Limits, page 17
Hairy was ahead of him. Vents had already opened in the air cushion skirts of raft and power plant. Robbed of thrust through the forward vents, the vehicles surged left and forward. Bronze Legs’ teeth ground against each other. One silver parasol had opened on the raft, probably Harvester’s, and five sharp fux faces were under it. Their tails thrashed with their agitation.
Grace brought the crawler around to follow. Left and forward, too fast, like the power plant. Hairy was on the ledge now. He cut his air cushion all at once. The power plant dropped. Its skirt screamed against rock, then dirt, then, at the edge of the drop, quit. The fuxes boiled off the raft, raised parasols, and began digging.
The crawler vibrated sickeningly as Grace cut the air cushion.
She was wearing her ruby goggles. So was Bronze Legs; he must have donned them without help from his conscious mind. He glanced again at the fuxes and saw only silver disks and a fog of brown dirt. The other crawler had stopped on the slant.
Windstorm’s howler sat tilted, but not rolling. Windstorm herself was sprinting uphill. Good enough. She should be inside, in one of the crawlers. Strange things could emerge in flare time. Where was the other howler pilot?
Far downslope and losing ground. Too far to climb back in any reasonable time. That was Rachel, the rammer, wasn’t it? With a little skill she could turn the howler and use the larger rear vents to bring her back; but she wasn’t showing that skill. She seemed to be trying to back up. Not good at all.
“Grace? Can we take the crawler down to her?”
“We may have to try. Try the intercom first, dear. See if you can talk her back up.”
Bronze Legs tried. “Her intercom’s off.”
“Off ? Really? The little idiot—”
“And she’s not about to notice the little light. Wait, here she comes.” Rachel’s howler lifted on emergency power, hovered, then started uphill.
Grace said, “She may have trouble landing.”
Then Bronze Legs saw what was happening around them.
To Rachel it seemed that everyone was in panic. Far above her, both crawlers and the power plant had come to a screeching halt. Tough, competent Windstorm had abandoned her own vehicle and was fleeing in terror from nothing visible. The fuxes, the native Medeans, were nowhere in sight. Could they all know something Rachel didn’t?
She was having her own problems. The damned obsolete sluggish howler refused to back up; it coasted slowly, frictionlessly downhill, further and further from safety. To hell with that. She flipped the override.
The howler went up. Rachel leaned far back, and the howler tilted with her, staying low, following the upward curve of terrain. If the power quit early she wanted some chance to land. But the howler purred nicely uphill, faster now, while Rachel concentrated on her balance. She was marginally aware that the gay orange pennants had all turned to dead black crepe, and that certain round white boulders were cracking, crumbling.
But when things emerged from the boulders, she screamed.
All in an instant the mountains were acrawl with a thousand monsters. Their skins were shiny white. Their eyes were mere slits in heads that were mostly teeth. As Rachel rose toward the precarious safety of the crawlers, the creatures chose their target and converged. They ran with bodies low, tails high, legs an invisible blur. In seconds that meager flat place where the crawlers rested was covered with rock demons.
No safety there.
She flew over the crawlers, glimpsed peering faces behind the windscreens, and kept going. The boulders had been rare near the crest, and the rock demons weren’t there yet. Neither was Rachel, of course. She’d get as far as possible before the howler quit. And then what?
She flipped on the headlights and the searchlight too. The rock demons throve in flare time, but even they might fear too much flare sunlight. It was worth a try.
The mountain’s rock face grew steeper and steeper. No place to land, unless she could reach the crest. The fans howled.
Here was the ridge, coming level. Rachel cursed venomously. The crest was carpeted in pink, sticky cotton candy. Its proprietors had withdrawn into huge snail shells.
The howl of the fans dropped from contralto toward bass.
Pale six-legged monsters, searching for meat on bare rock, turned big heads to squint as Rachel sank low. They blurred into motion.
The crawler coasted just above the pink froth, riding the ground effect now, not really flying. Strange corpses and strange skeletons were marooned in that sea. The wind from the fans was full of pink froth.
