‘Entering atmosphere,’ said the lifeboat, and Joel shoved the problem of the XCs onto the backburner as he turned back to the control desk. The lifeboat was diving almost straight down into the atmosphere to get away from the satellites and a mighty layer of dirty cloud was spread across his vision, looking sometimes like a sheet hung just beyond the viewports and sometimes like what it was, a layer many miles away at right angles to their course. The lifeboat was surrounded by an invisible forcefield, shaped to streamline its passage through the atmosphere, but a flickering yellow glow ahead of him showed where the field was meeting the air. The glow spread across his vision, whitening and increasing in fury. The viewports tinted, then turned almost black so that just a gentle radiance showed ahead.
‘We should perhaps pull up,’ said Boon Round. ‘We’re probably out of range of the satellites by now.’
‘Yeah,’ Joel said. He studied the displays that showed the power available to the forceplanes, the strains being put on them and the added stress that would come if they tried to change course at this stage. The sums didn’t add up. Or rather, they did, but it was the wrong answer. ‘We’re also committed. Sorry.’
The lifeboat ripped through the Dead World’s atmosphere with an echo that dislodged rocks from mountainsides and rang across half the hemisphere. The blur outside the viewports gradually resolved into mountains and valleys and plains, as the lifeboat dropped down from hypersonic to supersonic and then to what Joel thought of as just bloody fast.
From beneath, the cloud cover was even less attractive than above; blacker than the blackest storm, it hung above them and seemed almost close enough to touch, a layer of rocks and debris poised to fall if someone sneezed.
Enormous snowdrifts and banks covered the land, blurring the outlines. It would have looked almost inviting, if it could only have been bathed with a decent yellow-blue light and not the drab, cold glow that made its way through the clouds.
Ground radar picked out the firmer lines below the illusion, and Joel’s eye was suddenly caught by a mass of lines that couldn’t have been natural. It was a giant grid of squares and plazas, lying in a hollow twenty miles across that was filled up with ice and snow. A town, maybe even a city. He could see where the main thoroughfares of the city had been, the open spaces, the winding trail of a river course. Size was harder to judge; how many people had lived here? Ten thousand? Twenty? Thirty?
But overlaying those shapes were a burst of lines radiating outwards from one point. And the radiation count was way up. This place had received a direct nuclear hit. He pictured those roads and parks and plazas filled with people. He imagined how it had been before the attack; the inhabitants going quietly about their business, those few who bothered with looking up seeing a bright star tear its way through the skies above them before blossoming into another sun, a sun that touched the earth and seared the ground and the people.
Or maybe the hit had come well into the attack, and the people had had a good idea of what was to come and been prepared for it. Shell-shocked, knowing the fate that had befallen their neighbours, perhaps already succumbing to the radiation, they had maybe looked up dully and waited for the mercy killing to come from above.
On the display, in the airlock, the XCs had woken up again. They were uncurling from their balls but not apparently making any effort to stand up. They seemed drained of energy, almost subdued. He found himself once again seriously hating each and every one of their race.
‘
Do you wish to land at the selected location?
’ The lifeboat’s voice brought his attention back to the present and he realized he had adjusted the controls to keep the image of the dead city in the centre of the display. The lifeboat had noted his interest.
‘No,’ Joel said. ‘Go back to hypersonic and head for the equator. We may as well go somewhere warm.’
Half an hour later, Joel had their landing place. It was equatorial, a valley which sensors said was a degree or two warmer than the average, which was to say merely very cold indeed. Joel surmised it was sheltered from the prevailing winds and he noted a chain of semi-active, smouldering volcanoes to the south. He wondered if there was something volcanic in the area, maybe hot springs, that contributed to the ambience. Whatever, it seemed the best place to go.
The inhabitants of the Dead World had also found the place attractive, it seemed. There had once been a major metropolis here, another grid, like the last city. An interesting place to touch down.
‘We don’t have to land at all,’ Boon Round objected.
‘I want to see what damage the satellites did,’ Joel said. He glared back at the airlock and its inhabitants. ‘And why do we want this completely empty, uninhabited planet defended, eh?’ he called. ‘Afraid someone’s going to find out what we did, are we?’
