Melchior's Fire

XIII: HOT CROSSED PILGRIMS

The experiment with swapping stones was inconclusive. None of the trio had the same complete set of hallucinations as before, but each had visions more in tune with their original experiences than with the others’, and Queson felt confident that her theory was correct.

Sark seemed convinced that it was a natural sort of thing as well, but he wanted no part in playing with them. They didn’t ask why; everybody’s past was their own in this sort of business. Still, it was clear that he’d had some kind of run-in with drugs or other stimulations, and the experience had been bad.

Now that it was suddenly more of a familiar operation for them, they felt more confident in spite of the effects that the stones induced. Lucky detached the modular C&C from the Stanley with the shuttle docked in it and then brought the whole thing down through the atmosphere of the big moon and onto the huge plateau of lava about a kilometer from the rockfall, where it could be easily docked and lifted off in a hurry but would be away from any sudden avalanches and could be settled fairly level, its support legs doing the rest to make it not just solid as a rock, but considering the area, much more solid than these rocks had ever been.

Conditions, however, were much poorer than they’d been when they’d landed the first time. Clouds had rolled in, covering the sky and descending even below the high volcanic peaks all around them, and they rushed to scoop up and dump inside the containers within the C&C complex what they could of the slide and its strange but valuable cargo before it became impossible to do so. They managed to accumulate quite a lot, perhaps a third of their capacity, before the lightning started all around them, striking with increasing rapidity and force and causing thunderous explosive sounds to echo off the mountainsides and cliffs, finally accompanied by rain that seemed to come from under vast waterfalls rather than to precipitate from clouds.

They rushed fearfully back on their scooters to the C&C in the distance, thinking that at any moment the magnetic drives would pull down some of the fierce lightning and electrocute them as they fled for cover. The air already smelled of ozone, but they made it back, soaked and exhausted.

“I wouldn’t even want to take off in this stuff if I didn’t have to,” Lucky Cross told them. “The only good thing is it’s not bloody likely that any of those alien thingies are gonna venture out this way, either.”

“So we lose a little time,” Nagel told them. “And, yeah, we’d probably have been happier losing it up top, but we’re better off down here, acclimating to the gravity. I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling like I just had to fight my way out of the toughest bar on Sepuchus just from yesterday’s action, and we rode almost the whole way!”

“Well, take a little painkiller and relax,” An Li told him. “Any idea how long this shit will last?”

“Observations say it could be days, but probably won’t be,” Cross assured her. “Man! You think it’s bad now, try it with my weight! I feel like I’m in a permanent squat!”

“You weren’t out in that stuff!” Jerry Nagel replied, then sighed. “Well, let’s spend some time setting up as much in the way of an automated security perimeter as we can. We did that when we thought we were alone, and we know that there are other races, many races, with colonies on this dirtball, and that at least one of them knows where this place is, and who knows with this little crew and no mother hen whether or not we’ll all doze off. I wouldn’t want one of those headless snakes showing up with boundless curiosity during that time.”

As they set up the scanners and established both automatic warnings and weapons thresholds, Randi Queson couldn’t help thinking of that funny-looking vehicle they were going to try and salvage at the end of this. “I wonder why they left it?” she mused, aloud.

“Huh? What do you mean? Who’s ‘they’ and what did ‘they’ leave?” Jerry responded.

“Oh—just thinking aloud. But this isn’t exactly on the known trade routes, and anything as sophisticated as that alien vehicle had to be brought here as part of their exploration and maybe prospecting, salvage, or whatever operation. One, maybe a lot more, were put into it just like we’re here in the C&C module and sent out to look things over, maybe even discover and pick up Magi’s Stones. There’s no sign of any settlement of anything, least of all something that could build and drive that, anywhere on this side of the island, so it was brought here—flown here, floated here, who knows?—to do what it did. And then it got tripped up, stuck, and had to be abandoned or whatever. So why hasn’t anybody come for it to fix it? It’s got to be very valuable to them, even as salvage. Why did they leave it abandoned?”

“Maybe everybody inside made it back on foot or whatever they travel on and they didn’t have what it took to fix the thing,” Nagel suggested. “What’s the big deal? It’s not going anywhere.”