Then she had crossed and was coasting downhill, and it was already too late to land. The howler rode centimeters above the rock, too fast and gaining speed. Here the slope was shallower, and she was still in the pass chosen long ago by Medeans monitoring a tractor probe. But the howler rode too low. If she opened a slot to brake, the skirt would scrape rock, the howler would flip over. Find a level spot—
A quick glance back told her she didn’t want to stop anyway. A dozen of the rock demons had crossed the cotton candy. Probably used their siblings for stepping stones after they got stuck! Rachel held hard to her sanity and concentrated on staying right side up. The things were holding their own in the race. Maybe they were even catching up.
Bronze Legs squeezed between the crates and the roof to reach the crawler’s observation bubble. It was big enough for his head and shoulders. He found one of the rock demons with its forelegs wrapped around the bubble, blocking part of his view while it gnawed at the glass.
Rock demons swarmed on the ground. The fuxes couldn’t be seen, but a few rock demons lay unnaturally quiet where the fuxholes were, and Bronze Legs saw a spear thrust through the melee. He called down, “Try the searchlights.”
“Won’t work,” Grace answered. She tried it anyway. Other searchlights joined hers, and the thrashing rock demons blazed painfully bright even through goggles. They turned, squinted at the situation, then came all in a quick rush. The bronze spearhead on Harvester’s tail stabbed deep into a straggler. The rock demon’s blood jetted an incredible distance. It died almost instantly.
If there were live fuxes under the somewhat tattered silver parasols, they were safe now. All the rock demons were swarming round the vehicle’s searchlights. They liked the light.
Grace chortled. “Tell me you expected that!”
“I wouldn’t dare. I feel a lot safer now.” The monsters weren’t tearing at the lights; they fought each other for a place in the glare. “What do they think they’re doing?”
“We’ve seen this kind of reaction before,” Grace answered. “Medean life either loves flares or hates them. All the flare-loving forms act like they’re programmed to stay out of shadows during flares. Like, in the shadow of a mountain they’d be in just the conditions they aren’t designed for. Most of ’em have high blood pressure, too, and terrific reserves of energy. They have to accomplish a lot in the little time a flare lasts. Be born, eat, grow, mate, give birth—”
“Grace, get on the intercom and find out if everyone’s still alive. And see if anyone knows which sun flared.”
“Why? What possible difference could it make?”
“Phrixus flares last up to three quarters of an hour. Helle flares don’t last as long. We’re going to have to wait it out. And see if Rachel called anyone.”
“Right.”
Bronze Legs half-listened to the intercom conversation. Along the heatward slopes of the mountains the black flags flew in triumph, growing longer almost as Bronze Legs watched, making sugar while the sun flared. The rock demons milling in the searchlight beams were now hungry enough to be attacking each other in earnest. A vastly larger number of rock demons had deserted the mountainsides entirely, had swarmed straight down to the shoreline. The waves were awash with sea monsters of all sizes; the rock demons were wading out to get them.
Grace called up to him. “Rachel didn’t call anyone. Lightning says she made it over the crest.”
“Good.”
“What do you think she’ll do?”
“Nobody knows her very well. Hmm…She won’t land in the cotton candy. She probably could, because those snails are probably hiding in their shells. Right?”
“But she won’t. It’d be too messy. She’ll stop on the coldward slope, or beyond, anywhere it’s safe to wait it out. If there is anywhere. Do you think she’ll find anywhere safe?”
“She won’t know what’s safe. She won’t find anyplace that isn’t swarming with something, not this far to heatward. The further you look to heatward, the more ferocious the competition gets.”
“Then she’ll keep going. If she doesn’t wreck herself, she’ll go straight back to Touchdown City. Let’s see, Morven’s on the other side of the planet now. Say it’ll be up in an hour, and we’ll let them know what’s happening. That way we’ll know she’s safe almost as soon as she does. Grace, you don’t think she’d try to rejoin us?”
