Approaching footsteps sounded in the corridor outside. Luthis appeared moments later, ignored the guards, and came over. “We’re gathering in the staff mess—scientific heads and crew chiefs. You need to be there.”
“What’s happening?” Wernstecki asked.
Luthis had an almost bemused look on his face, as if he didn’t quite understand it himself. “Did you know that Vicki’s son is here—one of the officers with the boarding party?”
“Yes, Tanya told me.”
“Apparently, the two of them had a long talk at his request. Now she’s come out and told Reese that what we’ve been hearing about the whole . . . everything that’s going on, isn’t the whole story. There’s another side to it that we should be aware of. Reese thinks we should all hear it.”
Wernstecki couldn’t believe it. After all the vehement opposition he’d heard Vicki voice to the Pragmatists and what they stood for, she could have turned around so easily? He shook his head, equally mystified. Landen Keene had said on a number of occasions that he refused to discuss politics with scientists because they were totally naive when it came to such matters—even Terran ones. So what was a Kronian scientist like Wernstecki supposed to make of it? But there was nothing to be done except at least listen, he supposed.
“Very well,” he said. Luthis turned, and they headed back toward the forward part of the ship.
* * *
Knives of cold found their way through, however Keene tried to pull the foil-backed blanket around himself. The roar of the fans close-up pounded into his skull, and no matter which way he twisted in the rack space, a bar or an edge or a protuberance of some kind seemed to be digging into him somewhere. He thought of Charlie lying on a soft palliasse in a warm, dry hut, being pampered and fussed over by hordes of women.
Receding away to the right, he could see part of the river that they had followed, continuing below the lake before turning away to the west. Below, the land was a desolate succession of humps and ridges, new sedimentary deposits just starting to acquire a covering of vegetation like the coasts he had seen from the probe over New York: the unworked raw material of land, yet to accumulate the effects of time, the elements, and life in action. Then came the steep eastern scarp, formed by the broken edge of the tilted crustal block. Ahead, to the southeast, across a flat wilderness of sandy basins and marshes, the skyline of mountains loomed larger and higher.
“Okay, got ’em!” Heeland’s voice came suddenly from the handset, which Keene had wedged against the side of his head. Keene moved it to where he could see the tiny screen. It showed an aerial slant view from a distance of four objects on the ground. A zoom-in revealed them to be two small personnel carriers and two larger site buses.
“I see them,” Keene acknowledged, yelling above the din from the fans. “Where are they?”
“A hundred and twenty-five miles ahead of you. The probe that’s sending this is cruising a mile out. I sent the other one farther north before you gave me the coordinates. It’s on its way, but it’ll be a while.”
Figures were standing in line at one of the buses, moving forward and boarding. They were in regular tunics—Zeigler’s force from Serengeti, not Rakki’s warriors, who must have been already inside the other craft. “Looks like they’re leaving,” Keene said. “We must have just caught them.”
“Looks like it,” Heeland agreed.
Even as they watched, the last of the figures entered, the door in the side of the bus closed, and the craft began lifting off. Heeland put the probe into a wide circuit, tracking them as they rose. The four vessels formed up and settled onto a southeast heading, continuing the way both they and Keene had been going, which put him in the position of trailing them. The airmobile was built for endurance not speed, and would fall behind the faster flyers. But the probe would be able to shadow them. He would just have to follow where they led and catch up later, after they arrived.