The Blue Marble Gambit (10 page)

I
expected shock. Perhaps
denial. Rage wouldn't have
surprised me. But Trina was calm
and undisturbed, absolutely unflappable.
Or at least unflapped.
Maybe it was her Martian heritage. “Surely there must be some good news
too."

I
thought for a moment, and then another. It took a couple more, too, before I found the good news. “Ah. Well. The good news is that we'll take a lot
of Boffs with us. But we'll be in a
singularly poor position to appreciate that."

"Good
point," she agreed. “How long
did you say we have?"

I
told her again.
Just
under ten hours.

She
smiled. “I'm sure you'll think of
something. But first, I think, to
clear your mind, you should show me that trick again."

"What
trick?"

"You
know," she chided, "the one you said you learned on Io."

I
was confused for a moment at the mention of Jupiter's moon. Then I figured it out. “No, not on Io.
From a lass
named
Io. Although, to be accurate, I guess you
could say that at the time I was on-"

My
voice squeaked off as an iron grip grasped a fragile portion of my anatomy,
none too delicately. “Diz,
dear," Trina said lightly, "don't spoil the moment."

What
a creature. Trapped in lifeboat,
headed for meteoric

demise
, hours to live, and she was worried about
spoiling the

moment
. Who could resist? Well,
maybe some could. I didn't even

try
.

Much
later, Trina gurgled, "I love zero g," and closed her

eyes
.

I'd
never met someone more flippant and irreverent than

myself
. It was outrageous.

"Has it occurred to you that our mission is about to
fail, and with us we take the whole planet Earth? Aren't you a little relaxed about all that?"

She
smoothed back blonde sweaty hair, then fixed me with the

cool
golden gaze of her golden eye. "Diz. Please. Given the choice between
weeping,
teeth-gnashing
, hair-tearing and all that, or
enjoying what might well be my last few hours, I'll take the latter, thank you
very much. Besides, I don't know
how to pilot a ship - that's your department. Get me to that Time Oscillator, and then
you'll see fur fly. Until then, I'm
just baggage. The Admiral assured
me that you could - and would - get me there. I'm assuming you will. The how is up to you."

By
Neptune's frozen Trident! Was she
stupid? Had she looked around
lately?

"And
if I don't? Because things aren't going so well, you know."

"If
you don't get us there, then that's a problem." She shrugged, curled up, and closed her
eyes again.

A
problem, she called it. Martians
were known for their magnificent understatements, especially under fire. Somehow living on a hostile planet did
that to them. But still.

I
stared at the control console. Nine
hours to impact. We'd been steadily
slowing from gravitational friction since the loss of the transdrivers, but we
were still going to make a very big bang. Through the tiny slit of a viewport I could see the shining jewel of
Boff. It was a bilious combination
of green and brown.

Falling
from on high

Like
a bird shorn of its wings

A
big splat we'll make.

"Will
you stop that!" groaned Ned.

I
ignored him. We could, I supposed,
call for help. Though it seemed
pointless, for several reasons. First, the Boffs would almost certainly ignore us, and wisely so. If they went to the trouble of rescuing
us, they would just have to go to the further trouble of killing us, for alien
entry into their system without a permit, a major transgression under the
Boffian code. According to legend,
they once executed an entire returning army for that very offense, after a
minor paperwork error by a junior clerk. The final irony would be the means of our execution: the punishment
would be dropping us into the atmosphere from space. So rescue wasn't really an option.

At
least we stood little chance of being detected by spacedar. The lifeboat was small, and with the
reflectors stowed, had a very small signature. Besides which, the Boffs reputedly
didn't pay that close attention. They had few visitors and wanted fewer.

So
if there was to be any help, it had to be here.
Right in front of me.

The
control console was simple and I examined each and every item on it. My whole universe was reduced to two square
feet of absurdly polished ancient psuedo-Marsnut.
Nicely burled and
shiny.
What inane, perverse
logic. Who has a fancy lifeboat?
But at least, thanks to the whim of that long-forgotten Blutonian designer, we
would splat in luxury. I took
inventory.
A
control stick.
Thruster knobs - useless now.
Maneuvering jets.
Still workable.
Nav display. Com station.
A bank of circuits.

A small T-lever.

A small T-lever?
Hardly standard.
I looked closer.

