“Yup," Wubslin said, checking screens, nodding. “Feet have sunk in half a meter or so. We’ll have to remember to run the motors
for a while
before we try to lift off, when we leave. They’ll freeze solid in half an hour."
“Hmm," Horza said. He watched the screen. Nothing moved. There were no clouds in the light blue sky, no wind to move the snows.
The sun
wasn’t warm enough to melt the ice and snow so there was no running water, not even any avalanches in the distant
mountains.
With the exception of the seas—which still contained fish, but no longer any mammals—the only things which moved on Schar’s
World were
a few hundred species of small insects, slow spreading lichen on rocks near the equator, and the glaciers. The
humanoids’ war, or the ice age,
had wiped everything else out.
Horza tried the coded message once more. There was no reply.
“Right," he said, getting up from his seat. “I’ll step out and take a look." Wubslin nodded. Horza turned to Yalson. “You’re
very quiet," he said.
Yalson didn’t look at him. She was staring at the screen and the unblinking eye of the tunnel entrance. “Be careful," she
said. She looked at
him. “Just be careful, all right."
Horza smiled at her, picked up Kraiklyn’s laser rifle from the floor, then went through to the mess.
“We’re down," he said as he went through.
“See." Dorolow said to Aviger. Neisin drank from his hip flask. Balveda gave the Changer a thin smile as he went from one
door to the
other. Unaha-Closp resisted the temptation to say anything, and wriggled out of the seat straps.
Horza descended to the hangar. He felt light as he walked; they had switched to ambient gravity on their way over the mountains,
and
Schar’s World produced less pull than the standard-G used on the
CAT.
Horza rode the hangar’s descending floor to the now refreezing marsh,
where the breeze was fresh and sharp and clean.
“Hope everything’s all right," Wubslin said as he and Yalson watched the small figure wade through the snow toward the rocky
promontory
ahead. Yalson said nothing but watched the screen with unblinking eyes. The figure stopped, touched its wrist,
then rose in the air and floated
slowly across the snows.
“Ha," Wubslin said, laughing a little. “I’d forgotten we could use AG here. Too long on that damn O."
“Won’t be much use in those fucking tunnels," Yalson muttered.
Horza landed just to the side of the tunnel entrance. From the readings he had already taken while flying over the snow, he
knew the tunnel door
field was off. Normally it kept the tunnel within shielded from the snow and the cold air outside, but
there was no field there, and he could see
that a little snow had blown into the tunnel and now lay in a fan shape on its
floor. The tunnel was cold inside, not warm as it should be, and its
black, deep eye seemed more like a huge mouth, now that
he was close to it.
He looked back at the
CAT,
facing him from two hundred meters away, a shining metal interruption on the white expanse, squatting in a
blast-mark of
brown.
“I’m going inside," he told the ship, aiming a tight beam at it rather than broadcasting the signal.
“OK," Wubslin said in his ear.
“You don’t want somebody there to cover you." Yalson said.
“No," Horza replied.
He walked down the tunnel, keeping close to the wall. In the first equipment bay were some ice sleds and rescue gear, tracking
apparatus
and signaling beacons. It was all much as he recalled it.
In the second bay, where the flyer should have been, there was nothing. He went on to the next one: more equipment. He was
about forty
meters inside the tunnel now, ten meters shy of the rightangled turn which led into the larger, segmented gallery
where the living
accommodation of the base lay.
The mouth of the tunnel was a white hole when he turned back to face it. He set the tight beam on wide aperture. “Nothing
yet. I’m about to
look into the accommodation section. Bleep but don’t reply otherwise." The helmet speakers bleeped.
Before going round the corner he detached the suit’s remote sensor from the side of the helmet and edged its small lens round
the corner
of sculpted rock. On an internal screen he saw the short length of tunnel, the flyer lying on the ground, and a
few meters beyond it the wall of
plastic planking which filled the tunnel and showed where the human accommodation section
of the Changer base began.
By the side of the small flyer lay four bodies.
There was no movement.
Horza felt his throat closing up. He swallowed hard, then put the remote sensor back on the side of the helmet. He walked
along the floor of
fused rock to the bodies.
Two were dressed in light, unarmored suits. They were both men, and he didn’t recognize them. One of them had been lasered,
the suit
flash-burned open so that the melted metals and plastics had mingled with the guts and flesh inside; the hole was
half a meter in diameter. The
other suited man had no head. His arms were stuck out stiffly in front of him as though to embrace
something.
There was another man, dressed in light, loose clothes. His skull had been smashed in from behind, and at least one arm was
broken. He
lay on his side, as frozen and dead as the other two. Horza was aware that he knew the man’s name but he couldn’t
think of it just then.
Kierachell must have been asleep. Her slim body was lying straight, inside a blue nightgown; her eyes were closed, her face
peaceful.
Her neck had been broken.
Horza looked down at her for a while, then took one of his gloves off and bent down. There was frost on her eyelashes. He
was aware of the
wrist seal inside the suit gripping his forearm tightly, and of the thin cold air his hand was exposed to.
Her skin was hard. Her hair was still soft, and he let it run through his fingers. It was more red than he remembered, but
that might just have
been the effect of the helmet visor as it intensified the poor light of the darkened tunnel. Perhaps
he should take his helmet off, too, to see her
better, and use the helmet lights….
He shook his head, turning away.
He opened the door to the accommodation section—carefully, after listening for any noise coming through the wall.
In the open, vaulted area where the Changers had kept their outdoor clothes and suits and some smaller pieces of equipment,
there was
little to show that the place had been taken over. Further through the accommodation unit, he found traces of a
fight: dried blood; laser burns; in
the control room, where the base’s systems were monitored, there had been an explosion.
It looked like a small grenade had gone off under the
control panel. That accounted for the lack of heating, and the emergency
light. It looked as though somebody had been trying to repair the
damage, judging by some tools, spare pieces of equipment
and wiring lying around.
In a couple of the cabins he found traces of Idiran occupation. The rooms had been stripped bare; religious symbols were burned
onto the
walls. In another room the floor had been covered with some sort of soft, deep covering like dry gelatin. There were
six long indentations in the
material, and the room smelled of medjel. In Kierachell’s room, only the bed was untidy. It had
changed little otherwise.
He left it and went to the far end of the accommodation unit, where another wall of plastic boards marked the beginning of
the tunnels.
He opened the door cautiously.
A dead medjel lay just outside, its long body seemingly pointing the way down the tunnel to the waiting shafts. Horza looked
at it for a while,