‘Why else?’ Boon Round agreed. ‘We’re safe. Surely these two have outlived their usefulness?’
Joel sighed and checked the controls. They were still half a mile up. ‘Yeah, you’re right. Let’s just chuck ‘em out.’
‘At last you talk sense. Build up sufficient pressure in the airlock, then open—’
‘We are not chucking them out, you moron.’ Joel glowered at the two XCs. SkySpy had seen nothing to suggest their race’s natural aggressiveness had declined one jot in the years since the Xenocide, and these two had just tried to eat each other, but he wasn’t going to murder them like that. Strand them, maybe.
He glanced at the spread of ruins beneath the lifeboat, then at the display which was showing possible landing sites big enough to take them. He touched the display over one of them.
‘Land here,’ he said.
The lifeboat extended its landing feet and touched down along one side of a wide open plaza. Joel powered down the engines and, almost as a ritual gesture to show that they had indeed arrived, cut the internal artgrav. He immediately felt lighter, springier, and he bounced up and down a couple of times on the balls of his feet to get the feel of it.
Then he looked morosely through the viewports at what lay outside. It was dark – as dark as dusk on a dark, overcast day. Two- and three-storey buildings, the height of the lifeboat and more, surrounded the square. The stone was black and uninviting, the doors and windows were low and wide. Dust and debris gusted about the square in the wind, but no snow. It was cold but dry, though stains on the buildings and channels through the dirt suggested that water occasionally flowed here. Maybe snow did fall but got melted by warm volcanic breezes.
The architecture was solid and lumpish, nothing crude but nothing soaring and elegant either. This world was poor in metals and it was the opinion of Commonwealth experts that its inhabitants would never have reached a high level of technology; but they had still made it to a pretty advanced Stone Age, like the pre-Colombian peoples of South America. And what little they had had been taken from them.
‘I said, the power and command flows have all redirected,’ said Boon Round.
Joel jumped. ‘Sorry, I was miles away.’
‘I’ve been aft and inspected the damage,’ Boon Round said slowly, as if to someone of feeble intellect. ‘Remember, where the satellite hit us? We’ll have to make repairs and I recommend an external inspection.’
‘Good idea.’ Joel didn’t mention that Boon Round had been the one counselling against landing in the first place. He glanced outside and winced. It looked cold. More to the point . . . He called up the external environment display. ‘Well, we can breathe the air . . . radiation . . . we’d get a dose of one hundred and fifty, one hundred and sixty millisieverts if we stayed out for a day. Which of course we won’t.’
‘That’s higher than the recommended dose. We could wear our spacesuits for protection.’
‘Pretty cumbersome, though. Don’t worry, both our bodies can take the dose. We’ll take a couple of antirads before we go out and never notice the difference.’ Joel looked at the XCs. ‘I don’t know what their tolerance is, though.’
‘You’re going to take them outside?’ Boon Round exclaimed.
‘Well, I’m not going to leave them in here while we go out, am I?’
‘We can at least agree on that.’ Boon Round glanced at the airlock. ‘I’m not sure I want to go in there with them.’
‘You and me both,’ Joel muttered. ‘Get your calibrator really.’
And so Joel pulled on a weathersuit, and he and Boon Round swallowed a pair of antirads dispensed at the touch of a button from the medifac. Then, each armed only with instruments for fine-tuning an optical fibre network that they had to pretend were guns, Joel opened the inner hatch. The XCs looked up, but obediently moved back to let the two of them in when Joel gestured. Joel shut the inner hatch and opened the outer.
He sneezed as the air of the Dead World flooded into his nostrils and sinuses. It was bitterly cold and had a burnt, acrid quality that only lingered in his senses for a moment before the temperature anaesthetized his sense of smell. He tried not to think of all those decaying nuclei that were now entering his lungs and beaming their disrupting signals directly into his DNA. He quickly pulled his weathersuit hood up over his head, so that now just his eyes were exposed to the stinging cold.
Because he was nearest the outside he swung the ladder attachment out and released the catch that let it unfold. Then he climbed slowly down and became the first human to stand on the Dead World.
