The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (87 page)

I let out a roar and the echoes went careening around the temple. Even if I did sound like Schlacht, there’s a time for a leader to be a loudmouth, and this was it.

We had to abandon a lot of gear, but in twelve minutes all of us were jammed into the two shuttles and strapped down and they were moving. As we lifted off, I thanked whatever gods may be for the sang-froid of machinery, which is impossible to frighten. For an instant I was certain that our nose was going to impact the dome, but it didn’t, and below us the pale temple and the dark town flowed back and away.

For the first time I checked my watch. It said 0404. The storm was mostly over, and the clouds had scattered in time for a coldly brilliant moon to break through. Only it wasn’t a moon, it was the mother of all asteroids, and it flashed to the east, lighting up the little houses of the town. Below I could see neat patchwork fields and dark woods and the face of a ridge of high land topped with a brushy growth of ebony forest. The impact was going to be tremendous, so I ordered both Aleph and Beth platoons to shelter behind the ridge.

We descended and hovered close to the ground, turning on landing lights whose cold glare etched oddball trees without leaves but with spiral fronds coiling upward around the trunks. Eyes flickered in the light, little creatures and big, eyes green or yellow or red, a whole swarming ecology we’d never know anything about, because at that moment the sky lit up. The shock wave hit, first as a wall of compressed air and then as a tremor that shook the hills. The ground surged – I’d never seen anything like it, though I’d heard of earth imitating water during earthquakes.

By now a gale like seven cyclones was howling and a lot of the town was flying over, fragments of houses and trees and everything else. Even in the lee of the ridge, waves of turbulence scoured the valley and made the flyers bounce around like sticks in a torrent. At that time I’d had no training in flying at all, so I had to trust the autopilot, which fortunately didn’t need any human coaching to retract the airfoils to minimum extension and rev up the engine to max power. We seemed to have lived through the worst, and I was almost ready to breathe again, when a freakish blast of wind came howling down the valley and swept both shuttles up into the fury above.

I’d heard stories of people being sucked up into tornados and living, and of course we had a solid transorbital ship to huddle in, but that’s essentially what we were doing anyway, we and rags of flying clouds and the endless torrent of spinning debris. As we tumbled over and over, I had fragmentary glimpses of things happening below, of glistening bare sea bottom, of a gigantic wall of water moving with a kind of majestic deliberation toward the shore, of fields and hillsides stripped bare, of wind-driven flames spreading horizontally in sheets. One thing I didn’t see was the other shuttle – it had vanished in the storm.

Then all I had time for was surviving, while our autopilot’s little mechanical brain fought to regain control of the flyer, end the tumbling, ride the gale, climb to quieter air above. We were essentially helpless, at the mercy of the machinery and every second expecting to run head-on against mountain heights that lightning flashes showed advancing with daunting speed from the west. Wind velocity? 303.5 clicks, according to our instruments. Now that’s wind.

At last we rose above the turbulence, the air thinned out, and the bucking and groaning stopped, except of course the bucking and groaning of all the guys, including me, who’d been shaken like peppercorns and now were throwing up half-digested rations all over ourselves and one another.

Our flight steadied. We were approaching the limit of the atmosphere. We flickered out of the planet’s shadow and seemingly headed straight for the huge red eye of the sun. Then I noticed that something else had taken control, that we were beginning to turn, that a small but bright star in the distance was no star at all, it was the
Zhukov.
We were foul and stinking and disoriented and terrorized, but we were alive and under the control of the mother ship, and I figured I’d take a lot of airsickness and bad smells for that.

The welcoming committee seemed to feel the same way. The whole cadre was waiting for us and broke into cheers as one by one we crawled up through the hatchway out of the shuttle, looking and smelling like rats from a particularly unsanitary sewer. Marie hugged me without regard to smell or protocol, then clasped the hand of each and every member of Platoon Aleph as they filed past, from O’Rourke down to the yardbirds, with a special warm word for every one of them. “Thank God you’re safe. . . . Welcome home. . . . You’re a true hero,” and so forth.

