“So you believe that we are exactly where we wish to be, at the world of the four poles. Why then is Master Nenda enraged at Claudius and at Sinara Bellstock?”
“Why, because they delayed us. Had we left Pompadour promptly, we would not be the last of the expedition to arrive. Thanks to Claudius and Sinara, we have been deprived of the possible advantages of getting here first.”
“Will Master Nenda disembowel Claudius and Sinara?”
“No. Could you perhaps cease this obsession with disemboweling?”
“I will try. But still I do not understand. When we first arrived, Master Nenda seemed pleased. He reported that there were no signal beacons from other ships, and therefore we were ahead of everyone else.”
“That was my fault.” J’merlia hung his narrow head in a human gesture of remorse. “I was operating the communications console, and I reported to my dominatrix, Atvar H’sial, that no ships’ transponders or signal beacons were active in this stellar system.”
“Was that a false statement?”
“No. But it was an insufficient one. I failed to search for the much weaker signals from individual suits, which transmit on different frequencies. To my shame, it was Master Nenda himself who thought to look for and discovered such suit signals, emanating from the surface of Marglot. Worse than that, all but one of the other members of the original expedition now appear to have found their way there. The signal from the suit of Lara Quistner alone is missing.”
“How can that be?” Archimedes stared out of the observation port, scanning the planet with his great luminous eyes as though an individual suit might be visible to him even from a distance of five hundred kilometers. “If they are on Marglot, they must somehow have been brought there. Yet you found no ships’ transponder or signal beacons. Kallik, where are the ships?”
“You ask me the same question that Master Nenda asked. To my shame, I could provide no answer. He is very angry.”
“With reason. We have failed him.” Archimedes wrapped his great midnight-blue tentacles protectively around his mid-section. “He will surely disembowel all of us. Perhaps he will gut Claudius and Sinara Bellstock first, but then it will be our turn. Kallik, you have worked longest for Master Nenda and you know him best. Please speak to him on our behalf. Seek to take the edge off his anger and impose on us a lesser penalty. My bowels are very dear to me.”
Louis was indeed angry. Angry at Claudius, who had made a Bose transition when his brains were fried to a crisp. In doing that the Polypheme had endangered Nenda’s precious Have-It-All, not to mention everyone inside it. Chism Polyphemes were all liars. You could not trust one when he swore that the navigators of his species practiced their art best when they were on a radiation high.
The Polypheme lay on the floor of the middle cargo hold, a limp and wailing mass of cucumber-green misery. He had, he swore, the worst hangover that any living being had ever endured. That generated no sympathy in Louis. He kicked Claudius hard on the back of his blubbery head as he left.
Louis was just as angry with Sinara Bellstock. What she had swallowed, sniffed, injected, or inserted while down on Pompadour was her business. But it was certainly Louis’s business when Sinara, after offering a display of physical affection so enthusiastic and vigorous that Louis was willing to keep going while the Have-It-All disintegrated around them, had suddenly and completely passed out.
Nothing could wake her. Louis could have continued and she wouldn’t even have noticed. But he had tried necrophilia before, and he didn’t like it.
He had rolled Sinara to her own cabin and left her there to sleep it off. Then he went to find his clothes, ready to roam the interior of the ship looking for something to kill.
That was when he became really angry. Not with Claudius, and not with Sinara. With Louis Nenda.
How had he so badly misjudged the rest of the crew of the Pride of Orion? Darya Lang, quite apart from being a sexy piece, understood the Builders and their works better than anybody. Hans Rebka was a weaselly little runt, but he had been in trouble often and always found a way out of it. Those two might well have hopped and wiggled their way to Marglot. They had headed off to the big dead world in the system where they first arrived, hoping to do just that.
But what about the other witless collection? What about Julian Graves, so stupid that he considered the life of a pea-brained Ditron as important as the life of a human being? What about dinglebrain E. Crimson Tally, who if he had been a human would have died twice already. As for the “survival specialists” . . .
Sinara was a romantic nympho who put pleasure ahead of everything. All right for fun, but for survival? And she was the best of them. But they had all, Ressess’tress knew how, beaten Louis, Atvar H’sial, and the Have-It-All to Marglot. Sure, one of them was missing, but she might pop up any time. Maybe she was underground. The rest were on the surface, six of them near the Hot Pole and the other—E.C. Tally, from the suit’s identification—sitting near the Hot Pole/Cold Pole equator.
How come Tally was so far from all the others? There was no evidence from the radio signals of a ship, pinnace, or aircar anywhere on Marglot. How had Tally traveled such a distance, many thousands of kilometers? Louis could think of only one answer. The Marglotta must have provided transportation. Here was something to make him madder yet. You responded to a call for help across thousands of lightyears, and when you were stupid enough to respond, they were sitting cozy at home and apparently doing fine.
Louis stormed off to find Atvar H’sial. The Cecropian was crouched at her ease before an instrument panel of her own devising.
“Have you been following all this?”
“To the best of my humble abilities.”
“At, modesty don’t become you.”
“I have also received a detailed briefing from Kallik, by way of J’merlia.”
“Then you know we’ve been screwed. We’re arrivin’ last of the party, and if we can take anything at all with Julian Graves watchin’, it will be scrapings.”
“You and I agree on the facts, Louis. However, we draw different conclusions.”
“At, they’re ahead of us and down there—every one of ’em.”
“Correct. Six in one location, the seventh in another. But through J’merlia, I commanded Archimedes, whose optical powers are amazing and perhaps even unparalleled, to seek movement on the cloud-free portions of Marglot. He reports numerous small moving objects, all on the frozen hemisphere, but has detected nothing that could be a substantial piece of airborne or ground transport equipment.”
“We’ve got our pinnace, At. We don’t need none of the Marglotta’s junk.”
“True. But Julian Graves and his cohorts need it. Without it, they are confined to a tiny portion of the planetary surface. All the rest—” Atvar H’sial waved an articulated limb toward the window. Marglot hung in the sky beyond it, although with the Cecropian’s echolocation vision she could only be inferring the looming presence of the planet from other sensors. “All the rest, Louis, is ours to explore and exploit.