“Beats me.” Nenda could not hide his frustration. “I tried to get her to tell me what she meant, an’ she said you don’t explain things like that. If you don’t feel the difference in J’merlia, she says, you won’t know what she means even if she tells you.” He rubbed his pitted and noduled chest. “She comes up with that, after all I went through gettin’ this augment put in just so I could gab Cecropian!”
The Indulgence was finally at two thousand meters and still descending fast. Already the screens revealed the familiar curve of the shoreline, with the spit of land to the north jutting out into blue water. Inland, the dark scars in a carpet of gray-green moss showed Hans Rebka just where the seedship and Dulcimer’s scoutship had landed. Those scars looked subtly different from when he had left. But how? He could not say. At seven hundred meters he took complete manual control and brought them in to hover over their previous landing site.
“See anything?” His own eyes moved to the cluster of buildings where their party had first been trapped. Nothing had changed there. No sign of disturbance in the calm waters. It was Louis Nenda, scanning the broken masses of rock and scrubby vegetation a couple of hundred yards farther inland, who grunted and pointed.
“There. Zardalu. Can’t see what they’re doin’ from here.”
There were scores of them, clustered in a circular pattern around a dark chasm in the surface. They were in constant motion. Rebka flew the Indulgence across to hover directly overhead, where the downward display screens under high magnification showed upward-turning heads of midnight blue and staring cerulean eyes.
“Full-size adults, most of that lot.” Nenda moved to the Indulgence’s weapons console. “Let’s give ’em somethin’ to think about.”
“Careful!” Rebka warned. “We don’t know who else is down there in the middle of them.”
“No worries. I’ll just tickle ’em a bit.” But Nenda selected a radiation frequency and intensity that would fatally burn a human in ten seconds. He projected it downward, choosing the spread so that it covered the whole group below them. There was an instant reaction. Zardalu jerked and jumped in pain, then fled in flurries of pale-blue tentacles across the shore, heading for the safety of the water.
Nenda followed them with the radiation weapon, pouring it onto the stragglers. “Don’t die easy, do they?” he commented thoughtfully. He was burning them with a higher-intensity beam, yet every Zardalu managed to reach the water and swim strongly before plunging under. “Tough beggars, they eat up hard radiation. They’d be right at home with Dulcimer in the Sun Bar on Bridle Gap. Or maybe not. I guess they can take it, but they sure don’t seem to like it.”
The last Zardalu had vanished underwater. Hans Rebka hesitated. The easy piece was over, but what now? Was it safe to land the Indulgence, even with its sophisticated weapons system? He had learned the hard way an old Phemus Circle lesson: It’s a poor civilization that can’t learn to defend against its own weapons. The trouble starts when you have to defend against somebody else’s.
The last Zardalu Communion had at one time extended over a thousand worlds. They could not have maintained their dominion without something to help them.
He brought the Indulgence to a hover thirty meters up, exactly above the scar in the moss left earlier by its mass. When all continued quiet, he cautiously lowered the ship to the surface. If Darya and any other survivors of her party were trying to escape from the surface of Genizee, there was no more logical place for them to seek. And if there were no survivors…
That was a thought that Hans Rebka did not care to pursue.
“Steady. Somethin’s going on.” Nenda’s gruff voice interrupted his thoughts.
“What?”
“Dunno. But don’t you feel it? In the ship?”
And Hans Rebka did. A minor tremor of the planetary surface, changing angles slightly and sometimes imparting a faint jitter to delicately balanced items of the ship’s interior. Rebka instinctively lifted the ship to hover a couple of feet clear of the mossy ground cover, but further action on his part was overwhelmed by another input.
He had been watching the screens that displayed the seaward view, but now and again he switched his attention to one showing the land side. What he saw there filled him with strong and unfamiliar emotions.
It took a second to recognize them. They were relief and joy.
Running — staggering — across the uneven surface came Darya Lang. Right behind her was E.C. Tally, moving with the gait of a drunken sailor. And behind him, bounding along with a horde of dwarfed and apricot-colored young Zardalu snapping at his corkscrew tail, came a miserable, cucumber-green Dulcimer.
At the rate Darya and the others were moving they would be at the scoutship in less than thirty seconds. That was wonderful, but Rebka had two problems. The Zardalu were gaining — fast. They might catch Darya and the other two before they reached the safety of the ship.
And the shuddering of the Indulgence was growing. Accurate aiming of the weapons system to pick off the Zardalu was impossible.
Lift to safety, with Darya and the others just seconds away? Or wait for them, and risk the ship?
Hans Rebka placed his finger on the ascent control. Thirty yards to go, maybe ten seconds before they were inside the open hatch.
The ship lurched. He stopped breathing.
Those high-pitched, excited squeaks were the thing that had changed the Eaters from awful concept to Darya’s worst reality.
The voices of the baby and adolescent Zardalu were quite different from the clicks and whistles of the parents. They had come echoing along the tunnel behind Dulcimer, rapidly increasing in volume. With those in her ears, decision-making had moved from difficult to trivial.
“Tally, are you sure you know a better way to the surface?”
“Certainly. I followed it all the way, and I even emerged onto the surface of Genizee itself. May I speak?”
“No. You may move. Get going.”
For once, the embodied computer did not stop to give her an argument. He went scrambling up the steep incline of the duct, using the ribbed hoops of bracing material that supported the wall every few feet as a primitive set of steps.
Darya managed to stay close behind him for the first forty paces, but then she felt her legs beginning to tighten and tire. Even for someone in tip-top condition the steep ascent would be exhausting. But she had had no rest for days, no real food for almost as long, and she had spent a good part of the past few hours vomiting what little she had been able to eat. She had to stop. Her heart was ready to burst from her chest, and the muscles of her thighs were cramping into agonizing knots.
Except that the sound of the Eaters was louder. The young Zardalu were entering the duct that she was climbing. Close on her heels came Dulcimer. He was sobbing for breath and gasping over and over again, “They’ll eat me, they’ll eat me. They’ll eat me alive. Oh, what a terrible way to go. They’ll eat me alive.”
Not just you, Darya thought with irritation. They want to eat me as well. And then: Irritation is meant to be used. Build it to anger, to fury.
The Zardalu would not get a living Darya. Never. She would force herself upward along the lightening tunnel until she died of exhaustion. Then, if they liked, they could have her lifeless body.
She clenched her fists and moved faster, propelling herself up the narrow tunnel until suddenly she ran into the back of E.C. Tally. He had stopped a few feet from the end of the duct and was peering upward to the brightly lit surface.