Eight days into the first howling blizzard of the winter season, Bessany Weyman was convinced the Thule Research Expedition—of which she was a charter member—had made a dreadful mistake. As the wind shook Eisenbrucke Station's solid plascrete walls, Bessany glared across the rec-room table at Ed Parker, resident meteorologist.
"Tell me again, Ed. Why did we pick this horrible spot to build a research station?"
Mutters of agreement from the other scientists and technicians riding out the blizzard met Bessany's dour question, but Ed Parker just grinned. "Ain't it great?" Parker enthused, waving an expansive hand toward the ceiling. "The weather in this place is amazing. Simply amazing!"
Down the table, Elin Olsson glared at him. "That's not the word I'd have chosen." The petite blonde who served as the team's geologist was only three quarters the size of the burly meteorologist, but what she lacked in mass she made up for in sheer force of will. Bessany had seen Elin Olsson face down surly stevedores in backwater spaceports and leave them mumbling apologies. Ed Parker, however, was apparently immune to any forces of nature other than those related to wind speed and cloud formation.
"Mmm . . ." Parker smiled, "who was it said this spot was a geological treasure trove? Volcanic mountains to the south, an upthrust-fault mountain range to the north, complete with resident glacier that's got most of Thule's geologic history trapped in its ice layers? And a fissured basalt flow right next door, covering an ancient limestone seabed?"
Elin waved a dismissive hand. "I never said it wasn't a good research spot, Ed. The geological processes are fascinating. But I would not call that" —she jabbed a finger toward the ceiling— "amazing weather. Homicidal, maybe."
Parker chuckled. "Weather can't be homicidal, Elin, it's not sentient."
"Are you sure?" the geologist muttered.
Chuckles ran through the rec room, mingling with the clink of coffee cups and forks against plates. Bessany toyed with the last few crumbs of pie on her own plate, blessing whatever guiding angel had induced their provisions clerk to include a generous supply of desserts with the more prosaic rations usual in a facility like this one. Comfort foods became astonishingly important when a blizzard kept everyone confined to quarters day after monotonous day.
Elin sipped her coffee. "Anyway, I'm starting to agree with Bessany about this site. The planetary scouts who recommended it ought to have their licenses revoked."
Herve Sinclair, the expedition's project director, dunked a cookie into his hot chocolate and said mildly, "Winter's bad everywhere on Thule. Even the equatorial belt turns cold enough to cause a general dieback of the rainforest. Where should we have built? Underground? With as much seismic activity as Thule generates in an average month?"
One of the equipment mechanics muttered, "Aboveground or belowground, Thule's gonna getcha, ain't it? At least we got the aircars into the hangar before that blizzard hit. If we hadn't, our only transport would be thin smears of metal on the far canyon wall. Not that they're doing anybody a helluva lot of good. Not with the Tersae shooting down everything that tries to take off."
Bessany shivered. The Eisenbrucke Research Station—officially named just a few weeks previously, when the waterfalls pouring off the glacier had frozen into a solid bridge of ice—had been spared from attack, for now, but everyone knew only too well their reprieve wouldn't last past the end of the bad weather.
Herve spoke firmly, before already low spirits could plunge through the bedrock under the plascrete floors. "We've been lucky, very lucky, with this storm. Seta Point, too. I can't imagine anything alive moving through that kind of wind and snow, which means we should be safe until the weather clears. And that will give the promised military help time to arrive. At least," he frowned slightly, "I hope the Tersae can't travel through this kind of weather."
All eyes turned to Bessany. As resident xeno-ecologist—and the only human on Thule who'd actually talked to a Tersae—the ball was squarely in her court. She folded her hands in front of her to keep them from shaking. "Let's just say I'd be very surprised if they could travel through that blizzard. Not in any great numbers," she said cautiously. "The native species are remarkably well adapted to the vagaries of the Thulian ecosystems, so God alone knows what temperatures or weather conditions the Tersae may be able to stand. Seismic activity notwithstanding, I suspect the Tersae build sheltered winter nests in natural cavern systems. They'd have to, because their young couldn't survive a storm like this one without shelter and they don't build villages or towns on the surface. And I'm afraid I agree with Elin. We shouldn't have built on the surface, either. None of us should have, mining colonies included."
"How do you know their young don't mature in one season, same as most animals?"
The question came from Billy Dolinski, a genius with computer equipment, whose understanding of ecological sciences remained as vague as Bessany's comprehension of psychotronic matrix programming.
Bessany shook her head. "They can't. Sooleawa is fifteen summers old, but she isn't anywhere near her full adult growth yet. Chilaili is only an inch shy of eight feet, but Sooleawa is no taller than I am, and I know she's still growing, because I asked."
"Oh."
Herve Sinclair rubbed the side of his nose absently. "What about their wild ancestral stock? What do they do to survive winter?"
Bessany lifted her hands in a timeless "who knows?" gesture. "I didn't see any signs of migration before the blizzard hit. So unless this is a freakishly early storm—and I suspect it is, since Chilaili gave me no hint that she expected bad weather soon—they must overwinter in the same ranges they use in summer and autumn. But I won't know for certain until the weather clears and I can get out to check my data recorders. If," she added darkly, "I ever get the chance."
Bleak silence met her assessment.