“But it is! Don’t you see? If it doesn’t eventually get rolled over and possibly washed away by storms like these over time, or by a new slide caused by one, then one of these mountains is going to rumble and maybe spew in this direction, or at least cause some major and minor volcanic quakes. That’s why we put this unit where we did, and the best we could get was a seventy-six percent probability that we’d be okay here for the duration of our job. No, I would love to know why they abandoned it.”

“Maybe they didn’t. Maybe the slide was worse than you think and they’re all dead in there from shock or something,” Cross suggested. “That’d make Jerry happy. He could sell the first alien DNA.”

“Then why, if they went to so much trouble to get it here, didn’t anybody come looking for them? No, it doesn’t make sense.”

“Well, maybe someday somebody can come here with all the right diplomatic and translation moves and ask them,” An Li said, reclining on a bunk and yawning. “Me, I don’t give a damn unless it’s worth money to know or it’s something that might impact me.”

Randi just hoped that the answer didn’t impact them. They were, after all, now stuck down here surrounded by barely dormant volcanoes on a lava plain of uncertain thickness for the duration of a howling storm.

Had they been able to see through the storm all the way to the cliff face, and particularly whenever the cliff face was struck by lightning, they would have worried a bit more, for then they’d have seen the entire obsidian cliff throb like some living thing, some beating heart, with a glow that pulsed like a beacon in a swirl of terrorizing winds and rain.

One by one, each of the five in the C&C began to feel tired and dizzy, and almost without thinking more about it they either reclined in chairs or went to their bunks to let things pass. Randi Queson did have a fleeting thought that this might be some effect of the electrical storm and the stored Magi’s Stones, but before she could grab hold, announce it, and perhaps act to do something about it she, too, passed into a kind of nether sleep.

Randi Queson tried to mentally hold on, to at least keep steady against the onrushing hallucinations, but she could not. None of them could.

She was flying, flying through some strange, alien greenish sky with pink and yellow clouds.

Although it was clearly a point in some kind of atmosphere, she could see through it to the stars beyond, the whole starfield laid out before her, but not in the usual visual spectrum but through some other means. It was almost as if she were viewing some kind of photographic negative of the sky, an alien sky she’d never seen before filled with all the stars and formations of a globular cluster, but where light was dark and black was a kind of bright, soft pink.

Looking below, she saw a vast world that was heavily developed but long past its prime. Great domed cities stretched in uncounted number to the horizon, encapsulating ancient and dying masses whose shape and other details could not be determined from this height.

It would have been awesome if she hadn’t felt permeated with a sense of awful hopelessness, a feeling that all those billions plus billions down there were in total despair, creating so much unhappiness that it collected and beamed from every individual and every dome and perhaps every centimeter of the planet, and beyond, going to and right through Randi Queson. She felt tremendous sorrow for them, all the more because she knew that she could not help them in any way, only watch their decline into despair and death.

The others were all with her. She could feel them, sense them in a hundred inexpressible ways, yet she could not see her companions. They were wraiths, flying over a planet of the dead, but they were still wraiths, as helpless as any specter.

And now they were off the world, and into the strangely inverted and bizarrely colored void.

There were others out here as well. Many others, but wraiths just like themselves, able to witness but only to witness, as they went from world to world, system to system, in a flash of darkness, instantly going from world to world and finding only the feelings of horror, despair, and death.

There were Others, as well, on some of those worlds, and going between them. It was no more possible to tell anything else about them than it had been to tell details of the first and subsequent civilizations, but this was a different realm, a different sort of sensory perception, and they were clear as could be.

These were the Bringers of Despair, hatching from the dark, hidden places and wrapping themselves around the worlds they found and helplessly sucking the life out of them. The ones the Others attacked wanted to fight back, wanted to push back this horror, but they could not. Once attacked, they progressively lacked the energy to push against this overwhelming darkness, a darkness that seemed both infinitely collective and yet of one mind and attitude.

An Li had finally met Him.

They veered off, swallowing pride, running for their lives, flying through holes and folds in space one after the other, throwing off the pursuer or pursuers. All thought was gone; there was suddenly only panic, only fear, and a sense that they must return together.

And then it was all emotions, rising up like a giant wave and crashing down, washing over them, bathing them in a range so intense they could not bear it.

Inside the C&C module, as the storm still raged, only Eyegor was unaffected. The robot watched what the humans were doing with total confusion in its logical mind, but unable to determine anything about the cause except that it had to have something to do with the storm outside.

It nonetheless was watching and even recording scenes of sudden and complete human madness.

