There were fewer Hying creatures here, too. The smaller firefly-like things were very scarce, and the greater part of the “animal” population consisted of gliders as big as an outstretched human hand, like butterflies and dragonflies made out of crisp crepe paper.
There were fewer shots now—our pursuers rarely got a clear view of us, and now that the first recklessness of their excitement had cooled they were beginning to conserve ammunition. Serne, who had obviously been paying them closer attention than I, signaled to me that there were only half a dozen of them, but Susarma Lear extended the fingers of her left hand several times in rapid succession to remind him that there would soon be more. We could have shouted to one another even through the plastic of our helmets, but it would have been very difficult to make ourselves heard, so we settled for the kind of sign language that people use in vacuum. I could tell that the colonel was distressed by the stickiness of the going underfoot, and it wasn’t hard to see why. If our pursuers could bring vehicles into the hunt, they could cover this kind of territory much more easily than we.
Our problems were compounded by the fact that Tulyar and the other Tetron were already struggling to keep up. Even Finn was fit enough and fast enough to keep pace with the colonel, but the Tetrax are not overly devoted to physical culture, and Tulyar was a civilian used to all the comforts of advanced civilization. I saw Susarma Lear look back at them twice, speculatively, and I could imagine what was in her mind.
To what extent ought we to take risks ourselves in order to allow them to stay with us? Did we care if they became separated from the rest of us—and hence lost, given that we had the only direction-finder?
She didn’t look to me for any advice. I didn’t have any confidence at all in her eagerness to help them out, but I wasn’t sure that I was eager myself. No one could have argued that I owed any favours to the Tetrax in general, or 994-Tulyar in particular.
Things didn’t get much better in the course of the first hour. The shooting had stopped, but we had no reason to think that we had given our pursuers the slip. We were no longer sprinting and crashing carelessly through anything that got in our way, but we were still leaving a visible trail. Sometimes the grey mud was liquid enough to cover up our footmarks as soon as we’d passed on, sometimes it was set as hard as polystyrene, so that we didn’t leave any noticeable imprints, but mostly it was somewhere in between. The invaders probably had no experience in tracking, but they certainly wouldn’t have needed Cochise to read the signs and tell which way we had gone.
By the time the first hour was up we were moving at a purposeful walk. Tulyar and the other Tetron were still with us, though they were showing signs of distress. We were surrounded by bulbous white growths, many of which were intricately patterned in dark grey and black. It wasn’t easy to decide whether the dark tracery was specialised tissue belonging to the same organism or a kind of parasitic growth.
These globules seemed to me to be neither resting on the ground nor growing from it, but rather to be aggregations of the quasi-protoplasmic goo over which we walked, whose inner warmth I could feel even through my boots. It was as if we were walking upon a vast marbled-white tegument which welled up at irregular intervals into giant puff-balls.
It was easy to imagine that we were tiny endoparasites migrating across the skin of some vast scaly-skinned beast, and in my fanciful way I tried to enhance the illusion by trying to imagine the surroundings as verrucose growths on the hide of some albino giant. The globules varied in diameter from a metre to thirty metres; the larger ones towered above us and seemed almost to touch the ill-lit ceiling.
We dared not stop to rest, but Serne moved into step with Susarma Lear, touching helmets occasionally in order to be more easily heard. Their voices reached me as a low and distant murmur, and I couldn’t see most of the hand- signals they were exchanging, but I knew they were discussing tactical options. I deduced that Serne wanted to try to get us some guns—feeling, no doubt, that two experienced Star Force commandos were easily the equal of half a dozen savages armed with vulgar popguns. I guessed that the further we went without reaching any sign of a destination, the more that idea might come to seem attractive to the colonel. She knew, though, that there wasn’t time to lay an intricate ambush. We had no idea how much further we had to go, and our recyclers would supply us with oxygen for only three more hours.
Had I been fully fit, the pace at which we were moving would have been quite comfortable, but I had only just begun to recover from a bad bout of fever, and I was now beginning to feel weak at the knees. My stomach was sending me mutinous signals, and I became fearful that I might vomit. Throwing up inside a plastic suit is absolutely no fun at all, and can be very dangerous. You don’t need a reducing atmosphere to choke you to death when a rebellious body feels like making its own arrangements.
The colonel and the sergeant were showing no obvious signs of similar distress, but as we went on I noticed a slight faltering of their strides. They might have been giving the Tetrax a fair chance to stay with us, but it seemed more likely that the sickness was beginning to take its toll on them, too. To my annoyance, Finn seemed to be having no difficulty at all.
I soon began to have distinct feelings of deja vu, remembering that last time I’d broken out of jail, I’d quickly begun to wish heartily that I’d never left the comfortable safety of my cell. I reminded myself that the invaders had been all set to treat me like a good friend, until they had been disconcerted by the plague I’d unwittingly unleashed among them. Now my ingratitude in opting out of their hospitality had persuaded them to try to kill me. And for what? We still hadn’t a clue where we were going, or why.
I was seized by a distinct impression that ever since I had last been trapped deep inside Asgard with Susarma Lear and her loyal follower, with pursuers on our tail and the unknown up ahead, life had been one long bizarre dream. Maybe, I thought, I’ll wake up in a moment to find my head aching from that stupid mindscrambler, and discover that I’m right back at square one.
Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. What happened instead was that a whole section of the sky got ploughed up, and bits of it began to fall on the fungoid jungle like a black rainstorm. Just for a fraction of a second, it did look like the fancy mindscrambler Myrlin’s friends had used during our final encounter, but it wasn’t. The sound and the shockwave, arriving just behind the shattering of the sky, told us what it really was. The invaders had fired a shell at us from some kind of tank. They had miscalculated the attitude of the gun—the arc of the shell had been just a fraction too high and it had hit the ceiling.
It all struck me as being rather unsporting—it was like spearing fish in a bathtub. But I could hardly doubt that it would be effective, even if they only kept hitting the sky and bringing tons of debris down on our hapless heads.
Terror lent strength to my legs which I had been sure they did not have, and I ran. So did we all. There are times when you just have to let panic take over, and deliver your future into the unreliable hands of fate, even when you know full well that fate is out to get you.
24
I think it was the fourth blast that knocked me off my feet, although the bangs and the shockwaves and the solid black deluge were beginning to blend into an endless ongoing confusion, and my head was aching so badly I thought my brain might be about to erupt out of my skull like a grey volcano. I went face-forward into a mass of off-white goo that seized my plastic-clad limbs like flypaper. I struggled for a few moments to get up, but then another blast went off nearby, and more of the ceiling rained down.