"Chalker, Jack L - Quintara 1 - The Demons at Rainbow Bridge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)
Maybe.
If the energy pack lasted, and if the suit beacon wasn't drowned out by the interference, they might find her.
There wasn't any clear-cut way out or up from this point, and she didn't dare go down. Damn! Looked like a hundred of them down there now, and more energy used with each swath she cut. Maybe there was a better use for those shots. . . .
She set her pistol to its thinnest cutting beam and fired to her side, carving out a small and jagged, but possibly useful, series of handholds and footholds in the trunks. They proved pretty damned solid, as she'd guessed; they could hardly be mostly water or pulp and hold up that huge canopy.
Maybe, just maybe, they were enough to get across on.
She let the pistol recharge to full, then gave a particularly low cut to the tentacle forest, knowing she had maybe five or six minutes before they reformed. She eyed her steps, and made for the first cut, then the second. She would have to descend a bit in a few more meters to get around, but by then she'd have a near wall of trunks between her and the main body of tentacles. She had no doubt that they could flow around or under or whatever, but that would take more intelligence than they had so far exhibited. If she could fake them out, get over there quickly, they might lose her. It was worth a try, anyway.
She fired another thin cutting beam and almost at the same time made her move, going down, through, and around, then climbing as quickly as possible wherever thepossibility presented itself. Finally she stopped and looked down. The sound of her own hard breathing was the only sound around. There didn't seem to be any activity at all; in themurky gloom of the canopy, illuminated only by her helmet optics, she saw only peaceful swamp.
She half expected a giant tentacle to suddenly rise up and grab her, but after a little while she realized that, perhaps, at least for this short time, she'd made it.
Yeah, she'd made it -- so hip, hip, hooray! Now she was only stuck here in the middle of nowhere without communications, waiting until something set the things off again.
Think, Modra! Think! She forced herself to be calm, got her breathing regular, took a drink of water, and tried to figure out what to do next. Her beacon was on, so maybe the Durquist could home in on her when things settled down. Now, that was a thought. . . . She switched to scan mode and tried to see if there were any other beacons in the area. Yes! For a moment hope soared, but then the small viewer against the helmet began to show more plots, and more -- tons and tons of beacons. Damn it! Hama's all-frequency overload was tramping on the beacons as well, creating hundreds of ghost images. So much for that idea.
There was nothing for it but to try and make her way back to the shuttle. She doubted that the tentacles could do much to it, and it was in one of those holes in the canopy that the life below seemed to avoid. But there were fruit-falls all over this damned place. They'd been lucky, or maybe unlucky, to come in this far without one to trigger that -- whatever it was. They'd come in overland, in the swamp, too. Doing it via the trees might not even be possible.
What the hell were those tentacle things, anyway? It was almost as if the water had come alive, yet the water was water -- they'd tested that and a lot more.
With a sudden shock she realized that they weren't creatures at all, or at least not creatures in the standard sense of the word. Those bug-sized slimy slugs -- they covered the swamp, living just under the surface. Somehow, she realized, they had to be the creatures -- that something, maybe a chemical signal, was triggered in the water when the goodies from above hit. But why did they form new units? Not to eat fruit, surely. To grab things, maybe larger things -- now there was a cheery thought! -- or, perhaps, simply to move. Maybe they battled each other as colonies for the food, the swamp floor a constant battleground for what was needed to survive.
It didn't matter. Somebody might do something to this world and make it reasonable, but it would be damned expensive to do, and the ecosystem was odd enough anyway that the university types would probably put some kind of hold on it until they could determine the potential for this kind of life form. This one just wasn't going to pan out for them, and that meant deep, deep shit.
Of course, not as deep as the immediate problem, which was getting the hell out of here.
Idly she considered making some kind of armor or shield out of the trees. Clearly they couldn't eat the trees, and if the activation of a colony was chemical, they might not even be aware of her.
No, silly idea. No saws, no woodworking shop handy.
She looked around and saw, not far off, occasional flashes of varicolored energy lighting up the dark swamp like some kind of fancy light show. There was the real problem! If she could make it over there, shoot Mama's body, disintegrate it, damn it all, no matter how hard that was to do to a comrade and friend, she'd also get that radio. And with the radio gone, the interference would be gone. Her own radio and locator beacon would then work, and, of course, the I.P. was still sounding off as well.
She had no choice. While it was calm, before more fruit rained from above, she had to silence that noise.
She made her way cautiously toward the glow, which was intermittent but more than enough for the suit scanners to detect. Anything powerful enough to overload all radio frequencies and the beacons as well wasn't going to just vanish.
When she finally made it, it was an ugly sight. The tentacles had ripped the little Durfur almost to shreds, cracking both suit and body in a number of places, then seeping in. The half-eaten corpse was twisted and broken, crawling with those tiny things that could so easily combine to kill.
