The Sunborn (21 page)

“Somehow the whole place is getting pumped by the electrodynamic weather, you think?” she encouraged him.

He gazed at the surface, now so sharp in the stretched shadows of sunset that it looked like a drawing in black and white. “One thing the Voyagers told us was that voltages are trickling in from the Oort cloud’s deep freeze somehow. Ummm… There’s that data showing the shock wave in the solar wind. I hadn’t thought that could be related.”

She hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the briefings and endless 3-D color visuals about the region farther out. The solar wind speed had dropped near the Voyagers, decades back, she recalled, and the physicists thought that meant Voyager was about to meet a shock wave. The multicolored graphics made it look something like the shock cone riding just in front of a supersonic airplane, causing a sonic boom. That was where the solar wind, which had thinned in its expansion all the way from the sun, finally lost out to the pressure of the plasma that hung between the stars. “That’s sure a long way out,” she said.

“Yeah, but that fast probe, Ulysses, found that the shock’s much closer in now than when Voyager found it. They—we—call it a termination shock, and those are great at making fast particles and electric fields.”

Shanna retreated to what she knew: biology. “There are eels that can store charge indefinitely, I think. Swimming batteries. They use it to discourage predators and stun fish.”

He looked at her intently. “So being a battery might be a way to keep energy reserves when it’s night. Then—those zand could just connect up their internal terminals and—zap!—a quick, sure source of efficient energy. I’ll bet it’s the same for Darksiders.”

She sat upright, eyes on the main screen. “Something’s flying down there.”

Small wing-shaped things hovered, then lofted upward together, circling within the pit. Blue lights around the regimented ranks dimmed. “Hard to make them out,” Jordin said. “But they’re organizing, yeah.”

“Close-up in infrared,” she instructed DIS.

A dim view leaped into focus on the screen. Shanna squinted. “They’re…pulling something apart.”

Something bigger than the moving things. Jordin said, “Looks like they’re slicing up a…zand.”

Her stomach clenched, looking down at the black ice. “They attack the zand at night. The zand are bigger, but they’re sleeping, I guess.”

The vague forms had pulled pieces away. Quick, scurrying moves.

“Let’s have a look, okay?”

Jordin nodded and started their last deceleration. Zero hour; no more time for dispassionate study and idle speculation. It felt good.

He hit the controls. The lander danced up and away, maneuvering above the center of the great pit. Their steam blurred the view.

Shanna took a deep breath. The lives below were at risk, and maybe she didn’t fathom what was going on here…but she had to act; it was in her nature. Her pulse pounded in her ears. She had gotten here by following her instincts, the deft feel of intuition.
Even if I’ll regret it the rest of my life.

They could see better. “Yep, that’s a dead zand,” Jordin said. The shapes nearby moved into a circular pattern. “They see us. Maybe hear us, too—if they have ears.”

Shanna said tightly, “That li’l trick you rigged up—”

“On it,” Jordin said.

“They’re coming fast—”

“Man, they look—”

“Yeah, dangerous.” He put his hand on a little switch on the far side of the module from her. She hadn’t noticed it before, and he hadn’t mentioned it, either.

So I wouldn’t bump it by accident? But the call is mine…

More shapes swarmed in below. Jordin said very casually, “Y’know, we can’t hover forever.”

“Check. Okay, land in that big broad spot. Looks rocky.”

“Yep, it is.”

He took the lander into a bare plain, several kilometers from the Darksiders. They touched down, and the steam plume seemed to blow off the hard ice nearby without even provoking a liquid shimmer.

Jordin read off the shutdown protocol, and she echoed it. They spent several minutes checking the engine readouts, relayed the digital package up to
Proserpina,
and Jordin carefully evaluated the lander pads. “No melting under us.”

“Good, let’s—” Their audio rang with pops.

Jordin put their local radar on the big screen. “Yeah, I see it.”

Dots were converging from all around, making local radar give off a chorus of pings.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said quickly.

“Done.” He slapped the overrides, and the nuke flared again. A quick burst took them up a hundred meters.

“I think,” Jordin said mildly, “a professional biologist would label that aggressive behavior.”

“I tend to agree.”

Below, gray boxes moved with startling speed. They had rushed in under the lander’s plume, meeting just below. They now clustered and dispersed in quick, jerky movements.

