Poul Anderson: A Circus of Hells

She considered him for a while that grew. “All right,” she said most quietly. “That makes two of us.”

He had topped the ringwall when the bugs found him.

His aim was to inspect the flyer which had crashed on the outer slope, while Djana packed supplies for the march. Perhaps he could get some clue as to what had gone wrong here. The possibility that those patrolling would spot him and attack seemed among the least of the hazards ahead. He could probably find a cave or crag or crevasse in time, a shelter where they couldn’t get at him, on the rugged craterside. Judiciously applied at short range, the blaster in his hip sheath ought to rid him of them, in view of what the spitgun had accomplished—unless, of course, they summoned so many reinforcements that he ran out of charge.

Nothing happened. Tuning his spacesuit radio through its entire range of reception, he came upon a band where there was modulation: clicks and silences, a code reeling off with such speed that in his ears it sounded almost like an endless ululation, high-pitched and unhuman. He was tempted to transmit a few remarks on those frequencies, but decided not to draw unnecessary attention to himself. At their altitude, he might well be invisible to the flyers.

The rest of the available radio spectrum was silent, except for the seethe and crackle of cosmic static. And the world was silent, except for the moan of wind around him, the crunching of snow and rattling of stones as his boots struck, the noise of his own breath and heartbeat. The crater floor was rock, ice, drift of snow and mists, wan illumination that would nonetheless have burned him with ultraviolet rays had his faceplate let them past. Clouds drove ragged across alien constellations and the turbulent face of Regin. The crater wall lifted brutal before him.

Climbing it was not too difficult. Erosion had provided ample footing and handholds; and in this gravity, even burdened with space armor he was lighter than when nude under Terran pull. He adapted to the changed ratio of weight and inertia with an ease that would have been unconscious had he not remembered it was going to cause Djana some trouble and thereby slow the two of them down. Other than keeping a nervous eye swiveling skyward, the chief nuisance he suffered was due to imperfections of the air renewal and thermostatic units. He was soon hot, sweating, and engulfed in stench.

I’ll be sure to fix that before we start! he thought. And give the service crew billy hell when (if) I return. Momentarily, the spirit sagged in him: What’s the use? They’re sloppy because the higher echelons are incompetent because the Empire no longer really cares about holding this part of the marches…In my grandfather’s day we were still keeping what was ours, mostly.

In my father’s day, the slogan became “conciliation and consolidation,” which means retreat. Is my day—my very own personal bit of daylight between the two infinite darknesses—is it going to turn into the Long Night?

He clamped his teeth together and climbed more vigorously. Not if I can help it!

The bugs appeared.

They hopped from behind boulders and ice banks, twenty or more, soaring toward him. Some thirty centimeters long, they had ten claw-footed legs each, a tail ending in twin spikes, a head on which half a dozen antennae moved. Mimir’s light shimmered purple off their intricately armored bodies.

For a second Flandry seriously wondered if he had lost his mind. The old records said Wayland was barren, always had been, always would be. He had expected nothing else. Life simply did not evolve where cold was this deep and permanent, air this tenuous, metal this dominant, background radiation this high. And supposing a strange version of it could, Mimir was a young star, that had coalesced with its planets only a few hundred megayears ago from a nebula enriched in heavy atoms by earlier stellar generations; the system hadn’t yet finished condensing, as witness the haze around the sun and the rate of giant meteorite impacts; there had not been time for life to start.

Thus Flandry’s thought flashed. It ended when the shapes were murderously upon him.

Two landed on his helmet. He heard the clicks, felt the astonishing impact. Looking down, he saw others at his waist, clinging to his legs, swarming around his boots. Jaws champed, claws dug. They found the joints in his armor and went to work.

No living thing smaller than a Llynathawrian elephant wolf should have been able to make an impression on the alloys and plastics that encased Flandry. He saw shavings peel off and fall like sparks of glitter.

He saw water vapor puff white from the first pinhole by his left ankle. The creature that made it gnawed industriously on.

Flandry yelled an obscenity. He shook one loose and managed to kick it. The shock of striking that mass hurt his toes. The bug didn’t arc far, nor was it injured. It sprang back to the fray. Flandry was trying to pluck another off. It clung too strongly for him.

He drew his blaster, set it to needle beam and low intensity, laid the muzzle against the carapace, and pulled the trigger.

The creature did not smoke or explode or do whatever else a normal organism would. But after two or three seconds it let go, dropped to the ground and lay inert.

The rest continued their senseless, furious attack. Flandry cooked them off him and slew those that hadn’t reached him with a series of energy bolts. No organism that size, that powerful, that heavily shelled, ought to have been that vulnerable to his brief, frugal beams.

The last two were on his back where he couldn’t see them. He widened the blaster muzzle and fanned across the air renewal unit. They dropped off him. The heat skyrocketed the temperature in his suit and drove gas faster out of the several leaks. Flandry’s eardrums popped painfully. His head roared and whirled.

Training paid off. Scarcely aware of what he did, he slapped sealpatches on the holes and bled the reserve tank for a fresh atmosphere. Only then did he sit down, gasp, shudder, and finally wet his mummy-dry mouth from the water tube.

Afterward he was able to examine the dead bugs. Throwing a couple of them into his pack, he resumed climbing. From the top of the ringwall he discerned the wrecked flyer and slanted across talus and ice patches to reach it. The crash had pretty well fractured it to bits, which facilitated study. He collected a few specimen parts and returned to Jake.

The trip was made in a growingly grim silence, which he scarcely broke when he re-entered the boat. Aloneness and not knowing had ground Djana down. She sped to welcome him. He gave her a perfunctory kiss, demanded food and a large pot of coffee, and brushed past her on his way to the workshop.

They had about 200 kilometers to go. That was the distance, according to the maps Flandry had made in orbit, from the scoutboat’s resting place to a peak so high that a transmission from it would be line-of-sight with some of the towering radio transceiver masts he had observed at varying separations from the old computer centrum.

“We don’t want to get closer than we must,” he explained to the girl. “We want plenty of room for running, if we find out that operations have been taken over by something that eats people.”

She swallowed. “Where could we run to?”

“That’s a good question. But I won’t lie down and die gracefully. I’m far too cowardly for that.”

She didn’t respond to his smile. He hoped she hadn’t taken his remark literally, even though it contained a fair amount of truth.

The trip could be shortened by crossing two intervening maria. Flandry refused. “I prefer to skulk,” he said, laving out a circuitous path through foothills and a mountain range that offered hiding places. While it would often make the going tough, and Djana was inexperienced and not in training, and they would be burdened with Ammon’s supplies and planetside gear, he hoped they could average thirty or forty kilometers per twenty-four hours. A pitiful few factors worked in their favor. There was the mild gravity and the absence of rivers to ford and brush to struggle through. There was the probably steady weather. Since Wayland always turned the same face to Regin, there was continuous daylight for the span of their journey, except at high noon when the planet would eclipse Mimir. There was an ample supply of stimulants. And, Flandry reflected, it helps to travel scared.