Where the hell is LaRoque!
His arms shuddered with the strain and there was a rubbed-out pain in his abdomen and groin from the constant pounding of the cavort across the deck. Culla’s coughing was sounding more pathetic and strained, and his own-took on an ominous gurgle. He could feel the first stages of heat prostration and a dreadful fear that the ordeal would never end, even as their struggle brought his back up against one of the smoldering flesh-foam brands.
It smothered in a broiling release of heat as he screamed. The pain was too sudden and from too unexpected a quarter to be shunted aside. His tight grip around Culla’s throat slacked for an instant of agony and the alien tore at his hands. The grip parted and Culla rolled away even as Jacob grabbed after him.
He missed. Culla scrambled farther away, then turned quickly to face him. Jacob closed his eyes and covered his face with his encased left hand, expecting a laser bolt.
He tried to stand, but something was wrong with his lungs. They wouldn’t work properly. His breath was shallow and he could feel the balance waver as he slowly rose to his knees. His back felt like charred hamburger meat.
Not far away, two meters at most, there was a loud clack! Then another. Then another, closer.
Jacob’s arm fell. He no longer had the strength to hold it up. There was no use in keeping his eyes closed, anyway. He opened them to see Culla, kneeling a meter away. Only the red eyes and gleaming white teeth showed through the thick stomach.
“Cu… Culla…” he gasped Wheezing, the words sounded like tiny, failing gears. “Give up now, this is your last chance. I’m… warning you…”
Tania would have liked that, he thought. It was almost as good a parting shot as hers had been. He hoped Helene had heard it.
Parting shot? Hell, why not give Culla one! Even if he cuts my throat or drills a hole into my brain through my eyelids, I’ll still have time to give him a present!
He pulled the flesh-foam sprayer out of his belt and started to raise it. He’d give Culla such a spraying! Even if it meant he’d die at that instant by laser instead of by decapitation.
Excruciating pain burst like steel needle through his left eye. It felt like a lightning bolt crashing all the way to the back of his head and out the other side. At that same instant he pressed the release and held it in the direction Culla’s head had been.
29. ABSORPTION
Helene lifted her eyes briefly as the ship rose past the toroid herd on the left.
The greens and blues were faded, eaten by the distance. Still the beasts shone like tiny incandescent rings, specks of life ordered in their miniscule convoy, dwarfed by the immensity of the chromosphere.
The herdsmen were already too far away to be seen.
The herd passed behind the dark bulk of the filament, out of sight.
Helene smiled. If only we still had our maser link, she thought. They could have seen how hard we tried. They would have known that the Solarians didn’t kill us, as some will think. They tried to help us. We talked to them!
She bent to answer two alarms at once.
Dr. Marline wandered aimlessly behind her and the copilot. The parapsychologist was rational, but not very coherent. She had only just returned from the opposite end of topside. She walked unevenly and muttered softly under her breath.
Martine had enough sense to stay out of their hair, thank Ifni ! But she refused to strap herself in. Helene hesitated to ask her to go around to flip-side. In her present condition the good doctor wouldn’t be much help.
There was a stench in the air. Helene’s flip-side monitors showed only a thick billowing cloud of smoke. There had been shouting and sounds of a terrible fracas just minutes ago. Twice the intercoms had carried the sound of someone screaming. Just moments ago came a shriek that could have waked the dead. Then silence.
The only emotion she allowed herself was a detached sense of pride. The fact that the fight had lasted so long was a tribute to them, especially to Jacob. Culla’s weapons should have finished them off quickly.
Of course it wasn’t likely. they’d succeeded. She’d have heard something by now. She clamped a lid on her feelings and told herself she was shivering because of the cold.
It had dropped to five Celsius. The less efficient her reactions got, as she tired, the more she weighted the cold side of the Refrigerator-Laser’s increasingly erratic swing. The hot side would be disaster.
She answered a shift in the E.M. field that threatened to leave a window in the XUV band. It subsided nicely under her delicate control and continued to hold.
The Refer Laser groaned as it sucked heat in from the chromosphere then back out and downward as x-rays. They climbed with agonizing slowness.
Then an alarm clanged. It wasn’t a drift-warning, it was the cry of a ship dying.
The stink was terrible! Worse, it was freezing. Someone nearby was shivering and coughing at the same time. Dimly, Jacob became aware that it was himself.
He came erect in a fit of hacking that set his body trembling. For long moments after he got it under control he just sat, wondering numbly how he was alive.
The smoke had begun to clear slightly near the deck. Shreds and tendrils drifted past him toward the whining air compressors.
The fact that he could see at all was amazing. He brought his right hand up to touch his left eye. It was open, blind. But it was whole! He closed the lid and touched it over and over with his three fingers. The eye was still there, and the brain behind it…saved by the thick smoke and the depletion of Culla’s energy supply.
Culla! Jacob swung his head about to scan for the alien. He felt a wave of nausea come on and rode it out as he peered around himself.
A slender white hand lay on the floor, two meters away, exposed by the opening cloud of smoke. The air cleared a little more and the rest of Culla’s body came into view.
The E.T.’s face was burned, catastrophically. Black crusts of seared foam hung in shreds from the remnants of the huge oculars. A sizzling blue liquid seeped from large cracks in the sides.
Culla was obviously dead.
Jacob crawled forward. First he had to check on LaRoque. Then Fagin. Yes, that was the way to do it.
Then hurry and get someone down here who can work the computer panel… if there was still a chance to reverse the damage Culla’d done.
He found LaRoque by following the man’s moans. He was several meters past Culla, sitting up and holding his head. He looked up blearily.
“Oooh… Demwa, is that you? Do not answer. Your voice might blow my poor delicate head away!”
“Are you… all right, LaRoque?”
LaRoque nodded. “We are both alive so Culla must not be, no? He left his job on us incomplete so we may merely wish we were dead. Mon Dieu! You look like spaghetti! Do I look like that!”
Whatever the effects of the fight, it had brought back the man’s appetite for words.
“Come on, LaRoque. Help me up. We still have work to do.”
LaRoque started to rise, then wavered. He clutched Jacob’s shoulder to keep his balance. Jacob choked back tears of pain. Jerkily, they helped each other up and onto their feet.
The firebrands must have burned out, because the chamber was rapidly clearing. Wisps of smoke trailed in the air, though, hanging before their faces as they staggered along the dome in a clockwise direction.
Once they encountered the P-laser beam, a thin, straight tracery in their way. Unable to go over or under, they went through. Jacob winced as the beam stitched a bloody line along the outside of his right thigh and the inside of his left. They continued.