Ammonite Planets (Omnibus): Ammonite Galaxy #1-3 (90 page)

The Xianthan, who had been having some limited success himself, he thought, came out of his own meditations and bent to help her, signaling to the others to keep back.

“It is a good sign, I think,” he told them. “I believe … I hope that in some way we have succeeded in getting through to them.”

Six made a face. “Let’s hope so. We are pulling to a stop at the summit, which means that Grace will be about to stop at lightning corner. If they are going to do anything it will be there.”

They looked at each other and sighed. The doors opened, showing them the summit platform and the planets hanging overhead. They wandered forlornly out, and tried not to think of what might be happening to Grace.

THE LIGHTNING BOLTS which hammered the cage were terrifying in themselves. The discharge of such huge electric potential left the air ionized, and the occupants of the cages could feel a high tingling sensation, apart from the sheer panic of watching bolt after bolt of lightning smash into the cage. Grace felt the cage coming to a stop, and closed her eyes. Here, then, was the end of the journey for her. She could no longer dissociate herself from the two men in front of her. They were her judges and her executioners, and the universe had telescoped down into this small rexelene compartment, in a tiny metal cage, on this planet and at this time. There was to be no more to her insignificant existence. She tried, despite the gag, to put her chin up. She would not give them the satisfaction of seeing how scared she was, how little she wanted to die, how inside panic was freezing her heart into irregular jumps.

The doors opened. At Atheron’s signal, Xenon pulled Grace to a standing position, and manhandled her out onto the Lightning Corner Platform.
 

“Remove the bindings and the gag,” ordered Atheron.

His second-in-command hurried to obey. He seemed almost eager to get this over with, thought Grace, all her muscles tensing to resist, despite her best attempts to accept her fate.

Atheron was fiddling now with the fastenings on the platform. All he had to do, he thought, was to open the rexelene door from the platform to the cage, and then step through to the gate set into the cage and open that. It would only take a moment to throw the girl out, and she would be dead within seconds. If a bolt of lightning didn’t fry her, the cold or the lack of oxygen would only allow her a few lucid moments of regret before her life was snuffed out. And good riddance, he thought. She had given him nothing but trouble. If he had known how much damage she would do, he would have done something about her long before this!

Xenon restrained Grace, waiting for a sign from his master. Grace smiled up at him.

“He will do this to you, you know,” she said. “When he has no further use for you. Can’t you see what he has become? And what you are doing?”

Xenon gave her a shake. “Shut up!” he snarled.

“Do you really think Father would have wanted you to do this? You are deluding yourself!”

“He did what he had to. I am only doing the same.”

Grace smiled again, although she was quivering inside, and feeling slightly sick. “Goodbye, then Xenon. I hope it all proves to have b-been w-worth it.”

Atheron had managed to circumvent the failsafe device on the rexelene door, and had stepped outside to the metal gate. This was proving to be much easier, for the gate swung open on easy hinges, a gaping invitation to this travesty of freedom. She felt Xenon tense behind her, and Atheron beckoned to him. Already the air in the compartment was racing out into the thin atmosphere, exchanging comforting oxygen for thin sulphurous ozone. I hope they can’t get the doors shut again, she wished to herself. That would serve them right. Then they would suffocate to death up here themselves. A fitting end to the pair of them, she thought.

But now she was nearly at the metal gate to the cage. Atheron, who was grimly hanging on to one of the bars, caught hold of her left arm, and tugged her towards him. Xenon, struggling to catch a firm hold of the other side of the gate, pulled her other arm, until she was ensconced on the very edge of the gate, with only the void beneath her.

Atheron opened his mouth, and she knew he must have said something, but she couldn’t hear because of the tumultuous noise of the wind, the air, the lightning. Then he made eye contact with Xenon, nodded, and she felt a hefty blow on her back and then she was falling, falling out of the cage and down into the clouds. She heard an ear-splitting crack and her heart made a frantic attempt to leap right out of her body.

