She stopped about three meters over the edge of the rooftop, two cables dangling from one side. The cables, with large mechanical hooks, whipped about like snakes in the wind, and threatened to either not come close enough for them to grab or, worse, to suddenly whip into them and knock one or both off the roof.
“Grab the nearest one!” Nagel shouted to Queson, although both were on intercom and shouting wasn’t physically necessary. “Go ahead! I have a better shot at either! I need you to go first! Now!”
“Gang, I think that’d be a neat idea,” Cross said to them. “I’m battling this son of a bitch with everything I got, and on top of that it seems like something’s outside and slowly climbing up that ladder!”
That did it. As one of the cables whipped around, Randi Queson grabbed it and suddenly found herself flying in air, in a big and not fully controlled circle, holding on dearly with both gloves.
“Jerry! Hurry up!” she screamed. “I can’t get the hook on, and I’m not sure how much longer I can hold on!”
“Coming as soon as I can get a line, Doc!” Nagel responded. “I don’t want to take you out when I leap! Here we go! There you go! C’mon, c’mon… Holy shit!” Nagel turned and jumped at that, got the cable, and tried to just hang on. “Lift off! Lift! Go! Go!” he shouted.
They felt themselves suddenly yanked backward, and Randi almost lost her grip, but managed somehow to twist some of the cable around her arms and hold on. Cross quickly moved out from the greenhouses and towards the rocky desert beyond before slowing to a near stop and lowering down.
“Get off on the ground, both of you!” the pilot ordered. “Then I’ll put down on the surface just long enough to allow you both to get in the hatch. You hear me?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Nagel managed. “You far enough from those buildings?”
“I’m already five kilometers out. That should be more than enough.”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t see what I saw. Okay! Let’s do it!”
The shuttle dipped to only a few meters above the ground and first Randi and then Jerry dropped onto the surface, fell, rolled, and managed to get back up. The shuttle seemed to rise and vanish for a moment in the rapidly building storm, but managed to come back around and put down about forty meters from them. With their last strength, both rushed for the shuttle, and Jerry Nagel beat his partner into the open hatch by only a few seconds. They tumbled on top of one another as the hatch closed and sealed.
Cross didn’t wait for anything more than confirmation they were inside and then lifted straight up, then out at a steep angle, trying to get above the storm.
“Back on automatic now. You two okay?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Queson responded.
“Well, get out of those suits and into the inner chamber as soon as you can. ’Scuse me, but I have you on deep disinfection just in case. The suits, too.”
Jerry was already deactivating his suit and there was the hiss of air as the helmet seal was broken. He lifted it off, put it down, and then began to climb out of the rest. Randi felt drained, sick, every combination of misery, but she managed to start the same process. He helped her with the last of it, seeing her distress.
She couldn’t help but notice, though, that there was something different about him. The cockiness was gone, the cool confidence, the boyish sense of adventure. He looked scared.
“What did you see back there, Jerry?” she asked him, stretching to try and get her back in place and swiveling her neck to try and ease the pain and strain.
“I—I’m not sure,” he told her. “Maybe when we look at the video we can see if it was my imagination or what. If it wasn’t… I don’t even want to think of what we’ll do next. C’mon, let’s go into the decontamination chamber. I need to lie down badly.”
“You aren’t the only one,” she sighed.
She really didn’t want to get out of the chamber, which had her lying, naked, on a specially contoured bedlike couch while all sorts of radiation and diagnostic streams and such were played all over her to determine any alien or unusual organisms not present before and, if found, to try and deal with them. It meant lying there, only turning on one side, then the other, then on her stomach and then on her back, but mostly just lying there in a nice, warm, safe cocoon.
She didn’t bring up what Jerry might have seen again, or anything else. She was just too damned tired to care now that she felt safe.
A soft bell sounded, and Cross’s voice said over the internal intercom, “Okay, you two. You’re as clean as you usually are, for whatever that’s worth. Come on in and join the crowd.”
She groaned. “Do I have to?”
“Yeah, you have to. We’re waiting for Li and the Captain to decide what the hell to do next. We’ve set back down on the Salvage One central complex, but we’ll have to see how long or if we stay here. In the meantime, you’re free to go to your quarters, take a shower if you want, get a change of clothes, then join us in the conference room.”
“I just want to take some painkiller and sleep for a week,” she groaned.
“Yeah, well, you might get a nap, but we got some real work ahead of us now. There’s too much money lying out there to just leave it, but you ain’t gonna believe what we got to do to get it now. Nice, easy pickings! Hah!”
Now she really was curious, but still not curious enough to override the thought that whatever they had seen or discovered would be just as valid after twelve hours of sleep as it would be now.
Still, she welcomed the respite, and she certainly could use the shower, she thought. At least they didn’t seem to think that this complex was in any danger. Otherwise, the whole thing would have lifted off the moment they were all safely docked.
Still, as she made her way to her quarters, she couldn’t help but wonder how safe those colonists had felt where they were, apparently until the very last minutes.
Maybe, she thought, I’m not going to be able to sleep all that well after all…
Later, a bit refreshed, having eaten something, sitting there with a cup of coffee and under some powerful muscle relaxers from the dispensary, she was better prepared to at least join with the rest of the team in deciding what came next.
The entire ground party was there, which was most of the salvage crew. There was Jerry, smoking one of those foul things he liked without regard for who else had to breathe it; Achmed, eating a pastry; and Sark, looking like he’d just climbed out of his suit and with a three-day growth of beard, slumped in a big oval chair with his eyes closed. Lucky Cross had on nothing more than a robe and sandals and was drinking very strong-looking stuff. Cross was the only person Queson had ever known who mixed powerful alcoholic drinks by color. This one was a pastel blue. It was in a beer mug, and she wasn’t exactly sipping it when she drank, either.
Five people in the whole ground salvage crew, but this five was all that was needed to handle even a major demolition and recovery like the colony back over the desert and against the cliffs. Once these big machines went to work, you only had to make sure they were doing what they were told to do.
Randi looked over at Cross. “Okay, Lucky, did you see what Jerry thinks he might have seen but won’t tell us about?”
“Nope. Too busy battling those fucking winds to pay much attention to suit monitors. What did he think he saw, anyway?”
“As I said, he wouldn’t tell me. There’s no playback here?”