“She can’t get lost, and she can’t stop, and Touchdown’s visible from fifty miles away. She’ll just head home. Okay…” There was a funny edge of doubt in Grace’s voice. She stabbed at an intercom button. “Lightning? Me. You watched Rachel go over the crest, right? Did she have her headlights on?”
Bronze Legs was wondering just how teed off the rammers would be if Rachel was dead. It took him a moment to see the implications of what Grace was saying.
“The searchlight too? All right, Lightning. The long-range sender is on your roof. I want it ready to send a message to Morven by the time Morven rises, which will be to south of coldward in about an hour.…No, don’t go out yet. The way the beasts are running around they should die of heatstroke pretty quick. When they fall off the roof, you go.”
The rock demons followed Rachel twelve kilometers downslope before anything distracted them.
The howler was riding higher now, but Rachel wasn’t out of trouble. The emergency override locked the vents closed. If she turned it off the power would drop, and so would the howler. She was steering with her weight alone. Her speed would last as long as she was going down. She had almost run out of mountain. The slope leveled off as it approached the river.
The vicious pegasus-type birds had disappeared. The rolling mountainsides covered with feathery wheat were now covered with stubble, stubble with a hint of motion in it, dark flecks that showed and were gone. Millions of mice, maybe?
Whatever: they were meat. The demons scattered in twelve directions across the stubble, their big heads snapping, snapping. Rachel leaned forward across her windscreen to get more speed. Behind her, three rock demons converged on a golden Roman shield…on a mock-turtle that had been hidden by feather-wheat and was now quite visible and helpless. The demons turned it over and ripped it apart and ate and moved on.
The howler slid across the shore and onto flowing water.
Each patch of scarlet scum had sprouted a great green blossom. Rachel steered between the stalks by body english. She was losing speed, but the shore was well behind her now.
And all twelve rock demons zipped downhill across the stubble and into the water. Rachel held her breath. Could they swim? They were under water, drinking or dispersing heat or both. Now they arched upward to reach the air.
The howler coasted to a stop in midstream.
Rachel nerved herself to switch off the override. The howler dropped, and hovered in a dimple of water, churning a fine mist that rapidly left Rachel dripping wet. She waited. Come what may, at least the batteries were recharging. Give her time and she’d have a howler that could steer and fly.
The heatward shore was black with a million mouse-sized beasties. They’d cleaned the field of feather-wheat; but what did they think they were doing now? Watching Rachel? The rock demons noticed. They waded clumsily out of the water and, once on land, blurred into motion. The shore churned with six-legged white marauders and tiny black prey.
It seemed the fates had given Rachel a break. The water seemed quite empty but for the scarlet scum and its huge blossoms. No telling what might be hugging the bottom while the flare passed. Rachel could wait too. The coldward shore looked safe enough…though it had changed. Before the flare, it had been one continuous carpet of chrome yellow bushes. The bushes were still there, but topped now with a continuous sheet of silver blossoms. The clouds of insects swarmed still, though they might be different insects.
Upstream, something was walking toward her on stilts. It came at its own good time, stopping frequently. Rachel kept her eye on it while she tried the intercom.
She got static on all bands. Mountains blocked her from the expedition; other mountains blocked her from Touchdown City. The one sender that could reach Morven in orbit was on a crawler. Dammit. She never noticed the glowing pinpoint that meant Bronze Legs had called. It was too dim.
Onshore, two of the rock demons were mating head-to-tail.
The thing upstream seemed to be a great silver Daddy-long-legs. Its legs were slender and almost long enough to bridge the river; its torso proportionately tiny. It paused every so often to reach deep into the water with the thumbless hands on its front legs. The hands were stubby, armored in chitin, startlingly quick. They dipped, they rose at once with something that struggled, they conveyed the prey to its mouth. Its head was wide and flat, like a clam with bulging eyes. It stepped delicately downstream, with all the time in the world…and it was bigger than Rachel had realized, and faster.
So much for her rest break. She opened the rear vent. The howler slid across the river and onto shore, and stopped, nudging the bushes.
