wash of colored lines. Then the voice was silent, and the storm pattern around Gold glowed blue and white through the bow window.
Chapter Twenty-two
Citizens' Tree
KENDY'S READINGS WERE BEGINNING TO BLUR. FRUSTRATINGLY, the CARM's aft and ventral cameras worked perfectly. He had two fine views of the stars and the thickening Smoke Ring atmosphere. Plasma streamed past the dorsal camera, and Kendy sought the spectral lines of silicon and metals: signs that the CARM's hull was boiling away. There was some ablation, not much more than he would have expected when the CARM was new.
Inside the cabin the CO2 content was building. The jolting looked bad enough to tenderize meat. The passengers were suffering: mouths wide, chests heaving. Temperature was up to normal and rising. A blurred figure snapped its safety bands loose and struggled to tear its clothing away. Kendy couldn't get medical readings through the growing ionization, but the pilot had been under terrific tension earlier.
It looked chancy, whether the CARM would live or die. Kendy wasn't sure which he preferred.
He had bungled.
The principle was simple and had served the State before. To further the cause, a potential convert was ordered to commit some obscene crime. He could never repudiate the cause after that. To do so would be to admit that he had committed an abomination.
The caveat was simple too. One must never give such an order unless it would be obeyed.
Kendy was ashamed and angry. He had attempted to bind their loyalty to him by ordering an execution. Instead, he had almost turned them all into mutineers! He'd had to back down gracefully and fast.
He'd had no chance to recover from that, with the ionosphere building up around the CARM, cutting communications. His medical readings told him that they had lied to him, somewhere. He shouldn't have forced them to do that either! He didn't know enough even to guess at what they were hiding.
Too late now. If he sent some lethal course correction now, ionization would garble it. If they lived, they would tell of a Kendy who was powerful but gullible, a Kendy who could be intimidated. If they died Kendy would remain a legend fading into a misty past.
The forward view was a blur of fire as the CARM plowed deeper into atmosphere. He was losing even the cabin sensors.
There was flame in front of them, transparent blue, streaming to the sides. The Grad felt the heat on his face. They'd be losing air again: the black ice around the rim of the bow window had turned to mud, mud that bubbled. He'd been wrong. The screaming flame-hot air massed before the bow was coming in.
Things came at them. Little things were hopeless; they hit or they didn't. Blood spots turned black and evaporated. Larger objects could be avoided.
His hands strangled the chair arms. Trying to steer the carm through this would have been bad enough. Watching Lawri steer was distilled horror. From her rigid posture, the knotted jaw and bared teeth, she was just at the edge of screaming hysterics. Her hands hovered like claws, reached, withdrew, then tapped suddenly at blue dashes. His own hands twitched when she was slow to see danger.
The chairs were full. Citizens had objected, but the Grad had simply kept yelling until it got done: the corpse of Horse moored to cargo fixtures; Mark the silver man in back, gripping cargo moorings with his abnormal strength; Clave beside him, swearing that his own strength was enough; everyone else strapped into seats that would give some protection, even to jungle giants, against thrust from the bow. Reentry wasn't like using the main motor. It was an attack. The air was trying to pound the carm into bits of flaming starstuff.
Lawri had lived half her life with the carm. She hadtobebetterat this than the Grad, she'd insisted, and she was right. He gripped the chair arms and waited to be smashed like a bug.
The carm fell east and in. Integral trees showed foreshortened, as three…four pairs of green dots, hard to see…she'd seen them: jets fired. A bit of green fluff; dead ahead…Lawri fired port jets the carm swung sluggishly around, shuddering as the flpming air blasted the nose off-center. Forward jets: the carm eased backward, too slowly, while the fluff swelled to become an oncoming jungle.
A grunt of pain, aft. Clave had been jarred loose. The silver man was holding him in place with a hand on his chest.
The Grad saw birds and scarlet flowers before the jungle was past. Lawri let the bow face forward again. A pond a klomter across just missed swatting them; droplets of fog in its wake rang the hull like a myriad tiny chimes. The debris was growing ever thicker.
And it was moving past them more slowly.
Something barred their path like a green web. It might have been half of an integral tree with the tuft gone wild, the foliage spreading like gauze, the trunk ending in a swollen knob. Small birds played in the slender branches. Swordbirds hovered at the edges. He'd never seen such a plant…and Lawri was steering clear of it.
The Grad said, 'Lawri?'
'It's over,' she said. 'Damn, I'm tired. Take the controls, Jeffer.'
'I have it. Relax.'
Lawri rubbed her eyes fiercely. The Grad touched blue dashes to slow the cairn further. A fingertip touch set the cabin warmth control to normal. The cabin was already warm. If it hadn't been lethally cold when they entered atmosphere, they might well have roasted.
He looked back at his passengers. Six of Quinn Tribe remained.
Twelve total, to start a new tribe…'We're back,' he said. 'I don't know just where. Are we all alive? Does anyone need medical help?'
'Lawri You did it!' Merril chortled. 'We lived long enough to get thirsty!'
The Grad said, 'We're low on fuel and there's no water at all. Let's find a pond. Then pick a home.'
'Open the doors,' Jayan said. She released her straps and moved aft, with Jinny following.
'Why?'
'Horse.'
Right.' He opened the airlock to a mild breeze that smelled fresh, clean, wonderful. The carm's air stank! It was stale, a treefodder stink, fear and rotting meat and too many people breathing in each other's faces. Why hadn't he noticed?
The twins released the corpse from its mooring, wincing at the touch. They towed it through the doors. The Grad waited while they sent the bones of the salmon bird after it.
Then he fired the aft motors. If I met his ghost, he wouldn't even recognize me. How can I say I'm sorry? Never use the main motor unless—
Horse dwindled into the sky.
The pond was huge, spinning fast enough to form a lens-shape, fast enough to have spun off smaller ponds. The Grad chose one of the smaller satellites, no bigger than the carm itself. He let the carm drift forward until the bow window just touched the silver sphere.
What happened then left him breathless. He was looking into the interior of the pond. There were water- breathing things shaped like long teardrops with tiny wings, moving through a maze of green threads. He turned on the bow lights, and the water glowed. There was a jungle in there, and swimming waterbirds darting in flocks among the plants.
Lawri roused him. 'Come on, Jeffer. Nobody else knows how to do this. Pick two mutineers with good lungs.'
He followed her aft and didn't ask her about lungs until he'd figured it out himself. 'Clave, Anthon, we need some muscle. Bring the squeezegourds. Better than lungs, Scientist.'
'Squeezegourds, fine. If you'd planned your mutiny better, you'd have dismounted the pump and stored it
