Ship Who Searched (25 page)

“Struck” was the operative word, for a wall of wind and rain hit her skin hard enough to rattle her for a moment, and that was followed by a blast of lightning and thunder that shook Alex out of bed.

“What?” he yelped, coming up out of sleep with a shout. “How? Who?”

He shook his head to clear it, as another peal of thunder made Tia’s walls vibrate. “What’s going on?” he asked, as Tia sank landing-spikes from her feet into the ground beneath her, to stabilize her position. “Are we under attack or something?”

“No, it’s a storm, Alex,” she replied absently, making certain that everything was locked down and all her servos were inside. “One incredible thunderstorm. I’ve never experienced anything like it!”

She turned on her external cameras and fed them to her screens so he could watch, while she made certain that
she
was well-insulated against lightning strikes and that all was still well at the site. Alex wandered out into the main cabin and sat in his chair, awestruck by the display of raw power going on around them.

Multiple lightning strikes were going on all around them; not only was the area as bright as day, it was often brighter. Thunder boomed continuously, the wind howled, and sheets—no, entire linen-closets—of rain pounded the ground, not only baffling any attempt at a visual scan of the site, but destroying any hope of any other kind of check. With this much lightning in the air, there was no point even in trying a radio call.

“What’s happening down at the site?” Alex asked anxiously.

“No way of telling,” she said reluctantly. “The Exploration team went through these rains once already, so I guess we can assume that the site itself isn’t going to wash away, or float away. For the rest—the domes are insulated against lightning, but who knows what’s likely to happen to the equipment? Especially in all this lightning.”

Her words proved only too prophetic; for although the rain lasted less than an hour, the deluge marked a forty-degree drop in temperature, and the effects of the lightning were permanent.

When the storm cleared, the news from the site was bad. Lightning had not only struck the ward-off field generator, it had slagged it. There was nothing left but a half-melted pile of plasteel and duraloy. Tia didn’t see how one strike could have done that much damage; the generator must have been hit over and over. The backup was corroded beyond any repair, though Haakon-Fritz and Les labored over it for most of the night. Too many parts had been ruined—probably while it sat in its crate through who-knew-how-many transfers. Never once uncrated and checked—and now Doctor Aspen’s team paid the price for that neglect.

Tia consulted with Doctor Aspen in person the next morning. There was little sign of the damage from where they sat, but the results were undeniable. No ward-off generator. No protection from native fauna, from insectoids to the big canids. And if the huge grazers, the size of moose, were to become aggressive, there would be no way to keep them out of the camp. Ordinary fences would not hold against a herd of determined grazers; the last team had proved that.

“I don’t have a spare in the holds,” Tia told the team leader. “I don’t have even half the parts you need for the corroded generator. There were no storms like the one last night mentioned in the records of the previous team, but we should assume there are going to be more. How many of them can you handle? Winter is coming on, and I can’t predict what the native animals are going to do. Do you want to pull the team out?”

Doctor Aspen pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I can’t think of any reason why we should, my lady,” he replied. “The only exterior equipment that had no protection was the ward-off generator. The first team stayed here without incident all winter—there’s nothing large enough to be a real threat to us, so far as I can tell. We’ll have a few insects, perhaps, until first hard frost—I imagine those jackal-like beasts will lurk about and make a nuisance of themselves. But they’re hardly a threat.”

Alex, feet up on the console as usual, agreed with the archeologist. “I don’t see any big threat here, either. Unless lightning takes out something a lot more vital.”

Tia didn’t like it, but she didn’t challenge them, either. “If that’s the way you want it,” she agreed. “But we’ll stay until the rains are over, just in case.”

Stay they did; but that was the first and the last of the major storms. After the single, spectacular downpour, the rains came gently, between midnight and dawn, with hardly a peal of thunder to wake Alex. She had to conclude that the first storm had been a freak occurrence, something no one could have predicted, and lost a little of her ire over the lack of warning from the previous team.

