The thought wasn't complete before he was at the hatch. Atvar H'sial, even quicker on the uptake, was already through and had swept Quintus Bloom and Glenna Omar along in front of her. Louis took a swift look behind. The self-appointed Zardalu representative was at his heels, while a hundred furious others were gliding in hot pursuit.
Nothing ever went the way you planned! Louis threw himself through the hatch. It was anybody's guess whether the big Zardalu would be able to squeeze in after him, but if that one could, so could others.
Louis didn't wait to find out. He bee-lined for the controls and slapped in the lift-off sequence. The
Gravitas
started its rise, tilting far to the left. Nenda knew why. The big Zardalu was wedged halfway through the hatch on the side of the ship and was struggling to wriggle in farther. A dozen others had grabbed the tentacles that were still dangling outside. The ship was lifting with twenty tons of excess and unbalanced mass. But it was lifting. And the Zardalu in the hatch was flailing with one free tentacle at the hangers-on.
Louis watched, with no regret at all, as the first of the hanging Zardalu lost its grip, dropped a couple of hundred feet, and splattered on a line of jutting rocks that bordered the beach.
After that it was just a matter of time. The ship was still rising. The Zardalu outside were shaken off, one by one. It no longer mattered whether they fell on land or water. At this height both were equally fatal. The last one to go had managed to attach its suckers to the underside of the
Gravitas
. It clung on until the ship was almost at the edge of Genizee's atmosphere. But even a Zardalu had to breathe. Nenda watched it drop at last, a near-unconscious ball of defiantly thrashing tentacles. He even felt faint sympathy as it vanished from sight. You had to admire anything, human or alien, that just didn't know when to quit. The big Zardalu, after enormous effort, had squeezed its bulk all the way on board. Not before time, either, because the ship was losing air through the hatch. Nenda slammed it closed, nipping off the ends of a couple of tentacles that were slow to pull out of the way.
The Zardalu did not seem to mind. It lay on the deck for a few seconds, breathing hard, then lifted its head and stared around. Glenna took one look at the vicious beak and ran to stand behind Louis. She put her arms around him and clung to him, hard enough to make his rib cage creak.
Nenda ignored that. He stepped closer to the Zardalu and waited until the great cerulean eyes turned in his direction.
"I hope you have not caused me a problem." He used the crudest form of master-slave talk.
"Problem?" The Zardalu sounded terrified. "Master, why are you unhappy?"
"I'm not unhappy. But others may be. What about the ones who just got killed? What about all the ones who were left behind?"
"The dead do not feel happy or unhappy." Now the Zardalu sounded more puzzled than afraid. "As for the rest, why would they have reason to complain? I acted as any one of them would have acted. What other behavior is possible?"
Which was probably, to a Zardalu, a wholly reasonable position.
Louis gave up any attempt to understand aliens.
Or humans. Quintus Bloom had narrowly escaped death. He was standing within six feet of a creature who at Nenda's command would tear him into small pieces and swallow the fragments. And he was scowling at Louis.
"I did not authorize lift-off from Genizee. What about my evidence of Builder activities there? Return me to the surface at once."
The temptation was very great. Pop the hatch open for a second, and say the right word to the Zardalu. Then Nenda would have revenge for all Bloom's put-downs and insults. Bloom would have his own put-down, one that went a long, long way. He would be returned to the surface all right—just as he had ordered.
It was Glenna Omar who saved Bloom. But not by siding with him. She released her hold on Nenda and turned angrily.
"How dare you talk to Louis like that! I'm sure he did what was best for us. He took off because he had to. Didn't you see them? Hundreds of things like—like
that
thing"—she waved at the Zardalu, but averted her eyes from it—"waiting down there for us."
Louis was beyond confusion. In his experience—and he had plenty—no one had
ever
jumped forward to defend him, as Glenna was defending him. And Quintus Bloom seemed equally amazed. Glenna Omar had been allowed on the expedition specifically to admire and report back in glowing terms everything that Bloom did. But now she was
criticizing
him—and approving the unauthorized actions of some squat, swarthy barbarian from the middle of nowhere.
