Heminge nodded, his eyes still on Beaumont as he spoke. “How long, Captain?”
“On my authority,” Beaumont said, one hand straying to the pistol at his belt, “a day.”
“No.” I stared him down. “I command here. You may have my commission when we get home, but until then the decision is mine.” The orders had been clear enough. We weren’t to spend time on site, lest we become contaminated too. I’d already consigned
Six Degrees
and her crew to extensive quarantine on our return simply by landing and approaching Lehr in person—a fact as yet understood by no one but Beaumont, though I suspected Marley of either knowing or deducing it for himself. “As long as it takes.”
Beaumont refused to flinch. “A time limit, de Vere.”
Sadly, he was right. “Seventy-two hours, then.”
Deckard walked across the wardroom, slammed his shoulder into Beaumont, knocking the political officer backward, though they were of a height and build. “Excuse me,
sir
. My clumsiness.” He turned back toward me. “If time is short, we should be working.”
“As you were, Beaumont,” I shouted, before he could spring up off the deck. “We’re going back out. I want to speak to Cordel.” About these daughters, I told myself. The old man himself was useless, lost in the hallucination of a green world and decades of blind introspection.
“I’ll bet you do,” Beaumont muttered, picking himself up with a slow, false dignity. “I’ll just bet you do.”
We trudged across the dry crystal beds, gravel washed down from the distant cliffs. They smelled like talcum, with the astringent overlay of this world’s native organics, stirred by the hot winds to a sort of dehydrated atmospheric soup that would eventually damage our lungs if breathed too long. The sun glinted hot, mauve steel in the sky, hiding the mysterious Ray Gun somewhere behind its glare.
Ray Gun had to be inhabiting
Broken Spear
’s missing command section. I glanced upward, shading my eyes from the daystar’s killing brilliance. Where was she?
It.
Of course. Ray Gun was an “it.”
“Deckard,” I said, picking my way past a shining bush that resembled a fan of coral rendered by a drunken glassblower. “Did
Broken Spear
have on-board AI support?” Intelligence-boosted systems went in and out of fashion over the decades in an endless tug-of-war between the inherent instability of such self-aware entities, prone to mental collapse after a brief, hot life-cycle, and the high value of an intelligence not subject to the disorientations of supraluminal travel nor the stresses of high acceleration.
“Depends,” puffed my engineer.
“Depends on what?” asked Beaumont nastily.
I heard Deckard grunt, almost as if struck, but he could take care of himself. He chose the high road: “On whether she was pre- or post-Yankelov Act. Her ship class originally was, but there was a refit wave after the AI regs changed, right around the time
Broken Spear
was lost.”
I thought that over. “So Ray Gun might be Lehr’s ship’s systems. All alone up there in orbit all these years.”
“Crazy as an oxygen miner three days after a comet claim,” said Marley.
“Indeed. And one of Lehr’s daughters.”
“Maybe Cathar’s the other one,” Heminge said.
A stranger stepped from behind a pillar of stacked rubble and glittering silica. “Cathar is a traitor,” he declared.
Heminge and Beaumont both drew their weapons. I kept my own hands away from my holstered pistol and the swift death it could deal like the sword of justice. This was not my courtroom, so to speak. Instead, I studied the stranger as he studied me, ignoring the armed threat my men presented.
He was whipcord thin, naked as the landscape and, much like the sullen world around us, covered with white dust that sparkled and flecked as he moved. That coating matched the sparse, silvered hair upon his head and about his shriveled penis and the thousand-kilometer stare in his eyes, which seemed to bore right through me from beneath his hooded brows. Here was a man who looked across years, and carried their wounds upon his body. I could count his ribs, and the cords on his neck twitched as he spoke. He was no better armed than the wind.
“Another one rises from the earth,” I said mildly. “Of the crew?”
“Lieutenant Fishman,” he replied. His voice was as cracked as his skin, also a thing of this world. What this place had done to people, I thought. He raised his hands. “You should go. Before Granny Rail finds you.”
