Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

“Jesus! What’s that stink? And where are my pants?”

“We’re all a little torn up,” Randi told her. “If you can make your way out of here, get cleaned up, sit in the shower, then lie down. We’ll be back to do the same.”

Cross looked around. “What about the others?”

“Sark’s dead, Li’s in a coma but I think she’ll make it. Her head’s as hard as yours,” Nagel told her. “C’mon! Don’t slip on this shit!” With Cross steadying on Nagel and being pulled up by Queson, she managed to get unsteadily to her feet, where the two of them were able to help her back into the quarters area.

It wasn’t until they were all back there and reasonably cleaned up, with their wounds, if not repaired, at least treated, that any of them thought about what went next.

“We can call the Stanley from the shuttle,” Cross suggested. “Get pulled up by the Cap on auto—I’m not sure how long it’s gonna be before I can fly that thing. My eye’s swelling and I can see out of it about as good as it looks, just for one thing. No sweat, though. And at least we can call it in and get the hell back to low gee and good food and proper medical treatment. I don’t like it that Li ain’t woke up yet.”

“I don’t, either, but I think you better stay where you are,” Jerry Nagel told her. “I’ll go up and make the call. I can’t fly it but I sure can do that much.”

Nagel managed to climb the aft interior stair by sheer willpower and make his way down the corridor towards the shuttle airlock. He was surprised to see that it was closed and all the controls were red. They’d done that with the worm business to seal things, but it wasn’t common practice and it sure shouldn’t have been that way now.

Something caused him to get a last burst of adrenaline, and he almost ran to the hatch and checked its settings. He put his palm on the code bar, and then could hear the compressors working inside the airlock. There was a slight difference between inside and out for their comfort, so this didn’t bother him, but now he began to wonder. The inner hatch rotated, irislike, and he stepped into the airlock itself. Now, just ahead, he could actually see through to the interior of the shuttle through the small window in the far hatch, or, rather, he should have been able to see it.

He put his bruised face right up to the lock and looked out.

What he saw was Melchior, just lighting up from planetrise, and the dock and associated hooks that held the shuttle to the larger craft.

The shuttle was gone.

Something made him turn and rush back along the corridor, over the quarters, and to the aft compartments designed for salvaged material. These were removable but sealable airtight containers, and they’d dumped the half ton or so of harvested gems and obsidian mixture into two of them.

Those two, and only those two, were now missing. He didn’t have to look; the master board told him so.

It didn’t make sense. Even if the captain had double-crossed them or gone nuts herself, she could only have recalled the shuttle and whatever it was hooked to. It was strictly an emergency procedure. And yet, he, Randi, Lucky, Li, and Sark were all accounted for. Who the hell was there left?

He turned and rushed back to tell the others, but he was yelling one single name, the only name that really fit the evidence.

“Eyegor, you programmed bastard!”

“Base C&C to Stanley, come in, Cap,” Nagel called for the hundredth time. He and Cross had taken turns for a full Melchior day and night and had gotten no response.

“I can’t figure out how it’s possible,” Cross told the other two. “I mean, even if Eyegor made it back up there, the captain would never leave us without us or proof or death. I just can’t believe she’d do this, and I sure don’t see how Eyegore could, or did.”

Jerry Nagel sighed. “You missed the point, Lucky. Eyegore’s nothing more than a glorified camera, or so we were told, right? So how did it fly the shuttle? How did it control it so precisely, with full knowledge of how to detach, and, most importantly, even if we go with the idea that it just triggered the automatic emergency retrieval, how then did it detach, float to the back, pick just those two containers, lift them into the very limited bay of the shuttle, and then take off for the ship? There’s only one answer. Because it was designed and programmed to do it right from the start.”

“Sanders! That slimy son of a bitch! If I ever get my hands around his throat I’ll bite off more than his private parts!” Cross snarled.

Nagel nodded. “But the idea is to stick us here. Eyegore even has the exact place recorded where it left us, and it probably has scenes of our madness to explain to anybody back home that we succumbed to something weird and killed each other in some orgy of violence. Nobody will ask questions. He’ll probably even make a movie out of it. And he’ll sell the stones in little bits and pieces and make more millions, and he alone will still know how to get to the Three Kings.”

“But how did he get Cap to go along with this? And what keeps her quiet?”

“I dunno, but he’s got this all worked out, you can count on that,” Nagel asserted firmly.

Randi Queson looked over at both of them. “Remember that they said they did work on her memory and logic chips? Even she told us that she got the navigational information only when she needed it and that it was wiped as soon as she got back. Remember?”

“Yeah, I—oh shit! I see what you mean! She isn’t gonna remember anything . Probably not even us or this whole job. One command and as far as she’s concerned she’s been in orbit getting overhauled all this time and we’re long gone to other jobs. Great! Just great! ”

Cross chuckled. “If we’d’a been smarter and not suckers and known this was comin’, too bad we didn’t stay up on Balshazzar. At least that’s a kind of no-work tropical paradise.”

“Maybe for the rest of you, but not me,” Jerry Nagel replied. “I think I’d rather see what’s here than be trapped for the rest of my life around telepathic aliens and thousands of Holy Joes.”

“Well, we don’t have that option, and we can’t stay here,” Randi Queson pointed out. “Another of those storms could come along at any moment, and I don’t think any of us would survive a second one like that, at least mentally. That means moving out of this valley, taking with us whatever we can and leaving this here, probably like they did years ago.”

Nagel nodded. “Well, I think the scooters will still work, which will help. If we can get off and find a safer, more stable area to camp and near some source of water and maybe even food, and ferry what we can from here to there, it’ll be a start.”

“What about An Li? How can we move her until she wakes up?” Randi asked him.

“If necessary, we’ll strap her on and move her that way,” he replied. “I don’t see anything else we can do.”

The two women said nothing. There wasn’t much else to say.

Jerry Nagel sighed. “But first I’m going to bury Sark. He deserves that. Then we’ll start exploring and see what we can find. One step at a time, but I think we need to get out of here before the next storm no matter what. In fact, I’m prepared to say that if another storm looms, we all get the hell out of this big expanse, away from whatever is inside that cliff. We come back only when it’s relatively clear and breezy.”

“I’m for that,” Randi Queson told him.

While Nagel was preparing the grave for Sark’s body, he suddenly heard Lucky Cross calling from the underside hatch. “Jerry! An Li’s moaning! I think she may be coming to!”