Apart from the ticking of the lifeboat’s cooling hull and the moan of the wind, it was completely quiet. He was on a world where not another living thing breathed or moved. He shivered, with more than just the cold; it was an experience others could keep. He looked across the plaza at the empty buildings opposite. They were decayed and crumbling, and the empty holes that were the doors and windows in the bleak stone filled him with absolutely no desire to explore their dead secrets.
Boon Round and the XCs climbed down after him. The two unwanted passengers huddled close together, chirping quietly, and Joel again wondered what was going through their minds. Was it ‘Damn, they caught us out’ or ‘My God, I had no idea’?
Joel had seen two-hundred-year-old archive film taken at the end of Earth’s Second World War. In some areas, the allied forces that had conquered Germany had rounded up the civilian populations and forced them to walk through the Nazi death camps, to see at first hand what their late leaders had done. On the faces of some had been shame, some hardened resolve – it was no news to them at all – and some sheer, unwilling disbelief. If he could read XC expressions he wondered what he would see here.
‘The damage is this way,’ Boon Round said.
A dark outline in the ground around them showed where the lifeboat’s fields were still on, intersecting with the ground. ‘Field off,’ Joel said into his aide, and they walked down to the stern of the lifeboat. Joel squinted up at the cracked hole in the hull, the charred scars of the blast.
‘I’ll need to stand on your back to get a look at it,’ he said to Boon Round.
‘Why should I have to carry you?’
Joel sighed. ‘Because you’re stronger than me. Rusties are stronger than humans.’
‘I have lost count of the number of times you have used that term. You must know I prefer First Breed.’
‘I’m sorry. The First Breed are stronger than humans and I, in my weaker natural state, must rely upon your superior physical prowess to get me up there to inspect the damage, oh wonderfully-strong and ever-so-slightly-touchy one.’
‘I accept your reasoning,’ Boon Round said. ‘There’s no need to over-elaborate upon your initial argument.’ He reared up to place his forefeet against the hull. ‘Climb up my back and stand on my shoulders.’
Joel scrambled up. He knelt on Boon Round’s shoulders, braced his hands on the hull and slowly stood upright. The damaged section wavered in front of his eyes.
‘It’s clean,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s going to short circuit. We can tie off—’
‘Your right foot is too near my eye. Please move it.’
Joel growled to himself and shifted his right foot an inch.
‘That hurt! You’re scraping the skin off my shoulder. Can’t you lift your feet?’
Joel tried to imagine balancing single-footed on the shoulders of a wobbling Rustie. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Keep quiet, I’m trying to concentrate.’ The damaged node that had almost compromized the forceplanes was just above him. He leaned against the hull and stood on tiptoes. ‘Almost done, Boon Round. One more thing to check out.’
‘You’re much heavier than I first thought. I’m probably going to sprain something.’
‘God, you’re as bad as . . . never mind,’ Joel said. ‘Hold on just a minute longer.’
‘As bad as what?’ Boon Round’s voice came from below him.
‘A toy donkey in some stories my dad used to read me.’
‘What’s a donkey?’
‘An Earth animal.’ Joel peered more closely at the node. ‘An unintelligent beast of burden,’ he muttered to himself, and yelled as Boon Round suddenly dropped down on all fours and he fell to the ground. He landed with a blow that drove the breath out of his body.
‘I heard that remark!’ Boon Round stood over him. ‘I’ve had enough of your constant stream of insults and petty slights against the First Breed.’
Joel wheezed. ‘My what?’
‘If you don’t like us then I wonder why you bothered to join the Commonwealth in the first place. The Ones Who Command whom you were meant to replace at least treated us with respect.’
‘But I . . .’
Boon Round pushed on. ‘Ever since we have been incarcerated together, my every reasonable and subjective remark has been met by your sarcasm and lack of concern.’
‘Your every what?’ Joel had pushed himself up into a sitting position and to his surprise found that he wanted to laugh.
‘And now you compare me to an unintelligent beast of burden.’
‘Boon Round, I . . . I bet that when the Ones Who Command gave an order, you obeyed it and didn’t drive them mad with whinging and whining!’