by David Drake
Gardner tried to press his left fist against his mouth and bite his knuckles through the forgotten face mask. His mind staggered with the thought of those tanks and the thousands more implied by the size of this encampment: cities blazed and fell to ruin before them, and all the screaming victims in his mind were human as their destroyers surely were not.
The sound of the airlock opening beside him was lost in greater thunder, down the boulevard and in Gardner’s mind.
Someone shouted an interrogative in no Earthly language.
Mike jumped before he glanced around. Astor’s fingers slid off the shoulder of the borrowed suit. Like Gardner himself, Astor was unrecognizable, with a reflection instead of a face. The intruder could see himself as an orange distortion in the rippled mask of the figure confronting him.
Beyond the person who had called to Gardner was the shorter, equally anonymous form of Selve. Selve’s weapon had not been slung securely. When he stumbled through the airlock, the gun had slipped and tripped him. Now Selve carried the weapon in both hands. He was thinking only of keeping the unfamiliar burden out of his way, not at all of where the muzzle pointed.
Mike Gardner dodged around the corner of the building to avoid the unintentioned threat.
“Wait! Who are you?” Astor cried in English as she ran after the intruder.
Behind her, the airlock sprang open again. If either member of the Contact Team had thought the situation through, they would have wedged the outer door open to prevent the inner one from being used. The suited Monitors spilled out. “Grab him!” Deith ordered.
It was not until two Monitors tackled him that Selve realized he, rather than the fugitive, had been the object of the command. “No!” the Traveler said for the instant he thought that Deith had made a mistake. Then one of the Monitors wrestled the weapon away from Selve while the other one threw herself across his chest to pinion his arms and upper body.
Gardner ran down the side of the low building which had sheltered him from the traffic. It was no shelter now: the wing that thrust out into the central plaza housed a control room which stood in much the same relationship to the drive coils as did the instrument consoles controlling the lesser units on Earth. The walls were smooth and opaque with no door alcoves, window ledges, parked vehicles, or even litter to give the illusion of cover. The main building from which the wing was thrown blocked Gardner’s path a hundred feet in front of him, featureless and three stories high.
“Are you trying to get killed!” Astor shouted. The step Mike had paused when he realized there was no escape gave his pursuer the opportunity she needed. Astor tackled Mike from behind, using her bulk to topple him beneath her to the ground.
“Astor?” the engineer gasped. Her voice was recognizable despite the suit and the circumstances. “What are you?”
“Mike? Mike?” the Traveler said as she shifted into a kneeling position. “You shouldn’t have come here, you fool! Look, you’ll rebound in a minute or two at the most. Stay here, wait for us, we’ll—”
Four more figures in orange pounded around the corner thirty feet away. One of them had a pistol cleared.
“I’ve got him!” Astor shouted. She raised her left hand in prohibition. Instinct rather than conscious direction made her right shoulder twitch. The sling fell away. The gun slid down the inner curve of Astor’s arm till her hand on the grip caught it.
The four Monitors stopped. Three of them clumped beside the wall. Deith stood a step apart and called, “Get away, Astor! This isn’t the business of somebody who’s blundered as badly as you three!”
Selve cried something, the words muffled and unintelligible to his female colleague. They could have been “… few seconds!”
“Deith, we’ll take care of this!” Astor said. Her mind was lost in a sea of icy needles. There were no good choices. Even the questions were only amorphous horrors to her. She was not fit to decide this, that was for Keyliss or—
“You chose,” Deith snarled as she raised her sidearm.
Pure reflex is not enough for a gunfight conducted within the matrix of civilization. There must be go/no go decisions programmed by the intellect. Otherwise the ground is littered with dead hostages, dead allies, and dead children who opened a door at the wrong moment.
Reflex would have snapped Astor’s shot into the center of mass, damn the consequences to the shooter and to the proposal she had endorsed. Astor fired instead at Deith’s hand and gun while part of her brain correlated data which no one else present had fully gathered as yet.
