Horizon Storms (55 page)

“Just watch out that you don’t run smack into the star, BeBob. Sometimes you don’t pay enough attention to your piloting.”

“I resent that, Rlinda.”

“But I don’t hear you arguing.”

She adjusted course, and Davlin leaned close to the cockpit windows.

Viewing through infrared filters, they could still see fading colors as the planet’s thermal energy bled into space. With the sun’s nuclear fires extinguished, the whole Crenna system was nothing more than a cooling corpse, a dark ball in space. The planet’s atmosphere had already frozen out; ice sheets were piled on top of shattered ground upheavals. The air had condensed into carbon dioxide snow. All lakes and streams were obliterated, every living thing wiped out on the surface.

Davlin shook his head. “I hope the people are still alive down there.”

“How long did you say this ice age has lasted?” Roberts transmitted.

“Less than two weeks. There’s still heat emanating from the planet itself, and the star’s not entirely cold. Overall there’s about one percent of the former flux.”

“Good thing we brought our shovels,” Rlinda said. “Tell me where to go, Davlin.”

Before departing, he had placed a locator beacon with a long-lived battery near the hatch that covered the tunnels. He had never mentioned it to Mayor Ruis, not wanting the people huddled in their warrens to realize how bad the outer environment would get. He scanned through frequency bands and finally located the faint pinging of the locator beacon, much weaker than he’d expected. To his dismay, he realized that the beacon itself was buried under deep ice.

“I’ll project a bull’s-eye for you.”

They descended through swirling air that had frozen into a slurry of snow and carbon dioxide flakes. Davlin operated the comm systems.

“Crenna colony, this is Davlin Lotze.” He waited, but heard only static.

“Mayor Ruis, are you still receiving? I’ve brought help.” He tried several times, equally unsuccessful.

Rlinda looked at her equipment and shook her head. “Oh, don’t read too much into it, Davlin. The storms and the snow are building up a significant EM disturbance, and a normal signal might not be able to punch through all that ice.”

When the two ships reached position, Davlin peered down at the swirling layers of ice and frozen atmosphere. He couldn’t even see the protrusions of his hangar or any of the town’s buildings.

“Shall we sprinkle some salt?” Roberts joked.

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“If it’s frozen atmosphere, there’ll be a very low volatilization point.

We can melt it with the exhaust from our engines,” Rlinda said. “Don’t have to be pretty about it.” She dropped the Curiosity closer for a slow landing and let the hot vented gases blast geysers of steam from a wide area near the sealed vault door. Drifting up and down to hold her position, in half an hour she had cut a significant divot, then withdrew to let the Blind Faith take its turn in the small zone, evaporating more of the thick frozen shield.

Before long, they had excavated a large crater around the sealed metal cap.

“Now for the next problem,” Davlin said. “We were in such a hurry to get the Crenna colonists underground, to build a safe haven that would keep them warm, we just installed that single vault lid—not a sophisticated airlock.”

“Can they survive long enough to make it into our ships?” Rlinda asked.

Davlin shook his head. “There’s no air. It’s all frozen out.”

“Well, then, that is interesting,” she said.

“There’s no tube to connect the ship and the hatch,” BeBob said.

“How many extra environment suits do we have?” Davlin asked.

“I’ve got three aboard, and BeBob has three on the Blind Faith.”

“Four,” the other captain transmitted.

“Okay.” Davlin tapped his fingers on the panel. “You have an emergency shelter dome, right?”

Rlinda nodded. “It’s in the crash kit, but it only holds a couple of people.”

“So, we erect and pressurize the tent as an airtight bubble atop the hatch and keep all the suits inside, like a small airlock chamber. Then when we crack the hatch lid from below, a couple of the colonists can come out and suit up. They’ll go to the ships six or seven at a time.”

“A hundred and thirty people? That’ll take days for suiting up, pressurizing, and repressurizing,” Roberts said.

“Then it’ll have to take days.” Davlin flashed Rlinda an uncharacteristic grin. “But it’ll work.”

They all suited up and worked together outside, surrounded by the towering ice walls of the narrow borehole they had blasted down to the

vault lid. They wrestled out the large flexible structure designed as a sealed dome for short-term survival in an inhospitable space environment. Then they covered the region of the lid and anchored all the surrounding points.

