“I know that feeling.” Chan could not resist putting his arms around her again, but only for a moment. He said abruptly, “Did General Korin tell you what was in his letter?”
“No. But he called a meeting while you were asleep, and told all of us that he had to leave the ship. You would be in charge, he said, and when I woke you just before dawn you would tell everyone what to do next. I didn’t understand what was going on, but apparently the Angel did. It waved at him and said, `Aha. I am just going outside now, and I may be gone for some time. Go, General Korin, with the gratitude of the Angels of Sellora. We are a long-lived species. We hope that we will meet you again.’ Do you understand all that?”
“Yes. Not the thing that sounds like the quote, but what the Angel meant.” Chan read on, aloud. “You are aware of my opinion of generals and admirals who are miles or lightyears away from the battle, and still try to control the action. My best advice to you is, be flexible and do whatever feels right. Tell everyone — especially Elke Siry — not to worry about me. As I’ve told her many times, Benjamin Franklin is one of my heroes. He said he wished that he could be pickled in a barrel for a couple of hundred years so that he could see what the world was like when he came out. I feel the same way. And who knows—”
The knock on the outer door was loud enough to make Chan jump and Deb spin around into a fighting attitude. Danny Casement poked his head in.
“I don’t want to disturb, but me and Tully need some advice. We dragged together a whole heap of stuff we might need on shore, but it’s a lot more than one trip. The General never got back to us to say how many loads we’d take, and he left the ship before we had time to ask him. He says you’re in charge, right?”
Chan stared at the letter in his hand. “I guess so.”
“Then how much stuff do we want to take?”
Chan stood up. “Nothing. Just ourselves, the Angel, and the Pipe-Rilla. Is she still catatonic?”
“Coming out of it a bit, Angel says. But look, Chan, we can’t set up camp with nothing. We’ll at least need food and drink.”
“We’re not going to set up camp.” Chan looked at his watch. By now, Dag Korin should be ashore. “We’ll need suits, and that’s all. Can you be ready in thirty minutes?”
“With nothing to take we can be ready in five. But I don’t know where the Bun and Liddy have got to, nobody’s seen them since early last night.”
“I know where you can find them. Passenger suite I-47, forward. I hope Bony isn’t brain-dead this morning. He’ll have lots of work to do.”
“Why should he be?”
“Go get them, and you’ll see. Deb and I will take care of Tully and Elke Siry. They’ll give us a hand with the Angel and Vow-of-Silence.”
“Tully’s not in his own place.”
“Where is he?”
“With Elke.” Danny shrugged. “Don’t ask me, maybe it’s the heavy water. I’ve never believed it was safe to drink. Or maybe it’s the thought that we’ll all be dead in a few hours.”
“Not if I can help it.” Chan stuffed Dag Korin’s letter into his pocket. He didn’t need it at the moment, because everything to be done in the next hour had been detailed in his own letter to the General. “Fifteen minutes, in suits, at the main airlock. Come on, Deb.”
Chan walked out. He knew that Danny was itching to ask questions. Everyone would be. They had to wait. Either there would be plenty of time to answer, four hours from now; or all answers would be irrelevant.
Vow-of-Silence was the most difficult. When Danny had carried the Pipe-Rilla back to the Hero’s Return it had taken half an hour to remove the curled and rigid form from its suit. Putting a suit back on was even harder unless you knew Pipe-Rilla tricks. By the time that Chan and Deb, carrying her between them, reached the airlock, the others were already waiting.
“Elke.” Chan was beginning to worry about one aspect of his own plan. The Malacostracans were not obliged to follow the schedule they had offered the previous day. Suppose they decided to go ahead sooner than expected — any time, once Dag Korin met with The One? “You’ve studied the satellite maps more than anyone else. Can you lead us ashore?”
“I can. But not as well as you could. You and Deb Bisson and Danny Casement have already been there, I have not.”
“I don’t want to go to that part of the land. When I left it was patrolled by Mallie guards who shoot before they think. In fact, they can’t think. I want to go in along the inlet where the Mood Indigo is beached.”
“That’s easy.” Like the others, Elke was fully suited but with her helmet open. Her expression was nervous and her face gaunt as ever, but as usual she answered without seeming to take time to think. “The opening to the inlet is fifteen degrees south of east. After that we follow the line of the main channel due east. The Mood Indigo will be six hundred meters along, on the left.”
“You’re in charge of getting us there. The silt should be back on the seabed and the water clear. If not, we go single file and hold on to each other. Bony.”
“Right here.” Bony at least didn’t seem to be worried. The face inside the helmet was as serene as ever, and he was beaming.
Chan felt awkward now with Bony and Liddy. He knew that was ridiculous. They had no idea that he had overheard their private conversation. He wondered if they had asked Danny how he knew where to find them.
Why did your brain throw such irrelevancies at you, when you were trying to organize to save your life?
“Bony, when we reach the Mood Indigo you’ll have to work faster and harder than you ever worked. We need to know if that ship can fly, and if it can stand a vacuum environment. Friday Indigo said that it could when he was here, but in his condition I’d hate to take his word for anything.”
Bony gulped. “How long will I have?”
“Until we’re forced to try for a takeoff. Then we’ll find out if what you did was enough — one way or another.”
Bony gulped again, harder than before. Chan ignored him. He took a quick look around. Bony, Liddy, Deb, Danny, Tully and Elke; the suitless Angel, silent and presumably grumpy, uprooted from its precious soil pot so as to be more easily carried; the Pipe-Rilla, unconscious and coiled around itself like lengths of flexible ductwork: the whole remaining crew of the Hero’s Return , as ready as it would ever be.
“Close helmets, and let’s go. It will be a squeeze, but we can all fit in the lock. Tully and Bony, you take Vow-of-Silence. Elke, you exit first — but wait for the rest of us before you move.”
Chan and Danny Casement entered the lock last, carrying the Angel between them. Gressel suddenly came to life and muttered, “Farewell. Well done, thou good and faithful servant. ”
Chan realized that Gressel must be talking to the ship’s computer. It was enormously capable and close to sentience, and maybe from the point of view of the Angel’s own sentient inner crystal the computer was less alien than humans. But with a computing system spread through the whole ship there was no possible way to take it with them.
The lock closed and flooded. The Angel was suddenly no load at all. They would have to be careful to make sure that it did not float away from them. As the outer hatch opened, Chan saw that his guess was correct. The sediment had settled back to the bottom as the effects of the storm faded, and the ocean of Limbo was clearer than he had ever seen it.
Communication was not possible using the suit radios underwater. It was a silent and slow-moving procession that followed Elke Siry. Chan wished that they could speed up, but he didn’t want to risk rising to the surface and using suit jets when Malacostracan guards might be watching the sea.