"Lord of Lords." Graves's face was back to its spastic twitching. He covered it with his hands. "
Would
we have done that? Would we? We would, we would."
"Because closeness and dependence on each other is 'unnatural,' " Elena said bitterly. "You would have tried to
cure
us. We can't stand that idea. That's why you'll have to kill us before we will go with you. So go now, and leave us with each other. We don't want your cure. If we die, at least we die together."
Graves did not seem to be listening. "Blind," he muttered. "Blind for years, filled with my own hubris. Convinced that I had a gift, so sure that I could understand any human. But can an individual relate fully to a compound being? Is there that much empathy? I doubt it."
He straightened up, walked across to the two women, and put his open hands together in a gesture of prayer. "Elena and Geni Carmel, listen to me. If you will come with me now and agree to rehabilitation for what happened on Pavonis Four, you will not be separated. Never. There will never be an attempt to 'treat' your need to be together, or to break your closeness. You will continue to share your lives. I swear this to you, with every atom of my body, with my full authority as a member of the Alliance Council."
He dropped his hands to his sides and turned away. "I know I am asking you to trust me more than is reasonable. But please do it. Discuss this with each other. Commander Perry and I will wait outside. Please talk . . . and tell me that you will come."
The Carmel twins smiled for the first time since Perry had entered the tent.
"Councilor," Elena said quietly, "you are right when you say that you do not understand twins. Don't you understand that you do not need to leave, and we do not need to talk to each other? We both
know
what the other feels and thinks."
The two women stood up in unison and spoke together. "We will come with you. When must we leave?"
"Now." Perry had been a silent bystander, glancing from the three people before him to his watch and back. For the first time, he accepted the idea that Julius Graves had a gift for dealing with people that Perry himself would never have. "We all have to leave this minute. Grab what you absolutely need, but nothing else. We've been down here longer than we expected. Summertide is less than thirty-three hours away."
The aircar rose from the black basalt surface.
Too slow, Max Perry said to himself. Too slow and sluggish. What's this car's load limit? I bet we're close to it.
He said nothing to the others, but his internal tension willed them upward, until they were cruising at a safe height back the way they had come.
Apparently the others did not share his worries. Elena and Geni Carmel appeared exhausted, lying back in their seats at the rear of the car and staring wearily out at the glowing sky. Graves was back to his old manic cheerfulness, querying J'merlia, and through him Kallik, about the Zardalu clade and Kallik's own homeworld. Perry decided that it was probably Steven again, busy in simple information gathering.
Perry had little time himself for watching the others, or for conversation. He was tired, too—it was more than twenty-four hours since he had slept—but nervous energy kept him wide awake. In the past few hours Quake's atmosphere had passed through a transition. Instead of flying under a dusty but sunlit sky, the aircar sped beneath continuous layers of roiling cloud, black and rusty-red. They needed to be safely above those clouds, but Perry dared not risk the force of unknown wind shears. Even at the car's present height, well below the clouds, violent patches of turbulence came and went unpredictably. It was not safe to fly the car at more than half its full speed. Jagged bolts of lightning, showing as dusky red through windblown dust, ran between sky and surface. Every minute the lower edge of the cloud layer crept closer toward the ground.
Perry looked down. He could see a dozen scattered lakes and ponds, steaming and shrinking, giving up their stored moisture to the atmosphere. Quake needed the protection of that layer of water vapor to shield it from the direct rays of Mandel and Amaranth.
What could not be shielded were the growing tidal forces. The ground around the shrinking lakes was beginning to fracture and heave. Conditions were steadily worsening as the car flew closer to the place where J'merlia and Kallik had been found.
Perry wrestled the car's controls and wondered. A landing in these conditions would be difficult. How long would it take to drop J'merlia and Kallik at their car and move back to the relative safety of the air? And if there was no sign of Atvar H'sial and Louis Nenda, could they leave the two slaves alone on the surface?
They had not much farther to go. In ten more minutes he would have to make the decision.
And in thirty hours, Summertide would be here. He risked a slight increase in airspeed.