She felt the freezing cold projected like daggers into her skin; there was still enough atmosphere at this level for her to feel it pushing against her with hurricane force as she plummeted to the ground. She hurtled through the thin gas wrapped in an overwhelming smell of ozone. She found it impossible to force her eyes open, but it didn’t matter – they were incapable of focusing on anything in any case. In the few milliseconds gifted to her before she lost consciousness she was surprised to find her mind taking her back to one particular moment and one particular memory; then she mercifully blacked out and knew no more.

AS THE GIRL fell, Atheron turned to signal to Xenon to help him to close the gate to the cage. The two Sellite men struggled together, but the gate had swung wide open on its hinges, and it was proving more difficult to shut than it had been to open. Xenon had to hang with part of his body over the void to try to get a grasp on the gate outside and pull it shut. Atheron was clutching at him, in an intent to help.

There was a huge flash of light as one of the many bolts of lightning forked deafeningly down, fracturing the atmosphere into two parts, seething and spitting as it tore the very air apart. It drove unerringly for the one point where the lightning cage was vulnerable – straight for the open gate. Finding that one weakness in the cage was enough. The protection from the elements was broken, the lightning was free to do its worst. And it showed no mercy, it was completely unforgiving of that one small mistake.

With strident blasts of electricity bolt after bolt of lightning ripped into the cage, racing insatiably through every piece of metal, turning it to an incandescent red. There was not even time to cry out for the two organic beings who were hanging half-inside, half-outside the cage. They were instantaneously transformed into wizened and blackened corpses, both bodies fused grotesquely to the metal bars they had been holding onto. Neither Atheron nor Xenon were given any warning of their fate. One of the cadavers was carbonized forever with its mouth open, frozen for all time preparing for a cry it could never vocalize. The other hung gruesomely from hands burnt into the metal, incinerated to become part of the cage, a few white hairs still adhering to the odd patches of skin left on its chin.

What was left of Atheron and Xenon hung lifelessly against the metal bars as the automatic doors activated behind them and the cage began to descend in an orderly fashion to the ground, indifferent to the charred bodies it left behind it.

THE VIDEO CAMERA had been listlessly continuing its examination of the canths, and regretting the necessity of having been left behind, when it first became aware of the commotion amidst the canths. They were jittery, and seemed to be milling around by the ticket office. It was clear that something was very wrong. The Xianthan ticket collector had come out from his cabin, and was unsuccessfully trying to calm them down.
 

The globe, blended so that the ticket collector wouldn’t spot it, went in amongst the canths, and tried to find out exactly what the matter was, but there was no visible cause of their discomfort, yet they were becoming more and more edgy. They were dancing worriedly on their toes and nickering in anxiety.

Back in the small spaceship in orbit about Xiantha, the visitor decided to concentrate his mind. He was telepathic, after all, and that would help to pass the time until the others came down. He was mildly interested in these animals, which, though not particularly intelligent, showed unmistakable signs of being able to utilize quantum non-locality. He tried idly to tune in to them, knowing that if they were upset about something, he would find it much easier, they would be more propense to transmit their distress openly.

What he ‘saw’ galvanized him into action. There were clear pictures of Grace being held against her will, less clear ones of the orthogel entity having lost his coherence, very clear pictures of what was about to happen to Grace, and where, and a definite need for immediate action if something were to be done in the time he had before it happened. He flashed a message back to the canths to let them know somebody else was aware of the problem, and thought, as fast as he could.

His first thought was to contact Arcan, who could have saved her in a heartbeat – but he could get no response from the orthogel entity on Valhai. Atheron must somehow have managed to infect both the part of Arcan on Xiantha and the main orthogel lake on Valhai. The visitor thought that the antidote they had developed would have saved Arcan’s life, but there was no telling how long it would take him to overcome the effects.

No, the only way Grace could be saved was if he himself acted, though how he could do that was not so clear. He could send the video camera up to the next stop, but it would not be able to function in such a strong electrical storm. Which left him only one possible course of action. He would have to go himself. He should be able to reach the area in time. He was in a very low orbit, as usual – it helped to release and recapture the video cameras he used to examine the worlds he traveled to. But, even if he did manage to reach her in time, the chances of saving Grace were remote. The temperature outside would be sufficient to freeze her to death if she were exposed for any long period, and although he might be able to stop her fall, and might be able to shield her from the wind of her fall, there was nothing he could do about the temperature, except take her lower as fast as he could.

