“Let’s go,” Nicole said. “And remember, never move without being sure you’re secure.”
That proved far easier said than done. She still had her grapple gun but she couldn’t use it until they cleared the crest of the docking module and made what seemed like an eternally laborious passage around the base of one of the spokes—the metal actually thrumming beneath Nicole’s gloved palm as another rotation dipped the far end of the tower into the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere, like dipping an oar into the water to slow a boat down. So far the basic speed was so high, and the length of oar being dipped so small and for so short a time, that the effect was almost inconsequential. But each repetition increased the effect and it wouldn’t be terribly long before there were consequences to match. They didn’t dare be present to see that. Worse, because of the nature of the movement, they were essentially climbing uphill.
There was nothing ahead anywhere near midpoint to anchor the grapple to, so she raised the sights a fraction and let fly for the opposite spoke. Ten meters out from her, the grapple’s little solid-fuel charge ignited and the anchor vanished into the distance, drawn unerringly to its target by a microchip seeker. She couldn’t see or feel the impact, but the grapple obligingly transmitted a CONTACT confirmation back along a fiber-optic thread imbedded in the heart of the cable to the gun itself, and an LED crystal that flickered from red to green.
She passed the line back to Cobri, who patted her shoulder to tell her he had a good hold, and—after a final check of Grace Kinsella to make sure she was okay—Nicole led the way along the hub.
The farther they went, the less the rotational effect of the spin and consequently the lesser the gravity. But it also seemed to them that they were spinning ever faster, which raised another potential danger, that of disorientation sickness. Along the way, she pointed out the fairy-tale teardrop of the Hybrid, pacing their course at a cautious remove from the disintegrating station. Seeing the shuttle, though, reminded Nicole of Alex and the Jeep—cut off from the outside as she’d been, she’d lost track of him in her thoughts as well.
Suddenly, she was caught by a hand. The tug caught her at an awkward moment and her feet went out from under her. They’d been making their way along the leading edge of the hub, the part that was moving in the direction of the spin, so that inertia would press them into the hull beneath their feet (as opposed to the trailing edge, where it would be trying its best to pull them off). Down side was that every spin they had the looming presence of the daylit Earth and the Sun beyond full in their faces. But that same force now threatened to drag Nicole around the curve of the hull, and once she passed midpoint—if she couldn’t find a secure handhold—yank her into open space. She latched on to the nearest thing in reach, but it was a broken stanchion with the shape of a broken bottle and all she accomplished was to tear the surface layer of her glove—almost giving herself a heart seizure in the process, certain the moment she saw the leather-covered palm begin to rip that she was doomed.
She felt a tug at the waist, her body swinging sideways and then miraculously to a stop, a painful twist of her head giving her a view of Manuel Cobri sitting atop the hub, with feet braced and the tether in both hands. Seeing her look, he pointed, and she crabbed around—pulling herself back towards him in the process—to gasp in astonishment and horror at a set of distant navigation lights. The Jeep, in what she quickly recognized was a fast, sloppy copy of her own maneuver. Alex was above the plane of flight established by the Hybrid and the station, nose down towards the shuttle and inverted, describing a great loop that would ideally drop him pretty much on top of them. She saw a flash from his tail and knew he’d applied braking thrust, but that glance alone was enough to tell her he’d fired too soon. He had the idea, but not the instincts. He’d flinched, probably figuring to err on the side of caution, except that he’d done so from too extreme an attitude to do him any good. The engines were driving him ahead—what Nicole registered as “down”—without slowing his forward momentum. A standard Jeep didn’t have the thrust, or the reserves, for this kind of stunt. If he’d fired max power, as he’d doubtless seen Nicole do, he had nothing more to call for. Still, he tried, she gave him credit for that. Swinging the Jeep through the final degrees of pitch with attitude thrusters, lining up his mains where they should have been from the start, slowing perceptibly even as they watched.
Too little, too late.
If he was trying for them, he was way off line, skimming close overhead—Nicole and his father both instinctively ducking—to carom off the hub itself before final backward impact with the spokes beyond. There was a silent flash as the remaining fuel in the engines let go, an explosion that sliced through the base of one of the spokes, toppling it on top of the Cobri spaceplane, half tearing the beautiful craft from its moorings and leaving what remained a broken tangle of debris, venting raw hydrogen in a flickering gaseous display.
Nicole unbuckled the hand thruster and shoved it into Cobri’s grasp. “Take this,” she said, forgetting that he couldn’t hear her.
“What,” he protested, touching his helmet to hers, “what are you doing?”
