Reunion (10 page)

It struck him with brutal, indifferent force that if he could not effect some significant changes to his present situation within the next couple of minutes, he most assuredly was going to die.

Chapter 7

The shuttle’s AI stayed as calm as Flinx was frantic, blissfully ignoring all evidence of an increasingly desperate reality. When Flinx pleaded for it to reestablish communications with the master AI on the
Teacher,
the shuttle confidently assured him that such communications were active. When he tried everything to persuade it to increase deceleration, it insisted that all touchdown modes were operating on optimal, refusing to be dissuaded by the increasingly dense, increasingly heated atmosphere outside. When ordered to perform a thorough internal check-and-clean of its command systems, it promptly agreed to do so—only to conclude that everything was fine, nothing was the matter, and that they would be landing gently in a matter of minutes.

Meanwhile, the venting of critical fluids commenced, monitors began to fail, screens grew dark, and the shuttle gave every indication of shutting down section by section around its single human occupant. Fighting one system collapse after another as the unstoppable pathogen propagated throughout the shuttle, Flinx realized he had to set down quickly, while he still retained some semblance of control over the rapidly descending craft. Despite the desperation of his circumstances, the irony of it did not escape him. How fast would be too fast? How exacting an impact could he tolerate and still survive?

At least, if his remaining instruments could be believed, the shuttle was still on course for the chosen landing site. And why not? There was no reason for the crippling intruder to alter the path of descent. It could crash the ship as thoroughly on target as anywhere else.

Manual controls existed, but were a novelty to Flinx. Lacking time for a leisurely perusal of the relevant manuals, he set about fighting to disengage control of the vessel from its supervising AI. He had played with and practiced manual landings only a few times. Now he was going to find out what, if anything, he remembered.

He could not argue directly with the addled AI, but he could disconnect it. When he initiated the suspension sequence, there was some resistance, but nothing that drive and desperation could not overcome. Now in complete control of what remained of the craft’s operating systems, he began by bypassing the host of monitors that governed the engines. He celebrated a small accomplishment when he succeeded in shutting down the main drive. A larger triumph was achieved when the braking drive sprang to life. Descent velocity proceeded to degrade precipitously.

Would it be enough, and in time? He would know all too soon. Bursting forth from the underside of the inert cloud cover, Flinx set the shuttle’s delta wings to deploy to maximum. Screaming surfaceward, the trim little craft scattered a host of indigenous flying creatures from its path. The ill-defined blurring of beige and brown, blue and green that comprised the surface began to resolve itself into individual features. Flinx shot over canyons and badlands, defunct river deltas and eroded mountains. Somewhere in the jumble of anguished geology, he importuned, there had to be a suitable place to land.

Minutes later, it loomed in front of him: a broad, sandy plain bordered by dunes whose height he was too busy to estimate. Entering by way of the open seals, scalding hot air shrieked unimpeded through the cockpit. The survival suit he had so providentially donned prior to exiting the
Teacher
kept him from boiling in his own body fluids.

Landing skids deployed, nose up, braking drive blasting deafeningly, he continued to surrender altitude and hope for the best. A cliff riven with the intense blue and green of luxuriant copper mineralization materialized unexpectedly in front of him, forcing him to skew the shuttle sharply to the right. The hard surface leaped abruptly into view, an unforgiving, tawny terminus. Then it turned black, accompanied by a single overpowering, echoless banging in his ears . . .

Something was tickling his eyelids. Blinking, he found himself staring into slitted reptiloid eyes. Fearing dissecting AAnn, he jumped. Then Pip drew back, her head and upper coils blocking her master’s view of much of what lay beyond.

Wincing, he struggled to sit up. It required several attempts before his damaged harness reluctantly released him from the command chair. His neck throbbed, and his chest felt as if it had recently served as a temporary resting place for a tired elephant. Intense, buttery yellow sunlight made him blink. Pieces of the polarizing port that ought to have minimized the glare lay strewn throughout the cockpit, fragmented by the force of impact. Something gripped his feet.