It was at this tense, intense, and incomprehensible moment that the alarm system of the
Gravitas
sounded. The ship's remaining sensors were warning of a major emergency.
Too many crises, all different, and one right after another. Louis was fairly sure that he was in the middle of a long sequence of alternating dreams and nightmares. He had reached another piece of the dark side. Close your eyes, relax. Unfortunately he dared not take the risk.
The first information came from the viewing screens that showed what lay ahead of the ship. They once more displayed the pattern of singularities that had prevented escape from Genizee during Nenda and Atvar H'sial's last visit. Now, however, the singularities looked a good deal more ominous, dark bands with sudden lightning flashes across them mixed in with the pale wash of a gently wavering aurora. There were other differences, too. No saffron beam of light was stabbing out from the artificial hollow moon of Genizee, ready to return the ship to the planet's surface.
Good news. Except that a beam of vivid purple from the same source had locked on to the
Gravitas
. It was pulling them directly toward the hollow moon, at a steadily accelerating pace.
Nenda inventoried the ship's interior. The big Zardalu was lying quietly on the floor, inspecting the ends of its two clipped tentacles.
Fair enough. Louis couldn't think of one useful thing to tell it to do in an emergency. No allowance had been made in the
Gravitas
's design for strapping in a body that size. If it didn't move, that was a blessing.
Atvar H'sial, who couldn't see the screens, presumably had no idea what was happening unless she could smell it from Louis's natural pheromones—he had found no time to send a message to her, but he must stink of fear. Anyway, no help there.
Quintus Bloom was turning accusingly toward Louis, but his mouth was still only half-open when the lights went out. All the screens turned dark. A moment later, Glenna's arms went round Nenda from behind and ran like starved animals down his body. "Louis!" Her whisper was right in his ear. "It's another hiatus!"
It wasn't, though. It was more serious than that, and Louis knew it even if no one else did. He jerked forward, away from Glenna's embrace. As he did so the lights came back on and the screens flickered again to life.
He reached for the controls, guessing that anything he did would make little difference. In the couple of seconds that the lights had been off, the hollow satellite of Genizee had vanished. In its place stood a spinning ball of darkness.
Louis swore aloud. He knew exactly what that was, and he wanted nothing to do with it. The
Gravitas
was being drawn, willy-nilly, into the black tornado of a Builder transportation vortex. He had enough time to wonder where and if he was likely to emerge. But in the middle of that thought the vortex seemed to reach out, grip him, and mold its fierce embrace like a great animal constrictor around his whole long-suffering body.
Louis probably screamed. He was not sure. A scream was certainly justified.
Glenna all last night, then the Maw, and now the vortex. Hadn't he been assigned more than his fair share of out-of-this-world squeezing?
Two more days, and still no sign of J'merlia. With or without him, Darya had to decide how she and Kallik proposed to escape from the interior of Labyrinth.
It went beyond concern over suit supplies of air and food. Darya felt the breath of change, like an invisible wind all around her within the artifact. Hour after hour, the chamber
moved
. A haze in the air came and went. The walls themselves drifted and tilted to meet at slightly different inclinations. The effect was most noticeable at the wedge-shaped end. When Darya had first examined it the angle between the walls had been acute, no more than a few degrees. Now she could place her gloved hand down into the broad gap, far enough to touch the end with her fingertips.
The final decision, like all major turning points in Darya's life, seemed to make itself. One moment she was crouched near the end of the chamber, wondering what could have happened to J'merlia. The next, she was heading for the dark funnel of the entrance.
"Come on, Kallik, we've learned all we're going to learn in this place. Time to get out."
Don't stop to wonder about the condition of the outer chambers, or of the ship that she had left behind there. Logic was good, but too much logical analysis inhibited action. Darya had heard it seriously suggested that the original human cladeworld, Earth, had degenerated to an ineffectual backwater of a planet because computer trade-off analysis had increasingly been used as the basis for decision making. On purely logical grounds, no one would ever explore, invent, rejoice, sing, strive, fall in love, or take physical and psychological risks of any kind. Better to stay in bed in the morning; it was much safer.
