Ship of Strangers

CHAPTER NINE

The grid reference Surgenor had been given was so precise that he could have put the module on the designated spot with cross-hair accuracy, but Giyani told him to halt two hundred metres short. He opened the doors and waited until the three soldiers had stepped out on to the dark sand. The desert air was cold, the nightly temperature drop on Saladin being accentuated by the fact that the surface sand, by turning white during its exposure to sunlight, reflected away much of the day’s heat instead of absorbing it.

“This should only take a few minutes,” Giyani said to Surgenor. “We’ll want to move off immediately we get back, so I want you to stay here and remain alert. Keep your motors turning and be ready to head north as soon as I give the word.”

“Don’t worry, Major—I won’t want to sit around here.”

Giyani put on goggle-like nightviewers and handed a pair to Surgenor. “Put those on and keep watching us. If you see anything going seriously wrong, get out of here and then radio the ship.”

Surgenor put the viewers on and blinked as he saw Giyani’s face etched with unnatural reddish light. “Are you expecting trouble?”

“No—just being prepared.”

“Major, is it not true that there’s a full-scale diplomatic mission on its way to this planet?”

“What of it, Surgenor?” Giyani’s voice had lost its specious friendliness.

“Colonel Nietzel might want a feather in his cap—but other people might say he was improperly dressed.”

“The Colonel isn’t exceeding his authority, driver—but you are.”

The three soldiers moved quietly away from the survey module and Surgenor looked beyond them for the first time. It was curiously difficult to focus his eyes—a sensation rather like peering through a badly adjusted tridi viewer—but he picked out an upright figure, so motionless that it might have been a spar of wood driven into the sand.

He felt a mixture of emotions—awe compounded with fear and respect. If all the theories were valid he was looking at a representative of the most formidable culture men had yet encountered in their blind thrusts across the galaxy, a race which breasted the river of time as easily as a starship crossed the graviton tides of space. Every instinct he had told him that such beings should be approached with reverence, and only after they had indicated their willingness to traffic in ideas, but it was obvious that Giyani had other ideas.

The major was prepared to use force against an entity which had the power to slip through his fingers like smoke. On the face of it, the action was ill-conceived and doomed to failure—and yet Giyani was an intelligent man. Surgenor frowned as he remembered the major’s comment about the Saladinian being a pregnant female…

The alien figure moved suddenly, its grey shrouds swirling, as the three men drew near. Giyani advanced on it and for a few seconds it looked as though a conversation was being attempted, then the hooded figure turned away. One of the soldiers threw something and a hissing cloud of gas enveloped the retreating figure. It sagged to the ground and remained motionless.

The three soldiers lifted the inert alien and carried it towards the module. Surgenor engaged the drive and swung the vehicle closer to them, with its nose pointing north.

For a moment, during the slowing turn, the desert seemed to be alive with flickers of light and swooping, shrouded figures, but the illusion faded abruptly and by the time he had slid the module to a halt there was nothing visible but the three humans and their strange burden.

In a few seconds they were inside the vehicle. Surgenor twisted in his seat and looked at the unconscious alien on the floor. Even with the aid of the nightviewers he could barely discern a pale oval face in an aperture of the flowing robes. It is a female, he thought, then wondered how he knew.

“Get moving,” Giyani snapped. “At top speed, mister.”

Surgenor selected air cushion suspension and engaged forward drive before the module had properly cleared the ground. It accelerated northwards in a snaking, waltzing surge of power, trailing a huge fantail of upflung sand.

Giyani relaxed into his seat with a sigh. “That’s the way to do it. Don’t slow down until you see the ships.”

Surgenor became aware that he could smell the alien. The module’s cabin was filled with a sweet musky odour, reminiscent of Concord grapes or some other fruit he had not tasted since his childhood. He wondered if it was the female’s natural scent or an artificial perfume, then decided it was probably the former.

“How long will it take us to get back?” Giyani said.

“About an hour at this rate.” Surgenor increased the brightness of his control panel lights. Not that speed will help us any.”

“What does that mean, David?” Giyani’s voice was throaty with excitement or satisfaction.

“If the Saladinians really can move about in time there’s no point in trying to surprise them, or in trying to evade them, either. All they have to do is go back a few hours and stop you before you even started.”

“They didn’t do it, did they?”

“No, but we couldn’t hope to predict the way they will think or react in any given situation. Their minds are bound to be…’ Surgenor broke off as the alien on the floor gave a tremulous moan. At the same instant more ghostly flickers of light appeared and faded on the dark surface of the desert ahead, and it crossed his mind that the two events might be connected in some way which was beyond his understanding or previous experience.

“We should slow down, Major,” he said, making a fumbling effort to visualize time as a highway with hour-markers in place of milestones. “At this speed we have a longish stopping distance, which means a longish stopping time, and that could make us easier targets.”

“Targets?”

“Easier to see. In time, I mean. It makes us more predictable…’

“I’ve got an idea, David.” Giyani turned in his seat and grinned back at Kelvin as he spoke. “Why don’t you take a couple of minutes before dinner tonight and write us a tactical handbook? I’m sure that Colonel Nietzel would be grateful for any guidance you could give him.”

Surgenor shrugged. “It was just a thought.”

“You could call it ‘Tactics For Temporal Confrontation’.” Giyani was unwilling to forego his joke. “By D. Surgenor, bus driver.”

“All right, Major,” Surgenor said resignedly, “don’t flog it to…’

His voice was lost as, without warning, Module Five was drenched in blinding greenish light. Sunlight, he thought incredulously.

And then the massive vehicle was falling.

Images of lush green foliage whipped across the viewscreens as the module tilted, struck the ground on one side and bounded upwards again. There was a series of sharp reports as it mowed down a thicket of small trees, blanking out most of the viewscreens in the process as the sensors were wiped off the outer skin. Finally the vehicle slid to a halt in a tangle of ropy vegetation, and the thunderous sound of its progression gave way to a fretful hissing of gas escaping from a ruptured pipe. A few seconds later the shrill insistent bleeping of an alarm circuit announced that the cabin was becoming contaminated with radioactive matter.

Surgenor released himself from the clamps which had automatically sprung from the back of his seat at the first impact. He threw open the door nearest him, admitting a billow of hotly humid air of a kind which—his instincts told him immediately—the planet Saladin had not known in geological ages.