"We waited until it got dark," she said. "Then we were able to recover them."
"Will says they had venom," said Cookie. "Thank God for the e-suits. He says it would have worked on us. Paralyzed us. Sent the nervous system into shock."
He slept. When he woke again they were getting ready to leave. "Who's in Tess?" he asked. He was talking about Gappy's lander. Its pilot and all its original passengers were dead. But they didn't want to leave it down here.
"Nobody," said Cookie. "But it's no problem. After we're on our way, I'll just tell her to come home."
The AI.
The cabin was dark, save for the soft illumination of the instrument panel. Tatia sat silently on the far side, staring into the darkness.
He watched lights blink on outside and lift into the night.
"Okay, folks," said Cookie. "Looks like our turn."
It occurred to Nightingale that Cookie, as the surviving member of the command crew, was now the captain.
The harness, adjusting for his prone position, slipped down over his thighs and shoulders. It was fortunate that it did, because a sudden gust of wind hit them as they started up, rocking the spacecraft.
"Hold on," said Cookie. Nightingale couldn't see much of what was happening, but the pilot's movements suggested he'd taken manual control. The lander steadied and rose toward the stars.
No one spoke. Nightingale stared at the illuminated instruments. Tatia sat with her head thrown back, her eyes now closed. The reality of it was hitting home. Andi's absence was a palpable quality, something they could touch.
"Tess." Cookie spoke to the remaining lander. "Code one one. Accept my voice."
Nightingale listened to the wind rushing over the wings. Tatia shifted slightly, opened her eyes, and glanced at him. "How you doing, boss?"
"Pretty good."
"Will they send another team, do you think?"
He shrugged reflexively and felt his neck pull. It was numb. "They'll have to. I mean, this is a living world, for God's sake. There'll be a settlement here one day." But there'd be some political fallout, too. For him, responsible for the mission, for its people, there'd be hell to pay.
"Excuse me," said Cookie. "Randy, I'm not getting a response from Tess."
"That's not so good. Are you telling me we have to go back for the lander?"
"Let's see if we can spot what happened." The displays lit up and Nightingale was looking at a vid record, the woods in daylight. The view from their lander. A flock of redbirds flew across the face of the screen and vanished. People were coming out of the forest. One was being helped, one was being carried. A swarm of the birds ripped into them.
Nightingale saw Remmy, one of Biney's people, covered with blood, holding a hand to his left eye. He was down on one knee, firing away. Biney stood over him, providing as much cover as she could.
He saw himself, cradled in Hal's arms. Cookie appeared in the picture, swinging a branch.
Biney's laser cut everywhere, its white beam slashing through the afternoon. The birds fell to earth whenever it touched them.
"There," said Cookie. The laser grazed Tess, scorched her hull, moved up, and sliced off the communication pod. The pod exploded in a shower of sparks.
Cookie froze the picture.
"How'd Biney die?" Nightingale asked. "She was there at the end."
"She stood outside the airlock and held them off until we got everybody else in." Cookie was shaking his head. "We'll have to go back down."
No. Nightingale did not want anything more to do with this world. Under no circumstances would they go back.
"To get the lander," said Cookie, mistaking Nightingale's silence for indecision.
"Leave it, Cookie."
"We can't do that."
"It's too dangerous. We aren't going to lose anybody else."
PART 1
BURBAGE POINT
I
November 2223
The impending collision out there somewhere in the great dark between a gas giant and a world very much like our own has some parallels to the eternal collision between religion and common sense. One is bloated and full of gas, and the other is measurable and solid. One engulfs everything around it, and the other simply provides a place to stand. One is a rogue destroyer that has come in out of the night, and the other is a warm well-lighted place vulnerable to the sainted mobs. -Gregory MacAllister, Have Your Money Ready
They came back to Maleiva HI to watch the end of the world.
Researchers had been looking forward to it since its imminence was proclaimed almost twenty years earlier by Jeremy Benchwater Morgan, an ill-tempered combustible astrophysicist who, according to colleagues, had been born old. Even today Morgan is the subject of all kinds of dark rumors, that he had driven one child to tranks and another to suicide, that he'd forced his first wife into an early grave, that he'd relentlessly destroyed careers of persons less talented than he even though he gained nothing by doing so, that he'd consistently taken credit for the work of others. How much of this is true, no one really knows. What is on the record, however, is that Morgan had been both hated and feared by his colleagues and apparently by a deranged brother-in-law who made at least two attempts to kill him. When he'd died, finally, of heart failure, his onetime friend and longtime antagonist Gunther Beekman, commented privately that he had beaten his second wife to the punch. In accordance with his instructions, no memorial was conducted. It was, some said, his last act of vindictiveness, denying his family and associates the satisfaction of staying home.
Because he had done the orbital work and predicted the coming collision, the Academy had given his name to the rogue world that had invaded the Maleiva system. Although that was a gesture required by tradition in any case, many felt that the Academy directors had taken grim pleasure in their action.
Morgan's World approached Jovian dimensions. Its mass was 296 times that of Earth. Diameter at the equator was 131,600 kilometers, at the poles about five percent less. This oblateness resulted from a rotational period of just over nine hours. It had a rocky core a dozen times as massive as the Earth. It was otherwise composed primarily of hydrogen and helium.
It was tilted almost ninety degrees to its own plane of movement, and half as much to the system plane. It was a gray-blue world, its atmosphere apparently placid and untroubled, with neither rings nor satellites.
"Do we know where it came from?" Marcel asked.
Gunther Beekman, small, bearded, overweight, was seated beside him on the bridge. He nodded and brought up a fuzzy patch on the auxiliary display, closed in on it, and enhanced. "Here's the suspect," he said. "It's a section of the Chippewa Cloud, and if we're right, Morgan's been traveling half a billion years."
In approximately three weeks, on Saturday, December 9, at 1756 hours GMT, the intruder would collide head-on with Maleiva III.
Maleiva was the infant daughter of the senator who'd chaired the science funding committee when the initial survey was done, two decades earlier. There were eleven planets in the system, but only the doomed third world had received a name to go with its Roman numeraclass="underline" From the beginning they called it Deepsix. In the often malicious nature of things, it was also one of the very few worlds known to harbor life. Even though locked in a three-thousand-year-old ice age, it would have made, in time, an exquisite new outpost for the human race.
"The collision here is only the beginning of the process," Beekman said. "We can't predict precisely what's going to happen afterward, but within a few thousand years Morgan will have made a complete shambles of this system." He leaned back, folded his hands behind his head, and adopted an expression of complacency. "It's going to be an interesting show to watch."