Charles Sheffield - Transcendence

She lay flat on the solid floor. A moment later E.C. Tally was panting and grunting next to her. Darya lifted her head.

“Dulcimer!” she gasped. He was too heavy; Louis Nenda could never lift him in. She tried to struggle to her feet to help, but it was beyond her strength.

She heard a croaking scream from outside the ship. A dark-green body came soaring past her, the corkscrew tail fully uncoiled by one great leap. Dulcimer flew right across the hatch and into the ship’s interior, wailing as he went. She heard the bouncing-ball sound of rubbery Polypheme hide against metal bulkhead, and another anguished scream.

“All aboard. Take us up!” Nenda was kicking at the thick pink tendril. It was still growing.

“The hatch is still partway open.” Rebka’s voice came from the intercom at the same moment that Darya felt the ship rise and strain against its closing cage of vegetation.

“I know.” Nenda had pulled out a wicked-looking knife and was stabbing at the tendril. The blade bounced right off it. “I can’t close the damned thing. Give us maximum lift, and hope.”

Darya suddenly understood Nenda’s problem. The Indulgence had a powerful weapons system, but it was intended for longer-range use. The weapons had never been designed for anything that coiled around the ship itself.

The scoutship lifted a few more feet. There was a jerk, and the upward motion ceased. The whole hull groaned with sudden stresses. A few seconds later Darya felt another downward lurch.

“No good.” Nenda was leaning dangerously far out of the hatch, stabbing at something out of sight. “We’re at about ten meters, but we’re bein’ pulled down an’ the Zardalu are comin’ up. You hafta give it more stick.”

“I hear you,” Rebka’s calm voice said over the intercom. “But we have a slight problem. We are already at full lift. And I don’t think whatever’s holding us is even trying yet.”

The ship creaked all over, shivered, and descended another few inches.

“Wrong way, Captain,” Nenda said. If he and Hans Rebka were in the same screaming panic as Darya, one would never have known it from their voices. “An’ if we don’t get out of here soon,” he added, in the same conversational tone, “we’re gonna have ourselves some visitors.” He stamped on a pale-blue groping tentacle and booted it clear of the hatch.

Rebka’s voice came again. “Get where you can grab something and hold on. And move away from the hatch.”

Easy to say. But there was nothing within easy reach for anyone in the lock. Darya and E.C. Tally scrabbled across to the interior door of the lock itself and wedged themselves together in the opening.

“Hold on now ,” Rebka said, while Darya wondered what he planned to do. If they were already at maximum lift, how could Hans hope to do better?

“I’m going to try to rock us out,” Rebka continued, as though he had heard Darya’s unvoiced question. “Might get rough.”

The understatement of the century. The Indulgence began to roll from side to side. The floor beneath Darya’s feet rose to the right until it was close to vertical, then before she could adjust to that it was swinging back, to roll as far the other way. Cascades of unsecured objects came bouncing past, everything from flashlights to clothes to frozen foods — the galley storage cupboards must have been shaken loose.

“Not working.” Nenda had ignored Rebka’s command to stay away from the hatch. By some impossible feat of strength and daring he had braced himself by one hand and one foot against its sides and was leaning far outside to hack and kick at the climbing Zardalu. He hauled himself back in to speak into the intercom. “We’ve been pulled another half-meter downward. Gotta do somethin’ else, Captain — sharpish, I’d say.”

“Only one thing left,” Rebka said. “And I hate to try it. Away from the outer hatch, Nenda — and this time I mean it.”

Louis Nenda cursed, threw himself across to the inner door, and braced his stocky body across Darya. “Hold onto your guts.”

The ship moved. It dropped like a stone and hit the surface of Genizee with bone-jarring force as Hans Rebka canceled all lift. From below came the groan of buckled hull plates.

The cage of swathing pink tendrils was looser, opened at the bottom by the weight of the Indulgence and at the top by the ship’s sudden fall. Before it could tighten again, Rebka had put the ship into maximum forward thrust. The pointed nose pushed aside the two stalks that were growing there, and the Indulgence shot forward across the gray moss.

Darya could see out the open hatch. The pink arm of vegetation whisked away out of sight. But then they were heading for the jagged inland fingers of rock, too fast to stop.

Spaceship hulls were not built for structural strength. Impact with one of those jutting rocks would split the ship wide open.

Hans Rebka had returned to maximum lift the moment they were free of the enfolding growths. The Indulgence flew toward the rocky outcrops, straining upward as it went.

Upward, but too slow. Darya watched in terrified fascination. Touch and go. They were heading right for one of the tallest rock columns.

There was a horrible sound of scraping metal and a glancing blow all the way along the bottom of the ship. Then Darya heard a strange noise. It was Louis Nenda. He was laughing.

He released his hold on the inner lock door and walked across to the still-open outer lock, balancing himself easily on the shifting floor. As Darya watched he leaned casually out to look far down at the receding surface, then slammed the lock shut with one heave of a muscular arm.

He came back to where Darya and E.C. Tally were still wedged in the doorway, clutching it — in Darya’s case at least — with the unbreakable grip of pure terror. He lifted them, one in each hand, and set them on their feet.

“You two all right?”

Darya nodded, as a wail of anguish rose from beyond the lock. “I’m all right.” It was the wrong time for it, but she had to ask the question. “You were laughing . What were you laughing at?”

He grinned. “To prove to myself I ain’t dead.” And then he shook his dark mop of hair. “Naw, that’s not the real answer. I was laughin’ at myself . See, when I come down here this time I told Atvar H’sial that I was fed up of gettin’ close to the Zardalu, an’ then comin’ back without any blind thing to show they even existed. It happened on Serenity. It happened last time I was down on Genizee. An’ damned if it didn’t just happen again, though I swore to myself it wouldn’t. I didn’t collect even a tentacle-tip. Unless you wanna go right back down an’ look for keepsakes?”

Darya shivered at the thought. She reached out and put her hand on Nenda’s grimy, battered forearm. “I knew you’d come back to Genizee and save me.”

“Not my idea,” he said gruffly. He looked away, toward the interior of the ship where Dulcimer was still moaning and screaming. “Though it would have been,” he added, so softly that Darya was not sure she heard him correctly, “if I were brighter.”

He eased away from her in Dulcimer’s direction. “I’d better go an’ shut up that Polypheme, before he wakes up everybody on board who’s tryin’ to sleep. You’d think he was the only one anythin’ ever happened to.”

Darya followed him through to the main cabin of the Indulgence , E. C. Tally close behind her. Hans Rebka was sitting at the controls. Dulcimer was a few feet away, rolling around the floor in panic or agony.

“Shut him up, will you?” Rebka said to Louis Nenda. He gave Darya a wink and a grin of pure delight when she moved to stand next to him. “How did you like that takeoff?”