Beowulf's Children (23 page)

"Joe? That wind is really coming up. Double-check the moorings, will you? And get a wind warning down to Heorot."

Joe dropped a length of singed tubing, and grunted in disgust. "You know that they're off-line. We can get them in an emergency, but that's about it."

"All right-well, I hope they've got the skeeter sheltered."

"You know Justin. But I'll go make a check."

Linda kissed Joe, and he looked almost surprised. "I'm just going to Robor," he murmured against her lips.

"Do I need a reason these days?" she asked.

"Never." He kissed her again, and started off across the glade.

"Will you guys stop the mush?" Edgar said disgustedly.

"No respect," Linda clucked. "Remember-I'm going to be your mother one day soon."

"Hey. You know, one of a mother's duties is to find mates for her offspring."

"I told you what to do about that problem."

"Sure. I'll keep trying. Linda, Dad says it wasn't sabotage. You agree?"

"Yes."

"Say that again?"

"Yes! I agree it was not sabotage. Edgar, that wind is really howling now, it's getting hard to hear." She put her hand across her nose in a vain attempt to filter the dust. "It's as if the coal had little flecks of dynamite-" She stopped. Some creature was howling in torment.

"What's that?" Edgar shouted.

"I don't know-" Across the clearing, the dogs were leaping and biting-at the dust. Joe slapped at his chest and neck and face. At first she thought it some kind of joke... some kind of crazy dance.

The wind was stronger now, driving a wall of dust before it. She coughed and stepped out of the shelter, trying to see more clearly. Her smile was dead on her lips, her laughing questions stillborn in her throat. "Joe... " And then she screamed.

"Linda? Dad?" Edgar's voice sounded urgent. "Alert! All stations alert! Base Two is in trouble!"

She was blind before she quite realized that she was in trouble. Agony shrieked in her eye sockets, and she slapped her hands up to cover them. Blood slicked her palms, she felt the hollows where her eyes should have been, and the backs of her hands were being shredded.

The world was consumed with agony. The wind roared in her ears. She had time to scream "Joe!" and then the pain was at her lips, her ‘tongue, and she was gagging on blood. Some mass staggered into her, and she knew it was Joe, darling Joe, loving Joe, groaning like a thing that had never known human consciousness. The dogs' barking had transformed into an endless, pain-racked howl.

In Camelot, bedroom alarms shrieked, and the streets were filled with sprinting bare feet. Hastily armed grendel guns pointed in all directions, and found nothing. There was no threat to be seen.

By now the image from Satellite 16 was being piped through Geographic, enhanced, and relayed to Camelot's communications center. The image was expanded again, and then again, until it seemed the scene was no more than a hundred yards distant... but it was all a blur, just textures shifting through fog.

Hendrick Sills was first into the center. "What's the alarm, Edgar?"

There was panic in Edgar's voice. "I thought it was a dust storm! They come through there regular, no problem, but the dogs started barking and Linda was screaming and now I can't hear anything, and I can't see anything, and my God!"

"Get hold of yourself," Zack said. "Dust storm. Rain?"

"No, no rain, it's a dry hot wind, sirocco wind. Stronger than they usually get, but-Zack, I can't hear anything. They were screaming, and now they don't answer! What do I do?"

"Keep watching. Can you zoom in?"

"Trying. There, the dust is thinning out-"

The image focused. Edgar's voice dropped to a whisper. "Oh, my God."

Two human shapes and a dog shape were writhing on the ground. "Dad!

Linda!"

The wind howled, and under the wind they could hear a baby's wail. The image cleared for an instant. Shapes thrashed, slowed, then faded into a fog of blowing dust. Someone muttered a prayer; then the room was still. Half a world away, two people that they knew and loved were dying in agony, and there was nothing that they could do to help.

Linda was beyond pain. She felt her eyes eaten away, the flesh etched from her bones.

With the very last strength in her body, her blood-slicked fingers closed on Joe's misshapen, lifeless hand. And her last thought was Cadzie...

She heard her baby crying, crying, crying...

And then there was nothing at all.

PARADISE LOST

Nature is usually wrong.

