Ammonite Stars (Omnibus): Ammonite Galaxy #4-5 (66 page)

Finally the diamond star let them go, and the three of them slumped down onto the ground, where they lay, trying to get their strength back.

Six glared at the star shape, and then at his wife. “And you complain about the way I make first contact!”

Diva clutched at her head. “Ouch! That really hurt! Are you two all right?”

Tallen groaned as he tried to look upwards.

They stared back at the star shape, which was now slowly separating again into its tiny component parts.

The visitor’s voice broke into their minds. “Are you back with us? You went away for some minutes. I couldn’t hear you.”

“Didn’t they take over your mind?” asked Six.

“They did not!” The visitor seemed pleased with himself.

“Well, we didn’t have much choice!”

“No, they took over the trimorphs, too. The twins are not immune, but I am.”

The twins spun in disgust, and their change of colour showed just what they thought about the newly released animas.

The visitor regarded his fellow morphics with sympathy. “I know how they feel. I wasn’t immune when the Dessites attacked us, although they were. This time it was the other way around.” Then he darkened. “Though they were able to protect me against the Dessite minds, and I wasn’t able to protect them just now.” He gave the morphic equivalent of a sigh. “However, it must be much worse for you transients! You have no protection whatsoever against them, do you, you poor things? Especially Six!”

“Leave me out of this, spindle-brain! Couldn’t you have stopped them?”

“I am unable to penetrate their diamond star,” the bimorph said, with some dignity. “On the other hand, they are unable to penetrate my mind either. I am sorry, I couldn’t intervene.”

Six, Diva and Tallen began to stagger to their feet again, as the tiny alien forms seemed to suddenly fan outwards from the island, disappearing in a flash to examine the planet.

But by the time they had packed up the machines in their wrappings, the animas were back. They re-formed into diamonds, but this time did not combine to form the star.

“This planet is not acceptable. This is not Enara.”

“Can you hear them, Six?”

“Hard not to. Their voices vibrate through my skull like a juggernaut out of Rexel.”

“So now they don’t need us in the mindmerge to talk to us. They have found out how to communicate without it.”

“I don’t think there is much about me they haven’t managed to find out about. I feel like my whole brain was drained out of my skull!”

“That wouldn’t take them long,” said the bimorph.

Six glared, but decided to ignore the comment. “I hope that was first and last contact.”

The visitor flickered. “I expect they do too.”

Six grinned at that, and inclined his head in the bimorph’s direction. Before he could retaliate, the alien diamond was speaking again.

“You will find the other trapped Ammonite animas, and then take us to Enara. On arrival, we wish to meet with the beings you call canths, with the morphics and with the orthogel entity. Until the morphics find Enara for us we will survive in the boxes.”

The light suddenly intensified, and the box, which Tallen had been holding all the time, opened in his hands. He looked down at it, surprised. The myriad of small lights suddenly coalesced into a bright river of life which streamed into the box.

“How do we open the box when we reach Enara?” asked Six.

“
Our counterparts in the canths will know how.”

The lights flowed into the box, which closed behind them.

Tallen stared out into the distance. “They don’t want much, do they? And we still have to cross this ice sea to get back to the shuttle.” He pointed at the distance without enthusiasm.

Six finished tying the lasers back into the improvised sled, fastened the box on the top as securely as he could, and motioned to Diva. “Better get a move on, then.”

Tallen grunted. “I will go first, this time.”

Six shrugged, secretly rather pleased not to have to take up the strain again. He looked over at Diva, and raised his eyebrows.

She nodded, and stepped back onto the ice in Tallen’s wake. It was easier now that they had the practice, but she was still very careful of where she put her feet. Slowly they began to retrace their steps, tugging at the ropes to pull the sled as gently as they could over the slabs of ice.

Six thought that they were very lucky that the water seemed more viscous than it would have been on Kwaide. There, it would have been totally impossible to keep your balance on an ice floe.

They were about half-way across the pack ice on their way back to the shuttle when Six heard a slight cracking sound to one side of him. He squinted at the nearby ice floe. The white-grey colour of the clouds on the skyline blended to perfection with the ice floes underneath it, and it was hard to make out details.

He frowned. Both Tallen and Diva were further away from the disruption, but Six knew he had to find out what had made that noise. He gave a whistle to attract their attention, and then signalled to Tallen to tell him to stop for a moment. As Six’s rope became slack, he jumped the short distance across the intervening ice until he reached the source of the intriguing noise.

Once there, Six found himself looking down through the transparent ice. The glow of luminescence was much stronger here, so that in the murky light of the Tarbolean day the area beneath the ice gleamed with a greenish light.

As he watched, he saw a dark shape coast past him, underneath the transparent ice. It was at least five metres long, perhaps even more, and had mottled spots along a light brown skin, except right on the top of its body, where it seemed to be equipped with a large protective pad, presumably to prevent damage as it banged up against the ice flows. The dorsal fin was back near the tail, where it was safe from damage by the floating ice.

“Brilliant!” He said it out loud, though there was nobody close enough to hear him. The animals beneath him were certainly magnificent. Through the eerie turquoise glare of the ice he was able to make out five of them, clearly hunting for the krill which was gathered under the ice in a cloud. He stood up to signal Diva. She would want to see this! What a piece of luck, he thought; I must be standing slap in the middle of the most appetizing bank of krill on the whole of Tarboleus!

