Worlds in Collision (36 page)

The pups' mother was one of Sam's team and she welcomed her offspring proudly as they brought food to her and her fellow workers. Glissa was impressed with the seriousness of the young pups and the way they wore their commune's ceremonial red scarves, at such odds with the puffs of white fur that stood out so sweetly from their round little forms, like softly shaped clouds captured in blue overalls.

As she watched them on the screen, she heard familiar hoofsteps approaching. It was Sam.

“Are our pups as appealing to humans as they are to us?” Glissa asked, seeing that he, too, watched the young Tellarites at their work.

“The appeal of babies is universal,” Sam said. “But it's such a shame those two will grow up to resemble something as ugly as you.”

Glissa grunted happily and gestured to the slight rise of a digger's ridge beside her. “I have never met any human quite like you, Sam.” Glissa spoke without using a Civil intonation.

Sam paused, then sat down next to her, resting his arms on his knees and swinging his safety helmet idly from his hands as he watched the pups. They had finished eating and were now wrestling furiously, tumbling over and over each other with excited squeaks and snorts. “Then I suspect you haven't met too many humans at all,” Sam said.

Glissa folded her food tray shut, remembering what she had heard about what humans thought of bloodrinds. “I have met many humans here. Just none like you.”

Sam shrugged but said nothing. He glanced up to check the time readout on a viewscreen. There were still a few minutes left in the break.

“Why are you here, Sam Jameson?”

For a moment, Sam's eyes changed in a way too alien for the Tellarite to understand. “Why are
you
here, Glissa?”

“To build new worlds,” the Tellarite answered proudly.

A new expression appeared on Sam's face, and Glissa at least knew human misery when she saw it. “As if there weren't enough out there to begin with?”

Glissa didn't understand. She tried another approach. “You are not a hardcase.”

The human smiled sadly at that, but still there were undercurrents to his expression that she couldn't read. “What makes you think I'm not?”

“Interworld is not known for asking too many questions of those who want to be rockriggers. The human hardcases we get seem to be those who are one step away from shipping out on the next Orion freighter.” Then she peered closely at him, suddenly recalling how little sense of humor humans had. “Perhaps I should point out that I have used the term ‘freighter' in a sarcastic sense, if that makes my joke more logical.”

Sam looked away from her, his eyes somehow appearing to be more reflective, as if their moisture content had suddenly been elevated.

“Are you all right, Sam?”

“I'm fine,” he said, and smiled again with that same gentle sadness. “You just reminded me of someone I knew…a long time ago.”

“A close friend?”

“I think so. Though he might not want to admit it.”

“The human hardcases we get seem not to have friends, Sam.”

The human stared up at the far wall of the rock, but she felt he was looking at something else which only he could see. “On Earth, centuries ago, there was an…organization much like Interworld's rockriggers.”

“They built things? Surely not worlds so long ago, but…continents perhaps?”

“It was a military organization.”

“How human. No offense intended,” Glissa quickly added because this was not turning out to be a Civil Conversation.

“None taken,” Sam said. “It was called
La Légion étrangère.
It was the place to go to when there was no place else. No questions asked. They didn't even need to know a real name.”

“Sometimes…that is a preferable circumstance,” Glissa said as diplomatically as she was able. “Is it preferable to you?”

He turned to her and his face was unreadable. “No questions asked,” he repeated.

“Too bad, Sam. You look like a being who has many answers.”

He shook his head. “One answer is all it would take, Glissa. And I don't have it.” He hefted his helmet to put it on. “That's why I'm here. That's why I'm a hardcase.”

Glissa reached out to him, to place a soothing hoof on his shoulder. What was the answer he searched for? What possible reason could bring him here? “Sam, if there is anything that—”

The asteroid shifted.

A field of pulsed gravity swept over the work site. Glissa saw the bright spots of the lightpoles undulate as local gravitational constants fluctuated wildly. She grabbed at the rock beneath her, feeling herself rise up and down as if caught in a raging surf. Gravity warning alarms erupted from a hundred speakers, echoing shrilly from the hard iron floor of the rock.

“What is it?” she growled.

Sam's strong arms pushed her down between two iron ridges. He had expertly, instinctively, hooked his feet beneath a small ridge overhang at the first ripple of motion. “Harmonic interference,” he shouted over the sirens. “One of the gravity generators must have cut out and the others didn't compensate in time.”

Sam looped a safety strap around a second overhang, then fed it through one of Glissa's harness clips, fastening her safely in place. “Don't worry. It's self-correcting. There'll be a couple more fluctuations as the fields spread the load but we'll be all right.”

“The pups?” Glissa squealed, unable to turn her head to the viewscreen as a high-g wave slammed her to the ground.

Sam craned his neck to look over to where the client worker had been eating and the youngsters had been playing. “They're fine, they're fine. They're still hooked to the tractor wagon.” He grabbed onto Glissa as a low-g wave rippled back, sending him half a meter into the air. “See? It's getting weaker.”

“How do you know so much about artificial gravity fields?” the Tellarite demanded.

But before Sam could answer, the asteroid shifted again as another gravity generator failed—and another, twisting the rocky shell in two directions at once. A low rumbling sound began, mixed with the shriek of tearing metal. Sam turned to the source, eyes widening like the face of the dead as he saw—“The lake bed!”

Glissa grunted with a sudden and terrible knowledge. “The pylons are not in place. The lake bed cannot—”

The first pressure siren wailed, drowning out the gravity warning alarms.

“No!” Sam fixed on something Glissa couldn't see.

“What is it?”

