The Avengers of Carrig (10 page)

He stayed with it for a while. It was his only link with home. Meantime, he ate what was in his pouch, since the parradile had declined it.

That set a pattern fen: the next day, and those following, until they had begun to build the snow-wall across the sanctuary door and he realized this visit must be his last. He was afraid he might not reach the cave on this final day, for there was a blizzard from shortly after dawn until the afternoon, and the days were very short now.
The going was far too treacherous to think of trying to get back from the cave in the dark.

However, he seized his chance when the snow gave over for a while and made haste to bid his friend farewell for the winter.

The parradile, which by now had grown accustomed to his presence, gave a grunt of greeting the moment his head showed at the mouth of the cave. As he entered, going cautiously because it was so dim in here, it turned on its side in its big soft nest and raised one pinion to display what was hidden underneath.

A sleeping human being …

Afterward, Maddalena realized that she had been conscious during more of the disaster than she had believed at the time. She could remember practically nothing when she found herself lying three-quarters buried in a gigantic snowdrift, astonished that she was even alive; but that was the effect of shock, and the speed with which events had succeeded one another. Later, disconnected pictures, like dreams, pieced together in her mind and she was able to figure out what must have happened.

There was the pilot’s cry over the helmet phones announcing the presence of a ship in orbit around Fourteen, and Gus Langenschmidt’s horrified response. And the crash directly after. Presumably the orbiting ship had heard static on their subspace communicators; suspecting that it might be due to an approaching Patrol cruiser, they were on the alert. Directly they realized that their fears were confirmed, they holed the new arrival with a well-aimed projectile. It might have been a purpose-built missile, but it needed only to be a chunk of metal with a ferry-rocket
welded to it Somewhere or other she had picked up the information that a ferry-rocket pushing a ton of solid metal could break through the meteor-bumpers fitted to any vessel smaller than Sirius class, and a Patrol cruiser was half that size. Hitting at two or three hundred miles a second such a projectile would have opened the cruiser up like a split peascod.

There were more flash-pictures remembered from a little later, in the landing-craft: Gus Langenschmidt struggling with the controls to free them from the parent ship. A second jolting crash. The shock of looking back along the cabin and seeing a gash in their hull, and the rear edge of the gash glowing red-hot and melting in brilliant droplets as the thin outer air of the planet tore at it There was Langenschmidt giving her incisive orders, which she obeyed mechanically, although she barely heard them for the howl of air blasting across the opening in the hull, like wind in an organ pipe. The convincing feeling that she was jumping to her death, as she piled out of that same gap, when Langenschmidt had forced the speed down low enough, and plunged into a night black as space, where she felt as though the stars were below her and the white winter landscape above. Hitting the air-brake release on her suit then the trigger of the tiny altimeter-computer controlling the jets. The reaction-mass ran out when she was twenty feet above the ground, but it was deep snow she tumbled into and she was unhurt.

She lay there quiescent for perhaps an hour, until her hands and feet were numb even through the insulated suit. It took her that long to readjust to the fact that she was still alive, and afterward to convince herself that there was some point in getting up, even though she was alone on a strange planet with no resources bar what she had on, and her intelligence.

There was no telling what had become of Langenschmidt. She could not even recollect at first whether she had seen the landing-craft again as she hurtled ground-ward. The odds were strong that it had crashed. Perhaps Langenschmidt had baled out before it was too late; perhaps not. Certainly at the speed they had been traveling he would have landed hundreds of miles away even if he had left his control chair directly. She herself had jumped.

The cold and shock combined to make her mind sluggish. She had to struggle for a long time before she solved the simple problem of working herself out of the snowdrift in which she had sunk up to elbow-height. At last she realized that by moving with a kind of swimming motion she could prevent herself from sinking any deeper, and after a hundred yards of crawling she was able to stand up on solid rock. She looked about her. It was hard to accept that she was on a planet where human beings could live. The desolation was total.