The beam was choked tight. There was a white flash at the point of impact. Fractured molecules from Deith’s gun and hand were combining with chlorine much as they would have done at similar temperatures in an oxygen atmosphere.
One of Deith’s fellows released his equipment belt and flung it away, gun, holster, and all. Deith herself staggered sideways, toward the missing hand. The atmosphere swirled at the end of her wrist.
“Get a clamp on it, you idiots!” Astor shouted as she rose to her feet. The muzzle of the weapon faded back to neutral gray. She waggled it above the heads of the Monitors. “And get her inside. How much atmosphere do you think these suits hold?”
Behind Astor but by no means forgotten by her, Mike Gardner disappeared from the world of Portal Four Base.
There would be repercussions from what Astor had just done. Perhaps Selve could handle them, perhaps Keyliss was well enough by now to handle that task which would normally have been hers.
Right at the moment, Astor was feeling wryly glad that she had been offered a choice in terms she could fully comprehend.
* * *
Sue Schlicter’s body kept telling her that she was fully in control of her mount. Intellectually, she knew she was not. For the first week on a vehicle, there is always something new to learn—normally at a bad time. Her first ride in the parking lot on a motorcycle had been exhilarating until she tried to remember which of the levers and switches controlled the brakes.
Still, the alien car appeared to be of idiot-proof simplicity. There were no major obstacles to contend with once Sue nosed out of the forest. That experience had left her palms sweaty and her knuckles aching with strain, but scrambling through the trees had been awkward on foot as well. The animals she came upon were all herbivores, stragglers from the majority of a herd which now snorted and splashed in the creek—startled but not panicked or enraged by the bright lights.
The car was traveling at over twenty miles per hour, faster than was prudent, when it topped the grassy lip of the crater. Sue’s lights shot off into empty space, then sprayed the ground as the vehicle plowed dirt with its nose—the car had almost no axial stability when its front and back ends were at significantly different heights. Sue’s own attempt to compensate by throwing her weight back had no effect. Luck alone prevented disaster, and that only as the bow scraped wickedly.
Schlicter dialed back the power, overcorrected to a halt, and finally brought the speed back up to a fast jog, hoping her inept driving had not drawn the attention of any of those tens and hundreds of thousands of aliens in the encampment below.
The great pool of lights hid signs of particular interest as completely as absolute darkness could have done, but she could see some vehicles moving among the maze of buildings. More important, there were still a few other fans of light on the inner crater wall, vehicles traveling to or from the encampment just as Sue was struggling to do.
Though the slope down which she now drove was not dangerously steep, it was studded with frequent outcrops of rock whose abrupt lower faces could tip the car as thoroughly as the crater rim itself had done. The care required to steer around those dangers when they appeared in the lights was actually a benefit to Sue. It kept her from worrying about what she could do if she did reach her lover. Charles might fit in what seemed to be a storage compartment behind the seat—but that would mean folding the seat back, and she had no idea of how to accomplish that. Even if Charles were still in there. Even
if she reached him, even if she released him from what was clearly a prison.
Those were the medium-term questions. The larger and still less answerable doubt was how they would ever return home, since the time machine was not snatching them back the way Mustafa had said it did for others.
Almost abruptly, the alien camp became an obstacle course instead of a goal. Buildings with wrinkled walls and no apertures replaced the grass. The headlights became a fan of greater intensity in the area lighting. Leaves no longer whickered along the surface of the car. The alien presence of the buildings restrained any impulse to speed up on the smooth surface.
Schlicter entered the encampment on a causeway which was not straight and which might not have been a street at all, though it was brightly illuminated. Walls wobbled to either side of her vehicle. Occasionally, a structure overarched the road. The feeling of driving down a tunnel was weakened by ten-foot-high standards that threw out polarized floods of lime-tinged light. Nothing could really be seen above them anyway, so the fact that there was a building rather than sky overhead could be put out of mind.