Bessany massaged her neck and rotated her head slightly, trying to ease muscle tension. "Anyway, my best guess is the Tersae will be holed up in their winter nests for the duration of the storm, at the very least. The sustained winds on the plateau above this gorge are over a hundred kilometers per hour, with gusts clocked at one fifty. I can't imagine anything without roots—deep ones—not being torn away in that kind of wind." She pursed her lips for a moment and glanced at the burly meteorologist. "Any prediction on how long until this blizzard blows itself out?"
Ed Parker shook his head. "Not a very precise one, no. If we had good satellite feed, it would be a snap. Trouble is, all our satellites have gone dead. The ones put in place by the original planetary scouts died right after we got here and the ones our own transport ships left in orbit have gone dead, too. That's hardly surprising, considering how much junk is whirling through this star system."
Bessany's mouth twitched, halfway between a smile and a grimace. The night skies above Thule were spectacular, and not just because of the seventeen moons that sailed across the planet's heavens like ancient galleons going to war. There was an immense amount of debris in the Thule star system, which made for spectacular meteor showers on clear nights.
Meteors weren't the only spectacular thing on Thule, either. Ferocious summer thunderstorms produced appalling quantities of lightning, sparking fires in grasslands and forests if too little rain fell along the edge of the storm system to quench the flames. Bessany would never forget the storm that had caught her three days' hike from the station, when Sooleawa and Chilaili had nearly been killed right before her astonished eyes. The very last thing she'd expected to stumble across was a sentient species, much less two of its members in near-fatal trouble.
Alison Collingwood, the station's biochemist, asked quietly, "Do you think anyone's going to answer your messages?"
Bessany pushed back her long hair with a frustrated sigh. "I wish I knew. I'm not even sure any of my reports have even been seen. The Ministry of Mineral Resources hasn't responded at all. Not even with a routine 'report in message queue' reply. The Ministry of Xenology should have been really interested, but they haven't answered, either. The only thing that makes sense is budget-conscious bean counters refusing to foot the bill for an answering message."
Elin made a rude noise. "Given the outcome of the last elections, I'm surprised there's still a budget to keep us going."
Alison's lips twitched. "The cost cutters haven't pulled the plug because it would take more to ship us back home than to leave us out here. And you're probably right, Bessany. Communications techs who have to justify every teensy expense won't send expensive SWIFT messages to a world as far on the edge of space as Thule is, not without a really critical reason. I guess the Tersae aren't critical enough, huh?" A bitter silence fell as everyone reflected on the cost of that particular bureaucratic blunder. Open warfare on every human colony not socked in by this blizzard. Hundreds—maybe thousands—dead. A feeling of near hopelessness swept through Bessany, closing her throat and stinging her eyes.
Herve cleared his throat in the stricken silence. "Well, we have the comfort of knowing that has changed. Thule is at the top of the military's list of worlds to protect, Deng War notwithstanding. Speaking of which . . . isn't your brother-in-law in the military, Bessany?"
"Oh, yes. Third Dinochrome Brigade."
He wasn't answering her messages, either.
Of course, she and Lieutenant Colonel John Weyman were hardly on speaking terms.
She rubbed her temples, trying to soothe the beginnings of a ragged headache. Bessany had stupidly ignored his warning not to marry Alexander Weyman in the first place. Then she'd refused to answer any of her brother-in-law's messages in the aftermath of her husband's messy and very public suicide.
Sending a message—any message—to John Weyman had been one of the hardest things she'd ever done. Right up there with facing the endless sea of news cameras after the shattering dissolution of her marriage. Given her own track record, she could hardly blame him for not returning her messages, but it was distressing, nonetheless. Even if the reply was short and obscene, she'd expected him to say something about those incendiary reports of hers.
Yeah, well, he's assigned to the Dinochrome Brigade, which means he's probably at the front lines of the Deng War. Which is damned well where he belongs. Where he's happiest, God pity him . . .
She was about to ask Ed Parker if he could give them an educated guess on the blizzard's duration when an eerie sound brought the fine hairs at the nape of her neck starkly erect. "What's that noise?" she frowned, staring at the far plascrete wall, since it seemed to be coming from that direction. Her headache throbbed with a dull and distant warning. At that same instant, an alarm began to shriek from the weather station in the corner of the rec room.
Ed Parker blanched—a terrifying sight—and scrambled for the computer terminal which displayed weather conditions around the clock, for everyone's benefit. Parker rattled keys, scrolling through data screens, then stared in open horror. "Oh, my God . . ."
"What is it?" Bessany demanded, coming to her feet as real fright began to take hold. The noise—a low-pitched moaning roar—was getting louder. Much louder.
"Everybody down!" Parker yelled, throwing himself prone. "We've got a force five tornado bearing down on us—and I don't think it's going to miss!"
Chairs crashed. Bessany hit the floor, sliding frantically toward a doorway as a fragment of long-ago disaster training flashed through her mind. Doorways are more stable when buildings collapse. Aren't they? And hard on the heels of that thought, Since when do blizzards spawn force five tornadoes? Don't tornadoes form during collisions of warm-air fronts? Ed Parker's assessment of Thule's weather—amazing—was no longer even remotely funny. The tornado's monstrous roar rose to a scream . . .
Then the world shattered around her.