The buffeting and heat were subsiding, but they were not out of danger yet. The fighter(ship) was responding sluggishly to Senslaaevor's control. He'd lost a third of his power, and there was nowhere for him to go but down.
Senslaaevor's attention was divided between tracking and control. They had lost sight of the enemy in the confusion of trying to save themselves in the upper atmosphere. A shot from the Outsider had damaged him astern. Whether he had given as good as he had taken, he didn't know. His tracker had reported a hit. But the last he had seen of the enemy, it had been veering into an entry only slightly skewed from his own, going down in the same region. Even if they got down intact, they could still have an enemy to face on the ground.
He felt a sickening jolt. A whine reverberated through the backbone of the (ship), a protest from the (ship)'s central nervous system. The power-master called up the vine, "Losing another third."
"Conserve," Senslaaevor ordered, working to restore aerodynamic balance. His fighter(ship) was conformed into the shape of a flared thighbone, excellent in powered flight but poor in a glide; worse when damaged. He tried to expand the flared edges; the (ship) didn't respond. "Restore if you can." He scanned the sky; they were out of the clouds now, over land.
"Impossible to restore," came the answer. Senslaaevor kept his silence; he could feel the (ship)'s pain. One-third to bring them down? Impossible. But it would have to do.
The landscape was growing quickly; they were dropping like a stone. The navigator reported stepped plains below, and a ridge of mountains parallel to their course. Ahead were hills; the best area for landing was already below them.
The hull screamed against the wind. Senslaaevor banked and stalled, shedding speed. As the horizon rose and the land grew flat and enormous, he selected a spot and turned. The hull shook in protest. Too little power. "Secure for impact!" he called. The ground flew up to greet him; he flared back in a hard stall and held the (ship) against a violent convulsion. Control began to slip, and he called for the power-master to give him everything he had left. The reply was just enough to hold the (ship) against a roll, and as he watched the dancing bits of light in the landing-reader, the ground mushroomed . . .
He was nearly into conformation when the (ship) died. There was nothing left to control, and only silence from the power-master. "Impact!" he warned. The stern slammed down first, and then the nose. The (ship) bounced, throwing him violently against his restraints. Hold! he cried to himself, uselessly. The nose came down again with a bone-jarring crash. They stopped moving. He was stunned but unharmed. Smoke was billowing from the floor around him. He barked into outreach: "Get to safety! (Fleet): we are down!"
He was last out of the (ship). The Ell ran through the scorched grass in their pressure-suits, racing on four limbs. There were five of them alive, the engineering-mate shouting that the power-master was dead. When they reached a safe distance, they halted and turned. Smoke was venting from the battered fighter. It would never live again, but it contained a smoldering power-pile, and it could—
There was a flash of light beneath the hull, and a shudder—and the (ship) blew apart in a ball of fire and smoke. For an eternity, no one moved. They crouched, watching the pyre that had been their (ship).
Senslaaevor could not have articulated his feelings; two faithful servants had just died, his power-master and his (ship), and he felt their deaths deep in his mind. But there was no time to think about his feelings; they did not matter. What mattered was where he and his crew were and what they were going to do. He peered around. Except for the fire and smoke, there was little to see in any direction but thin-bladed vegetation, blue-grey sky, and, in the distance, the line of a mountain range.
Where, he wondered, was the enemy craft? The (fleet) could pinpoint the location from orbit, but their long-range communication had just died with the (ship). They were on their own. He turned to the engineering-mate and adjusted his suit communicator. "Test the air."
The mate was already performing the instrument analysis. "Remote readings confirmed," he answered. "Breathable at need. But not for long. If this is truly the Lost World—"
"We have not been sent to make that judgment," Senslaaevor snapped.
The mate acknowledged. "Shall I try the air?" Senslaaevor assented. The mate opened the vents on his suit, then opened his helmet. After a few breaths, he snapped his helmet shut and flushed the gases. "It is not pleasant," he reported with a rasp. "But breathable."
