Ammonite Stars (Omnibus): Ammonite Galaxy #4-5 (72 page)

“Bah! Nothing for a couple of Kwaidian no-names like us! You worry too much.”

“So ... can I help, or not?”

“Only for the first stretch,” Six told her. “You can untie the first stage when we signal you. Then I want you to make your way back to the shuttle. We will have to descend in stretches anyway, because we haven’t enough rope to go all the way down to the cleft in the rock.”

Grace nodded, trying to look cheerful. “Ok.”

She watched as the two men began to descend the smooth stone wall which plummeted to the floor below. From this height the bottom of the cliff was hardly visible, just a faint blotch of brown, interspersed with swatches of red and orange, where some oxidation had occurred. Grace waited anxiously for the two men to reach the full extent of the first rope.

At last a cheerful whistle told her to let the rope go. She did so with a feeling of great doubt, having to force her own fingers to obey her brain. It felt as if she were casting Six and Ledin off to their fate, abandoning them with no chance of redemption. It felt horrible.

She dropped her end of the rope down to them, and then turned sadly away, feeling somewhat superfluous. It was a horrendous drop, and she knew that it would be dangerous. But they were more than capable of taking care of themselves. She wouldn’t worry about them. Much.

THE DESSITE TRAVELERS had been given explicit instructions. They were to abandon the normal protocols of interstellar exploration, and to concentrate on finding out more about the orthogel entity and the ortholiquid.

Back on their home planet, Dessia, a whole new facility had been dedicated to going back through a thousand years of records, back to old videos, to anything which might help them to locate some of the liquid that they now knew could take them anywhere in the galaxy. They knew that it would help them to find water planets like their own, planets they could colonize.

The work ethic of the planet had suffered a complete turn. Now, the emphasis was on finding some way to travel quantically. The space exploration program had been adapted immediately.

The Dessites hadn’t found the long-awaited incorporeals, but what they had found was even better. If they could only get some of the ortholiquid to Dessia itself, they would no longer be tied to one planet. They would be able to travel, without the need of costly and limiting spaceships, to other planets; they would be free to find suitable water worlds which would enable them to survive their unrestrained population explosion. There could be no question. Every single one of the now 570 billion Dessite minds was concentrated on only one thing. Every one of the travelers knew that there was fame and glory for the first one of them who found a way for the Dessites to travel by quantum decoherence.

Another huge area of the floating island was now dedicated to a science known as observational probability analysis. This was manned by one of the oldest members of the Dessite race, a huge specimen who had lived long enough to remember when the oceans actually contained wild fish, before the overcrowding had become such a problem that almost all the remaining species on Dessia had disappeared, forced out of existence by the exigencies of survival.

The Dessite in charge of this section, known as the prognosticator because of his ability to foresee tendencies, apportion importance to incoming data and devise new avenues of exploration, was in a mental conversation with one of the small travelers – on this occasion one of the ones within the Vanex constellation itself.

“You are sure?”

He listened to the small thread of brain which was floating in a tank over a small, insignificant system almost 100 light years away, and then his mind gave a flash of victory which was so bright it seeped out into the consciousness of the rest of the Dessites on the planet. A burst of triumph pulsed right through the collective mind; the feedback nearly overcame the small organic thread of life in the distant spaceship.

The prognosticator damped his brain patterns down, and sternly excluded the rest of his compatriots from the connection.

“Then you know what to do,” he said, mentally sending a picture of the protocol to be followed.

The tiny traveler, in orbit around a lonely planet, flashed its understanding. It was thrilled; now there would be many honours to be received, many accolades to be reaped, many interviews to be born out nobly. It would be revered; its small part in the history of the Dessites remembered for all time. The tiny brain settled back in its nutrient solution, and resumed its scrutiny of Pyraklion. The most important part of its mission was to remain undetected. The subjects should have no idea that they were being watched. It checked hastily to make sure that both video cameras deployed on the surface were cloaked. Then it began to transmit what those cameras were seeing to Dessia.

Work slowly drew to a halt on the home planet.

SIX COILED THE rope that Grace had thrown down, and then slipped it around the column they had decided on as a belay. From now on they would have to reuse their ropes, which meant that they would have to double the rope up so that they could recover it later. The stretches, then, would be much shorter.

Ledin was spread-eagled on the rock, trying to keep his breathing calm. Although the towering columns of basalt were smooth, they also held quite a number of cracks, which helped. Even so, the mile drop beneath him was making him uncomfortable. Still, he thought, at least they weren’t being attacked by bats or avifauna, as they might have been on Pictoria.

The thought of Pictoria made him feel surprisingly homesick. There was something very special about that planet, he decided. Not just that Hanna was now buried there, either. It was the red rocks shining under the Pictoris sun, and the huge buttes stretching up into the sky. He missed it.

He fumbled a handhold, and slipped, having to use the rope to steady himself.

“Mind what you are doing!” Six had not been expecting the quick movement, and teetered himself.

“Sorry. I was thinking about something else.”

“Now might not be the best time to go off daydreaming,” suggested Six in a mild tone.

Ledin smiled at him. “Probably not.”

