The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall (26 page)

“Good point,” the captain murmured. Her faintly amused tone angered Benden: there was nothing remotely funny about what they had just witnessed.

“But if it did, and it’s what attacked Pern, I can’t blame ’em for wanting help,” said Ensign Nev, whose complexion was still slightly green.

The captain gave him a long look that caused him to flush from neck to a scalp that was visible under his latest space trim.

“Captain,” Ni Morgana said as she pressed the Destruct button and destroyed the remains of the sample, “I request permission to join the Pern landing party to pursue my investigation of this phenomenon.”

“Granted!” Stepping over the lintel of the lab, the captain paused with a wicked grin. “I always prefer volunteers for landing parties.”

Whoever might have envied Lieutenant Benden the assignment had different feelings once the details of the “organism” became scuttlebutt. A concise report from Lieutenant Ni Morgana was published to quell the more rampant speculations, and her lab team became welcome as experts at any mess.

Ross Vaclav Benden had nightmares about his uncle: the admiral, unexpectedly garbed in dress whites, great purple sash of the Hero of the Cygnus Campaign, and a full assortment of other prestigious and rare decorations on his chest, struggled against engulfment by the monstrosity of the lab chamber. Determined to do his best by his uncle, Ross studied, to the point of perfect recall, the EEC evaluation of Pern. The terse all-safe message by Admiral Benden and Governor Boll and Tubberman’s Mayday were easy to memorize, the latter tantalizingly ambiguous. Why had the colony botanist sent the message? Why not Paul Benden or Emily Boll, or one of the senior section heads?

Although this was not Benden’s first landing party command, he believed in checking and double-checking every aspect of the assignment. He wanted to be as prepared as possible for any and all hostile conditions, including omnivorous organisms and other enigmas to be solved or avoided, they might encounter on Pern’s surface; also, he judiciously plotted an alternative holding orbit, in case they had to evacuate early, before the escape window opened up for their rendezvous with the
Amherst.
The landing party had five days, three hours, and fourteen minutes on the surface to conduct its investigations. To his chagrin, Ni Morgana asked for Ensign Nev as the junior officer.

“He needs some experience, Ross,” Ni Morgana said, blandly ignoring Benden’s disgruntlement, “and he’s had
some
xeno training. He’s strong, and he obeys orders even as he’s turning green. He’s got to learn sometime. Captain Fargoe thinks this could give him valuable experience.”

Benden had no option but to accept the inevitable, but he asked for Sergeant Greene to command his marines. That tough, burly man knew more about the hazards that could embroil a landing party than Benden ever would. Having seen the organism Ni Morgana had unleashed, Ross wanted solid experience to offset Nev’s ingenuousness—if that was the proper word for the boy.

“Just what were you like as an ensign, Lieutenant?” Ni Morgana asked, giving him a sly sideways glance.

“I was never that gauche,” he replied tartly. True enough, since he’d been reared in a Service family and had absorbed proper behavior along with all the normal nutrients. Then he relented, grinning wryly back at her as he remembered a few incidents . . . “This sounds like a fairly routine mission: find and evaluate.”

“Let’s hope so,” Saraidh ni Morgana replied earnestly.

Ross Benden was delighted to be teamed up with the elegant science officer. She was his senior in years but not in Fleet, for she had done her scientific training before applying to the Service. She was also the only woman on board who kept her hair long, though it was generally dressed in intricate arrangements of braids. The effect was somehow regal and very feminine—an effect at variance with her expertise in the various forms of contact sport that were enjoyed in the
Amherst’s
gym complex. If she had made any liaisons on board, they were not general knowledge; he’d overheard speculation about her tastes, but no boasting or claims of personal experience. He had always found her agreeable company and a competent officer, though they hadn’t shared more than a watch or two until now.

“Did you see the tape of that thing?” Ross heard the nasal voice of Lieutenant Zane saying later as he passed the wardroom. “There’ll be no one left alive down there. Ni Morgana has proved the Oort cloud generated that life-form, so it wasn’t Nastie manufacture. There’s no rationale for taking a chance and landing on that planet if any of those
things
are alive down there! And they could be, with an entire planet to eat up.”

