Bowl of Heaven Read online

  Four of Beth’s team were still in the pressure box they’d built around the air lock’s wall. The fifth must be Tananareve, and she was running for Eros. She stopped when a hexagonal thing covered with lumpy protrusions rose through the Star Pit behind Eros.

  Jets of ice white lowered the hexagon toward the floor of the butte.

  Everybody was talking over comm — panic and anger and shouted orders that made no sense. Cliff watched the thing descend in the vacuum outside, tremendous compared to Eros. All happening only hundreds of meters away.

  It might as well have been a light-year. The hole in the air lock kept narrowing, and the ship that looked like an assembly of boxes and rhomboids and coiled tubes settled down nearby. Out of it came a lumbering machine on wheels.

  Soundless, the horror unfolded. The machine had a transparent cowling that looked like the atmospheric membrane, a shimmering pale blue balloon. Inside that sat three Bird Folk, working controls, staring at consoles that flitted across the walls in splashes of vibrant color. They moved with jittery intensity. Cliff made himself study the three and saw that they had different feather markings, and looked larger than the bigger variety on his side of the air lock. They moved with a lumbering, muscular purpose.

  Three more of Beth’s team were free of the pressure box. Coiled tubes unwound on the wheeled tank. These reached Tananareve, caught her. They plucked her up none too gently and dropped her into a cargo hold behind the cabin. Arms reached for the other crew, yanked them up one by one, added them to the hold.

  Then the tank rolled back toward its ship, up a ramp, and was gone. Just like that, Beth disappeared. Just like that.

  Horror paralyzed him while his own crew still fought the hole’s steady closing. Nothing worked. Cliff watched but could think of nothing to do. Their shouts came through on comm. But he heard it all through a cottony buffer, the words hollow and refracting. Meaningless. He dimly realized that he was in a state of shock, numb, unable to process the events. Part of him had shut down.

  The hole sealed itself up — a neat engineering trick, Cliff admitted distantly. He did not see the flicker of motion outside. Three tall Bird Folk were standing beside the air lock. They were of the third variety. They had the same markings as the ones in the crawler outside, and with a level, steely concentration they gazed impassively in at the humans.

  Something thrummed up through his feet. He turned and on one of the lock walls a set of symbols flashed, rippled, changed in a cadence. He sensed a change in the pressure. Behind the three taller Bird Folk the crowd backed away, their leathery mouths working. The three were somebody important. Maybe a funeral guard …

  “They’re going to open the inner lock door,” Irma said with an odd, flat calm.

  Cliff said, “Aybe!” The man’s head jerked around, wide-eyed. “We’re going out the instant there’s room. Here, give me that hand laser.”

  Someone called, “We shouldn’t make any fast moves. Just be — ”

  “We’ll make a run for it,” Cliff said loudly. “Everybody, get all the gear you can into your packs.”

  He had to try the laser himself. It worked, a brief flash. He watched the aliens. This was dangerous and he was in charge. But he was damned if he’d let his crew get scooped up like Beth.

  What to do? He looked up into the bowers of the forest. Some looked dry. Last night’s rain was long gone.

  “Burn the trees,” Cliff called. “No shots toward the birds.” The lock door somehow slid aside, though Cliff could see no housing it fed into. The door just shortened along one side. A puff of ivory fog swirled around it, humidity freezing out as it expanded. Cliff shouted “Stay together!” and was first through the opening.

  The big Bird Folk, third variety, were twenty meters away. The Mediums and Bigs were edging back, giving them plenty of room. Cliff aimed the laser at the trees nearby and blew hot spots in them. They burst into licking, hungry flame.

  The Bird Folk backed away, all of them, arms up in defensive gestures, legs stuttering in fast, short paces. Aybe helped the fire along with dried brush he snatched up. The rest of the crew copied him, moving to their left, behind Cliff. Irma was pulling Howard along.

  The trees crackled and gave off plumes of oily smoke. Cliff heard high-pitched calls that he guessed came from the Bird Folk, but there was no time to think, only to run and shoot at the trees, keeping as many burning trunks between them and the Bird Folk as he could. Bowers in the trees exploded with muffled bangs, showering the air with sparks.

