Sheena was terrified now, but she leaped.
She was in the air when the creature rolled. Its jaws flashed up and locked on her throat, reducing her death scream to no more than a terrified hiss. It drew back into the shadows before she hit the ground.
She lay on her side, struggling weakly to breathe, bubbles of air shining blackly in the moonlight as they pulsed from her throat.
She watched her killer draw close, stared into its eyes, its huge, soft, silver eyes. She whimpered.
It cooed at her, and when Sheena's flanks ceased trembling, came closer and gently licked at the blood oozing from her throat. The creature was hot, like a stove. It turned its back. Sheena felt blades entering her, and then nothing.
Chapter 3
FROZEN SLEEP
The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay,
Sat by the fire, and talked the night away
Wept o'er his wounds, or tales of sorrow done
Shouldered his crutch, and show'd how fights were won.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH, "The Deserted Village"
Geographic was one of the largest mobile objects created by human engineering. Seen from below as the shuttle rose to meet her, the ship looked like a gigantic flashlight with a silver doorknob attached to the end. The aft end was a ring of laser fusion reactors, a flaring section twice the diameter of the trunk. The trunk, over a hundred and fifty meters in length, was the cylinder that housed the life-support systems and cryogenic suspension facilities. Minerva Two was approaching the fore end: the laboratories and the crew quarters, where Cadmann had spent five waking years of his life. The dock was a conical cagework at the end of a protruding arm, barely visible even this close.
Minerva Two slowed as she rounded the fuel balloon. Bobbi Kanagawa was a cautious pilot. Cadmann's fingers itched and twitched. His touch would have been surer, his approach would have been faster.
But he wasn't flying Minerva Two.
Geographic's fuel balloon was shrunken, spent, and half its original size. Only a breath of gas remained of a half-kilometer sphere of deuterium ice. The Colony could not produce deuterium, not yet. We were Homo interstellar, Cadmann thought. We will be again.
Some of the external paneling had been stripped away from Geographic and shuttled down to Tau Ceti Four for building material. The shuttle maneuvered past a drifting mass. The tightly wrapped cylinder, scores of kilometers of superconducting wire, waited to be loaded in Minerva Two's bay by robot limpet motors. These would become part of the fusion plant. Its completion meant limitless power.
Eventually the Orion craft would be a skeleton, just an orbiting splinter of light in the sky. Perhaps she might survive in smaller form, with most of the life-support cylinder removed: an interplanetary vehicle, a gift of space to grandchildren yet unborn.
Bobbi Kanagawa counted softly to herself as Geographic loomed on the screen, the onboard computer continually checking her approach pattern. "Almost home," she said without looking back at her passengers.
Sylvia reached over and pinched Cadmann's arm. "Are you all right?"
"I've never liked dockings," Cadmann muttered. Geographic was half the sky now; more, as the silver wall of the fuel balloon slid past and the conical cagework opened like a mouth. "And if you're a Freudian, I don't want to hear it."
The shuttle's nose grated along the cagework and nuzzled into the lock at its base: click-thump. Cadmann sighed in relief and released his shoulder straps. Bobbi made her last-minute checks, then swung out of her seat with practiced ease. "All right, folks, this is a two-hour turnaround. Hope you don't need more time." Some of her straight black hair had escaped its binding, and drifted out at disconcerting angles when she moved.
"Two should do it." Sylvia strapped on her backpack.
The door at the rear of the shuttle hissed open, and Stu Ellington's voice chuckled at them from the control module. "It's about time. Swear to God that's just like a woman. Two-tenths of a second late again."
Bobbi glared at the speaker, drumming her fingernails against the console. "Just keep talking, Stu," she said sweetly. "You need all the friends you can get-the last vote was dead even for leaving your worthless carcass up here another month."
"Oops. Tell you what. Drop your friends in the lab, come on up to Command, and we'll discuss my carcass for an hour or so."
Bobbi's pale cheeks reddened. She ran her hand over her hair, discovering the flyaway strands. "I... uh, well-" she looked at Sylvia, who winked sagely. "I'll see you in a month, huh?" She scurried to be the first through the hatch.
She disappeared down a narrow connective hallway as Sylvia led Cadmann to the central corridor and back to the biolab section. Cadmann clucked in puritan disgust. "Sex. I remember sex. Highly overrated."
"Great attitude for a biologist."
"Just a Bachelor's, and it was marine biology," he sniffed. "Fish are damned civilized about it. She lays ‘em, and he swims over ‘em."
"You're a romantic, that's what you are." Sylvia worked her way along the handrails gingerly and seemed ill at ease. "All this time," she said, so softly that he wondered if she had intended for him to hear.
"What?"
"After all this time, I still get a little claustrophobic in here."
She laughed uneasily.
"You're not the only one." He slammed the flat of his palm against one of the steel-and-plastic panels that lined Geographic. The vibration thrummed along the hexagonal corridor, damping out before it reached the first corner. "This place was home and prison to all of us for a long time. Some of the colonists won't come back up at all."
"It doesn't make sense, really. Just forget it."
He leaned up behind her and whispered in her ear. "It's return-to-the-tomb syndrome." A Karloffian leer lurked just behind his solemn expression. "All of us spent at least a hundred and five years asleep in a little coffin-shaped box, awakened from the dead by a trickle of electricity through our brains."
"Lovely. We'll put you in charge of bedtime stories. I'll manage the sedative concession."
The door to the biolab was sealed to protect both the life within and the crew without. Some of the substances and microscopic life forms were extremely vulnerable, and others extremely dangerous. Sylvia punched in her four-digit personal code, and the door opened inward. In case of a loss of atmosphere in the main section of the ship, air pressure alone would keep the door sealed. "We'll have this reprogrammed to admit you."
The lights came up automatically as the door closed behind them. The room was the second-largest on Geographic. Its floor space was crowded with medical and analytical equipment, its walls completely lined with cryogenic vaults. There were hundreds of the dark plastic rectangles, and they held the future of Tau Ceti Four.
Sylvia sighed, shucked her backpack onto a wall hanger and pulled herself over to a rack of Velcro slippers. She handed him a pair. "One size fits all."
"I was hoping for something in a wing tip."
She led him to the nearest bank of cases. "Look," she said contentedly, triggering one of the dark panels into translucence. Within, barely discernible as canine, were dozens of dog embryos. Their dark eyes were filmed with transparent lids, tiny naked paws drawn up to their gauzy bodies in peaceful cryosleep. Each hung in its individual sack, connected by its umbilical to an artificial placenta.
"So." She studied the temperature and pressure gauges on the door of a sealed cabinet, nodded and opened it. "Alfalfa seeds. Check. Swiss chard. Check. Tomatoes. Check." She closed the cabinet. "Now for the embryos. The carriers are in that case over there. Inflate three for me, will you?"