“Slow bursts, straight out from here, perpendicular to the station’s line of flight.” There were Mayday signalers clipped to the shoulder harness and she flipped on both Cobri’s and Kinsella’s; the strobes could be seen for klicks and along with them went a pulsing radio tone that could be used for an RDF lock. Indeed, an answering flash from the Hybrid’s roof window told her the signals had been received. “They know you’re coming, either Colonel Sallinger or the Hal engineer, Tscadi, will be out to meet you. You tell ’em from me, that’s as far as they’re to go, that’s my direct order as Spacecraft Commander. Understood, Mr. Cobri? I make it back on my own or not at all.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The tail end of the Jeep bore the brunt of the impact. The cabin looks fundamentally intact. I’m going back for him.”
“That’s suicide. Look at your gauges, girl, you have too little air. And without the thruster, how will you return to the shuttle?”
“I’ll take my chances, and find a way. That’s a standard configuration Jeep, there should be portable bottles in the emergency locker, and a hand thruster, too. I won’t leave him.”
And she broke contact, pulling the tether from his grasp and giving him a shoulder shove that sent him and Kinsella into a slow spiral off the hub. He gave her a last, long look before turning his back and—after a moment’s fumbling—igniting the thruster. Only a fractional burst, an attempt to stabilize his movement and get himself pointed in a better direction. He was as good as he’d intimated, careful and methodical, taking the time to learn the tool before trusting himself to use it, and she knew he’d be fine.
The kid was another matter entirely. Not to mention her.
Once more down the hub, descending reversed, playing out the tether hand over hand, even more conscious of the station’s increasingly violent disintegration. She was singing again, delighted in a way that she had no one to hear her, giving full voice—far more enthusiasm than accuracy, but what the hell—to her favorite rock ’n’ roll. Breaking a lyric line every so often to call Alex’s name, even though she knew he couldn’t hear her.
As she neared the Jeep, she reconsidered her earlier spot evaluation, the small vehicle was a mess. The ceramic composite hull was warped and split along its entire length, with spiderweb fractures across the canopy. She wrapped a few loops around its partially deployed landing skid to secure her tether, then clambered awkwardly up the broken, bleeding hull to manhandle the emergency hatch.
The interior wasn’t much better. The fire had flashed forward as well as aft, scorching everything it touched, and making Nicole wonder if this was a wasted trip. She hadn’t looked at her bottle telltale since she started, she didn’t need to, she knew she had nowhere near enough to do the job. If she was wrong about the emergency locker, this was as far as she went.
She sought it first
—another automatic reaction, acknowledging that she could do far more once her own status was secure—and found what she was after, breathing a sigh of relief as she clutched the oxygen gently to her breast. Fate was indeed smiling today, because it held a thruster pack as well.
She was set.
Alex was in trouble.
He was still strapped into his chair. The fire had come and gone too quickly for any reaction. But the charring on his suit was surface effect, residue of combustion in the internal atmosphere around Alex, not of the suit itself. She thought he was fine, until she looked through his faceplate.
His eyes were wide, staring, mouth open and moving, the transparency fogged with the intensity of his breath as he spoke. He was looking right at her but didn’t seem to register her presence, even when she shined a torch full in his eyes. Not a matter of physical blindness, but of perception. And she cursed her lack of a functioning radio.
She leaned forward touching her visor to his and immediately heard a hoarse, hurried mantra, repeated over and over. “Recycle,” he was saying, “reset recycle reset recycle reset.”
“Alex,” she called, in the command voices she’d learned crewing sailboats as a kid, and refined on the parade quad at the Air Force Academy, a deep resonance that was guaranteed to get a person’s attention, anytime, anywhere. Or so she’d believed.
Live and learn. He didn’t bat an eye.
“Alex, it’s Nicole. Listen to me. Your vessel’s a wreck but you appear to be all right. It’s a serious situation, but not critical. I’m getting you out of here, Alex, I’m taking you home. Just relax, okay, take things easy. Can you hear me, Alex, are you listening?”
She might as well have been talking to the planet outside. He kept chanting.
“Goddammit, Cobri, this isn’t a Virtual scenario. It’s real, do you hear, do you understand, you can die here. If you don’t do as I say, you will die here!”
She didn’t like his color, and scrambled along his arm for a look at his telltale. But here the fire had done some damage, scoring the display circuits so that they flashed only intermittent and untrustworthy data.
“Alex,” she said, “stop panting. You’re creating an imbalance inside your suit. There’s enough air, I have an extra bottle for each of us. Slow, even, steady breaths, Alex, that’s the ticket. You’re pumping too much carbon dioxide into your helmet, the suit scrubbers can’t handle the load. Alex, you’re poisoning yourself, for Christ’s sake, will you listen? Let yourself go. Alex!” She was yelling, tearing her own throat raw in her effort to reach him. She looked around frantically, for anything that could be established as a sealed environment, kicked over to the locker in hopes of finding a LifeBall—officially tagged a Solo Survival Module, essentially a self-sealing, inflatable cocoon. Start losing atmosphere, pull the trigger, duck inside, and zip the sucker shut behind you. Came complete with larger versions of the suit beacons and was guaranteed good for twenty-four hours. Even if he didn’t come out of his mantra, the greater internal volume would allow her time to haul him back to the shuttle before his air got critical.
