Ammonite Stars (Omnibus): Ammonite Galaxy #4-5 (57 page)

THEY LOOKED BACK up at the curving stone staircase which wound around the vertical wall of the chasm on Kintara with dismay. Coming down had been bad enough, but now the journey appeared unimaginable. They were carrying packages, and it was uphill, instead of down. Apart from that, the planet seemed to have decided to give up the fight, for occasional large pieces of magma and rock were tumbling down upon them from above.

Even the ghostly light provided by the crystals embedded in the instellite seemed dimmed, and the way up was sombre and forbidding.

Six bit his lip, and then scanned upwards. “Those machines are going to make our lives difficult,” he said. “We will take turns at carrying them.”

Bennel gave a slow shake of his head. “That,
Valhai
Six, is our job.” He met Tallen’s gaze, and the Namuri inclined his own head in agreement.

“We will share the burden.” Diva had decided to enter the conversation, and the three men looked around at her in surprise.

“Either we are all together in this, or we aren’t,” she went on, taking hold of the largest machine with some difficulty, and proceeding up the first five steps. Once there, she put it gingerly on the slab and wound the rope around the inner flange of the flagstone. “Next!”

Six grinned, picked up the other machine and moved past her fifth step, and up another four. Since the two Coriolan men now had no choice, they simply grumbled a bit between their teeth, but picked up the map and the small boxes, and began to follow, roping themselves together.

After a hundred steps, by which time Diva’s hair was plastered to her face and even Six was looking slightly the worse for wear, they changed over, Bennel and Tallen slipping past Six and Diva to take over the following stretch.

Six stared upwards. It was unending. He had no idea how many of the stone slabs had been cut into the chasm wall, but it was certainly over a thousand. His heart was pounding its dismay, and part of it seemed to be beating in his ears. He clutched at Diva’s hand as she passed him carrying the precious map, and pulled her closer for a moment.

“Don’t fall,” he said.

Diva looked steadily into his eyes for what seemed like an eternity. Her sweat-stained face shone bright for a moment of intense light. “Watch your step, Kwaidian.”

Six leaned forward and gently touched her brow with his.

For just a small moment she pushed back against his forehead with her own, and the movement seemed amplified in those surroundings, as if it were a kiss. Then she was gone, had moved past him in the dull sparkle of the igneous rock surrounding them, and was on the following stone slab.

Six felt a warmth spread through him, giving him more energy. He peered back down at the floor of the chasm which was now receding from them with each step. The waterfall was smaller, giving no sign of the remnants of the huge civilization it was sheltering behind its curtain of water. Already it had become hard to distinguish that particular clearing from the other waterfalls which tumbled down, one after another, in a cascade of spray and white foam into the innards of the dying planet.

“Are you coming or not?” Diva’s ironic voice sparked him out of his reverie.

“Just taking in the sights,” he shouted back.

“Well, stop, or it is going to take us all day and all night, and—” Her voice broke off with a short yell of alarm, and Six cringed into the wall as a huge boulder, with plumes of fire visible out of fissures along its surface crashed off the wall of instellite immediately above him, and plummeted past him towards the centre of the planet, missing him by only a couple of feet.

“—Six? SIX!” Diva’s yelp had turned into worry. She had seen what he hadn’t. “JUMP!”

Six was shaking his head from side to side. He had received a glancing blow from a fragment dislodged by the main boulder, and was slower to react than usual. He heard her shout, but it took more than a few nanoseconds to penetrate the fog which had settled into his mind, and he closed his eyes momentarily, trying to disperse the haze.

“JUMP, NOMUS!” Diva’s voice was panic-stricken, and the edge it held chilled him to the bone. She had retraced three of her steps and was only two stone slabs above him now.

He managed to find where her voice was coming from, and held one hand out towards her.

It was enough. She grabbed a hold of him, and dragged him forcibly from the step he was standing on, and across the intermediate one. The impetus nearly pulled them both off the other side of the third slab, but Diva had slotted her hand into a small cleft in the rock, and luckily it was deep enough for her fingers to find traction.

They teetered on the brink of falling, and Diva clutched at Six with her free arm, trying to stop him from overshooting and cartwheeling over into the depths below. Her eyes were dilated by fear, and her breath was coming in short pants.

“Wha—” began Six, but his words were drowned out by a thunderous roar from directly behind him. Where the boulder had hit the face of the chasm, directly above where he had been standing, the rock was blossoming out, and the whole side of the precipice was disintegrating as they watched. A shard of cliff, the size of a shuttle, detached itself with a dull crack of rending stone, hovered for a second in mid air, and then majestically dropped from their sight towards the depths, taking everything it touched with it.

Six and Diva stared. Where the staircase had been, there was now a fracture; a whole piece of the crag was missing, leaving torn and jagged remnants behind.

And there was no sign of the steps that they had just crossed. Five of them had been erased forever from the winding row of stones which crawled around the cliff face. Now nobody else could ever find the hidden grotto behind the waterfall, even if they wanted to.

Six gave an involuntary shiver, and his head began to clear. He looked down at his own hands, and found, to his surprise, that he was still clutching the boxes they had been given.

