Gateways 07_ What Lay Beyond - Diane Carey [19]
The whole planet was a tundra. A metal tundra. Soot on silver on pearl on ingot, with leaden shadows and pewter hills. The only natural life was in the skies, and it came down only to die.
This animal grounded on the outskirts of the City of the Living, the oldest settlement on the planet, a cluster of knobby buildings and dome huts secured with pylons rooted twenty feet into the planet’s mantel. Out there, in the “suburbs,” were six or seven scattered huts out by themselves. As Keller watched in morbid fascination, the free dancer flattened right on top of one of the huts. The energy transferred back into the planet, and an instant later the blast wave blew through the city with a single deafening bark.
The echo bonged like a big doorbell. Blinding disruption blossomed across the open terrain.
Keller let the heavy iron shutter drop closed just in time, and ducked. The dome thundered around him.
When the shaking subsided, he bolted to his feet and grabbed his tricorder. “Come on! It landed on a hut!”
“Keller, why do you do these things?”
He didn’t wait. Braxan would follow him. She always did.
Heat from the dead free dancer radiated through the metallic streets and buildings with a vibrating thrum of harp strings. Though he felt the heat, he was protected by the chain-mail sheath over his own clothes and his tightly woven mail footwear.
The primary structural shape in the Living city was a dome. The city looked like a huddle of shellacked mollusks. They were built by inflating a free dancer’s float gland, then spraying a composite which Keller’s tricorder analyzed as some chemical soup that hardened when mixed, along with a bunch of unreadable adulterants over the balloon frame. The result was, on average, a six-hundred-ton house. The curvature could absorb hundreds of pounds’ pressure per square centimeter, which the weather frequently tested.
Otherwise, there were a few towers and a few large storage facilities. That’s all.
The free dancer’s dropping on a house with its shutters open caused an implosive charge. Curiosity had gotten the better of somebody. The people inside had made a bad bet a free dancer could die a half mile away, then in its final convulsion flip over and land right on some poor slob’s head.
Could’ve been me. Next time maybe I’ll close the shutter. It’s just such a sight!
The carcass was now a huge pile of placemat-sized ashes crudely recalling the shape of the dead animal, thickened by the spilled and stir-fried contents of its guts hundreds of pounds of candleflies, now cooked to a paste. Keller plowed right into the mess. Giant black flakes blew out of his way, then began to clog around his knees as he went deeper into the fried remains. His feet were gummed up in the candlefly paste. Behind him, hundreds of people swarmed out of the domes to watch. A few helped push the cooked flakes away from the imploded dome, but most held back.
As he pushed through the hesitant people, Keller cast a glance behind for Braxan.
She was there, right behind him. Her narrow shoulders shifted back and forth under the shimmering foil tunic she wore. What it would be on the other side of the gateway, he had no idea. Here, everything was silver, ferrous, bullion, and plate. The planet was one big ingot, hammered, pocked, or polished by constant storms. Some unknown inner force had formed jagged inorganic mountain peaks in the distance, but Keller’s tricorder offered only basic statistics and couldn’t read beneath the planet’s surface. Like a pet dog in a strange house, it didn’t act very happy here. Braxan stayed with him until he began climbing the dome’s ashentombed ruins.
“Hold this!” He handed her his tricorder just before climbing out of arm’s reach.
“When will you understand?” she warned. “They’ve been Anointed!”
“Don’t be silly. Come up and help me.”
“I shouldn’t.”
He glanced around for someone who might help and spotted two of their neighbors, a pair of brothers. “Donnastal! Serren! Climb up