Now that it was too late to determine, Sue realized that she could not remember where on the roadways—right, left, or middle—the aliens had themselves driven. The only thing she could recall with certainty was the image of the troop which captured Charles: the lighter vehicles had been scattered in the wake of the tanks. Since the tanks were as broad as the street, that provided no real answers. There was no traffic control evident at intersections, so the question had possible consequences worse than simple detection. The tall woman could only stick to the center of whatever roadway there was, swiveling her head with taut determination at every cross street or kink substantial enough to suggest a cross street.
No other traffic was now visible, a blessing but a threat to someone who feared to stand out. Occasionally the texture of a wall would change abruptly as she slid past it. Porosity became mirrored smoothness or a pattern of waves. Schlicter could not tell whether that was chance, a trick of the light, or a challenge which she, presumably, was not answering correctly. She kept moving.
Five minutes after she had entered the camp proper, although the road had twisted too many times for rational certainty, Sue remained convinced that she was coming close to the center and her goal. She had expected the huge drive coils themselves to orient her, but they were invisible because of the roof of light, even in those rare instances where the structures were far enough apart or low enough to permit a decent view upward.
When an avenue eighty feet wide intersected Schlicter’s path, it gave her almost as great a shock as would the cul-de-sac she had been fearing all along. Her thumb twitched down on the speed control over which it had been poised. The car slowed sharply enough that Sue’s head bumped the lowered canopy. In front of her, and as unexpected as the avenue itself, sped three trucks like those which had transported infantry across the valley. These were empty, but they were moving at over fifty miles an hour. If surprise had not stopped her, Sue and her car would have been centerpunched into wreckage as complete as anything that the carnivore had wreaked in the stream bed.
She let the car glide forward again, more slowly than she would have walked had she dared to dismount. There was no other traffic moving. A quarter mile to her left rose the globular drive coils, the nearer one superimposed on the sphere beyond it. The bulk of the units had ghostly presence above their brightly illuminated lower curves.
The small building she hoped still held Charles was nearer still—and it seemed unguarded.
Schlicter was clinging to the tiller with all the strength of her right hand. She was not afraid that the car would snatch control away from her, but rather that her trembling would cause her to lose it.
Expecting a bellow of authority as the car moved into the open area, her mind threw up images that normally hulked just below her consciousness. Her father stood there with his belt looped in his hand. Beside him was her onetime lover, the paratrooper who would beat her with anything but his bare hands when he became angry.
The fear did not keep Sue from acting, but it did keep her from looking around for real dangers because of her subconscious certainty that the past was about to savage her again.
She was as alone as a skater practicing in an empty rink.
When that realization struck her, Schlicter’s tension drained out with a sudden giggle. She was alone, she was being ignored, and her car was tracking across smooth pavement in silence. There was danger, of course, but nothing that would be made better by letting her chemical terror overwhelm her.
Driving around the cell at an ambling pace, she was close enough to touch the building had she wanted to raise her canopy. The two vents she had seen being cut into the sides with guns were too small for escape routes. The aliens had probably stripped Charles before they locked him in, but it still seemed doubtful that Sue’s knife could significantly enlarge the holes. She would try, if needs be, but the door seemed to be a better option.
Only she could not find a door, a handle, or a seam of any kind in the surface of the building.
She circuited the building again but achieved the same nonresult, then touched the speed control and slowed to a halt beneath one of the vents. So far as she could tell, the viewscreen was not degrading her vision in the least. Nonetheless, she seemed to have no alternative but to get out of the car and feel her way around the structure until she found a door. Or was found herself.
Then she remembered Charles might be present, albeit not visible. She swore under her breath and raised the canopy by an additional handsbreadth. Light—or images—passed through the unfamiliar material, but for all she knew it still might deaden sound. “Charles!” she called. Her voice cracked. “Charles!” she repeated, furious with herself.
