He stopped there. He did not say in case of what. It wasn't necessary, and he didn't have the opportunity. Litlun was already squawking urgently at him.
"That must be all, Captain Krake! No more persons are to stay aboard! One requires as many in the landing party as possible," the Turtle said peremptorily.
Krake stared at him. "Why? Are you looking for witnesses?" he asked. "Are you trying to tell us that the Turtle Mother would take our word for all this, and not yours?"
"It is not a question of doubting one's word," Lidun croaked, defensive, almost abject. "It is a matter of that which must be said. The things which one must tell the Mother are—" he hesitated. "Are shunned," he finished.
Marco Ramos put in wisely, "Because they're about quantum mechanics and all that sort of thing, right? I see his point, Francis. But since that's what we have to talk about, don't you think I ought to go, since I've been listening to those old lecture chips more than anyone else?"
Krake didn't answer that. He just shook his head. "Everybody else goes, then. Let's do it," he said to the others, and the four remaining—Moon Bunderan and her Taur, the Turtle and the captain himself—sorted themselves out and squeezed themselves into the scout ship. "Buckle in," he ordered as soon as they were all inside, and took the controls. And the little scout lurched away from the waveship, and began its long drop toward the surface of the great, dark planet, with its immense, faintly gleaming caps of ice. . . .
Then, suddenly, they were no longer alone in their descent.
Out of nowhere, a cluster of Turtle spacecraft appeared to orbit them, close in, escorting them—or threatening.
Moon Bunderan gasped, and the Turtle cawed incomprehensibly to himself. "It's all right," Krake said. "They were bound to detect us and they aren't going to harm us ... I think." But then he took a second look and swallowed. The ships that surrounded them were not like The Golden Hind. They were of an older and cruder design, and they possessed something no Turtle ship of his experience had ever had.
Each one of the ships around them carried a cluster of ominous-looking housings on its hull.
"Those are weapons!" Krake said in astonishment. "They're armed."
And Lidun echoed, "They arc armed, yes. Captain Krake, do you understand what that means? No ship of the Brotherhood has been armed since the war with the Sh'shrane! We arc at a time before the Sh'shrane ever reached here!"
That was inarguably true, if fantastic. There were plenty of other proofs. The mere fact that they had to make a powered landing was evidence enough that they had wound up at a long earlier time, for everyone knew that the Mother planet had had a skyhook of its own for many Mother-generations. The only question was, why) Krake puzzled over that with part of his mind, while concentrating with most of it on the reentry of the scout ship into the atmosphere of the planet. He accepted the fact that The Golden Hind had been performing what was in fact a kind of time-travel, first reentering their own universe at a very early point in its history, then cruising at wavespeed until they approached their own present. That was crazy enough, but he admitted it was true. But then why stop short? Thousands ofyears short? He glanced at the Taur, who was purring contentedly. "Thrayl says it's all right, Francis," the girl whispered. Fatalistically, Krake put the question out of his mind.
In any case, it was taking all his skill to keep the ship from excessive turbulence. As the lurching vessel threw them all against the straps, Lidun squawked rasping complaints.
"Arc you functioning properly, Captain Krake?" the Turtle demanded. "Shall one take over the controls for you?"
"Fat chance," Krake said shortly. Moon touched his shoulder from behind.
"I think you're doing fine, Francis," she offered. "And things will be all right when we land. Thrayl says so."
"Glad to hear it," he muttered. It was true that the Taur seemed quite relaxed where he was strapped in beside his mistress. His eyes were gently reassuring, and his horns now glowed softly in rainbow colors. It was obvious that Thrayl had completely recovered from his ordeal. All it had taken was a little sleep and a few meals and the Taur was back to normal. It was taking more than that for the rest of the Hind's crew; Krake wondered if there would ever be a time when his world would be "normal" again.
But he didn't really want it to be normal—at least, he surely did not want to return to the kind of normal, empty existence he had been living through ever since the Turtles picked him out of the Coral Sea. The trouble was that what he wanted, he told himself with resignation, was out of his reach forever. He accepted the fact that his brief time with Sue-ling Quong was over and would never come again . . . but acceptance did not imply contentment. There was still a yearning space in his heart that cried out to be filled.
Then the scout ship was screaming through the less tenuous stretches of the planet's atmosphere, and Krake had no time to think of anything but guiding the little ship.
"Hold on!" he yelled, while Lidun was tugging at him with one clawed hand, pointing toward a mountain range near a pole of the planet. The turbulent atmosphere shook them all up, but it had one pleasing consequence. The guardian ships were unable to maintain station in the buffeting, and they fell away, out of sight.
Krake swore at Litlun to shut him up; he knew where he was meant to land. He dived the scout ship down and away, pouring on power, heading for the chosen point at the fringe of the northern ice cap. The Turtle was craning his leathery neck to see with one eye, while the other eye roamed around to see if the escort ships were following.
"There," he squawked through his transposer, waving one stubby arm. "On that plain, just before the ice!"
"I know," Krake gritted, fighting the controls. It was not the proper way to land a scout ship. What you did normally was to orbit close in until you had spotted the best possible place, then come down to the surface in a long, careful spiral —halfway around the planet if necessary. But normally you did not have armed ships herding you along.
Krake swore as he scanned the images that were growing in the screen. "There's nothing there," he snapped. "Isn't there supposed to be a city somewhere?"
Even in that moment Litlun managed to sound indignant. "The Brotherhood does not huddle in cities,'''' he croaked, his wattles flushing. "Do as one instructs you now! Put this vessel down!"
Krake swore again—hadn't stopped swearing, really, for the last several minutes—and had reason to go on swearing, because his job was getting harder. This was a planet of high winds and rocky peaks, and the landing approach was bumpy. Only the rugged restraints kept him from flying off the control seat. In the window he saw the reflection of Moon Bunderan quickly raising a hand to her mouth, her face greenish in distress.
Krake thanked heaven that there were no clouds. At least he had unlimited visibility for the approach to the spot Litlun had chosen for landing. Krake caught a glimpse of an opening in the ice cap that yawned a few kilometers from the edge and blinked in surprise. Any gap in that massive ice cap was wholly unexpected; but he had no time to study it. He had no time for anything but landing the scout, for now the winds coming down off the ice were the strongest of all. Gusts tried to flip the little scout ship over as it came almost to the ground; Krake had to wrestle it level to get it down in one piece.
Then the ship touched down, skidding to a halt almost in the face of the giant cliff of ice.
Thunder above them told Krake that at least one of the escort vessels had managed to keep pace. Squinting out, he watched the Turtle ship slide to a halt on the ground a hundred meters away. Even before it had quite stopped its exit hatches were flying open.