Limits (25 page)

“Right.”

Bronze Legs half-listened to the intercom conversation.
Along the heatward slopes of the mountains the black flags flew in triumph, growing longer almost as Bronze Legs watched, making sugar while the sun flared.
The rock demons milling in the searchlight beams were now hungry enough to be attacking each other in earnest. A vastly larger number of rock demons had deserted the mountainsides entirely, had swarmed straight down to the shoreline. The waves were awash with sea monsters of all sizes; the rock demons were wading out to get them.

Grace called up to him. “Rachel didn’t call anyone. Lightning says she made it over the crest.”

“Good.”

“What do you think she’ll do?”

“Nobody knows her very well. Hmm…She won’t land in the cotton candy. She probably could, because those snails are probably hiding in their shells.
Right?”

“But she won’t. It’d be too messy. She’ll stop on the coldward slope, or beyond, anywhere it’s safe to wait it out.
If there is anywhere.
Do you think she’ll find anywhere safe?”

“She won’t know what’s safe. She won’t find anyplace that isn’t swarming with
something
, not this far to heatward. The further you look to heatward, the more ferocious the competition gets.”

“Then she’ll keep going. If she doesn’t wreck herself, she’ll go straight back to Touchdown City. Let’s see,
Morven
’s on the other side of the planet now. Say it’ll be up in an hour, and we’ll let them know what’s happening. That way we’ll know she’s safe almost as soon as she does. Grace, you don’t think she’d try to rejoin us?”

“She can’t get lost, and she can’t stop, and Touchdown’s visible from fifty miles away. She’ll just head home. Okay…” There was a funny edge of doubt in Grace’s voice. She stabbed at an intercom button.
“Lightning?
Me. You watched Rachel go over the crest, right? Did she have her headlights on?”

Bronze Legs was wondering just how teed off the rammers would be if Rachel was dead. It took him a moment to see the implications of what Grace was saying.

“The searchlight too?
All right,
Lightning
. The long-range sender is on your roof. I want it ready to send a message to
Morven
by the time
Morven
rises, which will be to south of coldward in about an
hour.…No
, don’t go out yet. The way the beasts are running around they should die of heatstroke pretty quick. When they fall off the roof, you go.”

The rock demons followed Rachel twelve kilometers downslope before anything distracted them.

The howler was riding higher now, but Rachel wasn’t out of trouble. The emergency override locked the vents closed. If she turned it off the power would drop, and so would the howler. She was steering with her weight alone. Her speed would last as long as she was going down. She had almost run out of mountain. The slope leveled off as it approached the river.

The vicious pegasus-type birds had disappeared. The rolling mountai
n
sides covered with feathery wheat were now covered with stubble, stubble with a hint of motion in it, dark flecks that showed and were gone.
Millions of mice, maybe?

Whatever: they were meat. The demons scattered in twelve directions across the stubble, their big heads snapping, snapping. Rachel leaned fo
r
ward across her windscreen to get more speed. Behind her, three rock d
e
mons converged on a golden Roman shield…on a mock-turtle that had been hidden by feather-wheat and was now quite visible and helpless. The demons turned it over and ripped it apart and ate and moved on.

The howler slid across the shore and onto flowing water.

Each patch of scarlet scum had sprouted a great green blossom. Rachel steered between the stalks by body english. She was losing speed, but the shore was well behind her now.

And all twelve rock demons zipped downhill across the stubble and into the water. Rachel held her breath. Could they
swim
? They were under water, drinking or dispersing heat or both. Now they arched upward to reach the air.

The howler coasted to a stop in midstream.

Rachel nerved herself to switch off the override. The howler dropped, and hovered in a dimple of water, churning a fine mist that rapidly left Rachel dripping wet. She waited. Come what may, at least the batteries were r
e
charging. Give her time and she’d have a howler that could steer and fly.

The heatward shore was black with a million mouse-sized beasties. They’d cleaned the field of feather-wheat; but what did they think they were doing now? Watching Rachel? The rock demons noticed. They waded clumsily out of the water and, once on land, blurred into motion. The shore churned with six-legged white marauders and tiny black prey.

It seemed the fates had given Rachel a break. The water seemed quite
empty but for the scarlet scum and its huge blossoms. No telling what might be hugging the bottom while the flare passed. Rachel could wait too. The coldward shore looked safe enough…though it had changed. Before the flare, it had been one continuous carpet of chrome yellow bushes. The bushes were still there, but topped now with a continuous sheet of silver blossoms. The clouds of insects swarmed still, though they might be di
f
ferent insects.

Upstream, something was walking toward her on stilts. It came at its own good time, stopping frequently. Rachel kept her eye on it while she tried the intercom.

She got static on all bands. Mountains blocked her from the expedition; other mountains blocked her from Touchdown City. The one sender that could reach
Morven
in orbit was on a crawler. Dammit. She never noticed the glowing pinpoint that meant Bronze Legs had called. It was too dim.

Onshore, two of the rock demons were mating head-to-tail.

The thing upstream seemed to be
a great
silver Daddy-long-legs. Its legs were slender and almost long enough to bridge the river; its torso propo
r
tionately tiny. It paused every so often to reach deep into the water with the thumbless hands on its front legs. The hands were stubby, armored in chitin, startlingly quick. They dipped, they rose at once with something that stru
g
gled,
they
conveyed the prey to its mouth. Its head was wide and flat, like a clam with bulging eyes. It stepped delicately downstream, with all the time in the world…and it was bigger than Rachel had realized, and
faster
.