Davlin took one of his heavy tools and banged loudly on the metal cap, hoping to signal the colonists who had not been able to read his transmissions. Before long, he felt a frantic vibrating response, people hammering back from the other side. “At least somebody’s alive.”

Still suited, Branson Roberts came through the sphincter door, hauling the three extra suits from the Curiosity. He and Davlin would make a second trip to bring the four others from the Blind Faith. Rlinda set up heaters inside the survival dome.

“This’ll be a tedious and not very dramatic ending to our rescue operation,” Roberts said.

“Saving people one step at a time is exciting enough for me.” Rlinda playfully punched Davlin in the shoulder. “You’re pretty compassionate for a spy, Mr. Lotze.”

Without answering, he worked the frozen hatch controls. When he finally succeeded in opening the heavy metal lid, several familiar colonists burst out, grinning. Mayor Ruis was one of the first, throwing his arms around Davlin and giving him a hug.

The greeting unsettled him, but Davlin had no regrets.

945ORLI COVITZ

Starting with the framework of the old Klikiss city, the new colonists swiftly converted their temporary camp into a secure settlement on Corribus. It was a whole new world to tame. So much basic work remained to be done that the settlers had little time just to explore.

Orli, though, considered it part of her job.

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Years ago xeno-archaeologists had gone through the alien ruins, gathering as much material as possible before their funding ran out. Later, Hud Steinman and other Hansa scouts had done a preliminary investigation of the area. However, Orli knew there were hundreds of nooks and crannies where no previous investigator had ever set foot.

Though her father was the one who someday expected to find lost riches, some of his persistent imagination had rubbed off on her. What if the Klikiss had hidden records or buried treasure during their last battle in the granite-walled canyon?

When she slipped off to explore, Orli left her furry cricket in its cage.

Her father had taken his shift in the listening station at the communications tower, where he was probably passing the time by dabbling with strange ideas for inventions. . . .

She went to where the canyon narrowed and the half-melted granite walls rose sheer and steep. Irregular mineral concentrations within the cracks had, over millennia, seeped out and grown into blocky crystals of alum, like stacked cubes of murky glass. They spangled the cliffsides like strands of rough-cut diamonds. In her original notation, Margaret Colicos had poetically described the site as “the mountains weeping crystal blood.” Margaret had wondered if the placement was some sort of message laid down by the Klikiss, or an integrated circuit patterned along the granite walls, but analysis showed that the crystals had grown long after the devastating attack vitrified the stone.

Now when Orli looked at the lumps extending up the sheer wall, she saw them as convenient handholds, a stepladder that could carry her up to the inaccessible cracks and niches high in the rockface.

She scrambled up, stepping on the crystals and grabbing with her hands to move her body higher. She grinned to think she was reaching places the archaeological expeditions could never have mapped. Margaret and Louis Colicos—as well as Hud Steinman—were old people. They would not have tried anything so physically demanding or risky.

Halfway up, she paused to look down, then realized that was not a good idea. The canyon floor was a long, dizzying way below her. The rest of the sheer cliff rose above her, and the lumps of alum crystal now seemed tiny and unstable. If she let go, if she fainted, the fall would be a straight, swift plunge to certain death.

Swallowing hard, Orli decided to look up and forward and not bother to glance back down. She had her eye on a black vertical notch half-hidden in a fold in the cliff. It might once have been a large cave opening, but the intense heat of ancient blasts had folded the granite down so that it drooped over the doorway like a partial curtain.

By now she was tired of climbing. When she reached the right height, she saw what she was looking for and started to work her way over to it.

One foot slipped on the slick, smooth surface of a tilted alum block, but she caught herself by grabbing a sharp edge of rehardened granite. Breathing hard, she squeezed her body into the dark cave.

Because many of the rooms in the Klikiss city were half-collapsed and dark, all the new colonists carried small handlights. Orli crawled until she reached what was obviously a spacious chamber, then fumbled in her pocket. Now that her sore hands were free, she switched on the illumination. Light flowed out, splashing on the cave walls.

