Dragonsdawn (41 page)

“Enough to clear this!” Sean knelt beside him and pulled up a hefty tuft. The dirt around the roots contained a variety of soil denizens, including several furry-looking grubs.

“Never seen that sort before,” David remarked, catching three deftly as they dropped. He felt in his jacket pocket, extracted a wad of fabric, and carefully wrapped the grubs. “Ned Tubberman was yakking about a new kind of grass surviving Fall down here. I’ll just take these back to the agro lab.”

Just then, Sorka, Pol, Bay, and Peter, each loaded with bundles, came out of the main house. Sean and Dave began to load the eight dragons.

“We can make another run for you, Mary,” Sorka suggested tactfully when the woman joined them with two stuffed bedsacks.

“I don’t have much besides clothes,” Mary said, her glance flicking to the compound. “Kathy said it was quick?” Her anxious eyes begged confirmation.

“Kathy’s the medic,” Sean assured her smoothly. “Up you go now. David and Polenth will take you. Mount up. You kids ever ridden a dragon before?”

Sean made a game of it for them and passed quickly over the awkwardness of the moment. He saw them all off before he and Pol ignited the funeral pyre. Then they took off in yet another shower of the volcanic dust which would eventually bury Landing.

“I can’t break Ted’s personal code!” Pol exclaimed in exasperation, throwing the stylus down to a worktop littered with clipboards and piles of flimsies. “Wretched, foolish man!”

“Ezra loves codes, Pol,” Bay suggested.

“Judging by the DNA/RNA, he was experimenting with felines, but I cannot imagine why. There’re already enough running wild here at Landing. Unless—” Pol broke off and pinched his lower lip nervously, grimacing as his thoughts followed uneasy paths. “We
know
—” He paused to bang the table in emphasis. “—that felines do not take mentasynth well. He knew that, too. Why would he repeat mistakes?”

“What about that other batch of notes?” Bay asked, gesturing to the clipboard lying precariously on the edge.

“Unfortunately, all I can read of them are quotations from Kitti’s dragon program.”

“Oh!” Bay cocked her jaw sideways for a moment. “He had to play creator as well as anarchist!”

“Why else would he refer to the Eridani genetic equations?” Pol slapped the worktop with his hand, frustrated and anxious, his expression rebellious. “And what did he hope to achieve?”

“I think we can be grateful that he hadn’t tried to manipulate the fire-dragonets, though I suspect he was practicing on the ova he appropriated from the vet frozen storage.”

Pol rubbed the heels of his hands into his tired eyes. “We can be grateful for small mercies there. Especially when you consider what Blossom has done. I shouldn’t have said that, my dear. Forget it.”

Bay permitted herself a scornful sniff. “At least Blossom has the good sense to keep those wretched photophobes of hers chained. I cannot think why she persists with them. She’s the only one they like.” Bay gave a shudder of revulsion. “They positively fawn on her.”

Pol snorted. “That’s why,” he said absently, riffling through the notes on the undecipherable clipboard. “What I don’t understand is why he chose the large felines?”

“Well, why don’t we ask Petey? He helped his father in the compound, didn’t he?”

“You are the essence of rationality, my dear,” Pol said. Pushing himself out of the chair, he went over and laid an affectionate kiss on her cheek, ruffling her hair. She was admonishing him when he punched the commcode for Mary Tubberman’s quarters. Both he and Bay had been visiting her daily to help her settle back into the community. “Mary, is Peter available?”

When Peter answered, his tone was not particularly encouraging. “Yeah?”

“Those large cats your father was breeding? Did they have spots or stripes?” Pol asked in a conversational tone.

“Spots.” Peter was surprised by the unexpected question.

“Ah, the cheetah. Is that what he called them?”

“Yeah, cheetahs.”

“Why cheetahs, Peter? I know they’re fast, but they wouldn’t be any good hunting wherries,”

“They were great going after the big tunnel snakes.” Peter’s voice became animated. “And they’d come to heel and do everything Dad told them—” he broke off.

“I expect they did, Petey. Several ancient cultures on Earth bred them to hunt all manner of game. Speediest things on four legs!”

“Did they turn on him?” Peter asked after a moment’s silence.

