“Thunder,” he insisted shakily. He was sure it was. Shuttles broke the sound barrier, but only remotely from here. “I think we’d better think about moving.”
“We take you safe,” Melody said, and ran and patted the statues, talked a sudden spate of hisa language to the statues, and left a single flower with them.
Then they scampered back, grabbed them by a hand apiece, and hurried them back toward the Base as droplets pelted down, let them go then on their own and just scampered ahead of them. A strong wind swept through the trees, making a rushing sound he thought at first was water rushing.
A faint siren sound wailed through the woods, then, over the pelting rain: that was the weather-warning, late.
The Base itself hadn’t seen it coming. Not in time. Someone was scrambling for the alarm switch. Someone was red-faced.
And they were a long way from shelter.
Chapter 4
The adventurer teetered on the edge of a blue-edged pit.
Fell in. Slid, with heart-stopping swiftness, whipped a scary spiral through stars, and shot out onto an unforgiving desert.
A dinosaur pack was on the horizon. Coming this way.
JR looked around for advantage, kicked the rocks around him.
A purple glow came from under the sand.
That was either another Hell level or a way out. He saw a big rock not so far away, and moved it with improbable strength. Actinic light flooded up at him through the sand, and he eased his feet into it. Slid in and down as the dino pack roared up over his head and lumbering bodies shook the ground. Teeth snapped and hot breath gusted after him.
Snaky purple ropes sprouted tendrils around him as he shot through the shapeless black, retarding his fall.
He shot through their grasp and with a sudden drop his tailbone hit a soft surface. Lights dimmed And brightened. Three times.
Game done.
He took off the helmet, raked a hand through his sweaty hair, and sat there on the floor below the exit chute, breathing hard for a moment. Shaking. Telling himself he was safe. Games were good. Games honed the reflexes. And no one’s life depended on him.
The adjacent chute spat out a cousin, Bucklin. And a second one, Lyra.
Equally exhausted, equally shaky. It was a rush, one that didn’t mean life and death, but combat-weary nerves didn’t entirely believe it.
“Pretty good, for purple lights,” Lyra said, out of breath.
“Yeah.”
They hadn’t done a vid ride since they were kids—vid rides had existed at Earth’s Sol Station, but there’d been, thanks to that station’s morality ordinances, only kid themes or mocked-up combat, and they’d seen mostly youngsters doing the one and wouldn’t let their potential pilots do the other. This ride mandated at least five feet in height, and adult spacers were doing it, so they’d delved up the chits from their pockets and given it a try, as they said, to test it out and see whether they’d clear the establishment for the three youngest cousins.
JR got to rubbery legs. You had to work up there in the sim. Stupid as it all was, it was, as Lyra had said, pretty good for purple lights and dinosaurs. He was sweating and breathing hard. And had a few bruises from knocking into real, though padded, walls.
This place advertised 47 rides, software-dependent. Some were hand-to-hand combat Some were relaxing. Some were workouts. This one, rated chase-and-dodge, proved that true. They were still sweating when they went out to a noisy little soft-bar—no alcohol in this establishment, which had strict rules about doing the ride straight There was a place down in White Sector that didn’t check sobriety, and that had a lot wilder adult content than the Old Man would like to know about, JR strongly suspected.
But Finity had been gone from Pell too long, out where they’d been had been real ordnance, real guns, and it wasn’t sex he was principally worried about as an influence on their youngest crew, although that was a concern with juniors mentally old enough but physically not. What the Old Man restricted most for the juniors on moral grounds were the space combat themes and, in the realm of reality, contact with the rougher element of some docksides. JR, in direct charge of the juniors, didn’t want to let the junior-juniors unsupervised into any establishment without knowing what the place was like—or (figuring that even very young Finity personnel had reflexes other people might lack) whether there were liabilities to other users.
It was fantastical enough, JR judged. The juniors wouldn’t confuse it with reality. It wouldn’t give them nightmares—or encourage aggressive behavior.
It didn’t mean he and the senior-juniors weren’t going to slip down to Red or White Sector when the junior-juniors were safely in their rooms and see what the adult fare was like on the seamier side of Pell docks. The senior-juniors, his own lot, had crossed that line to anything-goes maturity in the seven years since they’d last made this port. They’d been out where combat was real, and they’d walked real corridors where surprises weren’t computer-spawned. They came back to their port of registry after seven station-measured years of hard living and real threats in deep space, and sat and sipped pink fruit drinks in a soft-bar with painted dinosaurs and garish dragons on the walls as the rest of their little band found their way out to the bar area and found their table.
Chad, Toby, Wayne, and Sue showed up, sweaty and flushed and admitting it actually had been a little wilder than they expected.
“Won’t hurt the juniors,” was JR’s pronouncement, between sips of his fruit juice. Sweet stuff. Almost sickeningly sweet. It brought back kid-days with a bitter edge of memory.
The whole trip brought back memories, a nightmare that wouldn’t quite come right, because the dead wouldn’t come back and enjoy the things they’d known and shared the last time they’d been at Pell. A lot of the crew was having trouble with that, ghosts, almost, the eye tricked, in a familiar venue, into believing one face was like another face,
Or remembering that you’d been at a theater, and finding your group several short of a momentary expectation, a memory, a remembrance of things past.
Ghosts, far more vivid than any computer sim… poignant and provoking dreams. But you had to let them go. At his young age, he knew that. He’d just expected a bit more…
Dignity,
Pell had been a grim, joyless place during the war, so the seniors said; he’d seen it make its docks a rowdy, neon-lit carnival in the years since. Now… now the place had dinosaurs, as if the place had finally, utterly, slipped its moorings to reality.
So the Old Man said they were going back to trading, making an honest living, the Old Man said, now that Mazian’s pirates had gone in retreat and seemed apt to nurse their wounds for some little time. At least for now, the shooting war was over.
So where did that leave them, a combat-trained crew, brightest and best and fiercest youth of the Alliance?
Testing out the facilities—desperate hard duty it was—that they were going to let the junior-juniors into. Babysitting.
Well, that was the reversion the Old Man had talked about in his general speech to the crew. They could have a real liberty this time, the Old Man had said, and the Old Rules were in effect again, rules that had never been in effect in JR’s entire life, and he was the seniormost junior, in charge of the younger juniors. The dino adventure was now the level of the judgment calls he made, a little chance to play, act like fools… or whatever the easy, soft station-bred population called it, when grown men sweated and outran imaginary dragons, while paying money for the privilege.
This was station life, not much different than, say, Sol, or Russell’s, or any other starstation built on the same pattern, the same design, down to the color-codes of its docks, an international language of design and function. Pell was richer, wilder, fatter and lazier. Pell partied on with post-War abandon and tried to forget its past, the memorial plaques here and there standing like the proverbial skeletons at the feast. On this site the station wall was breached …
This was Q sector…