Moonstruck. Part 24

Were they afraid to come out? "Hand me Swelk's computer. Come out. You will not be harmed." The computer emitted the vowelless noise with which it always spoke to Swelk-at a low volume that could not possibly be heard inside the ship. "Computer, maximum sound level." It babbled back, no louder than before. "Computer, as loud as possible." Repeated paraphrasings had no effect.

What else could he try? Yelling. Perhaps it would translate louder if he spoke louder-and so it did.

"Come out! You will not be harmed!" The Krulchukor equivalent, a vowelless eruption, burst forth.

Moments later, two metal containers were flung from the open airlock.

"Don't shoot!" hissed Kyle to the startled commandos. The devices were clones of Swelk's bioconverters. The translation of these words, hopefully, was too soft to be heard inside. "Come out!" he screamed again.

* * * Rualf struggled to remain upright, dazed by the latest explosion to rock the Consensus. Smaller blasts sounded throughout the ship. Smoke thickened even as he marveled, stupefied, at the disaster. The hatch into the heart of the ship flapped between half- and full-open, its motorized mechanism thudding in abrupt reversals, unable to respond to fire both inside and out. With a spectacular tearing sound, the machinery stopped.

A gale whistled through the hold, sucked through the gaping airlock and stoking the spreading blaze like a bellows. The open airlock . . . that was his only hope of escape. He had a vague recollection of someone telling him so. Had one of the crew, or of his troupe, already come through here? No-whoever it was had gone into the ship. Some foolish hero type. He stumbled, limbs still quivering from what must have been a human weapon, toward the lock.

An impossibly loud feminine voice shouted from outside. "Come out. You will not be harmed." Had humans learned to speak like Krulirim? How could that be? Somehow, the thundering voice was familiar.

Swelk! The Krul who had gone past him, gone deeper into the ship . . . it was she. She was the reason the humans knew to stage a scene he could not resist filming. To bait a trap. The impossibly loud command, doubtless synthesized by Swelk's computer, nearly paralyzed him with fear. What would the humans do to him if he fell into their power?

A wave of coughing came over him. He was dead if he stayed here. But if he were the only survivor . . .

the humans would not know he was the one responsible for directing their photogenic self-destruction.

He waded through smoke to the interior hatch with its broken motorized controls. The hatch that had inconveniently frozen half open. There was an access panel beside the controls; he flipped it open to get at the manual crank. Wheezing, he worked until the heat-warped door was fully shut-then he jammed the mechanism. The wind whistling inward from the lock, due to fire-fed suction into the ship, died abruptly as the hatch slammed shut.

Time for his escape. He groped toward the beckoning airlock, low to the deck where the air was slightly fresher. Fodder, animal s.h.i.t, the Girillian ferns they had started synthesizing for the animals to s.h.i.t on . . . stuff was piled everywhere, and more and more of it was burning.

He was forgetting something. Escape to what? He could not survive without Krulchukor food. These beasts ate synthesized food, surely. Behind a cage he spotted what must be bioconverters. Gripping with one limb the handles of two heavy synthesizers, he dragged them, awkwardly, to the airlock. He flung them outside, and went for more.

"Come out!"

Something monstrous emerged from the smoke, as though summoned by the imperious demand. A bilateral head on a thick neck towered over him, like a ghost of the F'thk. Rualf had just recognized it for a Girillian creature when it knocked him over. Ma.s.sive hooves pressed him into the metal deck. Agony washed through him-but to lose consciousness now was to die. As he tried to lever himself upright, a

Girillian carnivore ran over him. It was smaller than the first animal, but its feet were studded with talons. Rualf collapsed, screaming, to the floor. Thick smoke filled his lungs.

As Rualf lay quivering, limbs splayed, bleeding and coughing, battered and bruised, apparition after

apparition burst from the smoke and flames. The biggest were deep within the hold, as if herding the rest. He sprawled, helpless, as creature after creature stomped and slashed him, each encounter inflicting new anguish.

The last thing Rualf ever saw was the huge flat foot of a swampbeast descending upon the center of his torso, directly over his sensor stalks.

The commandos flinched as a six-legged creature leapt from the open airlock. Only that moment of surprised nonrecognition saved the animal. "Hold your fire!" yelled Kyle. As Swelk's simulated voice reverberated from starship and hangars, he searched for and found on the computer what he hoped was its microphone. He covered the aperture with his thumb. "Hold your fire!" m.u.f.fled, the repet.i.tion went untranslated. He'd seen such a creature before-in a hologram projected by this very computer. "It's a zoo animal. There may be more."

Animal after animal appeared out of the smoke and flames. They retreated in confusion from burning ship and human building, lost and confused, huddling together. If the Girillian menagerie included predator and prey-and Kyle was almost certain from Swelk's tales that it did-the xen.o.beasts were too overwhelmed to care. He'd never quite believed the stories of terrestrial predators and prey fleeing peacefully side by side from forest fires-now all skepticism vanished. "Call the National Zoo. We need gamekeepers, p.r.o.nto."

"Swampbeasts. They're beautiful." Darlene's voice was quietly awestruck. She pointed, quite unnecessarily, at two magnificent, web-footed animals that stood about eight feet tall. They were the last to emerge from the airlock now impenetrably thick with smoke.

She gently took Swelk's computer from Kyle's hand. Walking slowly toward the knot of shivering animals, she crooned, "Smelly. Stinky. Smelly. Stinky." The computer repeated something after her, softly. The swampbeasts pushed forward. Bowing their heads, they approached cautiously, eyes wide and staring. They brushed their enormous heads against Darlene's outstretched hand, then settled to their knees beside her.