She felt herself sliding toward hysteria as she strained her eyes into the dimness, and cast about desperately for a straw of hope. What light there was came from a moon about quarter-full and a fairly dense patch of stars showing through a rift in the otherwise general cloud-cover. There was also a distant furnace-like glow illuminating some of the clouds in the direction she was facing. Polar lights, presumably.

Her desperation lessened as she realized that if she could see enough of those stars she could determine at least a few facts about her predicament: where north lay, for example. They had provided pictures of the local star-patterns as part of her briefing. Was there a distinctive constellation up there in that small, clear patch?

For a long moment she was afraid there were too few stars to make sure. Then there came a hot surge of excitement and relief. She could see two of the three stars composing the Northern Triangle of this planet’s sky—unmistakable because there was the dim, fuzzy blur of a globular cluster exactly midway between them, a combination unique in either hemisphere.

So she could set her suit’s gyrocompass, at least. Fumbling with gauntleted fingers site freed the catch that held its float fixed when not in use, and heard its very faint humming begin immediately. It was powered by the warmth of her body inside the suit, and required no further attention.

Obviously the thing to do was to head south, failing any visible landmarks in this icy desert. The ship that brought the refugees here from Zarathustra had crashed in the Arctic, that was known; it had become the focus of some kind of mystical cult. When the refugees’ descendants migrated
away, the only direction they could logically take was to the south, to more fertile lands. Provided only that she was on the same side of the pole, there was a chance she might stumble across habitation fairly soon.

There was no point in just standing here, anyway. She considered waiting for daylight before making a start, but then realized that since she had been coming to the planet at the end of its northern summer, for all she knew the polar night at this latitude might have set in already. She might have to wait six months for the dawn.

She remembered to change from the suit’s canned air supply to filtered external air. She cursed the length of her hair, which had come loose from her lace cap and kept blowing across her mouth, and began to trudge.

At first she was buoyed up by recollection of her mission and the good resolutions she had made about reforming herself. There was no doubt that she had been hurled into the midst of a far worse crisis than Slee had ever dreamed of, a crisis involving strange orbiting ships where no ships ought to be, and a crew so terrified of the Patrol that they shot on sight. That spelled, to her, something at least on the scale of the Slaveworld case. She tried to lure herself onward with fantasies about how she would single-handedly foil the conspirators, be decorated and promoted and …

But the chill, and the sheer effort of plodding through the soft, dense snow, made those fantasies less and less credible. She dismissed them in favor of more mundane matters: what to do if she did find her way to human habitation. She would have to strip off and destroy her suit, for instance, with its too-advanced gadgetry; likewise she would have to invent a story to account for her presence here … What? Could she have been kidnapped by bandits? There were bandits on Fourteen, the reason why caravan masters like Trader Heron needed armed guards to convoy their merchandise. But were they to be found so far north? Probably not—there was no one here worth robbing. There was no one here, period.

Have to think of some other lie to tell …

Bit by bit, as she grew tired, her thoughts slowed down. A sharp headwind arose, and made her progress difficult with its blustering resistance. Every few moments a spray
of snow would dust across her helmet and blind her until she wiped it away with the back of her gauntlet. There was a mechanical wiper, but it had been intended only to cope with fine spatial dust, not clogging snowflakes, and anyway its movement was hypnotic and combined with weariness to dull her brain.

She had been walking so long she wanted to fall down and go to sleep; the only thing that prevented her was that a decision was needed to stop walking, and it was less demanding not to make any decisions. It began to occur to her that it was getting lighter over half the sky, and darker over the other half. This puzzled her for a while. At last she discovered that as the sun rose on one side of her, an ominous army of cloud was sweeping from the other. The wind grew fiercer still; she had the impression she was walking on one spot, as though on a treadmill, unable to go forward.

She put one foot on a patch of ice and sprawled headlong. Shock made her draw in a gasping breath, and with it came a tress of hair.