But that still didn’t excuse the corroded generator.

Still, the weather stayed cold, and the rain left coatings of ice on everything. It would be gone by midmorning, but the difficulty in walking around the site meant that the team changed their working hours—beginning around ten-hundred and finishing about twenty-two-hundred. Despite his recorded disclaimer, Doctor Aspen insisted on working alongside his students, and no one, not even Haakon-Fritz, wanted him to risk a fall on the ice.

Meanwhile, Tia made note of a disturbing development. The sudden cold had sent most of the small game and pest animals into hiding or hibernation. That left the normally solitary jackal-dogs without their usual prey, and in what appeared to be seasonal behavior, they began to pack up for the winter, so that they could take down the larger grazers.

The disturbing part was that a very large pack began lurking around the camp.

Now Tia regretted her choice of landing areas. The site was between her and the camp; that was all very well, especially for observing the team at work, but the dogs were lurking in the hills around the
camp.
And with no ward-off generator to keep them out of it—

She mentioned her worry to Alex, who pointed out that the beasts always scattered at any sign of aggression on the part of a human. She mentioned it again to Doctor Aspen, who said the animals were probably just looking for something to scavenge and would leave the camp alone once they realized there was nothing to eat there.

She never had a chance to mention it again.

With two moons, both in different phases, the nights were never dark unless it was raining. But the floodlights at the site made certain that the darkness was driven away. And lately, the nights were never silent either; the pack of jackal-dogs wailed from the moment the sun went down to the moment the rains began. Tia quickly became an expert on what those howls meant; the yipping social-howl, the long, drawn-out rally-cry, and most ominous, the deep-chested hunting call. She was able to tell, just by the sounds, where they were, whether they were in pursuit, and when the quarry had won the chase, or lost it.

Tia wasn’t too happy about them; the pack numbered about sixty now, and they weren’t looking too prosperous. Evidently the activity at the site had driven away the larger grazers they normally preyed on; that had the effect of making all the smaller packs join up into one mega-pack—so there was always some food, but none of them got very much of it. They weren’t at the bony stage yet, but there was a certain desperate gauntness about them. The grazers they did chase were escaping five times out of six—and they weren’t getting in more than two hunts in a night.

Should I suggest that the team feed them? Perhaps take a grav-sled and go shoot something and drag it in once every couple of days? But would that cause problems later? That would be giving the pack the habit of dependence on humans, and that wouldn’t be good. Could they lure the pack into another territory that way, though? Or—would feeding them make them lose their fear of humans? She couldn’t quite make up her mind about that, but the few glimpses she’d had of the pack before sunset had put her in mind of certain Russian folktales—troikas in the snow, horses foaming with panic, and wolves snapping at the runners. Meanwhile, the pack got a little closer each night before they faded into the darkness.

At least it was just about time for the team to break off for the night. Once they were in their domes, they’d be safe.

As if in answer to her thought, the huge lights pivoted up and away from the site, as they were programmed to do, lighting a clear path for the team from the site to the camp. When everyone was safely in the domes, Les would turn them off remotely. So far, the lights alone had kept the jackal-dogs at bay. They lurked just outside the path carved by the lights, but would not venture inside.

As if to answer that thought, the pack howled just as the first of the team members emerged from the covered excavation area. It sounded awfully close—

Tia ran a quick infrared scan.

The pack
was
awfully close—right on the top of the hill to the right of the site!

The beasts stared down at the team—and the leader howled again. There was
no
mistaking that howl, not when all the rest answered it. It was the hunt-call. Quarry sighted; time to begin the chase.

And the leader was staring right at the archeologists. The team stared back, sensing that there was something different tonight. No one stirred; not archeologists, nor jackal-dogs. The beasts’ eyes glared red in the darkness, reflection from the work lights, but no less disturbing for having a known scientific explanation.

“Alex,” she said tightly. “Front and center. We have a situation.”

He emerged from his cabin as if shot from a gun, took one look at the screen, and pelted for the hold where they kept the HA grav-sled.