He thought some more. She would reach some sort of a terminal velocity very quickly, probably somewhere just short of the speed of sound at that height, and with that strength of atmosphere. Falling lower would actually slow her down, perhaps to even a third of that value. So, if he were going to do something it didn’t really matter where he did it, so long as it gave him time to slow her fall with a deceleration her weak body could stand. In fact, the lower the better, because the faster she fell through the sub-zero section, the less likely she was to die.

His calculations positioned him under Lightning Corner fairly comfortably; he was in orbit some 60 miles above that spot, and he could easily cover that distance in the time his informants told him he still had. No, the problem was that his ship would not be able to maintain a thrust of the magnitude necessary to slow such a fall for very long, and that he would be unable to return to space afterwards. His ship had never been designed for planetary landings; he was meant only to maintain fairly energy-saving orbits.

The visitor hesitated for a few moments, wondering just what to do. If he asked permission from the Dessites it would be refused. They would see no sense in saving the life of a member of a 3b species, it would be beyond their comprehension. No, they would forbid him to participate in such an undertaking. It would be the end of his space mission, and it might well be the end of him, if they decided to terminate his contract prematurely. He had already been sentenced to termination once his mission was over, but that date could well be brought forward for such disobedience as this. On the other hand, he had promised the orthogel entity to watch over his 3b friends, and a promise to a 2b entity was of the utmost importance. Then, too, he found the Grace 3b quite an entertaining animal. She was a kind creature, who had worried over his own comfort more than once. It would be a hard thing to sit by and watch her destroyed.

So the decision, he found, had made itself. His thought processes had put the little ship into action as he was still thinking about it, and already it was angling down into the atmosphere. He would have to allow time for the fuselage to cool, he realized, or he would fry his intended patient instead of rescuing her. That would be another reason to leave the proposed rescue as late as he could.

The little craft was already a trail of light from the mesosphere and into the stratosphere of Xiantha. If the occupants of the cages had looked up at that moment they would have seen something like a shooting star dropping towards them. It hurtled headlong into the ever more populated wisps of air, until the whole of the outer plating shone.

The visitor timed his descent carefully. He needed enough time at the eight mile height to make sure the metal hull cooled sufficiently, but he could not afford to use up all the fuel he had available on hovering there for very long. He made the mental calculations quickly, efficiently. Now he was committed to the rescue operation he was able to calculate the odds coldly. He had cut off all contact with Dessia deliberately; it would not do to have them interfering at this stage. There would be time enough to hear their reactions when he was forced to reopen communication; no traveler could cut himself permanently off from the Dessites.

SO WHEN GRACE was pushed off the Lightning Corner platform, she was not completely alone at the twenty mile height. She couldn’t have seen the visitor if she had tried, but he was hovering not a hundred metres away.
 

Unfortunately he was unable to see her either, and the instruments he had on board were nowhere near good enough to pick up one life sign amidst all the electromagnetic chaos reigning in Lightning Alley. The visitor, not prone to emotions, felt suddenly flat. He had made some life-changing decisions himself to get this far, and it was annoying to find he had overlooked a crucial detail.

He broadcast an irate blast of frustration without knowing, and found – to his surprise – that the canths were listening. They plunged and tossed their heads, he could feel, and then there was a moment’s stillness in them, and they paused, allowing one clear ‘voice’ to come through. The visitor was able to identify Grace’s canth, which was somehow in tune with her, and able to pinpoint her position for him. The visitor latched eagerly onto this signal, and the other canths amplified it for him as soon as they felt his need. He knew, then, where Grace was.

He angled the spaceship down again, heading for the mental vector he had for her, calculating at the same time, both the point of intersection and her terminal velocity at that point so that he could power down the small ship to match her speed. At the same time he had to concentrate on the signal from the canths, and try to superimpose that mental position with a real position which his instruments could give him. It was a nightmare, and the visitor really began to doubt his sanity. The possibilities of pulling off something like this were tiny, a probability of less than 0.02, he calculated. This was not a logical operation for a 2a species. He wondered, with the microscopic part of his brain not already involved in lengthy calculations, why he had undertaken such an improbable mission.

