Vernor Vinge: The Witling

The darkness was almost complete now, but Yoninne Leg-Wot confidently guided the sledge toward the pass in the hills ahead. He had to admire the girl sometimes. Among other things, she had an uncanny sense of direction. If all the Novamerikan colony could spare for this ground reconnaissance were a couple of social rejects, then they could have done worse than send Yoninne Leg-Wot and the senile archaeologist Ajão Bjault. Let’s not be maudlin , Ajão told himself. At your age you could never have wangled a colonist’s berth without the respect of a lot of people. You were lucky beyond all justice that this solar system has two habitable planets. And then an intelligent species is discovered on one of them, and you still whine about your declining career!

He shook the snow from his head and pulled the hood down over his face. There was something vastly peaceful about a thick, quiet snowfall. Except for the ever-present drag of this world’s higher gravity, he could almost imagine that he was back on Homeworld, three parsecs—and forty years—away.

Leg-Wot fell back so that they walked abreast. “I think we’re being followed,” she said softly.

“What!” His response was halfway between a hiss and a scream.

“Yeah. Take this,” she handed him the sledge’s control box, “and gimme the maser. Okay, now let’s keep walking. I think there’s only one, and he’s keeping his distance.”

Bjault did not dispute the instructions. He tried to see into the deepening gray. It was no use. It was hard enough to see a pine tree just ahead in time to walk the sledge around it. Yoninne must have heard something; her ears were much more acute than his.

On his right Leg-Wot fumbled about as she checked the maser, then pointed it into the sky to the north. She spoke the appropriate call signs into her hood mike, but there was no response. That wasn’t too surprising. In order to save fuel, the ferry was making an unpowered entry, using the planet’s atmosphere to slow itself down. No doubt the spacecraft was momentarily blacked out by entry ionization.

Leg-Wot waited two minutes, then repeated her call. Almost immediately, Bjault’s earphone came alive with Draere’s cheerful voice. “Hello, down there!” the voice said, ignoring standard radio procedure. “We’re about sixty kilometers up and coming down fast. Never fear, the mail will arrive on time.”

Leg-Wot outlined their situation to the descending ferry. “Okay,” came Draere’s voice, “I understand. If you can hold on for another ten minutes, you’ll be all right, I think. The ferry’s landing jets are guaranteed to scare the wits out of the uninitiated, and if that doesn’t work, we do have some firepower aboard—Holmgre and his entire platoon. We didn’t leave anything but some robot radios on that miserable little island.

“Keep in touch. You should be able to switch to your omnies any minute now.”

“Wilco, out,” Leg-Wot replied. They had reached the pass in the ridge line and were starting down the other side. Here the snow lay much deeper, the product of more than one storm. The sledge churned along just ahead of them, its treads acting as tiny paddles in the loose snow. The woman retrieved the sledge control from Bjault and guided them down the slope toward their ablation skiff.

Still he heard nothing but their own footsteps and the sound of the sledge. Perhaps Yoninne had heard some large animal. He loosened his machine pistol in its holster. They knew there were such things: their sonic fence had scared away something big just the day before.

Leg-Wot turned the sledge hard right, let it run on about two meters, then halted it. It was completely dark now. As Ajão walked forward he nearly tripped over a curving mound covered with a few centimeters of fluff snow. The ablation skiff! Bjault went to one knee and swept the snow from its hull. There was something comforting about the feel of the scorched ceramic beneath his gloves, even though the skiff would never fly again. The ablation skiff was nothing more than a spherical hulk, three meters across. Inside there was barely enough room for two humans, their equipment, and the skiff’s parachute. The little craft had no power of its own, and there was really only one mission it could ever fly: dropped from an orbiting spacecraft, it burned its way down through the upper atmosphere to an altitude and a speed where the parachute could bring it to a gentle landing. In concept the ablation skiff was nearly as old—and as simple—as the wheel. No doubt the human race had rediscovered both dozens of times during the last thirteen thousand years.

Yoninne’s voice came softly into his ear. Apparently she had sealed her suit and was speaking—whispering—to him over the hood radio. “Let’s stick to radios from now on, Bjault. I drove the sledge off to one side, so whoever-it-is that’s following us may get the wrong idea. I’m crawling back to the skiff now. If we just lie quiet in the snow, I don’t see how they can know exactly where we are—just remember, we’re the guys with the automatic weapons.”

Ajão closed his hood. “Yes,” he whispered back, though he wasn’t sure if he could bring himself to play mass executioner, even in a pinch.

He relaxed in the snow, listened. The hood’s earphone had a good acoustical link with the outside air, but he heard nothing beyond that faint hiss of endlessly falling snow. Somewhere to the north, way, way out in the dark—perhaps ten kilometers up, still—the ferry was plummeting toward them at hundreds of meters per second. Five hundred tons of titanium and plastic just—falling. When would Draere kick on her landing jets?

As if in answer to his thoughts, Draere’s voice sounded in Bjault’s ear. “Any trouble with the locals?”

“No, but Yoninne thinks we still have some undesired company.”

“Aha.” Pause. “Well, I just lit my jets. I wonder what they’ll make of that. See you.”

The silence stretched on for another thirty seconds. Then a vast and continuous rumble swept over them. The ferry was still so far away that all but the lowest frequencies were smeared out by the air. What was left sounded like strange thunder; it started loud, and just kept getting louder and louder. To anyone not acquainted with reaction motors it must have sounded like an immense monster, only a few hundred meters away and coming closer.

A pearly white light glowed faintly in the blackness above and to the north of them: even the light from plasma jets had trouble penetrating the thousands of meters of thickly falling snow. Through the mike he could hear Draere calmly reading out the ferry’s altitude.

Louder, louder, the sound came till it was a physical force pushing at him through both air and ground. Winds generated by the superheated air from the jets whirled the snow up and around him. The very storm itself was being shattered by the energy these jets were pumping into it. Ajão tried to bury his faceplate in the snow, but out of the corner of his eye he could see the needlelike blue flames of the ferry’s three plasma jets. A perfectly normal night landing, he chuckled to himself, and tried to burrow deeper into the snow. God, it was going to be wonderful to have a shower and some decent food. Most of all, wonderful to get away from Yoninne Leg-Wot.

Draere’s voice came distorted and faint against the roar, “Three hundred meters up, and your reflector is shining loud and clear direcdy under us. Hold on, gang.”

The ferry’s thirty-meter bulk hovered, then slowly descended on the reflector Bjault and Leg-Wot had set at the bottom of the valley, three thousand meters away. The snowstorm was literally blown away from around it, and looking up, Bjault could see the hillsides lit by painfully bright, electric-blue light. Ajão gasped. They had been followed: across the blue-lit snowfields, dozens of figures stood silhouetted in the glare.