There was only one thing to do. He switched the direction of the thrust, to propel himself laterally rather than slowing his forward speed. The sideways jump was enough for him to miss the opening and smash straight into the chamber wall.
A Lo’tfian was tough, and so was J’merlia’s suit, but the impact tested them both to the limit. He bounced back, two of his thin hindlimbs broken and his torso bruised all along its length. His suit hissed suddenly with lost air, until the smart sensors detected and repaired the small stress rupture at a joint.
J’merlia turned end over end, too breathless to produce a desired whistle of triumph. He had succeeded! He was many hours late, but at last he was back in the same chamber with the Myosotis.
He righted himself with some difficulty — one of his attitude controllers was also broken — and found that his thrustors still operated. He drove toward the waiting ship.
That was when he was glad he had produced no triumphant whistle.
It was a ship, certainly. Unfortunately, equally certainly, it was not the Myosotis.
Chapter Nineteen
By the end of the second day trapped in the hiatus, three of the four travelers on board the Gravitas were not at all happy.
The absence of ship’s lights was an inconvenience, but it was the lack of power that would eventually be fatal. Louis Nenda had already done the calculation. The air circulators were not working, but natural thermal currents plus the ship’s own steady rotation would provide enough convection to keep a breathable atmosphere in the ship. However, after about six days the lack of air generators and purifiers would become noticeable. Carbon dioxide levels would be perceptibly higher. Five days after that, the humans on board would become lethargic. Four days more, and they would die of asphyxiation. Atvar H’sial would survive maybe a week longer.
Quintus Bloom was not afraid of dying. He had a different set of worries. He was convinced that Darya Lang was far ahead of him, scooping discoveries that should rightfully be his. A dozen times a day, he pestered Nenda to do something, to get them moving. Twice he had hinted that Louis had arranged all this on purpose, deliberately slowing their progress as part of a conspiracy to aid Darya Lang. Nenda wondered if somehow Atvar H’sial had managed to communicate her own paranoia about Darya to Quintus Bloom.
The blind Cecropian was in some ways the least affected by their plunge into the hiatus. She could tolerate carbon dioxide levels that would kill a human, and her own seeing, by echolocation, was independent of the interior lights on the Gravitas. But the loss of power meant that communication with Glenna Omar through the terminals was no longer possible. Atvar H’sial had again become completely dependent on Louis Nenda and his pheromonal augment for anything that she wished to say to or hear from the others.
The exception in all this was Glenna. Logically she, pampered by a life on Sentinel Gate where every wish and whim could be satisfied, should have been most affected by the drastic change to life aboard the Gravitas. But it was a continuing oddity of the spiral arm that the inhabitants of the richest worlds played the most at primitivism. So about once a year, the fortunate dwellers on Sentinel Gate would deliberately head out to their forests and prairies, equipped with sleeping bags, primitive fire-lighting equipment, barbaric cooking tools, and raw food. After a few days in the wilds (but never more than three or four), they would return to abundant hot water, robotchef meals, and insect-free lodging. There they assured each other that they could “rough it” as well as anyone, if ever they had to.
Glenna had played that game a dozen times. She was trying a new variation of it now. The luxurious passenger suites of the Gravitas were equipped for cozy and candle-lit evenings, where dining tête-à-tête was often a tasteful prelude to romance. Glenna went from suite to suite and took the candles from every one. She used them all to provide subdued lighting for her own suite only, and invited the others to attend the soirée. Atvar H’sial’s invitation had to be transmitted through Louis Nenda. The Cecropian received it, and replied with a pungent pheromonal combination that Nenda had never before encountered. It felt like the Cecropian equivalent of a Bronx cheer. He took it to be a rejection of the offer.
Louis Nenda arrived first, wondering if it was a mistake to show up at all. He did so only from a long-held principle: that he needed to know everything that happened on any ship he was piloting. And if he were absent, who knew what Quintus Bloom and Glenna Omar might plot between them?
Nenda stared gloomily at fifteen candles, arranged strategically around the boudoir. The oxygen used in their burning would shave several hours off their lives, but in the circumstances that didn’t seem like a big deal.
Glenna obviously thought this was going to be one swell party. She had her blond hair piled high on her head, to show off to advantage her long, graceful neck. The clinging cotton dress that she was wearing, cut hair-raisingly low at front and back and with a split from ankle to hip, showed a good deal more than that. She pirouetted in front of Louis, revealing what appeared to be several yards of leg.
“How do I look?”
“Astonishing.” That at least was the truth. He heard with relief the sound of footsteps behind him. Quintus Bloom appeared, wearing an expression that Louis could interpret exactly. I’d rather be some place else, but there is nowhere else. And anyway, I can’t afford to miss something important.
Wafting in with Quintus Bloom came something else. A hint of pheromones, too weak to be caught by anyone but Nenda.
“At. I know you’re there, waiting outside. I thought you decided not to come.”
“I have no desire to attend what I suspect to be designed as a human multiple mating ritual. However, I wish to know what is said about other matters. Like you, I am opposed to any conspiracy of which I am not a part.”
“What I thought we would do is this.” Glenna, unaware of the exchange of pheromonal messages going on around her, was playing hostess. “Since we’re here, in such primitive conditions, I thought we ought to tell stories to each other the way our ancestors did, thousands and thousands of years ago, sitting terrified around their camp fires.”
Dead silence. Louis didn’t know about Quintus Bloom, but he had sat terrified around a camp fire a lot more recently than that.
Oblivious to the lack of response, Glenna went on. “Sit down, both of you.” She waited until the two men were in place on the divan, half a yard of space between them. “Now, I’ll be the judge, and the one of you who tells the best story will get a special prize.”
She squeezed into the space between them and placed a warm hand on each man’s thigh. “Since we’re almost in the dark, we ought to talk about scary or romantic things. Who wants to start?”
Blank silence.
“Did I not warn you?” The message drifted into the room with an overtone of satisfied humor. “If I may offer advice, Louis, I say: Beware the special prize.”
Nenda glared at the door. As if things weren’t bad enough, Atvar H’sial was laughing at him.
“Oh, come on, Louis!” Glenna squeezed his leg to bring his attention back to her. “Don’t play hard to get. I know from what Atvar H’sial told me that the two of you actually met live Zardalu, when everybody else thinks they’ve been extinct for eleven thousand years. That must have been frightening, even for you. What are they like?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Oh yes I do!” She slid her hand along the inside of his thigh, and added breathily, “You know, I find this sort of thing just makes me tingle.”