“Surely you mean Ray Gun?”
“No.” He laughed, a mirthless chuckle dry as an old bone. “She has taken the sky from my Captain. Granny Rail has taken the world. Lehr lives on sustained only by the love of Lady Cordel and myself.”
Beaumont shoved forward, pistol in his hand. “Granny Rail. You’re as cracked as that old rummy, Lieutenant Fishman. Go back to your hole in the soil and count yourself lucky to have any days remaining in your life.”
Fishman shifted his long-range stare to drill through Beaumont. “You wouldn’t understand loyalty, would you, man? Count yourself lucky to have any minutes remaining in your life.”
Three gouts of dark fluid spouted in Beaumont’s chest, grim flowers bringing color to this drab and barren landscape even as his final words died in his mouth. A smile quirked across Fishman’s taut face as the rest of us dropped, but the great, gray-silver spider thing that erupted from the ground ignored him completely.
It whirled, clattering, a motile version of the crystalline plants of this world except for the well-worn but fully functional Naval-issue assault rifles in two claws. Rolling up against a backbreaking jag of rocks, I drew my own pistol, but the blunted flechettes intended for antipersonnel use in vacuum-constrained environments would have very little effect on this bright, spinning monster.
Heminge moved past me, firing his much more deadly meson pistol. The rays gleamed with an eerie antilight, the air ripping as the weapon sundered the very molecules that sustained us all, dust particles flashing into component atoms in the same moment to create an eye-bending sparkle that distracted even our ferocious many-limbed assailant.
One rifle exploded, taking the tip end of an arm with it in a shower of glass, accompanied by an ammoniac ordure very much at odds with the gleaming destruction. The other rifle swung to Heminge as he collided with the fast-moving legs, tumbling amid their silver-gray stems like a man in a twisting cage.
I launched myself after him, noting out of the corner of my eye Deckard taking a headshot on Beaumont, even as Marley scrambled for better cover, his medical kit already in his hand. Ever an optimist, the doctor, thinking about who might survive to be the recipient of his attentions. The rifle spat again, and something burned my thigh with the fire of a solar prominence, but then I was in among the legs, pressing the bell of my flechette pistol against a joint and firing even as Heminge shouted something unintelligible and loosed his meson pistol into the dented, dull ball which seemed to serve as nerve center and balance point for our enemy.
The very air ripped once more and my hair caught fire, and then the thing exploded in a clatter shower of legs.
For a moment there was only the patter of debris and the whirl of dust devils, the ammonia scent of local death mixing with the stench of my burned hair. I looked up, for somehow I was not standing anymore, to see the long legs of Fishman above me.
“Granny Rail will be angry,” he said, smiling enough to show shattered teeth that gleamed even within the shadows of his mouth.
I was amazed that I could hear him. I struggled for my voice, choking on dust, some thick, pooling liquid, and—though it shamed me—fear. “I want Cordel,” I said, my finger crooking on the trigger of my pistol.
Marley bent over me while Deckard gathered pieces of the monster. Heminge, who unaccountably still had all his hair, grabbed at Fishman’s arm. “We will find her.”
A few minutes later my leg was bandaged and splinted. Deckard had the pieces of the monster laid out in roughly their original relationship, albeit disjointed and unmotivated now, studying them with the intensity of a mystic at the feet of his god. Marley squatted on his heels and watched me just as carefully.
“What is it we came to kill?” the doctor finally asked me. “Surely not these madmen with excessively high survival quotients?”
I could not be certain that I wasn’t dying—Heminge’s meson pistol had done more to my head than simply burn my hair off, either that or our erstwhile assailant had struck me a chance blow there during the battle. Beaumont was dead, unmourned, and so would not report me for treasonous speech. I could see him, steaming slightly, something wrong even with his blood.
“Broken Spear,”
I said, finding the words difficult. My mind formed them well enough, but something was wrong with my mouth and throat. “
Broken Spear
carried . . . biologicals—templates.”
