Bridgehead (28 page)

“It's just what they were doing last night,” the woman whispered. She rested a hand on Gardner's thigh to steady herself, physically and otherwise.

The building began to hum its insistent note. The office windows trembled, casting hinted shadows within because irregularities in the glass created minute lenses. Selve joined his larger companion in the center of the docking circle. Astor handed him one of the guns she held. Mike Gardner's chest went numb with remembrance of how Keyliss had been mutilated. A different weapon, of course, but the same unexpected conflict.…

“Look away,” Lexie Market reminded him. Gardner closed his eyes. The flash was scarlet as it seared his retinas through the blood vessels of the eyelids.

Mike was moving through the door before the air had cleared of echoes. He was leaving the physicist behind, forgotten in his fear and sudden resolution.

Market uncoiled from her crouch with a gymnast's grace, hiked up her skirt with one hand to keep from being hobbled, and met him when he thrust the key into the lock of the enclosure. “What are you doing?” she demanded as fiercely as if she already knew.

Mike went through the gate. He could already see that the Travelers' locker was open, just as they usually left it. “Going to follow them,” he muttered, half hoping that he would not be understood. “We've got to find out what's going on.”

He unhooked the third suit from within the locker. Keyliss's weapon, bumped by the student's arm, slipped and clashed its butt loudly on the floor of the locker. “They're not going to tell us, so I'm going to look.”

“You saw Barry,” the woman said. She did not grab Gardner's wrist, as her strength and agitation made him think she would.

Gardner scuffed his shoes off without untying them: the atmosphere suit would fit over his jeans and polo shirt. “Professor Rice wasn't wearing one of these,” he said. “Mrs. Market, I think
somebody's
got to do this. Please don't get in the way.” Mike knew that the more he thought about what he was doing, the harder it would be when it came time for him to execute.

He stepped into the suit. The front of it was split down to the crotch. His hands fumbled as they tried to find a zipper.

“Here,” said Lexie as she brushed his fingers aside. She had watched the Travelers opening their suits the night before. As she expected, the seam closed neatly between her thumb and forefinger as she slid them up the opening to the man's throat. She paused there, continuing to hold Mike as if she had caught him by the tie. “Now, wait,” she said firmly. “You don't know what's on the—other side, and you can't. But before you do anything else, we'll close the hood and you'll breathe for a full minute to make sure that it's really functioning. Agreed? Before anything else?”

The young man nodded because he did not fully trust his voice. “I need to check the controls,” he added, a statement without emotional baggage.

“Wait,” Market repeated. She lifted the cowl over Gardner's head. The lower edge fell into a smooth join with the torso of the suit without even her touch to guide it. “If you can't function normally while you're wearing it, then you need to know that now.”

“Right,” he said. Though his voice was normal, it was an octave lower than before and came from his chest rather than the closed hood. “Hey, M—Lexie. This works!”

He was probably taking a deep breath in proof of his words, but Lexie could see no sign of it. The sheet covering Mike's face was slick and opaque to her. Presumably he could see through it without distortion, because he stepped decisively to the instrument panel and threw a switch. Just as Barry had done, the woman thought.

Aloud she said, “I wanted you to wait.”

“It'll take more than a minute,” Gardner explained, “for the charge to build, Keyliss says, but I—” He broke off with a catch in his voice. “I don't guarantee the mechanism, but it's true that it takes.…” He broke off, his faceless mask turning from the woman to the docking area.

Lexie held him by the inner crook of both elbows. Mike's head spun to her again. She raised herself on tiptoe and kissed the smooth covering over where she thought his mouth must be. “Go get 'em, tiger,” she murmured as she released him.

Mike Gardner held his pose for a moment longer, looking like a statue of surprise sculpted by Henry Moore. Then the insistent buzzing that made the soles of his feet quiver reminded him of his decision. He jumped over the painted boundary of the docking area.

The flash came fifteen seconds later. Dr. Alexis Market was still within the fenced enclosure. Her back was turned to the drive coils and the circle. The arms that she had thrown over her lowered face were there to protect more than her eyes from what was coming.