Then they were off to scrub down and, where necessary, get patched up by Doc Gannett. No one turned out to have any injury more serious than abrasions and contusions and an occasional egg-sized lump on the noggin, which was either the most improbable good luck or else direct intervention by the god of fools and spacemen.

Heading for the command suite to do my own more luxurious cleaning up, I asked Marie quietly if she had any news about Morales and his people. She shook her head.

“We can’t find them,” she admitted. “Fires are spreading everywhere, so you can’t see anything. Close to the surface the ionization is impenetrable, so the scanners are useless, unless Morales can rise above the turbulence as you did. That was very brave and very intelligent of you,” she added, and I accepted manfully the praise that rightfully belonged to nothing but a smart autopilot and plain dumb luck.

Near the entry to the bridge, Cos intercepted us and said, “I’m sorry, Kohn. I knew something bad was coming, but I didn’t know what it was.”

“The object was dark.”

“Yes, it was dark.”

About the other platoon he was at least moderately encouraging. “I think your friend is still alive. When somebody I know dies, it’s like being jabbed with a needle. I haven’t felt that yet.”

“So it wasn’t us the colonists were afraid of?”

He seemed perplexed. “Us? No, they were never afraid of us. What gave you that idea? Somehow they knew this thing was coming. Maybe their prophet is clairvoyant after all, and he must be better than I am. They didn’t think they could escape it, and yet – somehow – they seem to have done just that.”

Then it was shower time, followed by some unpleasant patchwork from Gannett, including sewing back a partially detached left ear. I hadn’t even noticed the injury – it had bled all over me, but in the general mess, who could tell? – until hot soapy water hit it in the shower, when I almost went though the nearest bulkhead. After Gannett left me with six stitches and a shot of painkiller, I and my bandaged ear went to bed, to be wrapped up in clean sheets and comforted by Marie.

I suppose you think we made love. Actually, I was asleep in about twenty seconds, and thoughts of romance had to wait for tomorrow.

The next few days would have been wonderful, except for our anxiety over Morales and his people in Platoon Beth.

Views of the planet were grim. The whole thing was now submerged in clouds that whirled this way and that, random streams of energy colliding with each other and forming cyclones or anticyclones, depending on latitude. After the initial inferno of forest and grass fires, there was evidence of a steadily dropping surface temperature because the red sunlight had been almost totally blocked out.

“Conditions,” said a computer voice, summing up the situation for several of us on the bridge, “have become severe and inimical to life.”

“Thank you so much,” I muttered, but Marie said, “My dear, it’s only a machine, of course it’s banal. It’s supposed to be banal.”

Cos kept insisting that our people were probably alive, or at any rate that he hadn’t received any definite notice of their death. The second or third day, I forget which, he was finally able to indicate a general area where he thought they were – about 300 clicks from where I’d lost contact with them. He added that their shuttle was damaged and they were pinned down by the storms, and were hungry. He figured they might have tried to escape the planet, only to be hit by a downdraft and crash again.

I wanted to take the surviving shuttle and go look for them, but Marie vetoed the idea without hesitation. “Thirty-six people in imminent danger are quite enough,” she said. “To say nothing of the colonists, wherever they may be.”

Now that was truly baffling. Our scanners and Cos wore out their various exotic senses, and simply couldn’t find any indication of them. Yet thousands of people – even if they were somehow managing to live in areas remote from the impact crater, without electronic communications and even without fire – at least had to be thinking and feeling, and Cos should pick up on that. And if they’d all been killed, Cos said he should have received the psychic “tsunami of despair” the mind hurls out at the moment of death. But except for the faint signals from our own people, he’d heard nothing.

As the days went by, Marie came as close to being distraught as I ever saw her. Finally she chose dinnertime, when the surviving cadre were together – effectively a staff meeting, though it wasn’t called that – to announce her decision.

“We’re going to take the
Zhukov
in,” she said. “All the way down to the surface.”