So much for her rest break.
She opened the rear vent. The howler slid across the river and onto shore, and stopped, nudging the bushes.

The Daddy-long-legs was following her. Ten of the dozen rock demons were wading across. As the bottom dipped the six-legged beasts rose to balance on four legs, then two. As bipeds they were impressively stable. Maybe their tails trailed in the mud bottom to serve as anchors. And the mice were coming too.
Thousands of them, swimming in a black carpet among the patches of scum.

Rachel used the override for fifteen seconds. It was enough to put her above the silver-topped bushes. The lily-pad-shaped silver blossoms bowed beneath the air blast, but the ground effect held her. She wasn’t making any great speed. Bugs swarmed around her. Sticky filaments shot from between the wide silver lily pads, and sometimes found bugs, and sometimes struck
the fans or the ground-effect skirt.

She looked for the place that had been cleared for a fux encampment. Deadeye would be there, a feisty male biped guarding his nest, if Deadeye still lived. She couldn’t find the gap in the bushes. It struck her that that was good luck for Deadeye, considering what was following her.

But she was lonely, and scared.

The Daddy-long-legs stepped delicately among the bushes. Bushes ru
s
tled to show where ten rock demons streaked after her, veering to snatch a meal from whatever was under the blossoms, then resuming course. Of the plant-eating not-mice there was no sign, except that here and there a bush had collapsed behind her.

But they were all falling behind as the fuel cells poured power into the howler’s batteries.

Rachel oriented herself by Argo and the Jet Stream and headed south and coldward. She was very tired. The land was darkening, reddening…and it came to her that the flare was dying.

The flare was dying. The goggles let Bronze Legs look directly at the suns, now, to see the red arc enclosing the bright point of Helle. A bubble of hellfire was rising, cooling, expanding into the vacuum above the lesser hell of a red dwarf star.

They were six-legged rock demons all around them, and a few on the roofs. All were dead, from heatstroke or dehydration. A far larger number were gathering all along the Ring Sea shore. Now they swarmed uphill in a wave of silver. They paired off as they came, and stopped by twos in the rocks to mate.

The diminished wave swept around the expedition and petered out. Now the mountains were covered with writhing forms: an impressive sight. “They make the beast with twelve legs,” Bronze Legs said. “Look at the size of those bellies! Hey, Grace, aren’t the beasts themselves bigger than they were?”

“They have to be. They’ve got to form those eggs. Dammit, don’t di
s
tract me.”

The intercom lit. Grace wasn’t about to notice anything so mundane. The paired rock demons were growing quiet, but they were still linked head to tail. Bronze Legs opened the intercom.

Lightning’s voice said, “I’ve got Duty Officer Toffler aboard
Morven
.”

“Okay. Toffler, this is Miller. We’ve got an emergency.”

“Sorry to hear it.” The male voice sounded sleepy. “What can we do about it?”

“You’ll have to call Touchdown City. Can you patch me through, or shall I record a message?”

“Let’s check…” The voice went away. Bronze Legs watched a nearby pair of rock demons crawling away from each other. The thick torsos seemed different. A belly swelling that had extended the length of the torso was now a prominent swelling between the middle and hind legs. It was happening fast. The beasts seemed gaunt, all bone and skin, except for the great sphe
r
ical swelling. With fore and middle legs they scratched at the earth, digging, digging.

“Miller, you’d better record. By the time we got their attention they’d be over the horizon. We’ll have them in another hour.”

“Good—”

“But I don’t see how they can help either. Listen, Miller, is there som
e
thing we can do with an interstellar message laser? At this range we can melt a mountain or boil a lake, and be accurate to—”

“Dammit, Toffler,
we’re
not in trouble! Touchdown City’s in
trouble,
and they don’t know it yet!”

“Oh? Okay, set to record.”

“To Mayor Curly Jackson, Touchdown City.
We’ve weathered the flare. We don’t know if the fuxes survived yet. The rammer, Rachel Subramaniam, is on the way to you on a howler. She has no reason to think she’s dangerous, but she is. By the time you spot her you’d be too late to stop her. If you don’t move damn
quick
, the human colony on Medea could be dead within the year. You’ll need every vehicle you can get your hands on…”

The expedition had crossed a great bay of the Ring Sea in twelve hours. Rachel could cross it in three; but she’d be rid of what followed her moments after she left shore. She had heard Lightning mention the parasitic fungus that floated on this arm of the Ring
Sea, that
was deadly to fuxes and any Medean life…unless the flare had burned it away.

The flare was long over. She rode through the usual red-lit landscape, in a circle of the white light from headlights, taillights,
searchlight
. She hu
n
gered and thirsted for the light of farming lamps, the color of Sol, of ship’s sunlights; the sign that she had come at last to Touchdown City.

But she hungered more for the fungus that would kill the rock demons and the Daddy-long-legs. She hated them for their persistence, their mo
n
strous shapes,
their
lust for her flesh. She hated them for being
themselves
! Let them rot, slow or quick. Then three hours to cross the bay, half an hour more to find and navigate that rubble-strewn pass, and downhill toward the bluewhite light.

That was the shoreline ahead.

Ominously blood-colored beasts milled there. One by one they turned toward the howler.

Rachel cursed horribly and without imagination. She had seen these things before. The expedition’s searchlights had pinned a tremendous tho
u
sand-legged worm, and these things had been born from its flesh. They were dog-sized, tailless quadrupeds. Flare time must have caught a lot of the great myriapods, brought vast populations of parasites to life, for this many to be still active this long after the flare.