When they woke up, they were as confused and as physically and emotionally drained as they had ever been.

There were groans, and then attempts at rising, and finally one, then another, managed to sit up and look around.

The place stank. The smell of sweat and bodily fluids mixed with the acid smell of urine and the overwhelming scent of human excrement. One by one, awareness returned, and with it shock.

“My god! I’m bleeding!” Randi Queson exclaimed, looking down at herself. There were several wounds and quite a large number of ugly-looking bruises, but none of the wounds looked deep or in dangerous territory unless the surroundings infected them.

What was more startling was that she was mostly naked except for her boots and one part of her work shirt on her left arm. The material, tough synthetics that looked like denim but was much, much tougher, appeared to have been ripped off.

Jerry Nagel was further forward, but he neither looked nor sounded much better. He had his pullover shirt on, soaked with perspiration and stained here and there with blood but otherwise intact, but no pants. His body had a number of clawlike scratch marks that stung like hell, some still bleeding slightly, and he felt like he’d bitten his tongue half through. His balls ached as well, as if they were one big massive bruise.

He looked around, shook his head in bewilderment, and then caught sight of the nearly nude body of Lucky Cross lying draped, head down, over one of the chairs. There were more bloody wounds and the start of some nasty bruises on her backside, but none looked more than superficial. Still, she didn’t move at all, and he rushed over, worried that Cross was dead. He turned her over and almost did more damage as the heavy woman fell limply from the chair onto the floor, the heavy gravity making it even harder to cushion her fall. She looked worse in front than in back, and there were a number of wounds that would need attention—good god! Were those teeth marks? More like bites that had drawn blood, but he could see some movement and could tell that she at least was still alive.

Leaving her for the moment, he looked around the interior of the C&C module for the others. He found Queson rather quickly, but she was just sitting there, vacantly staring, shaking a little off and on. She looked up at him with a mixture of surprise and shock, but did and said nothing else.

That’s it! he thought, trying to get hold of the situation. We get back up to the ship, we go to medlab, and we get the hell out of this horror!

He was already formulating a theory of what had happened in the back of his mind, the sensory overload of close proximity to all the stones here and a mountainful not far off, electrically charged particles flying all over from the storm adding up to sheer insanity. He could remember almost nothing of it save the early visions, but you could deduce the rest from just looking around at the ones who’d also gone through it.

An Li was stark naked, lying on the floor, her legs in a spread Nagel wouldn’t have thought possible. She actually looked a bit better than the others, no bleeding body wounds, but there were lots of bruises and contusions present and suggested, and lots and lots of deep scratches. Around her mouth was a large amount of congealed blood. She looked like a vampire after a feast, or some kind of weird blood rite priestess of some ancient religion, but a check showed that most of it didn’t seem to be hers. She did, however, have a missing front tooth, and he felt a couple of his own, just on his right side, were at least loose. An wasn’t going to like the body and facial scars—nor would any of them. Well, at least those could be looked after if they had the money to get them fixed.

And then he found Sark, lying in a pool of more blood than Jerry Nagel had ever seen.

The big man must have torn at his own clothing and ripped much of it off. Still, that wasn’t what was so tough to look at.

He was certainly dead; no human being could suffer that loss, and the number of wounds he had, and where he had them, in addition to the one that had not so much slit his throat but more properly torn it out, was ghastly.

And yet Nagel could only stare for a moment and think, over and over again, No treasure is worth this. Nothing is worth something like this!

Appearances aside, he and the Doc seemed to be in the best physical condition, so he made his way back to her. She once more gave him that semivacant stare.

“You must snap out of it,” he said as firmly as possible, aware of all sorts of pain in his mouth and hoping he wasn’t mauling his words too much to be heard because of it. “Li and Lucky are alive but unconscious, and both are in pretty bad shape. Worse than us. We need to get them out of this charnel house here. We need to get them cleaned up. I can’t do it by myself. You will have to help me.”

“Wha…?” she managed, still in shock but partly responding to his words.

“We forgot about those damned stones. Half a ton in our cargo, who knows how much just over the rise, and a massive electrical storm to boot. It made us insane. Now we have to pick ourselves up and get out of here or we’ll die.”

She looked at him, trying to filter the information, but everything seemed so distant, so remote.

