Resurgence

He gave her a puzzled look. “That’s what I had in mind. Unless you think I ought to dump them outside? I wasn’t going to, because if we decide tomorrow that we’d like to dissect them, by that time the rain could have ruined the bodies completely. They’re falling to bits as it is.”

He sounded unbelievably cold and casual. Darya had to remind herself that there was another side to the man. In crises, he seemed able to suppress every trace of emotion. All was calm logic. Maybe that’s why he was such a good troubleshooter.

If you wanted empathy and feeling for others, you would take Julian Graves. If encyclopedic knowledge was the requirement, without much judgment to go with it, then E.C. Tally was the person of choice. If you needed someone who through long experience had a sense of Builder constructs and how they might and might not act, maybe you would turn to Darya herself. But if you were in such deep trouble that you thought you would never emerge alive, then you turned to Hans Rebka—and you hoped that sentiment and finer feelings would not interfere with the need for the split-second decisions and hard actions that survival demanded.

Ben was already in the passenger seat, his body turned a little to give him as much comfort as he could find. He needed real medical treatment, but he would not get it here. Hans was in the back. He was moving things around there, and Darya did not choose to turn her head and find out what they were.

She stared straight ahead, out through the car’s forward window. The sun was lower yet, dipping toward the horizon with what seemed like infinite slowness. The day on Marglot was very long, and they had to be prepared to endure an equally long night.

The rain fell steadily, soaking into the springy vegetation and the tall conical growths that hid the small mummified animals. The hillside was as bleak a prospect as Darya had ever seen. Tonight they would rest as best they could, but tomorrow they must begin to ask and answer a different question: Was it possible for humans to survive on Marglot, as the food supplies of their suits ran out?

Darya’s brain felt turned off. She was not thinking about anything at all as she stared at the hillside ahead. She saw nothing and was expecting to see nothing, when her trance was broken by a change in the light outside. A vertical shaft of illumination was forming, as though a second sun shone through a rift in the clouds to produce a bright column of light. The shaft was about four meters across, and it struck the ground where Darya, Hans, and Ben had been expelled from it.

“Hans!”

“What?” Incredibly, his voice sounded as though she had wakened him from sleep.

“Look outside. In front of the car. Something’s happening.”

“Huh?” But he was sitting up, leaning over Darya’s shoulder. “That wasn’t there ten minutes ago.”

“No. I saw it forming. What is it, Hans?”

“I don’t know. But it’s changing.”

The column of light no longer ran from heaven to earth. Its upper end was fading, even as the lower part lifted, solidified, and took on a definite shape. It formed a glowing oval whose lower end hung three meters or so above the soaked earth. As they watched it changed further, into a perfect sphere that slowly drifted downward.

It was three meters above the wet vegetation—two meters, one meter, and still descending. As the lowest point made contact with the wet plants, the sphere emitted a flash of light so bright that the photosensitive faceplates of the suits instantly darkened to protect their eyes.

When they could see again the bright sphere had disappeared. But it had not vanished without leaving a trace. Where the sphere had touched down, something remained. Three somethings. Three suited human figures. Three people, back to back, sitting down on the wet hillside with legs outstretched in front of them.

As Darya watched in disbelief, one figure climbed slowly to its feet. It was facing away from the car, so she could not see into the faceplate of the suit. The person within would not at once see her.

A voice said, “Well, I suppose you’d have to say that this is an improvement. When you have been nowhere at all, and sitting under a force of two and a half gees while you were nowhere, almost anywhere else qualifies as better. But as to why we were brought here . . . ”

The words tailed off, but Darya did not need to hear more. Only one person in the Sagittarius Arm possessed that deep, hollow voice. The man standing with his back to the car was Julian Graves.

And with him, scrambling to their feet with expressions on their faces that suggested they were as surprised as Darya, were two others whom Darya recognized. There was no question that they were Torran Veck and Teri Dahl.

Which left only the biggest question of all. It was the one asked by Julian Graves of himself and his companions, but it applied equally well to Darya, Hans, and Ben: Why had they been brought here?

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Planning a landing