Reign of Fire Read online

  Susannah was overwhelmed. Stavros seemed determined to focus on her with the same single-minded intensity he gave to his work. He said little, content to be with her, acknowledged as her lover. She thought it all a bit impulsive but, enormously flattered and instantly addicted to his impassioned lovemaking, she put it down to his youth, as she had his other excesses.

  For the first part of the throw, the caravan pursued the winding canyon bottom, travelling upstream and more or less eastward toward the foothills of the Talche. After the mid-throw rest, the river narrowed as its bed was increasingly lined with rocks. The white spittle of rapids broke the surface as the current picked up speed. The canyon walls closed in around them until there was little more than a boulder-choked gorge ahead, thick with broad-leafed clusters and tangles of the yellow brush.

  Aguidran turned the lead wagons into an upward-sloping dry wash, and with much urging and swearing and shouting, the lathered draft animals hauled the train of wagons back to plains level.

  The Dop Arek was gentler here, the ground less ravaged by flooding. Soft brush-covered undulations flowed like waves into hills to the east. The old road appeared again, offering a decent surface over which they could at last make good time. The brush soon gave way to tall, sharp-edged grasses that bent before the wagon’s passage like a mango-colored wheat field. The dairy herd as well as their drivers perked up at the sight of the hills and the rounded peaks of the Talche beyond them, but Stavros slipped his arm around Susannah’s waist and pulled her close as they walked.

  Aguidran pushed past the usual twelve-hour travel period in order to reach her intended campsite. Appearing suddenly out of the sea of orange grass was another river, broad and fast-moving but very shallow, full of sandbars and reddish reeds.

  After dinner. Stavros led Susannah off to find a bed with him among the concealing grasses.

  “When all this is over…” He waved an arm at the sky as they lay entwined on her blanket. The nearby clatter of the caravan was settling down for the sleep round.

  Misunderstanding him, she said, “But I thought you liked it here.”

  He dropped his arm to stroke the curve of her belly. “Oh, I do. I do.”

  She fell asleep in his arms. Later, his kisses woke her. He smelled of strange grasses and desire. Sleepily, she pressed herself against him.

  “I love you,” he said.

  She laughed softly, to lighten his mood.

  “I do. Just remember that.”

  But when her chronometer’s alarm beeped at her hours later, it lay beside her on an empty blanket. Stavros was gone.

  “He’ll steal the working antenna from the wrecked Sled, contact CRI in secret and send a message drone home before Clausen can file his claim.” Megan was sympathetic but unrepentant. “We agreed I could tell you once he was on his way. He was afraid you’d try to talk him out of it.”

  Susannah stared at the ground. To her surprise, she missed him already.

  “He didn’t want a fight. The lad loves you, Susannah.”

  Susannah’s voice was flat. “If you’d told me about all this before…”

  Megan’s gentle shrug held no apology. “We just couldn’t be sure how far you’d carry your insistence on neutrality. Two partisan souls such as Stav and myself were sure you’d turn us in, on the admittedly sound principle that politics have no place in the practice of science. But out here, we’re safely out of contact, and by the time we get back to DulElesi, Emil’ll have figured out what Stav’s up to anyway, so the only additional risk in telling you is to me.”

  “And to Ghirra and Liphar and Aguidran…”

  Megan raised an innocent brow and Susannah’s anger blossomed.

  “Come on, Meg. I may be untrustworthy as a conspirator, but I’m not stupid! My own work depends on good powers of observation!” She spun away, pacing in short lengths of frustration, feeling unjustly taken to task for her loyalty to the ideal of objective observation. It did not mean that when the time came, she would not commit herself. It was just that the definition of the proper time depended so on your point of view. “Meg, if I thought there was a legal way to stop CONPLEX from ruining the planet…”

  “Then my point is well taken. Our strategy is semilegal at best, and that’s only if everything works out the way we’ve planned.”

