ruins. At the center of devastation, buildings had not simply been toppled, but pulverized to a fine dust that trailed eastward, riding the prevailing breeze.
Had similar evil already befallen Tarek Town, where the pleasant green Roney met the icy Bibur? Or Dolo Village, whose fine dam sheltered the prosperous hive of his aunts and mothers? Though Blade had grown up near humans, he now found that stress drove Anglic out of his mind. For now, the logic of his private thoughts worked better in Galactic Six.
My situation — it seems hopeless.
To Mount Guenn — there is no longer a path by ocean ship.
With Sara and the others — I cannot now rendezvous.
So much for my promise … So much for my vow.
Other qheuens were rising out of the water nearby, their cupolas bobbing to the surface like a scattering of corks. Some venturesome blues had already reached the ruined streets ahead of Blade, offering their strong backs and claws to assist rescue parties, searching through the rubble of fallen towers for survivors. He also saw a few reds and several giant grays, who must have somehow survived the night of horrors without a freshwater refuge. Some appeared wounded and all were dust-coated, but they set to work alongside hoons, humans, and others.
A qheuen feels uneasy without a duty to fulfill. Some obligation that can be satisfied, like a scratched itch, through service. On the original race homeworld, gray matrons used to exploit that instinct ruthlessly. But Jijo had changed things, promoting a different kind of fealty. Allegiance to more than a particular hive or queen.
Seeing no chance that he could accomplish his former goal and catch up with Sara, Blade consciously rearranged his priority facets, assigning himself a new short-term agenda.
Corpses meant nothing to him. He was unmoved by the dead majority of Ovoom Town. Yet he roused his bulk, pumping five legs into rapid motion, rushing to help those left with a spark of life.
• • •
Survivors and rescuers picked through the wreckage with exaggerated care, as if each overturned stone might conceal danger.
Like most settlements, this one had been mined by a chapter of the Explosers Guild, preparing the city for deliberate razing if ever the long-prophesied Judgment Day arrived. But when it finally came, the manner was not as foreseen by the scrolls. There were no serene, dispassionate officials from the great Institutes, ordaining evacuation and tidy demolition, then weighing the worth of each race by how far it had progressed along the Path of Redemption. Instead there had poured down an abrupt and cruelly impartial cascade of raging flame, efficient only at killing, igniting some of the carefully placed charges that the explosers had reverently tended for generations … and leaving others smoldering like booby traps amid the debris.
When the explosers’ local headquarters blew up, a huge fireball had risen so high that it briefly licked the underbelly of the Jophur corvette, forcing a hurried retreat. Even now, several miduras after the attack, delayed blasts still rocked random parts of town, disrupting mercy efforts, setting rubble piles tottering.
Matters improved when urrish volunteers from a nearby caravan galloped into town. With their sensitive nostrils, the urs sniffed for both unexploded charges and living flesh. They proved especially good at finding unconscious or hidden humans, whose scent they found pungent.
Miduras of hard labor merged into a blur. By late afternoon, Blade was still at it, straining on a rope, helping clear the stubborn obstruction over a buried basement. The rescue team’s ad hoc leader, a hoonish ship captain, boomed out rhythmic commands.
“Hr-r-rm, now pull, friends!.. Again, it’s coming!.. And again!”
Blade staggered as the stone block finally gave way. A pair of nimble lorniks and a lithe chimpanzee dived through the exposed opening, and soon dragged out a g’Kek with two smashed wheel rims. The braincase was intact, however, and all four eyestalks waved a dance of astounded gratitude. The survivor looked young and strong. Rims could be repaired, and spokes would reweave all by themselves.
But where will he live until then? Blade wondered, knowing that g’Keks preferred city life, not the nearby jungle where many of Ovoom’s citizens had fled. Will it be a world worth rolling back to, or one filled with Jophur- de-signed viruses and hunter robots, programmed to satisfy an ancient vendetta?
The work crew was about to resume its unending task when a shrill cry escaped the traeki who had been assigned lookout duty, perched on a nearby rubble pile with its ring-of-sensors staring in all directions at once.
“Observe! All selves, alertly turn your attentions in the direction indicated!”
A pair of tentacles aimed roughly south and west. Blade lifted his heavy carapace and tried bringing his cupola to bear, but it was dust-coated and he had no water to clean it. If only qheuens had been blessed with better eyesight.
By Ifni, right now I’d settle for tear ducts.
An object swam into view, roughly spherical, moving languidly above the forested horizon, as if bobbing like a cloud. Lacking any perspective for such a strange sight, Blade could not tell at first how big it was. Perhaps the titanic Jophur battleship had come, instead of dispatching its little brother! Were the Jophur returning to finish the job? Blade remembered tales of Galactic war weapons far worse than the corvette had used last night. Weapons capable of melting a continent’s crust. A mere river would prove no refuge, if the aliens meant to use such tools.
But no. He saw the globelike surface ripple in an unsteady breeze. It appeared to be made of fabric, and much smaller than he had thought.
Two more globelike forms followed the leader into view, making a threesome convoy. Blade instinctively switched organic filters in his cupola, observing them in infrared. At once he saw that each flying thing carried a sharp heat glow beneath, suspended by cables from the globe itself.
Others standing nearby — those with sharper eyesight — passed through several reactions. First anxious dread, then puzzlement, and finally a kind of joyful wonder they expressed with shrill laughter or deep, umbling tones.
“What is it?” asked a nearby red qheuen, even more dust-blind than Blade.
“I think—” Blade began to answer. But then a human cut in, shading his eyes with both hands.
“They’re balloons! By Drake and Ur-Chown … they’re hot air balloons!”
A short time later, even the qheuens could make out shapes hung beneath the bulging gasbags. Urrish figures standing in wicker baskets, tending fires that intermittently flared with sudden, near-volcanic heat. Blade then realized who had come, as if out of the orange setting sun.
The smiths of Blaze Mountain must have seen last night’s calamity from their nearby mountain sanctum. The smiths were coming to help succor their neighbors.
It seemed blasphemous, in a strange way. For the Sacred Scrolls had always spoken of doom arriving from the fearsome open sky.
Now it seemed the cloudless heavens could also bring virtue.
Lester Cambel
HE WAS TOO BUSY NOW TO FEEL RACKED WITH conscience pangs. As commotion at the secret base neared a fever pitch, Lester had no time left for wallowing in guilt. There were slurry tubes to inspect — a pipeline threading its meandering way through the boo forest, carrying noxious fluids from the traeki synthesis gang to tall, slender vats where it congealed into a paste of chemically constrained hell.
Lester also had to approve a new machine for winding league after league of strong fiber cord around massive trunks of greatboo, multiplying their strength a thousandfold.
Then there was the matter of kindling beetles. One of his assistants had found a new use for an old pest — a dangerous, Buyur-modified insect that most Sixers grew up loathing, but one that might now solve an irksome technical problem. The idea seemed promising, but needed morc tests before being incorporated in the plan.
Piece by piece, the scheme progressed from Wild-Eyed Fantasy all the way to Desperate Gamble. In fact, a local hoonish bookie was said to be covering bets at only sixty to one against eventual success — the best odds so far.
Of course, each time they overcame a problem, it was replaced by three more. That was expected, and Lester even came to look upon the growing complexity as a blessing. Keeping busy was the only effective way to
