Resurgence

Now there was nothing more that Ben could do. And precisely because he could do nothing, he relaxed for the first time since his injury on the surface of Iceworld. He had been unconscious for much of that time, but those medicated periods had not rested him. He leaned back against the little wall of snow. He adjusted his suit’s thermal setting to its most comfortable level. As the long day drifted on, he drowsed.

What woke him was no more than a shadow, a patch of darkness sensed through closed eyelids in a place where no shadows should exist. He came fully awake, opened his eyes, and scrambled to his feet in a panic. Thirty meters away from him a black sphere hovered above the snow. He had no idea how long it had been there, but already it was beginning to sink down into the surface.

Would he be too late?

Ben made the effort of his life, scrambling and sliding toward the sphere. When he came to it he did not hesitate or slow. He hurled himself forward. The dark heart of the sphere swallowed him up, and one minute later it too was gone.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Stripping the ship

Sometime, someplace, humans and aliens might discover practical telepathy. Until they did, there was always a chance that whatever you said might be misunderstood.

If Louis had not been convinced of this before, the point was emphasized as he was walking along the Have-It-All’s lower corridor and happened to glance into the conference room. He had just come from the lowest level, where Torran Veck, Teri Dahl, Atvar H’sial, and J’merlia were beginning to clear packed snow from the drive unit. Now Louis was looking for Kallik and Archimedes to set them to work.

He certainly found them, though what they were up to was another matter. Kallik stood by the conference room table, her round head level with the polished white top. Archimedes was sprawled along the length of it, his blue tentacles wrapped around each end. They flexed as Nenda watched, and the table top warped upward under a mighty force.

“I don’t suppose you two would like to tell me what the hell you’re doin’?”

“It is the table, Master Nenda.” Kallik touched it with a forelimb. “Although we can pass it through the biggest of the cargo hatches, it will first be necessary to remove it from this room. That requires that it be broken into pieces. Indeed, although I had never thought about it before, it is a mystery how it was ever brought in.”

“It wasn’t. It was secreted on the spot by a bunch of Doradan Colubrids, an’ for the moment it stays here. Archie, get down off that table or you’ll be lookin’ for a new set of guts.”

“Master Nenda, you specifically declared the table to be expendable.”

“If, Kallik. Didn’t I say if

? If things get desperate, an’ we’re not there yet. What I want is an inventory. We need to know the mass of everything that’s not nailed down, plus a bunch of things that are. But until that’s done, we throw nothin’ overboard. Clear enough?”

“Master Nenda, it will be done exactly as you command.”

“An’ you, Archie, shape up an’ get useful. If that table has to go outside in bits, maybe you go with it.”

Nenda hurried away double-time through the ship’s interior. Kallik was smart, and if she could get it wrong, so could anybody.

Claudius would not be a problem. Louis found the Polypheme coiled down tight in one of the cabins in a trance of terror. Neither useful nor ornamental—now there was a candidate to throw overboard when you needed to reduce mass. Louis hurried on. He was approaching the hatch through which they had all entered, and this part of the ship was colder than everywhere else. That was surprising. The air circulation system should have taken care of that long ago. Even more surprising was the sight of a group of figures in one of the nearby cabins.

Hans Rebka, Darya Lang, Sinara Bellstock, E.C. Tally, and Julian Graves. Almost half the available work force. And doing what? Not one damn thing, so far as Louis could see. They were clustered around a display terminal.

Louis was about to say, “It must be nice to be a guest on board, an’ not have to work,” when he saw the message on the display.

Sinara came over to him and grasped his arm. “Ben is outside. We must go after him.”

“His message tells us just the opposite.” Louis was still reading. “Besides, we have no idea what he thinks he’s up to or where he might have gone.”

Darya said, “We don’t know what Ben is doing, but Hans has his suspicions.”