“I don’t know, Petey. Are you coming to the bonfire tonight?” Pol asked brightly, feeling that he could not leave the conversation on such .a sour note. “You promised me a rematch. Can’t have you winning every chess game.” He received a promise for that evening and disconnected. “From what Petey said, it would appear that Ted used mentasynth on cheetahs to enhance their obedience. He used them to hunt tunnel snakes.”

“They turned on him?”

“That seems likely. Only why? I wish we knew how many ova he took from vet. I wish we could decipher these notes and discover if he only used mentasynth or if he implemented any part of Kitti’s program. Be that as it may—” Pol exhaled in frustration. “We have an unknown number of predatory animals loose in Calusa. Loose in Calusa!” Pol let out a derisory snort for his inadvertent rhyming. “I wonder if Phas Radamanth has had any luck deciphering the notes on those grubs.
They
could be useful”

Patrice de Broglie burst into Emilie’s office. “Garben’s getting set to blow. We’ve got to evacuate. Now!”

“
What
!” Emily rose to her feet, the flimsies she was studying slipping out of her hands to scatter on the floor.

“I’ve just been to the peaks. There’s a change in the sulfur-to-chlorine ratio. It’s Garben that’s going to blow.” He slapped his hand to his forehead in a self-accusatory blow. “Right before my eyes, and I didn’t see it.”

Alerted by Emily’s cry, Paul came through from the adjoining office. “Garben?”

“You’ve got to evacuate immediately,” Patrice cried, his expression contorted. “There’ve even been significant increases in mercury and radon from the damned crater. And we thought it was leaking from Picchu.”

“But it’s Picchu that’s smoking!” Stunned, Paul struggled to keep his cool. He reached for the comm unit just as Emily did. She grabbed it first, and he jerked his fingers back and let her contact Ongola.

“That Garben is as sly a mountain as the man we named it for. Volcanology still isn’t a precise science,” Patrice said, rolling his eyes in frustration as he paced up and down the small office. “I’ve sent a skimmer up with the correlation spectrometer to check on the content of the fumarole emissions that just started in the Garben crater,” Patrice went on. “I brought down samples of the latest ash. But that rising sulfur-to-chlorine ratio means the magma is rising.”

“Ongola,” Emily said. “Sound the klaxon. Volcano alert. Recall all sleds and skimmers immediately. Yes, I know there’s Threadfall today, but we’ve got to evacuate Landing
now
, not later. How long do we have, Patrice?”

He shrugged in exasperation. “I cannot give you the precise moment of catastrophe, my friends, nor which way it will spew, but the wind is a strong nor’easterly. Already the ash increases. Had you not noticed?”

Startled, governor and admiral glanced out the window and saw that the sky was gray with ash that obscured the sunlight, and that Picchu’s smoking yellow plume was broader than usual. A similar halo was beginning to grow about Garben’s peak.

“One can even become accustomed to living beneath a volcano,” Paul remarked with dry humor.

Patrice shrugged again and managed a grin. “But let’s not, my friends. Even if the pyroclastic flow is minimal, Landing will soon be covered with ash at the rate it’s now falling. As soon as we’ve decided possible lava flow paths, I’ll inform you, so you can clear the most vulnerable areas first.”

“How fortunate we already have an evacuation plan,” Emily remarked, selecting a file and bringing it up on the terminal. “There!” She ran the sequence to all printers, on emergency priority. “That’s going to all department heads. Evacuation is officially under way, gentlemen. What a nuisance to have to do it at speed. Something is bound to be forgotten no matter how carefully you plan ahead.”

Trained by repeated drills, the population of Landing reacted promptly to the klaxon alert by going to their department heads for orders. A brief flurry of panic was suppressed, and the exercise went into high gear.

The sky continued to darken as thick gray clouds of ash rolled up, covering the peaks of the now active volcanoes that had once appeared so benign. White plumes rose from Garben’s awakened fumaroles and from crevasses down its eastern side. Morning became twilight as the air pollution spread. Handlamps and breathing masks were issued.

In charge of the actual evacuation, Joel Lilienkamp supervised from one of the fast sleds, keeping the canopy open so that he could bawl orders and encouragement to the various details and make on-the-spot decisions. The laboratories and warehouses nearest the simmering volcano were being cleared first, along with the infirmary, with the exception of emergency first aid and burn control. The donks trundled everywhere, depositing their burdens at the grid or carrying them on down to temporary shelter in the Catherine Caves.