*   *   *

Sue Schlicter had started to doubt that she would find anything, even the creek. Then her right boot sank in mud, and there was no longer a sprawling tangle of branches in front of her.

She had assumed that she could pick her way downhill easily enough, despite the dark. That had not been true even on the steeper part of the slope. The trees camouflaged the terrain surface with unexpected thoroughness. When she did suddenly splash into her initial goal, however, the ultimate goal was facing her. In the soft plants across the stream lay the corpse of the giant carnivore; beside it hovered the car from which the beast had plucked the first alien to threaten it. The vehicle's empty cockpit glowed the soft greenish amber of a sick man's urine.

Sue splashed toward the car determinedly.

The sky glow was not sufficient to make more of the carnivore than a bulk whose surface quivered. The motion was not that of life or even the creature's autonomic nervous system disengaging from the muscles it had served: the slayer had become carrion, and thousands of its lesser fellows were devouring their late lord. The chitinous buzz of insects was multiplied by the numbers of wings involved. It led to an unpleasant recollection of the time machine that had ambushed her and Charles.

Heavy insects lighted on the woman's blouse and face as she strode closer. Their touch was shocking, and their feet drew blood as they briefly gripped. Schlicter's cheeks were taut in fearful parody of a grin, but she managed to swat the creatures only with her left hand. Her right held the open knife, its three-and-a-half-inch blade her only hope against larger predators now that the dark foreclosed flight. The insects disliked the woman's odor as much as she did their touch. None of them gripped her for long or tried to slash or suck her flesh.

There was other alien wreckage and even one broken corpse sprawled near the water's edge like a patch of algae; however, only the one car seemed to be functional. Sue had not been sure the aliens would have left anything. It had seemed a reasonable possibility, however, since only one-person vehicles had penetrated the forest fringe. It was not surprising that the aliens, nervous and literally out of their element, had not dispatched recovery personnel on a hike through the trees in the dark to a site where numbers of their fellows had been slaughtered in broad daylight.

Anyway, the alien vehicle afforded the only possibility Sue saw for rescuing her lover.

Its cockpit was something of a scramble to enter. The aliens had not seemed particularly strong, but their joints were extremely limber. The car was apparently intended to be mounted by gripping the coaming with a combination of six hands and feet, then executing a quick jerk to swing the rider aboard. Schlicter grimaced as her right palm slipped on the four-foot-high coaming. She folded her knife, slipped it back in her pocket, and tried again to clamber aboard. Her boots first slipped vainly, then flailed outside the cockpit as her buttocks landed on a seat not meant for humans.

The controls were not meant for humans, either.

The cockpit was lighted, but there was a tiller instead of a steering wheel; no knobs or pedals; and no identifiable instruments. The pattern of lines in the dashboard's lumpy padding might at that have been the instruments, but the possibility could only be tested if Schlicter got the vehicle to do something in the first place. The cockpit had the warm washday odor of bleach, but there was no gush of chlorine to poison a human occupant as she waggled the tiller experimentally. Nothing happened.

Gingerly, she put her feet down, boots cocked sideways to make room for her toes, her knees raised almost to eye height by the low seat. Her feet did not shuffle onto hidden controls.

Running her right index finger along the dashboard, Sue found that what had seemed to be padding was in fact hard and slick. Therefore, the bulge over which her finger was tracking might—

The car dropped with a bump and a slurp of mud. The lights went out. The woman swore. On reflection, though, anything was better than still being stuck here in the morning. And if touching the top of the lump made the vehicle ground itself, perhaps …

Her finger tweaked the lower curve of the dash, very briefly, as if she were testing a hot stove. The touch was enough: the car rocked as it freed itself and balanced again a handsbreadth above the ground. The hidden cockpit lighting again cast its bilious glow over the interior.

Since the molding to the right of the tiller was the off/on switch, then the similar excresence to the left must also be significant. Sue touched the top of the lump with more assurance than she had reactivated the car a moment before. Nothing happened. Frowning but still determined, she slid her finger down over the surface of the lump. The car lurched forward as if someone had let in its clutch with a bang. Above Sue, the open viewscreen flapped like a sail.

