and handholds; and in this gravity, even burdened with space armor he
was lighter than when nude under Terran pull. He adapted to the changed
ratio of weight and inertia with an ease that would have been
unconscious had he not remembered it was going to cause Djana some
trouble and thereby slow the two of them down. Other than keeping a
nervous eye swiveling skyward, the chief nuisance he suffered was due to
imperfections of the air renewal and thermostatic units. He was soon
hot, sweating, and engulfed in stench.
I’ll be sure to fix that before we start! he thought. And give the
service crew billy hell when (if) I return. Momentarily, the spirit
sagged in him: What’s the use? They’re sloppy because the higher
echelons are incompetent because the Empire no longer really cares about
holding this part of the marches … In my grandfather’s day we were
still keeping what was ours, mostly.
In my father’s day, the slogan became “conciliation and consolidation,”
which means retreat. Is my day–my very own personal bit of daylight
between the two infinite darknesses–is it going to turn into the Long
Night?
He clamped his teeth together and climbed more vigorously. Not if I can
help it!
The bugs appeared.
They hopped from behind boulders and ice banks, twenty or more, soaring
toward him. Some thirty centimeters long, they had ten claw-footed legs
each, a tail ending in twin spikes, a head on which half a dozen
antennae moved. Mimir’s light shimmered purple off their intricately
armored bodies.
For a second Flandry seriously wondered if he had lost his mind. The old
records said Wayland was barren, always had been, always would be. He
had expected nothing else. Life simply did not evolve where cold was
this deep and permanent, air this tenuous, metal this dominant,
background radiation this high. And supposing a strange version of it
could, Mimir was a young star, that had coalesced with its planets only
a few hundred megayears ago from a nebula enriched in heavy atoms by
earlier stellar generations; the system hadn’t yet finished condensing,
as witness the haze around the sun and the rate of giant meteorite
impacts; there had not been time for life to start.
Thus Flandry’s thought flashed. It ended when the shapes were
murderously upon him.
Two landed on his helmet. He heard the clicks, felt the astonishing
impact. Looking down, he saw others at his waist, clinging to his legs,
swarming around his boots. Jaws champed, claws dug. They found the
joints in his armor and went to work.
No living thing smaller than a Llynathawrian elephant wolf should have
been able to make an impression on the alloys and plastics that encased
Flandry. He saw shavings peel off and fall like sparks of glitter.
He saw water vapor puff white from the first pinhole by his left ankle.
The creature that made it gnawed industriously on.
Flandry yelled an obscenity. He shook one loose and managed to kick it.
The shock of striking that mass hurt his toes. The bug didn’t arc far,
nor was it injured. It sprang back to the fray. Flandry was trying to
pluck another off. It clung too strongly for him.
He drew his blaster, set it to needle beam and low intensity, laid the
muzzle against the carapace, and pulled the trigger.
The creature did not smoke or explode or do whatever else a normal
organism would. But after two or three seconds it let go, dropped to the
ground and lay inert.
The rest continued their senseless, furious attack. Flandry cooked them
off him and slew those that hadn’t reached him with a series of energy
bolts. No organism that size, that powerful, that heavily shelled, ought
to have been that vulnerable to his brief, frugal beams.
The last two were on his back where he couldn’t see them. He widened the
blaster muzzle and fanned across the air renewal unit. They dropped off
him. The heat skyrocketed the temperature in his suit and drove gas
faster out of the several leaks. Flandry’s eardrums popped painfully.
His head roared and whirled.
Training paid off. Scarcely aware of what he did, he slapped sealpatches