Chapter Six.

The chip that Lossin gave them was designed for the old external input system on the North Star, of course. But before the ships had left Exchange, Tang Ya had built conversion hardware and software so that the systems of the North Star and the Solar Queen-which was designed to use quantum-tapes-were now compatible.

Dane saw Stotz close the outer hatch, and in silence the engineer fell in behind Rip. Though no one had said anything as yet, they found Ali waiting on the control deck. Dane glanced at Kamil's tight expression, the challenging glitter in his dark eyes, and wondered what had angered him.

But there was no time to consider the engineer's moods. Rip activated the big screen, and after a moment keyed the chip to general broadcast, so that the others elsewhere in the Queen could bring it up on their screens if they wanted.

A flash of unfamiliar script appeared and disappeared, and then they found themselves watching an automated vid-scan of the same clearing that Dane and Rip had just walked in, only seen from a different angle. For a few seconds they listened to an unseen speaker talk in a language unfamiliar to Dane-the tone made it clear she was reporting. After a moment Rip tabbed the mute, and they continued to watch the scan, now in silence. Dane calculated that the Ariadne had landed about a hundred meters southwest of the Queen's present position. He recognized two of the gigantic trees they'd just left, the great branches undulating in the continuous strong wind.

The scene changed abruptly; now figures moved about. Dane recognized the actions, if not the tools. Crewmembers were taking samples of soil and plant life, and measuring air currents. As thin wisps of fog obscured the higher tree branches, two crewmembers, humanoids wearing the brown of Free Traders, walked cautiously downhill between the trees, marking a pathway and stopping to scan and report as they went. Behind them walked an unseen person carrying the vid recorder.

They emerged from the shelter of the trees into a clearing and stepped into a fairly thick fog bank. The recorder was perhaps twenty meters behind; the operator had paused to take close views of some of the plants.

Suddenly the vid jerked and swerved. The two in the clearing had stopped, and stared up at something in the fog.

Rip tapped the audio key again, and Dane heard the rapid exchange of voices, higher in tone, sharp. He felt his own adrenaline spike; he leaned forward, as if the movement would bring the scene into clearer view.

The vid operator tabbed the zoom, and vid now focused on the fog. The vague outline of a turnip-shaped thing, light gray in color, hovered above the two on the pathway. Another one was just barely in view, perhaps ten meters above the first. Dane squinted, and thought he could see the vague outline of others even higher up. His neck muscles tightened.

"Balloons," Stotz murmured. "Look like balloons."

As they watched, the two in the clearing exchanged rapid words, one of them reporting into a comlink. Then the crea-ture above them compressed slightly, and what looked like ribbon rolled down, dangling in the wind. The ribbons brushed one crewmember's head, with horrific results. Dane felt his throat go dry as the man stiffened, his body vibrating as if undergoing electric shock. He screamed, a terrible sound.

"Damp that," Ali snapped.

Rip had already extended his hand; he tapped the mute, and the wrenching sound stopped abruptly. But on the screen the terror had not ended. Blood erupted from the man's nose and ears, and he fell to the pathway in a boneless way that indicated he was dead before he reached the ground.

The woman with him had frozen still for a moment; she suddenly turned and started to run, but her initial pause condemned her. She had scarcely gone two steps before another of the things lowered its ribbons, which touched her. Now they could see more clearly, for she was closer to the vid operator, and facing them square on. She flung her arms over her head, but the ribbons contacted her wrist, and adhered to her flesh where they touched. Dane and the others were forced to watch her undergo the same violent death as her crewmate. Hers, in fact, seemed to last longer. Several times Dane wanted to tell Rip to stop it, or to get up and go away himself, but he forced himself to view it all. This was important; he would be facing the same danger.

While the woman was dying, the vid operator kept the vid going, but it jerked and jiggled. Dane figured she (if the operator was the same voice they'd heard reporting the initial vid-scan) was either yelling orders or begging for help. Probably both.

Then one of the gray things started lowering within a frighteningly close distance to the vid operator, and the screen abruptly went dead.

"I hope she got away," Rip said into the shocked silence.

After another pause, Dane said, "We'd better get helmets."

"Except that second person was not touched on the head, but her wrist," Stotz pointed out.

"Biohaz suits, then?"

"The others said in their first warning that that wouldn't work." Rip gave his head a shake, as if to dispell bad images. "It seemed to me that those people died of a jolt of electricity."

