The Legacy of Heorot (40 page)

"Being fixed?"

"Already done. Now, you hook up Minerva Two for power, but you load the cargo too. Those fences can't hold up forever—"

"Soon as the fences go, the Minerva goes too. We've been through this. You'd better get over to the dam." Cadmann shook Zack's hand hard, then glanced up as a hypersonic shriek split the sky: Minerva One, returning for another load.

Zack sighed. "You know, Cadmann, there's just been no time. No time at all. I... you could have taken the Colony away from me, and we both know it."

"That's bullshit."

Zack seemed to be searching for something else to say. He gave up and turned, leaving Cadmann and Carlos.

"Virtues of the warrior," Carlos murmured.

"What are you babbling about?"

"The virtues of the warrior, since ancient times: Protection of the Innocent, Courage in Battle. The greatest of them was Loyalty to the King."

"The king." Zack's dejected figure reached the dining hall and disappeared inside. "I guess he's the only king we have, at that." Cadmann laughed. "Come on. We've got a lot more to do, before we're through today."

The communications shack was busy. Marnie and Jerry were monitoring communications, coordinating thermal graphs from Geographic. Wedges of color showed the forward progress of the grendels.

There was no "wave." There was a growing density of heat sources along all the streams on Avalon, ruby red along the Miskatonic, with a gap around the Colony. The gap was filling in as grendels moved into open territory.

"How long now?" Carlos asked soberly.

Marnie switched her throat mike off to answer. "Twenty hours tops."

Jerry nodded optimistically. "It's going to get right down to the wire, but I think we can hold that long."

Gunfire sounded: several guns at once. Carlos watched one of the video screens. Baby grendels danced in the corn stubble—three, four.

We won't have bullets forever.

Carlos looked sour. "They're getting larger."

"They would be," Jerry said. "Ye gods, the growth rate—I worked it out myself and didn't believe it."

"They've got a hell of an incentive to grow."

Cadmann broke in on the chatter. "Get the Bluff for me, would you?"

"No problem." The holo stage cleared, and Jerry answered the line.

Cadmann clicked on his throat mike. "Is Mary Ann there?"

"One minute."

The stage was blank for about thirty seconds, and then Mary Ann was on. "Cadmann." She looked tired, but not depressed, not frightened.

"Mary Ann. This may be the last opportunity. Tell me again you won't go back to Geographic?"

"No one knows the Bluff like I do. I'll have to show everybody where things are. If Sylvia takes care of Jessica, I'll be happy."

"Yeah." He paused. "I'd feel better if you got out of there."

"No. No. They need me here to show them where things are. If the grendels kill everybody here, there won't be anything to come back to. I'd rather be here."

"All right. I just had to ask."

"I just had to answer." She chuckled. Cadmann clicked the line off.

Outside the communication shack, the smell of fear and smoke and baby grendels roasted by flamethrowers mingled. The stench hung in the air like a shroud.

He and Carlos walked over to the fence above the Miskatonic. Carlos pointed at a black form wiggling up from the water below them.

It twisted its head slowly, questing, as if it could smell them. It tried to climb the rise, but slid back down into the rushing waters.

Over to the south, fire lashed from a Skeeter. A meteor raced at ground level toward the river, lost direction and finally stopped.

"Cadmann? Carlos?"

Sylvia. The wind stirred her hair ever so gently, and it ruffled in a halo around her face. She seemed so incredibly young, so beautiful. She turned, exposing the papooseka backpack that held Jessica.

Terry glided along beside her, carrying Justin in his lap.

She stepped back, framing the four of them with her hands as if taking a holo.

Cadmann closed his eyes and felt the old hunger race through him. The very real possibility that he might never see her again made it almost unbearably intense.

She hugged Cadmann, then reached up and kissed him gently. "For luck," she whispered.

Carlos stood quietly, his hands at his sides. Sylvia had to take his arms and put them around her. She whispered something to him that Cadmann couldn't hear, and then kissed him hard.

Cadmann turned away, embarrassed. Terry studiedly held Justin. Their eyes locked, and Terry raised his eyebrows.