  The fear that had stayed latent while her anger ran its course finally surfaced. She said dully, “Emil will kill him, Meg.”

  Megan smiled mirthlessly. “Funny you should see that as quickly as I did. It took Stav having a laser put to his head to realize that possibility.” She nodded as Susannah glanced up at her sharply. “Oh yes, our man from CONPLEX came armed.”

  “But that’s against…”

  “Regulations? Regulations mean nothing to a man like that. And we’re not safe in this either, you know. Or at least I’m not. You still have the choice.”

  Susannah’s eyes burned with tears she did not want to shed. She was angry with Stavros for rendering her suddenly vulnerable. “Choice? It’s not a real choice if you’re forced into making it. I wish he’d…” She stopped, shaking her head in loss and confusion.

  And Megan noted soberly to herself, what sure instincts the boy has, to bind each of us to him with a different chain.

  5

  Clausen bounded up the last flight of steps, ignoring the twinges in his ankle. He was glad he hadn’t broken bones in the Sled wreck, as Danforth had. He still thought of his body as the well-honed tool he had made of it, but the reluctance of a mere sprain to heal forced on him another of those irritating reminders that he wasn’t as young as he used to be.

  He turned past the entry to the FoodGuild’s main storage cave and headed along the ledge toward the stable entry. It was one of the oldest caves. The opening was ragged, shaped like a wide mouth caught in an awkward smile. The old stone shelter for the weather watch hunched to one side like a single blunted tooth.

  He paused in the shade of the overhang, seeming to brush dust from his impeccably fitting khakis. No one waited on the inner stair, or hurried down to meet him with the usual armload of produce. Clausen adjusted the fit of his soft, fingerless suede gloves, pulled the straps tight around his tanned wrists. He flexed his left hand gingerly to assure himself that the tiny air-powered hypodermic lay comfortably in its sheath against the pad of his thumb. He lounged about, alert to the possibility that he was being watched. He made a show of standing back to study the guardian frieze in its high niche in the rock. The ancient frieze held no aura of mystery for him. He saw it as just one more artifact of a culture that did not impress him as particularly distinguished. He could admire the boldness of the carved representations of the Goddesses, or the crude expressiveness of the many tiny figures lamenting at their feet, but he’d seen far better in his time. Even so, he would take a few crates worth with him when he left, to make up for the regrettable fact that Sawl pottery was too sophisticated to bring much of a price on the primitive arts black market. Clausen’s income was nicely supplemented by his connection to certain wealthy art patrons and dealers back home.

  He edged toward the upward stair. His eyes restlessly skimmed the inner walls, tracing the smooth striations of the rock with the frustration of a compulsive reader who has been allowed only one book to read over and over. If the lithium strike on Fiix was as big as he expected it to be, he considered making it his last. He would go out in a blaze of glory, retiring to the seclusion of his colony planet estates and the company of his priceless collection of orchids. Clausen was tired of waiting, waiting for the comlink to be fixed, waiting for the Sawl rangers to return to haul the broken Sled back to base, waiting to be able to begin the task he had travelled two hundred and twenty parsecs to accomplish. But he knew the dangers of letting frustration sour into rage, and so channelled it into his fanatical cooking, into tinkering with McPherson, into disputing subtle points of astrophysics with Weng. The one near-truthful expression of his feelings that he allowed himself was to needle Danforth wi
th relentless cheer, knowing the other’s frustration to be as near the boiling point as his own. He thought it an amusing game to see who would erupt first, though he didn’t consider it much of a contest.

  His most serious amusement, and the one which took the greatest concentration of his effort and resources, was getting past the Sawls into the secret depths of the Caves.

  The guardian frieze glared at him with unblinking obsidian eyes. He gave it a mocking salute from the bottom of the inner stairs and started up. To his disgust, a welcoming party awaited him at the top: two elderly women, bent and smiling, and a young man with a limp, well known by now to Clausen, who understood his name to be Leb. The invalid leg had been crushed in a rockslide, and the fellow supported himself with a knobby wooden cane. But Clausen noted that he moved with surprising agility when the need arose. He regarded the boy as his principal watchdog and longed to kick away the cane in order to discover just how much of Leb it actually supported.

