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"Look at those domes, built to catch every meager ray, even magnify it,"
Carialle said.
"Perhaps our ammonia-breathers photosynthesize, and live on water."
"Or the cities below ground are full of hydroponics," Keff said. "I don't see
enough domes to support a breeding population of mitochondroids." In spite of
the peril and the anger he felt at the pirates, he and Carialle had dropped
back into the game they loved to play, anticipating the facts about an unknown
race. "Is it possible this planet was a lot warmer once? Or do you suppose
we've discovered silicophages?"
"It wouldn't be the first discovery of mineral-eaters," Carialle said, after
running through her memory banks, "but it would be the first one that attained
sentience and
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JODY LYNN NYE - [The Ship Who Sang Series - 06] The Ship Errant space travel."
"In stolen ships," Keff said, flatly. "What do we know about them so far?"
"From the emissions of the ship Tall Eyebrow damaged, body temperatures in
range tolerable by humans, between twenty degrees C and forty degrees C. Size,
from my readings in the structure ahead of you, they are larger than humans,
but smaller than lions. Anything else, I must await data from you and our
party of rolling frogs."
"Add to that, intelligent and dangerous," Keff said, nodding, but keeping his
eyes pinned on the dome. "Well, I can't wait here forever. TE, I'm moving.
Watch the building and stop anything that comes in after me."
"I hear," the small voice said in Standard over the helmet speaker.
Staying flat on his belly, Keff crept over the rise. On the other side was a
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steeply sloping valley. Long-departed rivers or perhaps the celestial
pressures of planetary formation had crazed the plain with shallow canals.
Keeping low enough to remain out of sight to occupants of the largest
structure, Keff crawled on hands and knees.
Fine silt, undisturbed for eons, rose briefly around him, then settled out in
the heavy gravity, burying his tracks.
Parked a dozen kilometers away beside the Cridi spaceship in a lonely valley,
Carialle watched his progress simultaneously on her charts and through the
body-cam he wore on his tunic.
"You're coming to a T-intersection," she said, as Keff paused and reared up on
his knees so she could see his precise location. "Take the left branch. No,
the left one. The right one leads straight into a deep thermal vent."
Keff made his way along the turnings, wrinkling his nose against the clouds of
dust even though he knew they couldn't penetrate his protective suit. His
heads-up display told him the half-meter-high bank of fog into which he
crawled at a low point in a ditch was heavy with ammonia and traces of other
gases reduced to liquid. He gulped.
One breach in suit integrity, and he was a green icicle. Never mind; he was
committed to his mission. In some small way, he was helping Carialle to lay
the ghosts of her past, as well as ridding the Cridi of a menace and avenging
the deaths of the Central
Worlds diplomatic personnel. A moon in its second quarter rose on the horizon
and crept up the sky, throwing a little more light on his path. His canal
dipped sharply as he crawled another ten meters, then light from the moon was
cut off. In the blackness
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JODY LYNN NYE - [The Ship Who Sang Series - 06] The Ship Errant his
suit-lights went on. He paused, waiting for the prickle between his shoulder
blades that would tell him he was being watched. Nothing.
"You're almost underneath the building now," Carialle was saying. "If you go
around to the right, you'll be in front of that hatchway."
Keffs back began to ache from the heavy gravity. He paused with hands on
knees.
"It looks a long way up," he panted, staring at the black shape above him,
picked out by distant pinpoint stars. His lungs dragged in oxygen.
"What are you building up all of those muscles if not for an effort like
that?" Carialle asked dryly.
When she started making ironic comments, Keff could tell she was the most
worried.
He just shook his head. In an instant the aches in his lower back and thighs
went away. "Just oxygen-starved," he said. "Just a moment." He reached into
the gauntlet of his right glove for the control pad, and turned up the nitrox
mix slightly. The faint hissing sound was a comfort.
In the gloom the building over his head looked ominous. The slab on which it
was built had been slagged out of a lip of the ridge, so the people inside had
at least stolen, if not evolved, heavy pyroconstruction equipment.
Keff heaved himself up. The domes began at a meter above the platform, giving
him an expanse of blank wall against which he could conceal himself. Ahead of
him, the platform widened out away from the domed windows to an apron that
bore scorch marks from repeated launches and landings, limp, metal-bound hoses
lay on the ground in skeins. They led from the putative fuel tank, which stood
on pylons around a fold of the ridge from the domes.
To protect the glass from
Jody Lynn Nye explosions
, Keff thought, with an approving nod to the designers. A dusty accordion-
pleated hood was bunched up around the entrance to the building. It seemed to
be long enough to extend all the way to the edge of the platform. Not at all
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sophisticated, but it would scarcely ever need major repairs. He took the
video pickup off his suit and held it up against the bottom margin of the
clear wall.
"Can you see anything, Cari?" he whispered.
"Aqua foliage," Carialle replied. "Spiky, like evergreens  no, more like fan
coral. I
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JODY LYNN NYE - [The Ship Who Sang Series - 06] The Ship Errant can't see
anything moving, even on infrared. My sensors are still picking up those same
four body traces. No one much seems to come up to the surface."
"If they're anything like us, it's too cold for them up here. I'm ten meters
from the entrance. Where are you, TE?" Keff asked his suit mike.
"We see you, other side of edge," the globe-frog's voice piped. "Under-by
tank-
container."
"Back me up. I am going to try and enter. If I am not out in fifteen minutes
from the time of my entrance, come in and help me. At that point, revealing we
have Core technology will be moot."
"Sir Frog waits," the small voice said. Keff grinned.
He crawled the rest of the way to the rough plascrete arch. The entrance
resembled an airlock, devoid of any security devices Keff could recognize. The
pirates must have been very confident that no one knew they were here.
"Where are the guards, Cari?" he asked.
"All four are deep inside," she said. "It looks like your best chance."
Keff nodded to himself. "Here goes."
He stood up against the inside edge of the arch, hidden momentarily from sight
of anyone in the dome. Carefully, he turned around. Inside a metal frame, two
flat bars jutted out from the wall.
"I've only got a fifty-fifty chance of cocking up," he said, and a childhood
singsong bubbled up from memory. He waggled his finger playfully between the
two bars. "My mother said to pick the very best one, and you are ." With
that, he stabbed the upper it bar. It moved easily under his finger,
depressing flat to the wall.
Immediately behind him, something heavy and soft dropped to the ground. Keff
spun.
He was now curtained into the enclosure by a metal and plastic mesh. Hissing
erupted from the wall side. In a few moments, a door, large enough to admit a
cargo container, slid upward.
Keff listened before he stepped inside, turning up his external mikes to the
maximum.
No alarms. No one seemed to have heard the airlock open. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]