Spotty watched, and her joy was suddenly muted. “Littlefeet,” she muttered, an agonized expression replacing the jubilant one.
Harker groaned in back of them, then opened his eyes and cried out, “No! I—”
He suddenly realized he was on his back and in the trees and that the two women were there and paying no attention to him whatsoever.
He tried to get up, failed the first time, then managed to sit up and feel his jaw and the back of his head. He tried to remember what had happened but it was all a confusing blur.
“Kat! Spotty!” he called.
Spotty continued to look at the spectacle, which was now becoming harder and harder to see as most of the illumination faded, leaving only that from the surviving ships and the areas they had transformed to magma. Kat, however, turned and bent down. “You okay?” she asked him.
“What—what happened?”
“Oh, they took the shot,” she told him. “The base is no longer.”
He tried to get to his feet in a hurry and, with her help, he managed it. “You mean I missed the damned show? After all that?”
“You got caught in one of their beams. The only way not to have you turned into one of their spies was obvious, so I knocked you out.”
“You knocked me out?”
“Well, you were kind of spaced-out, you know. Easy target.”
He felt his jaw and then the back of his head once again. “I think you got lucky. Feels like my head hit a rock or something when I fell. Damn! Was it worth seeing? Help me to where I can at least look at the rubble!”
“C’mon, helpless! Not much to see anymore, though. And stay out of the way of those ships. They’re reeling but they’re not finished yet!”
But, they were finished, at least at Ephesus. The ships patrolled the area, back and forth, and occasionally one of them sent out a searchlight of some kind, checking on something below, but there was little more they could do. They seemed aimless, confused, unable to accept that they’d just suffered a tremendous blow and that something was definitely out there hunting them for a change.
Harker watched it, and something in the back of his mind understood.
“They don’t have any connection with the rest of the network,” he commented. “They can’t consult, they can’t get orders, they can’t make collective decisions at the speed of light. One thing’s sure—they didn’t trace the shots to space. They’re not going up in a hurry to take on Hector, Krill, and her gates.”
She shook her head. “It didn’t look like it came from there,” she told him. “For some reason, sheer luck, I was staring down at it when it happened. It was like it came out of the ground. I expected a bolt from the blackness, and it came from out of the ground. Go figure.”
He looked up at the night sky. “No grid. No giant continental neural net. Now it’s the flowers that’ll be going mad.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. I’m not even positive myself what it means, but I can tell you that they are hurt bad.”
Spotty turned and looked at him. “Will they build it again? Will it come back?”
He sighed. “I don’t know, Spotty. I honestly don’t. I hope not. If they don’t, at least we’ll know that Krill reclaimed this system. How they do this in places where they’re not orbited by a peanut moon like that I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter to us anymore.”
Kat looked back at the now darkened scene. “Now what?” she asked.
“Now we’re out of the battle and out of the war,” he told her. “Now we get to go someplace where I can sleep off this pounding headache, where we can all eat and drink and relax. Maybe, when we get back to the Styx, we’ll take some time and teach Spotty how to swim. She’s already got an oversized flotation collar on her chest. Two of ’em. Shouldn’t be too hard for somebody who walked into a demon city and walked back out leaving it a pile of rubble.”
“Okay, then what?”
“Well, we find a really pretty place near the coast with a nice view of the ocean and no monsters under the sand and with lots of food and water and good wood, and we work up some tools. We live there and we do the best we can and see about building a boat. We defend the place and protect it. If they find us before I finish the boat, well and good, or if I finish the boat first, well, maybe we’ll go find out who won the war. There’s nothing but time now, and there’s no hurry at all.
TWENTY-TWO
Something of Value
The shuttle craft circled the area and studied the settlement below. It was quite typical of small communities on Eden, although those on the other continent had not developed as smoothly, and those who lived there were still primarily nomadic hunter-gatherers.
Not that Eden’s small villages were any wonders of technology, but the people did tend to stay put and trade a bit with their near neighbors.
Like the others they had surveyed, this one had shelters but no totally enclosed structures; rather, the “houses” were basically earthworks with roofs of woven straw held up by bamboolike poles. They had no sides, and were open to the elements.
There was a small fire pit, but it was well away from the rest of the village and only a wisp of smoke could be seen from it. These people had an inordinate fear of fire, and while they used it, particularly on Eden, they used it minimally.
At one time there appeared to have been taller earthworks as a kind of outer wall, but these had now been so dug through with access paths that they were more a boundary than a hindrance.
As with the others, the people painted their faces and bodies, sometimes with dyes but sometimes with permanent and elaborate tattoos. They wore no clothing. The women had long hair but the length did vary once it reached the shoulders; the men tended to wear shoulder-length hair and medium-full beards, but clearly hair and beards were cut and trimmed.
The newcomers had already seen how some great sea beasts could sneak in under the sand and present a nasty danger to anyone on it, yet these people seemed to have no fear of them. There weren’t too many coastal communities, but the few that there were seemed to have found a way to divert the creatures or keep them well at bay. Indeed, the coastal types were mostly fishers, who used small, rough dugout canoes to spread nets woven of hairy vines native to the more junglelike interior. They used the sea creatures—“fish” was a relative term for creatures that filled the same general niche and were edible—as trade goods for dyes, fruits, vegetables, cooking oils, and the like from villages farther inland.
The cliffs seemed to be almost solid salt.
So far they had contacted a number of tribal groups on Eden—and particularly in the Great Basin region, the vast bowl-shaped area ringed by high mountains—looking for any traces of the expedition that had been sent in and had performed its duty.
The two-person shuttle craft did one more lazy circle, then the uniformed woman in the left seat said to her similarly attired male companion, “Let’s put down. This is the most sophisticated-looking group we’ve seen on the coast yet, and the closest to the site of old Ephesus.”
“You’re the boss,” the man responded, and hordes of young children scattered and people came from just about everywhere pointing to the sky as they descended.
“Jeez, they really make a lot of babies around here,” the woman noted.
Her companion shrugged. “After dark there doesn’t seem an awful lot else to do.”