Chapter 25
GRIMES SLID THE SCREEN of the upper viewport to one side, ready to snap it back at the first sign of hostile life outside. He did not expect that there would be such. There was not. He was reasonably certain that the drones were no more impervious to a lethal combination of almost hard vacuum and extremely low temperature than humans would have been. He turned to the others, said, “All right. We’re going down.”
“Please be fast, Captain,” said Lennay. “My men . . . they are injured, dying . . .”
Or dead . . . thought Grimes. But as long as a spark of life remained in any of the raiding party speed was essential.
He threw the inertial drive into neutral, dropped like the proverbial stone. He heard Tamara gasp, the Darrijans moan in fear. He watched the fast decreasing tally of kilometers on the radar altimeter screen—a diminishing numeration that very soon was that of meters only. At 30 he slammed on maximum vertical thrust. Little Sister was exceptionally robust; she could take this treatment but she didn’t have to like it. She complained bitterly with an agonized creaking of structural members while a veritable galaxy of red warning lights flashed on the console. She quivered to a halt ten meters from the ground, started to rise again. Grimes adjusted thrust while looking into the screen. Yes, there was the river, with the sandspit. Concentrations of metal—the barge, the guns—showed up brightly. Grimes spun the pinnace like a top about her short axis, made for them.
***
Only one man had survived the Shaara counter attack. This was Tambu, Lennay’s chief clerk. He was wounded, a laser beam having slashed away the flesh from his right shoulder; had the injury not been instantly cauterized he would have died from loss of blood. He was unconscious but, said Lennay, would survive if he were taken without too much loss of time to the cave temple.
Tamara asked, “How much time do we have, Grimes? How long before Baroom flies back to deal with us?”
He said, “I don’t think that she’ll be back until the Rogue Queen has finished her business to the north.”
“But she must know what’s happened here, that her people have been massacred.”
“Not necessarily,” he told her.
“But the Shaara are telepaths . . .”
“And their telepathy is short range. For longer distances they rely on radio—among themselves they speak in coded stridulations. If they had a transceiver in the dome they may—they probably will—have gotten word of our attack through to the ship. But I suspect that the only radio here is that in Little Sister—in which case we have time to get ourselves organized.”
“Tambu must be taken to the temple,” said Lennay stubbornly. “Also the bodies of our people must be carried there for proper crematory rites.”
“They’ll keep,” said Grimes with a callousness that he did not feel. “So will Tambu. I’ve seen men recover from much worse wounds. If you like you can find some sterile dressings in the medicine chest for him. But we must make use of whatever time we have. First of all, I’m flying back to the dome. We must make a search, find out if there is a radio set inside it. If there is—it’s battle stations again. If there’s not, we collect up all the arms and ammunition, from the dome and from the Shaara dead, that will be of use to us. Then we fly back to the cave. But first of all,” he looked with extreme distaste at the bodies of the princess and the drone, still oozing a greenish, foul-scented ichor over what had been the spotlessly clean deck of the cabin, “we get these outside . . .”
Lennay’s two men put the unconscious Tambu on to one of the bunks, then dragged the Shaara corpses out through the airlock. As soon as they had finished Grimes lifted the pinnace, flew back to the ruined dome. The rest of the ship cleaning could wait until later although, as soon as possible, he must disentangle those messily burst corpses from the twin laser cannon.
***
Grimes went into the dome with Lennay and the other two Darijjans leaving Tamara, to whom electronic equipment was not strange, in charge of the pinnace. Should Little Sister’s radar show the approach of any space or aircraft she would let him know at once.
Fortunately the plastic hemisphere was not fully deflated. Grimes and his companions were able to crawl through tunnels and spherical chambers without too much difficulty, although even where there was headroom it was impossible to maintain an upright posture on the yielding floors. That odd diffused lighting was still on and through the almost transparent plastic of the interior walls Grimes could see the dark shapes of machines. Getting to them was the trouble; the inside of the dome was a three dimensional maze. But at last he was satisfied. One of those metallic shapes turned out to be a food dispenser and another doled out strictly rationed drops of some sort of syrup. The third and last one was only a drinking fountain. There were no weapons, although there were boxes of ammunition that would fit both the machine pistols and the light machine guns. To Grimes’ disappointment there was nothing—either banked power cells or any sort of generator—that could be used to recharge captured laser pistols. But this did not matter, he suddenly realized. Little Sister had power a-plenty.
He made his way out of the dome followed by the Darijjans dragging their prizes. Back in the pinnace Tamara told him that there was still nothing on the radar screen and informed Lennay, who was making anxious enquiries, that Tambu was still sleeping. Everything was under control but for the passage of time. The night was almost over; the overcast sky was grey rather than black, was lightening with every passing minute. Sooner or later somebody would be coming down from the city to investigate the shooting—probably a military patrol, and the army leaders were pro-Shaara . . .
But there were still things to be done. There were the weapons to be collected from the Shaara dead. There were the corpses of the killed guerrillas to be loaded aboard Little Sister. Grimes could appreciate Lennay’s concern but still thought that this was a criminal waste of time . . . He arranged to have the two surviving Darijjan soldiers make their way to the river between the rows of bushes, picking up what they could during their journey, while he flew Little Sister to the wreckage of the battery and its crew.