Reap the Whirlwind

“Fire.”

Whooping screeches accompanied every multiple-warhead salvo that shot away from the Endeavour. The blazing blue streaks joined with identical payloads fired from the Lovell. Sparks of sapphire, they glowed in the darkness of space for several seconds until they cruised out of visual range, on course for their rendezvous with Gamma Tauri IV.

From millions of kilometers away, only the barest flickers attested to the antimatter-fueled cataclysm that was transforming the planet into a sphere of molten rock and radioactive glass.

All around Khatami, her crew hung their heads in shame and sorrow. She kept her head up and her eyes on the screen. You’re the captain. You gave the order. You don’t get to look away. You have to watch…and you’ll have to remember.

23

Wounded and clutching the signal dampener to his mauled torso, Terrell had passed his hours of painful solitude crawling under the foliage back to the campsite where he and Niwara had been attacked nearly twelve hours earlier. It hadn’t taken as long to get back as he had expected it would; following the river’s edge, he dragged himself across the hundred-fifty-odd meters of muddy ground in just a couple of hours.

Little was left of Niwara, and most of their equipment had been destroyed. To his relief, his tricorder remained intact, and from the shredded remains of his pack he retrieved an intact canteen of clean water. In the swiftly rising temperatures of the jungle, he was grateful for every drop of potable liquid. The sun had begun its slow descent from the midheaven; by his best estimate, dusk was only a few hours away.

His communicator beeped. In the eerie silence of the jungle it sounded conspicuously shrill. He plucked it quickly from his belt and flipped it open. “Terrell here,” he said, and was struck by how tired and hoarse he sounded.

“Get ready for evac, Clark,” Captain Nassir said. “Your ride should be arriving any second.”

“It’s about time,” Terrell joked, smiling through the pain.

A powerful rumbling of maneuvering thrusters and turbo-fans went from barely audible to deafening in a matter of seconds. Terrell closed his communicator and tucked it back on his belt as a peculiar-looking, mottled-gray spacecraft appeared above his wrecked campsite. The ship’s nose was a narrow wedge, its belly a fat and blocky mass, its warp nacelles short and squat. Distorted above a curtain of heat radiation, it hovered for a few seconds and lowered vertically to the ground, kicking up a massive cloud of dirt and debris. The moment its landing struts touched down, its aft ramp lowered, and a trim young man with short sandy hair jogged out and peered into the dusty haze.

“Over here!” called Terrell, who weakly waved his arm.

The young man ran to him and kneeled at his side. He had to shout over the piercing whine of the engines. “Can you walk?”

“No,” Terrell said, hugging the signal dampener.

The young man spoke into a small communications device clutched in his left hand. “Get down here and give me a hand!” Moments later another man scrambled out of the ship. He was older and out of shape, with long, unkempt bone-white hair.

He greeted Terrell as he took hold of his arm. “Cervantes Qui

As the duo lifted Terrell to his feet and carried him back to the ship, the younger man nodded and said simply, “Tim Pe

They portered Terrell adroitly up the ramp into their ship. Qui

The scruffy pilot asked Terrell, “Hammock or chair?”

“I’ve been lying down all day,” Terrell said. “Chair.”

Leading with his head, Qui

With surprising dexterity and gentleness, they lowered Terrell into a wide, deep, and well-padded seat on the starboard side of the vessel’s roomy cockpit. He pulled his tricorder away from his hip and let it rest on his lap next to the signal dampener as he settled into the seat. “Thank you, gents,” he said. “Much longer out there, and I’d have been in real trouble. What brings you boys out this far, anyway?”

Qui

“They’re leaving?” he asked, surprised at the news.

Pe

Perhaps noticing Terrell’s disappointment, Pe

“One of our people got swept downriver,” he said. “We—” His mind afflicted him with the memory of Niwara’s gruesome slaying. “We were looking for her when we got attacked.” His hands closed around the tricorder, and he lowered his head. “Still, I suppose it doesn’t make much sense to go on. I don’t even know if she’s alive or how far the river might’ve taken her by now.” This time he noticed a silent debate being volleyed between his two rescuers, with Pe

“Would you gentlemen care to let me in on whatever you’re pretending not to argue about?”

Qui

Terrell leaned forward and focused his eyes past the rain and the roiling clouds. In the darkness below the storm lurked a city of titanic curves and twisting shapes, its undulating ribbons of light concealed by steady ground strikes of forked lightning.

The river he had been following flowed directly into the heart of the alien city, as did several others that snaked through the jungle valley. Pe

Terrell’s mind was racing. The young Scotsman was right, but with all the interference that had garbled his tricorder’s sensors, he couldn’t be sure Theriault was alive or, for that matter, where in that vast metropolis she might be. If only I could break through the noise and get a clear reading. Then he looked around at the cockpit itself. “Mr. Qui

“Um, yeah,” Qui

Terrell said, “I’m going to patch my tricorder into your sensors. You’ll provide the power and the hardware to give me the range I need; the tricorder’s software will make sense out of the signals it gets from your ship.” Activating the tricorder, he added, “If Ensign Theriault’s alive, we’re going to find her right now.”

Qui

“And a lot more,” Terrell said as he made the necessary adjustments to slave the Rocinante’s sensor array to the tricorder. It was a fortunate side effect of the signal dampener’s fading power that its effective range had shrunk to less than two meters, which would prevent it from interfering with the Rocinante’s sensor hardware.

A faint human life sign appeared on the tricorder’s screen.

“She’s alive,” Terrell said. “And she’s in there. Bearing zero-zero-three, range fifteen-point-two kilometers.”