Resurgence

“Unaffected. But you can’t use the Bose drive unless you’re at a Bose node. It’d be a miracle if there was one on the surface of Marglot. Even if there is, we got no idea where it might be.”

“So what’s your suggestion.”

“I don’t have one. I’m goin’ outside. If conditions are too bad, the Have-It-All may not be able to land at all.”

And how bad was too bad? Nenda again glanced at his suit monitor. Down to twenty-five below. Where the devil was the Have-It-All? Louis wasn’t sure which worried him more: the idea that it was too windy to permit a landing, or the idea that J’merlia would attempt it no matter what and smash the ship to pieces.

He knew what would happen, of course. J’merlia, with Kallik’s enthusiastic support, would try for the landing no matter how impossible.

He felt a sudden weight on his legs, and thought for a moment that part of the cone-house must have collapsed. He turned. It was Sinara Bellstock, wiping the snow from her faceplate and peering in through Louis’s.

“I was worried about you.” She snuggled down beside him, half demolishing the shelter that had cost him a great deal of trouble to make. “Captain Rebka said that you had gone outside. You’ve been carrying a tremendous load ever since we left the Pride of Orion. And Torran Veck told a story from pre-space times, about a man who went out into the snow to die so that others of his party might be saved. I thought you might have—I was afraid you might have—but I should have known, you are too brave for that.”

It took Louis a moment to catch on. Who in his right mind would wander off outside, to die in the cold? Louis had heard about cases like that, and decided that in the old days there were even more lunatics around than there were today. Sinara, of course, was looking for a hero. Didn’t she know that you were a real hero if you helped people to survive—especially yourself?

“I didn’t come out here to die.” Even with his helmet in contact with hers, he had to shout to be heard above the wind. “I have no intention of dying. I’m looking for the Have-It-All and wondering where the hell it’s got to. They ought to have been here hours ago.”

“What does it look like? I mean, its lights. I know we won’t be able to make out its shape in these conditions.”

She was right about that. Louis could see maybe forty meters. Everything beyond was obscured by falling snow, changed from its earlier gentle flakes to a torrent of hard-driven ice needles.

“Maybe a searchlight, though that isn’t necessary. J’merlia will be landing using instruments only. The ship will be flying in atmospheric mode with wings deployed. There should be navigation lights, one steady red, two flashing red.”

“You mean like that?” Sinara immediately pointed off to the left, in the direction of the pelting snow crystals.

Beginner’s luck. Louis had stared that way a hundred times, scraping ice from his visor, and seen nothing.

“Exactly like that. Sinara, don’t move!” She was starting to stand up. “Wait ’til they land.”

He didn’t like the look of the way those lights were veering and tilting. The Have-It-All had stabilizers, but when you came right down to it the ship was designed for space, not atmosphere. If the wind happened to be too strong, there would be problems.

The navigation lights rolled, pitched upward, straightened, and fell. Louis could not estimate the distance of that final drop.

“Come on. Now we go.”

You couldn’t run through waist-deep snow. Kallik or Atvar H’sial would have covered the distance in a dozen gigantic leaps. Louis floundered. Even Sinara was better at this than he was, reaching the ship twenty meters in front of him. The hatch was three meters above her head, far too high to reach. She would have to wait until someone lowered a ladder—no easy job in this wind and snow.

The hatch opened barely wide enough to admit a suited human. Louis heard a startled scream. He saw Sinara grasped by a giant tentacle and whisked inside.

Good old Archimedes. Brains weren’t everything. He panted his way the final few meters and stood expectantly. He was grasped and whipped up and away like a paper doll.

Kallik and J’merlia were leaping with excitement as Archimedes set him down. But first things first.

“Damage assessment?”

“The structural damage is superficial. But—” J’merlia looked uncertainly at Sinara Bellstock.

“It’s okay. You can talk in front of her. She can’t learn anything the rest won’t know soon enough.”