“What were you thinking?”

“That I prefer Pictoria.”

Six thought about it, and then looked surprised. “I know what you mean. Who would have thought we would end up liking that backward planet full of avifauna?”

“With spiders the size of dinner plates,” added Ledin.

Six grinned. “—And man-eating bats!”

“Not to mention the ortholiquid lake that traps you in underground caverns!”

Six groaned. “Don’t remind me of that! Not one of my favourite days.”

Ledin’s memory took him back to that moment, and he gave a shudder. “Nor mine.”

“This is a doddle, in comparison.”

Ledin wasn’t prepared to go that far. “I don’t know,” he said doubtfully. “I can’t say I’m enjoying this much, either.”

“Only another couple of hundred metres to go!”

“Sure. A breeze.”

There was a long silence as they continued their climb down. There were deep indentations in the columns, but some stretches were completely smooth, and they needed all their makeshift skills to avoid slipping on the treacherous surface. Six thought that the sheer magnificence of the climb was breathtaking. He stared out into the distance. The planet stretched on beneath them, with just this one huge drop. The continental shelf must have subsided along this fault line at some stage, millions of years ago. But the view from this particular spot was something else.

After nearly two hours they picked a larger crevice, and wedged themselves in, before ingesting a nutripack and a waterpack each.

Ledin looked over at the horizon. “Nice to be on a planet with no lethal lifeforms,” he said.

“So far. Don’t speak too soon.”

“You think there might be some?”

“I hope not. But there is water here – it seems to collect on the top of the hexagonal rocks, doesn’t it? Which means that there should be bacteria. So there might be other lifeforms. Although I suppose they might have all been killed off by the trauma of the disruption of the planet and by the asteroid belt. I don’t know.” Six took another swig of his nutripack, and looked at it with disgust. “You know, I am getting so used to living off these things that I have nearly forgotten what sweetfruits taste like.”

“I know what you mean. They do take the fun out of eating, don’t they?”

Six stood up. “Ready for another couple of hours?”

Ledin inclined his head. “As I ever will be.” He looked up at the clouds. “And the cloud base is thickening. We had better get a move on – we don’t want Diva to be struggling against the wind, as well as everything else.”

Six had to agree. Diva was very skilled as a pilot, but there were limits to everything. “We won’t stop again.”

Ledin sighed. He looped his length of rope around a column, and began to descend. They must have gone on in this fashion for about another half an hour when they both looked up suddenly. There was a tearing noise coming from above them. It took a few seconds, and then they were both able to see a brilliant white ball of fire ripping through the atmosphere, seemingly in their direction.

“GET DOWN!” screamed Six. “If that thing explodes anywhere near us, it will knock us both off the cliff!”

Ledin looked around frantically. Six was above him right now, about to follow him down the stretch. He would be able to duck back into the crevice they had used to tie the rope. But Ledin himself was more exposed.

The sound of the meteoroid as it thundered towards them was almost supernatural. It made the same sound as a lightning ray, but multiplied by a thousand. The hairs on the back of Ledin’s neck stood on end.

He knew he was too exposed where he was, and began to let himself down precariously hand over hand. He needed to get to the next small horizontal shelf. And fast.

The last couple of metres were a race against time, and he nearly fell off the face of the cliff altogether. Then his foot found the empty air he had been hoping for, and he let himself down into a thin shelf, about three metres long, and perhaps one deep. He was aware of an immense flash of light in the sky above him as he threw himself right to the back of the rock crevice.

Nothing happened for long seconds, and then the shock wave hit them. Ledin felt the whole of the column of basalt rock shudder, and begin to tremble at the explosion. Then he was hit by a wave of energy which picked him up bodily and hurled him back against the wall, causing him to cry out in pain. He huddled back, his hands clapped over his ears, shouting out loud into the mammoth explosion of air and sound that created a cacophony around him.

It could only have lasted one or two moments, but it felt like a lifetime. His ears hurt; he knew he had been deafened by the phenomenon. He waited for an impact in the ground, a second explosion, but there was none. All of the meteoroid must have exploded above the ground

He waited some five minutes, and then crawled out of his hiding place, knowing that he had been very lucky. If that backlash had caught him exposed on the cliff face, it would have ripped him away from the stone as easily as the wind takes a flurry of dust.

He peered cautiously back up the cliff. “
Six?”

A wary face appeared, staring wide-eyed down at him. “You all right?”

Ledin’s ears were still ringing, but he could tell what the question was. He examined himself. “I think so. You?”

Six nodded. “Some explosion!”

Ledin found the rope, still hanging placidly where he had left it. He moved it against the rock face, and Six nodded, signaling that he was on his way down.

By the time Six dropped into Ledin’s crevice, they were both able to hear some sounds again, although these still reverberated as if they were coming down a long, metallic pipe. They thumped each other on the back, both euphoric at having escaped the worst of the blast.

“Almagest was smiling on us there!” Six said.

Ledin nodded. He knew how close he had been to being blown off the rock face altogether. He thought of Grace. He hoped she had not been caught out in the open. Surely she would be back inside the pod by now?