  The aliens did not move fast. A breeze whipped down from the muggy sky and slid down the butte wall. It gushed out at the base, pushing the flames toward the Bird Folk. Cliff and Aybe formed a team, Cliff watching to be sure they did not get flanked, Aybe shooting at more trees, the others staying close. Inside their suits, they did not have to fight the smoke. Cliff could see legions of the Bird Folk staggering away from them, into the safety of the forest.

  They kept on the move long after the Bird Folk had vanished in the growing firestorm. The land began to rise and they pushed on up it, getting enough height to see. The forest ran to the fuzzy distance. Nowhere were there any signs of a town or even a tall building. The fire had gathered momentum and now surged away from the butte wall. They had created a disaster.

  Cliff was elated. Panting, the others grinned … except Howard, who sat like a sack of potatoes as soon as the rest stopped moving. Cliff finally had a chance to look at him. A three-inch sliver of metal protruded from Howard Blaire’s arm, through a slashed sleeve. Nasty and bloody — shrapnel from the attempt to block the closing hole.

  Given his ripped suit, Howard was breathing local air already. Tananareve got his suit peeled down, extracted the metal shard — Howard refused even to wince — and stopped the bleeding. She had him patched within minutes with a “walking anesthetic” that would not impair his ability to move. Howard stayed silent through it all, looking at the many odd details of the flora and fauna, still doing his job. He even caught something like an insect with his free hand and held its buzzing body for inspection. “Big wings, eyes I don’t understand. It seems — ouch!” The creature shot away.

  Cliff gave a hand signal and they gingerly opened their suits to the outside air. Fragrant with odd odors, thick, a bit sour — but the first natural air any of them had breathed in years.

  Victory, of a sort. Cliff savored the moment.

  He took time to pull the metal spar out of Howard’s arm. It stuck in the bone, then jerked loose. Irma had her medkit open; she handed him antibiotic gel, then superskin spray. They all pooled their medkits and made a selection. Howard asked, “Painkiller?”

  Irma asked, “Could you still run? Wait, here’s a local anaesthetic.” She rubbed white cream generously over the bleeding wound.

  Beth and the others were back there, probably captured by now. He tried not to think about that.

  They pushed on. Howard was able to run with them, but he didn’t speak. He sweated a lot and seemed in shock. He’d been one of the last to be warmed up from the sleep. Cliff suspected he’d been hit with too much strangeness. Just like them all.

  TEN

  Beth’s team took positions to cover all directions. Tensely they waited and watched. Things were moving. They crouched at the edge of the great bare plain, their backs to the closed air locks.

  The space above the Star Pit had become dusty, vague. Dust motes don’t behave that way in vacuum, floating, sparkling, drifting up in currents. Beth never noticed. She and the others were watching Cliff and his team in the air lock, still trapped, still trying to find controls they could work. Then — outside the pressure box, above the tremendous pit in the floor of the butte — space came alight.

  All the motes were aglare, lighting Eros and the bottom of the butte and the line of air locks. Through the Star Pit rose a building, a skyscraper, a tremendous hexagonal prism festooned with coiled gray snakes. Metallic snakes. They began uncoiling. Some of them glared white at the head end. Ot
hers ended in grabbers, mechanical hands, clusters of nostrils that might be little rockets or sensors.

  Beth and three others were inside the pressure box, up against the air lock wall. Tananareve was outside. A huge boxy thing was descending on them. “Look out!” Beth had time to call. “Get away from the Big Box!”

  A look and a gasp, and Tananareve ran. Behind her the Big Box settled carefully. A wall in it split. A smaller wedge-shaped thing rolled out on tractor treads.

  Consternation blared in her earphones. Beth turned around to see that the hole they’d burned through the aliens’ air lock was closing. The Wickramsinghs and Lau Pin were trying to jam stuff into it, blocking Cliff from climbing through. Shit! Howard Blaire started to try anyway, then pulled his arm and head out and hurled himself backwards as some of the blocking struts bent, then exploded.

