"No." Kellie had thrown herself on the ground beside him. Her voice was low and strange. "It's all that's holding him together."
Hutch knelt and picked up his wrist. "Mac," she said, "get the medkit."
MacAllister turned and hurried over to Hutch's backpack. "No pulse," Hutch said.
"He's not breathing." Kellie's voice was thick.
Reluctantly, they punched off the suit and Hutch tried direct administration of his air supply.
Somebody must have spoken Embry's code because her voice came on the circuit. "Don't move him," she said.
And Marceclass="underline" "Put out guards. They may come back."
"I got it," said Nightingale.
Kellie said, "Burn anything that moves."
"Do you have the kit yet?" Embry again.
"Mac's getting it."
"Mac, hurry up. What's the bleeding look like? Let me see it."
MacAllister returned with the medkit. Hutch took it and signaled for him to help Nightingale. Kellie pulled out a couple of pressure bandages and began applying them. Mac stood for a moment, staring down at Chiang. Then he turned away.
Nightingale was checking another dead attacker. MacAllister hoped Chiang's assailant was among the corpses.
They stayed together and circled the campsite. The exobiologist looked drained. MacAllister wondered for the first time whether he might have been unfair years before to Nightingale. "You've been here before, haven't you, Randy?" he said.
"Yeah." Nightingale made a face like someone who'd just bitten into bad fruit. "There's a little bit of deja vu about this." He paused and took a deep breath. "I really hate this place."
MacAllister nodded. "I'm sorry." He wasn't sure what he meant by the phrase.
"Yeah. Me too." Nightingale's features hardened. He looked as if he were going to say more. But he only shrugged and looked away.
MacAllister listened to the conversation on the allcom.
"Give him the R.O."
"Doing it now."
"Kellie, you need to stop the blood. Clamp down tighter."
"It's not working, Embry." "Stay with it. Any pulse yet?" "A trace."
"Don't give up. Kellie, get a blanket or something on him." MacAllister looked toward the east, toward Deneb, while Chiang slipped away.
They buried him where he fell, during a ceremony at dawn. MacAllister, whose reputation ordinarily denied him the luxury of sentiment, found a stone, cut Chiang's name and dates into it, and added the comment: DIED DEFENDING HIS FRIENDS.
They dug the grave deep and lowered him in. Kellie wanted to conduct the ceremony, but she kept choking up, and finally she asked Hutch to finish.
He did not belong to an organized church, Kellie said, although he had a strong faith. Hutch nodded, didn't try to sort it out, and simply consigned him to the ground-she could no longer bring herself to say earth-observed that he had died too soon, and asked whatever god might be to take charge of him and to remember him.
Kellie stood paralyzed, resisting all offers of support, as they filled in the grave.
Nightingale announced that the attackers were vertebrates, but that their bones were hollow. "Birds?" asked MacAllister.
"At one time," he said, "I think so." He described filaments between arms and ribs that seemed to indicate that the species had only recently lost its flight capabilities.
They went through the creatures' garments. There were pockets, which contained fruits and nuts and a few smooth rocks. Ammunition.
"Let's get moving," said Hutch.
"What about these things?" asked Nightingale. "Shouldn't we bury them, too?"
Kellie's face hardened. "Let their own take care of them."
NEWSLINE WITH AUGUST CANYON
"Tonight we have bad news. An hour ago, the landing party was attacked-»
Beekman was looking out from a virtual cliff top over a turbulent ocean when Marcel arrived. Snow whipped across the crest and fell into the night, but it was a ground blizzard stirred up by fierce winds, and had nothing to do with the skies, which were clear. Morgan was high overhead.
The tides on Maleiva III were, as a matter of course, gentle. There was no moon, so the only visible effects were generated by the distant sun. But tonight, with the gas giant approaching, the sea was monstrous. Huge waves pounded the cliffs on Transitoria's north coast.
"Tomorrow night," he said, without turning toward Marcel.
Marcel sank against a bulkhead. "My God, Gunny. That's still another day they've lost."
"There are weaknesses in the range. Fault lines, Harry tells me. Worse than we thought. They're going to give way tomorrow night."
"You're sure?"
"Yeah. We're sure." He turned sad eyes toward Marcel. "There was no way we could know-"
"It's okay. Not anybody's fault." A cold hand gripped his spine. "They're still thirty klicks away."
Beekman nodded. "I'd say they better get moving."
XXII
Tides are like politics. They come andgo with a great deal of fuss and noise, but inevitably they leave the beach just as they found it. On those few occasions when major change does occur, it is rarefy good news. -Attributed to Gregory MacAllister by Henry Kilbum, Gregory MacAllister: Life and Times
Hours to breakup (est): 78
In fact, Canyon had belatedly realized there was still another big story developing: the reaction of the people on board the other ships to the plight of the ground team.
He'd become uncomfortable interviewing Hutchins and her other trapped rabbits. It was too much like talking to dead people. So he'd switched over and done human-interest stories on the other superluminals. He'd found a young woman who'd been the traveling companion of the reporter who'd died in the Evening Star lander. She'd wept and struggled to hold back a case of galloping hysteria, and on the whole it had just made for a marvelous show. There were several people who'd been personally skewered or whose fondest beliefs had been shredded by MacAllister. How did they feel now that MacAllister was in danger of his life? For the record, they delivered pieties, expressing their fondest hope that he could be brought safely out. Even when the interview had formally ended, most said they wished him well, that nobody deserved what was happening to him, but something in their voices belied the sentiments. Only one, a retired politician who'd run a campaign on the need for moral reform, damned him outright. "Nothing against the man personally," he'd said, "but I think it's a judgment. We'll be better off without him."
Everyone on the Wendy jay had been hit by Chiang's death. There was, he reflected, nothing like losing one of-your own to bring home reality. Now they were worried about Kellie, and several of the younger males seemed stricken at the possibility of losing her, too. Her boss, Marcel Clairveau, regretted that he'd allowed her to go down to the surface. Occasionally, when he spoke of her, his voice trembled. That also made good copy.
He'd interviewed the physician left on Wildside about Nightingale. She expressed sorrow, of course, but it was a perfunctory response. He was quiet, she said, very reserved. Never got to know him. Canyon had done his homework and knew Nightingale's background. There was a dark irony, he thought, that every time Nightingale touched down on this world, people died.
Canyon hadn't said anything like that, at least not for public consumption. But the observation would show up in his broadcast after the situation had sorted itself out. He was putting a great deal of time into writing the spontaneous observations that he would make in the wake of the event.
Canyon knew the right questions to ask, and he was able to work most of his subjects up to a state of near hysteria. If Hutchins and her friends came out of this, he thought, they'd be heroes of the first order.
His own career prospects looked brighter than ever. What had begun as routine coverage of a planetary collision that was of interest primarily because the event was so rare and people liked fireworks, was instead turning into one of the human-interest stories of the decade. And it was all his.