When she had finished, she took Justin from Terry and stepped back again. "My three favorite men in all the world," she said soberly. "God bless and keep you. Keep each other."

She knelt by Terry and kissed him. At first it was a peck, then it became desperately hungry. Justin began to cry.

Sylvia pressed the child to her chest. Tears streamed freely down her cheeks. Without another word, she turned and ran to the Skeeter pad.

Cadmann hesitated, then said, "I'd like to ferry her over myself. Do you mind?"

"Not at all." Terry's voice shook. He stared at the ground and wiped at his face with an unsteady hand.

Stu was running the Skeeter shuttle. Cadmann grabbed his arm and swung him to the side. "Stu—why don't you do us both a favor and grab a cup of coffee?"

"S'all right, Cad. I can keep going for a while—" He glanced at Sylvia, and then back again. "Oh. Right."

Cadmann held the door for her, then hurried around to the pilot's side. He performed all the checks and instrument adjustments automatically. She made no sound until they lifted off, then sighed audibly.

"I might have known that it would be Carlos," he said.

"You understand, don't you?"

"How could I not? I just wish..."

"Don't say it, Cad. We've been through all of it already."

They could see Camelot clearly from their perspective. The angles and swirls, the rectangles of the home lots, the rolling parks. The schematics of their dream. A dream that had become a nightmare.

"Cadmann. Are we going to make it? I mean, any of us?"

"The answer is yes. We've made mistakes, bad ones. Not surprising—no one has ever dealt with an alien ecology before."

"But Cad—"

"No buts this time." He set the Skeeter down on the asphalt surrounding the dam. Minerva One waited there for them, her sides scarred with exhaust heat, the water still steaming around her. Cadmann twisted in his seat. "I swear to you—Justin and Jessica are going to live. They're going to have a place to grow up. They will inherit this planet. My solemn oath."

Sylvia melted against his chest, her face only inches from his. He bent to kiss her, felt his senses swim with her taste and touch and smell.

"You're our only hope, Cadmann. Please."

He bussed Jessica and then Justin, as if both were his own children.

And if there were any justice in the world, they would be.

Sylvia climbed down out of the Skeeter, and closed the door behind her.

He watched, motionless, as she climbed onto the Minerva. With a final wave, she disappeared into the airlock.

That was that. It was almost all done. There was nothing left but to face the grendels.

HOLDING

And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, Forebode not any severing of our loves!

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, "Intimations of Immortality"

Geographic hadn't changed. Sylvia had seen it like this through a tiny window when the next-to-last shuttle brought her to board humankind's first interstellar spacecraft. Minervas had ridden the hull like limpets; they were gone now. The hull was scarred by decades of cosmic rays and micrometeorites. Skin tension had pulled the empty fuel tank to half its size. Yet this was still Geographic.

What was missing was inside. Electronics. Hydroponics, life support, computers, everything that could be used below had been sent down to Avalon. Geographic was no longer an interstellar spacecraft.

The air processors can't support more than thirty people for even seventy-two hours. We'll be breathing soup after fifty. "She's dead," Sylvia said.

"Not dead. Sleeping," Rachel said.

"Bloody right." Zack was grim. "We'll all live to take her to the planets—"

"Yeah, sure—"

"You are damned right, ‘Yeah, sure!'" Rachel said. "What is this?

Giving up already?"

"No," Sylvia said. "Little tired."

"We're still Homo interstellar. The one and only, now. If we fail here, what lesson will we teach in Sol system? There won't be another ship for a thousand years. Maybe never. We came as conquerors. Some of us died as prey, but we ate the samlon too. When we get through this, we'll eat every samlon in the Avalon rivers while our crops are growing. Jesus, I wish I'd recorded that!"

Zack crowed, "Me, too! Rachel, with a speech like that I could get elected to anything!"

Stu fired the retros, and the Minerva began to pivot. The restful azure curve of Avalon passed the window. Tau Ceti crested the horizon, rose like a flaming gemstone. Talons of searing white light raked at the shadows.

Avalon was neutral. The children of Earth might die, they might thrive. Avalon would embrace their bones or their progeny with equal warmth.

