"Tell us how we may help."
"I didn't want them down here with me," Keff said, sublingually, hunkering himself down further into the crevasse beyond the outskirts of the building they had designated as the spaceport. "I wanted them up there, where they could use their Core to help protect us, and you."
"Nonsense," Carialle said. "There's a delay in response time, even from space. I want them where they can be on the spot if you need them."
Keff didn't protest, but the sound of the plastic globes rolling along the rocky surface of the planet sounded louder than thunder to him. Tall Eyebrow paddled at the head of a party of scouts, heading around toward the other side of the compound. Big Eyes kept up gamely behind him, beside Small Spot and her father, but most of the homeworld Cridi frankly cheated and used their amulet power to levitate their new globes. They bobbed along behind the toiling group, sitting at their ease in the bottom of the transparent spheres.
"Darn it, TE, tell them not to do that," he growled into his helmet's audio pickup. "I know the extra gravity's uncomfortable, but I'd rather take a chance on movement being spotted than extraneous power transmissions." It was bad enough that the Cridi had to use the Core technology to keep the water in the globes from freezing on this cold world. They risked detection of their ship with every deviation from strict survival. "They might at least put down a physical twitch as indigenous wildlife. If there is any. What a bleak place."
A hundred meters away, the lead globe stopped and spun in place. The water inside sloshed upward. Tall Eyebrow made a few signs quickly and with authority toward the other globes. Keff was reminded abruptly that the insecure visitor to the Cridi homeworld was also the leader of the exiled Ozran-born Cridi, who kept his population together, alive, and sane in the most dangerous and deprived of circumstances. He admired the way TE threw in a tactful sign or two that alluded to the difficulty of using a travel globe, but added staccato chops for "absolute necessity." Reluctantly, Big Voice and the others lowered the spheres to the ground. The lead globe rotated 180 degrees, and the party set off again more slowly, but more loudly. Keff flattened himself down so that he could no longer see them. He studied his target.
There appeared to be little activity, but Carialle had detected at least four life-forms in the building. She had a hard time finding body-heat traces. The planet's surface was cold, but it was dotted with hot spots where volcanoes and geothermal vents broke through. Structures placed over these took advantage of the natural heat.
Most of the population had to be below ground, with only a few exits to the open sky. It was impossible to pick out individuals. Ammonia/oxygen flares ignited occasionally, and as swiftly, blew out. Carialle cursed as one trace after another that she was tracking suddenly vanished. Gravity was approximately one and a half times Standard norm; bearable for short periods. The "spaceport" was a ridge, the edge of a huge crater filled in over eons with dust and debris that had solidified into a flat plain. Architects had bored into, or more likely, out of the side of the hill overlooking the plain, and built onto it. Carialle reported that heat traces from inside the building registered at least 35 degrees C. That sounded much nicer than the surrounding landscape, which was bare and dusty where it wasn't covered with discarded junk from hijacked spaceships.
"What do these people eat?" Keff wondered out loud, his voice sounding hollow in his survival suit.
"Look at those domes, built to catch every meager ray, even magnify it," Carialle said. "Perhaps our ammonia-breathers photosynthesize, and live on water."
"Or the cities below ground are full of hydroponics," Keff said. "I don't see enough domes to support a breeding population of mitochondroids." In spite of the peril and the anger he felt at the pirates, he and Carialle had dropped back into the game they loved to play, anticipating the facts about an unknown race. "Is it possible this planet was a lot warmer once? Or do you suppose we've discovered silicophages?"
"It wouldn't be the first discovery of mineral-eaters," Carialle said, after running through her memory banks, "but it would be the first one that attained sentience and space travel."
"In stolen ships," Keff said, flatly. "What do we know about them so far?"
"From the emissions of the ship Tall Eyebrow damaged, body temperatures in range tolerable by humans, between twenty degrees C and forty degrees C. Size, from my readings in the structure ahead of you, they are larger than humans, but smaller than lions. Anything else, I must await data from you and our party of rolling frogs."
"Add to that, intelligent and dangerous," Keff said, nodding, but keeping his eyes pinned on the dome. "Well, I can't wait here forever. TE, I'm moving. Watch the building and stop anything that comes in after me."
"I hear," the small voice said in Standard over the helmet speaker.
Staying flat on his belly, Keff crept over the rise. On the other side was a steeply sloping valley. Long-departed rivers or perhaps the celestial pressures of planetary formation had crazed the plain with shallow canals. Keeping low enough to remain out of sight to occupants of the largest structure, Keff crawled on hands and knees. Fine silt, undisturbed for eons, rose briefly around him, then settled out in the heavy gravity, burying his tracks.
Parked a dozen kilometers away beside the Cridi spaceship in a lonely valley, Carialle watched his progress simultaneously on her charts and through the body-cam he wore on his tunic.
"You're coming to a T-intersection," she said, as Keff paused and reared up on his knees so she could see his precise location. "Take the left branch. No, the left one. The right one leads straight into a deep thermal vent."
Keff made his way along the turnings, wrinkling his nose against the clouds of dust even though he knew they couldn't penetrate his protective suit. His heads-up display told him the half-meter-high bank of fog into which he crawled at a low point in a ditch was heavy with ammonia and traces of other gases reduced to liquid. He gulped. One breach in suit integrity, and he was a green icicle. Never mind; he was committed to his mission. In some small way, he was helping Carialle to lay the ghosts of her past, as well as ridding the Cridi of a menace and avenging the deaths of the Central Worlds diplomatic personnel. A moon in its second quarter rose on the horizon and crept up the sky, throwing a little more light on his path. His canal dipped sharply as he crawled another ten meters, then light from the moon was cut off. In the blackness his suit-lights went on. He paused, waiting for the prickle between his shoulder blades that would tell him he was being watched. Nothing.
"You're almost underneath the building now," Carialle was saying. "If you go around to the right, you'll be in front of that hatchway."
Keff's back began to ache from the heavy gravity. He paused with hands on knees.
"It looks a long way up," he panted, staring at the black shape above him, picked out by distant pinpoint stars. His lungs dragged in oxygen.
"What are you building up all of those muscles if not for an effort like that?" Carialle asked dryly.
When she started making ironic comments, Keff could tell she was the most worried. He just shook his head. In an instant the aches in his lower back and thighs went away. "Just oxygen-starved," he said. "Just a moment." He reached into the gauntlet of his right glove for the control pad, and turned up the nitrox mix slightly. The faint hissing sound was a comfort.
In the gloom the building over his head looked ominous. The slab on which it was built had been slagged out of a lip of the ridge, so the people inside had at least stolen, if not evolved, heavy pyroconstruction equipment.
Keff heaved himself up. The domes began at a meter above the platform, giving him an expanse of blank wall against which he could conceal himself. Ahead of him, the platform widened out away from the domed windows to an apron that bore scorch marks from repeated launches and landings. Limp, metal-bound hoses lay on the ground in skeins. They led from the putative fuel tank, which stood on pylons around a fold of the ridge from the domes. To protect the glass from explosions, Keff thought, with an approving nod to the designers. A dusty accordion-pleated hood was bunched up around the entrance to the building. It seemed to be long enough to extend all the way to the edge of the platform. Not at all sophisticated, but it would scarcely ever need major repairs. He took the video pickup off his suit and held it up against the bottom margin of the clear wall.