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Wraker was now firing frequent short bursts into the balloon, reducing the speed of descent to a crawl, and as the ground came nearer Toller’s eyes began to play malicious tricks on him. The darkness was no longer homogenous, but was composed of thousands of crawling, squirming shapes, all of them with the potential to be what he least wanted them to be. They ran beneath the drifting ship, silently and effortlessly keeping pace with it, their upraised arms imploring him to come within range and be cut and clubbed and hewn and hacked into anonymous fragments of flesh and bone.

It seemed a long, long time before the encompassing gloom relented and yielded up something unambiguous—a tremulous mote of pale grey which gradually lightened in tone and resolved itself into the figure of a woman dressed in white…

Chapter 17

“Sondy!” Bartan Drumme called, leaning far over the rail beside Toller. “Sondy, I’m here!”

“Bartan!” The woman was walking quickly to keep abreast of the ship. “I see you, Bartan!”

There was no awesome, mind-numbing telepathic contact —just a woman’s voice charged with understandable human excitement—and the sound of it overwhelmed Toller with wonder. For the moment all cognisance of symbonite super-beings was gone, and he could think of nothing but the strangeness of this meeting. Here was a woman who had been” born on his home world and had lived an ordinary life there before being transported to another planet in bizarre circumstances. Every dictate of reason said that she should then have vanished forever from human ken, but her grief-crazed, drink-sodden husband had inspired a voyage across millions of miles of space, and—against all the odds—they had reached her. That woman, whose voice trembled with natural emotion, was only a few yards away from him in the alien darkness—and Toller spellbound by the reality of her.

The sound of the gondola’s exhaust cone and legs swishing through vegetation snapped him back into a universe of practicalities. Bartan had climbed over the gondola’s side and was perched on the outer ledge, reaching towards his wife with one hand. She caught hold of it and within a second was standing beside him. Toller helped her roll herself over the rail, marvelling as he did so at the simple bodily contact. Bartan came inboard again with a single lithe movement and clutched Sondeweere to him. Toller, Berise and Zavotle were spontaneously drawn to them, and arms were lapped upon arms in a gratifying multiple embrace. It ended when the gondola’s legs glanced against the ground, sending a shudder up through the deck.

“Take us aloft,” Toller said to Wraker, who at once began firing a long burst which was to revitalise the gigantic entity of the balloon waiting patiently above them.

“Yes, yes!” Sondeweere divorced herself from the cluster of bodies and stepped towards Wraker, her right hand extended in a gesture of greeting. He responded by raising his free hand, but the expected clasp did not take place.

Sondeweere reached past him and—before anybody watching could react—caught the red line connected to the balloon’s rip panel and jerked it downwards with irresistible force.

There was no immediate reaction in the cramped microcosm of the gondola, but Toller knew that the balloon had been killed. Far above him a large trapezium of linen had been torn out of the balloon’s crown, and the envelope would already be starting to wrinkle and sag as the hot gas which sustained it was vented into the atmosphere. The ship was now committed to setting down on Farland—possibly for ever.

“Sondy! What have you done?” Bartan’s anguished cry was heard clearly through the general clamour of shocked protest. He lurched towards Sondeweere with both arms outstretched, as though belatedly trying to prevent her making an injudicious move. She fended him off and went quickly to an empty section of the gondola. Sondeweere has gone. Toller thought. The symbonite superwoman is now among us.

“There was good reason for what I did,” she said in a firm, clear voice. “If you will listen to me for…”

Her words were lost as the gondola struck the ground and tilted to a steep angle, hurling bodies and loose equipment against one wall, before dropping back to the horizontal.

“Get the struts off,” Toller shouted, jolted out of his reverie. “The balloon is coming down around us.”

He tugged the quick-release knots which were securing a strut to the corner nearest him and pushed the slim support away from the rail, hoping to prevent it taking the weight of the subsiding envelope. The gondola was being inundated with choking hot miglign gas which was belching down out of the balloon’s mouth. A sound of splintering told Toller that at least one of the other struts had already been overloaded.

He climbed over the side, peripherally aware of others doing the same, and leaped down to the ground. He ran a short distance through what felt like ordinary grass and turned to view the collapse of the balloon. The vast shape was still tall enough to blot out part of the sky, but it had lost all symmetry. Distorted, writhing like a leviathan in its death throes, it sank downwards at increasing speed. The slight breeze deposited most of it downwind of the gondola where it lay flapping in the grass, raised into shifting humps here and there by gas that was trapped within.

A brief period of silence followed, then the crew members turned and closed in on Sondeweere. There was no hint of threat in their demeanour, nor even of resentment, but the courses of their lives had been profoundly altered by a single unexpected action on her part and they sought some kind of reassurance. Toller could see them well enough in spite of the darkness to note that he was the only one wearing his sword. Obeying old instincts, he dropped his hand to the hilt of the weapon and looked all about him, trying to penetrate the folds of alien night.

“There are no Farlanders within many miles,” Sondeweere said, addressing herself directly to him. “I have not betrayed you.”

“May I be so bold as to enquire what you have done?” he replied, falling back on sarcasm. “You will appreciate that we have a certain interest in the matter.”

“We need to know,” Bartan added in a quavering voice which indicated that he, perhaps more than anybody else, had been devastated by the turn of events.

Sondeweere was wearing a belted white tunic and she drew it closer around her throat before she spoke. “I invite you to consider two facts which are of paramount importance. The first is that the symbonites of this world are aware of my exact whereabouts at all times. They know precisely where I am at this moment, but their suspicions are not aroused and they will take no action because—fortunately for all of us—I am of a restless disposition and it is my habit to travel far and wide at irregular hours.

“The second fact,” Sondeweere went on, speaking with a calm fluency, “is that the symbonites brought me here in a ship which can make the interplanetary crossing in only a few minutes.”

“Minutes!” Zavotle said. “Only a few minutes?”

“The journey could have been completed in a few seconds, or even fractions of a second, but for short distances it is more convenient to proceed at a moderate speed. My point is that if I had gone aloft in the skyship the symbonites would very quickly have realised what was happening and would have intercepted us with their own ship. As I have already told you, they are not homicidal by instinct, but they will never permit me to return to my home world. They would have forced the skyship down, and in doing so would have killed everyone on board.”