Jensen had reached the crash site before Weis caught up with him.
“Jesus Christ,” said Weis reverently as he came to an abrupt stop beside him. “The mountain ate it!”
Where the scouter had been was a ridge of bare rock some fifty feet long and as tall as a man. Of their craft, nothing remained.
Not a superstitious man by nature, even he was shaken by the sight before them. “I see it,” whispered Jensen, taking a tentative step forward. Something lying in the newly fallen snow, glowing faintly, caught his eye and he stopped to pick it up.
As he did, he heard the call again, this time a longer and more plaintive cry that got rapidly louder. Grabbing the object, he stood up in time to see something rushing toward him out of the night.
Weis yelled out a warning and dove for him as he stood rooted to the spot, staring in disbelief at the almost invisible shape hurtling toward him. At the last moment, it veered to one side. His cheek was brushed by something soft yet bitterly cold moments before Weis catapulted into him, knocking him back against the mountainside.
The call sounded again, urgent this time, and from the opposite direction. He’d no sooner swung his head to the right than he heard it answered from the one on his left-both sounded very close by. Looking wildly from side to side, Jensen tried to pinpoint their locations. From the one that had come at him, he’d gotten the impression they were human-sized, but what he saw was insubstantial-they had no visible heat source.
He flicked his goggles back to normal sight. Now he could see something-a pale fluttering shape within the swirling snow… No, two, they were together! They were silent now, but he could sense an urgency in their movements as they seemed to edge closer to them.
“What the hell’s going on?” demanded Weis, breaking his concentration. “What came at you?”
He pushed himself away from the rock face. “We have to leave!” he said.
“I’m not moving till I know what’s out there, and neither are you!” said Weis, pulling him back with one hand while waving his pistol menacingly in an arc in front of them.
“Put the goddamn gun away,” snarled Jensen, hitting Weis’s arm down. “Whatever it is, it isn’t dangerous to us! If it was, we’d be dead already.”
They called out again, sharp, plaintive bursts of sound as they fluttered closer then backed off again as if afraid to get too close.
“They know what a gun is,” Jensen murmured.
“I can’t see a thing in this blizzard,” snarled Weis.
“We have to leave, Weis,” he said again as behind him, the rock began to tremble slightly. In the distance, he heard a sharp crack followed by a dull rumbling that rapidly began to get louder.
“Avalanche!” he yelled, looking up as he tried to pull away from Weis.
With a shout of terror, Jensen sat bolt upright, gasping for breath. It was pitch black, and he could hear his heart beating loudly. Sweat began to run down between his shoulder blades, coating his body in a slick film, making his T-shirt stick uncomfortably to his back.
Reason told him if he could sit up, he wasn’t still buried under the avalanche, but reason had little to do with the nightmare of being buried alive that he relived each night.
The light flicked on, making him blink owlishly.
“Another nightmare?” asked a sympathetic feminine voice. “That’s the third this week. Want me to get you something to help you sleep?”
“No,” he said, rubbing shaking hands over his face and through his sweat-soaked hair, pushing it back from his eyes and forehead. Tonight’s dream was proving more difficult to shake off. “I’m fine. Just leave the main light on.”
“You know I can’t do that,” she said regretfully, stepping into the room. “Power is still rationed in Landing, but I have brought you a spare bedside lamp. It runs off a small atomic cell.”
He glanced up at her as she walked across to his bedside and placed the lamp on his night table.
“Touch the base to turn it off or on,” she said, demonstrating before turning to check that his left leg was still held firmly in the traction unit.
He lay back among his pillows, watching her. Something was different tonight.
“Tell me again how you found us,” he said abruptly.
Keeping her back to him, she gave a small laugh as she busied herself tucking the blankets around his uninjured right leg.
“I tell you this every night. We picked up the signal from your scouter before it exploded, and a party of the men went out to rescue you. You were extremely lucky, you know. There was a ledge just above you that took the brunt of the avalanche. You were only buried under a few feet of soft snow, and somehow you’d managed to push an air hole up to the surface.”
Her laugh sounded forced, unnatural.
“How’s Weis? When can I see him?”
She said nothing at first, just finished straightening the bed. “You need to sleep, Jensen, otherwise your leg will take longer to heal.”
Straightening up, she turned to face him, a bright smile on her lips. “We’ll talk about that tomorrow, shall we? Once you’re rested.”
“What’s happened to him? I want to know now!”
She hesitated, the smile fading. “It seems the blow to Weis’s head was more severe than we thought at first. I’m afraid he died a few hours ago.”
“What?” He sat up again, staring at her, hardly able to believe what he was hearing. “But you said he was fine…”
“It was very sudden,” she said, turning to leave. “Dr Kingston will be in to see you again tomorrow. He can answer all your questions.”
“I want to know now!”
“In the morning,” she said firmly, turning out the light and closing the door behind her.
“Damnit!” he snarled, reaching for the lamp and hitting the base to turn it on. It wasn’t bright, but it did push back the darkness immediately around his bed.
Why had the Company left them on Kogarashi instead of taking them back to the Deigon to be treated? None of the colonists had wanted them there; in fact, once they knew the Company had sent them to scan the mountain range at the back of Landing, they’d been as near hostile to them as they could be.
His instincts were telling him there was something wrong about the whole setup, that even the nurse was hiding something from him. It was a hell of a time to be stuck flat on his back with a broken thigh!
He froze, hearing a small sound from behind the drapes off to his right. Slowly, he turned his head.
“You better have a good reason for…” he began quietly.
“There’s nothing wrong with your leg now,” she said, pushing the curtains aside and moving closer to the light so he could see her. “They’re lying to you. And your friend isn’t dead. He escaped.”
He scanned her face, taking a moment or two to recognize her. She’d been at the town meeting when they’d been asked to explain why they were there. What was her name? Avana! That was it.
Small, her long, fair hair now drawn back in a single plait, she was clad in the ubiquitous jeans and sweater of the colony. He knew he was focusing on irrelevancies, but what she was saying, after the events of the last few days…
She moved closer, walking around the bottom of his bed to his injured side, then stopped. Seeing a flash of metal in her hands, he uttered a wordless cry, lurching forward to stop her.
The knife flashed, slicing through the cables holding his leg up. Released, it fell to the bed. He braced himself for pain that never came.
“I told you,” she said, leaning down to sever the bindings on the cast that encased his leg from groin to foot.
“Hey!” He grabbed her hand, holding it firm against her attempts to pull free. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
She stopped struggling, eying him up and down. “They certainly don’t choose you Company men for brains, do they? Mind you, you are quite cute, though. Nice green eyes. I’m taking off the cast; what do you think I’m doing?”