Beneath him, another huge grey shadow grazed against the ice, and the floe moved correspondingly. Six struggled to keep his feet, staggered, nearly fell, and then managed to right himself.

He couldn’t drag his eyes away from the ice beneath his feet. The krill were obviously aware of the presence of a pack of hunting sharks, too, for the luminescence had grown much stronger, and the cloud of green was actually moving away from the gaping mouths of the sharks as fast as it could. It wasn’t, he saw, anything like fast enough.

One huge fish scraped its back along the underside of the ice and it suddenly became all too clear to Six why he had heard the loud crack, earlier. The krill they seemed to like so much was too close to the underside of the ice, and they had to scrape the protected upper part of their bodies along the dangerous shards to be able to harvest their favourite food. They had such a huge body weight that each time they nudged the underneath of the ice, the integrity of the whole piece was threatened.

Six fell completely over this time, scrabbling desperately for a hold on the dipping block of ice. The floe quivered in the water, and the sheet of ice creaked ominously.

Diva was shouting something urgently across to him, but he was too busy trying to get back to his feet and stay on top of the block of ice to make out what she was saying. His feet slipped again from under him as the whole thing did its best to precipitate him into the freezing water.

Six realized, rather belatedly, that he shouldn’t have come over to examine the source of the noise. He had the sneaky feeling that Diva would have something to say about it if he were tipped into the water by a large fish. He tried to calculate how long he would be able to last, should that happen. The bodywrap should keep the cold out, but when he needed to change his next mask pack he was unlikely to survive the process. The ice would be bound to clog the replacement.

As he watched, two more of the creatures pushed past underneath him, and he was horrified to see the transparent ice which separated him from them splinter into a white network of cracks. There was a sound loud enough to be heard several hundred feet away, and the whole slab he was lying on reared up into two separate pieces. He felt himself begin to slide into the deadly waters.

Then the rope around his wrist tightened and he felt a huge tug on his whole body. It dragged insistently at him, trying to overcome the inertia, and then yanked him away from the rearing break in the ice. He closed his eyes, felt as if he were flying through the air, and finally hit something solid with a force large enough to knock the breath out of him. There was a moment when everything went blank, and then he was being hauled bodily across the ice. He was faintly aware of being unable to breathe, and then he knew no more until he woke up to find his head in Diva’s lap, and the comforting solidity of the metallic floor of the shuttle under his legs.

“Wh-what happened?” he asked, still feeling very groggy.

She gave a ferocious frown. “Do you realize that I thought you were DEAD?” she demanded.

“Did you? I’m sorry, I—”

“Do you HAVE to go around scaring the living daylights out of people?” The warning tooth was jutting out over her lip now. “What on Sacras made you stop to sightsee?”

“Well, I—”

“Of all the knuckleheaded, stupid, crass things to do!”

“Here! There’s no need to—”

“—You needn’t think I am going to put up with things like that every day.”

“No, I—”

“Because I’m not! If you are going to be so dumb as to—”

At that moment Six gave a theatrical wince and shut his eyes, a tactic which proved temporarily effective, because she stopped in mid sentence and demanded to know where he was hurting.

“You were unconscious,” Tallen informed him. “We dragged you off the floe that was breaking up just in time and managed to get you to the shore. But you weren’t breathing. We thought we had lost you – until I realized that your mask pack had been violated and had gone into autoblock. You had passed out from lack of oxygen. Once we figured out what was wrong, we had another mask-pack on you in seconds, although
Valhai
Diva had to give you cardiac massage.”

Six grinned at him over Diva’s shoulder. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

Diva straightened up. “Appreciate it? APPRECIATE IT? We saved your LIFE, you silly noodle! Next time you want to stop and commune with the local fauna you might remember that.”

“Look, Diva, I know you have a strong character, and it is one of the things I admire most in you, but don’t think you are going to take me over and tell me what I can and can’t do all the time. Because you’re not. We Kwaidians can be pret-ty stubborn, too, when we want to.”

Diva stared at him. It struck her that, at that particular moment, her husband’s face bore a remarkable resemblance to that of a Cesan mule. He looked about as malleable as a steel post.

He regarded her with understanding. “You need to relax; take it easy.”

“RELAX?” Diva put both hands on her hips and regarded him darkly.

“Only ... sitting like that ... shouting at me, you look a bit like a Cesan fisherwoman.”

Her eyebrows touched in the middle. “I look like a WHAT?”

“Just saying.” He lowered his head, so that his eyes wouldn’t give him away. “I mean, you probably wouldn’t like people to think you were a shrew, would you?”

“I ... I ... I ...” For once in her life, Diva was speechless.

“That’s all right. No need to thank me. After all, that is what husbands are for, isn’t it?”

There was a deathly silence. Diva reminded him of one of the lava vents on Kintara, about to erupt.

He struggled a bit until he was supporting his own head on one elbow, and assumed a righteous tone. “Anyway, I just wanted to see what was moving under the ice.
You’re
the one who is always telling me I should practice my first contact skills.”

Diva pushed him back down, much more firmly than was necessary. His arm slipped and his head hit the metallic floor with a distinct bump, causing him to look at her reproachfully.