Assignment: Avalon

Chapter Four: An Unfriendly Rescue

Melodan woke as the protective gel drained from her face. For a moment, choking on fetid air and finding her head lower than her feet, she struggled frantically against the restraining webbing; then, as the surge of terror subsided, realized she must have landed.

The lid will come off when the last of the gel drains, she reassured herself; but the stuff was almost gone, leaving behind a faint smell of decomposing roses, and the padded panel inches from her nose had not moved.

The manual control, Melodan thought. She felt for and found a short metal level by her right hand and jerked it sharply.

It didn't budge.

She pulled harder, and her heart leaped as something snapped and a crack of night sky appeared—but stopped growing when only an inch wide.

Through that narrow space, she saw a tall spear of rock silhouetted against bright stars. A twisted bit of metal protruding from her left attested to the violence of her landing. The cocoon had saved her—but maybe only temporarily. The automatic and manual releases had both failed, and there was no third alternative.

You really screwed up, didn't you? she thought bitterly. Asleep when you popped out of dimspace right in front of an Preceptorate cruiser. No escape jump programmed. And now you're going to starve to death in a ready-made coffin.

Rage filled her. No, she was not! That would be the final screw-up, and she wouldn't give her father the satisfaction of saying "I told you so!"

She began a silent, desperate struggle to raise her right arm to her chest. There were only a few centimetres between her body and the narrow opening to the outside world, but by keeping her arm tight against her body and tugging and scraping her hand from thigh to stomach to breast, fighting the sucking grasp of the damp fabric enveloping her, she succeeded in getting her fingers into the cool night air.

Halfway there, she thought, and repeated the struggle with her left hand. By the time those fingers, too, were outside, she was panting and the smell of her own sweat mingled sharply with the stench of the gel. But she paused only a moment before seizing the edges of the lid and trying to pull them apart.

The metal panels dug into her hands like dull knives. Her fingers tingled, then numbed—but still she pulled, gritting her teeth.

It was no good. The doors wouldn't budge, and her strength was fading. She pulled her fingers back inside the cocoon and stared bitterly up into the night sky through the crack, feeling the icy air of freedom seeping down around her wet body, but unable to reach it.

Somewhere up there was home, and Melodan wished she had never left it. Maybe Father was right, she thought. If I'd listened to him, I'd still be on Newhope, helping Mom and Angela run the ranch. I could be riding Jojo through Painted Canyon right now, instead of lying in a coffin on a mountainside a thousand light years away.

Home. She remembered crisp autumn air, frost on the golden thunderpines, the smell of bacon drifting up the stairs to her room under the eaves, her mother's sweet soprano mingling with the chords of the synthilyre on Winterfest Eve in the den with its long black beams and gray stone walls.

She could see her father, too, seated on the overstuffed couch, legs crossed comfortably on the opalwood drink table, whittling some small animal out of a piece of foamfir while telling stories of his famous battles, of Deux Roches and Caliban and snowy Baffinbree, orange firelight gleaming in his salt-and-pepper hair, his voice slow and deep and his tone offhand as he spoke of deadly dogfights and hair's-breadth escapes, but his blue eyes bright with adventure.

Melodan always followed him around the ranch as he chopped wood or mended fences, chores he insisted on doing, to the distress of the robots. "A man should keep in touch with what he's fighting for, Melodan," he told her once. "It's too easy to fly and fight just to be flying and fighting, and then you're no better off than one of the Preceptorate's soldierserfs."