Bright patches of red appeared on the colonel's close-shaven cheeks and traveled down his neck. "I'm afraid I cannot allow-"
"Mr. Guthe," she said to her own com officer, "do patch me through to the High
Command so they can provide authorization for the colonel to make use of our resources."
The colonel turned away for a moment. Murel and Ronan were certain it was to get control of his temper. When he turned back to face them, he did seem to have regained a measure of composure.
"That won't be necessary, ma'am," he said smoothly. "It's very good of you to offer your help. However, I've just received word from our link to the surface that the meteor bombardment seems to have stopped for the moment so we can all proceed."
He had his navigation officer provide landing coordinates for Johnny, and communications terminated while the Custer darted toward the pockmarked planet, the Piaf following.
As they neared the surface, the landscape before them looked even less habitable than it had from the air. Murel had done some computer research on volcanoes while aboard ship, wanting to learn more about the one forming Petaybee's newest landmass. One of the pictures of the field inside the volcanic crater had looked something like Halau's surface. There were large craters pocked with emberous pimples of meteor rock. The comparatively level bits of ground looked back at them with thousands upon thousands of bloodshot eyes, and the air was still spangled with fiery rain.
Ke-ola, his finger trembling, pointed out what had been New Puna.
"You see that big hole there? That is where we had the gardens. And that one over there? That is where the pool was that held the Honu's relatives."
"And your relatives, Ke-ola? Where are they?"
He scanned the viewport in a slow, deliberate way then shrugged. "I don't see the home dome, where the people lived. Not even a splinter. That big hole with the m melted edges? That's where it used to be."
Johnny quietly placed a hand on Ke-ola's shoulder.
As soon as it was humanly possible they suited up and prepared to leave the ship.
The soldiers and Johnny at first wanted Ronan and Murel to stay aboard but the twins were adamant.
"Since we are Petaybee's ambassadors," Murel said, "I think we really do have to be in on everything."
"You are only ten years old," Marmion said. "It could be very upsetting out there."
"We won't be any more upset than Ke-ola or his bruthahs and sistahs," Murel said, pronouncing the words the way Ke-ola did, out of respect for what seemed to be a colloquial language mutation, rather than ignorance of the way everyone else said it. "We're here to help and that's that."
"Perhaps we should use the Piaf as a base camp, ma'am, and take flitters out to reconnoiter. It would be faster and we'd be less vulnerable in case the rocks started banging about again," Johnny suggested. "Also, if we needed to collect the wounded, we'd have something to carry them in."
"I'm not sure your flitters will work here," Ke-ola said.
"Why shouldn't they?"
"Too heavy," he said.
"Not that much of a problem," Johnny said. "Our all-terrain vehicles are just that- vehicles that adapt for all terrains. Terrain includes gravity. Might take a bit of adjusting but I reckon they'll run, all right."
"That's good, man," Ke-ola said.
They took the lift to the docking bay, where they suited up and prepared to disembark. The bay held all kinds of machinery-flitters, cranes, shuttles, and forklifts among them. The main entrance to the bay was cavernous enough to allow smaller ships to enter, but there was also another hatch for personnel only, and Ke ola veered away from the flitters and headed for the air lock. It irised open, and the others stepped inside while it closed behind them and the gantry-a broad platform with an extendable staircase-extruded itself. Ke-ola took a step out onto the platform. It groaned beneath his weight.
CHAPTER 4
RIGHT, THEN," JOHNNY said through his helmet's mic. "Perhaps we'll try it without the flitters for now." He signaled the bay's control room and gave the order that the flitters should be recalibrated for heavy g.
Meanwhile, Ronan followed Ke-ola. Once he was out of the Piaf's controlled environment, he found it hard work to pick up his feet and put them down again. It was as if he were wading through hip-high snow in heavy boots.
"Use the antigrav setting on your boots," Johnny instructed. "Two ought to do it."
Johnny tapped the control panel on the wrist of his suit. The twins had never had to wear such heavy protection before.
I'm glad the controls aren't actually on the boots, Murel said, following Johnny's example. I don't think I could see my feet real clearly with the helmet in the way.
Yeah, Ronan agreed, activating his own boots' antigrav function. But-hey, that's a lot better!
Dust and smoke rose from the dozens of meteors smoldering in craters like malign red eggs in nests of molten rock. The steam and smoke from them formed a gray brown sludge that hung in the heavy air.
Ke-ola swarmed down the ladder ahead of Ronan. He ran like a charging rhino toward the meteor that had landed on the residence enclosure.
"Poor kid," Johnny said. "We probably won't even find bodies if they were under those things when they hit."
"Well, surely not everyone perished," Marmie said optimistically. "If these meteor showers happen often, the inhabitants must have developed some sort of defense."
"Ke-ola would know about that kind of thing, wouldn't he?" Murel asked.
The three of them were on the ground by then. Ronan trudged over to the crater where Ke-ola was. The larger boy was circling it, examining the edges carefully.
"They might be under there," he said slowly, nodding to the meteor.
"You mean crushed under the meteor?" Ronan asked as delicately as possible.
"Maybe not. They might have had time to take cover in one of the root canals before this one hit. There were trapdoors inside the habitats. Believe it or not, we're in the planet's green belt here. The meteors usually hit the equatorial belt, which is a big desert where nobody lives. I remember the elders saying how the showers were changing the orbit of the asteroid belt and shifting the planet on its axis, so maybe they started hitting here because of it. Anyway, usually, when they're not all burned up like now, there are some scrubby trees and other plants that grow here-only part of them grows on the surface, though."
"So how would those keep people from being…you know?"
Ke-ola's breath huffed through the mic into Ronan's helmet, and with deliberate patience he explained. "Because there are so few nutrients or water in the surface soil, they have these roots that are maybe ten times as deep as they are tall. Where old ones have burrowed into the ground and then died and the roots rotted away-a long time ago-there are the canals or tunnels. They're big enough for people to stand in, or even live in, and some of them interconnect. They're real deep too. My people use the channels sometimes, even though they don't much like being underground. I think the tunnel under this bubble went deeper than the meteor."
"Then all we'd have to do is dig them out," Ronan said, thinking of all of the digger attachments for the flitters he had seen in the docking bay.