“Don’t you see?” he almost yelled at her, painful as it was. “That’s what happened to that alien scout car out there! And if we don’t get a move on, we’ll wind up going through it again and again until we’re all dead! C’mon! Stand up! Get a grip! I need the Randi Queson who had the nerve to talk to an alien worm! I need your strength! Come back to me, damn it! I just can’t do this alone!”

She seemed to come out of it, at least a little bit. “I—I can’t feel anything. It’s like I’m dead inside.”

“It’ll come back. Before it does, we need to be out of here and where we can all just cry it out.”

For the first time, she saw Lucky lying there. “What—is she dead?”

“No, I think she’s just out cold. Probably a concussion. If you can get me a bucket or something with a lot of warm or cool water in it and maybe a rag, then we can start. The fact that she’s not dead doesn’t mean that she can’t die.”

Queson nodded. “You want the medkit?”

“Bring it, but we don’t have enough stuff to treat all of us at once. You and I are gonna have to bleed a little longer while we see if we can bring Lucky and Li around. Let me start with Lucky, since I don’t think both of us together in our condition are gonna be able to manage a hundred fifty plus kilos, as well as the added weight down here, and move her anyplace. Li I can probably carry on my own once I make sure there aren’t broken bones.”

The Doc seemed to snap out of it, or at least to put it behind her until the current need was met. She was suddenly aware of the horrible smells.

“Us,” he told her. “It played every bit of us like a small child at a control center. No sense in washing ourselves off, not now. We couldn’t sterilize if we tried. Once we get ’em to where we can get out of here, then all of us can be cleaned up.”

While Nagel was tending as best he could to Cross, Randi asked, “You want me to see to Li?”

“It’s—well, don’t let any of your imagination run too wild when you see her. Over there. If you can check her for breaks and, if you think it’s okay, move her into the cabin area, any low bunk, then try what you can.”

“I told you. At the moment I can’t feel anything. Not shock, surprise, nothing. And I have seen my share of blood and death.”

She got up and went back to An Li.

She saw the blood all over the small woman’s mouth, saw Sark farther back lying in a still-spreading lake of blood, and guessed at least the basics. Sark had been almost a meter taller and probably two and a half times her weight, but, deep down, instinctively or by reflex, coming from the background she had, An Li knew how to kill a larger man like that. Poor Sark, she thought. He wasn’t much except muscle, but he was a loyal comrade and he didn’t deserve to die like that. At least, she thought, he probably wasn’t even consciously aware that he was done in, nor, most likely, was An Li conscious that she’d done him in. There would be some small comfort in that.

There was a real goose egg rising on the back of Li’s head, which was certainly the source of her coma or whatever it was, and some congealed blood in her hair, but there didn’t seem to be any breaks in the neck or spinal column. Her right arm showed a potential fracture, but if she came out of this then that would be bearable.

It would be nearly impossible for Queson to lift even the small woman, but she managed to get a grip under each arm and drag An Li out of the battle zone and back to cleaner and better lit circumstances.

She cleaned off Li as much as possible, used a soaked towel as a sort of compress for the head wound, and treated the other wounds with emergency spray. If there wasn’t a lot of internal damage and if the head wound caused no more problems, there was nothing that couldn’t be fixed when they got back to the Stanley’s excellent medical unit.

She went back into the smell and filth of the torn-up wardroom, wondering if there was some sort of curse attached to it at this point, and saw that Cross appeared to be coming slowly around.

“Li’s in her bunk. Bad concussion, maybe a broken arm, too. I cleaned out her mouth, and that whole area, too. Do you really think she bit off his penis?”

Nagel sighed. “I was afraid it might be something like that. Lucky? Gail? C’mon! Snap out of it! It’s Randi and Jerry!”

Gail “Lucky” Cross moaned but with the help of both of them managed to sit up on the floor and shake her head slowly from side to side, more because of the disorientation than in response to any questions.

“What the fuck happened?” she managed. “I don’t remember nothin’. I was sittin’ here and then, all of a sudden— Ouch! That hurts!”

“You got a bad and still-bleeding wound on the right side of your head,” Nagel told her. “Looks like you were hit with something rather than fell, but I can’t tell.”

“Jesus! What’s that stink? And where are my pants?”

“We’re all a little torn up,” Randi told her. “If you can make your way out of here, get cleaned up, sit in the shower, then lie down. We’ll be back to do the same.”

Cross looked around. “What about the others?”