"Or some kind of poison that instantly traumatizes the neurological system," AH murmured. "Either way, you won't catch me out during daylight hours, suit or no suit."

"Agreed." Rip sighed. "We'll send this up to Captain Jel-lico, but I know what he'll say. This means it's going to be considerably tougher to get at that cielanite, for we don't have the energy budget for night mining. Not in this climate."

"Our friends out there must have equipment designed for this planet, though," Stotz said. "If they've managed to maintain it despite being marooned." He turned to Dane. "Think you can work a trade?"

Dane was thinking rapidly. "I'll try." He remembered the low growling voices, the ritual gestures. The one who ran off so suddenly. In a sudden surge of doubt, he said, "I wish Jan was here."

"We don't have Van Ryke," Rip said slowly. "And I don't think we're going to get him. Especially now-these people out there have no ship, no fuel. We are their only hope of lifting off. Bringing the North Star down would just double the chances of a jacking, if they're that desperate, or worse, actually allied with the pirates-if those are pirates above us."

"Even if they're honest, from the looks of these people on the vid, each will cost upwards of three hundred kilos of ore or refined cielanite at liftoff," Ali said.

"But the cost of that depends on how far refined it is," said Stotz. "If we can refine it further-a.s.suming they've kept up their mining-" He fell silent, considering.

By the laws of Trade, they couldn't leave the Traders there-but what would it cost them to lift them off? How would this affect their profit? Would they be reduced to seeking another desperate gamble like staking everything on another Survey auction in order to recoup their losses, or would they lose the North Star?

Rip's voice broke into his thoughts. "There must be a way to approach them. I consider their sharing this data an act of good faith. They know who we are-they know we have their ship. They could as easily have sat tight in their camp, wherever it is, and let those Floaters zap us one by one."

Stotz was now drumming his fingers on a console. "Cielanite is a possible fuel, although a touchy one. If we can refine it far enough to bring it into range of the catalysts we have. but that depends on how much mining equipment they have."

"That could be the trade we need," said Dane, feeling a sense of relief at thepossible solution to the problem. "The law gives us their ore, but not their equipment. If they lease it to us, that could save us enough of our energy budget to compensate for their liftoff ma.s.s."

"I'd better do some simulations," Stotz said. "Be ready for what they'll offer so we can come right back at them with a counteroffer if we need to." He fingered his jawline, got to his feet. "Epsilon converters, probably," he muttered, his gaze turning inward. He muttered a few more phrases in his incomprehensible engineer jargon, then stopped and sent a look at Rip.

Shannon nodded; orders asked for and received. Stotz disappeared.

Rip looked up at Dane. "We'll turn this data over to Tau, and see what he can extrapolate from it. But in the meantime we'd better get some fast answers to some questions before we proceed any farther."

Dane nodded reluctantly. "Comlink first, I hope."

Shannon gave a brief nod, and an even briefer smile. "But you know we're going to have to go out there eventually."

Ali Kamil stood under the shower and let the water beat against his eyelids. He had turned the pressure and the temperature up as high as he could bear it. The roar in his ears, the hot sting on his skin, all closed him in, smothered him in the comfort of narrow awareness-narrow focus.

He breathed deeply of the steam, and felt stress and anger leach out of him. When his skin felt tender but his mind had calmed, he shut off the water and watched the last of it gurgle down the drain on its way to the hydro-recycler. For a moment he let himself imagine the molecules of H2O tumbling down through the pipes to the machines he himself tended. then his awareness expanded to the technological grid of the ship-not the outer hull, or skin, but the spine, connected by electronic cabling like nerves, all leading to the skull-the control deck- "

And without warning he heard them both there, Rip and Dane. Rip was speaking-at least Ali "heard" his voice, as if m.u.f.fled underwater. And then, before conscious thought could reject it, his mind, quick as a nerve-synapse, zapped out and located Jasper, found him down in Ali's own area, the engines.

Ali pressed his hands over his face and head, as if trying to hold his brains in. That was what this d.a.m.ned psi-thing felt like, as if his brains were leaking out. No, as if his skull had dissolved, and his brains were mixing in with the other three men's and Ali's ident.i.ty was escaping, to be smeared through the heads of Rip and Jasper and Dane.

A sudden, ferocious anger seized him. Why him? The only thing-the only thing he had come to trust, to value, was his privacy. He'd lost everything else-family, friends, home-in the Crater War; since then he'd learned never to get too close to people because it was simply too easy for them to walk away, or get transferred, or sick. Or killed. Wealth came and went-the tides of fortune. None of that really mattered. He had adjusted to the meteroids of material gain and loss that crashed through one's personal hull, but all pa.s.sed on.