“Ummm,” Jordin said. “Walking washing machines.”

“More like combinations. Legs that end in wheels. See that one? It’s rolling over the flat rock, then steps over the small boulders. Ingenious.”

“Wheels. Gotta be machines, not zand.”

“Right. And look, they’re extruding pipes out the top.” She pointed where a cluster was poking narrow tubes upward. Their steam dispersed quickly, so the boxy forms seemed to ripple. More came in steadily from the sides. There were at least a hundred within view. As the newcomers arrived, they, too, started extending their tubes.

“Ummm. Don’t like the look of that.”

“Me, either.” She felt a sudden prickle of fear.

“Like they were ganging up to…shoot at us.”

“That switch?”

“Yeah.”

“Draw them in.” She thought,
Jordin and I have fashioned an instrument designed for delicate exploration of an alien world…
into a bomb.
“Then…do it.”

Something flickered in Jordin’s face. “You—really—”

“I know, it’s a big step—”

“Let’s just clear out of here.” His lips set firmly, resolved.

“We’ve got to act,” she said quickly.

He looked at her. “We?”

“Okay, me. I’m captain, I’ll take the responsibility.”

He nodded, lips working, then nodded again. “Right. Your call.” His thumb touched the jury-rigged relay. He made the lander lower a bit. Darksiders came flocking in from the sides, moving even faster. Shanna felt sudden fear. They were so fiercely agile, and in this deep cold. How could anything—

“Should drop some.” Tensely Jordin counted. The minicam showed the rocks below growing larger. An instant before impact, he hit the probe’s cutting torch. The oxy-hydrogen mixture exploded.

A giant yellow fist blasted out of the pit. Vapor boiled up, thick fog condensing at once into glinting crystals. Debris shot far and wide.

A shock wave slammed into the lander. The deck rocked. Something solid screeched right through from wall to wall, in and out again. Its passage rang like a giant’s handclap.

Shanna was in her armor—otherwise explosive decompression would have finished her. In the air around her she saw crystals rattle down in a frigid shower. Air screamed out of the lander.

Jordin fought the lander’s controls. The vehicle swayed and sank like a drunken express elevator. Deceleration jets sputtered, then coughed out. With a shriek of twisting metal the lander thumped down. Too
hard.
Three legs groaned and buckled under, canting the deck steeply.

Shanna slammed against the wall and felt blood run down one cheek. Her right shoulder hurt, sharp and biting. The silence in the shattered cabin, after so much thunder, seemed eerie. Pluto’s cold gases sighed in. She saw her breath frosting over the faceplate and turned up the armor’s heater. It gave a wan warm breath at her neck. She breathed in shallow gasps, and the air cut her throat. Her legs were already getting numb. Not
much more time.

She glanced sideways, stopped. Jordin was sprawled halfway out of his couch, mouth sagging, unconscious. She shouted, but he didn’t move. Dead? She couldn’t tell if he was breathing.

Proserpina
rasped in her ear, demanding answers.

The cold
… A pouch near her mouth held medication designed for just such a terminal emergency. No pain, the briefers had told her; a bland taste, drowsiness, and then—nothing.

She had told them back Earthside to take it out, but after launch she found that it was still there.

No, damn it.
With blunt fingers she punched in the suit command to call
Proserpina
on the hailing frequency. “We’re down, hull breach, trying to—” Her throat rasped, and her voice shut down. The cold was tightening around her. Her arms and legs moved sluggishly as she got up, turned to the dead command board, then looked at the few screens still live.

Movement. A square, bulky object, outlined in cold blue light, lurched past the outside view screen.

Noise. Clanking, cutting rasps, thumping.

Sudden terror—real, little-child fright at monsters in the dark-—clutched at Shanna’s heart. The Darksiders were here.

The creeping, aching cold fogged her mind. Some small corner of it still knew nonetheless what it was doing. “Wiseguy! Wiseguy!”

Dazed, she got the translator up and running, a hiss in her ears. Outside-direct interface. “Wiseguy…talk to them,” she hoarsely whispered. “Explain…”

Talk to them how?
Even with the simpler zand it had taken hours of eavesdropping…

A section of bulkhead wrenched away. Pale blue light. In through the ragged hole came a many-jointed, metallic limb ending in a…lobster claw. It groped along the control board.