Senslaaevor acknowledged, gazing at the smoking remains of his fighter(ship). After a moment's consideration, he opened his own suit vents and helmet and puffed his membranes. The air was stifling, acrid with reactive oxygen. He withstood the discomfort and sniffed again, searching for more than just an odor. He sensed . . . something. He could not say what. A presence, faint and distant.
A thought-smell. Expectancy? Malice? It was in the land, in the soil, in the air. But what was its source? The question, he knew, had plagued Or!ge, and the entire (fleet). And now . . . he still could not tell. But he had to make a guess.
The Lost Ell? Or the enemy?
If, as he suspected, it was the latter, then the enemy had survived and remained a danger.
He closed his helmet and flushed his suit of the unpleasant gases. "We must move away quickly. Toward the mountains. And then we shall seek the enemy."
* * *
Through the smoke and confusion at the rear of the lander, Tony DeWeiler stared at the unmoving figure of Martins, the young engineer he had barely known until three days ago. A damage-control group pushed him back out of the way, trying to get through to a ruptured fuel line. Tony's stomach was knotted.
"DeWeiler! Get over here!" an officer shouted.
"Coming!" Tony yelled back. But before he obeyed, he pushed through to get a closer look—and choked on the stench of burned flesh. Martins was dead, all right—he had already known that—but he hadn't known that the right side of Martins' head was incinerated. He must have been sitting directly in the line of fire.
"DeWeiler!"
"Coming," he grunted, stumbling forward again. He struggled to control his stomach.
The officer, surrounded by several men, glared. "We don't have time for that now. We were lucky to lose only one—lucky to be alive at all." He addressed the group. "All right, the forward hatch has been cracked, and we need all of you outside for guard detail and damage survey. Hogan—" He addressed Tony's immediate supervisor. "As soon as you get a go-ahead from the skipper, take Tony and Dennis and scout the area. Get your gear out now. Go."
The group made their way to the forward airlock, where someone was passing out respiration filter-masks. Tony felt a pang of fear as he pulled his instrument packs out of a storage compartment and hefted them to follow the others outside. A man he had known for barely three days, a new friend, was dead. What else awaited them? His thoughts flickered to Mung, back on the ship, waiting for word. Probably everyone back there was frantic with worry. Suddenly this was no longer the lark that somehow he must have thought it would be. Why hadn't he stayed home, safe? Like Sage. Are you still there, Sage? Is Earth? He adjusted his mask, afraid to step through the airlock. Someone bumped him from behind, and he moved.
The sunlight hit him full in the face, and he sneezed, stumbling down the gangway. His first reaction when his feet hit the ground was astonishment, that the place looked so much like Earth: blue sky, wispy clouds, grassy vegetation singed by the lander's jets. Gravity about normal. He couldn't tell much about the air through the mask.
"Jesus Christ," he heard Hogan saying. The survey leader was circling the base of the craft. Tony dropped his pack and followed, then understood. The underside of the ship was scored and burned, and the landing struts were bent all to hell—but amazingly enough, the hull was intact except in the one place where the laser had burned through. "Someone give Dietrich a medal," Hogan said, standing with his hands on his hips.
Tony murmured agreement. They'd taken the hit high in the atmosphere, losing pressure and maneuverability; but their pilot had managed a remarkable crash landing, avoiding fire or explosion. There was plenty of damage, including a stabilizer and an engine; but Tony could hear the damage-control chief talking to Commander Mortaine back near the stern right now, saying that it could have been much worse. He seemed to think that the craft might even be made to fly again.
The skipper saw them and gestured them over, along with Dennis, the planetologist. "You men get started making a sweep, before we lose daylight," he said. "Scout the immediate surroundings—find out if there's any sign of our friends. Right now I just want to know if there's any immediate danger."