Patrice’s group had already calculated areas of high and low pyroclastic hazard. Warnings had been sent as far east as Cardiff, west to Bordeaux, and south to Cambridge. Already favored with a heavy fall of ash, Monaco was also in range of moderate pyroclastic missile danger. Every boat, ship, and barge was mobilized in the bay, to be loaded and sent off to stand beyond the first Kahrain peninsula.

The last sacs of fuel were emptied into the tanks of the two remaining shuttles. Most of the dragonriders were put to herding the livestock toward the harbor. For the first time, no one assembled to fight Thread at Maori Lake—a more deadly fall threatened.

No one had time to cheer as Drake Bonneau lifted the old
Swallow
, with its cargo of children and equipment, just as daylight receded from the plateau. The technicians moved immediately to the
Parrakeet
. Ongola and Jake, monitoring in the tower, took advantage of the respite to eat’ the hot food that had been sent up to them. The communications equipment had been placed on trolleys and could be quickly shifted if the tower was threatened.

“
Swallow
looks good,” Ezra called in from the interface chamber where he was monitoring the flight. He had spent much of that day erecting a shield of heatproof material around the chamber, not quite ready to accept Patrice’s hurried assurance that the room’s location did not intersect any channels of previous lava flows. Unfortunately the interface with the orbiting Yokohama could not be disconnected, relying as it did on a fixed beacon to the receiver on the
Yoko
. Since the setting on the Yoko could no longer be altered to a new direction, there was no point in taking the interface and reassembling it.

That night, the air was choking with sulfur fumes and full of gritty particles, and Patrice warned that the buildup was reaching the critical point. White plumes from both Picchu and Garben, ominously rooted in a muted glow from peak and crater, were visible even against the dark sky, casting an eerie light over the settlement.

Drake Bonneau reported that he was safely down after a difficult flight. “Damn crate nearly shook apart, but nothing was damaged. None of the kids so much as bruised, but I don’t think any of them will develop a yen for flying. Hard landing, too, plowed a furrow when we overshot the mark. We’ll need the rest of the day to clear the site for the
Parrakeet
. Tell Fulmar to check the gyros and the stabilizing monitors. I’ll swear we had tunnel snakes in the
Swallow
’s.”

There was a constant stream of vehicles down to the harbor, as the bigger ships and barges were loaded with protesting animals prodded into stalls erected on deck. Crates of chickens, ducks, and geese were strapped wherever they could be attached, to be off-loaded at the Kahrain cove, safely out of the danger zone. With any luck, most of the livestock would be evacuated. Skimming over the harbor, Jim Tillek managed to be everywhere, encouraging and berating his crews.

By nightfall, Sean called a halt for dragonriders ferrying people and packages to the Kahrain cove. “I’m not risking tired dragons and riders,” he told Lilienkamp with some heat. “Too risky, and the dragons are just too young to be under this sort of stress.”

“Time, man, we don’t have time for niceties!” Joel replied angrily.

“You handle the exodus, Joel, I’ll handle my dragons. The riders will work until they drop, but it’s bloody stupid to push young dragons! Not while I can prevent it.”

Joel gave him an angry, frustrated glare. The dragons had been immensely useful, but he also knew better than to put them at risk. He gunned the sled away, perched behind the console like a small, ash-covered statue.

Sean and the other riders did work until they dropped. Each dragon then curled protectively about his rider as they slept. No one had time to notice that there were few dragonets about.

Then, all too soon, Joel was there again, exhorting them from the air, and they rejoined the Herculean efforts of the people around them.

Suddenly, the klaxon sounded a piercing triple blast. All activity ceased for the message that followed.

“She’s going to blow!” Patrice’s almost triumphant shout echoed throughout the Landing.

Every head turned toward Garben, its peak outlined by the eerie luminosity from its crater.

“Launch the
Parrakeet
!” Ongola’s stentorian voice broke the awed, stunned silence.

The engines of the shuttle were drowned by the rumbling earth and an ear-splitting roar of tremendous power as the volcano erupted. The attentive stance of observers broke as people scrambled to complete tasks at hand, shouting to one another above the noise. Later, those who watched the peak fracture and the red-hot molten lava begin to ooze from the break said that everything appeared to happen in slow motion.