Rebka’s announcement that he would take them up to space at three gees answered that. His words filled her with dismay. She could hardly stand in a field of less than one gee. She would have to lie down, and then three gees of acceleration would press her ruined foot to the unforgiving floor.
Before she could say anything, Kallik’s stubby body wriggled across toward her. The Hymenopt placed her soft abdomen next to Darya’s injured foot and uttered a dozen soft whistles.
“No! Don’t touch it!” Darya cried out in panic.
As she tried to move her leg away, the gleaming yellow sting emerged from the end of Kallik’s body. It pierced inches deep into her lower calf. Darya screamed and fell over backward, banging her head as she went on the supply chest behind the pilot’s seat.
Liftoff began before she could move again.
Darya found she was flattened to the floor with her foot pressing onto metal. Her hurt foot! She had to scream. She opened her mouth and suddenly realized that the only parts of her body that were not in pain were that foot and calf. Kallik’s sting had robbed them of all feeling.
She lay back and turned her head to rest its increased weight on her cheek and ear. A tangle of bodies covered the floor. She could see Kallik, right in front of her, cushioning Geni Carmel’s head on her furry abdomen. Julius Graves lay just beyond, but all she could see was the top of his bald pate, lying next to J’merlia’s shiny black cranium. Rebka, piloting the ship, and Max Perry, harnessed into the seat next to him, were hidden by the supply chest and the seat back.
Darya made a great effort and turned her head the other way. She could see out of the ship’s side port, a foot away from her. Unbelievably — surely they had been rising for minutes — the ship was still below Quake’s cloud layer. She caught a vivid lightning-lit view of the surface; it had shattered into crisscrossing fault lines, over which waves of orange-red molten lava were sweeping like ocean billows. The whole planet was on fire, a scene of ancient perdition. Then the ship lifted into black dust clouds so dense that the end of the vestigial control surfaces, just a few feet beyond the port, became invisible to her.
The turbulence and shear forces tripled. Darya rolled helplessly against Kallik, and both of them went sliding across the floor to collide with Julius Graves. Another moment, and all three were tumbling back, to crush Darya against the wall. She was still in that position, pinned by the weight of everyone except Rebka and Perry, when the Summer Dreamboat emerged unexpectedly from the clouds of Quake. The ship’s port admitted one sunburst of intolerable golden radiation before the photoshielding came into operation.
Darya was lucky. She was facing away from the port, and she happened to have her head caught under Kallik’s abdomen when that searing light-blast hit the ship. Everyone else in the rear compartment was blinded for a few seconds.
Rebka and Perry had been protected in the front seats, but they were facing forward and trying to coax a ship to orbit in circumstances for which it had never been designed. So it was Darya alone, turning to look sideways and out behind the ascending ship, who saw everything that happened next.
The Dreamboat was soaring over the hemisphere of Quake that faced away from Opal. The disks of Mandel and Amaranth loomed low in the sky to her left. Reduced by the photoshielding to glowing, dark-limbed circles, the twin stars showed their bright disks pocked and speckled with sunspots. Their tidal forces were tearing at each other, just as they tore at Quake and Opal. Directly overhead, Gargantua shone pale and spectral, a giant whose reflected light was reduced by the photoshielding to a faint and insubstantial ghost world.
From a point very close to Gargantua’s edge — Darya could not be sure quite where it lay, on the planet or off it — a glittering blue beam stabbed suddenly down toward Quake, bright with controlled energy.
Darya followed it with her eyes. It could not be a beam of ordinary light. That would be invisible in empty space, and she could see it all the way along its length. And where that pulsing ray from Gargantua struck the clouds, the dust-filled protective layer boiled instantly away. A circular area of Quake’s surface, a hundred kilometers across, was suddenly exposed to Mandel and Amaranth’s combined radiation. Already seething with molten lava, the surface started to deform and crater. A dark tunnel formed and became rapidly deeper and wider. Soon Darya could see the molten rocks of the planet’s interior thrown back in waves to form a sputtering, sharp-sided edge to the hole.
The ship’s motion was carrying Darya away from the tunnel, and her viewing angle was too steep to see the bottom of the pit. She leaned closer to the port, ignoring the pain in her bruised body and face. As the ship’s altitude increased, Quake hung below her like a great, clouded bead, threaded onto that pencil of bright blue light. Where the ray struck, the dark hole through the bead was lit by a glowing rim of molten lava.
The next events came in such quick succession that Darya had trouble afterward in relating their exact sequence.
As Quake’s rotation was taking first Mandel and then Amaranth below the horizon, a second blue beam came stabbing down from open space to merge with the one from Gargantua. It did not come from any object that Darya could find in the sky, although her eye could follow it up and up, until it finally became a line too faint to see.
The new pencil of light skewered the tunnel in Quake’s crust, and the hole widened — not steadily, but in one impossible jerk of displaced material. Narrow answering beams of red and cyan thrust back into space, following the exact center of the incident ones. And in the same moment, two silvery spheres crept forward from the depths of the tunnel.
They looked identical, each maybe a kilometer across. Rising slowly clear of Quake they hovered motionless, one just beneath the other, wobbling like two transparent balloons filled with quicksilver.
The blue beams changed color. The one from Gargantua became bright saffron, the other a glowing magenta. The pulses along their length changed in frequency. As they did so, the higher sphere began to accelerate, moving along the precise line of the magenta ray. Slow at first, then suddenly faster, it remained visible for only a split second and then was gone. Darya could not tell if it had been propelled out of sight — at huge acceleration — or had vanished through some other mechanism. As it disappeared, so did the magenta beam.
The second sphere still hovered motionless close to Quake. After a few moments it began to inch up along the saffron pencil of light. But its motion was leisurely, almost ponderous. Darya could follow it easily, a ball of silver climbing the saffron beam like a metal spider ascending its own thread. She tracked the shining globe as it crept upward.
And then her eyes were suddenly unable to focus. Around the bright ball the starfield had become twisted and distorted. The ball itself disappeared to become a black void, while around it scattered points of starlight converged and met in an annular rainbow cluster. The vanished sphere formed an ink-black center to that brilliant stellar ring. Still it ascended the yellow light beam.
While she was squinting at that hole in space, the Dreamboat performed a dizzying half roll and a surge at maximum thrust. She heard Hans Rebka, in the pilot’s seat, cry out. A bright jet of violet, a starship’s drive working at high intensity, flared across the starfield and moved across the bows of the Dreamboat.
Darya turned her head and saw the blunt lines of a Zardalu Communion vessel swooping in close to them. Concealed weapons ports sprang open on the ship’s forward end.