Glancing down, he pulled them free of the grasping sand that now filled much of the shuttle’s forepart. Experiencing a sudden, uncharacteristic attack of claustrophobia, he hurried to remove the survival suit’s headpiece. As the shuttle’s instrumentation had originally confirmed when it had been functioning properly, the atmosphere of Pyrassis was safe to breathe. It was hot, incredibly dry, and smelled faintly of desiccated myrtle. Freed from the confines of the suit, Pip unfurled her pleated pink-and-blue wings and soared through the shattered foreport, out into the alien sky. He made no attempt to restrain her. She would not stray far, and he envied her the freedom. Should he feel threatened, she would come back to him in an instant.

Struggling to move in the clinging sand, which like the cliff he had barely managed to avoid was electric with blue and green ores, he took stock of his situation. Reflecting the confusion that had afflicted its AI, the interior of the shuttle was a useless mess. The fact that he had survived with little more than a few bruises was a tribute to the sturdiness and design of the Ulru-Ujurrian—installed harness. As bad as the shuttle’s unflyability was the destruction of all internal communications facilities. Those built into his survival suit would also allow him to exchange basic commands with the
Teacher,
to let it track him, perhaps even to let him instruct it to send out a second shuttle to pick him up—except that his ship was concealed behind the planet’s near moon to forestall just that kind of interactive communication with the Pyrassisian surface.

Eventually, the
Teacher
’s highly sophisticated AI might wonder at his continued absence, deduce that something was amiss, and initiate a search without having to be prompted. That would take time, and would require a decision on the part of the AI to countermand Flinx’s instructions to remain where it could not be observed from the world below. Presently then, his best hope lay in that portion of the
Teacher
’s programming that allowed for cybernetic initiative. He was not sanguine.

What he was, not to put too fine a technological point on it, was stuck. On an alien world he knew next to nothing about. He did know, however, the approximate last location of the landing party from the
Crotase.
Several options were open to him. One was to try and contact his fellow humans—openly, now—while using the time prior to making such contact to invent a plausible excuse for being in the improbable place where he was. Another was to wait for the AAnn to find him, in which case he was unlikely ever to see a humanx world ever again. A third was to do his best to stay alive until the
Teacher
’s AI decided it was incumbent upon it to disobey directives and contact its owner, if only to seek clarification of those same prohibitions.

Eventually, he decided his best chance lay in combining the first and third of his alternatives. He would commence a search for the
Crotase
landing party. When contact was made, he would keep his distance until he could no longer survive on his own, in the hope that the
Teacher
would come for him before his endurance was exhausted and he was forced to throw himself on whatever mercies his fellow humans might deign to visit upon him. Meanwhile he could try to locate and appropriate the personal recorder containing the long-sought-after sybfile.

It sounded like a workable course of action. Provided, of course, that the crew of the
Crotase
were not already preparing to depart, having carried out and completed whatever plan they had come to fulfill. Provided that the local AAnn, sparse and scattered though they might be, did not first discover the humans who were prowling illicitly in their midst and irately obliterate them. Provided he could survive the harsh climate, difficult terrain, and unknown inimical life-forms that might inhabit this underpopulated, out-of-the-way speck of grit.

Yes, it was a workable plan—if one disregarded all the
provideds
he had not provided for. The survival suit would help. Having come through the crash landing with all its functions apparently intact, it could distill water from air even as low in humidity as that presently surrounding him. Its integrated storage compartments contained food bars and supplements that could keep him alive, if not sated, for a while. The tools that filled the sturdy service belt that formed an integral part of the suit’s waistband were marvels of miniaturization. One leg pouch held a potent endural pistol that fired small but satisfyingly explosive pellets, on the theory that where caliber might prove inadequate, a loud enough noise might be sufficiently disconcerting to the unsophisticated to discourage attack.

And of course, he had Pip.