“No—don’t break anything!” she cried wildly. As if having heard, the claw stopped. Extended. It jerked forward. The arm swung, extended across the cabin, and touched her faceplate with a sharp click.

She blinked. Fast-growing frost crystals framed the claw in an ivory glow.

Tired…cold…no…mustn’t
—not yet. Poking blindly with her stiffening hands, she pawed at the claw. “Wiseguy…tell them… Warm…” Shanna slumped. Her icy armor stung her flesh through her padded jumpsuit.

Then she was falling through space, into an endless nighted gulf. The ultimate outrage was that a last lucid spark of awareness was able to watch it happening.

Down…down…down.

L
ONG
,
SLANTING AFTERNOON RAYS
stained the cliffs of Rendezvous in soft turquoise and pale gold. The thin air rang to the cracking and clanging of round, dark shells as they opened like great eggs.

Old One hovered over the placid sea just offshore, drifting lazily on the welling heat from below. It came alertly out of its meditations and deftly moved toward a stretch of barren rock shingle. There its particular young friend and mate in Self-merge drew apart like giant, slick amoebas. And there, glistening on the sand between them, feebly stirred seventeen splendid zand.

Harsh cries clashed in the cold air. Flappers, patiently poised above Rendezvous to wait for Self-merge to end, now folded themselves and arrowed downward.

With quick energy it had doubted that it still possessed, Old One flipped over. It pointed its vent apertures at the sky—and fired. The rosy flame lit its plunge. It carved the sky, swooping by the furiously flapping shapes, turning the shrill exhaust on them.

Hunger calls turned to thin screams of dying rage. Blackening flapper bodies tumbled and fell to ground. A host of small scavengers raced out to feed on the smoking remains.

Baffled, the surviving flappers circled over the beach, readying to strike again. By this time other zand came scurrying into action. They had forgone the bliss of Self-merge in order to stand guard, awaiting Birthings. A furious, snapping air battle erupted over the stony shores of Rendezvous.

The little new zand below obeyed the genetic impulse imprinted into them. Like baby turtles on tropical isles, they scrambled down the sterile stretch of beach, searching for something to give them lifegas. Not finding any, they dove with tiny splashes into the sea. There beckoned a gray scum of marine organisms. The floating mites fed on microscopic crystals of ammonia and carbon dioxide, exhaling hydrogen, the gas of life itself.

Adult zand flocked in behind the newborn and joined end-to-end in a living wall, fencing off the shallows as a swimming area for the young. One warder on the seaward side cried out as its body took the impact of a borer. Commotion, thrashing. A flapper darted in, nipped off the parasite’s body behind the head, and flapped away.

“Feed the young some of this!” Old One commanded, jetting toward blue-gray scum. The zand rushed to obey, catching the wrigglers. The young ate, breathed in lifegas, squeaked. Zand warbled gratitude. With great effort the zand and their shellmates struggled up, groggy from Self-merge, and began weakly singing the first notes of the Hymn of Birthing. All along hillsides and ice hollows of Rendezvous, other zand joined in thanks and praise to Lightgiver.

But a strange new sorrow gnawed at Old One. It joined, with the quavering of age, in the song, while inwardly it wondered—did Light-giver truly hear? And what did the new beings mean, who brimmed with fatal heat and acted so strangely? Could they be of Lightgiver Itself?

Old One had long been certain that Lightgiver did not move across the sky. Instead, somehow it knew that the World in its day turned toward the bright body in the sky, warmed itself, and then spun away again, in endless cycle. Putting together its own thinking with what the hot strangers had said, it now reasoned further—that in the much greater cycle from warm to cold, Lightgiver did not approach and recede from the World. Instead—the thought electrified—the World traveled in a great eccentric loop, first closer to the Source of light and life, then away.

Old One basked in thought. So far this was compatible with zand theology and perhaps even strengthened it. Lightgiver was not a wanderer across the sky but instead commanded, the unmoved center of All. The strangers had implied a stunning conclusion—that Lightgiver was, in fact, one of those strange bright points in the sky that multiplied at twilight and grew fewer, thinner at dawn.