  A snaky arm from the tractor plucked Tananareve from the shadow of Eros and set her inside the Big Box. Another, much larger grab reached out of the bigger vehicle and closed around the human-built pressure box. Air puffed in momentary frost, and Beth felt the pressure change. She looked for the chance to escape, to run.

  The crumpled pressure box had already risen too high. If she let go, she’d be killed. Like Beth herself, Mayra and Abduss and Lau Pin were clinging hard to whatever they could reach. The pressure box descended into a much larger cargo bin in the larger vessel.

  Many of the walls in the alien ship were transparent, like thick, murky glass. Beth and the rest rolled or crawled out of the wrecked pressure vessel in time to see grapplers close on Eros and lift it against the Big Box’s hull. The thing was immensely strong.

  The Big Box rose fast. In sudden hard and tilting thrust, Beth eased herself against the floor of the cargo bin, a smooth transparent surface covered with wedge protrusions so big that she had to wrap both arms around one.

  Lau Pin’s voice rose above the general sounds of dismay. “Tananareve? Tana — Oh, shit.”

  “Lau Pin? Where are you?”

  “She rolled. We’re over … up against a wall. She’s out cold. Her arm’s broken, I’m pretty sure.”

  Thrust eased. Vanished. They were falling. They clung to the tie-downs and waited.

  ELEVEN

  Beth shook herself, trying to keep track of time, at least.

  She didn’t believe her in-suit displays. Days had passed.

  Beth wrenched around, feeling sluggish. Bile slid up into her throat. She clenched, swallowed, forced it back down. Not the time to get sick.

  She blinked at the passing scenery. Beneath her feet lay deep space, yawning vacuum. To the sides, slabs and beams and walls stretched away.

  The back of the cup was sliding past. Occasional grapplers and other machinery came into view, some of it working. No living things, just robotic arms and, in the distance, locks. A weird, stressing vision.

  She moved slowly. Her body felt numb, as though senses came through a filter. It took hours to get her crew together and make them work.

  Fred recovered early. He watched passing scenery, mumbling notes to himself.

  They spent the time taking care of Tananareve, and tying harnesses onto the lockdowns available on the walls. Nobody else had suffered anything but bruises and banged joints. Tananareve’s ulna was broken. She clenched her teeth and said little. They tried to set it and splint it, with dubious results. She had broken ribs, too, but there was little to be done about that. Mayra could inject painkillers through the suit. Tananareve fought it for a while, groaned, then went slack.

  Meanwhile the Big Box rose behind the wok-shaped section of the Cupworld. Very little noise came through the walls of their chamber. Thrust came and went, with no sound of rocket motors. They must be moving by magnetic interaction, hovering so close to the cup that its curve was almost lost. They were close enough to make out hexagonal plates that made up the mirror, and tiny-looking motors on their backs, all mounted to a grid that seemed no thicker than spiderweb.

  That trip was their first good chance to see anything of their tremendous prison. Stars shone in the hard black. Brute slabs of metal passed by. Clangs and grinding noises, usually with small jerks and electromagnetic noise.

  A long series of plates passed by as they rose. These were a city block or larger on a side, with enormous arms to move the plate’s position. Beth felt that she was seeing the rear view of a giant array, devised to tilt the laminated wedges. Yet the huge areas were not thick. What could this be?

  The mirror lands. They had seen those areas on their flight along the jet. Abduss had figured they reflected sunlight back onto the star’s hot spot, to boil the surface and drive the jet out. These plates, then, were able to tilt and yaw, adjusting the reflection of the mirrors on the other side from their Big Box elevator line. The whole array was like the smart telescopes Beth had seen, only not used to look at stars across interstellar distances. These drove their own sun through interstellar space.

  The Big Box rumbled as it rose up the back of Cupworld, taking its time. Sometimes there was rattling thrust, sometimes not. The big alien Variety Three Bird Folk didn’t like heavy gravity, it seemed. No wonder, given their size.

  They ate the food paste in their helmets, and thereafter went hungry. Not thirsty; the suits were made to recycle. They talked about food. They talked about whether they would starve. They wondered how much those huge aliens ate, and what they ate, and if humans could eat it, too. Occasional thumps, surges, rattles, hums. Mayra collected pictures of everything on her all-purpose phone, which had no reception, of course. She watched her team bear up.

