Dragonsdawn (40 page)

Paul had a report on his desk from Telgar and his group. They had done a survey of the old crater above the fort hold, with its myriad bubble caves and twisting passages, and had pronounced it a suitable accommodation for the dragons and their riders. Telgar had a team working to make the place habitable, while they still had power in the heavy equipment. A stream was being dammed up for a dragon-sized bathing lake, water piped into the largest of the ground-level caverns for kitchen use, and a chimney hole had been bored for a large hearth complex.

Obviously, that would be the pattern for future human habitation on Pern, and for some, accustomed to sprawling living space, it would take some getting used to. But it was the best way to survive!

PART THREE

CROSSING

“P
OL
?”

I
T TOOK
a moment for the biologist to identify the anxious voice. “Mary?” His response was equally tentative, but he pulled at Bay’s sleeve to attract her attention away from the monitor she was frowning at. “Mary Tubberman?”

“Please don’t turn an old friend away unheard.”

“Mary,” Pol said kindly, “
you
weren’t shunned.” He shared the earpiece with Bay, who nodded in vigorous approval.

“I might as well have been.” The woman’s tone was bitter, then her voice broke on a tremulous note and both Ray and Pol could hear her weeping. “Look, Pol, something’s happened to Ted. Those creatures of his are loose. I’ve pulled down the Thread shutters, but they’re still prowling about and making awful noises.”

“Creatures? What creatures?” Pol locked glances with Bay. Beyond them, their dragonets roused from a doze and chirped in empathic anxiety.

“The beasts he’s been rearing.” Mary sounded as if she thought Pol knew what she was talking about and was being deliberately obtuse. “He—he stole some frozen in-vitros from veterinary and he used Kitti’s program on them to make them obey him, but they’re still . . . things. His masterpiece does nothing to stop
them
.” Again her bitterness was trenchant.

“What makes you think something has happened to Ted?” Pol asked, picking up on the words Bay mouthed to him as she gestured urgently.

“He would never let those animals
loose
, Pol! They might harm Petey!”

“Now, Mary, calm down. Stay in the house. We’ll come.”

“Ned’s not in Landing!” Her tone became accusatory. “I tried his number. He’d believe me!”

“It’s not a question of belief, Mary.” Bay pulled the mouthpiece around to speak directly into it. “And anyone can come assist
you
.”

“Sue and Chuck won’t answer.”

“Sue and Chuck moved north, Mary, after that first bad rock shower from Picchu.” Bay was patient with her. The woman had a right to sound paranoid, living in seclusion as she had for so long, with an unbalanced husband and so many earthshocks and volcanic rumblings.

“Pol and I are coming down, Mary,” Bay said firmly. “And we’ll bring help.” She replaced the handset.

“Who?” Pol demanded.

“Sean and Sorka. Dragons have an inhibiting effect on animals. And that way we don’t have to go through official channels.”

Pol looked at his wife with mild surprise. She had never criticized either Emily or Paul, obliquely or bluntly.

“I always felt someone should have investigated the report Drake and Ned Tubberman made. So did they. Sometimes priorities got lost in the shuffle around here.” She wrote a hasty note which she then attached to her gold dragonet’s right foot. “Find the redhead,” she said firmly, holding the triangular head to get Mariah’s full attention. “Find the redhead.” Bay walked with her to the window and opened it, pointing firmly in Sorka’s direction. She filled her mind with an image of Sorka, leaning against Faranth. Mariah chirped happily. “Now, off with you!” Then, as the dragonet obediently flew off, Bay ran a finger over the black grime that was once again settling on the windowsill she had swept earlier. “I’ll be glad to move north. I’m so eternally tired of black dust everywhere. Come on, Pol, we’d better get dressed warmly.”

“You volunteered to help Mary because it gives you a chance to ride a dragon again,” Pol said, chuckling.

“Pol Nietro, I have long been concerned about Mary Tubberman!”

Fifteen minutes later, two dragons came swooping over the rise to settle on the road in front of their house.

“They are so graceful,” Bay said, making certain her headscarf was tied, as much against the prevailing dust outside as in hopes of riding. As she left the house, Mariah circled down and settled to the plump shoulder with a chirrup of smug satisfaction. “You’re marvelous, Mariah, simply marvelous,” Bay murmured to her little queen as she marched right up between Faranth and Carenath. However, it was Sorka she addressed. “Thank you for coming, my dear. Mary Tubberman just contacted us. There’s trouble at Calusa. Creatures are loose, and Mary thinks something has happened to Ted. Will you take us there?”