Benden paused to listen, knowing perfectly well that, despite the dangers involved, Zane would have given a kidney to be in the landing party. Nev was, at least, an improvement on the sour and supercilious Zane. And when the navigation officer added some invidious remarks that Benden had been chosen only because of his relationship to one of the leaders of the colony, Ross passed quickly down the corridor before his temper got the better of his discretion.

As the
Amherst’s
majestic passage through the system approached the point where the shuttle could be launched, Benden called for a final briefing session.

“We’ll spiral down to the planetary surface in a corkscrew orbit which will allow us to examine the northern hemisphere on our way to the site of record on the southern continent at longitude thirty degrees,” he said, calling up the flight path on the big screen in the conference room. “We’ve landmarks from the original survey of three volcanic cones that ought to be visible from some distance as we make our final approach. Survey report said the soil there would be viable for hardy Earth and Altairian hybrids, so it is reasonable to assume that the colonists started their agrarian venture there. The Tubberman Mayday came in some nine years after landing, so they should have been well entrenched.”

“Not enough to avoid that organism,” Nev said flatly. “Your theory would hold water, Ensign,” Saraidh ni Morgana said mildly, “if I could figure out how the organism transported itself from the Oort cloud to Pern’s surface.”

“Nasties sowed it in Pern’s atmosphere,” Nev responded with no hesitation.

“Nasties are more direct in their tactics,” the science officer replied with a diffident shrug.

“We taught ’em to be cautious, Lieutenant,” Nev went on. “And devious. And—”

“Nev!” Benden called the ensign to order.

Benden kept his expression neutral, but he wondered if Ni Morgana was regretting her choice of the irrepressible Nev and his wild theories, if the science officer hadn’t found a transport vector for the organism, the Nasties were unlikely to have discovered it. Their forte was metallurgy, not biology. Nev subsided and the briefing continued.

“Once we have made landfall, we may also have answers to that question and others. It is obvious our search must begin at the site of record. We will also have made a good sweep of the entire planetary surface and can deviate if we find traces of human settlements elsewhere. We board the
Erica
at 0230 tomorrow morning. Any questions?”

“What do we do if the place is swarming with those
things?”
Nev asked, swallowing hard.

“What would you do, Nev?” Benden asked.

“Leave!”

“Tut tut, mister,” Ni Morgana said. “How will you ever increase your understanding of xenobiological forms unless you examine closely whatever samples come your way?”

Ensign Nev’s eyes bugged out. “Begging your pardon, Lieutenant, but
you’re
the science officer.”

“Indeed I am.” And Ni Morgana rose, the scrape of her chair covering a mutter of gratitude from the end of the table occupied by the four marines assigned to the landing party.

Launched from the
Amherst,
the gig proceeded at a smart inner-system speed toward the blue pebble in the sky that was Rukbat’s third planet. It began to dominate the forward screen, serene and clear, beautiful and innocuous. Benden had plotted the gig’s course to intercept the geosynchronous orbit of the three colony ships, to see if the colonists had left a message to be retrieved. But when he opened communications, all he got was the standard identification response, stating the name and designation of the
Yokohama.

“That might not mean anything,” Saraidh remarked, seeing Benden’s disappointment. “If the colony’s up and running, they won’t have much use for these hulks. Though I find that sight rather sad,” she added as Rukbat suddenly illuminated the deserted vessels.

“Why?” Nev asked, surprised.

Saraidh gave a shrug of her slender, elegant shoulders. “Look up their battle records and you might appreciate their present desuetude more.”

“Their what?” Nev looked blank.

“Look up that word, too,” she said and, in an almost cloying tone, spelled it for him.

“Old sailors never die, they just fade away,” Benden murmured, gazing at the three hulks, feeling a constriction in his throat and a slight wetness in his eyes as the gig drifted away from them, leaving them to continue on their ordained path.

