He shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut. If sight failed, he would have to make do with other senses. The key questions still had to be asked and answered.
Concentrate. Make your brain work, even though it doesn’t want to.
Hearing. He listened to the noises around him. First answer: some of the others on board had survived the crash. He could hear cursing and groaning, and the clicks and whistles of conversation between Kallik and J’merlia. The groans had to be Louis Nenda. And anything that had left humans alive was unlikely to have harmed a Lo’tfian, still less a Hymenopt. Atvar H’sial, most massive of the ship’s occupants, might be in the worst shape. But that fear was eased when Rebka felt a soft proboscis touching his face, and heard Nenda’s voice: “Is he alive? Lift him up, At, let me get a look at him.”
Smell. The ship had fared less well. Rebka could smell an unfamiliar and unpleasant odor, like cloying damp mold. The integrity of the hull had been breached, and they were breathing the planet’s air. That disposed of any idea of testing the atmosphere before exposing themselves to it. Either it would kill them, or it wouldn’t.
Touch. Someone was poking his chest and belly, hard enough to hurt. Rebka grunted and opened his eyes again, experimentally. The flicker was fading, reduced to a background shimmer. His head ached horribly. Louis Nenda had finished his abdominal poking and was moving Rebka’s arms and legs, feeling the bones and working the joints.
“Don’t need to do that.” Rebka took a deep, shuddering breath and sat up. “I’m good as new. The ship…”
“Should probably fly atmospheric with no problem. But we can’t leave for space till that’s fixed.” Nenda was pointing forward. Hans Rebka saw a spray of black mud right in front of his seat, squirted in through a caved section of the seedship’s hull. “Atvar H’sial and J’merlia are checking it out, seein’ how big a job we got before we’d be ready for a space run.”
“If we’re allowed to leave.” Rebka was trying to stand and finding that his legs did not want to cooperate. It did not help that the floor of the seedship remained at ten degrees to the horizontal. Rebka came upright in the cramped space and leaned on the wall. He noticed a deep bleeding gash on Nenda’s muscular left arm. The Karelian was calmly suturing it with a needle and thick thread — and, of course, without anesthetic.
Rebka registered that without comment. Whatever Nenda’s defects, he was tough and he was not a whiner. A good man to have at your back in a fight — but watch your own back, afterward.
“We didn’t have any control coming in,” Rebka said. “If we leave, that same beam could drop us right back — less gently next time.”
“Yeah. We were lucky,” Nenda mumbled through clenched teeth. He had finished his stitching and was biting through the coarse thread. He finally spat out the loose end, went to the open hatch, and peered out. “Soft mud. If you have to hit, best possible stuff to land on. Kallik!” he called outside, adding a click and a loud whistle. “Damn that Hymenopt. I said to take a peek outside, but I don’t see her nowhere. Where’s she got to now?”
With the ship tilted as it was, the bottom of the open hatch was five feet above the ground. Rebka followed Louis Nenda as the Karelian sat on the sloping floor and swung himself out of the hatch to drop onto the surface of the planet. The two men found themselves standing on a flat, gray-green moss that gave an inch or two beneath their weight. The skidding arrival of the seedship had gouged a straight black furrow, a few hundred yards long, in that level surface.
“Lucky,” Nenda said. “We could have landed in that.” He pointed to the ship’s rear. Half a mile away the flat ground gave way to a patchwork of tall ferns and cycads, from which twisted fingers of dark rock were projecting. Their serried tops were sharp as dragon’s teeth. “Or in that.”
Nenda turned and pointed the other way, ahead of the ship. The gray-green moss on which they were standing formed a shoreline, a flat between the jutting rocks and a silent, blue-gray sea. “If we’d flown one mile farther, right now we’d be trying to breathe water. Lucky again. Except I don’t believe it was luck.”
“We were brought here,” Rebka agreed. The two men moved farther from the crippled ship, searching the surface from horizon to horizon. There was an unspoken thought in both their heads. Every planet carried its own life-forms and its own potential dangers. But if this world was in fact Genizee, there was a formidable known danger to worry about: the Zardalu.
Rebka was cursing the decision — his decision, he made himself admit — to penetrate the singularities using the nimble but unarmed seedship. They could not have brought the Erebus, bristling with weapons, without risking the loss of the whole party if the ship was unable to negotiate the encircling singularities; but they could have brought Dulcimer’s ship, the Indulgence, well-armed enough to allow adequate self-defense. With only the seedship, they were reduced to fighting with their bare hands — and they knew how hopeless that was against the Zardalu. True enough, they had never intended to land; but Rebka would not excuse his error.
“I don’t see ’em,” Nenda offered. He did not need to specify what he did not see.
“And we don’t want to. Maybe we can repair the ship and take off for orbit before they know we’re here. This is a whole planet. We’re seeing maybe a millionth of the whole surface.”
“Don’t bet on whether anyone knows we’re here. We didn’t pick where we landed — something else did. Mebbe we’re about to find out who.” Nenda pointed to the straggling rocks, curving away in a half circle beyond the ship. “Here comes Kallik — an’ in a hurry.”
Rebka stared at the dark, distant blur with a good deal of curiosity. He had never seen a Hymenopt at full stretch. The rotund, barrel-shaped body with its short, soft fur and eight sprawling legs looked too pudgy and clumsy for speed. But Kallik’s nervous system had a reaction speed ten times as fast as any human’s. The wiry limbs could carry her a hundred meters in less than two seconds.
They were doing it now, each leg moving too fast to be visible. All that Rebka could see was the central speeding blur of the black body. Kallik skidded to a halt at their side in less than ten seconds. Her coat was covered with wet brown mud.
“Trouble?” Nenda asked.
“I think so.” The Hymenopt was not even out of breath. “There are structures along the shoreline about three kilometers away, hidden by the rocks. I approached them and went briefly inside two of them. It was too dark to see much within, but it is clear that they are artificial. However, there was no sign of the inhabitants.”
“Could they be Zardalu dwellings?”
“I believe they are.” Kallik hesitated, while Rebka reflected on the little Hymenopt’s courage. Thousands of years had passed since her species had been slaves of the Zardalu, but the images of the land-cephalopods were still strong in Kallik’s race memory. On her last encounter with the Zardalu they had torn one of her limbs off, casually, to make a point to humans. Yet she had entered those unknown structures alone, knowing there might be Zardalu inside.
“For several reasons,” Kallik continued, “not least of which is my conviction that this planet is indeed Genizee. Look at this.”
Before Rebka or Nenda could object she was off again, racing down to the water’s edge and continuing into it. The beach fell away steeply, and within a few feet Kallik vanished beneath the surface. When she reappeared she was holding a wriggling object in her two front claws and blurring back toward them.