Marian, he assured himself bitterly, was dead. She must be. He couldn't but be too late.
IX
The spaceboats landed within hundreds of yards of each other under a leaden sky. They'd made practically all their descent on the far side of the planet, where radar would not have spotted them, even were radar in use by this world's pirate population. It wasn't, but Trent wouldn't risk it being turned on for some accidental reason. Then they'd come in low and barely skimmed mountain tops with valleys in between sometimes filled with smoke. Finally they went down really low over the acid sea. Once, only hundreds of feet above the water, they passed a place where the circle of a volcano's crater rose only a little higher than the waves. It was like an atoll, with its lagoon hundreds of feet below sea-level and filled with surging lava instead of sea. From several places in the crater rim, sea-water cascades leaped down into the depression, and turned to steam before they struck.
The three spaceboats left it behind. Trent kept in touch with his followers by lightphone, invented by the inventor of the telephone itself. It was used mostly for ship-to-ship and ship-to-office communications in spaceports, where there was already enough interference. But it worked well enough here, except once when they were driving through a giant cloud of condensed steam blowing across the water from some submarine source of heat.
Trent let his small squadron down lower and lower when land appeared ahead. In the end they flashed across an almost circular harbor with an extremely narrow exit to the sea. There was vegetation here, sparse and with that starveling appearance of all living things desperately surviving against great odds.
The spaceboats landed, kicking up clouds of volcanic ash. Trent's followers disembarked. The air smelled strongly of sulphur-fumes. Where there was volcanic activity on such a scale, there would be sulfur in every breath a man drew. One man sneezed. Another, and another.
"Use your masks," commanded Trent. "They'll take care of matters for a while. We'll probably get used to it. Now, look here!"
He spread out the enlarged copies the mate had made of the pictured descent of the Cytheria. The landing party crowded around to see. They were an extraordinary group to look at. Most of them would have made an ordinary citizen uneasy if he'd encountered them in some dark alley. There were tall men and short ones, and bulky ones and spare ones. But each had the indefinable air of men accustomed to take care of themselves. And they had a comfortable confidence in Trent.
Trent traced out items on the space photos.
"Here's the Cytheria," he observed, "heading down to this spot. It's a sort of a pothole of a valley with mountains almost all around it. Here and here you'll see things that look like spires of stone. They aren't. They're ships."
Men crowded closer, staring over each other's shoulders to see the pointed-out objects.
"I've counted," said Trent, "and there are thirty-odd of them, counting the Cytheria. She landed by rocket with her Lawlor drive to help, of course. In this photo she's not yet aground. In this one she is. Here's the blast-area her rockets burned away when she hovered to land gently. See?"
There were murmurings of assent. Trent's crewmen took turns looking closely. They appeared much more piratical than pirates would. Every man had two shaped-charge satchel bombs, dangling from his hips, and there were grenades in their belts and bandoliers of cartridges across their shoulders. Every man had automatic pistols and a rifle.
"The point," said Trent, "is that where she landed her rockets burned away what green stuff there was. There are seven other ships—they look like pointed rocks—with burnt-away places around them. There's no burnt area around the rest. You see what that means?"
They waited to hear. It was not that they couldn't think, but they were content to let him do their thinking for them. A man sneezed. He'd taken off his gas-mask. He put it back on.
"When a ship's landed on rockets," Trent pointed out, "it stands in a scorched place. If it doesn't take off again, after a while the green stuff grows back. There are twenty odd of them with the green stuff returned. They've been aground a long time, some of them maybe years."
A burly man grunted. He had a scar on his cheek.
"They brought 'em here after they captured 'em," he said confidently. "They looted 'em as they felt like it. Then they left 'em where they were."
Trent nodded.
"Which means," he explained, "that we aren't up against the crews of thirty pirate ships. Those twenty-odd ships are carcasses, brought here to be rifled and then left to rust. And not all the lately landed ships are pirates, either. Some of them were brought in lately to be stripped. We may be up against odds of two or even three to one, but not more. And we'll have surprise on our side. We shouldn't have too much trouble."
Grins went around the group. Nobody spoke, which was a good sign. Nobody needed to assure himself of his own courage.
"Now, here's our route," said Trent. "Like this."
He traced it out. He'd picked it out carefully. It could be followed easily enough by day, of course, but for night guidance he'd mentally marked down where for a mile or two they'd trudge along the seashore, and farther where an active volcano should throw a glow against the sky, and another place—
"We want to hit them just before sunrise," said Trent. "We'll be able to take a rest, I think, just this side of where we'll find them. So… let's go!"
In minutes he was leading his file of nearly thirty men away from the landing place. The spaceboats were partly covered by the ash in which they'd landed. Judging direction by the landmarks he noted, and thereby establishing a bearing for the sun, he headed toward the planet's south. He was, of course, as much burdened and as well-armed as any of his men. He led them across a rocky ridge and down on the other side again. There he found a patch of flowers. They were, as it later developed, the only blooms he was to see on the third planet out from Kress. They were utterly white, and very large, and somehow they looked artificial. They made one think of death.
The skies were somehow smoky, and the sun seemed redder than when seen from space. The air had the smell of sulphur, of which a very, very minute quantity seemed able to get through the gas masks, but in time they seemed to become used to it. After the first hour or two it became rare for anyone to wear his mask more than half the time. But the sulfur smell was annoying. It came from the volcanoes, of course.
They tramped, and rested, and tramped again. There were places where spindling, somehow skeleton-like trees with white bark and extravagantly spreading branches struggled to attain a height of seven or eight feet. There were other places where thready green plants—but the green was not quite of vegetation brought from Earth—covered the ground so that men's boots crushed them and left clear trails where the plants had been.
They saw no animals. It was not to be doubted that animals existed, of course. Trent himself more than once saw tiny movements out of the corner of his eyes, but he didn't actually glimpse anything to be called an animal. Near sundown, though, they waded through a small brook—Trent tasted its water and it had a bare taste of rotten eggs in it, but it was drinkable—and they saw things that would probably be considered fish. And a mile or so farther on a small thing with many legs ran away from them with a clattering sound. It was more like a crab than any other familiar creature, but one doesn't usually think of a crab as an animal.
When the sun set in smoky redness, they were marching beside an oily, sulfur-scented sea. The beach was volcanic ash. There were giant mountains far away which poured out thick smoke and formed inky clouds which were blots against the sunset sky.