“Sark’s dead, Li’s in a coma but I think she’ll make it. Her head’s as hard as yours,” Nagel told her. “C’mon! Don’t slip on this shit!” With Cross steadying on Nagel and being pulled up by Queson, she managed to get unsteadily to her feet, where the two of them were able to help her back into the quarters area.

It wasn’t until they were all back there and reasonably cleaned up, with their wounds, if not repaired, at least treated, that any of them thought about what went next.

“We can call the Stanley from the shuttle,” Cross suggested. “Get pulled up by the Cap on auto—I’m not sure how long it’s gonna be before I can fly that thing. My eye’s swelling and I can see out of it about as good as it looks, just for one thing. No sweat, though. And at least we can call it in and get the hell back to low gee and good food and proper medical treatment. I don’t like it that Li ain’t woke up yet.”

“I don’t, either, but I think you better stay where you are,” Jerry Nagel told her. “I’ll go up and make the call. I can’t fly it but I sure can do that much.”

Nagel managed to climb the aft interior stair by sheer willpower and make his way down the corridor towards the shuttle airlock. He was surprised to see that it was closed and all the controls were red. They’d done that with the worm business to seal things, but it wasn’t common practice and it sure shouldn’t have been that way now.

Something caused him to get a last burst of adrenaline, and he almost ran to the hatch and checked its settings. He put his palm on the code bar, and then could hear the compressors working inside the airlock. There was a slight difference between inside and out for their comfort, so this didn’t bother him, but now he began to wonder. The inner hatch rotated, irislike, and he stepped into the airlock itself. Now, just ahead, he could actually see through to the interior of the shuttle through the small window in the far hatch, or, rather, he should have been able to see it.

He put his bruised face right up to the lock and looked out.

What he saw was Melchior, just lighting up from planetrise, and the dock and associated hooks that held the shuttle to the larger craft.

The shuttle was gone.

Something made him turn and rush back along the corridor, over the quarters, and to the aft compartments designed for salvaged material. These were removable but sealable airtight containers, and they’d dumped the half ton or so of harvested gems and obsidian mixture into two of them.

Those two, and only those two, were now missing. He didn’t have to look; the master board told him so.

It didn’t make sense. Even if the captain had double-crossed them or gone nuts herself, she could only have recalled the shuttle and whatever it was hooked to. It was strictly an emergency procedure. And yet, he, Randi, Lucky, Li, and Sark were all accounted for. Who the hell was there left?

He turned and rushed back to tell the others, but he was yelling one single name, the only name that really fit the evidence.

“Eyegor, you programmed bastard!”

“Base C&C to Stanley, come in, Cap,” Nagel called for the hundredth time. He and Cross had taken turns for a full Melchior day and night and had gotten no response.

“I can’t figure out how it’s possible,” Cross told the other two. “I mean, even if Eyegor made it back up there, the captain would never leave us without us or proof or death. I just can’t believe she’d do this, and I sure don’t see how Eyegore could, or did.”

Jerry Nagel sighed. “You missed the point, Lucky. Eyegore’s nothing more than a glorified camera, or so we were told, right? So how did it fly the shuttle? How did it control it so precisely, with full knowledge of how to detach, and, most importantly, even if we go with the idea that it just triggered the automatic emergency retrieval, how then did it detach, float to the back, pick just those two containers, lift them into the very limited bay of the shuttle, and then take off for the ship? There’s only one answer. Because it was designed and programmed to do it right from the start.”

“Sanders! That slimy son of a bitch! If I ever get my hands around his throat I’ll bite off more than his private parts!” Cross snarled.

Nagel nodded. “But the idea is to stick us here. Eyegore even has the exact place recorded where it left us, and it probably has scenes of our madness to explain to anybody back home that we succumbed to something weird and killed each other in some orgy of violence. Nobody will ask questions. He’ll probably even make a movie out of it. And he’ll sell the stones in little bits and pieces and make more millions, and he alone will still know how to get to the Three Kings.”

“But how did he get Cap to go along with this? And what keeps her quiet?”

“I dunno, but he’s got this all worked out, you can count on that,” Nagel asserted firmly.

Randi Queson looked over at both of them. “Remember that they said they did work on her memory and logic chips? Even she told us that she got the navigational information only when she needed it and that it was wiped as soon as she got back. Remember?”