“NO!” Sam untangled himself from Glissa's harness and unhooked his feet from the rock ledge.

“Sam, what?”

“The children!” As Sam leapt over Glissa and scrambled away, the wind began.

Glissa struggled to sit up. The wind could only mean the thin lake bed floor had cracked in the stress of the gravity harmonics. And there was nothing beneath it except the vacuum of space.

The Tellarite heard the screams of her work crew mix with the wild screech of disappearing air and the clamor of sirens and alarms. She slapped her hoof against the nearest viewscreen control, calling up image after image until she tapped into a sensor trained at the lake bed.

“Dear Kera,” she whispered as she saw the pups trailing at the end of their safety cables, only ten meters from a ragged tear in the rock floor through which debris and white tendrils of atmosphere were sucked into nothingness. “Dear Phinda,” she cried as she saw Sam Jameson, crouching against a ridge near the youngsters, attaching a second cable to an immovable outcropping of metal.

Glissa switched on the panel communicator's transmit circuits. If she could send this image to cargo control perhaps they could lock onto Sam and the pups. Surely the risk of being transported at low frequency was better than the certain death of being sucked out into space. If only the pups' cables would hold. If only Sam would stay in position.

But the cables were anchored to the small tractor wagon and the winds were pushing it closer and closer to the fissure. And no matter how little Glissa knew of the real Sam Jameson, she knew enough to know that nothing could keep him from going to the pups.

Glissa called out coordinates to cargo control as Sam pushed himself up from the safety of the ridge and moved out into the open, slowly playing out his safety line, pulled taut by the force of the gale that blew against him.

He moved across the open lake bed in the finally stabilized gravity as if he were aware of nothing but the infants, now only six meters from the opening into space. Rocks and debris flew past him. Some hit him. But he ignored their impact and the blossoms of red human blood that they brought. Glissa had never been able to completely understand much of what Sam felt, but at this moment, his intent so fixed, his concentration so powerful, she was sure that the human felt no fear.

Sam reached the slowly skidding tractor wagon. Its in-use lights were out, its power exhausted by fighting the inexorable wind. He wrapped his arms around its sensor pod, trying to stop its movement. Glissa switched sensors and brought up an image of Sam as he strained against the impossible pressure. His cable was pulled to its limit. Glissa could see his arms tremble with the force he was exerting. But the tractor still slid forward. The squealing infants still slipped toward the inescapable pull of the vacuum.

Sam's eyes blazed, and of the few human emotions Glissa could recognize, she knew it was anger that lit his eyes. Then he reached to his harness and disengaged his cable. Glissa called out to him to stop though she knew he would never hear her.

The tractor wagon bounced a meter forward on the lake bed as Sam swung around it and began crawling down the length of the youngsters' cable. He reached them as they were only three meters from the fissure. And it was widening, Glissa saw with sickened certainty. Where was cargo control?

Two meters from the fissure, Sam had both round forms in his arms. He pushed against the gale and the floor. But where was he going? And then Glissa saw his plan. There was a smaller ridge almost within reach. With an effort which she would not have thought was possible for a human, Sam pushed the pups into position against it. If they didn't move, they would be safe as long as the atmosphere lasted. But how could he keep them there when the ridge wasn't large enough for him as well?

Glissa could only moan as she saw what the human did next. He
removed
his harness—his last hope for survival—and wound it around the infants, using its straps to tie them firmly into place.

“Please, no,” Glissa prayed to the twin Moons as she saw Sam's fingers desperately try to dig into the unyielding surface of the metal ridge. She prayed to the mists and the mud and all the litters of heaven but it was the heavens that were claiming the human now.

Sam slipped from the ridge. He fell toward the fissure. Toward space. Toward the stars.

And he caught himself on the opening, arms and legs braced to hold on for a few more hopeless seconds.

Glissa caused the sensor to close in on Sam's face and fill a hundred viewscreens throughout the rock so his heroism and his sacrifice would be remembered by all.

What manner of human was he? What manner of being? He had no chance yet still he struggled. And on his face, an instant from oblivion, poised above an endless fall into the absolute night of space,
there was still no fear in him.

Tears streamed from Glissa's small eyes because she did not know what she witnessed. He faced the stars and death with a ferocious defiance she could not imagine.
They shall name this world for you,
Glissa thought.
I swear it, Sam. Sam Jameson. My friend.
And with that vow, the human's hands slipped for the final time.

The stars had won.

But the howl of the wind abruptly stopped as a near-deafening transporter chime overpowered the wail of the sirens and alarms.

Glissa peered closely at the viewscreen as Sam slowly rolled away from the fissure. Within it, the familiar glow of the transporter effect sparkled from the smooth metal walls. Cargo control had not transported Sam and the pups
out,
they had transported pressure sealant
in.

Glissa tapped her hooves to her forehead in thanks to the Moons, then unhooked her harness and ran out to the lake bed to welcome Sam to his second life. But when she joined him, others had arrived before her. And she was shocked to see anger and disgust in their eyes.

The Tellarite pups, now only sobbing fitfully, were cradled by their mother and her fellow workers. The fissure had become nothing more than a long scar mounded with the hardened blue foam of pressure sealant. Sam sat slumped against the ridge that had protected the pups, his work clothes torn, blood streaming from a dozen wounds. But the humans clustered near him offered no help. They only whispered among themselves.

Glissa pushed through them and went to Sam's side.

“I'd think twice about doin' anything for 'im,” one of the humans said. He was taller and heavier than Sam, and wore a punishment tattoo from a penal colony.