  Fred — was he watching everything? Or just wrapped within his own mind?

  Nothing to do but look at one another and worry.

  Their chronometers clocked four more days.

  TWELVE

  They slowed down as their adrenaline high faded. Cliff could feel the energy leak out of them. It left a sour taste in his mouth. They trotted, then walked. His own breath turned ragged, wheezing.

  Cirrus clouds overhead fuzzed Wickramasingh’s Star into a gauzy reddish blur. Strange, layered forest lay in all directions. There were several decks to the high trees, separated by open air. Cliff wondered if these had evolved to allow the constant sunlight to reach separate layers as the tall trunks swayed in breezes. The oddly spray-topped trees were getting bigger as they moved over a ridge and down its slope. The trees were strange, often thick at the top and with rough bark.

  He glimpsed plenty of birds flitting among the branches, and some very large, broad-winged ones hanging in the sky. Odd songs and squawks resounded in the high, thick canopy. At 0.8 g, it must be easier to stay aloft. Smaller birds flitted across the sky, too, in great chirruping flocks.

  He suppressed the biologist in him and concentrated on seeing if they had pursuers. No sign of it, and the first two hours went without incident. All eyes surveyed the forest. Heads jerked at the sound of small things scrambling in the bushes. They were tense at first but slowly relaxed.

  “We’ve got to live on the land,” Terry said at a break. “Conserve our supplies. Cliff, you’re the biologist. What can you see that we can eat?”

  “Can’t tell at a glance, Terry. We need to do checks to see what here we can even digest. I’ve been looking for what’s chasing us.”

  “Stay away from those aliens, right,” Aybe said. “We need to figure out what’s going on.”

  Cliff had doubts as to what was possible, but kept quiet. This was a small group, and they had to learn to work together first, and stick to essentials. “How much food do we have?”

  A quick inventory showed that he was carrying more than the others. They did carry gear that worked in concert, compact food, and not much else beyond personal gear, comm, and tool sets.

  “Say, let’s hunt,” Irma said brightly. “I used to do that. Liked it.”

  “Using what?” Terry’s expression told them he would not have expected her to be an outdoors type, though she was tall and strong. “Lasers take a wh
ile to recharge.”

  Irma turned to show her hand-sized solar panel riding at her upper spine. “Mine’s already done recharging. Hunting is a good way to scope out the wildlife.”

  “And vice versa,” Aybe the engineer said crisply.

  “We should find water first,” Howard said, looking dry already, his clothes sweat-stained. His arm was healing fast and he showed few signs of any slowness. Vibrant health and response to treatment had been an essential in crew selection.

  “We’re too easy to spot up here,” Cliff said, eyeing the horizon. “Water’s down below. Safer, anyway.”

  They set off toward a denser stand of trees, using cover as they could, working down from the ridgeline. Irma insisted on taking the point position, hefting her laser intently, eyes jittery. After her came Aybe, and Cliff decided to give the man his own laser. He didn’t want to be the marksman and also have to scan the terrain, figuring things out as a biologist. As soon as he let go of the laser he felt downright naked, which was the point. Not having a weapon reminded him that he was not a hunter, but rather the wary, hunted stranger. They all were, but some didn’t know it yet.

  Everyone seemed to accept Cliff as at least their temporary leader. It was best to appear pretty sure of yourself, he knew, so he did not share his own doubts.

  So … What to do? Deal with the immediate. Learn, let time educate them all.

  His first major decision came when he stumbled over a gnarled tree root and fell flat on his face. Getting up, tasting the sour taste of the soil here, he realized that he was tired. They all were.

  His eyes felt grainy. “Let’s take a nap,” he said.

  They groused a bit. Aybe was still pumped up with what Cliff judged to be adrenaline energy, but the others looked gray and drawn in the full daylight.

  “How can we sleep in this glare?” Irma asked, fidgeting, ready to push on.

  “In the shade.” Cliff said it flat and sure … and after a long moment, they accepted it.