“Yeah, I—oh shit! I see what you mean! She isn’t gonna remember anything. Probably not even us or this whole job. One command and as far as she’s concerned she’s been in orbit getting overhauled all this time and we’re long gone to other jobs. Great! Just great!”

Cross chuckled. “If we’d’a been smarter and not suckers and known this was comin’, too bad we didn’t stay up on Balshazzar. At least that’s a kind of no-work tropical paradise.”

“Maybe for the rest of you, but not me,” Jerry Nagel replied. “I think I’d rather see what’s here than be trapped for the rest of my life around telepathic aliens and thousands of Holy Joes.”

“Well, we don’t have that option, and we can’t stay here,” Randi Queson pointed out. “Another of those storms could come along at any moment, and I don’t think any of us would survive a second one like that, at least mentally. That means moving out of this valley, taking with us whatever we can and leaving this here, probably like they did years ago.”

Nagel nodded. “Well, I think the scooters will still work, which will help. If we can get off and find a safer, more stable area to camp and near some source of water and maybe even food, and ferry what we can from here to there, it’ll be a start.”

“What about An Li? How can we move her until she wakes up?” Randi asked him.

“If necessary, we’ll strap her on and move her that way,” he replied. “I don’t see anything else we can do.”

The two women said nothing. There wasn’t much else to say.

Jerry Nagel sighed. “But first I’m going to bury Sark. He deserves that. Then we’ll start exploring and see what we can find. One step at a time, but I think we need to get out of here before the next storm no matter what. In fact, I’m prepared to say that if another storm looms, we all get the hell out of this big expanse, away from whatever is inside that cliff. We come back only when it’s relatively clear and breezy.”

“I’m for that,” Randi Queson told him.

While Nagel was preparing the grave for Sark’s body, he suddenly heard Lucky Cross calling from the underside hatch. “Jerry! An Li’s moaning! I think she may be coming to!”

He put down his excavator and ran for the hatch. Sark had waited this long; a little longer wouldn’t hurt.

She was coming around, twisting and turning and grimacing in her bed, although her eyes remained shut. It took another fifteen or twenty minutes, with a lot of soothing words, hands-on guidance, and wet cloths, but she finally lay still for a moment, then opened her eyes. She had two black eyes—they all had one or two of those—but inside, the pupils looked relatively clear if slightly vacant. She looked up at their faces and smiled, but it wasn’t an An Li smile, rather it was an innocent smile, a child’s smile. “Hello!” she said with a slight lisp.

“Hello yourself,” Randi responded softly. “How do you feel?”

“I hurt. And my arm hurts, too.”

“You have a lot of cuts and bruises, and you broke your arm, but we have treated them and your arm’s in a splint and cast. It should be okay over time.”

“What’s a splint?”

“That thing you can probably feel under the cast. It keeps you from moving the arm until it’s better.”

“What’s a cast?”

They all began to sense that something was wrong. “Do you know who you are and where you are?” Randi asked her sweetly.

“My name is Li Li,” she responded. “What’s your name?”

Queson had a feeling that the head injury had done a lot more than it appeared to have, either that or the consequences of the coma. “My name is Randi. This is Jerry, and that’s Lucky. How old are you, Li Li?”

“I dunno, Randi. I never learned to count yet.”

Queson stood up and whispered to the others, “It may come back. Things like this are really rare. Damn! If we just had the ship, we could find out if there’s a physical cause and treat it. Here…?”

Nagel looked down at the one-time tough woman of the bunch and said, “Well, we can’t wait for any miracle cures. We’re going to have to move, and she comes with us or for sure she dies. If either of you has any maternal instincts, you may need them in the days and weeks to come, though, that’s for sure.”

“I’ll look after her for now,” Randi Queson told them. “Lucky will continue with the inventory and packing so we move what we can. You finish up outside, and then find us a place to live for now that’s far enough away we won’t have nightmares, but close enough we can actually move stuff.”

Nagel nodded. “Then we’re all agreed. No matter what, we survive. We survive until one of us, or somebody for us, can demonstrate how we were left here and go back and slowly roast a certain son of a bitch.”

“One more trip,” Jerry said insistently.

“Okay, one more, but that’s it for now,” Randi told him. “Every time I’ve been left here I get the strangest feeling that an alien voice is going to come out of somewhere and tell me that negotiations are irrelevant. We’re already down to little things we forgot and some things we’re never going to use that somehow we feel paranoid about not taking. Face it.”