A glow of ruddy light began to appear in the sky ahead. Perry peered at it with tired eyes.
Was it Amaranth, seen through a break in the clouds? Except that no cloud break was visible. And the bright area was too low in the sky.
He stared again, reducing speed to a crawl until he was sure. When he was finally certain, he turned in his seat.
"Councilor Graves, and J'merlia. Would you come forward, please, and give me your opinion on this?"
It was a formality. Perry did not need another opinion. In the past few hours there had been intense vulcanism in the area ahead. Right where J'merlia and Kallik had been picked up, the surface glowed orange-red from horizon to horizon. Smoking rivers of lava were creeping through a blackened and lifeless terrain, and nowhere, from horizon to horizon, was there a place for an aircar to land.
Perry felt a shiver of primitive awe at the sight—and a great sense of relief.
He did not have to make a decision after all. Quake had made it for him. They could head at once for the safety of the Umbilical.
The arithmetic was already running in his head. Seven hours' flight time from their current location. Add in a margin for error, in case they had to fly around bad storms or reduce airspeed, and say it might take as much as ten. And it would be eighteen hours before the Umbilical withdrew from the surface of Quake.
That was an eight-hour cushion. They would make it with time to spare.
Noise meant inefficiency. So did mechanical vibration. The motors of an aircar in good shape were almost silent, and its ride was silky smooth.
Darya Lang listened to the wheezing death rattle behind her and felt the floor tremble beneath her feet. There was no doubt about it, the shaking was getting worse. Getting worse
fast
, noticed easily above the buffeting of the wind.
"How much farther?" She had to shout the question.
Hans Rebka did not look up from the controls, but he shook his head. "Fourteen kilometers. May be too far. Touch and go."
They were churning along no more than a thousand meters above the surface, just high enough to escape added dust in the intake vents. The ground below was barely visible, ghostly and indistinct beneath a fine haze of swirling powder.
Lang looked higher. There was a thin vertical strand far off in front of them. She cried out, "I can see it, Hans! There's the foot of the Stalk!" At the same moment Rebka was shouting, "No good. We're losing lift."
The aircar engine began to sputter and gasp. Spells of smooth flight at close to full power were followed by grinding vibration and seconds of sickening descent. They dropped into the dust layer. The silver thread of the Umbilical vanished from Darya's view.
"Six kilometers. Four hundred meters." Rebka had taken a last sighting before they entered the storm and was flying on instruments. "I can't see to pick the landing site. Check your harness and make sure your mask and respirator are tight. We may be heading for a rough one."
The aircars were sturdy craft. They had been designed to fly in extreme conditions; but one thing they could not guarantee was a soft landing with an engine worn to scrap by corundum dust. The final gasp of power came when the instruments showed an altitude of twenty meters. Rebka changed flap setting to avoid a stall and brought them in at twice the usual landing speed. At the last moment he shouted to Darya to hold tight. They smacked down hard, bounced clear over a rock outcrop big enough to remove the car's belly, and slithered to a stop.
"That's it!" Rebka had hit the release for his own harness and was reaching over to help Darya while they were still moving. He took a last look at the microwave sensor and turned to give her a grin of triumph. "Come on, I've got the bearing. The foot of the Umbilical's less than half a kilometer ahead."
Ground conditions were much better than Darya had expected. Visibility was admittedly down to a few tens of meters, and wind sounds were punctuated by the boom of distant explosions. But the ground was calm, flat, and navigable, except where a row of house-sized boulders jutted up like broken teeth. She followed Rebka between two of them, thinking how lucky they were that the engine had failed when it did, and not a few seconds later. They would have flown on and smashed straight into those rocks.
She was still not convinced that Quake was as dangerous as Perry claimed, and she had a lingering desire to stay and explore. But having flown so far to reach the Umbilical, it made sense to use it. She peered ahead. Surely they had walked at least half a kilometer.
Not looking where she was going, she slipped on a thick layer of powder, slick and treacherous as oil. Rebka in front of her fell down in a cloud of dust, rolled over, and staggered to his feet. Instead of shuffling onward he halted and pointed straight up.