Everybody gave a muted gasp, then sat silent, figuring what that might mean. She began to speak quietly, in the kind of sure, still tone that comes from someone who’s made a tough decision and means to stick by it.

Of course, she said, superficially her plan was nonsense, first refusing to risk thirty-six people in the surviving shuttle and then risking the ship and all aboard. But the
Zhukov
wasn’t just a big transorbital. It was made of nuclear steel and it had almost limitless supplies of energy at its disposal.

She admitted that regulations forbade bringing spacecraft into a planet’s atmosphere for a variety of good reasons – corrosive effects on the ship, release of toxic emissions into the planet’s environment, and so forth. But the regs also allowed commanders to violate standard operating procedures under emergency conditions, the only proviso being that they’d damn well better be able to justify their action later on. She thought she could.

“Anyway, this is what we’ll do,” she finished. “If anybody wants to file a protest, they’re welcome to do so.”

Nobody said anything.

“Then let’s get on with it,” she said. “When we go in, all personnel will be at battle stations. All safety doors will be closed and sealed. All personnel will wear survival suits. I don’t think anything down there can breach a compartment, but if something does and a group becomes isolated, they’ll have to survive on their own for an unpredictable length of time until we can reach them. Mr Cos will guide us until more standard scanning methods pick up signals from the ground. Bonne chance.”

Wine had been served, and we solemnly raised our glasses and wished her and each other luck.

I spent the next twelve hours with my platoon, working out exact procedures if we had to exit the
Zhukov
and help collect Morales and his people. Instead of retreating closer to the core of the ship, like the others, we were to occupy the compartment nearest the shuttle hatch. Everybody suited up, and O’Rourke and I began checking them over and over and over again, to make sure that all the seals were tight and the heating and breathing units were functional. I figured we’d need to take our air with us, because the planetary atmosphere had become a sandstorm of dust and ashes and toxic byproducts of burning. We’d need our helmet lights. We’d need nylon lines connecting us like mountain climbers, so we wouldn’t get lost or blown away. We’d need old-fashioned basket litters to haul the injured. We’d need every goddamn thing.

As we were reaching the end of our preparations, I got a squawk from the bridge. My presence was demanded soonest. I left O’Rourke to do his very competent best and hastened past retracted safety doors through a corridor that would soon, I expected, be chopped up into segments like a snake that ran afoul of an autoplow in a wheat field. As I trotted along, the doors began to be tested, sliding closed with a sigh and whisper and a terminal clank, then opening again.

I popped out onto the bridge to find Marie looking stormy, Cos looking obstinate, and the celestial navigator (what was the guy’s name – Sajnovich? I can’t remember) looking at the planet in the big monitor that hung over the bridge and whistling softly and tunelessly to himself. Marie gestured at Cos, one of those very French gestures, as if she was throwing away a piece of food that had begun to smell bad.

“Écoutez!” she snapped. “Listen to this!”

Cos, still looking mulish, said, “Well, what d’you want me to say? I’m telling you what I’m getting, or not getting, and if it interrupts all your wonderful plans, I can’t help that.”

I touched his shoulder. “Just tell me,” I said.

“I’ve lost Morales and that bunch. They don’t seem to be there anymore.”

“You mean they’re dead?”

“I don’t think so. They’re just gone, that’s all.”

Another goddamn mystery disappearance. When I relayed to O’Rourke the news that all our preparations had been wasted, he looked as rebellious as I ever saw him. Then he shrugged and said “*#%&” ten or twenty times, and told the guys to take off their survival suits and go back to their barracks compartment.

Zhukov
stayed in orbit, bombarding Paradiso’s infernal surface with every form of radiant energy it had, looking for somebody – anybody, in fact. Hours went by, and we were still at it when the sensors started screaming. Not because they’d found our people, but because a chunk of metal instantly identifiable as a VNO, or vehicle of nonhuman origin, had emerged from behind the planet and was crossing the terminator into the dim red light of the sun.