  But he could not yet afford overt acts of hostility. He needed the Sawls’ help to retrieve the Sled, He flexed his left hand once more and mounted the stone steps with a hearty greeting in the beginner’s Sawlish that he had finally decided would be advantageous to learn.

  McPherson unloaded the last boulder into the appropriate pile. She slumped comically and let her tongue loll like a dog’s. “Heavy sumbitch.”

  Beside their emptied two-cart, the three FoodGuilders looked on with dubious curiosity.

  “Thanks for the loan of the wagon,” she said, not adding that it would have been even nicer of them to have offered to help with the stones. She took a swig from her canteen and bent back to her task.

  She hefted a square, flat rock and staggered gamely through the hot sun to an open area beside the Lander which she had already cleared of flood debris and raked crudely, Two neat circles of plastic stakes stuck out of the ground like concentric teeth. McPherson set her rock down between the first pair of stakes. She stood back, then nodded, satisfied with the fit, and went back for the next stone.

  The three Sawls spread palms to one another. They pulled down the brims of their sun hats, reloaded their sacks of compost onto the cart and trundled off into the fields.

  When she had laid the first circle of stones, McPherson paused for breath, brushing sweat from her eyes. Her hair was quickly bleaching to near white from the constant sun, and her round face was turning golden brown. Danforth said she was starting to look like a beach bum. McPherson decided to take this as a compliment.

  She walked to the edge of the Lander’s shade. “This is gonna work just fine, Commander.”

  Weng’s charts rattled briefly as she leaned over to make a brief calculation on a crumpled data sheet. “Excellent work, Lieutenant.”

  “Then all we gotta do is scrounge enough cable to hook the damn thing up.” McPherson eyed the wounded high-gain dish, flat on its back, as useless as an upside-down tortoise. “ ’Course, without the omni, we’ll be in deep shit if the Orbiter ain’t where she’s supposed to be. I mean, I can get the angle right but this contraption won’t be real adjustable.”

  “She’ll be there,” Danforth rumbled from the depths of his own ruminations. “Why would she be anywhere else? Those guys up there are going to be glued to their consoles until they finally hear from us again.”

  “Captain Newman won’t really start worrying for another week or two,” Weng observed, as McPherson did an about-face and tromped back to her growing circle of stone. The Commander wore her top collar button unfastened, her only concession to the heat. She bent gracefully to a large transparent star chart that lay unrolled across her newly set-up desk of crates. Sinuous red tracings wove like the parallel lines of a contour map around and among the dark blots of stars. Weng figured an angle, drew a faint slash tipped with a spidery arrow. She sat back, considering, then folded her pale hands across her lapful of printout and well-thumbed astronavigation manuals.

  “Dr. Danforth,” she began carefully. “Perhaps it is presumptuous of me, but I do wonder if enough weight has been given in our thinking to the astronomical situation of this system. I have been trying to shape the navigators’ approach data into a more complete and up-to-date map of this sector, and unless I am very much mistaken, the whole of Byrnham’s Cluster is migrating slowly into the Coal Sack, in fact has been for some hundred-odd thousand years. It is even now approaching the regions of highest concentration of nebular materials.”

  Danforth looked up in wonder. This was the longest sustained sentence he had heard out of Weng’s mouth since he had boarded the mothership Hawking in near-Earth orbit. He waited for her to make her point.

  “Well, surely this could be expected to have some effect on the planet’s climatic mechanisms?”

  He nodded slowly. His usual response would have been to dismiss such information as the red herring he was sure it was. But Weng had clearly worked hard to derive it and he suddenly found himself without the heart to dump on the woman he had seen as a rival authority for the entire outward trip. He wondered if the heat and humidity were sapping his resistance.

