“Want me to come along?” Wernstecki asked. “I was heading that way.”
“Sure,” she said automatically, her mind racing through a score of possibilities.
* * *
They arrived less than five minutes later to find Reese waiting outside his working stateroom. “I think this should concern you alone,” he told Vicki.
“I’ll wait here,” Wernstecki told her.
Reese ushered Vicki into the stateroom, which was otherwise unoccupied, closed the door, and indicated for her to sit down. Then he looked at her. “You have a son with the Trojan expedition, heading for Jupiter, I understand,” he said.
Something tight convulsed in Vicki’s stomach. “What’s happened?” she whispered.
Reese made an empty-handed gesture, as if to say there was no other way to put this. “We’ve just received word from Saturn that all contact with the ship has been lost,” he said.
* * *
A message of sympathy came in from Emil Farzhin and the others in the Academy on Dione not long afterward. Almost two hours later, because of the longer delay times, communications expressing similar sentiments arrived from Keene, Sariena, Charlie Hu, and Gallian on Earth. All of them urged her not to give up hope just yet. But beyond that, there was little anyone could say. It was a time of danger and perils all over the Solar System.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Rakki and White Head would go; and Gap Teeth would go because he refused to allow Rakki to venture into an unknown and alien domain without his personal protection. It took the Sky People some time to convince him that he wouldn’t need his spear.
They summoned one of their winged metal shells that flew like a giant bird—much larger than the one called down by the Sky Being called “Keene,” that Rakki had thought of as the head god when they first appeared in the egg with legs that rolled. It descended from the sky a short distance from the huts and opened. Naarmegen, the first of them to use words that were intelligible, came out, along with two others. Rakki and his two companions were taken inside.
Rakki could never have imagined such surroundings. They consisted entirely of strangely shaped creations from metal and other materials that were of the same essence as Oldworld objects he had seen . . . but patterned and organized together in a way that formed a totality of purpose that he was unable to comprehend. There were bundles of rods running along the walls and overhead, like vines but straighter and without leaves; patterns of shapes like straight-sided pebbles and slices of berries, some emitting light; constructions that looked the way he had heard ammunition boxes described; flat windows, glowing with designs in colors he had never seen before. Light came from brilliant shapes set into the sides of the interior and above. For the first time since his recollections began of having any coherent impressions at all, it brought home to him the full enormity of what must have been lost. The few relics he had come across of the past that was gone had been just that: oddments and tatters of what had once been a whole world.
They sat Rakki in one of the huge seats that extended past the top of his head, but when they tried to bind him to it with straps, Gap Teeth roared in protest and leaped to intervene. The Sky People seemed amused and were placating, and things quickly calmed down when the three passengers saw that they were securing similar restraints around themselves also. Maybe binding themselves to the Mother Bird was a way of symbolically consigning themselves into her safe keeping, Rakki thought.
One of the Sky People closed the door, sealing them from the outside, and then moved forward to sit at a place near the front, behind the bird’s eyes. Sounds like an animal whining and bellowing filled the space around them, and Rakki could feel the bird’s life energy pulsing in the floor beneath his feet. Gap Teeth’s hands were like claws, gripping the arm supports on the seats. Then he felt the bird move—for a moment his body felt sickened—and he knew they were lifting from the ground. Moments later, through the solid-water windows in the bird’s side, he could see the huts of Joburg, the creek that ran beside it, the surrounding rocks and growth, and then the side of the lake where the creek ended, all growing smaller as the bird rose, finally slipping behind and out of view. Soon even the hills were far below, shrunk to the appearance of folds in the mud along the sides of the creek.