Star Wars_ Shatterpoint - Matthew Woodring Stover [60]
Perhaps I should risk a hibernation trance; no predator will reach us through the eruption. Predators need to breathe, too.
And they-That-Wait, that sounded like-Queer. Some Haruun Kal jungle predators mimic their prey's mating calls or cries of distress, to lure or to drive them. I wonder what kind of predator that one was: something that preys on humans, it must be. That cry almost got me. Sounded exactly like a child's scream of terror.
I mean, exactly.
And now this one-Oh.
Oh, no.
That's Basic. Those are screams. There are children out there.
Mace pelted downslope, running half blind through rain and smoke and steam, navigating by ear: heading for the screams.
Smoke from the caldera above had smothered the glowvines; his only light was the scarlet hellglow that leaked through cracks in the black crusts floating on lava flows. Rain flashed to steam a meter above the washes. A swirling red-lit cloud turned the night to blood.
Mace threw himself into the Force, letting it carry him bounding from rock to branch to rock, flipping high over crevices, slipping past black-shadowed tree trunks and under low branches with millimeters to spare.
The voices came intermittently; in between, through the downpour and the eruption and the hammering of his own heart, Mace heard a grinding of steel on stone, and the mechanical thunder of an engine pushed to the outer limits of its power.
It was a steamcrawler.
It lay canted at a dangerous angle over a precipice, only a lip of rock preventing a fall into bottomless darkness. One track clanked on air; the other was buried in hardening lava. Lava doesn't behave as a liquid so much as a soft plastic: as it rolls downslope it cools, and its piecemeal transition into solid rock can produce unpredictable changes in direction: it forms dams and blockages and self-building channels that can twist flows kilometers to either side, or even make them "retreat"
and overflow an upstream channel. The immense vehicle must have been trying to climb the track to the outpost when one of the lava washes plugged, dammed itself, then diverted and swept the steamcrawler off the track, down this rainwash gully until it jammed against the lip of rock.
The curl and roll of lava broke through black patches of crust around it, scarlet slowly climbing the crawler's undercarriage.
Though steamcrawlers were low-tech-to reduce their vulnerability to the metal-eating fungi-they were far from primitive. A kilometer below the caldera, the lava flow didn't come close to the melting point of the advanced alloys that made up the steamcrawler's armor and treads. But lava was filling in the gap below its flat undercarriage until the only real question was whether the rising lava would topple the steamcrawler over the lip before enough heat conducted through its armor to roast whoever was inside. But not everyone was inside.
Mace skidded to a stop just a meter upslope of where the flow had cut the track. The lava had slashed through the dirt to bedrock, making the edge of the gully where Mace stood into an unstable cliff, eight meters high, above a sluggish river of molten stone; the steam-crawler was a further ten meters down to his right. Its immense headlamps threw a white glare into the steam and the rain. Mace could just barely make out two small forms huddled together on the highest point: the rear corner of the cabin's heavily canted roof. Another crawled through the yellow-lit oblong of an open side hatch and joined them.
Three terrified children sobbed on the cabin roof; in the Force, Mace could feel two more inside-one injured, in pain that was transforming into shock, the other unconscious. Mace could feel the desperate determination of the injured one to get the other out the open hatch before the 'crawler toppled-because the injured one inside couldn't know that getting