This-this curse was not going away, and he could not go anywhere to get away from it. And-he gritted his teeth- there was no worse personal trespa.s.s. He knew, for during one short but eventful period of life he'd challenged the fates by partic.i.p.ating in them all.

Why couldn't it be Thorson who kept seeing and hearing the others so clearly? "Head as thick as a rock," Ali muttered as he pulled on his clean uniform.

Except he knew that wasn't fair. The big Viking looked as impa.s.sive as a rock, and he invariably reacted to events with a stolid front that indicated a lack of emotions, but that was a lie, and Kamil knew it was a lie.

What about Rip? Ali had been friends with Shannon ever since Kamil had come on board the Queen, an angry, moody apprentice engineer with a very bad record. Rip had accepted him with the same calm friendliness with which he accepted the entire universe. It was an intelligent, deliberate calm, the kind that indicated a balanced inner gyroscope, Ali had subsequently found out, for of course he had tried Rip's limits. He did that to everyone he might have to come to trust. Rip's calm was not the blind, pa.s.sive calm of the follower; he was a natural-born leader. It was he who Wanted to experiment with this curse-and it was he, ironically, who displayed the least sign of being pestered by it.

Except for Jasper. It was hard to tell how much he felt, for his demeanor never changed. Ali ran a comb through his hair, considering Jasper. It was all too easy to forget about Jasper, for he was small and unprepossessing and his manners were the self-effacing politesse of the third-generation Venusian colonist. Jasper rarely spoke except to the point in mess cabin gatherings, and on leave time, he seldom if ever went out. He seemed completely content to sit in his cabin listening to musical tapes from across a hundred worlds, and carving intricate little statues out of the weird blue-green woods he ordered from his home colonies. Ordered. He didn't go back to buy them himself.

Ali had never been to any of the Venusian colonies. A friend had once admiringly said that a person could drop his wallet, containing his entire life savings in nonbonded chits, in one of the biggest colony's busiest streets and come back a week later and find it there. Or if he didn't find it there, he'd go to the nearest lost-and-found operated by the street cleaners, and there it would be. Ali's friend had expressed appreciation, but to Ali it had given shivers. What kind of control created such a society? As Ali thought back, he realized Jasper had never said anything about his home at all-bad or good. But he'd also never gone back for a visit, even when they'd been permitted to enter Sol's system.

How intense was this psi connection for Jasper-and what kind of thoughts did Jasper have on the matter? Ali knew that it was enough for him that the others had agreed not to talk. This meant Jasper would say nothing, even if he was reading Ali's thoughts right at that moment.

With a grimace of self-disgust Ali decided he'd brooded in self-pity long enough. It was time to pay a visit to the medic and get some kind of drug. but he knew that Tau would try once again to impress on him the scientific importance of this idiocy, and Ali didn't want to face that now.

So the obvious choice was to go up to the control deck and find out what was going on. After all, the busier he kept himself, the less time he had to brood about this curse.

He found Dane and Rip sitting at the comlink. Both glanced up when he entered. Rip's dark eyes looked tired, and his tunic was partially unfastened, a rare slip in his habitual spruce appearance that served as mute evidence for how many sleep periods he'd scanted, or skipped entirely.

"What's the word?" Ali dropped down into the astroga-tor's empty seat.

"Nothing," Dane said somberly.

"You mean, they can't answer your questions, or they won't?"

"We don't know," Rip said, thumbing his eye sockets. "They won't answer. We tried every channel, we tried different questions. The quantum sensors indicate the messages were received, but they're not answering. Dane even found a few words of their language, and we tried that. Nothing."

"Mura thinks they might be preparing to take the Queen, since we have their ship," Dane said.

Ali whistled. "That would mean they planeted with weapons. How many Traders do that?"

Rip shrugged slightly; they'd considered that aspect. "Impa.s.se."

Ali grinned at him. "So now it's time for you to follow your own advice to me."

Dane gave Rip a significant look.

Ali lounged back. "I take it I'm not the first to offer this friendly piece of advice?"

"Tau's been up here. Mura. Stotz. Next we'll have Jasper up here ranting and raving at you," Dane said in a wooden voice.

The idea of Jasper even raising his voice was so strange that they all laughed.

"All right," Rip said, getting up. He winced, and Ali felt a twinge of headache that he knew was not his own. This annoyed him. But he gave no sign, either in face or voice. "Let me know if anything changes."