“Soldiers, not sailors,” Saraidh said, “but the quotation is apt.” Then she frowned at a reading on her board. “We’ve got two beacons registering. One at the site of record and another much farther south. Enlarge the southern hemisphere for me, will you, Ross? Along seventy degrees longitude and nearly twelve hundred klicks from the stronger one.” Ross and Saraidh exchanged looks. “Maybe there are survivors! Pretty far south though, over mountain ranges of respectable height. I read altitudes of from twenty-four hundred rising to more than nine thousand meters above sea level. We’ll land at the site of record first.”

As the gig slanted in over the northern pole, it was obvious that this hemisphere was enduring a stormy and bitterly cold winter: most of the landmass was covered by snow and ice. Instruments detected no source of power or light, and very little heat radiation in areas where humans usually settled: the river valleys, the plains, the shoreline. There was one hiccup of a blip over the large island, just off the coast of the northern continent. The reading was too faint to suggest any significant congregation of settlers. If they had followed the usual multiplication so characteristic of colonies, the population should now be close to the five-hundred-thousand mark, even allowing for natural disasters and those mortality patterns normal for a primitive economy.

“We’ll do another low-level pass if we’ve time later. The settlers were determined to be agrarian but they might be using fossil fuels,” Saraidh said as they plunged toward the equator, leaving the snow-clad continent behind them and slanting down across the tropical sea. “Lots of marine life. Some big ones,” she added. “Bigger than the survey team reported.”

“They took Terran dolphins with them,” Nev said. “Mentasynth-enhanced dolphins,” he elaborated.

“I don’t think rescuing dolphins is what Captain Fargoe has in mind, even if we had the facility to do so,” Saraidh said. “Have either of you any training in other-species communications? I don’t. So, let’s table that notion for now.”

“There’s another consideration: How long do dolphins live?” Ross asked. “Remember, this trouble started when the colony was down eight to nine years. In your report, Lieutenant, you did mention that further tests with the organism proved that water drowned it and organic fire consumed it. Mentasynth-enhanced creatures have good memories, sure. But how many generations of dolphins have there been? Would they even be aware of what happened on land? Much less remember?”

“Would they want to, is more the case,” Saraidh said. “They’re independent and very intelligent. I imagine they’d cut their losses and survive on their own. I would, if I were a dolphin.”

Then Saraidh started the recorders on the gig’s delta wing, to take a record of the plunging antics of the large marine life as the
Erica
swooped over the ocean on its final descent toward the site of record.

“Records state that the
Bahrain
brought fifteen female dolphins and nine males,” Nev said suddenly. “Dolphins produce—what? Once a year. There could be nearly eight hundred of ’em in the seas right now. That’s a lot of terrestrial life-forms we’d be abandoning.”

“Abandoning? Hell, Cahill, they’re in their element. Look at them, they’re doing their damnedest to keep pace with us.”

“Maybe they have a message for us,” Nev went on earnestly.

“We look for humans first, Ensign,” the science officer said firmly. “Then we’ll check the dolphins! Ross, I’m not getting anything from the ship-to-ground interface that’s recorded for the site. It’s inoperative, too.”

“Now hear this! Buckle up for landing,” Ross said, opening a channel to the marines’ quarters.

“Muhlah!” was Saraidh’s awed comment as they saw the two ruined volcanic craters and the smoking cone of the third.

Ross could say nothing, appalled by the extent of the eruption. He had never expected anything as catastrophic as this. Or had this devastation occurred after the organism had begun to fall? While he had more or less resigned himself to the idea that he was unlikely to encounter his uncle, he
had
hoped to chat with the admiral’s descendants. He certainly hadn’t anticipated this level of devastation. They flew over the landing-field tower, its beacon now blinking, activated by the proximity of the gig.

“See those mounds, just coming up on portside?” Saraidh pointed. “They’ve got the outlines of shuttles. How many did the colonists have?”

“Records say six,” Nev replied.
“Bahrain
had one,
Buenos Aires
two, and the
Yoko
three. Plus a captain’s gig.”

“Only three parked there now. Wonder where the others went,” Saraidh mused.

“Maybe they were used to get out of this place when the volcano blew?” Nev suggested.

“But where to? There were no signs of human habitation on the northern continent,” Benden said, sternly repressing his dismay.