She stood up and turned quickly to look at her surroundings.
Tally had been right about another thing. This was much closer to the place where they had landed the Indulgence. She glanced that way. And saw the most wonderful sight that she had ever seen.
The ship was there, just as though it had never left the surface of Genizee. It was no more than a couple of hundred yards away, and she could see that its main hatch was open.
A booby trap?
Who cared? No future danger could be worse than what they faced here and now. Tally and Dulcimer were out of the duct, and Tally was picking up big loose rocks and hurling them down the entrance. But it was not doing any good. The approaching high-pitched squeaks of immature Zardalu were louder and angrier than ever.
“Come on. We’ll never stop them with rocks.” Darya began to run toward the ship, across a broken terrain of stony fragments and low, ankle-snaring bushes. She thought that progress would be easier as soon as she came to the level stretch of moss, but when she reached it her desperate dash became a dreadful slow motion. She felt as if she were running through thick, viscous air; she was so tired that the whole shoreline and the sea seemed to tilt and roll in front of her. The sky darkened. She knew it had to be her own exhaustion and failing balance.
Just a little farther. Just a few more seconds, a few more steps. Quickly. The Zardalu were catching up with her. She dared not turn to look. She concentrated all her attention on the ship ahead. It must have weapons — so why didn’t it fire them at the young Zardalu behind her, and to hell with Julian Graves and his pacifist views? Fire, dammit, fire. Or were the Zardalu so close that any shot would hit her, too?
And then she realized that there was something wrong with the ship itself. It had risen a few feet clear of the surface, but instead of hovering smoothly it was rocking and shuddering. There was something beneath it, something rising from the dark mud.
Tentacles. The pale-pink tentacles of gigantic subterranean Zardalu, curling up to grasp the whole forty-meter length of the ship.
And then, still staggering forward, Darya realized her mistake. Those were not Zardalu. They were not tentacles. They were the tiny perfumed flowers of the gray moss, on their delicate hair-thinstalks, as she had seen them when she first set foot on Genizee. But now they were enlarged to monstrous proportions and growing faster than anything could ever grow.
At last, and at the worst possible moment, the Zardalu were revealing their full mastery of biological science. In the time it took Darya to struggle five steps, the body-thick stalks had sprouted another three meters. They were curling up around the smooth convex hull of the Indulgence. The ship sank a fraction, tugged downward by the web of tendrils.
Louis Nenda was at the open hatch, four feet off the ground. He shouted to Darya and reached down past a thick pink growth that reached into the hatch itself. She held up her hand, felt it gripped in his, and was lifted into the air and into the lock in one arm-wrenching heave.
She lay flat on the solid floor. A moment later E.C. Tally was panting and grunting next to her. Darya lifted her head.
“Dulcimer!” she gasped. He was too heavy; Louis Nenda could never lift him in. She tried to struggle to her feet to help, but it was beyond her strength.
She heard a croaking scream from outside the ship. A dark-green body came soaring past her, the corkscrew tail fully uncoiled by one great leap. Dulcimer flew right across the hatch and into the ship’s interior, wailing as he went. She heard the bouncing-ball sound of rubbery Polypheme hide against metal bulkhead, and another anguished scream.
“All aboard. Take us up!” Nenda was kicking at the thick pink tendril. It was still growing.
“The hatch is still partway open.” Rebka’s voice came from the intercom at the same moment that Darya felt the ship rise and strain against its closing cage of vegetation.
“I know.” Nenda had pulled out a wicked-looking knife and was stabbing at the tendril. The blade bounced right off it. “I can’t close the damned thing. Give us maximum lift, and hope.”
Darya suddenly understood Nenda’s problem. The Indulgence had a powerful weapons system, but it was intended for longer-range use. The weapons had never been designed for anything that coiled around the ship itself.
The scoutship lifted a few more feet. There was a jerk, and the upward motion ceased. The whole hull groaned with sudden stresses. A few seconds later Darya felt another downward lurch.
“No good.” Nenda was leaning dangerously far out of the hatch, stabbing at something out of sight. “We’re at about ten meters, but we’re bein’ pulled down an’ the Zardalu are comin’ up. You hafta give it more stick.”
“I hear you,” Rebka’s calm voice said over the intercom. “But we have a slight problem. We are already at full lift. And I don’t think whatever’s holding us is even trying yet.”
The ship creaked all over, shivered, and descended another few inches.
“Wrong way, Captain,” Nenda said. If he and Hans Rebka were in the same screaming panic as Darya, one would never have known it from their voices. “An’ if we don’t get out of here soon,” he added, in the same conversational tone, “we’re gonna have ourselves some visitors.” He stamped on a pale-blue groping tentacle and booted it clear of the hatch.
Rebka’s voice came again. “Get where you can grab something and hold on. And move away from the hatch.”
Easy to say. But there was nothing within easy reach for anyone in the lock. Darya and E.C. Tally scrabbled across to the interior door of the lock itself and wedged themselves together in the opening.
“Hold on now,” Rebka said, while Darya wondered what he planned to do. If they were already at maximum lift, how could Hans hope to do better?
“I’m going to try to rock us out,” Rebka continued, as though he had heard Darya’s unvoiced question. “Might get rough.”
The understatement of the century. The Indulgence began to roll from side to side. The floor beneath Darya’s feet rose to the right until it was close to vertical, then before she could adjust to that it was swinging back, to roll as far the other way. Cascades of unsecured objects came bouncing past, everything from flashlights to clothes to frozen foods — the galley storage cupboards must have been shaken loose.
“Not working.” Nenda had ignored Rebka’s command to stay away from the hatch. By some impossible feat of strength and daring he had braced himself by one hand and one foot against its sides and was leaning far outside to hack and kick at the climbing Zardalu. He hauled himself back in to speak into the intercom. “We’ve been pulled another half-meter downward. Gotta do somethin’ else, Captain — sharpish, I’d say.”
“Only one thing left,” Rebka said. “And I hate to try it. Away from the outer hatch, Nenda — and this time I mean it.”
Louis Nenda cursed, threw himself across to the inner door, and braced his stocky body across Darya. “Hold onto your guts.”
The ship moved. It dropped like a stone and hit the surface of Genizee with bone-jarring force as Hans Rebka canceled all lift. From below came the groan of buckled hull plates.
The cage of swathing pink tendrils was looser, opened at the bottom by the weight of the Indulgence and at the top by the ship’s sudden fall. Before it could tighten again, Rebka had put the ship into maximum forward thrust. The pointed nose pushed aside the two stalks that were growing there, and the Indulgence shot forward across the gray moss.
Darya could see out the open hatch. The pink arm of vegetation whisked away out of sight. But then they were heading for the jagged inland fingers of rock, too fast to stop.