Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [152]
He tried to call Dulcie, but she still wasn’t answering her phone. He hesitated over calling Tang Dinh Quan, but decided that it could wait until he had more definite news.
Instead, he continued thinking about possible correlations between nutritional versatility and exotic reproduction, and the reasons why intelligent bipeds might be favored by evolution on a world like Tyre, and the reasons why civilization might fail on such a world in spite of the fact that its walls had never been exposed to cannon fire or fire of any other sort. He thought too about the probable ecological impact that a species like humankind might have on a world like this one, given the scenes to which he had recently been witness.
This isn’t bad, he told himself. Not yet. If we’re lucky, it could be good. And we are lucky. We’re riding a streak, and we can ride it all the way. I can do this. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Shen was right. Leader or not, I can light the way, with just a little help from my friends.
THIRTY-THREE
Some of the equipment is definitely missing,” Lynn said, as soon as Ike had freed the cable and allowed Matthew to complete his descent to the sticky black ground. The downside of using the flamethrower to dispose of the tentacled slugs was that the enigmatically transfigured masses on which they had set themselves had been devastated. Only a handful of the bulbous protuberances remained intact. The probability was that their contents had been damaged, if not thoroughly cooked.
“What’s gone?” Matthew asked, tersely.
“Nothing absolutely vital to the reassembly, although we might be a couple of hull plates down and some leg elements are definitely gone. Some machetes are missing—three, unless one or two are still packed away where I can’t find them. Some rope. A bale of bubble-fabric. A canister of fuel oil—fuel for the inorganic motor, that is.”
Matthew’s heart leapt with exultation, even though he’d fully expected some such news. “Did they take Bernal’s artifacts?” he asked, swiftly.
“I don’t know,” Lynn confessed. “I can’t find them—but I don’t know where Dulcie packed them.”
“Can we get by without the hull plates and leg parts?” Ike wanted to know.
“We have patches to replace damaged hull plates,” Lynn said. “We weren’t carrying enough spares to fix all the legs, but the loss isn’t critical. It certainly wasn’t any kind of worm that mounted the raid. It could have been monkey-analogues, but …”
“It was the humanoids,” Matthew told her, firmly. “They know we’re here—and we know they’re curious. Maybe curious enough to …”
That was when his phone began to beep. His first assumption was that it was Tang or Vince Solari, impatient to know how the night had passed, but it wasn’t. This time his heart seemed to leap all the way into his throat.
“Dulcie!” he exclaimed, raising his voice to make sure that Ike and Lynn would respond without delay. They immediately picked up their own phones and tapped into the call.
“Can you hear me?” Dulcie asked, anxiously. She was whispering, but Matthew knew that wasn’t what was worrying her; she was afraid that she might have gone so far into the glassy forest that her signal could no longer get out.
“Yes,” he said, tersely. “Go on.”
“Sorry to worry you all,” she said. “I didn’t want my phone beeping in case it alerted them. I thought I could follow them without them knowing. It seemed plenty dark enough, and I felt sure they hadn’t spotted me when I first caught sight of them—but I guess they were stringing me along all the time. They probably wanted to lure me away from the bubble. I didn’t even know how many of them there were. Stupid.”
“What’s your situation now?” Matthew asked, as waves of nauseous fear stirred