JAMES ABBOTT MCNEILL WHISTLER, Ten O'clock

Jessica snuggled next to Aaron in their sleeping bag. She was only half awake until the whitter of skeeter blades roused her from her reverie.

She had barely wedged her eyes open in time to see it thump to ground, landing too damn fast. Justin leapt out, and ran toward them. "Emergency, dammit!" he screamed. He was bare-chested, wearing only briefs. A surge of adrenaline whiplashed her into wakefulness. Aaron was already scrambling to his feet.

All right, so Camelot had gotten nervous. This wasn't the first time the Star Born had taken themselves off line. She knew that they'd catch hell for that one day, and just maybe that day had come...

She struggled her clothes on, and hopped out toward the skeeter. Sprawled around the dead fire, the other Pranksters were hauling themselves toward consciousness.

"What's the problem?"

Justin looked pale. "Edgar rang through. He was on-line with Linda and Joe. They got cut off. Move it!"

The piled into the skeeter. Aaron had time to yell "Trouble at Deadwood!" to Toshiro, who was up and pulling on a knit shirt. "We're going up. Get back to camp and watch the Scouts. Set a defensive perimeter. Keep them back in the cave. Interlocking fields of fire and no mistakes."

"Got it."

Jessica buckled in. "Any sounds, messages, images at all?" she asked.

"Screams," Justin said tightly. "Just screams."

"Anything on the motion sensors? The thermals?"

Unbidden, Edgar's voice came over the radio. "Nothing. We've got Sat Twelve locked on, and I don't see anything. I think they're dead."

They rose up out of the glade, in toward Heorot. There they dropped down for a moment. Jessica and Aaron took the other skeeter, and she had them airborne in fifteen seconds. Their ascending spiral twisted the glade, the valley, and the surrounding mountains into a dizzying whirl.

No one spoke as the skeeters leveled out and dove, crossing the two kilometers to the camp in about ninety seconds. Robor's Chinese-dragon shape leered up at them, its red fringes rippling slowly in the wind.

There was nothing. Nothing...

And then Jessica whispered, "Oh dear God." Bones. Human bones. Animal bones. Aaron said, "I see three skeletons. Two human. One canine." His voice still held a machine precision. He was speaking for Cassandra, for Edgar back at Camelot. For whoever might have tapped into the line, and was now sick with concern.

Her mind reeled. Grief and fear and raw hatred boiled within her like lava. Her vision clouded. She gripped the handbar in front of her as if a moment's loss of concentration would tumble her off the edge of the world.

Justin's voice was arctic. "What do you see on the movement sensors?

Any thermal flares?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing," Aaron agreed.

Justin's voice was labored. He sounded like some kind of animal straining in a trap. "I don't see any sign of the baby. Of Cadzie."

A trapdoor opened in the back of her mind. She felt herself slide a little ways down, then clawed her way back up. What waited at the bottom of that pit bore fangs and claws, and was ravenously hungry.

"No sign. Not yet." And what she didn't say, what she couldn't say, was Cadzie is barely a mouthful for a grendel.

They hovered almost directly over the glade. Skeletons. The mining dome. A dozen yards distant, the refinery shack. The dirigible. And that was all.

Aaron snapped out the trance first. "Cassandra, replay Sat Twelve, during or just prior to the incident."

Jessica slipped on a pair of goggles, and watched while the images played. Running, struggling. A dusty windstorm. Death.

Bones.

"Oh, sweet Jesus," Jessica muttered. "That was no grendel."

"It wasn't anything." Aaron was shaken. "It was invisible."

Camelot was awake, and gathering in the main hall.

Carlos tore at a scrap of ragged flesh at the corner of his thumb. The satellite feed kept playing it over and over again, enhanced with thermals, to full magnification, giving the illusion that the couple was no more than a hundred meters away.

Impossibly far away. A world away.

Justin's voice came over the speaker. "This is Skeeter Two. We are holding at seventy feet. We see skeletons. There's nothing alive down there that we can see. Nothing we can do to help them. Need instructions."

Zack touched his collar. "Moskowitz. Did you say skeletons?"

"Yes, sir. Two human skeletons. One canine," Aaron said.