“Come on,” he shouted. “We have to move faster.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Thank you for saving my life, Diva?” she suggested.

“Yes, yes. No time for all that now, your royal numbness. If you don’t watch out you will find there are no steps left for us to climb up. Get a move on, will you?”

She lifted her eyes heavenwards. “Not at all,” she said to herself. “Don’t mention it, please. It was a pleasure.”

“What on Sacras are you muttering about? Come ON, will you?”

She sighed, but scrambled after him as best she could. “I think I like you more when you are woozy from a blow on the head,” she grumbled.

But Six was out of hearing, ignoring the throbbing wound in his head, with his eyes fixed upwards, up towards the rim of the chasm.

IT TOOK THEM twenty hours. By the time they reached the top of the precipice they were far beyond the end of their endurance. The last two hundred steps had been an exercise in agony. Their eyes no longer distinguished the distances between steps correctly, their hands were so stiff that they could hardly twist the ropes around the anchor slabs. Their breath was coming in ragged bursts, where lungs gave one more futile struggle to admit enough air for the process of living to continue. Their legs were trembling, the muscles screaming for oblivion, demanding to be rested with sharp pains and dull throbbing.

Tallen was the first one over the top. It was his turn with the caskets, which he placed carefully back from the huge drop, before turning to help the others.

Bennel was next, and the map had made it up the hewn staircase nearly in one piece. The dampness of the atmosphere had left large stains across it, but it could still be read.

They turned to take the first machine out of Diva’s hands as she carefully negotiated the last four steps. She staggered out away from the sheer drop and sank to the ground, holding her sides and gasping for breath.

Six was the last. He passed the laser machine up to the waiting arms and pulled himself over the edge with a deep sigh of relief. At last! He sat, shaking, on the dark floor of the overhang, and wondered if they would ever be able to make it back to the shuttles.

“We need to rest.” Tallen’s dark eyes glittered in the gloom.

Diva shook her head wearily. “No time,” she managed. “We have to get back to the shuttles. The black hole isn’t going to wait for us to sleep, and Kintara is very nearly at periapsis. We need to find the canths.”

“We will give ourselves fifteen minutes,” determined Six. “We can’t allow ourselves more. Let’s find some of the nutripacks we left up here, we will feel a bit better if we manage to get something inside us.”

They managed to eat and drink something, and the jagged pain in their muscles abated somewhat. Diva found her eyesight returning, although she still felt light-headed and unsteady.

After their short break, they stood up together, picking up all of the equipment they had left at the top of the precipice. None of them moved to look back over the chasm. None of them ever wanted to see it again, and they knew that no other living thing would. Soon it would be a memory, buried deep inside the event horizon of a black hole. Soon all of its greatness would be damped down until all this was nothing more than a thin string of atoms, spiralling out of control into the maws of the singularity.

Without looking back, they ventured out from under the overhang of rock which hid the access to the Ammonite grotto, and blinked in the sudden blaze of light which hit their retinas.

While they had been gone, the planet had undergone severe changes. The sulphur fumes were now visible, thin yellowing threads which hung above the surface of the planet. Huge columns of ash towered upwards from twenty or thirty large volcanoes which had erupted suddenly from the planet’s surface, and thousands of lava vents were issuing a mixture of steam and plumes. There was fire all around them, and the landscape was ominous.

They looked up. Only the black hole remained unchanged; the stars circling it shone on exactly as before, giving no sign of the cataclysmic changes this central singularity could cause. The sky was peaceful, almost benign. It seemed impossible that this pastoral scene could be causing such destruction here on Kintara.

Diva dropped her gaze, and stared around her. A movement nearby caught her attention and she dropped everything she was carrying. “The canths! They are still here!”

She ran towards her own seal brown canth, and then her legs gave way, which meant that it looked as if she had knelt before it in supplication. She stared back at the others, daring them to speak. Six held up his hands, and put on an innocent face, but his lips twitched.

Diva struggled up, and touched the velvety nose of the canth. “You stayed.”

Six indicated the weltering planet surface in front of them all. “Where would they go? Be reasonable, Diva.” All the same, he moved close to his own dapple grey, and stroked its neck. It whickered a welcome to him, seemingly pleased to see him.

Bennel walked up to Diva’s canth, saddled it up again, and began to load the equipment onto its back with his usual calm efficiency. “That will make things easier,” he said with equanimity.

Tallen followed his example, and loaded up Six’s canth, careful to fasten one of the coveted machines and the coffers very securely to its saddle. “At least the canths have had time to rest,” he pointed out.

“Yes. We are lucky.”

The others all stared at Six, feeling that his description had pushed the definition of the word lucky far beyond all previously known bounds. He caught them staring at him.

“What? Well, we are! The canths could have been back at the shuttles by now!”

Diva stared at the landscape they had to cross if they were to get back to the shuttles, bursting with volcanic eruptions. “I wish
we
were.” She nodded in the direction of the upheaval. “It isn’t going to be easy to get back to them now.”

They all nodded grimly, and then stepped out from under the overhang, together with the canths, out onto the arena of destruction which was going on all across the surface of Kintara, caught in its last, desperate struggles to free itself from the unrelenting pull of the black hole.