After the Collapse

“This—this is not good,” murmured Wrinkles.

Pankey said, “We’ll sail south or north, evade them—”

Storm grew indignant. He wanted to reach out and shake some sense into Pankey. “Are you joking? Those monsters can easily pace us on land, while we sail a greater distance than they need gallop.”

Jizogirl interrupted the argument. “It’s academic, my bucks! Look!”

The anoles and their riders were wading into the surf, making straight for the Squid.

“This—this is even worse,” Wrinkles added—rather superfluously, thought Storm, in an uncanny interval of stunned calmness.

Catmaul began yanking on one of the half-dozen kite tethers. “We have to get away! Now! Why doesn’t Tropo help us!”

Rotifero gently pulled the doe away from the cables. “Old Tropo is a stern taskmaster. He brought us here to do a job, and do it we must.”

Storm looked up in vain at the unmoving kite.

The kite!

“I have a plan! But we need to ditch our UPD’s first. They’re too heavy for what I have in mind.”

Suiting actions to words, Storm doffed his harness, detached the proseity device, then redonned the bandolier with just logic bombs attached.

“Stash your swords in your harnesses, and follow me!”

Not waiting to see if they obeyed, Storm leaped onto the kite cables and began to climb. He felt a rightness and force to his actions, as he threw himself into battle without thought for his own safety, only that of his comrades, and the success of their necessary mission. Here, then, was the defining moment he had sought, ever since he left home.

The angle of the cables permitted a fairly easy ascent. Soon, Storm belly-flopped onto the wind-stuffed mattress of the kite. Seconds later, his five comrades joined him, with plenty of room to spare.

Below, the swimming anoles had closed half the distance to the ship.

“We have to do this just perfectly. We sever the four inner cables completely, and the two outer ones partially. Pankey and I will do the outer ones. Get busy!”

The composite substance of the cables was only a few Mohs softer than the sword blades, making for an arduous slog. But with much effort, Wrinkles, Jizogirl, Rotifero and Catmaul got the four inner cables completely separated—they fell gracefully, with an ultimate splash!—causing the parafoil configuration to deform non-aerodynamically, attached to the ship now only by a few threads at either end.

Storm spared a look down. The anoles were too big to clamber aboard the ship. But the simians weren’t. And the apes were approaching the remaining two tethers linking kite and ship.

“Now!

Storm and Pankey sawed frantically and awkwardly in synchrony from their recumbent positions—

Twin loud pops from the high-tensioned threads, and the kite was free. Instant winds sent by an alert weather mind grabbed it and pushed it toward land.

Storm allowed himself the tiniest moment of relief and triumph and relaxation. Then he sized up what awaited them.

The terrain below showed rampant greenery of cloud forest far off to every side. But the Kilauea caldera itself loomed off-center in a barren zone of old and new lava flows: the Kau Desert. Twenty-four kilometers away, the mother volcano Mauna Loa reared almost four times higher.

“Can we ride this all the way?” shouted Pankey.

“I hope so!” Storm replied. “Maybe we can bomb one of the magma rifts from up here!”

But his optimism soon received a dual assault.

Several slave-capped gulls stalked their kite, relaying visual feeds to the magma mind. As the kite moved deeper inland, it met attacks.

From an artificially built-up stone nozzle, under concentrated pressure, a laser-like jet of magma shot up high as the kite, narrowly missing the wardens, but spattering them with painful droplets on its broken descent. The kite fabric received numerous smelly burn holes. At the same time a fumarole unleashed billowing clouds of opaque choking sulfurous gases, which the kite sailed blindly through, at last emerging into clear air.

Gasping for breath, wiping his reddened eyes, Storm finally found his voice again.

“We’re a big easy target! We have to split up!”

Wrinkles got to his hands and knees. “Me first! I’m the best glider!”

Without any farewells, Wrinkles launched off the unsteady platform. He spread his unusually generous patagium and made graceful curves through the sky.

Jizogirl cried, “Go, Wrinkles, go!”

A lance of red-hot lava shot up from an innocuous spot, and incinerated Wrinkles’s entire left side. With a wailing cry he plummeted to impact.

Storm felt gut-punched. “We all need to leap at once! Now! Find a rift and bomb it!”

The remaining five wardens flung themselves free of the kite.

Focused on his gliding, Storm could not keep track of the rest of the Fellowship. Heaven-seeking spears of hot rock burst into existence randomly, a gauntlet of fiery death. Deadly vog—the volcanic fog—stole his sight and breath. He lost track of his altitude, his goal. He thought he heard cries and screams—

Out of the vog he emerged, to see the tortured ground much too close, an eye-searing, writhing active rift bisecting the terrain. He braced for a landing.

His right paw-foot caught in a crevice, and he heard bones snap. The pain was almost secondary to his despair.

Working to free his paw-foot, he heard two thumps behind him.

Pankey and Jizogirl had landed, their fur smoldering, eyes cloudy and tearful.

Jizogirl came to help free Storm’s paw-foot.

“Rotifero, Catmaul—?”

Jizogirl just shook her head.

Meanwhile, Pankey had detached a logic bomb from his bandolier, and now darted in toward the living rift. Its incredible heat stopped him some distance away. He made to throw the bomb.

Overhead, the spy gulls circled low. One screeched just as Pankey threw.

A whip of lava caught the bomb in mid-air, incinerating it but prophylactically detaching from the parent flow, frustrating the spread of the released antisense agents backward along its interrupted length.

Pankey rushed back to his comrades. “It’s no use. The bombs have to be delivered by hand. It’s up to me!”

Jizogirl said, “And me!”

“No! Only if I fail. You and Storm— Just stay with him!”

Before either Storm or Jizogirl could protest. Pankey had taken off at a run.

Storm’s nose could smell the scorched flesh of Pankey’s paw-feet as the warden dodged one whip after another.

“Remember me—!” the leader of the team called, as he hurled himself and his remaining logic bombs into the rift.

The propagation of the antisense mind-killer agents was incredibly rapid, fueled by the high energies of the system. A deep subterranean rumble betokened the titanic struggle of intelligence against nescience. In a final spasm, the earth convulsed titanically, rippling like a shaken sheet in all directions, tossing Jizogirl down beside Storm, then bouncing them both.

The quake lasted for what seemed minutes, before dying away. Even when the shaking at ground zero had stopped, rumbles and tremors continued to radiate outward into the surrounding ocean, as the antisense assault propagated. Storm could picture undersea lava tubes collapsing, tectonic plates shifting far out to sea—

Jizogirl got shakily to her paw-feet, and helped Storm stand on his one good leg.

“Is Mauna Loa dead?” she asked.

“I think so….”

Big menacing shapes moved in the vog around them.