Ali wondered if they'd run this problem past Jellico, but he glanced at the triple chrono he'd set up. Three time measures flashed: one, the North Star's...o...b..tal pattern, displaying when the ship was in communication range and when it wasn't, and how long in and out of each cycle remained. The second display was Terran biological time, the twenty-four-hour cycle on which their bodies' internal clocks centered in permanent obedience to the rhythms of distant Earth. The third was Hesprid IV's time-the nineteen-hour day divided up into twenty-four "hours" of about forty-five Standard Minutes each.

The North Star chrono showed it would be less than an hour before Jellico was due back in range, which meant most of the time Ali had been asleep he'd been in communication silence.

Dane stood up, ducking his head under the hatchway. "I need something to eat," he said.

Ali followed him down to the mess cabin. There they found Jasper, Johan, and Frank gathered. All three looked up. "Still no word?" Mura asked.

Dane gave a flick of his hand that indicated a negative, and went over to draw a mug of hot drink. "Craig racked up finally?" he asked over his shoulder.

"We said we were going to jump him and knock him out with one of his own drugs," Stotz said, with one of his rare smiles. "He'd just finished lecturing us on how this nineteen-hour cycle was going to wreak havoc on our Terran bio-rhythms, despite the hormone therapy and a change in diet-"

"We can expect to have one good day out of four," Frank cut in wryly.

"-but then I counted up, out loud, how many hours it had been since he'd been in his cabin, and he finally up and went."

"Thinks he needs to oversee Rip?" Ali asked, dropping into a chair.

"Rip thinks so," Dane commented.

"Making him twice as jittery," Ali finished. "Well, I'll stroll down and have a chat with the good doctor when he wakes up. Meantime, what do you think about this sudden silence out there?"

Stotz frowned. "I was just saying that it reminds me too much of Limbo. That so-called Dr. Rich who was after the Forerunner artifacts. Just after you joined the crew." He nodded toward Dane.

"I remember." Thorson made a slight grimace. "But he was bad news from the minute we took him on board. I don't want to go blasting into yon Trader camp with sleeprods charged, when for all we know they're off having some kind of funeral ritual."

"n.o.body leaves a camp untended, especially the corn-link," Ali cut in. "I don't care how religious they might be."

"They still might think we're pirates preparing for attack," Mura put in.

"Or, they're preparing an attack." That was Jasper's quiet voice.

"So do we go down there and attack first? And with what?"

Into the sudden silence came a low, rumbling thrum. Ali realized the ship was vibrating. He half rose, then felt the deckplates reverberate under his feet. "Something hit the ship," he said, moving in one quick stride to activate the port-screens.

The outside scanners showed blackness; then lightning strobed, too shortly to reveal more than a glimpse of their surroundings. Impatiently Ali tripped the perimeter lights, and then stood back as they stared out at a powerful deluge. The wind had kicked up so strongly that the heavy rain was nearly horizontal. At the edge of the, light perimeter they saw tossing branches; some of the trees were swaying at angles Ali would have thought impossible without actually uprooting.

"n.o.body is attacking in this weather, unless they have an armored groundcrawler," Frank said.

"How are we going to mine in that?" Thorson muttered.

"And Tau said that this is summer," Jasper added softly.

As they watched, the ship vibrated again, under another mighty buffetting from the gale-force winds. Ali fancied he could hear the winches humming as they compensated. The lightning seemed to be increasing, the bolts more frequent and longer in duration. Thunder drummed through the hull as the storm intensified.

"One thing's sure," Jasper said. "We won't be talking to the North Star until this dies down. The EMP is kicking up like I wouldn't have thought possible."

"One more reason to stay in the Queen during a storm," said Mura. "The EM readouts are at unhealthy levels-might even have neural and immune system effects on us." He nodded toward the screen. "I don't know what effect it's having on them."

"It's only going to get worse as the sunspot cycle peaks."

Ali added. "And even inside the Queen we may see some effects. It's already hitting the computers-their error rate is up, and processing efficiency is down almost a percent."

"All of which puts a time limit on our being here-a much tighter one than the Charter time," Jasper said. "Tau can offset the health effects to a point; beyond that we'd require expensive medtech that will outcost any theoretical profit."

"Don't want to test that theory," Dane muttered.

"The trouble is," Ali said as he shut down the exterior lights and closed the screen down, "all this merely postpones the problem with our friends out there, it doesn't answer it."