  “It might over an enormous time scale,” he temporized. “But I doubt it could cause the freakish variability we’ve observed here. Unless…” His own word choice sparked a further possibility.

  “Unless the primary itself has become variable,” Weng finished for him.

  Danforth rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “Yah. Due to interaction with the increased concentrations of dust.” He frowned, then shook his big head. “Scale’s still too big-maybe we’d see some effect over the course of several hundreds of days, but between one hour and the next?… Well, what the hell. Do we have any decent stellar output figures in that stuff you rescued?”

  “Some.” Weng fanned a stack of water-stained papers and spread them across the star chart. “For the twenty-two days of approach, between dropping out of jump and orbital insertion. The data since then are in CRI’s files.”

  Danforth decided that Weng was not as pleased with this part of the evidence. “And…?”

  “The star’s output seems steady over that period,” she conceded.

  His headshake was definitive this time. “With further data, we could tell better, but my guess is that collision with the Coal Sack will effect the situation only over a scale of tens of thousands of years. Let’s agree, though, that the nebula is at least partly responsible for the current condition of the primary. If dust interaction is causing it to heat up, then the planet will also… well, we can be sure that the planet is not what it was before the collision began. Let me see the numbers on the dust concentration.”

  He stored the graphs he had been toying with on the crippled terminal at his side. Referring to the sheet she handed him, he did some hurried figuring, his frown deepening unconsciously as he worked.

  “It’s little better than a guess when you have to do it this way,” he complained with disproportionate bitterness, letting his own frustration bleed into the task at hand “But anyway, following your first line of reasoning: before collision, the average planetary temperature could have been a nice comfy seventy degrees, probably fairly constant, due to the negligible axial tilt. A pretty nice place to live, in other words.

  “Then, as the system rolls into the center of the nebula, the temps could be working themselves up to a potential average of one thirty to one fifty Fahrenheit, a not-so-nice place. All very interesting, but useless for the moment, since here we are, pretty much into the middle and the temps aren’t even near those levels… though the probe data did lead me to expect at least one fifteen…” He gazed musingly at the screen as his own dilemma resurfaced in Weng’s figures. His hand returned to worry his jaw. “This heat business, Weng… it is a fundamental conundrum. There is heat missing from this system.”

  Weng’s thoughtful expression did not change. She traced a thin finger around the curlicues of braid on her white cuff and stubbornly pursued her own line of inquiry. “Accepting, then, that the Coal Sack has it
s effect only over the long run, would the climate here be expected to revert to normal once the passage through the nebula is complete?”

  Danforth winced at the word “normal,” which he had taken recent care to exile from his vocabulary. He wondered what she was getting at. “Well, yes, if there’s anything left of the atmosphere after another… how long did you figure?”

  “Approximately eighty-five thousand years until the system exits the Coal Sack.”

  “Right. After eighty-five thousand years of heating and dust interaction. Christ, you know, come to think of it…” He slumped into his many pillows with a woeful grimace. “A lot of my original assumptions about this star’s evolution may be totally dog-faced if the nebula’s interacting enough to make the star look older than it really is.”

  Weng was for once more interested in the fate of planets. “Is the atmosphere really endangered?”

  “It’s a possibility, if the star swells up enough.”

  “What has our average surface temperature been?”

  “Hell, you’re the one who’s been reading the thermometer to me these days,” Danforth grumped, distracted by this new threat to his preliminary theorizing. “Locally, it’s been around eighty degrees, but averages don’t mean much when you leap from zero to seventy in an hour and a half, then back to forty in twenty minutes. Globally, it’s been… Holy shit!” He sat up so suddenly that his chest wound protested with a lancing arc of fire that took his breath away.

  “Dr. Danforth, please…” Weng reached to steady him.

  “No, I’m okay, I’m okay.” His hand grasped for his keypad and though his face was rigid with pain, he began tapping at it frantically. “Damn it, CRI,” he rasped, “where are you when I need you!”