The sight sickened, enraged, and frightened her. Almost without thinking, she whipped out the pistol, set it to full charge, and began frying the scene. The slug-covered body shivered as the beam hit and enveloped it, and smoke from the burning of remaining hair and flesh as well as frying slugs rose up. She kept at it, steady as a rock, and much of Mama's remains did go up, but not enough, not enough. The suit material was still protecting the interior, including the equipment. Damn it! The pistol didn't have enough power at this range!
As the small warning of power drain began flashing and sounding, she suddenly sensed movement near her and whirled, her finger still on the trigger. At the exact moment the beam came to bear on the intruder, it cut off.
Tris Lankur climbed right next to her and touched helmets with her. The helmets were small, almost form-fitting, the visor shielding the eyes and allowing for mental control of the various screen displays. If all else failed, the helmet contact provided a very weak low-power communication.
Each suit's code was programmed into the logic of all other suits; that made it impossible to fire on one of your own team, even by accident. The only reason her suit had allowed her to fire at poor Mama's body was because the suit break and monitors showed that the team member was dead.
She practically fell into Tris's arms. "My God! I thought I was the only one left alive!"
"I was having my doubts, too," he admitted, sounding his usual calm and strong self. In all these years, she'd known him to be sarcastic, flip, calm, cool, and collected, but never did lie seem frightened or out of his element. He was the bedrock of the company, and of her.
"I was trying to fry that damned power supply," she told him.
"It's under water," he responded. "I had the same idea, but the back of his suit's obviously intact and shielding the pack. How much power do you have left?"
She checked. "Not much. Ten per cent, no more. I've had to use a lot."
"Uh. Okay, I'm reading forty-four per cent, so give me your plug and I'll transfer some. Then we'll both hit him full strength at the same time until we're down to fifteen per cent or that racket stops. Combined, we might have enough power to do it."
She nodded and hooked up, watching her energy gage rise as his fell. When he declined to twenty-seven per cent, he cut it off.
"Okay," he told her, "Don't miss. Count down from five and then go. Remember to cut off at fifteen per cent. If we haven't burned through by then, it's not going to give."
She nodded, took a braced position, aimed, and started only a fraction of a second after he did. In a couple of seconds the two beams converged on the target and stayed on it. Lankur's presence calmed her, and she made this count. At the fifteen per cent mark they both cut off, then quickly checked the radio. It wasn't silent, but there was no longer any screech, just hissing and crackling, through which they could hear each other, although not much better than by the helmet touch method.
"Well, we got it, or most of it," he said with satisfaction. He shifted the scan. "Your locator's on okay, but I don't get the Durquist at all. Damn! Tran might not be able to pick out the beacon through the canopy." He sighed. "Well, he'd better. Nothing to do now but wait."
The exterior sound monitor suddenly filled with a crackling noise of its own, and her blood ran cold.
"Oh, my God! It's going to rain fruit again!"
For seven hours they had been trapped high in those giant trees, with declining power, in a world illuminated only by a failing electronic sensor system, intermittently attacked by tentacles rising from the ooze, the rest of the time in silence much more terrible, waiting for that telltale sound of crackling, falling food.
And through it all, Tris Lankur had told dirty jokes and made rude comments about the world and the situation and kept her alive.
Ultimately, though, they had to start shutting down suit systems to the bare minimum and deciding whether or not to waste precious energy taking out a tentacle if it arose. Pretty soon even the air recycling system would give out, and that would be the end of them.
Tris had even been philosophically fatalistic about that.
"I always thought I'd go this way," he told her. "Sorry to have you here as well, but if I have to go, this is better."
"Better?" She looked around at the stinking hellhole. "Better than what?"
"Better than dying in the poverty I was born into. Better than the mud and filth and real emptiness of dying of starvation. Better, or at least more honorable, than being shot by a copper in a getaway after stealing a couple loaves of bread. Better than bein' just another geek who never even had a chance at this."
The Exchange hadn't been terribly kind to humanity, just letting it go. Her home world was at least pastoral; few there had much in the way of riches or access to major technology, but nobody starved and you could carve out a decent if simple life. Tris's home world had been uglier, had gone horribly wrong without the means or contacts to straighten it out, and nobody had cared. She knew that, academically, but she'd never been on any of those kinds of worlds, never really wanted to see starving children with distended bellies and know that her world could produce enough to feed them but didn't have the cash to transport the food where it was needed.
Sitting there, perched in a tree, all systems failing, her old home, which had seemed so boring and so unromantic, now seemed almost like Utopia. She had faced death many times since taking over the Widowmaker company, but never like this, never slow, never in such horror. In all that time they'd had many close calls, but this was the first time they'd ever lost a team member, the first time she'd had to look down upon the body of a friend and comrade and imagine herself there as well. Kama, at least, had gone quickly, not like this.
And for what had he died? For what were they now going to die?
At that moment, any sense of the romance of this job, the thrill and excitement of it, the very appeal of it, died within her. Even if by some miracle they got out of this one, and somehow found the money to keep going, she wasn't sure now that she could keep going -- or even that she wanted to. This one was probably going to get them, but, if not, the next one would, or the next, or the next.
| © 2025 Библиотека RealLib.org (support [a t] reallib.org) |