“We’ll have to try.” While he was still staring at the Umbilical, Darya was already slipping and sliding across the layer of talc, heading toward the aircar. “Come on. If we can make our car hover next to the apron on the bottom of the Stalk, maybe we can jump across onto it.”
She listened in amazement to her own words. Was it really Darya Lang proposing that? Back on Sentinel Gate she had avoided all heights, telling friends and family with a shiver that she was terrified by them. Apparently everything in the universe was relative. At the moment, the prospect of leaping from a moving and malfunctioning aircar to an Umbilical, a kilometer or more above the ground, did not faze her at all.
Hans Rebka was following, but only to grip her arm and swing her around. “Wait a minute, Darya. Look.”
Another aircar was cruising in from the northwest, just below cloud level. It was in a descent pattern, until its pilot apparently saw the Umbilical. Then the car banked and started to ascend in a slow and labored spiral.
But the foot of the Stalk had begun to rise again, and more rapidly. The two on the ground gazed up helplessly as the Umbilical gradually vanished into the clouds, the pursuing aircar laboring upward after it. As they both disappeared it seemed that the car was losing the race.
Darya turned to Hans Rebka. “But if Graves and Perry are up there on the Stalk, who’s in the aircar?”
“It must be Max Perry. I was wrong about him and Graves being on the Umbilical. The Stalk ascent is performing its automatic Summertide retraction, but it’s taking place ahead of time. It has been reprogrammed.” He shook his head. “But that doesn’t make sense, either. Perry is the only one who knows the Umbilical control codes.” He saw her stricken look. “Isn’t he?”
“No.” She stared away and would not look at him. “Atvar H’sial knew them. All of them. I told you, that’s how we got over from Opal. This is all my fault. I should never have agreed to work with her. Now we’re stuck here, and she’s safe up there on the Umbilical.”
Hans Rebka glared up at the overcast. “I’ll bet she is. That damned Cecropian. I wondered as we were flying here if she was still on Quake. And J’merlia will be with her. So the aircar up there has to be Perry and Graves.”
“Or maybe the Carmel twins.”
“No. They didn’t have access to an aircar. Anyway, we can stop speculating. Here it comes again.”
The car was spiraling down from the clouds, searching for a good place to touch down. Darya ran toward it and waved her arms frantically. The pilot saw her and carefully banked closer. The aircar flopped to a heavy landing no more than fifty meters away, creating a minor dust storm with its jets of downward air.
The car door slid open. Hans Rebka and Darya Lang watched in astonishment as two identical and identically dressed humans climbed out, followed by a Lo’tfian and a dusty-looking Hymenopt. Last of all came Julius Graves and Max Perry.
“We thought you were dead!” “We thought you were on the Umbilical!” “Where did you find them?” “How did you get here?”
Perry, Rebka, Lang, and Graves were all speaking at once, standing in a tight inward-facing group by the aircar door. The two aliens and the Carmel twins stood apart, staring around them at their desolate surroundings.
“No active radio beacons — we listened all the way here,” Graves went on. He stared at Darya Lang. “Do you have any idea what has happened to Atvar H’sial?”
“I’m not sure, but we think she’s probably up there on the Umbilical.”
“No, she isn’t. No one is. We couldn’t catch it, but we could tell that no capsules are in use. And it’s out of aircar altitude range now. But what about you? I thought Atvar H’sial left you behind on the surface.”
“She did. Hans Rebka rescued me. But Atvar H’sial must have intended to come back for me, because she gave me supplies and a signal beacon.”
“No, she didn’t. That was J’merlia’s doing.” Graves gestured at the Lo’tfian. “He says that Atvar H’sial did not forbid him to help you, and so he did. He was very worried about your safety when they left you behind. He said that you seemed poorly equipped for survival on Quake. But then he thought you must be dead, anyway, because when we listened there was no sign of your beacon. I feel sure that Atvar H’sial didn’t intend to go back for you. You were supposed to die on Quake.”
“But where is Atvar H’sial now?” Rebka asked.
“We just asked you that question,” Perry said. “She must be with Louis Nenda.”
“Nenda!”
“He came here on his own ship,” Graves said. “And did you know he can talk to a Cecropian directly? Kallik told J’merlia that Nenda had a Zardalu augment that lets him use pheromonal communication. He and Atvar H’sial left J’merlia and Kallik behind, and went off somewhere by themselves.”
“We think they came here. Atvar H’sial had help. Somehow she obtained the control sequences, and she must have set the Umbilical for earlier retraction from the surface.” Hans Rebka gave Darya Lang a “say-no-more” look and went on. “She wants us all dead, stranded on quake at Summertide. That’s why she left J’merlia and Kallik behind — she didn’t want witnesses.”
“But we heard their distress signal and picked them up.” Perry nodded to the silent aliens. “I think Nenda and H’sial may have intended to come back for them, but they would have been too late. The landing area was molten lava. We had to keep J’merlia and Kallik with us.”
“But if Nenda made it back to his own ship,” Graves said, “he and Atvar H’sial can still leave the planet.”
“Which is more than we can do.” After his earlier depression, Rebka had bounced back and was full of energy. “The Umbilical is gone, and it won’t be back until after Summertide. We only have one aircar between the lot of us — ours died as we arrived here. And they can’t achieve orbit anyway, so they’re no answer. Commander Perry, we need a plan for survival here. We’re stuck on Quake until the Umbilical returns.”
“Can I say it one more time? That’s impossible.” Perry spoke softly, but his grim tone carried more weight than a bellow. “I’ve been trying to impress one fact on you since the day you all arrived at Dobelle: Humans can’t survive Summertide on the surface of Quake. Not even the usual Summertide. Certainly not this Summertide. No matter what you think, there’s no ‘survival plan’ that can save us if we stay on Quake. It’s still pretty quiet here, and I don’t know why. But it can’t last much longer. Anyone on the surface of Quake at Summertide will die.”
As though the planet had heard him, a distant roar and groan of upthrust earth and grinding rocks followed his words. Moments later a series of rippling shocks blurred the air and shook the ground beneath their feet. Everyone stared around, then instinctively headed for the inside of the aircar and an illusion of safety.
Darya Lang, the last one in, surveyed the seven who had preceded her.
It was not a promising group for last-ditch survival schemes. The two Carmel sisters had the look of people already defeated and broken. They had been through too much on Quake; from this point on they would act only as they were directed. Graves and Perry were filthy and battered, clothes torn and rumpled and covered with grime and dust and sweat. They both had bloody and inflamed scratches on their calves, and Graves had another set of scabby wounds along the top of his bald head. Worse than that, he was acting much too cheerful, grinning around him as though all his own troubles were over. Maybe they were. If anyone could save them, it would be Max Perry and not Julius Graves. But after Perry’s gloomy prediction, he had returned to a brooding, introverted silence, seeing something that was invisible to everyone else.
J’merlia and Kallik seemed fairly normal — but only because Darya did not know how to read in their alien bodies the signs of stress and injury. J’merlia was meticulously removing white dust from his legs, using the soft pads of his forelimbs. He seemed little worried by anything except personal hygiene. Kallik, after a quick shiver along her body that threw a generous layer of powder away from her and produced protests from the rest of the aircar’s occupants, was stretching up to full height and staring bright-eyed at everything. If anyone was still optimistic, maybe it was the little Hymenopt. Unfortunately, only J’merlia could communicate with her.