Mist swirled below. Rain coming? Mary Ann stood at the edge of Cadmann's Bluff and strained to see through the swirl. The Colony was a geometric blur. After a while the breeze came up again, and the mists parted for a moment.

Tweedledum's cold nose thrust into her hand. "Good dog," she said absently.

The mist began to close again. For the moment everything was tranquil. The rapidly flowing Miskatonic, the neat lines of the Colony, the rows of unharvested crops. Off to the left, a Skeeter moved in curves. There was no trace of grendels. A picture-postcard day, for Avalon.

The wind rose again, a clean, brisk east wind. She treasured the feel of it, the way it wound around her, through her, dried and cooled the perspiration on her skin.

"Cadmann—" she whispered.

But he was down below her, with his own concerns. For now she was on her own.

Suddenly large hands were on her shoulders, massaging deeply. Waves of heat flooded away the fatigue and her knees sagged. She looked up over her shoulder.

"That's wonderful, Jerry. I'm yours."

"Dump Weyland and it's you and me, babe. Are you all right?"

"My body wants Jessica." She touched her breasts, the moist patches where she had leaked through the bra shields. "I think that she's crying for me. But we have six women up there who can make milk for her. She'll be all right."

"How about you?"

She grinned, nodded assurance, and they linked arms. Together they headed back toward the house.

Even from below, the changes were apparent. The house had expanded. Thirteen of Hendrick's crew had deepened and widened the foundations and reinforced the roof and walls with quarter-inch metal sheeting. That had been a cheerful time, when they reshaped Cadmann's Bluff just to keep Madman Weyland happy.

Jerry and Mary Ann passed among the same men now. They were harvesting, digging, driving tractors loaded with now useless machinery, machinery that could not become weapons. Their mood was greatly changed.

When the main camp was overwhelmed, Cadmann's Bluff would remain the most defensible area on the island.

The Bluff's cultivated rows of corn and hybrid melon cactus would never survive the onslaught. What was ready to be harvested was being gathered for storage. Perhaps when this was all over, they could begin again.

The Joes were restless in the cages. Twenty of them squealed and chattered, pressing their noses against the wire. They exuded sour, pungent fear musk. Something was coming from the south, a horror that had sent their ancestors fleeing into the mountains... but the Joes didn't know. It was the massive influx of strangers that had upset them.

Mary Ann took folded papers from her pocket. Cadmann's broad, strong handwriting and diagrams filled them.

She examined his drawings, matched them to the plateau that was now below them. The ground was turned and broken into dark moist chunks, save for a pathway ten feet across. That path zigzagged through the field. "Mines—all through this crescent." She pointed. "Except for the path marked with stakes. The mines are live now."

Jerry took the sketches. "Too bad we don't have the fuel for a moat. That might have worked. These asterisks... right, that's the last line of defense, what Cadmann called ‘an array.' Said that it worked at Rorke's Drift, wherever that was."

"Africa," Mary Ann said. "A handful of British soldiers stood against the entire Zulu nation."

"Then it should work here," Jerry said. There was more hope than certainty in his voice. "The Zulus could think. Grendels react in fixed-circuits. Their attack patterns are genetically predetermined."

"Or mostly are." Mary Ann frowned. What were the words? "Dis... dis something." She stopped, embarrassed.

"Dispersion," Jerry said gently. "Random action. Evolution works better if there's random elements. Most of the grendels will be wired up to do what's been successful in the past. Not all. We'll have to be careful of that." He continued studying the sketches. "Mine field blows them apart. Smell of blood gets them into that feeding-frenzy state. They'll attack each other as quickly as us. Only—"

"What, Jerry?"

"They're not supposed to reach the mines. They'd be ten kilometers uphill from their water source. The internal heat should kill them if they go on speed."

"They fooled us before."

"Yeah. Yeah. If they get here at all, they've fooled us again. Then what'll they do? Sniff out the mines? Learn to fly?" His bemused eyes suddenly focused on hers. "Oh, Mary Ann, pay no attention to this. It's just my way of keeping my brain working. I shouldn't do it out loud."