Then the pack poured down the hillside in a furry avalanche.

Haakon-Fritz took off like a world-class sprinter, leaving the rest behind. For all the attention that he paid them, the rest of his team might just as well have not existed.

Shellcrack! Aspen can’t run—

But Les and Treel were not about to leave Aspen to become the a la carte special; as if they had rehearsed the move, they each grabbed one arm and literally picked him up off his feet between them and started running. Fred and Aldon grabbed shovels to act as some kind of flank-guard. With the jackal-dogs closing on them with every passing moment, the entire group pelted off for the shelters.

They were barely a quarter of the way there, with the jackals halfway down the hill and gaining momentum, when Haakon-Fritz reached the nearest shelter. He hit the side of the dome with a crash and pawed the door open. He flung himself inside—

And slammed it shut; the red light coming on over the frame indicating that he had locked it.

“
Alex!
” Tia cried in anguish, as the jackal-dogs bore down upon their prey. “Alex,
do
something!” She had never felt so horribly helpless.

Grav-sleds made no noise—but they had hedra-players and powerful speakers, meant both to entertain their drivers and to broadcast prerecorded messages on the fly. A blast of raucous hard-wire shatter-rock blared out from beneath her—she got her underbelly cameras on just as Alex peeled out in the sled at top speed, music screaming at top volume.

The unfamiliar shrieks and howls behind them startled the pack for a moment, and they hesitated, then came to a dead halt, peering over their shoulders. The rock music was so unlike anything they had ever heard before that they didn’t know how to react; Alex plowed straight through the middle of them and they shied away to either side.

He was never going to be able to make a pickup on the five still running for their lives without the pack being on all of them—but while he was on the move with music caterwauling, the jackal-dogs hesitated to attack him. And while he was harassing them, their attention was on him, not on their quarry.

That must have been what he had figured in the first place—that he would startle them enough to give the rest of the team a chance to get to safety inside that second dome. While the archeologists ignored what was going on behind them and kept right on to the second shelter, Alex kept making dives at the pack—scattering them when he could, keeping the sled between them and the team. It was tricky flying—stunt-flying with a grav-sled, pulling crazy maneuvers less than a meter from the ground. Not a lot of margin for error.

He cornered wildly; rocking the sled up on one side, skewing it over in flat spins, feinting at the pack leader and gunning away before the beast had a chance to jump into the sled. Over the sound of the wild music, the warning signals and overrides screamed objection for what Alex was doing. Alex challenged the jackal-dogs with the only weapon he had; the sled. Tia longed for her ethological pack; still not approved for the Institute ships. With a stun-needler, they could have at least knocked some of the pack out.

The animals assumed that the attack was meant to drive them off or kill them. They must have been hungrier than any of them had guessed, for when nothing happened to hurt or kill any of the pack, they began making attempts to mob the sled, and they seemed to be trying to think of ways to pull it down.

Tia knew why, then, in a flash of insight. Alex had just gone from “fellow predator” to “prey”; the jackal-dogs were used to grazer-bulls charging them aggressively to try to drive them away. Alex was imitating the behavior of the bulls, though he did not know it—and in better times, the pack probably
would
have responded by moving to easier prey. But these were lean times, and any imitation of prey-behavior meant they would try to catch and kill what was taunting them.

Alex was now in real danger.

But Alex was a better flyer than Tia had ever thought; he kept the sled just out of reach of a strong jump, kept it moving in unpredictable turns and spins.

Then, one of the biggest beasts in the pack leapt—and landed, feet scrabbling on the back bumper of the sled.

“
Alex!
” Tia shrieked again. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw his danger.

He sent the sled into a spin; the sled’s protection overrides objected strenuously, whining as they fought him. The jackal-dog fought, too, hind-claws skidding against the duraloy of the bumper. Alex watched desperately over his shoulder as the beast’s claws found a hold, and it began hauling itself over the bumper toward him.