“Yeah, I know, I know,” Nagel told her. “Still, one last look around. It’s bright and clear, and that one storm we went through here didn’t do much except wet us down and keep us awake, so one more trip.”

They were in one of the dense forests that abounded all over Melchior, with varicolored trees and bushes and a canopy of leaves and fronds that at least helped filter the downpours. There was fresh water in pools, even a pretty little multiple waterfall dropping three or four meters, then filling an indentation in the rock, then spilling over another few meters, and so on.

They had the advantage of some of the portable testing equipment, too, as long as the power lasted and so long as nothing malfunctioned. One included a kind of syringe that, inserted into plant matter, gave its entire composition and, most importantly, if the plant matter or fruit or whatever was edible by humans without risk and what sort of nutrition it delivered.

There were at least a half dozen fruits and some ground and vine-based vegetables that were surprisingly nutritious, if not always very good tasting to the human palate. It was amazing what you could get used to and no longer even notice once you were forced to, though, or so they discovered.

Randi suspected that the other two were sneaking back and getting heated meals from the food synthesizer in the C&C unit, but it wouldn’t matter much longer. Sooner or later they’d have to adapt to eating this gunk just like she and An Li already had. Better to go cold turkey and simply dream of the tastes of yesteryear.

Although technically on the slope of one of the monster volcanoes, they were more than forty kilometers from the internal valley and the obsidian cliff and the abandoned C&C unit.

They’d had a little informal service for Sark, the best they could do, and now, as this was to be the last trip, or at least was intended to be the last trip, they were going to turn on the locator beacon inside the unit just in case.

Normally this would have been standard operating procedure from the start, but they didn’t know how many non human receivers might be able to hear it as well, and the last thing they wanted right now was that kind of company. This was hard enough; acclimating to the world and its conditions came first and foremost. Later they could explore and see about communications with whoever or whatever else might live somewhere on this big piece of land.

Randi’s suspicions were correct on the food situation, but the place still stank too much for eating. When Lucky and he got what they wanted, they came outside and ate it, calling it their “reunion picnics with Sark,” always toasting him with something good and pouring a little symbolically on his grave.

“You got the remote?” he asked Lucky when they were done.

She nodded. “One push and we arm the security perimeter, turn off all but standby power inside, and activate the beacon. God only knows when anybody might hear it and come runnin’.”

Suddenly there was a rumbling sound, and the ground began to shake. The scooters toppled over, and so did they.

It stopped for a moment, and Jerry picked up his scooter and hopped on, and Lucky did the same. “What the fuck was that?” she yelled to him as they rose into the air.

“Quake!” he shouted. “Push the button and let’s get the hell out of here! Something’s gonna blow and it’s not gonna be pleasant!”

They both accelerated to the maximum but—now in particular—excruciatingly slow speed away from the C&C. As they made it to the rise that would take them out and towards their camp, Cross slowed, turned, and looked back. When Jerry realized that, he did the same.

She pushed the button, and the place they’d just left became a beacon and a fenced-in security area. Human searchers would have little trouble with it, but anyone else might have problems.

“Goodbye, Sark,” she said with a sigh.

At that moment the whole interior valley began shaking so badly that she could actually see it with her own eyes, and there were blasts of disturbed air coming from inside.

Slides began to happen, and then, without further warning, tiny cracks began to appear in the valley’s rock floor. The cracks expanded more and more, until they were like some kind of massive jigsaw puzzle, and then out of the cracks came yellow and red ooze and acrid smoke.

“Holy shit!” she said. “Another ten minutes…”

He understood her perfectly, thinking the same thing.

And now, here and there, things widened even more. The C&C appeared to be floating now, uneasily trying to balance itself on a large block of rock now resting on a sea of magma.

All at once it tipped over, and magma started running up one side and dissolving the rock shelf, causing even more instability. When it was about a third dissolved, the weight of the C&C became too much to support and the rest of the solid rock suddenly and completely flipped over, leaving a pool of bubbling, churning liquid rock where it had been.

“Well, so much for the rescue beam,” Cross said, turning and starting slowly away.

Nagel paced her for a bit. “Well, there’s one thing. At least we don’t have to worry about the security system being inadequate…”

“Now we’re citizens of Melchior, I guess,” she said to him. “But, God, I hope I live long enough to see Normie show up to film his epic…”