The three men went to assemble their gear. Tony, sorting his equipment, gazed skeptically at his nobblie apparatus. It would take time to set up, and it wasn't terribly portable. "Leave it, this trip," Hogan said, walking by. "Bring the microbial scanners. Plenty of time for the other, later." Tony shrugged and closed the case. They hoisted their packs, and Hogan pointed toward a rise in the west. "That way first. We'll take samples as we go."
They strode off through the ankle-high grass.
* * *
"Look off there and tell me what you see, will you?" Dennis' voice was muffled by his respirator mask. They were standing at the crest of a knoll, gazing out over a rolling countryside full of dips and rises that hid much of the land from view. Dennis was shading his eyes, pointing to the northwest.
Tony squinted. "I don't know. What am I supposed to see? Are you talking about the land contour?"
"No—above ground. You don't see something moving?"
Tony saw only pastoral stillness, and said so.
Dennis sighed. "I don't see it now, either." He lifted his binocs again.
Tony blocked the sun with his hand. It was tricky, scanning a land full of shadows when you didn't know what to expect. On Earth you might look for some sheep, or a coyote, or an eagle. Here, there was no way to know. Several times he had thought he'd seen something, only to have it gone when he blinked.
Hogan rose from setting up a remote sensor. "What are you muttering about?"
"Denny saw something. Probably just a shadow. Like I've been seeing."
Hogan frowned. "Hey, Denny—you okay?"
Dennis was rubbing his eyes. He looked pale. "One of you . . . look over there again, will you?" He passed his binocs to Tony. Hogan raised his own.
"Give me a heading," Hogan said.
Tony adjusted the binocs to their last heading and read off the numbers.
The distant landscape clicked into focus. Greenish-brown rolling hills, empty, except . . . there was something now, to the right. He drew a breath. "Go to minus eleven." He clicked the zoom in a notch. There was something shadowy moving across the land like tumbleweed. He snapped a picture through the binocs. "Do you see it?"
"Not yet—yeah, there, I see it." Hogan was silent a moment. "Hard to track. Damn, I—there, I've got it again."
Tony was having trouble following it, too. "It's moving too fast to be wind-borne," he said, trying to keep the image steady.
"Looks like it's running," Hogan murmured.
"And coming this way." Tony backed off to wide angle. Now it was just a smudge of shadow on the move. He snapped a picture, then went to close-up again. He switched to infrared and the shadow vanished; he switched back to visual and it reappeared.
"Stay on it," Hogan ordered. "I see another now, to the north."
Tony stayed with it. Now it looked like a striding figure of smoke, vaguely humanoid. An alien from the other ship? He felt a coldness in his stomach. He couldn't see its feet touching the ground. It was heading a little to the south of them. He snapped some more pictures. "Still got it?" Hogan asked. "I lost the other one." Tony gave him a new heading, then lowered the binocs. He turned to hand them to Dennis.
Dennis was standing rock-still, staring. Tony's stomach tightened. "Denny?" He shook the other man's shoulder. "What's wrong?"
"Damn!" Hogan said. He lowered his binocs, blinking. He looked at Tony. "It's gone. Did you see it go?"
Tony shook his head. There was a chill of fear prickling at the back of his neck. He raised the binocs again. Zoomed in. Scanned. He saw nothing but barren land. "It's not there anymore," he said softly.
"Damn thing gave me the willies," Hogan said. "Did you get some shots of it? What's wrong with Dennis?"
Whatever had caused their companion to freeze, he was shaking himself out of it now. "Hey," he said. "Did you see something?" He rubbed his temple.
Tony felt an icy poker slide up his back—then suddenly evaporate. He sighed with a shock of relief. Whatever had touched them, it was gone now.
"We saw it," Hogan said. "If it was our friends"—he jerked his thumb skyward—"then they're awfully close, and they're fast. If it's something else . . ." He shaded his eyes, scanning the horizon, then shrugged. "I wish we had your nobblies, Tony. Let's get the hell back and analyze those pictures."
"Fine with me," Tony grunted.
Hoisting their packs, they fled back the way they had come.