Dark Ararat

This time, they accepted the necessity. Ike appeared on the edge of the ill-cleared area within minutes, clad in ochreous armor. Matthew watched while he spent a few minutes making sure of the lie of the land, testing the speed at which the giant slugs could move.

“Just kill the bloody things, will you,” Matthew shouted down to him. It wasn’t the sort of thing an ecologist ought to say, but the urgency of the situation overrode other considerations.

Ike had already taken an opportunity to begin delving in one of the ragged heaps of cargo, freeing the flamethrower. He carefully fitted the canister of propellant to his back and placed protective goggles over his eyes, while the tentacled slugs went contentedly about their business. When he eventually let fly, in a series of short but lethal bursts, he managed to roast more than twenty of the monsters without placing the boat or its cargo in the least danger. He had to pick off half-a-dozen more one by one, using more subtle but equally lethal instruments, but he completed the task as quickly as was humanly possible.

Only then did Ly

The stink was appalling. Matthew’s nasal filters had carefully screened him from those complex organic odorants to which he might have been allergic, but the cruder fumes of burnt flesh posed no threat of that kind, and he was permitted to experience the full measure of their unpleasantness.

Ly

“What if more of them come?” Ike asked.

“Matthew can drop the rifle down to me so that I can blast them at short range.”

“We didn’t come here to conduct a holocaust,” Ike said, sorrowfully. “This is getting way out of hand.”

“We’ll go back to being Mr. Nice Guys when we’ve got back to being Mr. Safe Guys,” she countered, grimly. “We’ll put a cosmetic gloss on the story when we relay it back to Tang if you like, but until further notice I’m the original devil-may-care shoot-anything-that-looks-at-me-sideways colonist, okay?”

“If you say so,” Ike conceded, a little stiffly. He raised his voice to say: “I’m on my way, Matthew. Just sit tight for one more hour.”

“Whatever you do,” Matthew shouted down “for heaven’s sake don’t fall.”

Ike’s only response to that was a gesture of contempt.

Having watched Ike do his painful work. Matthew now had to watch Ly

It wasn’t obvious that the work of reassembling the boat could be completed that day, but Ly

He tried to call Dulcie, but she still wasn’t answering her phone. He hesitated over calling Tang Dinh Quan, but decided that it could wait until he had more definite news.

Instead, he continued thinking about possible correlations between nutritional versatility and exotic reproduction, and the reasons why intelligent bipeds might be favored by evolution on a world like Tyre, and the reasons why civilization might fail on such a world in spite of the fact that its walls had never been exposed to ca

This isn’t bad, he told himself. Not yet. If we’re lucky, it could be good. And we are lucky. We’re riding a streak, and we can ride it all the way. I can do this. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Shen was right. Leader or not, I can light the way, with just a little help from my friends.

THIRTY-THREE

Some of the equipment is definitely missing,” Ly

“What’s gone?” Matthew asked, tersely.

“Nothing absolutely vital to the reassembly, although we might be a couple of hull plates down and some leg elements are definitely gone. Some machetes are missing—three, unless one or two are still packed away where I can’t find them. Some rope. A bale of bubble-fabric. A canister of fuel oil—fuel for the inorganic motor, that is.”

Matthew’s heart leapt with exultation, even though he’d fully expected some such news. “Did they take Bernal’s artifacts?” he asked, swiftly.

“I don’t know,” Ly

“Can we get by without the hull plates and leg parts?” Ike wanted to know.

“We have patches to replace damaged hull plates,” Ly

“It was the humanoids,” Matthew told her, firmly. “They know we’re here—and we know they’re curious. Maybe curious enough to …”

That was when his phone began to beep. His first assumption was that it was Tang or Vince Solari, impatient to know how the night had passed, but it wasn’t. This time his heart seemed to leap all the way into his throat.

“Dulcie!” he exclaimed, raising his voice to make sure that Ike and Ly

“Can you hear me?” Dulcie asked, anxiously. She was whispering, but Matthew knew that wasn’t what was worrying her; she was afraid that she might have gone so far into the glassy forest that her signal could no longer get out.

“Yes,” he said, tersely. “Go on.”

“Sorry to worry you all,” she said. “I didn’t want my phone beeping in case it alerted them. I thought I could follow them without them knowing. It seemed plenty dark enough, and I felt sure they hadn’t spotted me when I first caught sight of them—but I guess they were stringing me along all the time. They probably wanted to lure me away from the bubble. I didn’t even know how many of them there were. Stupid.”

“What’s your situation now?” Matthew asked, as waves of nauseous fear stirred in his empty belly.

“Under observation, I suppose. They haven’t made a hostile move—yet. They seem to have quite a lot of our stuff, including some very wicked steel knives as well as Bernal’s things. They have spears of their own too. I can count twenty-two, but there might be a few I can’t see. If they do attack, I don’t stand a chance, but they still seem wary. They know I’m doing something now, but they seem more intrigued than alarmed. They know they have me surrounded, and they know that I know, but they’re holding back, still half in hiding.”

“ Which way?” Ly