keep them busy!”
Chlorine was drifting from the wrecked vehicle like smoke from a fire.
Selve plunged out of sight and out of the area targeted for the Vrages by the fighting. As his colleague had said, Selve and the chance of recall were the only chance they had of survival. They: the transport party, and the world.
* * *
There was nothing Henry Layberg could do for Keyliss, but he was a doctor and he was going to try. The Traveler had fallen on her right side, hiding the extent of the injuries there. The severed portion lay beside the body. The cut surface rose from the point of Keyliss’s hip to the middle of her shoulder joint. Blood and cellular fluids slimed the flesh now. Where the bone was dense, however, its ends gleamed in the light. The damage had been done without physical contact. The weapon cut like a microtome and polished objects smoother than jeweler’s rouge could have done.
The damage to blood vessels was surely fatal, even though the beam had not sliced the internal organs. The greatest shock of Layberg’s first human dissection had been the amount of the body’s mass given over simply to transportation and support: bone and muscle, nothing more. The body cavity seemed absurdly small when emptied. Most of even that volume held intestines and the later stages of food processing. The brain had been yellow gray with death and embalming. It was a double handful, a liter and a half of the total body, but all that was required for the portion of life which was wholly human.
The brain and the life it embodied were dependent on the support system, and Layberg knew as he rolled Keyliss off her glistening wound that her support system was damaged beyond any but the most sophisticated repair—and that if the help were received at once.
Among the things that made Layberg gape with surprise was the way Keyliss’s clothing—the severely professional charcoal-gray suit coat—was growing across the bloody wound. Tendrils were extending swiftly enough to be seen as moving.… The cut edge of the fabric was still as razor sharp as the Vrage weapon had left it, but the margin was now hemmed by a band of what looked like the silk of a spider’s egg case. It was gauzy and cream-colored with a hint of yellow in it. Blood oozed across the new material from thousands of minor vessels severed when the Traveler’s side was planed away. There was a vivid spurt from the brachial artery, although the attached tags of shoulder muscle were fully retracted as if to squeeze shut the tube through which life gouted. The gore soaked and darkened the coat itself, but none of it clung to the gauzy extension. Drops sparkled and beaded and slid away like mercury from a drumhead.
Layberg reached out to clamp the end of the brachial artery between his left thumb and forefinger. His other hand was thrusting frantically into his pocket to find something, anything with which to tie off the vessel. Something twitched beneath his clamping fingers. He squeezed harder, very hard indeed, and the cut end squirmed away from him anyway.
Layberg looked from his pocket to the wound. The center of the area—the original raw surface had totaled more than a square foot—was still slimy and dripping. The edges were being swept clear by the gauze, however, and that insubstantial fabric had just crawled fluidly between fingers pressed together with all Layberg’s considerable power. The doctor more or less expected to see the surface beneath the transparent gauze distending with blood which Keyliss’s heart continued to ram out the severed artery. Instead, the sheathing which had slipped over the artery like a liquid itself was sealing the vessel as completely as could a haemostat.
And the result was achieved without pressure on the wound. The artery was still clearly visible. Layberg probed it in a spirit of scientific fascination which he knew was better suited to nonhuman subjects. The surface gave at his touch like meat, like muscle prodded through a layer of skin. The fabric that now was sealing itself along the center of the plane of the injury was not acting as a pressure bandage and compressing the injury to rigid impermeability.
The ribs were quite evident. Their stub ends were sectioned as cleanly as slides waiting for the microscope. The extrusion from the cloth was no longer visible now that it formed a sheet without the raw wound for contrast. The gauze was a texture rather than a color, a matte finish which had stripped twigs and loam from the flesh as effortlessly as it had mooted Layberg’s well-meant efforts.
Henry Layberg swore in wonder, and swore again even more softly. His index finger moved again. This time it did not quite touch the diaphanous layer holding in what remained of Keyliss’s life.
Vrage weapons howled nearby. There were shouts in muffled and distorted English, always the same, “Halt! If you move, I’ll blow you away.…” A brief hiss that might have been Astor’s gun and a racking discharge which recapitulated the sound of the first alien vehicle being smashed.
And then there was something subliminal, too faint to be a sound and yet perceived by the doctor hunched over what should by now have been a corpse. Layberg cocked his head back over his right shoulder. A second Vrage car was floating past the wreckage of the first. The vehicle stopped gently as a thought the moment Layberg moved. The black viewscreen lifted silently.
The alien behind it was already pointing his weapon through the opening.
* * *
Even if the forest were as thick with Vrages as with its native herbivores, Astor knew that by freezing in concealment she could be almost certain of avoiding them. Any Vrage who stumbled over her would have made the worst of luck for himself. The Traveler’s formal clothing was ideal camouflage in the current environment, while the atmosphere suits and enclosed v
ehicles which the Vrages required were a serious impediment to their own perceptions.
The problem with that tactic was that it would work for Astor, but for no other member of the party. The big female was too goal-directed to hesitate about sacrificing even Selve; and as for the locals, that decision had been made. Selve was necessary to the project’s success. Selve would be struggling with the emergency controls, making calculations with apparatus which would be as useless to Astor as to any of the locals. If a Vrage found him concentrated on his task, Selve was dead despite the weapon beside him. It was therefore Astor’s duty to focus Vrage attention away from the area in which Selve hid.
And that was just fine, because Astor had chosen to call attention to herself very simply: smash her way noisily through the undergrowth and depend on reflexes to blast anything colored magenta. That would be some slight recompense for Keyliss.
The Vrages could not have been more cooperative. Three of their utility vehicles in line ahead met her squarely as they raced toward the initial gunfire. The cars were moving at almost twenty miles an hour, too fast for conditions and their mechanically flimsy construction. Astor shot and dodged, a black shadow in a world of black shadows. The lead vehicle sprayed sparks and chlorine out its punctured windscreen. It lost speed, touched the ground, and exploded as the second car rearended the wreckage before Astor could snap her next burst into that planned target. Foliage curled and yellowed along the track of her first shot and where the Vrage vehicles were scattering molten remnants of themselves.
The driver of the third car was very good. If he was as handicapped as his fellows by the conditions which the environment forced upon him, then he at least knew how to buy himself some time. His vehicle spun on its axis, short of the joined wreck of his leaders. Astor fired, but she had only the brilliantly armored flank for a target. Her stream of focused energy was an orange-white line till it struck the vehicle. Then the line diffracted into a garnet spray. It wilted vegetation for a hundred feet and stung the shooter’s own eyes, but it did not scar the surface at which it was aimed.