Here the rock was rough-hewn pristine granite, not flash-softened like the outer cliffs, but the chamber was too perfectly symmetrical, too out of place high up in the middle of a granite cliff, to have been formed naturally. She imagined an army of workers—the insectoid Klikiss?—chopping out a spherical room five meters across. But why so high up in the cliff?

She shone her light on the rough ceiling and the far walls, searching for tunnels or exits, but found only the strange, weblike Klikiss writing, hieroglyphics and equations that spiraled outward from a central point.

When she pointed the handlight toward the dusty floor, she gasped.

The last reports Margaret Colicos had transmitted contained images of a mummified Klikiss body found on Rheindic Co. Now, seeing the withered corpse on the floor, the girl instantly recognized the leathery cockroach shape of a Klikiss—this one no longer intact. Its body had been torn apart, its exoskeleton exploded from the inside, as if numerous swallowed land mines had detonated. Its limbs and wing coverings looked chewed, as if something had torn its way out from within the corpse. Some terrible parasite native to Corribus? A predator?

Inside the chamber, the shadows seemed darker, the temperature colder. She listened intently, but heard only the pounding of her pulse in her ears, her own ragged breathing, and the faint whistle of a breeze outside the cave opening.

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Beside the alien’s body Orli found another wrecked form, this one larger and darker, as if coated with oily shadows. It had the same basic shape, but made out of metal and obsidian-colored ceramics—one of the Klikiss robots!

The beetlelike machine had also been torn apart, just like the Klikiss body. Its components were smashed and pummeled. Barely recognizable scraps lay strewn around the chamber floor, as if an army of rodents had toyed with a pile of treats. Pieces of near-indestructible exoskeleton were shattered, mangled, discarded like garbage. She couldn’t imagine the strength such a thing would have required.

Though this had taken place thousands of years ago, the sheer violence of the scene resounded like a shout in the claustrophobic silence. Something awful had destroyed both the ancient Klikiss creature and the powerful robot. What sort of predator would strike both the Klikiss and their machines?

Orli shuddered, and the rock-walled chamber seemed much smaller now, the air thicker. Backing away, she bumped into the rough rock of the far wall and let out a yelp of fear. This was not the kind of mysterious treasure she had hoped to find.

To calm herself, she drew several deep breaths and tried to hum one of the tunes she had made up on her synthesizer strips. She told herself she had nothing to worry about. Everything that might have attacked the Klikiss had been gone from Corribus for millennia.

The rational part of her mind realized that what she had found in this cave might be a truly significant archaeological find. But though her head was clear and her thoughts perfectly logical, her heart still hammered in her chest. She wanted to be out of the sheltered cliff chamber she had discovered.

Orli suspected it would be a very long climb back down to the colony settlement.

P R I M E D E S I G N A T E T H O R ’ H

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955PRIME DESIGNATE THOR’H

After his uncle’s startling imitation of the Mage-Imperator’s ascension ceremony, Thor’h was glad to turn his abilities to arranging for the creation of an opulent chrysalis chair for the new self-proclaimed Imperator.

By now, surely his father had sensed something amiss here at Hyrillka.

The Prime Designate instructed Hyrillka’s best artisans, rememberers, and sculptors to design a fittingly extravagant vessel for the true leader. The craftsmen and artists worked with absolute dedication, refusing to rest or take sustenance until they were finished.

Along its curved sides inlaid with jewels, crystals, and precious metals were scenes from the Saga of Seven Suns, tales of great Mage-Imperators from Rusa’h’s honored lineage. The events Thor’h had chosen to depict were taken from the mists of the past, with no connection to the unpleasant present, the misdirection and corruption his own father had laid upon the Ildiran people.

After his giddy day of celebratory shiing consumption, Rusa’h had bound the disjointed thism of the Hyrillkan people to himself, forming a tight new web completely separate from the rest of the Ildirans. Hyrillka’s population followed the new Imperator’s every instruction, and any person who had accidentally or intentionally failed to ingest the potent stimulant drug was tracked down and forced to partake. Except for Pery’h, all of Hyrillka was now a single unified organism. Thor’h had willingly and joyously offered his own abilities to support his uncle’s rule.