The people who came out to meet the shuttle were burned black by the sun, but their hair had turned almost snow white. They were all thin enough to count ribs from afar, but still they looked in reasonably good shape. It was in their eyes that you saw the length and depth of their ordeal. These people had been camping out in Hell for several lifetimes.
Even with the breather and the protective suit it was no place the others, even the marines, wanted to linger. The air was thick with volcanic dust and gasses, there seemed tremors that vibrated everything and everybody coming every minute or two, and with just breathers on there was no way to completely avoid the stench.
The girls hadn't been joking. Hot as hell and it stank.
It was only when the marines were helping the castaways aboard that they could see the signs of injuries on the leatherlike skin: scars and missing or chipped teeth, and places where they'd been both punctured and sandblasted with nothing in a kit to help.
Nonetheless, the one man in the group carried something in a kind of sack made from the leaves of one of the jungle outcrop tree fronds.
Over the howls of the wind outside, Sanchez yelled at him, "Where's the fourth person? We can't stay!"
"We don't know! She's around! We haven't had much of a way to control her!" Jerry Nagel shouted back.
"Well, we'll give her a few minutes. Otherwise we'll just mark the spot and see if we can come back later."
"Li! For God's sake! Get in here!" the smaller and older of the women yelled.
Suddenly, from the thick brush beyond, a tiny figure raced for the shuttle and almost jumped on board.
Nasser hit the bay door closed the second she'd cleared it, and even before it was all the way shut, Broz had begun to lift off. The wind and coming storm were actually buffeting the shuttle, and she wanted up and out of there as quickly as possible. The moment the aft compartment was sealed and pressurized, she took it up at full speed.
Most of their new passengers were out cold the moment they hit the deck inside, but one, a nearly skeletonlike figure of an older woman, kept looking around at them and muttering, over and over, "Thank God! Thank God!"
XI: INVITATION TO THE DARK
The Voices were there and they spoke to him in the same soothing, cajoling, wondrous way that they'd first reached out to his mind. He was afraid he'd lost them, or that they no longer needed him once they were here, in their domain, but they had not let him down in the end.
It was all so… simple. He'd never demonstrated any special powers to the others, so they had been content to keep a ship's watch on him and restrict him to an area where they thought he couldn't cause any trouble. Little did they know!
Now, though, the demons had come again to him, and spake unto him, and this time they had unfolded his destiny.
They already knew how to fool these primitive ship's systems. It had been so simple and, of course, they'd had the download from the minds of those simpleton girls. Now, though, it was time to put away childish pettiness and fulfill his dreams.
He had been limited here because of the lack of sufficient stones, but now there were enough, more than enough. That was why the others had to be rescued. He understood that now. But he saw that they had brought him not only sufficient stones for him to commune and transfer the vast power they offered him, but they had brought him his sacrifice as well. They had kept the useless thing alive so long, under such miserable conditions, until she could be bled out alive to their greater glory.
Now it was time.
"Joshua!" he whispered, shaking the big man slightly so as to awaken him without startling him.
"Huh? Uh… Sir?"
"Joshua, you are to proceed to the shuttle and do a systems check," Georgi Macouri instructed. "I shall be along shortly. I have someone special to collect."
"The shuttle? But that's going to be under full security, sir!" the big man whispered back, awake now.
"They will not see you nor notice you. You will be as if invisible to them. Trust me. We are both called to glory this time, and this time no one shall interfere!"
Joshua had no faith, but his code required obedience in these matters. He had seen enough in his service of his master that he was prepared to accept almost anything as possible, yet he didn't believe that this was more than delusion. It didn't matter.
"Do you have a chronograph?"
"I have a watch, sir. Three thirty-seven ship time."
"Good, good. I will synchronize. Yes. Are you awake enough to go now? I do believe we must operate within a window here."
"Yes, sir. As you wish. Anyone else accompanying us?"
"How I would like it to be so! But, no, the voices have instructed that we carry only one, the one who fits the situation of sacrifice. Leave her to me."
Joshua rubbed his eyes and got as awake as he could, then stood up. "As you wish, sir."
Macouri went to the door, his eyes glowing with the vision of the fanatic. "This is Destiny. My family, now me. This is the climax to my life and the reason all of us have been born. I feel ashamed to have doubted it, but I shall never doubt again!"
In another part of the ship, a far different scene was taking place.
"You should be asleep," Maslovic told Randi Queson.
"Yeah, I should, but, the fact is, I did more of that than anything else. I'm now beginning to feel some energy come back into me. Hope will do that. I looked at myself in the face, though. I was never much of a beauty and it's been a long time since I was a child, but I truly look ancient."
"It will pass, or much of it will. You just need to get some weight back on and get a solid reconstruction medical program going. The same with the others."
"Lucky-that's Cross, the other woman like me-she might actually come out of this ahead. She weighed over a hundred and sixty kilos at standard one gravity, which is why she spent so much time in low gravity situations. Now-well, she was always tall, but she's as skinny as me. I know she never gave a damn about her own looks, but I suspect that if she doesn't thoroughly relapse she's going to look radically different and that'll change some of her future life." She paused. "Um, we have a future life, I assume?"
"Hard to say. Your ship never made it back, either. Just like the others."
She nodded. "I heard someone say that. Hell, maybe we won't be able to go back. We may wind up enlisting or whatever it is you do to join the services."
"Nobody joins the services anymore," Maslovic told her. "You are born into it, period. We have changed just enough from you that it's no longer possible-or necessary."
Someone else entered the wardroom and they turned. It was Jerry Nagel, looking over the spartan machinery for a snack.
"You get pretty much what it decides, rather than you," Maslovic called to him. "This is the navy, after all."
Nagel took what he fervently hoped was some coffee and a rectangular bar of the nearly tasteless vitamin cakes that were kind of standard fare here and came over to them. "Hello," he said, more to Queson than to Maslovic. "I'm surprised you can still get coffee."
"Synthetic, like everything else," the sergeant responded. "But it's traditional. There is always coffee in all wardrooms."
"After God knows how long eating leaves and tasteless fruit and berries and drinking mostly water, I can tell you that even this helps."
Queson turned the conversation towards the practical. "So what are you going to do now?"