“Sue? Have they caught you, too?” floated Eisley’s voice through the hole in the wall.
“I’m here in one of their cars,” Schlicter said. Until her lover spoke, she had not been aware of how alone she had felt and how much that bothered her. “I’m all right—there aren’t any of them around. I can’t find a door to let you out through, though.”
“Sue, this is very important,” Eisley said. He spoke with the care of a parent whose child has just crawled out on a high ledge. “I can’t be sure where the door is myself, even though I’ve seen it open. The edges must grow together. But it’s very important that I get away from here. They’re using their—their matter transmitter, it’s not what we were told—to hold me here. When they—let go—I’ll snap back with a bomb. A, ah, at least a fusion bomb, from what they implied. Can you move the whole building with your car? I think maybe just a few yards will do it, get me out of the focus of their machine. Otherwise, I … I don’t want you to die, Sue, or me to die, either. And I’m afraid it’s going to be much worse than that, back on Earth.”
Schlicter did not try to absorb most of what the diplomat was saying. Two things were important: Charles did not think the door could be opened; and moving him like tuna in the can of his cell would achieve the same result.
“Move you away from the balls, you mean?” she asked as she examined the cell from a new mental perspective. She knew her vehicle was flimsy from the way the carnivore had shredded similar ones. That did not mean the—engine, whatever—was not powerful. By the same token, the cell could be light even if it were very strong. “Which way?”
“I don’t think it matters,” Eisley was responding. “It must— I hope it’s a point, an area, the way the docking area Mustafa explained was. If I get out of that, we’ll be all right.”
Sue had not learned how to make her commandeered vehicle back up. She cramped the tiller hard away from the cell and touched up the least possible amount of forward speed. The car began to describe a slow, tight circle. When its nose aligned with the cell, Sue centered the tiller again. She let her vehicle coast against the small building with no more impact than the doors of an elevator closing.
“All right, Charle
s,” she called. She fingered in slightly more power.
The car began to twitch with increasing anger. The cell did not move. Lines of white light began to pulse on the dashboard.
With the suddenness of bear traps firing, doors opened in half a dozen of the buildings in sight of the plaza. The aliens who scuttled out were the first ones Schlicter had seen walking on the ground.
Sue chopped the car’s throttle. There was no audible alarm, but she felt a nervous tingling in rather than on the surface of her skin. Neither the cell nor the car had budged visibly while the one tried to push the other. There was enough energy stored somewhere in the combination, however, to fling the vehicle back ten feet when the car stopped thrusting forward. The elastic effect surprised both Schlicter and the alien whose beam slashed the wall of the cell where the car had been nosing.
When in doubt, gas it.
Sue slid her thumb fully down the lump controlling the car’s speed. The acceleration was not the kick in the pants of a cammy motorcycle; the car’s speed built at a linear rate but with quickness bespeaking an enormous power-to-weight ratio. Wind roar beneath the cocked viewscreen and the blur into which objects dissolved to either side of the axis of motion proved to Schlicter that she was aboard something even hotter than the 1,100 cc pavement-rippler she had parked back at the engineering building worlds away.
Human retinas have the capacity to react only to gross inputs during high-speed driving. Sue dragged the tiller hard toward the major avenue, knowing she could not hope to maneuver through a narrow alley at a rate that could get her clear of the alerted encampment.
Two of the eight-limbed aliens ran into the throat of plaza and avenue. There was plenty of room to avoid them, but both were raising hand weapons.
One of the aliens fired as Sue essed toward the avenue. The guide beam might have missed behind her—for a moment or two—if the car had continued its high-speed circuit. As it was, the beam ticked the flank of the car and shut down all systems as thoroughly as distributor failure does a gasoline engine. The car had been rock steady at short-radius turns on the unbanked plaza. Now it skidded and spun like a hockey puck. The alien gunner continued to waggle his beam, but he did not hit the car again.