and finally slewed to a stop. Reave was the first one to get to his feet. Smoke drifted through the seriously canting observation deck, but there was no fire.
'Is everyone okay?'
There were groans of acknowledgment. No one had suffered more than cuts and bruises.
Billy was nursing a sprained wrist. 'An old-fashioned Flash Gordon airship crash where everyone dusts themselves off and walks away.'
'An old-fashioned what?'
Billy shook his head and helped Blaisdell to his feet. 'Nothing.'
Reave cut through the cross talk. Billy could go on all night dragging weird stuff out of his memory. It was something he did in the aftermath of stress. 'Let's get out of here. The damn thing could still blow up.'
Power was out, so the Minstrel Boy threw the lock onto manual mode and wrestled with the wheel that swung the door open. The five of them hurried through it and then kept up a fast walk until they were some fifty yards from the grounded ship. It was only when they were what Reave considered to be a safe distance away that they turned to look back at it. Considering what the R1009 had been through, it was in comparatively good shape. The framework was twisted in a couple of places, and parts of the outer skin had been blown away, but it had not broken up.
The worst damage was up by the nose, where a blackened hole had been blown in the fuselage.
Renatta sighed. 'I guess it lost its luxury status.'
Billy glanced at Reave. 'You think there's any chance of it flying again?'
Reave scratched his head. 'I'm damned if I know. These things are supposed to be able to fly when they're half falling apart, but this baby's taken a lot of punishment'
At that moment a smaller lock nearer the nose popped open. The metaphysicians began carefully climbing out. They seemed hardly touched by the crash. Not even their bodysuits were dirty. Reave went back to meet them, but before he could reach the main group, Showcross Gee detached himself from the other twenty-six and headed him off.
'This is a bad business,' the metaphysician said.
Reave nodded. 'Have you seen anything of the crew? Did they survive?'
Showcross Gee shook his head. 'We simply got ourselves; out of the aircraft, just as you did.' Showcross Gee was nor going to brook any reproach from the help.
Reave looked back at the ship. 'I guess we ought to go back inside and see if there's anyone left alive in there. It doesn't look as though the ship's going to blow.'
He started to round up the others, but Showcross Gee called him back. 'Do you have any idea what this place might be?'
Reave looked across the strange checkerboard plain. 'I don't have a clue, except that it doesn't look like an area of generated stasis. I think this is something random, and I'd like to get out of here as soon as we possibly can.'
Showcross Gee was thoughtful. 'That's interesting. I think I tend to agree with you.'
He knelt down and placed a hand flat on the ground. 'Strange.'
'I think I ought to go and look for survivors.'
Showcross Gee ignored Reave. 'It hardly feels like any normal mineral at all.'
Reave was getting a little tired of Showcross Gee's detached indifference. 'What does it feel like?'
'I hesitate to guess.'
'I'm going to look for survivors.'
Showcross Gee straightened up, dusting off his hands. 'At least we saw a disrupter close up.'
Reave scowled. 'That's a treat I could have missed.'
He walked over to where the others were waiting and beckoned to the Minstrel Boy. 'You come with me. We're going to the control room to see if any of the crew made it through the crash. Billy and Renatta, you two go aft and check the cabins. See what happened to Jet Ace and Stent.'
Clay Blaisdell glanced around. 'What do I do?'
Reave nodded toward the metaphysicians. 'Keep an eye on them. See that they don't pull anything.'
'What could they pull?'
'I don't know, but I don't trust them.'
Showcross Gee had rejoined the other twenty-six. They had walked over to the deep trench left by the disrupter that ran like a long straight scar in the geometric landscape, clear to the horizon. They were peering into it. Strange shards of color still lingered in the trench, gradually fading.
Reave and the Minstrel Boy made their way through the ship, walking with great care on the tilted deck. The door to the control room was jammed, and they had to force it. Inside they found that a bulkhead had been blown out, and although one control console remained just about intact, the rest of the control surfaces were a spaghetti of tangled metal, shattered tubes, and slimy ropes of leaking biogel. Two from the crew of six were bending over a third who had a bad head wound. A fourth was sprawled on a contour chair with her head at an angle that left no doubt that she was dead. The remaining two were rigging bridging lines to the control console that was still intact. They all turned in alarm as Reave came through the door, shoulder first.
'I'm sorry to burst in like this; it was jammed.'
'Don't worry about it. We couldn't get it open from the inside. We feared we were trapped in here.'
Reave noted that no matter what their fears, the crew members were still calmly going about their business. There was something robotlike about the hexads that ran airships.
'Do you need any help?' he asked.
'I think we can manage now that the door's open.'
'How bad is the damage?'
'We should be able to lift the ship in a couple of hours. Control will have to be largely manual, but we will be able to fly.'
'What about the stasis field?'
'We'll be ready to test that in a few minutes.'
'So we have no insurmountable problems?'
'There is one.'
'What's that?'
The crewman indicated a section of tangled wreckage that Reave had been trying not to look at. Something pale and bloody was crushed in the middle of it.
'The brain host is dead.'
That was something that turned even Reave's stomach. The lizardbrain core of the guidance system had been grafted onto a tailored human host — if, indeed, something could be called human that had no arms, legs, nose, or mouth, that breathed through a vent in its chest like a gill and stared unblinkingly out of huge, mad saucer eyes.
'So we have no guidance?'
'None.'
'What would be our chances of finding a settlement if we just went in blind?'
'In a reality this size, it could be years before a chance stasisfall. Maybe hundreds of years.'
'Suppose we stay here and wait for help?'
'It's our estimation that here may not be here for very much longer. It has the feel of something random and very unstable. It may have only developed at the coming of the disrupter, and, now that it's gone, all this could simply vanish.'
Reave slowly turned and faced the Minstrel Boy. He did not have to voice what he was thinking.
The Minstrel Boy sagged. 'I really don't want to do this.'
The crewman looked at the two of them inquiringly. 'Is there something I should know?'
'The Minstrel Boy has a lizardbrain implant.'
The crewman beamed. 'Then we have no insurmountable problems.'
'He has to use cyclatrol to achieve cognizance.'
The crewman's face fell. 'Oh.'
The Minstrel Boy regarded him with an expression that was almost sad. 'You know what that means?'