Parachute,
read the label beneath it. Parachute?

Ned
phased in. He was dressed in black;
I could swear a funeral dirge was playing in the background.

"Don't
bother," he moaned. “Won't
help."

"Spawn
you," I said, borrowing a crustaceanoid expression. “What's the squishiest part of
Boff?"

"The
lowland Peristalsis Peat Bog is, as a matter of fact, the largest swamp in the
sector and something of a tourist attraction for the Boffs. They come from all over their system to
see it. Parts of the sodden moss
are kilometers deep." Sullenly, he pulled up a graphic - a brown and green
globe, overlaid with the concentric circles of a bulls-eye. We weren't going to hit the bog, but we
weren't going to hit far from it. We
would be plummeting straight into a high rocky plateau, which the Boffs had
sculpted into an enormous sculpture of, not surprisingly, a Boff. The huge spear shape was so big we'd be
able to see it from space, except for the layers of swirling green and brown
clouds.

"Wonderful,
isn't it," Ned said sarcastically. “By the way, it's been a real pleasure serving with you. I can't say how much I've enjoyed this
last mission in particular."

I
punched a few commands into the nav computer,
then
rotated the ship with the maneuvering jets. I checked my positioning, then waited
three long slow minutes. I checked
the nav again. Then I fired our
maneuvering jets, expending every bit of our fuel.

"What
are you doing?" Trina murmured, opening her green eye.

"Aiming,"
I shrugged. On the bright side, we
might not burn up. Modern lifeboats
had heat shields. But that still
left us with a fairly insoluble problem at the end of our descent.

Impact.

Through
the monitor, Boff swelled larger, all green and yellow-brown swirls. It looked something like a monstrous
toilet flushing. Trying to be
helpful, the on-board computer placed a tiny golden crosshair on our impact
point.

"Get
rid of that!" I snarled. It
vanished.

I
sat back. The capsule began to rock
and shiver as we entered the atmosphere.

Trina's
gold eye opened to join her green one in projecting a look of calm
resignation. “If you don't get us
out of this," she said, "I'll never trust you with my life
again."

"You're
right about that," I agreed. With nothing left to do, I reached up and yanked the T-handle.

It
came out in my hand. I stared at
the piece of polished metal.
Thank you, Blutonian Inspector # 7,149,008(b).
At least nothing else could go wrong,
though only because there wasn't anything else left to go wrong, and even if
there
was
, it wouldn't have time.

There
was an odd clunking sound, then nothing. The chute? I knew we were so high that it would barely inflate, but that
was the idea.
A
slow deceleration, in the high thin air.

"Why
bother? It'll either burn up or rip off," complained Ned drearily.

That
was probably true, I knew. “At
least then I'll be rid of you."

Ned
snapped away.

The
capsule shivered and bobbed and quivered; air roared over us. At least it wasn't hot.

Yet.

Slowly,
like an invisible blanket, the weight of Boff lay down upon us as we slowed.

The
capsule jolted; the rush of air fell off; we swayed.

I called up an external, upward
view. Once again, I realized
without a hint of modesty, I'd underestimated my own feckless resourcefulness.

We
were dangling beneath a large green canopy. We had been going far too fast; I had
actually thought we might not survive. But for some reason the Blutonians had equipped their lifeboat with a
parachute worthy to the task. Now
we were about to float down, light as the neck feathers of an Altarian
virgin. Which are, of course, very
light indeed. The green canopy
would even camouflage us against the nauseous sky.

I
turned towards Trina, prepared to crow and gloat, to claim my rightful place as
her savior. Her gaze was fixed on
the screen, an odd expression on her face.

I
glanced up at the canopy again. The
green was now flecked with gold, I saw. It was a pleasing effect. For what seemed like no reason at all I suddenly recalled that Altarian
virgins don't have neck feathers, they have pebbly scales. Heavy scales.

The
gold grew. Not gold at all, I
realized. Fire.

"We're
on fire," Ned announced smugly. “We were going too fast. Friction. I knew it."

"What's
that?" Trina asked suspiciously, pointing at the flames. Of course she couldn't hear Ned.

The
shroud lines ripped away and the chute billowed upward as we plunged
hellward. We were in freefall. Zero g.

"Oh,"
she said quietly. No dummy, her.