Taking time to apply salve from the suit’s medikit to the worst of his bruises, he scavenged the ruined shuttle for anything else that might prove useful. Designed to convey travelers safely between localities, it was ill equipped for his present needs. He did manage to cobble together a crude backpack into which he loaded an improvised water bottle, in the event his suit’s distiller either broke down or proved unable to suck enough moisture out of the air, and some plasticine sheeting from which to extemporize a shelter. Making certain that the shuttle’s integrated, shielded emergency beacon was active so that the
Teacher,
if and when it grew so inclined, would not have to search half the planet to find him, he exited the downed craft by climbing out the shattered foreport. The main hatch was jammed beyond repair.

For someone so young, he had experience of a number of different ecosystems, from the rain forests of Alaspin and Midworld, to the urban centers and high mountains of Earth, to the underground world of Longtunnel and its wind-scoured surface. There were also the years he had spent growing up on Moth, a colony world that boasted a rich variety of environments. But only once before had he spent any significant time in a desertlike climate, and that was in the company of a hoary old prospector named Knigta Yakus.

He tried to remember all that he knew of such conditions as he set off, striding strongly away from the downed shuttle as he let the suit’s tracker lead him eastward. Somewhere over the dune-dominated horizon the crew of the Commonwealth freighter
Crotase
was engaged in dangerous, illegal, and scandalous activity the likes of which Flinx could not imagine. It was sobering to realize that unless his circumstances changed drastically, and soon, those interlopers represented his best hope for survival.

While the heat would not bother her, he knew that eventually Pip would begin to suffer from the lack of ambient humidity. He would have to take care to keep her properly hydrated. With its headpiece restored but faceplate retracted, the suit kept him reasonably comfortable. Designed to allow its wearer to survive in free space for a period of up to ten days, its internal power source would last a good deal longer in the comparatively benign environment of a habitable world. It would keep him cool during the day and warm at night, and if he so felt the need, he could conserve its resources even longer by shutting the suit’s eco-functions down when they were not required.

He let them run now, however, because otherwise he would not have been able to make nearly as much progress in the strength-sapping heat of the day. It was imperative that he locate and overtake the landing party from the
Crotase
before they concluded their work. Keeping his distance, monitoring their activities, and trying to find out what they were doing here would not only serve to take his mind off his present awkward situation, but perhaps also answer some of the questions that had brought him here as well. Unaware they were being stalked by one of their own kind, there was no reason for them to keep moving around. Presumably, they had set down and subsequently established themselves right where they wanted to be.

Try as he might, he still could not contrive a connection between the barren world across which he was presently striding and the disreputable eugenics work of the Meliorare Society. Above and ahead of him, Pip soared appreciatively on the warm air, elated to be free of the confines of the survival suit. With luck, they would steal up upon the
Crotase
encampment within a few days or so.

Had anyone from that ship descried and tracked the shuttle’s descent, and if so, would it unsettle them enough to abandon their plans? He doubted the latter. They had come too far, at too great an expense, and risked too much to pull out at the first sign of the unexpected. The shuttle’s touchdown had been rough and crippling, but nonexplosive. If they had followed the shuttle’s descent, the crew of the
Crotase
had at their disposal any number of ways to rationalize what they had beheld. That was assuming they had seen anything. The shuttle had come in from the west, describing a very low angle of approach. Even in this clear desert air its distant touchdown might not have been noticed.

Lengthening his stride, he stepped confidently over the sand, Pip darting to left or right to check out an unusual formation, a plant, or something unseen that might be stirring in shadow. Activating the survival suit’s distiller by sucking on the internal dispenser tube, he luxuriated in the cool moisture it provided. He was not worried about stumbling into the
Crotase
’s encampment, or even into an outlying sentry. This was because for the moment, at least, his sometimes erratic talent was active and alert. In this otherwise uninhabited alien desolation, he would be able to pick up even sedate human or AAnn emotions long before he sighted those to whom they belonged. He felt confident that before long, despite the temporary setback, he would finally be able to obtain answers to the flush of bewildering questions that had carried him beyond the farthest limits of the Commonwealth.