They had emerged into a region shielded from the wind. Visibility had improved by a factor of ten. A circular disk, blurred in outline by high-level windblown dust, hung above them in the sky. As they watched, it lifted higher and shrank a fraction in apparent size.
His cry coincided with her understanding of what she was seeing.
"The foot of the Stalk. It's going up."
"But we got here earlier than we expected."
"I know. It shouldn't be doing that. It's rising way ahead of time!"
The Umbilical was fading as they watched, its club-shaped bottom end receding into the clouds and blown dust. Around its rising base stood the apron supporting the aircars. She knew their size and tried to judge the height. Already the lower end must have risen almost a kilometer above the surface.
She turned to Rebka. "Hans, our car! If we can get back there and take it up—"
"Won't work." He moved to put his head close to hers. "Even if we could get the car into the air, there's nowhere to land on the base of the Umbilical. I'm sorry, Darya. This mess is my fault. I brought us, and now we're stuck here. We've had it."
He was speaking louder than necessary—as if to make nonsense of his words the wind had dropped completely. The dust in the air began to thin, the surface was quiet, and Darya could see right back to their aircar. Above them the foot of the Umbilical was visible, hovering tantalizingly close.
It was the worst possible time for such a thought, but Darya decided that a little anguish in Hans Rebka's voice made him nicer than ever. Self-confidence and competence were virtues—but so was mutual dependence.
She pointed. "It's not going any higher, Hans. Who's controlling it?"
"Maybe nobody." He was no longer shouting. "The control sequences can be preset. But it could be Perry and Graves—they may have taken it up just to get clear of the surface. Maybe they're holding it there, waiting to see if we show up. But we can't reach them!"
"We'll have to try." While he was still staring at the Umbilical, Darya was already slipping and sliding across the layer of talc, heading toward the aircar. "Come on. If we can make our car hover next to the apron on the bottom of the Stalk, maybe we can jump across onto it."
She listened in amazement to her own words. Was it really Darya Lang proposing that? Back on Sentinel Gate she had avoided all heights, telling friends and family with a shiver that she was terrified by them. Apparently everything in the universe was relative. At the moment, the prospect of leaping from a moving and malfunctioning aircar to an Umbilical, a kilometer or more above the ground, did not faze her at all.
Hans Rebka was following, but only to grip her arm and swing her around. "Wait a minute, Darya. Look."
Another aircar was cruising in from the northwest, just below cloud level. It was in a descent pattern, until its pilot apparently saw the Umbilical. Then the car banked and started to ascend in a slow and labored spiral.
But the foot of the Stalk had begun to rise again, and more rapidly. The two on the ground gazed up helplessly as the Umbilical gradually vanished into the clouds, the pursuing aircar laboring upward after it. As they both disappeared it seemed that the car was losing the race.
Darya turned to Hans Rebka. "But if Graves and Perry are up there on the Stalk, who's in the aircar?"
"It must be Max Perry. I was wrong about him and Graves being on the Umbilical. The Stalk ascent is performing its automatic Summertide retraction, but it's taking place ahead of time. It has been reprogrammed." He shook his head. "But that doesn't make sense, either. Perry is the only one who knows the Umbilical control codes." He saw her stricken look. "Isn't he?"
"No." She stared away and would not look at him. "Atvar H'sial knew them. All of them. I told you, that's how we got over from Opal. This is all my fault. I should never have agreed to work with her. Now we're stuck here, and she's safe up there on the Umbilical."
Hans Rebka glared up at the overcast. "I'll bet she is. That damned Cecropian. I wondered as we were flying here if she was still on Quake. And J'merlia will be with her. So the aircar up there has to be Perry and Graves."
"Or maybe the Carmel twins."
"No. They didn't have access to an aircar. Anyway, we can stop speculating. Here it comes again."
The car was spiraling down from the clouds, searching for a good place to touch down. Darya ran toward it and waved her arms frantically. The pilot saw her and carefully banked closer. The aircar flopped to a heavy landing no more than fifty meters away, creating a minor dust storm with its jets of downward air.