That was the straw which broke her patience. All self-control failed, and for the next few minutes she was weeping and railing and screaming curses—damning the Corps for bribing her with its promise of long life, damning Brzeska for not sending her back to Earth in disgrace, damning Langenschmidt for not crashing and killing them both instantly, damning the crew of the mysterious orbiting ship for firing on the cruiser, and most fervently of all, damning herself for being a weak-willed idiot.

While she was recovering from her hysterical despair, and finding that it had paradoxically done her good by clearing and calming her mind, the edge of the storm came upon her and she forced herself to her feet, aching from head to toe. If she stayed where she was, the blizzard would snow her under and she would die for sure.

The going here was tougher than ever, and it was not only because she was hindered by the wind, she suddenly discovered. She was breasting a steep rise in the ground, and the last few yards of the ascent seemed impossibly difficult.

She began muttering to herself. “From the top of the rise I’ll see a village. I’ll see people. At least I’ll see smoke
rising from a fire. Maybe there’ll be someone to come and meet me and help me the rest of the way. Maybe—”

She looked up as a movement caught her attention. For one instant, before a blasting shower of snow blinded her, she had a clear sight of something monstrous and winged that circled patiently overhead. Waiting.

In historical romances she had read about the vultures that would close on a dying traveler lost in the deserts of Earth; and she had seen tapes of how you could track the progress of a wolfshark through the shallow seas of Cyclops by the line of Jackson’s buzzards that formed over its murderous trail, and dived one by one to feast on the killer’s leavings. The images fused in her muddled mind. That thing! Up there! Waiting until she dropped in her tracks, and then …

She hurled herself wildly to the crest of the ridge, sobbing.

When she had clawed most of the snow off her faceplate, she saw that a few rays of sunlight were slanting between the clouds. She could make out that she was at one end of a quadrant of cliffs, low here, much higher at the other end. The face of the cliff was riddled with dark patches that might be the mouths of caverns. But she scarcely noticed them. For one of the sunrays fell directly upon a glistening domelike shape around the sides of which snow had drifted. Its top, however, was still being broomed clean by the wind, and that top gleamed as only one substance she knew could gleam—the chromium alloy plated four inches thick on the hull of a spacecraft.

At that, she lost her head utterly. She heard herself shout, “Gus!
Gus!”
And she strode forward.

There was nothing under her feet.

She half-slid, half-tumbled, fully twenty yards down the icy slope, her hair once again blocking her mouth so that she had to spit and splutter to cry out; and when she rolled over and the sky whirled into her field of vision, she saw the monstrous flying beast hurtling toward her, with its blood-red mouth gaping and its taloned feet poised for the strike.

It was upon her at the very moment when she sank helpless into a pile of soft snow, with her arms flailing and
her ears full of her own vain calls for help. A snapping grip like pincers clamped each of her upper arms and she was instantly whipped off the ground. To struggle was useless, as she learned immediately—the monster was incredibly strong, and no matter how violently she twisted, it kept on its imperturbable course toward the face of the cliff.

On a ledge outside the mouth of one of the many caves there, it set her down with such astonishing gentleness that she was taken aback. Then it planted its feet firmly, keeping its wings spread wide to prevent her jumping over the edge, and began to prod her with its blunt muzzle.

Willy-nilly she stumbled into the cave.

There was a sort of nest there, she found—soft, smelling pungently of its owner with a tang that penetrated even the filters of her suit. When she reached it, she waited passively, expecting the beast to attack her any moment now.

Instead, it backed past her and burrowed its body among the nest-material. When it was comfortable, it half-opened one enormous pinion and hooked it over her head, knocking her off-balance and forcing her to fall into the nest as well.

For a little she struggled; then, as exhaustion claimed her, she lost track of the terrifying predicament she was in and was aware only of how warm and restful this place was after the cruel snowscape she had crossed all night long, of how loudly the wind outside was howling, how …

Gus never mentioned this in his briefing about Fourteen …

And that was her last thought until she awoke hours later to find that a lean young man was staring at her from the entrance of the cave, his face pinched with cold and his mouth ajar with pure amazement.