If you were lucky enough to have a bed. Did the Builders sleep, eat, laugh, and cry? Did they feel hope and despair? Darya paused at the narrow exit from the innermost chamber.
Follow the streaky white lines
. The
Myosotis
, complete with beds and bunks and all the other niceties that she had not seen for days, lay in that direction.
"With respect." Kallik had come up close behind and was edging ahead of Darya. "My reactions are faster than yours. It is logical that I lead."
Logic again. But Darya found this point difficult to argue. With Hymenopt reaction times, Kallik could be fifty meters away while Darya was still wondering if there might be a danger.
"Be careful. Things in here are
changing
."
As if Kallik needed to be told. Her senses were more acute than Darya's, her reasoning powers in no way inferior. She was already away, shooting along the tunnel to the next chamber. Darya followed, expecting when she arrived to see Kallik far ahead and fighting her way through the moving maze of vortex singularities that they had faced on the way in. To Darya's surprise she found that the Hymenopt had not progressed beyond the end of the tunnel. Kallik was floating with folded limbs, obviously waiting.
"Too dangerous?" Darya approached the end of the tunnel. She expected to see the energetic vortices, zipping back and forth past the tunnel entrance. What she saw instead was one great pool of swirling black, as though a single vortex had taken up station at the chamber entrance and waited for them there.
That impression faded as she moved to Kallik's side. The usual circulation pattern was visible, sure enough, and it came from a bloated monster of a vortex. However, it did not fill the whole chamber. There was room for a human—or a Hymenopt—to squeeze past on either side. It might be safe enough, provided that the dark whirlpool did not increase again in size.
"What's the problem?"
Kallik did not reply in words. Instead she pointed to the black heart of the pool. At first Darya saw nothing, a darkness so complete that instead of delivering illumination the vortex center seemed to draw light away from the eye. After a few moments a faint ghost of an image rippled into that darkness, then just as quickly vanished. Darya was left with the subliminal impression of a distorted cylinder, a long ellipsoid with each end sheared off and replaced by flat planes.
Before she could speak the spectral image came again, and again slipped away.
Again. And again, lingering a moment longer.
"Next time, I think." But even before Kallik's quiet comment, Darya knew what she was seeing. It was a Builder transportation system, in the very act of giving birth. Something or someone was being squeezed and corkscrewed through a narrow space-time canal—Darya would never forget the feeling—and any moment now would be delivered into the chamber ahead.
The vortex trembled. Smooth blackness became in an instant a dazzling flash of blue and white. Darya's suit visor cut out with photon overload. When the visor again admitted light, Darya saw that the chamber in front of her contained something more than the whirling singularity. A dull gray ship of unfamiliar design floated beside the dark whirlpool. And the vortex itself was changing. With delivery over, it was dwindling, tightening, shrinking back to normal size. After a few seconds it faded to gray. At last it became an insubstantial fog, a wraith through which the chamber beyond was visible. And then it was gone.
Darya started forward. She halted when the ship in front of her began to change. Hull plates slid aside, and the smooth gray surface was broken by open dark circles. Darya froze. Even someone from the peaceful worlds of the Fourth Alliance knew enough to recognize weapons ports.
"
Ristu 'knu'ik. Utu'is's gur'uiki
." A blare of warning came from the ship ahead, accompanied by supersonics that raised the skin on Darya's arms to goose pimples. Something within the ship had recognized what Darya herself had forgotten—that the chamber was filled with air. Breathable or unbreathable, the gases would carry sound signals.
"Can you understand that gobbledygook?" Darya spoke on the private suit channel.
"No. But I think I recognize it." Kallik was moving slowly to one side, studying the swollen cylinder ahead from different angles. "It is a language peculiar to the worlds of the Cecropian Fringe, where the Federation meets the Communion. I have heard it spoken, but regrettably I have had no prior opportunity for study. J'merlia would surely understand it."