enormous. Hoban thought it was like being inside a snare drum that some madman was attempting to play.
45
“It's gettin' too close for comfort!” Badger cried as his refuge in a corner of the room was zapped with blue-white flame.
“You can say that again,” Glint said. “We better get out of here!”
“I'm thinking about it,” Badger said. “We might need to regroup, reorganize….”
Machine-gun bullets stitched across the ship's walls above their heads, showering them with fragments of metal. There was more noise as a concussion grenade, thrown by Hoban, landed just outside of effective range.
“Okay,” Badger said. “Time we got out of here.”
The normal egress port was barred, but an elevator to other areas stood with its doors open. Badger and Glint and the remaining crewmen beat a hasty retreat, and managed to shut the doors and get the elevator moving.
Captain Hoban, wounded in the arm by a beam weapon, refused medical attention and led the pursuit.
Most of the crew had not joined the rebellion. Those who had been wavering now decided they'd had enough.
Only Badger and Glint and their close friends, Connie Mindanao, Andy Groggins, and Min Dwin, were irrevocably committed.
All together now, they moved down one of the corridors, maintaining a rolling fire to keep the pursuing officers at a distance.
Glint was saying, “Where we going, Red? What we going to do now?”
“Shaddap,” Badger said. “I've got it all doped out.” He led them through the now deserted commissary and out to the rear hold. “Where we goin'?” Glint asked.
Badger didn't answer.
“There's no place to go!” Glint said.
“Don't worry, I know what I'm doing,” Badger said. “We're going to get out of here.”
“Out of here?” Glint looked puzzled.
“Off this ship,” Badger said. “We'll take one of the escape pods and leave this death ship behind. We'll go down to AR-32.”
“Yeah, okay,” Glint said. Then he thought of some-thing. “But where'll we go after that, Red? There's no civilization down there!”
“Well then make contact with
Glint turned it over in his mind.
“Red, are you sure we want to do that? Those people are killers!”
“Of course I'm sure. We're on their side now. They'll give us good money for turning our information over to them. They're going to be very interested to hear about Captain Hoban and the doctor and what they're up to. We'll be heroes.”
“I don't know,” Glint said.
“Trust me, “ Badger said. “Anynow, what else can you do?”
“I guess you're right,” Glint said. You could tell from his voice that it was a load off his mind, letting Badger make the decisions for both of them.
The others in the party weren't interested in asking questions. They wanted to be led, to be told what to do, and that was what Badger liked to do, lead people. It made him feel strong and good, until something went wrong, which, unfortunately, it did all too often. But not this time. This time he knew what he was doing.
“Come on,” Badger said. “We've got to get the spare lander.”
Andy Groggins said, “They're apt to be waiting for us there, Red.”
“If they are,” Badger said, “then so much the worse for them.
46
Stan sat in the lander and watched through Norbert's viewing screen as the robot's view of AR-32 swayed precipitously and began to slide off the screen. The lander was still vibrating after its bobsled descent through AR- 32's turbulent atmosphere. Stan felt battered and bruised: sitting at the controls trying to steer all that liveliness and power to a safe landing was like going fifteen rounds with the Jolly Green Giant. Stan still wasn't sure which had won.
He fine-tuned the knobs on the viewing screen, trying to focus on the images Norbert was sending back from the surface of AR-32. The picture lurched with each of the robot's footsteps, and jumped in and out of focus.
Stan hated out-of-sync pictures like that. They seemed to trigger some long-dormant primeval receptor in his brain stem. He found the oscillations of the picture upsetting his own psychic balance.
He tried consciously to steady himself. He didn't want to go freaking out now, but the way that picture jumped was going to do it to him yet, and they'd have to scrape him off the wall.
Then the picture stabilized and the focus locked in. Stan was looking at a pile of wind-polished boulders in various shades of orange and pink. When Norbert raised his head, Stan could see ahead of him a narrow valley of stone and gravel. The swirling clouds of dust made visibility difficult after about fifty feet.
“Look at this place,” Stan remarked to Julie. “We haven't seen a green thing since we got here. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this place has no natural vegetation. None on the surface, anyhow.”
“If plants won't grow here,” Julie remarked, “how are the aliens able to sustain themselves?”
“I said there was no vegetation on the surface,” Stan said. “Belowground it could be a very different story. There's an ant species that practices underground gardening. The aliens might have followed the same course of evolution.”
“This isn't their home world, is it?” Julie asked.
“I doubt it very much. It's extremely unlikely that they evolved here. No one knows the location of their original home planet.”
“So how'd they get here?”
“I have no idea. But however they did, they must have brought their culture with them. And their nasty habits.”
Norbert's picture began to bounce again.
“He's going uphill,” Stan said. “Have you spotted Mac yet?”
“He ran on ahead,” Julie said. “He's out of the picture now.”
Gill said, “There's something in the viewer's top right quadrant.”
Stan studied it. “Yes, there is. Norbert, magnify that quadrant.”
Norbert did so. The object sharpened, resolving from a black dot to a blocky shape of lines and angles.
Gill said, “It looks like a cow skeleton, Doctor.” Norbert walked over to it. Up close, it did turn out to be a cow skeleton, though the head was missing. Norbert panned the remains. Mac had found it, too, and had pulled loose a thighbone. The animal's rib cage had been exploded outward under great pressure from something inside.
“What could have done that?” Julie asked.
“Probably a chestburner,” Stan said, alluding to the young of the alien species.
“I doubt that cow creature came here naturally,” Gill put in.
“Of course it didn't,” Stan agreed. “If those bones could speak, I think we'd find that cow and a lot of her sisters were brought to this planet from Earth.”
