Gateways 07_ What Lay Beyond - Diane Carey [20]
The two teenaged boys looked around at the others, scouting for disapprovals. Excitement got the better of them. They broke with traditions and swam through the ashes toward Keller, who was now about ten feet up on the crumpled dome, straddling the nearest shutter.
The shutter wasn’t latched, but only bent by the force of the free dancer’s frying-pan act. The hinges were crimped.
“Ready… three… two… haul!”
Though his hands weren’t strong enough, his foot behind the shutter and the two boys pulling on the sides did the trick.
Donnastal and Serren were young, but on Metalworld a teenager was a mighty commodity. Serren was wiry and Donnastal, though only sixteen, was built like a shuttlecraft. Against all the precepts and rules of their planet, these boys would take chances and do what the stranger ordered. Keller wasn’t beyond making use of a little teenager hero worship.
The iron shutter rasped a god-awful honk and bared the glassless window. Keller swung around on his hip and dropped into the hole.
Inside he dug through what was left of the house and came up with three people right under the shutter one unconscious, one moaning, one dead. The shutter was a skylight. Probably they’d been sleeping and hadn’t heard the alarms in time. Any minute they’d be crushed by the weight of the shifting rubble. The Living called it destiny, fate, random order. Keller didn’t buy it.
He got the moaning woman up on his shoulder and called, “Donny, reach down! Pull these people out and hand them to Serren. Good boys.”
He hoped they wouldn’t hesitate. The Living carried fatalism too far. An unintelligible mutter of protests squabbled outside, but Donnastal appeared over his head and reached down. One by one, the victims were hoisted out of Keller’s arms and into the open.
“Braxan, hand down my tricorder. Can you hear me?”
The instrument had a terrible time operating on this side of the gateway. Half the readings were scatterbrained and silly. He’d learned to take notice of sick blips that otherwise he would ignore and to expect huge skips in data. The terrible moment came when the instrument figured out what he wanted it to do, and reported, clearly, nothing.
Keller turned off the tricorder. He leaned back against one of the bent steel braces and closed his eyes. No one else buried under this jagged, electrocuted mess… around him, the ruined dome structure groaned. Metal scratching against more metal. Unsupported, it would soon collapse under the very weight of its own materials.
Metal and more metal and more. For the first six weeks he’d hardly slept a wink from the weirdness of the noise. Simple footsteps made the ring of chains. A falling tool made not a thump or bonk, but a jannnngggggg. He was living on a giant tuning fork.
No wonder these people dreamed of trees and moss.
What about Challenger? What were his shipmates thinking after so long? He’d left them with the order to keep the gateway open to the last Anointed.
“Are you returning?” Braxan’s voice threaded from outside. “The dome will crack and you’ll be a legend. How would you like me to tell the story of you?”
He looked up. Donnastal was reaching down for him.
“Thanks, butch,” he said, and accepted help out.
Donnastal bit his lip. Neither of the boys talked much mostly they were waiting to see just how far their culture could be pushed.
And I’m counting on that, Keller thought.
The three victims had already been taken away, two to be tended, one to be Anointed. Cold wind scratched across Keller’s skin and pulled at his hair, which, as it batted in his eyes, reminded him again why so many of the Living wore their hair clipped very short. In defiance he hadn’t cut his. In fact, it lapped at his shoulders a ridiculous state of being for a good ranch hand. He thought of his brothers and how they would hoot at him. Shave, but no haircut.
Before him a throng of brush-cuts and slick-downs clustered around the dome, waiting to see what the mysterious stranger would do next. He was still enough of an oddity that the people liked