The Daddy-long-legs was following her. Ten of the dozen rock demons were wading across. As the bottom dipped the six-legged beasts rose to balance on four legs, then two. As bipeds they were impressively stable. Maybe their tails trailed in the mud bottom to serve as anchors. And the mice were coming too. Thousands of them, swimming in a black carpet among the patches of scum.
Rachel used the override for fifteen seconds. It was enough to put her above the silver-topped bushes. The lily-pad-shaped silver blossoms bowed beneath the air blast, but the ground effect held her. She wasn’t making any great speed. Bugs swarmed around her. Sticky filaments shot from between the wide silver lily pads, and sometimes found bugs, and sometimes struck the fans or the ground-effect skirt.
She looked for the place that had been cleared for a fux encampment. Deadeye would be there, a feisty male biped guarding his nest, if Deadeye still lived. She couldn’t find the gap in the bushes. It struck her that that was good luck for Deadeye, considering what was following her.
But she was lonely, and scared.
The Daddy-long-legs stepped delicately among the bushes. Bushes rustled to show where ten rock demons streaked after her, veering to snatch a meal from whatever was under the blossoms, then resuming course. Of the plant-eating not-mice there was no sign, except that here and there a bush had collapsed behind her.
But they were all falling behind as the fuel cells poured power into the howler’s batteries.
Rachel oriented herself by Argo and the Jet Stream and headed south and coldward. She was very tired. The land was darkening, reddening…and it came to her that the flare was dying.
The flare was dying. The goggles let Bronze Legs look directly at the suns, now, to see the red arc enclosing the bright point of Helle. A bubble of hellfire was rising, cooling, expanding into the vacuum above the lesser hell of a red dwarf star.
They were six-legged rock demons all around them, and a few on the roofs. All were dead, from heatstroke or dehydration. A far larger number were gathering all along the Ring Sea shore. Now they swarmed uphill in a wave of silver. They paired off as they came, and stopped by twos in the rocks to mate.
The diminished wave swept around the expedition and petered out. Now the mountains were covered with writhing forms: an impressive sight. “They make the beast with twelve legs,” Bronze Legs said. “Look at the size of those bellies! Hey, Grace, aren’t the beasts themselves bigger than they were?”
“They have to be. They’ve got to form those eggs. Dammit, don’t distract me.”
The intercom lit. Grace wasn’t about to notice anything so mundane. The paired rock demons were growing quiet, but they were still linked head to tail. Bronze Legs opened the intercom.
Lightning’s voice said, “I’ve got Duty Officer Toffler aboard Morven.”
“Okay. Toffler, this is Miller. We’ve got an emergency.”
“Sorry to hear it.” The male voice sounded sleepy. “What can we do about it?”
“You’ll have to call Touchdown City. Can you patch me through, or shall I record a message?”
“Let’s check…” The voice went away. Bronze Legs watched a nearby pair of rock demons crawling away from each other. The thick torsos seemed different. A belly swelling that had extended the length of the torso was now a prominent swelling between the middle and hind legs. It was happening fast. The beasts seemed gaunt, all bone and skin, except for the great spherical swelling. With fore and middle legs they scratched at the earth, digging, digging.
“Miller, you’d better record. By the time we got their attention they’d be over the horizon. We’ll have them in another hour.”
“Good—”
“But I don’t see how they can help either. Listen, Miller, is there something we can do with an interstellar message laser? At this range we can melt a mountain or boil a lake, and be accurate to—”
“Dammit, Toffler, we’re not in trouble! Touchdown City’s in trouble, and they don’t know it yet!”
“Oh? Okay, set to record.”
“To Mayor Curly Jackson, Touchdown City. We’ve weathered the flare. We don’t know if the fuxes survived yet. The rammer, Rachel Subramaniam, is on the way to you on a howler. She has no reason to think she’s dangerous, but she is. By the time you spot her you’d be too late to stop her. If you don’t move damn quick, the human colony on Medea could be dead within the year. You’ll need every vehicle you can get your hands on…”