Marley’s mouth twisted, his eye thoughtful. “Combat viruses?”
I tried to nod, but that was worse than speaking. “Uh huh. Tactical . . . population . . . con . . . control.”
He glanced around. “If they’re loose, we’re all already infected. We may never go home.”
“Planet . . . buster. We . . . have . . . quarantine . . . arr . . . arrangements.”
“I can imagine. Well, whatever it is didn’t kill
all
of these people. There are at least three of these lunatics left, after several decades. Which makes me wonder if the virus ever got into the wild.”
My voice was coming back to me. “Not much . . . population control . . . there.”
The doctor grinned. “You’re returning to us, Captain. Had me worried for a minute or two.”
Deckard wandered over, a broken crystal rod in his hand. He cocked his head, stared at me as he wrinkled his nose. “You going to live, sir?”
“Yes.” I wasn’t ready to sit up, though.
“That thing was a highly modified naval recon drone. Cyborged, if that’s the right word, with components from the local ecosystem. Somebody’s spent a lot of time over the years.”
“Somebody’s
had
a lot of time,” I managed. Then:
“Bury Beaumont, will you? Please?”
They exchanged glances.
Cordel came to me at last, trailed by Heminge with his pistol still in his hand and Fishman wearing a truculent expression. The ancient Lieutenant seemed to be so much furniture to his superior officer, but even I could see that when his eyes turned toward her, that thousand-kilometer stare came into bright focus.
I knew how he felt.
“I am sorry about your man,” she said.
“I’m too tired to fence.” My voice was quiet and slow. Marley and Deckard had propped me up against a rock, for the sake of my dignity. I had refused to be moved back to the ship until after I’d met Cordel, here, on open ground. The spider-thing still smoked nearby, evidence of someone’s perfidy, and the pulsing sunlight seemed a better choice to me than the oily aired, whispering corridors of
Six Degrees
. “So I will simply ask, on your life, ma’am. What has become of the biologicals
Broken Spear
was carrying in the captain’s safe?”
Her puzzlement was genuine, as best as I could tell. “Biologicals? We carried no biologicals, Captain de Vere. Not beyond the standard cultures in our sick bay.”
“You’ve been here thirty years and Lehr never mentioned this?”
She folded her knees, bending down to speak to me at eye level. I could have watched her legs move, stork-scissors, for hours. And had she opened to me, a little, some sense of engagement in those gray eyes? In that moment, I was ashamed of the reek of my injuries. “Captain,” Cordel said. “I emptied the safe the one time Ray Gun landed on the surface. There was nothing of the kind, I assure you. How did you come to think we were carrying something like that?”
I turned her statements over in my head. Why
was
I sent to crack a world to cinders? “What is
Broken Spear
’s terrible secret, then?”
“Ah,” she said, her face shuttering. “Perhaps you should speak to my captain once more.”
“He is too busy gazing at green fields beyond,” I muttered.
“Indeed.” She stood. “Fishman, gather this man up with all due gentleness and bring him to Lehr.”
Deckard and Marley stepped forward together to object, but Cordel turned her glare, now pure ice, upon them. “Granny Rail will not bother Fishman. Hands free, you two might be able to win through with your lives if we are attacked once more by her servants.”
And so we went, my head lolling back as I stared into the deepening colors of evening and tried to remember why I’d ever wanted to come to this world.
Approaching Lehr’s palace, Deckard and Heminge were attacked by another of the spider creatures. It lurched out of a stand of the crystalline growth, brushed past Marley and headed straight for the other two. I watched from my curious angle of repose in Fishman’s arms—I am not light at all, which gave me cause to wonder at the Lieutenant’s strength, especially at his advanced age—as Heminge snapped off a meson bolt that sheared two legs, while Deckard pumped flechettes into a high-stepping joint. Heminge’s second shot slagged the underslung central core, proving that the creatures’ advantage lay in surprise, which position they had now surrendered.