Charles Sheffield - The Spheres of Heaven

Chan walked out. He knew that Danny was itching to ask questions. Everyone would be. They had to wait. Either there would be plenty of time to answer, four hours from now; or all answers would be irrelevant.

Vow-of-Silence was the most difficult. When Danny had carried the Pipe-Rilla back to the Hero’s Return it had taken half an hour to remove the curled and rigid form from its suit. Putting a suit back on was even harder unless you knew Pipe-Rilla tricks. By the time that Chan and Deb, carrying her between them, reached the airlock, the others were already waiting.

“Elke.” Chan was beginning to worry about one aspect of his own plan. The Malacostracans were not obliged to follow the schedule they had offered the previous day. Suppose they decided to go ahead sooner than expected — any time, once Dag Korin met with The One? “You’ve studied the satellite maps more than anyone else. Can you lead us ashore?”

“I can. But not as well as you could. You and Deb Bisson and Danny Casement have already been there, I have not.”

“I don’t want to go to that part of the land. When I left it was patrolled by Mallie guards who shoot before they think. In fact, they can’t think. I want to go in along the inlet where the Mood Indigo is beached.”

“That’s easy.” Like the others, Elke was fully suited but with her helmet open. Her expression was nervous and her face gaunt as ever, but as usual she answered without seeming to take time to think. “The opening to the inlet is fifteen degrees south of east. After that we follow the line of the main channel due east. The Mood Indigo will be six hundred meters along, on the left.”

“You’re in charge of getting us there. The silt should be back on the seabed and the water clear. If not, we go single file and hold on to each other. Bony.”

“Right here.” Bony at least didn’t seem to be worried. The face inside the helmet was as serene as ever, and he was beaming.

Chan felt awkward now with Bony and Liddy. He knew that was ridiculous. They had no idea that he had overheard their private conversation. He wondered if they had asked Danny how he knew where to find them.

Why did your brain throw such irrelevancies at you, when you were trying to organize to save your life?

“Bony, when we reach the Mood Indigo you’ll have to work faster and harder than you ever worked. We need to know if that ship can fly, and if it can stand a vacuum environment. Friday Indigo said that it could when he was here, but in his condition I’d hate to take his word for anything.”

Bony gulped. “How long will I have?”

“Until we’re forced to try for a takeoff. Then we’ll find out if what you did was enough — one way or another.”

Bony gulped again, harder than before. Chan ignored him. He took a quick look around. Bony, Liddy, Deb, Danny, Tully and Elke; the suitless Angel, silent and presumably grumpy, uprooted from its precious soil pot so as to be more easily carried; the Pipe-Rilla, unconscious and coiled around itself like lengths of flexible ductwork: the whole remaining crew of the Hero’s Return , as ready as it would ever be.

“Close helmets, and let’s go. It will be a squeeze, but we can all fit in the lock. Tully and Bony, you take Vow-of-Silence. Elke, you exit first — but wait for the rest of us before you move.”

Chan and Danny Casement entered the lock last, carrying the Angel between them. Gressel suddenly came to life and muttered, “Farewell. Well done, thou good and faithful servant. ”

Chan realized that Gressel must be talking to the ship’s computer. It was enormously capable and close to sentience, and maybe from the point of view of the Angel’s own sentient inner crystal the computer was less alien than humans. But with a computing system spread through the whole ship there was no possible way to take it with them.

The lock closed and flooded. The Angel was suddenly no load at all. They would have to be careful to make sure that it did not float away from them. As the outer hatch opened, Chan saw that his guess was correct. The sediment had settled back to the bottom as the effects of the storm faded, and the ocean of Limbo was clearer than he had ever seen it.

Communication was not possible using the suit radios underwater. It was a silent and slow-moving procession that followed Elke Siry. Chan wished that they could speed up, but he didn’t want to risk rising to the surface and using suit jets when Malacostracan guards might be watching the sea.

Elke seemed to know exactly what she was doing. When she had traveled a certain distance she angled to the left. They had reached a drowned valley, and were walking along its center. In another few hundred meters she turned left again, this time more sharply, and began to ascend the valley slope.

In another half minute the helmet of her suit disappeared from view. Chan realized that it must have broken the surface and was now above water. One by one, the rest followed. Helmet vanished, then shoulders, then chest. Finally it was Chan’s own turn, and he instinctively blinked as his head emerged.

Elke was already beyond the waterline. He took one quick look at her, at the Mood Indigo on the slope right ahead — thank Heaven for Elke’s mania for precision — then up and down the shore. It was full day. There was no sign of Malacostracans. If everything could just stay the way it was for five more minutes …

Chan heard a commotion in the line ahead. He dropped his side of the Angel and hurried forward. Tully and Bony were having trouble, trying to hold on to a suddenly animated Vow-of-Silence. In spite of its tube-like build, the Pipe-Rilla was incredibly strong. Vow-of-Silence broke free, and before anyone could manage to reach her she went bounding away along the shore of the inlet in ten-meter leaps.

Bony was all set to follow when Chan grabbed his arm. “No. You’d never catch her. Look at her go.”

They followed the Pipe-Rilla’s direction of travel. “Away from the Malacostracan camp,” Elke said. “If she keeps that heading at that speed, she’ll reach the line of vegetation in a few minutes. There’s a very rough area beyond it, and I’m not sure we can follow her there. But neither can anyone else.”

“Vow-of-Silence will have to look after herself for the moment,” Chan said. “We have to get inside the Mood Indigo. Come on, up the slope.”

Easier said than done. Lifting the ship from the sea to its present location would have been impossible if the Malacostracans had not possessed anti-gravity machines. The side of the inlet was a mess of sharp-edged rock that at first sight could not be climbed. Liddy was the one, ranging away to the left, who found a long cleft that a person could scramble up. Then it was everyone working together, to hoist the unwieldy bulk of the Angel along the narrowing crack in the rock. In any gravity field stronger than Limbo’s they could never have done it. As it was, the whole party was panting and strained when at last they levered Gressel over the lip of the rocky bowl where the Mood Indigo lay, and could scramble the rest of the way.

Again, Chan was the last one up. He found Bony standing by the side of the stranded ship, shaking his head.

“Looks pretty good,” Chan said, as he came up to Bony.

That earned him a skeptical glance. “Appearances don’t tell you much,” Bony said. “The storm gave her a terrible bashing. All the external communications equipment was stripped off.”

“How’s the hull? Was it breached?”

“I can’t tell from here. Friday Indigo bought the best, so that should help. But there’s only one way to know. Once we’re inside we’ll change internal pressure and see what happens.”