The surface had been at rest when they landed, but as Perry and Graves started forward a new spasm of seismic energy passed through the area. The ground ahead broke into longitudinal folds, rippling down the side of the valley.
“Keep going,” Rebka shouted above the grind and boom of breaking rock. “We can’t afford to stand and wait.”
Perry had halted and put his hand on Graves’s arm to stop him. He turned to shake his head at Rebka. “Can’t go yet. Earthquake confluence. Watch.”
Ground waves of different wavelength and amplitude were converging fifty paces ahead of the party. Where they met, spumes of rock and earth jetted into the dusty air. A gaping trench of unknown depth appeared, then contracted and filled a few seconds later to vanish completely. Perry watched until he was sure that the main earth movements were over, then started forward.
Rebka felt relief. Whatever Perry’s problems, the man had not lost his survival instinct. If he could hold on to that for another kilometer, his main job would be done.
They scrambled on. The ground shivered beneath their feet. Hot breaths rose from a hundred fissures in the fractured rock, and the sky above became one rolling tableau of fine ash and bright lightning. Thunder from sky and earth movement snarled and roared around them. A warm, sulfur-charged rain started to fall, steaming where it touched the tide-torn hot ground.
Rebka eyed the rest of the group speculatively from his vantage point at the rear. The Carmel twins were walking side by side, just behind Graves and Perry. After them came Darya Lang, between the two aliens and with one hand on J’merlia’s sloping thorax. Everyone was doing well. Graves, Geni Carmel, and Darya Lang were limping, and everyone was weaving with fatigue — but that was a detail.
So they needed rest. He smiled grimly to himself. Well, one way or another they would find it, in the next few hours.
The big problem was the increasing temperature. Another ten degrees, and he knew they would have to slow down or keel over with simple heat prostration. The rain showers, which should have helped, were becoming hot enough to scald exposed skin. And as the party moved lower into the Pentacline Depression, further heat increase seemed inevitable.
But they had to keep descending. If they slowed or went back up, for rest or for shelter, the forces of Sumemrtide would destroy them.
He urged them on, peering ahead as he did so to study the approach to the basalt outcrop. With no more than a few hundred meters to go, the path looked pretty easy. In another hundred paces the jumble of rocks and broken surface that were making walking so difficult would smooth out, providing a brown plain more level than anything that Rebka had seen in the Pentacline. It looked like a dried-out lake bed, the relic of a long, thin water body that had boiled dry in the past few days. They could move across it easily and fast. Beyond the narrow plain, the ground rose with an easy slope to the base of the rocky uplift on whose top they should find the ship.
The two leaders had advanced to within twenty paces of the plain. The hulking, flat-topped rock seemed close enough to touch when Max Perry paused uncertainly. While Rebka looked on and cursed, Perry leaned on a large, jagged boulder and stared thoughtfully at the way ahead.
“Get a move on, man.”
Perry shook his head, lifted his arm to halt the others, and crouched low to examine the ground. At the same moment, Elena Carmel cried out and pointed to the top of the rock outcrop.
The sky had turned black, but near-continuous lightning gave more than enough light to see by. Rebka could detect nothing where Perry had been staring, except a slight shimmer of heat haze and a loss of focus in the lake bed ahead. But beyond that blurred area, following Elena Carmel’s pointing finger to the top of the rock where the dust clouds rolled, Rebka saw something quite unmistakable: the outline of a small starship. It sat safely back from the rock edge, and it seemed undamaged. The line of ascent was an easy one. In five minutes or less they should be up there.
Elena Carmel had turned and was shouting to her sister, inaudible above the thunder. Rebka could read her lips. “The Summer Dreamboat,” she was shouting. Her face was triumphant as she went running forward, past Graves and Perry.
She was already onto the dried-mud plain and heading toward the bottom of the outcrop when Perry looked up and saw her.
He froze for a second, then uttered a high-pitched howl of warning that carried even above the thunder.
Elena turned at the sound. As she did so the crust of baked clay, less than a centimeter thick, fractured beneath her weight. Spurts of steam blew pitch-black, steaming slime into the air around her body. She cried out and raised her arms, trying to hold her balance. Under the brittle surface, the bubbling ooze offered no more resistance than hot syrup. Before anyone could move, Elena was waist-deep. She screamed in agony as boiling mud closed around her legs and hips.
“Lean forward!” Perry threw himself flat to spread his weight and started to wriggle forward onto the fragile surface.
But Elena Carmel was in too much pain to take any notice of his cry. He was too slow, and she was sinking too fast. He was still three paces away when the bubbling mud reached her neck. She gave a final and terrible scream.
Perry threw himself across the breaking crust to grab at her hair and one outstretched arm. He could reach her, but he could not support her.
She sank deeper. Far gone in burn-shock, she made no sound as the searing mud bubbled into her mouth, nose, and eyes. A moment later she was gone. The liquid surface swirled into a small whirlpool, then in less than a second became smooth again.
Perry wriggled forward again and plunged his arms to the elbows in boiling blackness. He roared in agony, groped, and found nothing.
The others in the party had stood rigid. Suddenly Geni Carmel gave a dreadful scream and began to run forward. Julius Graves dived after her, tackling and holding her at the very edge of the boiling quicksand.
“No, Geni. No! You can’t help, she’s gone.” He had her around the waist, trying to pull her toward safety. She resisted with desperate strength. It was all he could do to hold her until Rebka and Darya Lang ran forward to grab her arms.
Geni was still trying to drag herself toward the place where Elena had vanished. She pulled them to the edge of the safe area of rock. As she turned she swiveled Darya with her, forcing the other woman out onto the cracked crust. Darya’s left foot broke through and plunged in above the ankle. She screamed and sagged toward Rebka in a near-faint. He had to leave Geni to Graves while he pulled Darya clear.
Geni tried one more time to move to the open area of mud. The surface where Elena had been sucked under spouted and bubbled like escaping breath. But Perry, his face distorted with pain, had come sliding backward across the treacherous mud to the safe region of broken rocks. His hands were useless, but he stood up and used his body weight to push Geni back.
They stumbled together to safety. Geni was quieting. As the first frenzy ended she put her hands to her face and began to sob.
Rebka kept one arm around Darya Lang and surveyed the group. They were all stunned by Elena’s death, but still he had to worry about other matters. In thirty seconds, their position had gone from difficult to desperate. The air was almost unbreathable, the heat was increasing, and the surface of Quake was more and more active. The one thing they could not afford to do was slow down.
What now?
He made an unhappy assessment of their new situation. The thunder from ground and sky was a little less, but instead of eight humans and aliens, all fully mobile, they had been reduced to four able-bodied beings: himself, Graves, J’merlia, and Kallik. It was anyone’s guess how useful the two aliens would be in a crisis, but so far they had performed as well as any human.