Larry Niven - Footfall

Nat Reynolds ran down the hall. He heard Carol behind him.

Roger sat in the biggest Cadillac in the lowest level of the underground parking structure. It was noon. They’d been here almost twenty hours.

There were sounds from inside another Caddy two cars away. Jeez, what does she see in him? Roger wondered. They were at it not six hours after her live-in boyfriend bought it.

And you’re jealous, because you had nothing to distract you from the thought that they’d tumble the building down on your head. Or from them — There hadn’t been any sounds from outside for hours. Roger couldn’t stand it any longer. He crept toward the exit. Another small group-a man, two women, and four small children — huddled in one corner of the garage. They stared at Roger as he went past, but they didn’t say anything.

The ramp was blocked by debris, but the stairs were intact. Roger climbed up, pausing at each landing.

“Ho.”

He jumped, startled. The voice had been feminine and definitely human. “Hello.”

“It’s quiet out there,” she said.

Roger climbed up to the landing.

She was older than he’d thought from her voice. Roger guessed she was almost forty. She wore jeans and a wool shirt and a bandana, and her face was covered with soot and grime. Her nose had once been broken, and wasn’t quite straight. Not quite ugly, but she could work on it. “What’s happening?”

“I think they’ve gone. I’m Rosalee Pinelli, by the way.”

“Roger Brooks. Where did they go?”

She shrugged. “All I know is they were out there all night. I could hear them. But they never came in here.”

“Did you go look?”

She shook her head vigorously. “Not me. We didn’t hear anything for a couple of hours, so about dawn the five guys who were in here with me went out to look.” She indicated a hole in the concrete structure. “You can see ’em through here.”

Roger looked. There was a pile of bodies in the street. “That’s more than five.”

“They made a pile,” Rosalee said. “They left people alone until some guys blew one of their tanks.” She shook her head. “Goddam, it was beautiful! They used dinner plates to look like mines, and when one of the snouts stopped they hit it with Molotov cocktails! Beautiful!”

“Until the snouts blew up the town,” Roger said under his breath. “Yeah. I saw it.”

“After that, the snouts started that pile of bodies out there,” she said. “I haven’t seen or heard anything since about nine this morning, but I’ve been afraid to go out.”

“I’ll look around,”

“Be careful-here, I’ll come with you.”

“They’re gone,” Brooks said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“How?” Nat Reynolds asked.

“There’s some junk on the ramp,” Brooks said. “But with a little work we can get it clear and drive out.”

“Aren’t there cars up above?”

“Not like this one,” Brooks said. He patted the VW diesel Rabbit. “f can get two thousand miles on the fuel in this. More, now that we drained that truck.”

“Come on, Nat. I’ll help,” Carol said. She took his hand.

Possessive as hell. “Yeah, let’s get at it,” Roger said.

Rosalee was already tossing away light debris. In an hour they had a pathway he could drive through. The four of them piled into the Rabbit.

I don’t remember asking either of the women. Not that it matters. Reynolds isn’t going to leave that one behind, and there’s room for Rosalee. I might as well get her story.

“Where to?” Reynolds asked.

“ Colorado Springs . The government’s got to be there.”

“East!” Rosalee shouted. “Away from the snouts!”

“I’m for that,” Reynolds agreed.

They drove up the ramp.

“You sure they’re gone?” Carol asked.

“Yeah,” Roger said. “I looked.” They came out of the structure. Lauren , Kansas , looked like Berlin after World War II. Buildings were gutted. Bodies lay in the streets, not just the pile the snouts had created, but others as well.

“Godalmighty damn,” Roger muttered. He threaded his way through the debris. “All that in revenge for one tank—”

“Traitors,” Reynolds said. “They were killing traitors, or rogues, or crazies.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?” Rosalee demanded.

“We surrendered,” Reynolds said. “As far as they’re concerned, we surrendered, and then we attacked them.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Carol protested.

I wonder. Roger drove past another ruined building. “How do you know, Nat?”

Reynolds laughed. “I don’t. I’m guessing. But look, gang, I’m not a scientist and I’m not a newsman. When I guess wrong, nothing happens. Maybe I even sell the story—”

“If you guess wrong here you’ll get us all killed!” Rosalee snarled.

“Shall I stop guessing? We could die that way too, because I’m the only expert you’ve got.”

When they reached the end of the debris, he turned south despite the others’ protests. There was no sign of an enemy.

The engineers who built Message Bearer must have considered the communal mudroom expendable. They had located it just inside the hull. This had its advantages.

Under spin, a srupk’s depth of mud fonned a shell inside the hull; it would shield the ship from an unexpected attack. Mud boiling from a rent would freeze in place, a plug to hold air.

The mudroom was under full spin gravity. Winterhome’s mass and surface gravity had been established by telescopic studies, a year before the ship reached the ringed giant. For sixteen years, since birth in many cases, the communal mudroom had taught fithp to move under Winterhome gravity. Warriors bound for the surface would have at least that advantage.

It was the biggest room aboard Message Bearer, covering an eighth of the hull surface of the life support region. From the middle it curved out of sight in both directions. The mud was good sticky-wet horneworld dirt below, with nearly clear water floating on top. Fathisteb-tulk remembered the ceiling as oppressively close, and bare. It was still close, but not oppressively so. Generations of spaceborn had decorated it with painted friezes.

Above his head was a full-sized representation of a thuktun: a weathered granite rectangle covered with script and with a centered representation of a thuktun, which was covered with script and a representation of a thuktun, which… Fathisteh-tulk wondered if the priest Fistarteh-thuktun had ever seen this part of the ceiling. Such a thuktun would be a legendary thing. The thuktunthp spoke of every subject a fi’ could imagine, but none spoke of the thuktunthp themselves, nor of their makers.

Fathisteb-tulk was the only sleeper in a crowd of spaceborn.

“It’s not that we don’t trust planets,” the gangling warrior said. “We trust one planet, the Homeworld, the world on which you were born, sir. We trust other worlds to obey other rules.”

“Mating seasons,” Fathisteh-tulk said, half listening.

He filled his mouth and sprayed water at a spaceborn female, barely mature, who had been avoiding him. This social barrier between spaceborn and sleepers had to be broken, even if done one fi’ at a time. There was power in Fathisteb-tulk’s lungs. She preened in the spray, then (belatedly, but as protocol required) sprayed him back. She was just able to reach him.

The gangling warrior-Rashinggith? something like that-was still talking. “Exactly! The target world orbits in about seven eighths of a Homeworld year. After three generations in space, we still follow a mating season of one year; and the sleepers, because they were wakened at the wrong time—”