He let her go for a little bit, but when he finally tried to break free and get her some water she couldn’t release him.
“Please! Please!” she managed, breathless. “Just—humor me for a little bit. Just hold me. I need—I need to bring myself back.”
So, for as long as he could, he just held her there and let her calm herself and gather her wits.
Lucky Cross came up with a boot in her hand. It was one of Randi’s, and it was last seen on the woman’s foot. Now it was not only not being worn, it seemed to have been yanked, pulled apart, ripped half to shreds. “Pack’s back there as well,” the pilot commented. “Straps are broke but it’s still okay. We can probably mend it. She’s barefoot from now on, though. Musta been real wild to have had the strength to rip them things like that. Them boots are rated for industrial units!”
Nagel looked down at Randi, who seemed half lost in some other mental place, but she was still awake, still staring at him.
“You want to tell us what happened?” he prodded gently.
“I—I needed to get out of the storm. The cave I picked had the rocks.”
He gave a low whistle. “You’re lucky you didn’t go Li’s route,” he noted. “All comes clear now. I wonder just how common those damned things are?”
“Very, I think. And there’s more, but even I can’t tell you if it was real or not.” Slowly, between gasps and occasional reflexive gags, she managed to tell the other two about her ethereal conversation with John Robey up on Balshazzar.
Lucky cross-checked the sky, which was already clear after the storm. “Yep, it’s up there, all right. See it? ’Bout two hands up from the horizon to the west and maybe, oh, five o’clock.”
They had discovered almost from the start that the other moons were readily visible when all were in the same part of the sky, and that Balshazzar, being so relatively close, was quite prominent. A blue-white world about the size of a gaming token in one of the bars back on Marchellus, it would have dominated any sky it was in save for the even larger gas giant that loomed over them and trapped them both.
Kaspar, much farther out and smaller than either of the other two, was harder to spot, but hardly invisible in the night sky. There was just too much of a light source for reflection for anything of any size to remain hidden out there.
“You think it was real?” he asked Randi.
“I—I think it might have been. I think you and I both had an idea it was more than just a mineral. I wonder, though. Do they also have outcrops of them on the other two moons?”
He smiled. This was the old Randi coming back, slowly but surely. “I think they might. At least on Balshazzar. Who knows about Kaspar?”
She sighed, but made no move to get up or break physical contact from him. “He said it took practice. Like learning to fly. And that it was just as dangerous. Do you think maybe he really was real?”
“Well, it ain’t like we got a computer with a roster handy,” Cross noted. “Still and all, mind-rotting rocks I can see, but mind-reading radio rocks, well, I got to say you’d hav’ta show me.”
“Well,” Nagel said, “remember that horrible night when those rocks took us over? I can’t help remembering that when those of us who survived, one way or the other, compared notes we found we all had the same nightmares. Pretty strange alien nightmares, too. Ones I never got out of my head, and I don’t think you two ever got out of yours. Suppose we were actually seeing something real? Some real places, real events? Something so horrible, so traumatic, it stuck in the minds of the entire alien race that created these things, assuming that they are artifacts, not natural. Maybe, just maybe, our minds don’t work like theirs so we don’t process the information right, but it’s nonetheless real. If these things could in fact be controlled… Think of it! Two-way telepathic broadcasting! And they—the Holy Joes up on Balshazzar—they’ve been stuck there a lot longer than we’ve been stuck here, and with more contact with other alien species who might have been there longer. It’s possible. It just could be…”
“Then you think—maybe… I wasn’t losing my mind?”
He gave a wan smile and shrugged. “You might well have been at the brink of insanity and still heard just what you heard. Who says they’re mutually exclusive? One thing’s sure, though. All of us—one at a time, anyway, with the others ready to pull them out—have got to experience this, maybe, if it’s learned, all get taught how to master the damned things. It may be the only chance we got of ever getting off this hole.”
“Or it may just drive us all nuts like Li,” Cross noted.
“If it isn’t real, what’s the difference?” Randi asked her. “And if it is, and even one of us manages it even if the price might be madness for others, then to me it’s more than worthwhile. I’m scared to death, and all I want to do is run and hide and sleep for a year,” she added. “And yet, tomorrow, I’m going to try it again.”
II: TASK FORCE ELEVEN
“I see him, Leader. He’s lying back behind the asteroid, six o’clock.”
“Very well. I see him. Going to instrumentation mode. Balance of flight, on me.”
The fugitive ship had been hovering just inside a deep rift valley on the dark side of the barren planet with all systems powered down to minimum. It was in fact an impressive feat of flying. The ship was half the size of a destroyer but not engineered for those kind of maneuvers; to set it into a planet so that it hovered only meters above the surface and merged in most sensors with the surrounding rough landscape was not only skillful but also far beyond what such a ship should have been able to do. Whoever modified and maintained the old hulk knew what they were doing, and that in itself made them of great interest to the naval commanders supervising this operation. To take a ship designed essentially for commercial exploration and turn it into a formidable clipper was a skill worth pursuing.
“Agrippa to leader first squadron. Shall we come in and take her with a nullifier?” came a query from their parent destroyer lying well away from these close quarters and asteroid-filled neighborhoods for now as the smaller one-person craft ferreted out the quarry.
“Uh, negative, Agrippa. We’ll flush him out and send him to you if that’s your desire.”
There was a sigh from the larger vessel’s operations commander. “Well, we’re made, so he’s not gonna run for home until and unless he’s positive we missed him, so we might as well take him and get the information the hard way. Go for flush.”
The leader nodded reflexively. “Flight, spread out, and be careful. You remember the last one. We don’t want this thing flipping out and gunning itself full throttle into the star. First squadron, pull around and put yourselves between quarry and inbound. Keep position and do not vary unless quarry moves clearly away. At all times keep between quarry and star. Got that, Alpha leader?”
“Got it. You’ll never let me live that one down, will you? He comes my way, he gets concentrated full forward fire. His shields can’t be that great after this. You flush him, we’ll roadblock and you climb up his ass.”
“Don’t be vulgar, Alpha. Beta, on me. Let’s flush the bastard.”
The squadron’s ships peeled off in precise order and dived on the hapless ship below as if they were somehow connected together or at least piloted by master machines with split-second timing.