“Officially, or unofficially?” Sean asked as Sorka glanced over at her mate.

“It’s all right to help Mary,” Bay said, looking for support from Pol, who had just come up to the dragons, his glance as admiring as ever. “And with who knows what sort of beast . . .”

“Dragons are useful,” Sorka replied with a grin, arriving at her own decision. She beckoned to Bay. “Give the lady your leg, Faranth. Here’s my hand.”

With Faranth’s assist, Bay was agile enough to settle herself quietly behind Sorka. She would never admit that she was pinched fore and aft between the ridge. Mariah gave her usual squeak of protest.

“Now, Mariah, Faranth’s perfectly safe,” Bay said, and looked over to see that Pol was settling behind Sean. The young dragonrider’s grin was very broad as he winked at Bay. Well, this time it really is an emergency, she told herself. A woman trapped in her home with small children and unidentifiable menaces prowling outside.

“Hang on tight now,” Sean said as always. He pumped his arm in the signal to launch.

Bay suppressed an exclamation as Faranth’s upward surge pushed her painfully against the stiff dorsal ridge. Her discomfort lasted only a moment, as the golden dragon leveled off and veered leisurely to her right. Bay caught her breath. She would never get accustomed to this; she didn’t want to. Riding a dragon was the most exciting thing that had happened to her since . . . since Mariah had first risen to mate.

Calusa was not a long trip by air, but the flight was tremendously exhilarating. The dragons hit one of the many air currents that were the result of Picchu’s activity, and Bay clutched at Sorka’s belt, stuffing her fingers to the knuckle in the belt loops. Flying on a dragon was so much more immediate an activity than going in the closed shed or skimmer. Really much more exhilarating. Bay turned her head so that Sorka’s tall, strong body shielded her from the worst of the airstream and the dust from Picchu that seemed to clog the air even at that altitude.

The journey gave Bay time to ponder what Mary had said about “beasts.” Red Hanrahan bad reported a late-night entry into the veterinary laboratory. A portable bio-scan had been missing without being logged out, but as the bio lab was always borrowing vet equipment, the absence was dismissed. Later someone had noticed that the order in which the frozen ova of a variety of Earth-type animals were stored had been disarranged. It
could
have happened during the earthquakes.

Ted Tubberman had been very busy in his discontent, Bay thought grimly. One of the strictest dictums of her profession as a microbiologist was a strict limitation of genetic manipulation. She had actually been surprised, if relieved, that Kitti Ping Yung, as the senior scientist on the Pern expedition, had permitted the bioengineering of the fire-dragonets. Had Kitti Ping any idea of what a marvelous gift she had bestowed on the people of Pern?

But for Ted Tubberman, disgruntled
botanist
, to tinker with ova—and he
had not
at all understood the techniques or the process—to make independent alterations was intolerable to her, both professionally and personally. Bay knew herself to be a tolerant person, friendly and considerate, but if Ted Tubberman was dead, she would be tremendously relieved. And she would not be the only one. Just thinking about the man produced symptoms of agitation and pure fury which made Bay lose her professional detachment, and that annoyed her even more. There she was on dragonback, a marvelous opportunity for peaceful reflection, with only the noise of the wind in her ears, with all Jordan spread below her, and she was wasting contemplative time on Ted Tubberman. Bay sighed. One had so few moments of total relaxation and privacy. How she envied young Sorka, Sean, and the others.

She was astonished to see Calusa in the next valley. It was a sturdy complex, built by the Tubbermans as headquarters for their stake acres. The galvanized roofs of the main buildings had grown to a dull dark gray from the repeated showers of volcanic ash that Picchu Peak deposited wherever the wind blew. But Bay had scarcely had time to notice that when Sorka’s cry of astonishment blew back to her.

“Jays, that building’s a shambles!” Sorka pointed to her right, and Faranth abruptly turned in response to an unspoken request. The dorsal ridge bit into the soft flesh of Bay’s crotch, and she gripped Sorka’s belt more tightly.

“
Look
!” Sorka was directing her gaze downward.

Seventy-five meters from the main house, there was a roofed compound with separate enclosures along an L passageway, forming two sides of a fenced-in area. One of the outside walls and several of the interior partitions were smashed, and a corner of the roofing had burst outward. Bay could not recall if there had been any more earthshocks reported in that area to cause such structural damage. No other building was damaged.

As the dragon once more changed direction, Bay grabbed at Sorka, felt the girl’s reassuring fingers on hers, and then they were down.

“I do like riding Faranth. She’s so very graceful and strong,” Bay said, tentatively patting the warm hide of the dragon’s neck.

