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Ferry glared up toward the ‘coder. “You said we had to land at Colony!”
“I have been in contact with Kerro Panille,” Bitten said. “He asserts that Colony has been destroyed.”
“Destroyed?” Hali sat stiffly in her couch, dumb with shock.
Ferry gripped the arms of his command couch, knuckles white. “But we’re programmed for landing at Colony.”
“I remind you that I am the emergency program,” Bitten said. “Present conditions fit the definition of emergency.”
“Then where can we land?” Hali asked. And she felt the stirrings of hope. Contact with Kerro!
“Panille asserts that I can make a sea landing near an occupied site called the Redoubt. He is prepared to guide us to that landing.”
Hali checked the fastenings which held Waela in the passenger couch, returned to her own seat and strapped in. The plaz directly in front of her framed a brilliant circle of cloud-covered planet.
“They meant us to die,” Ferry muttered. “Damn them!”
“Do you desire to land at the alternate site?” Bitten asked.
“Yes, land us there,” Hali said.
“There is risk,” Bitten said.
“Land us there!” Ferry shouted.
“A normal tone of voice suffices for conversational direction of this program,” Bitten said.
Ferry stared at Hali. “They meant us to die.”
“I heard you. What do you mean?”
“Murdoch said we would have to go to Colony.”
Hali looked at him, weighing his words. Was the man unaware of what he had just told her?
“So it was a set-up,” she said. “You staged that fight.”
Ferry remained silent, blinking at her.
“But you cut off one of Murdoch’s ears,” Hali said, remembering.
Ferry bared his old teeth in a terrible grin. “He did something to my Rachel. I know he did.”
Hali crossed her arms over her breast, hearing all the unspoken things in Ferry’s words. Her gaze went to the laser scalpel clipped in a breast pocket of Ferry’s singlesuit: a thin stylus with death or life in its mechanism.
He was supposed to bring the scalpel in case he needed it against me!
“I made it seem like an accident,” Ferry said. “But I knew they did something to my Rachel. And Murdoch’s the one they get to do the nasty stuff.” He nodded at Hali. “In the Scream Room. That’s where they do it.”
As he said Scream Room, he shuddered.
“So we were supposed to go to Colony and it’s destroyed,” Ferry said. “Demons, yes. Very neat. They didn’t like my asking about Rachel.”
Hali wet her lips with her tongue. “What’s . . . what’s the Scream Room?”
“In Lab One where they do the nasty stuff. It was because of Rachel, I know it was. And I drink too much. Lots of us do that after the Scream Room.”
Bitten’s voice intruded: “Correction noted.”
“What was that?” Ferry demanded.
“This is Bitten. I have acknowledged a course correction from Kerro Panille.”
“You’re going to land us in the sea?” Hali asked, filled with sudden concern for her unconscious patient.
“Near shore. Panille asserts there will be help where we land.”
“What about the demons?” Ferry asked.
“If that is a reference to native fauna, you can protect yourselves with the weapons in this freighter’s cargo.”
“You carry . . . weapons?” Hali asked.
“The cargo manifest lists food concentrates, building equipment and tools, medical supplies, groundsuits and weapons.”
Hali shook her head. “I knew you needed weapons to survive groundside, but I didn’t know they were being made shipside.”
“Do you know what a weapon is?” Ferry asked, looking directly at Hali.
She thought of her history holos, and the soldiers at the Hill of Skulls. “Oh, yes. I know about weapons.”
“This laser scalpel.” Ferry touched the stylus shape at his breast. “Acid concentrates, plasteel cutters for construction teams, knives, axes . . .”
Hali swallowed past a lump in her throat. Every bit of her med-tech training cried out against this. “If we prepare to . . . kill,” the word was barely a sigh past her lips, “then we will kill.”
“Down here, it’s kill or be killed,” Ferry said. “That’s the way The Boss wants it.”
In that instant, the freighter skipped into the first thin surface of Pandora’s atmosphere. Vibration hummed all through the cabin, then smoothed.
“Can’t we run away?” Hali asked. Her voice was a low whisper.
“Nowhere to run,” Ferry said. “You must know that. All Shipmen learn enough about groundside to know that.”
Fight or flee, Hali thought, and nowhere to flee. And it occurred to her that Pandora was a place where people were made into primitives.
“Trust me,” Ferry said, and the quavering in his old voice made the statement pathetic.
“Yes, of course,” Hali said.
She felt the freighter’s braking thrust then as it pressed her against the restraining harness, and she glanced back to reassure herself that Waela remained secure.
“We will land in the cradle of the sea,” Hali said. “That’s what Waela said. Remember?”
“What does she know?” Ferry demanded, and it was his fearful, querulous tone, the one which had made her despise him.
Chapter 62
This the true human knows:
the strings of all the ways
make up a cable of great strength
and great purpose.
—Kerro Panille, The Collected Poems
FOR A long time Panille sat in the shadows of the seaside cliff while he felt the approaching presence from space. The sea lay below him down a rugged path, the cliffs soared high behind. Avata had been the first to tell him about this problem and, for a few blinks, he had fallen back into Thomas’ ways of thinking.
The Redoubt will know about this freighter, will send its weapons against it.
But Avata soothed him, told him that Avata would transmit false images to the Redoubt’s systems, concealing the freighter’s passage. Avata would continue to mask the nest’s location with similar projections.
The rock was cold against Panille’s back. From time to time, he opened and closed his eyes. When his eyes were open he was vaguely aware of the amber glow from Double Dusk—the sky alight from two suns dodging just below Pandora’s horizon.
Ship would know he was here and what he was doing. Nothing escaped Ship. Did that omnipotent awareness work through phenomena similar to those of Avata? Was it awareness of even the most minute changes in electrical impulses? Or was it some other form of energy which Ship and Avata monitored?
That presence from space was coming closer . . . closer. He felt it, then he saw it.
The freighter skipped up the horizon, a great stone crossing the surface of a glassy sea. The fall into atmosphere was deceptive. The freighter had entered Pandora’s pull at the lowest point on the horizon. It streaked a long upward arc as Panille felt it fill his awareness. It grew larger with its approach around the planet’s curvature, and he saw it now falling white-hot toward him.
The crunch of gravel told him of Thomas’ approach, but Panille had only a single purpose now. The approaching freighter was himself and he was diving through the sky alight with amber.
“Can you do it?” Thomas asked.
“I am doing it,” Panille whispered. He begrudged the distraction of answering.
Until he had seen the pinpoint of that first glow against the Pandoran dusk, Panille had not been sure he could master this thing.
“I’m thinking them in,” he whispered. There was awe and wonder in his voice.
“Who is coming?” Thomas asked.
“Avata did not say.”
Thomas emitted a wry, jibing chuckle. “It’s a surprise package from Ship. Maybe more recruits
for me.”
He moved around Panille and climbed down out of sight along the narrow path, his figure a mysterious movement in the half light.
Going to the shore where the surf crashes. The surf will make this landing perilous.
