“Seven seconds to impact,” Tally said cheerfully. “Approach velocity two kilometers a second and steady. Just listen to the wind on the hull! Four seconds to impact. Three seconds. Two seconds. One second.”
And then the ship stopped. Instantly — just a moment before it hit the ground. They were hovering six feet up, no movement, no deceleration, no feeling of force, not even—
“Hold tight!” Darya shouted. “Free-fall.”
No feeling even of gravity. Dulcimer’s scoutship fell free in the fraction of a second until it smacked into the surface of Genizee with a force that jarred Darya’s teeth. Dulcimer rolled across the floor, a squeaking ball of green rubber.
“Approach velocity zero,” E.C. Tally announced. “The Indulgence has landed.” The embodied computer was sitting snug in the copilot’s seat, neurally connected to the data bank and main computation center of the Indulgence. “All ship elements are reporting normal. The drive is working; the hull has not been breached.”
Darya was beginning to understand why she might be ruined forever for academic life. Certainly, the world of ideas had its own pleasures and thrills. But surely there was nothing to compete with the wonderful feeling of being alive, after knowing without a shadow of doubt that you would be dead in one second. She took her first breath in ages and stared at the control boards. Not dead, but certainly down, on the surface of an alien world. A possibly hostile world. And — big mistake, Hans Rebka would have planned ahead better — not one of their weapons was at the ready.
“E.C., give us a perimeter defense. And external displays.”
The screens lit. Darya had her first view of Genizee — she did not count the brief and terrifying glimpses of the surface as the ship swooped down at it faster and faster.
What she saw, after weeks of imagining, was an anticlimax. No monsters, no vast structures, no exotic scenery. The scoutship rested on a plain of dull, gray-green moss, peppered with tiny flecks of brilliant pink. Off to the left stood a broken region of fanged rocks, half hidden by cycads and tall horsetail ferns. The tops of the plants were tossing and bending in a strong wind. On the other side stretched an expanse of blue water, sparkling with the noonday lightning of sunbeams reflected from white- topped waves. Now that she could see the effects of the wind, Darya also heard it buffeting at the hull of the Indulgence.
There was no way of telling where the seedship had landed. The chance that a pair of ships would arrive even within sight of each other, on a world with hundreds of millions of square kilometers of land, was negligible. But Darya reminded herself that she had not landed — she and the Indulgence had been landed, and the same may have been true of Hans Rebka and the seedship.
“Air breathable,” Tally said. “Suits not required.”
“Do you have enough information to compute where the seedship made planetfall?”
Instead of replying, E.C. Tally pointed to one of the display screens that showed an area behind the Indulgence. A long, shallow scar in the moss revealed an area of black mud of just the right width. But there was no evidence of the ship itself.
Darya scanned the whole horizon at high resolution. There was no sign of Hans and his party. No sign of Zardalu; no sign of any animal life bigger than a mouse. Other than the disturbed area of moss, nothing suggested that the seedship was anywhere within five thousand kilometers of the Indulgence. And — her brain should have been working earlier, but better late than never — the message drone could be launched only when the seedship was in orbit. So although the ship might have landed there, it was unlikely by this time to be anywhere close-by. Rebka and the others were probably far away. What should she do next? What would Hans Rebka or Louis Nenda do in such a situation?
“Open the hatch, E.C.” She needed time to think. “I’m going to take a look outside. You stay here. Keep me covered, sound and vision, but don’t shoot at anything unless you hear me shout. And don’t talk to me unless you think there’s something dangerous.”
Darya stepped down onto the surface, her feet sinking an inch into soft mud covered with a dense and binding thicket of moss. Close up, the bright spots were revealed as little perfumed flowers, reaching up on hair-thin stalks of pale pink from the low ground cover of the plants. Every blossom was pointing directly at the noon sun. Darya walked forward, feeling guilty as each step crushed fragile and fragrant beauty. She walked down to the shore, where the moss ended and an onshore wind was carrying long, crested breakers onto pearly sand. She sat down above the high-water mark and stared at the moving water. A few yards in front of her feet the shore was alive with inch-long brown crustaceans, scuttling frantically up and down to try to stay level with the changing waterline. If this region was typical, Genizee was a fine world on which to live, an unlikely spawning ground for the most feared species of the spiral arm.
“Professor Lang.” E.C. Tally’s voice in her earpiece interrupted her thoughts. “May I speak?”
Darya sighed. The interruptions were coming before she had even started to generate ideas. “What do you want, E.C.?”
“I wish you to be aware of what this scoutship’s sensors are reporting. Four organisms — very large organisms — are approaching you. Because of their location, however, I am unable to provide an image or an identification.”
That did not make sense to Darya. Either the ship’s sensors could see what was coming, or they could not. “Where are they, E.C.? Why can’t you get an image?”
“They are in the water. About forty meters offshore from where you are sitting, and coming closer. We are unable to obtain images because the sensors are not designed for good underwater sighting. I disobeyed your instructions and spoke to you of this because although the weapons of the Indulgence are activated, you forbade me to shoot them without your command. But I thought you would like to know—”
“My God.” Darya was on her feet and backing away from the wind-tossed water. Every random surge in the breakers became the head of a huge beast. She could hear Hans Rebka lecturing her: Don’t judge a planet by first appearances.
“Although what you said was not, strictly speaking, a shout, if you wish me to fire, I can certainly do so.”
“Don’t shoot anything.” Darya hurried back toward the Indulgence. “Just keep watching,” she added as she rounded the curve of the hull and headed for the port from which she had exited. “Watch, and I’ll be back inside in—”
Something rose from its crouching position on the gray-green moss and sailed toward her in a long, gliding leap. She gasped with shock, tried to jump away, and tripped over her own feet. Then she was sprawled on the soft turf, staring at eyes that seemed as wide and startled as her own.
“Tally!” She could feel her heart pounding in her throat. “For heaven’s sake, why didn’t you tell me…”
“You gave specific instructions.” The embodied computer was all wounded innocence. “Do not speak, you said, unless you think there is something dangerous. Well, that’s just J’merlia, walking all nice and peaceful. We agree that he’s not dangerous, don’t we?”
“There was evidence of Zardalu presence,” J’merlia said. “But when Captain Rebka and the others entered the buildings, they were all empty.”
The Lo’tfian was leading the way, with E.C. Tally and Dulcimer just behind. A few minutes cuddled up next to the main reactor of the Indulgence, added to J’merlia’s assurance that the members of the party who had landed earlier were all alive and well, had worked wonders. The Chism Polypheme was three shades lighter, his apple-green helix was less tightly coiled, and he was bobbing along jauntily on his muscular spiral tail.