“A hundred meters across!” Zentz gurgled.
Zentz’s eyes were wild, the pupils dilating and constricting on both sides, dancing to some strange rhythm.
Nevi didn’t answer. Zentz had started this raving about some giant hylighter as soon as Nevi had gotten the foil back in the air.
“Crista Galli, kelp gone crazy,” Zentz went on, “giant hylighter grab whole foil …”
“That’s hocus-pocus, and it’s in your head,” Nevi said.
He knew Zentz couldn’t hear him, but it made Nevi feel better. His voice was calm and flat, a practiced calm that paid off whenever he had to work with Zentz. He knew it gave Zentz the creeps, and that always gave Nevi the edge. He wondered whether it would give Zentz the creeps in his dreams. He hoped so. Flying made Nevi nervous.
The storm buffeted Nevi against the restraints in his command couch. Some of the updrafts along the coastline nearly emptied his stomach. Like most Pandorans, he preferred traveling the kelp’s subways, particularly during afternoon storms, but today speed was critical. The cat had played the mouse too loose. Maybe Zentz was right about their foil. Who knew what the kelp had shown him?
If Ozette and Crista Galli got loose afoot in this country they might just wind up being dasher bait. Ozette didn’t strike him as the survival type. Nevi knew that Flattery needed both of them alive—for now. For now, what Flattery needed Nevi needed, and he didn’t want to get so comfortable out here that he forgot it.
Zentz needs them alive more than anyone, he thought.
The big question mark for Nevi was the hylighter—what would contact with that thing do to Crista Galli?
Or what might it do for her?
And something about those damned Zavatan squatters upcoast gave even Nevi the creeps. Nobody could farm the open country like that without some kind of protection. He wanted to know what that protection was. Or who. They kept one jump ahead of Flattery and the dashers—accomplishments that captured Nevi’s personal respect.
The squall cleared occasionally, allowing Nevi glimpses of the coastline. Cloudfront pushed across both suns and confounded his perspective. He knew that thousands of square kilometers lay under Zavatan camouflage. It didn’t take much imagination to appreciate the value of that new fertile land below.
In a matter of weeks the Zavatans turned bare rock into garden, pumped water and started up their smelly labs. The entire upcoast region was laced with streams and pockmarked with hundreds of small lakes. They’d already turned many of the lakes into fish farms. Their pitiful farms grew more than enough to sustain them, this Nevi knew. His information was better than Flattery’s, but Flattery didn’t pay him for information.
Where does their surplus go? he wondered.
He knew that when he discovered the answer to that one he would answer the Shadow question as well.
No food, no Shadows, he thought.
It would be a pity if Flattery managed to wipe out the farms to stop the supplies that he was sure were channeled to the underground. There must be a more profitable way …
It occurred to him that the Shadows might win. He shrugged.
Nevi admitted an admiration for these Zavatans, for their independence that Flattery couldn’t yet control. He didn’t intend to muddy his own hands, though this trip had already proved messy enough.
Nevi smiled, a rare break in the steel of his countenance. He had plans for his retirement, and this upcoast region with its farmland and Pandora’s first, burgeoning forests appealed to him. The people up here just might want some professional protection soon. Protection from the likes of Flattery and his bungling Chief of Security.
Lot of new squatters this year, he thought.
Since the earthquakes started a few years ago people had turned to the surface for safety. Even with burmhouses it was easier to spot a dwelling than a tunnel, it wouldn’t take that much effort to map these people. Nevi flew into a sudden wall of weather and there wasn’t much possibility of spotting anything.
Nevi kept his attention on the screen. The slash of rain against the metal skin and plaz of the cabin nearly deafened him. He switched on the landing lights to clarify the terrain. Still, visibility was a few hundred meters, tops. A buzzer reminded him that he was flying at the stall point.
They were only a couple of kilometers downcoast from the overflight coordinates. Zentz camearound enough to set his couch up and hold his head.
“So, how was it?” Nevi asked.
“I don’t ever want to go back.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Everywhere.” Zentz wiped his drool with his sleeve. “I went everywhere … at once. I saw them picked up.”
“They’re around here somewhere.”
“Beached,” Zentz said. “Down the cliff. Beached.”
Nevi grunted his amusement. He imagined this gray land on a sunny day, blooming.
Flattery couldn’t possibly send troops, he thought, they’d never come home at all.
“Approaching set-down,” he said, and throttled back. “See them yet?”
“No … yes!” Zentz pointed a shaking finger starboard. “There, look at the size of that … thing! I knew it was more than a dream.”
Nevi was disgusted at the spit-spray of Zentz’s excitement. The squall moved on already as quickly as it had come, and visibility over the downed hylighter was good. The terrain, however, looked deadly. The crumple of downed foil was plainly visible amid the orange shards of the deflated hylighter.
It was a monster, all right, and deflated it covered far more than the hundred-meter diameter it had occupied in the air. Almost half of it trailed the fifty meters down to the sea, and the rest lay crumpled in the narrow stretch of beach between the sea and the precipitous rocks. The foil appeared to be nearly intact right at the foot of the cliff.
Nevi did not want to set down inside the perimeter of that thing—he’d seen what that blue dust did to some of those burned-out Zavatans who wandered dazed around the village. The strip of tideline was too narrow and the tides less predictable than he liked. The beach itself, from tideline to cliff, was a jumble of boulders. That meant a water landing or a set-down at the top of the cliff. He didn’t like the look of all that kelp in the water, or the positioning of the dead hylighter.
“Electronic and infrared scan,” Nevi ordered. “I’m making a couple of passes so that we don’t get surprised down there. Then we’ll worry about how to get them out from under that thing.”
Their situation suddenly struck Nevi as absurd. Flattery had positioned his precious Orbiter and had the Voidship nearly ready to go; he had plans to establish a steppingstone colony in a debris belt over a million kilometers away. Pandora’s moons were even more unstable than the planet. Even Nevi agreed that fleeing was the ultimate answer. But he doubted that it would be worth it in his own lifetime.
Especially if he insisted on risking his life in a wrestling match with a hydrogen gasbag of hallucinatory dust and tentacles. He chose a set-down atop the cliff, near a trail that didn’t look too difficult. Zentz should be clear of his kelping by the time they reached bottom.
If the girl’s as holy as they say, let’s see her get herself out of this one.
Chapter 49
That’s all Ship ever asked of us, that’s all WorShip was meant to be: find our own humanity and live up to it.
—Kerro Panille, from The Clone Wars
Rico sprung the galley hatch with a crowbar from the tool locker and saw Ben sitting up, fumbling with the catch of his harness.
“Ben, buddy …”
He stumbled over the crumbled deck to Ben’s couch, but was careful not to touch him. Ben’s Merman- green eyes seemed clear when they looked at him, but they weren’t tracking all that well. Both Ben and Crista were half-buried in debris from what was left of the galley.
“Can you talk?”
Ben’s voice caught in his throat. “I … I think so,” he said.
“Sit back,” Rico said.
&n
bsp; His own head started a strange buzz, so he took a deep breath, let it out slow. “We’re not going anywhere for now, so relax.”
He hesitated short of unclipping the last two restraints.
“Crista …” Ben’s voice sounded foreign, distant. “Is she all right?”
Rico felt his lips tingling, and his fingertips, too. Just like Ben to think of someone else first. He glanced over at the other couch. There was no movement. All the lights in the galley were out, but from where Rico knelt in the rubble it looked as if she wasn’t breathing.