“You hadn’t bothered to take into account, I suppose, that you’re a star-captain in the Star Force, and that I’m your commanding officer?”
“I guess I’m a deserter through and through,” I confessed—not without a pang of uneasiness. “But I was going to tell you.”
“Jesus!” she said, with more tiredness in her voice than disgust. “What the hell did I ever do to deserve this command? Poor Serne got blasted, and all I have left is you and that creep Finn. We might be standing on the very spot where Khalekhan got killed in action, you realise that? Where you go, I go. All the way. Got that?”
I found that my mouth was a little bit more open than it should have been, though not so much that you could say that my jaw had dropped.
“You want to go to the Centre?” I said.
“I think that if you have to go, you surely need someone to look after you. You’re not exactly my idea of a hero, Rousseau. Anyhow, running away to the surface would look like cowardice in the face of the enemy, and that’s not my style. We’ll go to the Centre, Rousseau—the Star Force way.”
I wondered which of us was volunteering for the mission; everything seemed slightly cock-eyed, if not entirely upside down. But what can you expect, when you go through the looking-glass into the magic world? I had my reservations about the Star Force way, but it was a way that had saved my neck before.
“994-Tulyar’s not going to like it when you tell him you’re not going up,” I said.
“The hell with 994-Tulyar,” she retorted. “In fact, the hell with Tetra and everything it ever spawned. From now on, the ambassadors of the galactic community are you and me, and whatever treasure we find at the bottom of the hole belongs to humankind. When were you thinking of starting out?”
“The robot should be nearly ready,” I told her. “The main problem is knowing which way to go. We’ve got no map of the levels. The Nine have thrown out a few dark hints about there being more than one way to get to the Centre, but they haven’t explained exactly what they mean. I’m hoping they’ll be able to figure out a way to guide us, but…”
I never got the chance to discuss the doubts and uncertainties of the matter. The wall behind me exploded, and the Shockwave hurled me head over heels into the meshes of the Gordian knot.
5
Although the gravity was low, I wasn’t exactly feather-light, and I hit the plants with a lot of momentum. But the tangled branches turned out to be so tightly interwoven that I didn’t get stuck—in fact, they were so rubbery that I bounced. I was able to roll forward as I hit them so that I was tumbling like an acrobat as I continued on my ungainly way.
Shards of the broken wall were flying everywhere, showering the bell-like flowers and lacerating their petals. I felt a prickling sensation in my back accompanying the sensation of being hit by the shock-wave, and knew that I’d been cut in a dozen places. The rolling probably didn’t help, but at least I didn’t drive anything between my ribs to administer a fatal stab in the back.
The noise was tremendous—the big flightless insects that roamed this overgrown wilderness always screamed with panic when they were disturbed, and they were certainly disturbed now. I felt them struggling to get out of the way as I landed on a softer spot, crushing the vegetation down upon them.
When I stopped rolling I was sprawled on hands and knees shaded by a huge palmate leaf. I came to my feet as quickly as I could and looked back at the spot from which I’d been hurled. What kind of petard had been used to blast the hole I couldn’t imagine, but I saw immediately that it hadn’t been quite big enough, because the thing which was struggling to get through wasn’t finding it at all easy.
It wasn’t immediately obvious whether it was a living creature or an artefact. In a bizarre fashion it didn’t seem completely out of place in this world of enormous insects and elephantine flowers because if it resembled anything I could put a name to, it looked like an immense praying mantis, with great long legs, a small head carried high, and groping arms, though the “hands” on the end of the arms looked like a cross between a crab’s pincers and one of the articulated graspers they put on robots designed to explore places where no human being can go.
It seemed to be made of metal and plastic, but its joints were as flexible as the joints of a living creature, and the way that the head was moving from side to side as it tried to get its legs through the jagged split in the wall was surely suggestive of something searching for a sight of its prey. The head could swivel through three hundred and sixty degrees, and it was mounted with four shiny black lenses which probably gave it vision in depth in all directions. It also had a rigid proboscis that looked ominously like the barrel of a gun.
But it didn’t have vision in depth in all directions for long, because Susarma Lear had been far enough away on the curving path to be shielded from the blast, and she already had the Scarid crash gun in her hand. Whether it was a lucky shot or whether she’d been practising I didn’t know, but the first bullet she fired hit one of those black lenses smack in the centre, and blew it to smithereens.
One of those grasping hands immediately reached for her, striking with awesome speed. I had the uncomfortable feeling that if it had grabbed her it could have broken her in two with its clutch, but the act of turning sideways jammed the thing firmly in the narrow fissure through which it was trying to haul its ungainly body, and when the pincers clicked shut at the limit of the arm’s expansion, she was all of ten centimetres out of reach. The monster spat fire, dragon-fashion, revealing that its proboscis was some kind of flamer, but the firebolt missed by a couple of metres.
Anyone with an ordinary capacity for fear would have run like hell, but the colonel was anything but ordinary. She watched the groping hand close and withdraw, not moving her feet at all, and as soon as she had the space she put her gun-hand forward again, supporting it at the elbow with her left, and took a quick but careful sight of that wheel-mounted head.
Her second bullet hit the skull-cap a mere half-centimetre away from the rim of a second eye, and ricocheted harmlessly away. I couldn’t hear her because of the cacophonous complaints of the insects, but I saw her lips move and I could easily imagine the manner of her cursing.
I saw—as she must have seen—that the colossal mantis had taken advantage of the miss to haul a bit more of its bulk through the scissored cleft in the wall, and that it only needed one last wriggle to get its entire carcass into the garden. I think I shouted at her to run, but there was no way she could hear me. As usual, it was an utterly futile gesture, because she was undoubtedly better at judging these circumstances than I was, and she wasn’t about to hang around for the next flame-bolt or the next attempted snatch at her midriff. She was already backing away, although she had the gun raised, anxious to try a third shot if she could balance herself—the Scarid gun wasn’t an easy weapon to use because of the recoil kick.
While I was watching, fearful for her life, I’d carelessly forgotten my own troubles, and it was with a sense of desperate astonishment that I noticed the second arm flashing out in my direction, ambitious to grab my shoulder and pluck me out of my hidey-hole in the bushes. Even with its eyes at seventy-five-percent strength, the monster was obviously capable of paying attention to two targets at once.