Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [89]
One tank leaked copiously before he noticed it. Despite the urgency and desperation of the moment he had to laugh at the idea of fleeing into the cold, heartless vacuum of space with water sloshing around his feet. It was a short, terse laugh. He had neither the time nor the inclination to indulge in any extended bouts of hilarity. Outside, down the mountain and beyond the woods, the beautiful, the glamorous, the estimable Pitar were slaughtering and eviscerating. The noble Pitar. The neighborly Pitar.
He had to get away. Somehow he had to avoid the blanket of detection they must even now be expanding across the planet. It was possible that the spider’s web was not yet complete. All that was necessary was for one fly to get through. Throughout the night he slaved intently on readying his wings.
Two hours before sunrise he was ready. As to whether the lifeboat was, the answer would come from the trying. The proof would be in the doing. If his preparations proved inadequate, if trouble arose that was beyond his power to amend, well then, he would die no slower than if he fell into the hands of the invaders.
Settling himself into the cockpit he ran a final check. Those instruments that still functioned, many of which he had personally repaired or replaced, insisted that their respective components were functional. He found himself wishing he had spent more time with each and every one, that he had taken a little extra effort with each installation and connection. But it had all been a lark, a time killer, something to amuse himself with in his idle hours. Now his life would depend on the skill with which he had indulged in a hobby.
Was there anything he had forgotten, anything that had been omitted? Once committed to the launch sequence he would not be able to change his mind, to remember something overlooked. He did not trust the old lifeboat, or for that matter his own skill at restoration, to recover from an abort sequence. Deciding to go, he would go, and devil take the consequences.
Then he did remember something. Spending as much time as he did in the shop, and away from home attending to various work assignments, he tended to miss a good deal of live entertainment and news. When not watching the tridee, it was set to record. It would have recorded informational bulletins. It would have recorded presentations and sports from the capital and elsewhere throughout the colony. Unfortunately, the last transmissions it would have recorded were unwatchable garbage.
But the images he had recently viewed on the lifeboat, the singular movements and images that had been transmitted by the orphaned media mobile, would have been recorded by its own built-in unit, and should be available for playback.
He did not have time to check. Opening the console, he dug inside until he found what he was looking for. Removing the tiny mollysphere, he slipped incontrovertible proof of Pitarian perfidy into a pocket, shut himself into the lifeboat, force-sealed the reluctant lock, and settled into the pilot’s seat and harness. He was no qualified pilot, not of a craft the size of the lifeboat or of anything else. But the whole concept behind such a vessel, the notion that underlay its very design, was that it had to be able to be operated in a moment of emergency by utterly unqualified passengers. As an ex–ship’s engineer he was far better prepared than the average citizen to operate a lifeboat’s instrumentation, even a design as antiquated as the one that now enfolded him.
The star Argus would soon be making its presence known above the eastern horizon. While the Pitar were certainly equipped with all manner of sophisticated tracking devices, he saw no reason to make their search any easier by providing the additional possibility of visual identification. He could do nothing about the lifeboat’s initial liftoff signature. It would be noisy and bright, but only until he reached