There was a sound from the water.
Sharn-igon froze. It was not possible for him to be wholly silent while he breathed at all, but he did his best.
He listened out of his shallow cave and heard a small, almost inaudible, blurred echo from the water. A coracle. And in it what seemed to be a Poison Ghost.
Another to kill? It was approaching. Sharn-igon thrust himself out of the cave and reared up to defend himself; and then he heard his own name shouted across the beach: “Sharn-igon!” And then those barbarous sounds that were the name of his mistrusted ally, or his truced foe: “OCK-med doo-LAH.”
He scuttled across the sand, half to greet Dulla, half still ready to kill, as Dulla yelled and pleaded. “Hurry! The Fats will be searching this whole coast. We must get out!”
With Sharn-igon aboard, the coracle rode very low in the water. It could not easily sink. Its cellular shell entrapped too much air for that. But it could swamp.
Crossing Broad Water it often did, and then both of them splashed and bailed and kept a watchful eye or ear for Ghosts Above until they could get under weigh again. The little sail helped them when the wind blew fair, but there was no keel. When the wind shifted, the sail had to come down and they had to paddle. It seemed to take forever; and Sharn-igon felt increasingly ill; and at every stroke or splash the grim recriminations continued.
“But for you, my he-wife would still be alive.”
“You are foolish, Sharn-igon. He tried to kill us; it is not our fault he died of it.”
“And my village was attacked, and another village destroyed entirely, and I myself am ill.”
“Speak of something else, Sharn-igon. Speak of the promises your Krinpit made to join in the attack on the Fats and how they broke them.”
“I will speak of my sorrow and my anger, Ahmed Dulla.”
“Then speak also of mine! We too have suffered in fighting with you against the common enemy.”
“Suffered?”
“Yes, suffered! Before my radio was destroyed — by you, Sharn-igon, by your clumsiness! — I could hear no voice from my camp. They may be dead, all of them!”
“How many, Ahmed Dulla?”
“A dozen or more!”
“A dozen or more of you have then died. Of us, how many? Of persons, two hundred. Of females, forty. Of backlings and infants—”
But it was not until they had crossed Broad Water and Sharn-igon heard the silence from his city that he perceived the immensity of the tragedy. There was no originated sound! There were only echoes — and what echoes!
Always before, when he crossed Broad Water, the city had presented a bustling, beautiful sound. Not this time. He heard nothing. Nothing! No drone of immature males at the waterfront shredding the fish catch. No songs from the mold-eaters on the Great White Way. No hammering of stakes to build new palisades on the made land on the point. He heard the echo of his own sounds faintly returning to him and recognized the shadowy outline of the mooring rocks, a few sheds, one or two boats, some structures half destroyed, a litter of empty carapaces. Nothing else.
The city was dead.
The Poison Ghost Dulla chattered worriedly to him, and Sharn-igon made out the words. “Another attack! The place is empty. The Greasies must have come back to finish the job.”
He could not reply. Stillness overcame him, a great, mourning silence so deep that even the Poison Ghost turned toward him in wonder. “Are you ill? What is happening?”
With great effort Sharn-igon scratched the words out on his tympanum. “You have killed my city and all my back-mates.”
“We? Certainly not! It could not have been the People’s Republics; we have not the strength anymore. It must have been the Greasies.”
“Against whom you vowed to protect us!” roared Sharn-igon. He rose on hind legs to tower over Dulla, and the Poison Ghost cringed in fear. But Sharn-igon did not attack. He threw himself forward, out of the coracle, with a broad splat that sent the waves dancing. The water was shallow here. Sharn-igon managed to keep some of his hind feet on the oozy bottom, while enough of his breathing pores were above the surface to keep him from drowning. He charged up the shoreline, scattering the littered water in a V of foam.
The tragedy made him still again, at every step and at each fresh echo. Dead! All dead. The streets empty except for abandoned carapaces, already dry. The shops untended. The homes deserted. Not a living male, not a female, not even any scrambling, chittering young.
Dulla waded through the stink of dead and floating marine animals, towing the coracle and staring about. “What a horror!” he exclaimed. “We are brothers now more than ever, Sharn-igon.”
“All of my brothers are dead.”
“What? Well, yes. But we must be as brothers, to take revenge! We must be allies against the Greasies and the Fats.”
Sharn-igon reared up, trapping him against the wall of a ruined shed. “I now need new allies, Ahmed Dulla,” he ground out, falling upon him. In the last moment Dulla saw what was to happen and tried to escape. But it was too late; his quickness was not enough when he dodged from the snatching claws only to take the full force of the murderous club of chitin that stove his head in.
When he was quite sure Dulla was dead, Sharn-igon staggered away, blundering through the dried shells that had once been friends, to rest creakily against the wall of a shop he had once known.
He took little satisfaction in the death of one more Poison Ghost. He did not even mourn any longer for the death of his city. A nearer pain touched him. His joints were aching, his body felt bloated, his carapace seemed to be sundering at the seams. It was not his time. But there was no doubt about it. Alone in the open tomb that had once been his home, with no one to care for him while he was helpless, he was beginning to molt.
EIGHTEEN
AT 0130 HOURS, Major Santangelo, along with the pilot-engineer who had brought in the third ship, reported in.
“Some good news, Margie. There’s a coal outcropping in the Bad Hills, two kilometers up. Plus we can burn wood and biomass, and Richy here says we can make a steam boiler with plates from one of the landing craft. If your turbine arrives, that means we can drive the generator up to full capacity, fifty kilowatts, without using up our fuel reserves.”
“When?”
Santangelo looked at the engineer. “Ten days? Call it two weeks.”
“Call it one week,” Margie snapped. “What about alcohol?”
“Well, Morrissey’s got a kind of a yeast — something like a yeast — anyway, he’s getting fermentation. Should be putting the first batch through the solar still tomorrow. You can probably smell it.”
“Saint, I can taste it. I need that alcohol to stretch out the airplane fuel!”
“I’ll goose him along,” Santangelo promised.
“Do it,” said Margie. When they were gone she picked up the handset and called the radio shack. “Any ETA yet?”
“No, ma’am. They’re still in orbit, figuring a minimum-energy descent.” She hung up. At least the resupply ship was in orbit around Jem, not light-years away. But that last little step was a killer. The captain had radioed that his maneuvering reserve was low and he was waiting for the most favorable approach. That might be days! Worse than that. If the Cape had launched them without plenty of reserve, that meant things were seriously wrong at the Cape. Even wronger than the coded tactrans from Earth had indicated, and that was wrong enough.