Experience with motorcycles kept Schlicter from the panic reaction of snatching her hands away from the controls. Instead, she drew her left index finger fiercely back up the curve which had set the vehicle in motion. Her right hand grabbed at the tiller.

The car slewed to the right momentarily before it lost its forward motion.

A fan of light flooded from the curve of the vehicle's bow, illumination as clean as that of a halogen beam, but—like the interior lights—with a disquieting hint of yellow green. Schlicter had palmed the end of the tiller, a natural act for a human but not for the Vrage, whose hands had more of an elbow joint than a palm. The light switch, out of the way of its normal users, had been thrown by human accident.

Sue Schlicter paused. She was cramped into the alien vehicle like a fat man in a basket chair. The car's lights glared out at the tangled forest. Beneath her, the stream bubbled frantically. She took a deep breath and drew the viewscreen down. Her vision through it was as clear as if it were optical-grade Plexiglas without the differing refractive indices of air and glass to contend with. The screen hung where she released it, its bottom edge a finger's breadth above the coaming. Whether or not chlorine would flood the cockpit when the screen latched, the seal would certainly cut off the outside air the human herself required.

“Dear God, Charles,” Sue muttered. Then she touched the speed control and began to pick her way through the vegetation.

*   *   *

The dome rattled, as it always did when someone transported to Base Four from an oxygen world. The volume balanced. The slightly higher pressures within the shed before transport, however, meant that the flimsy structure shuddered at the shock of partial vacuum.

The door flew open before Selve could reach for it. Selve and Astor had expected to be greeted by one of the Monitors. There were six figures waiting. All of them were anonymous in their suits until Deith spoke. “Come to beg us for another chance when the Directorate won't give you one?” the stocky Monitor said, gesturing the Contact Members out of the shed with a brusque hand.

The Monitors wore holstered handguns. Unlike the shoulder weapons which Astor had insisted she and Selve carry, guns were not issued to Monitors as part of their working equipment.

“Do you like wearing atmosphere suits, Deith?” Astor said as she strode out of the docking shed without looking down at Deith. Selve followed his colleague more deliberately. He knew that his own physical presence would not prevent jostling in the doorway. None of the Monitors would permit themselves to be in Astor's line when the tension was this high.

“If you don't,” the big female continued as she walked away, “then let's keep this till we're inside. But hold the thought, it's important.”

The cruel atmosphere made an underwater scene of Base Four. Vision was not impaired more than it would have been on Skius—or Earth—in a light haze, but the distorted colors were more unpleasant than was the actual constriction of the atmosphere suits. Vehicles for internal ground transportation in this hostile environment snapped along the guides set in the streets when the base was laid out. There were no aircraft. Anything more than a few feet in the air would be suicidally vulnerable in combat of the sort the base's architects anticipated. So far as the planet itself was concerned, there was nothing anywhere on its surface of interest to the Skiuli except for the staging area they had built for their assault.

Of course, the Vrages must have made similar assumptions when they equipped their own staging area.

Deith muttered a demand to one of her colleagues. That Monitor, at her order, abandoned dignity and ran ahead of the party, which Astor continued to lead with her long strides. The Monitor pulled open the outer door of the airlock and stood holding it, as if he feared that the Contact Team would slam it shut on their hosts. Astor halted at the opening without looking around, blocking the others until Selve stepped by her. The big female then followed Selve regally, making room for the Monitors.

“Not what we're here for,” Selve muttered disapprovingly. Pumps began to ram the local atmosphere out through vents.

“Neither is breathing,” said Astor. “But we have to breathe, too, if we hope to succeed.”

The Portal Four control room was in a wing devoted solely to instrumentation and living quarters for the Monitor Group. Deith and her fellows were nearly as isolated from the remaining base personnel as the Contact Team was from the local populace of Earth. The Monitors were to remain behind during the assault and holding action which would mean death for very nearly everyone they sent through the Portal. The circumstances
could
have made Deith what she was … but Selve, for one, believed the pattern of the Monitor's personality had been set long before.