As he got closer to Grace’s position he had to be even more careful. Two metres too high and he would himself cut her to bits. With infinite care, the spaceship edged underneath her position, matching the vector with hers, until the point-like mental image of her was directly above the ship.

The visitor applied a smidgeon more thrust, slowing his own vehicle slightly, and waited, still keeping his mind’s eye on the exact position of the girl. It was like trying to catch an egg with a magmite net, he thought. Any miscalculation on his part and the girl would be triturated on his fuselage. He intensified even more the connexion with the canths, anxious not to fail at this stage. He hoped her own canth knew exactly where the girl was – there was only a margin of error of centimetres.

He had a long few seconds’ wait and then, at last, he felt – with his mind, not with the controls – that the girl had landed reasonably gently on the ship. She was approximately positioned in the middle, but he hoped that she would soon wake up and so be able to keep herself centred on the curved plating. She had been falling now for nearly four minutes, and ought to recover consciousness shortly, if she hadn’t already. The air down here would be much more acceptable to her lung necessity, he thought.

The visitor now began to apply a slow but steady upward thrust to slow them both down. He had very little time, but as the tiny ship obeyed him, that time began to expand. Finally, at about a hundred metres above the ground, he was down to a reasonably sedate velocity.
 

Even so, it was a dangerous landing. He had no room for manoeuvre, any lateral movement at all could shake loose his precarious passenger. He couldn’t risk moving into the night side of the Xianthe, where he himself would be more protected. Yet he was coming down directly onto the waiting canths. He flashed a mental warning to the herd, which instantly dispersed, and then he brought the tiny spacecraft to a soft, belly-flop landing designed to bring Grace to the ground without a jar. Even so, his passenger was jerked off the smooth metal plating, and tumbled down to the ground, where she lay like a broken doll. The canths gathered around her in a circle, regarding the crumpled figure stolidly, and now calm once again.

WHEN THE CAGE they were traveling in came around into Lightning Alley its occupants were silent once again. Ledin, who had his face in his hands, saw nothing of the impressive lightning bolts as they rained down on the safely insulated cage. For a moment he thought he had received a faint wisp of a message, and felt a tendril of some sort of hope that fizzled away soon after. He looked up for a moment, to see if any of the others had noticed anything. The Xianthan met his gaze, and Cimma had her eyes open too. But they said nothing to each other. What was there to say?

At last the cage came slowly into the Lightning Corner platform. And they found themselves looking at the grim results of opening a protected metal cage in full electric storm. There was a collective gasp of horror.

The doors opened slowly, unaware of the drama, and exposed them all to an oxygen-thin atmosphere. Six leapt for the failsafe switch, and jabbed at it frantically several times.
 

“The protection is broken,” he muttered. “We must get our own gate closed, or we could be struck by lightning too!”

The metal gates were closing much too slowly for their comfort, and nobody was able to breathe until they finally shut with a clang, and the rexelene doors had swished to a close too. Then they let out their breath, and began to speak, all at the same time.

“Is that …?”

“Neither of those can be Grace, can it?”

“Do you think…?”

“A nasty way to die.”

Ledin had moved to the front edge of the cage, and with the exceptional sight which had made him into such an excellent pilot, was examining the charred remains.

“The bodies are those of Xenon and Atheron,” he determined finally. “I can see the remnants of the shoes they were wearing. There … there is no sign of G-Grace. They must have been struck by lightning when they pushed her out. Serves them right! I hope they suffered greatly!”

“Unlikely,” opined the Xianthan. “Lightning as strong as you get around here kills very quickly.”

“Pity,” said Six, regarding the corpses indifferently now he knew that neither of them was Grace. “They deserved a long and painful death, that’s for sure.”

Cimma was crying softly, and Diva had moved over to huddle near her, to try to comfort her. Six and Ledin looked at each other, and they both swallowed, and then looked away. It was clear that there had been no escape for Grace.