Swelk's computer did not translate "humph," but that was okay. They understood what it meant.

* * * Swelk coughed and spat, splattering a smoke-blackened clot of blood against the bulkhead. The clot sizzled. Despite the fire-suppressant sprays, fire was everywhere. Her skin was blistered. Her extremities had been so repeatedly scorched that she no longer felt them.

The initial fireball had burst through the open hold where Rualf and his troupe had been working, killing

everyone. She had no idea why the hatch to the ship's interior, never unlocked when she was aboard, was now wide open. The ship's corridors had channeled the fire and blast, catching most of the crew at their posts. The draft from the second airlock had deflected the fireball from parts of the ship, sparing the bridge from the worst of it.

And saving her Girillian friends.She had explored the Consensus from end to end, and there were no survivors. She omitted Grelben from her tally. He would surely refuse to leave the ship. Captain's prerogative. Captain's curse. Captain's penance, too, she considered, still unable to wish upon him, or anyone, death in this manner.

She had been lost repeatedly in the smoke, been saved more than once by providential discoveries of

emergency respirators. Their capacity was limited, and she'd left a trail of empties behind her on her trek. She finally found her way to the hatch that led to the zoo hold and safety.

The entrance was shut and inoperative.

Frantically, she tore open the access panel to get at the manual override. The crank stuck after a quarter

turn. Crying in frustration, she tugged and tugged. It would not budge.

The corridor grew ever hotter. Gagging, Swelk limped to the cargo hold where the fire had begun. The

flames there remained impenetrable to vision, let alone pa.s.sage. She could not get off the ship. She turned inward, stumbled to the bridge, feeling herself roasting.

"I did not expect to see you again." The captain was slumped across his command seat, his limbs and

sensor stalks limp. A command console behind him flashed insistently.

Swelk could not see the console-the flashing was an alarm of some kind, she a.s.sumed-but its light pulsed luridly through the thick, billowing smoke. "No Krul should die alone."

Grelben winced at her words. "You are a better Krul than I give you credit for." When she did not

comment, he added, "You are a better Krul than many of us.

"Let me show you something. Look closely; the outside sensors burn off in seconds when I expose

them." A gagging fit interrupted whatever explanation he was trying to make. He gestured at a flat display. "Section . . . three . . . two . . . two . . . camera . . . on."

Swelk peered through swirling smoke into the little display, flat like a human television. A sense of

warmth, totally unrelated to the fires ravaging the starship, suffused her. The Girillian animals, her friends, were wandering on the airfield. There was no mistaking the two who were settled calmly beside Darlene: Smelly and Stinky. As the swampbeasts extended their long necks to be touched, the image dissolved into a blizzard of static.

"Sorry, Swelk. That's my last outside sensor." They sat-together-in companionable silence until consciousness faded from them. * * * Except for smoke and hungry flames, all that moved on the bridge of the Consensus was the text still blinking on the command console.

Clean Slate acknowledged.

THE LAND OF DARKNESS.

CHAPTER 30.

The garments and skin colors varied with the architectural backdrops, but the scenes were otherwise depressingly alike. Seething seas of humanity: fists shaking, faces contorted in anger, mouths agape in angry chanting. Desecrated flags-usually American, with a scattering of Russian. Hand-lettered signs-always in English-denouncing the two great nuclear powers. Uncle Sam in effigy, hung or aflame or trampled underfoot.

Why isn't anything Russian ever hung in effigy? wondered Harold Robeson. An effigy bear, maybe?

Hal, isn't there something more productive you could be thinking about?

There was a hesitant tap. His secretary was befuddled by his blowing off a long-scheduled confab with a key senator, for no apparent reason other than navel gazing. "Yes, Sheila."

A ma.s.s-of-black-curls head poked through a barely ajar door into the Oval Office. "Secretary McDowell

to see you, sir."

Nathan McDowell, the secretary of state, was a short, pudgy fellow, his acne-scarred face dominated by a plug nose and a scruffy goatee. He evidently went out of his way to find ill-fitting suits, which he then had professionally rumpled. The contrast of his dishevelment with his ten-steps-ahead thinking could not have been starker. "Mr. President."

They were alone, old friends who'd met as Marine lieutenants in Nam. The formality was ominous. He pointed at a chair. "Take a load off. What's up, Nate?"

Ignoring the invitation, Nate studied the muted monitors. "Basking in the appreciation of our fellow citizens of Earth?"

"I never expect appreciation, but is holding down the stupidity so much to ask?"

"Not stupid, Hal, only ill-informed. Reacting to dashed hopes." His friend paused, hands clasped behind

his back, watching the chanting mobs. "Do you know how many billion people on this Earth live in grinding poverty? How many have yet to use a phone?

"The arrival of the Galactics was a big deal to them." McDowell gestured at the screens. "In some ways,

more than for the advanced countries. These people are taught-with some justification-to blame the major powers for colonialism and Cold War proxy wars, for the banking panics that periodically crush their economies, for global warming. The Galactics stood for hope. They promised new wonders for Earth. The poorest on our planet had the most to gain, while the envied, and sometimes hated, First World was revealed in its technological shortcomings.

"Now we and the Russians have taken all that away."

"What hope?" Robeson pounded what had once been Teddy Roosevelt's desk. "Dammit, Nate, the aliens were genocidal. We and the Russians, the ones being reviled in Cairo and Beijing, in Caracas and Lagos