Well,
at least it had been close, I decided. We had over a thousand meters to fall yet. My feckless resourcefulness had drowned
in feck.

"Time
for a quickie?" I suggested.

For
once, Trina wasn't in the mood. Though I wouldn't get to tease her about it for long. She looked away, pointedly.

"Well,
then," I said, and settled onto my couch. As best I could, that is, given the zero
G of freefall.

I
wondered whether we would have any sensation of the impact, of being flattened
and squished into monomolecular pancakes, or if the world would just go
black. I supposed it would be a
race between the rate of actually being crushed, and the rate of the
actually-being-crushed
signals zooming up our neurons to
inform our already-crushing brains of this useless news. I wasn't sure which I should root for.

I
was still trying to decide when everything went black.

CHAPTER
7. LUNCHMEAT

And
then, much later, it went green.

I
had a horrible thought. Suppose,
just suppose, that the Boffs are the only species really to figure out the
whole furball of metaphysics and the afterlife. Or, perhaps, no less tragically, that on
any given planet the locals govern what happens in those mist-encrusted
realms. That might create a
tumultuous situation on Earth, with its welter of religions - Crusaders and
Aborigines, together in Heaven? -
but
the Boffs were
far more homogenous.

If
either of these possibilities were true, then Trina and I would be consigned to
the Boff version of Heaven or Hell. From the warm green glow I could see everywhere, this might well be Boff
heaven. Which should be only an
inch or so from human hell. How
convenient! At least I'd know people there.

"Diz!"
Something slapped my face. “Do
something! We're sinking!"

I
focused my eyes. The lifeboat was
indeed all aglow with a dark, and darkening, green.
A wet green.

By
Mercury's burnt butt! We were in the swamp. Somehow the bog had slowed us enough -
which, I recalled proudly, had been my original plan in aiming at it.
Although, to be
honest, I perhaps hadn't thought things through quite far enough.
We were far too deep to just blow the hatch
and swim for it - even assuming that that green stuff wasn't a sea of acid, an
important point which for some reason I couldn't quite remember. It might have been.

The
lifeboat groaned. The pressure, I
surmised.

"The
pressure," Trina said. She was,
after all, the smart one.

"Ah,"
I said, while scanning the control console. It seemed impossible that I would find
another miracle there but I looked anyway, for the simple reason that
impossible things have an inexplicable tendency to happen to and around
me. Of course, a parachute was far
more likely than something that would save us here. Of all the unlikely possibilities an
escape pod might encounter, this one - deep in a swamp, and sinking - had to be
one of the most unlikely of all. But look I did. Court diz
Astor does not give up. I squinted
madly in the green dimness. Thrusters, jets, view controls, buttons, big hole for missing
T-handle.
Nothing,
nothing, and more nothing.
I
was about to give up when - wait! There, hidden in a corner,
a
small orange button with a dusty label
bearing a magic word: Floatation.

"Aha!"
I said, and pressed the small orange button.

The
capsule shook. Green bubbles
streamed by the windows. We seemed
to sink faster.

What?
Tricked? I banged an inquiry into the computer, which after a moment of
battery-powered electronic smugness explained the situation in calm terms. The impact had ruptured the air cells
that would have floated us.

Down
we went.
A very
dark green, now.
The
lifeboat groaned again, a sinister sound of high-strength metal under serious
stress.
The sound
of metal fretting.

I
winced.

Trina
gave me a look of extreme discomfort, a look of agony. Waiting for death, it said. No, make that waiting for an uncommonly
unpleasant death. It was a little
hard to read.

"This
is not so good," she observed.

The
capsule groaned in emphasis. The
air seemed to squeeze us.

Ned
flashed into being, a petulant look on his face. He was a kimono-clad Japanese warrior,
short sword aimed at his own abdomen. “Just kill us, Court. Just
get it over with. I can't stand the
tension. So many possibilities!
Will we be blasted? Burn up? Fall to our deaths? Squash? Maybe-"

"None
of those," I interrupted, staring out the viewport, which framed a large
and growing black shape at its green center. The Fates seemed to be toying with us;
things had careered from bad to terrible and were now plainly on the way to
outright perverse. We would reach
that plateau of high irony, I estimated, in approximately four seconds.

I
finished my thought: "We'll be eaten."

And
we were.