“No, don’t dismount,” Sorka said. “Faranth says there’s something prowling in there. The dragonets will have a look. Whoops!”

The air was suddenly full of the chitterings and chatterings of angry dragonets. Bay’s Mariah shrieked in her ear.

“Now, now, it’s all right. Faranth won’t let anyone harm you.” Bay held up her arm for her gold, but Mariah joined the investigating fairs. Bay was astonished to realize that the dragon was growling, a sensation she could also feel through her body contacts. Faranth turned her impressive head toward the compound, the many facets of her eyes gleaming with edges of red and orange.

A pierceing yowl was clearly audible and then there was silence. The excited fairs swirled back over the two dragonriders’ heads, chittering and chattering with their news. Faranth looked up, her eyes wheeling as she absorbed the dragonets’ images.

“There’s some kind of very large spotted beast out there,” Sorka told Sean. “And something else that is even larger but silent.”

“We’ll need trank guns, then,” he said. “Sorka, have Faranth call up some reinforcements. Marco and Duluth, if possible; Dave, Kathy—we may need a medic. Peter’s Gilgath is sturdy, Nyassa won’t panic, and ask for Paul or Jerry. I think we should evacuate Mary and the two children until the beasts can be captured.”

Her ordeal ended, Mary Tubberman wept copiously on Bay’s shoulder. Her son, Peter, usually a cheerful seven-year-old, watched poker-faced and taut with anxiety. His two little sisters clung together on a lounger and would not respond to Pol’s efforts to comfort them, though he was generally very deft with children. Mary did not resist the suggestion that she move to a safer location.

“Dad’s dead, isn”t he?” Petey asked, stepping right up to Sean.

“He could be out trying to recapture the beasts,” kindhearted Bay suggested. The boy gave her a scornful look and went off down the corridor to his room.

The dragon reinforcements arrived with the trank guns. Sean was pleased to see them landing in the order they had been drilled in. Sean gave Paul, Jerry and Nyassa the trankers and sent them off on their dragons to see if they could find and disable the escaped animals.

Leaving Sorka to help the Tubbermans assemble their gear, Sean and the others, armed with the pistols, cautiously approached the wrecked compound. Inside the building, the reek of animal was heavy and mounds of recent dung littered the place. They found Ted Tubberman’s mauled and gnawed body pitifully sprawled outside his small laboratory.

“Fardles, nothing we have kills like that!” David Catarel exclaimed, backing out of the corridor.

Kathy knelt by the corpse, her face expressionless. “Whatever it was had fangs and sharp claws,” she remarked, slowly getting to her feet. “His back was broken.”

Marco grabbed up an old lab coat and some toweling from a rail and covered the corpse. Then he picked up the remains of a chair, made of one of the local pressed vegetable fibers that were used for interior furnishings. “This’ll burn. Let’s see if we can find enough to cremate him here. Save a lot of awkwardness.” He waved in the direction of the main house. Then he shuddered, clearly unwilling to move the mangled body.

“The man was insane,” Sean said, poking a rod into the dung pats in one enclosure. “Developing big predators. We’ve enough trouble with wherries and snakes!”

“I’ll go tell Mary,” Kathy murmured.

Sean caught her arm as she went by. “Tell her he died quickly.” She nodded and left.

“Hey!” Peter Semling picked up a covered clipboard from the littered floor of the laboratory. “Looks like notes,” he exclaimed, examining the thin sheets of film covered with notations in a cramped hand. “This is botanical stuff.” He shrugged, held it out to Kathy, and picked up another. “This is . . . biological? Humph.”

“Let’s collect any notes,” Sean said. “Anything that would tell us what kind of creature killed him.”

“Hey!” Peter said again. He flipped the cover back on a portable bio-scan, complete with monitor and keyboard. “This looks like the one that went missing from the vet lab a while back, along with some AI samples.”

Meticulously they gathered up every scrap of material, even taking an engraved plate with the cryptic message
Eureka
,
Mycorrhiza
! which had been nailed to the splashboard of the sink unit. Dave carried out several sacks to be brought back to Landing. Then Sean and Peter collected enough flammable materials to make a pyre that could be lit once Mary and the children had gone.

“Sean!” David Catarel called. He was hunkered down by a wide green swath that was the only living thing in the raddled and ash-littered plot, though its color was dimmed by the pervasive black ash. “How many Falls has this area had?” he asked, glancing about. He ran his hand over the grass, a tough hybrid that agro had developed for residence landscaping before Thread had fallen.