Zack was unnaturally calm. "We copy that. Skeletons. Satellite inspection detects nothing."

"Motion sensors detect nothing," Aaron said. "And we see nothing—wait one. There is a small skeleton in the rocks about twenty meters above the camp."

"Human?"

"No, sir, too small. Now I see another. There are two small skeletons.

I would say Joeys from the size."

"You say there's nothing to be done for Joe and Linda?"

"That's my best judgment," Aaron said. "And there's no sign of the baby. "

Zack looked around. "Where's Colonel Weyland?"

"On the way."

"Hold off on landing for a minute, please."

There was no answer. "Please continue reports," Zack said. More colonists streamed into the hall, their voices a roiling cacophony.

"Wha—"

"The hell—"

"Will somebody tell me—"

"Who's up there—"

Still no answer. Zack lowered his voice. "I know that you can hear me. Hold off on landing until we have an assessment—" Carlos tried to imagine what Justin was feeling now. In one sense, he couldn't possibly know. In another, he understood precisely. The entire colony was family, their lives linked as closely as the fingers of a hand. But Linda was Justin's kid sister.

All of their lives, the Second had heard horrific stories. But a thousand stories pale in comparison to a single scream of agony.

The crowd behind them parted as Cadmann Weyland stormed in. He was red-faced, unshaven, and flinty-eyed. His beige coveralls were wrinkled and stained, as if he had thrown on yesterday's clothes.

He glared at the screen, his face as solid and square as stone. "What happened?"

"Something attacked the minehead," Zack said. "No one knows what."

The second image was a skeeter-eye view of the same scene. Skeeter ID number and pilot registration were etched at the bottom of the screen.

"Justin," Cadmann barked. "Who's up there with you?"

A long pause.

"Justin! Answer me, dammit." They didn't hear a sound at first, and then Justin's voice rang down to them.

"Jessica. And Aaron." Thank God, Cadmann thought. Jessica and Justin could handle their own, but Aaron Tragon was one of the best shots he had ever seen.

"We're going down. Dad."

"Hold off on that. We're still sweeping the area."

"We don't see anything. The motion sensors don't pick anything up—"

"They didn't pick anything up twenty minutes ago, either!"

Mary Ann had made her way to Cadmann's side. Her face looked as if emotion had been pressed from it like oil from an olive. "Linda? Is Linda all right—"

Cadmann squeezed her hand. "I don't think so. Justin, you're there. Do you see the baby?"

"Baby!" Mary Ann shouted. "Justin, go find him!"

"Cadmann." It was Aaron's voice this time. "You're wrong. The sensors did pick up motion before. Wind. Dust storm. Probably some kind of mineral powder, something that confused the sensors. We have to go down."

"Roger. Be careful. Secure Robor first."

"We will."

"Is that safe?" Zack demanded.

"They're on the spot," Cadmann said. "And without Robor they can't get the Scouts off the mainland."

"Oh—"

"Cadmann, what's happened to Linda?" Mary Ann wailed. "Justin, where's the baby!"

"Father," Jessica said. He almost didn't recognize the voice. He had never heard his daughter sound like that before. "I don't see Cadzie." Her voice was beyond ice, somewhere out in deepest space. The clearing juddered on the wall. "Father, that's Linda down there. And Joe. They're dead. But one dog is missing, and I don't see Cadzie. " He was searching for something to say. What hope was there for his grandson's survival? Almost none. And yet, if there was any chance at all...

"All right," he whispered. "We'll keep watch from here." Then he turned, and held Mary Ann. When it came right down to it, there was really nothing else to do.

Justin watched Jessica touch down without a bump, taking that last couple of inches as carefully as a man stepping onto thin ice.

Aaron dismounted, carrying a grendel gun. Jessica bore a regular hunting rifle, its safety off.

Justin hovered overhead, watching. He wiped his moist hands nervously on his pants. He strove to starve his imagination, to keep focused on each individual moment. Now and Now and Now, and after that, the Now to come.

One careful step at time, Jessica and Aaron Tragon crossed the twenty feet between the autogyro and the skeletons. After each single footstep, she stopped to sense her surroundings. There was no sound except the steady shoop shoop of Justin's skeeter blades above them.