Wasn’t where it was supposed to be. But the locker had sprung with the crash, couple of the restraints broken, so she began searching along the nooks and crannies, threatening a profane mantra of her own until fingers brushed a package and she half collapsed with delight to find it intact and unmarked.
Touched helmets again with Alex, more reassurance that he was going to be okay, reaching up through the hatch—because there was no way an inflated ball would fit, especially occupied!—to fasten the package with a triple tie and pull the lanyard, grinning exultantly as the silver sphere popped gloriously full before her eyes. She’d lose pressure when she tucked him in and raised his visor, but she could use one of the emergency bottles to make up the difference.
Speaking of which, getting close to the time when she should switch her own. She glanced down through the clear canopy, en route to the locker, when she saw Alex spasm suddenly against his restraints.
She was on him in a flash—a risky dive considering the floating trash and occasional jagged outcrops—found his mouth gaping, tongue protruding, hands flailing aimlessly about his chest. He was straining against the straps, as though under the impact of a massive electric shock, his expression changing as she watched to one of real pain.
“No,” she screamed. “You miserable rock-fucking little toad, don’t you do this to yourself, no!” She punched the locking junction of the restraints, pivoting him over her hip to throw him to the deck, raising her fisted hands in helpless frustration and a scream of anguish because the stupid son of a bitch was wearing a hard suit (Of course, some insanely anal part of her noted in passing, considering how he feels about taking risks, what else would he wear but something that affords the absolute maximum of protection?) and there was no possible way to administer CPR through a solid breastplate. The poisoning air and his panic had combined to throw him into a massive heart attack and there was nothing she could do about it.
The shuttle, she thought, get him to an open environment, where we can crack him out of his shell and buy time enough—please oh please oh please—to boost for Sutherland. Minimal G’s, a lot safer than reentry, and their zero-gravity ward is ideal for critical recovery.
So she hauled him off the deck and towards the hatch, and the waiting LifeBall. But he grabbed her hard, bunching the front of her suit in his hand, fear bursting in her own eyes that he’d open her suit and take her with him. It wasn’t an intentional act, though, just reflex, and she saw his mouth working, trying to speak.
She touched his faceplate with hers and heard the mantra replaced by a breathily groaned, “Oh.”
“Alex,” she said, “hold on, I’ll get you home. I’ve got a LifeBall right here. A few stinking minutes”—the better side of thirty was what she meant—“you can do that for me, for yourself, c’mon, man, please!”
“I screwed up,” he managed to say.
“Everybody does,” she said, wriggling them out of the wreck, making a quick grab for a tether before they went too far and got tumbled over the side.
“Recycle,” he said.
“No,” she cried.
“Reset.” He sounded confused, unable to comprehend why his toys weren’t behaving. The tension was draining out of him, his grip loosening on her suit, the pain leaving his face.
“No,” she roared.
But he was beyond hearing.
* * *
fifteen
The butler pointed her towards the garage, where he said the old man was puttering with a pet car. There was a spectacular view off the terrace towards the harbor and the glistening Manhattan skyline beyond and she paused for a moment’s enjoyment before proceeding on her way. It was a crisp day, the kind she loved, when she’d enjoy nothing more than to be in an old beloved Skye sweater and jeans, wandering the Nantucket shore. Or better yet, chasing currents through the sky in her sailplane. The air was mostly clear, swept by a freshening breeze off the ocean, with clouds in scattered ranks overhead like Brobdingnagian puffballs. So many things she’d rather be doing, so many places she’d rather be than here.
Over the years, Cobri had bought up most of Todt Hill—making, and she smiled without mirth, the homeowners offers they couldn’t refuse—plowing under the houses and lots and restoring the land to a pristine state. Talk was that his ultimate goal was to purchase all of Staten Island, making it private property except for the Interstate running from the Verrazano Narrows to the Goethals Bridge. No one took him seriously—except perhaps the locals who’d be shunted aside—but no one could afford to put it past him, either.
Nicole figured it was a done thing. It may take a generation or two, but if that’s what Cobri wanted, that’s what would happen. Not a doubt in her mind.
Her heels made small clicks on the flagstones and she wondered at the impression she’d made on the butler. This suit was an absolute change from her normal clothes—charcoal wool jacket and knee-l
ength skirt, over stockings that were slightly less dark and a white blouse that had been given to her by Tscadi. A gift originally brought by Matai, welcoming her in a sense to the family. The fabric looked like fine cotton, felt like silk, a wraparound design that swept up to a high collar while leaving an open neck. Under it, warm against her skin, she wore the fireheart choker. Her hair was swept straight back, almost severely, from her forehead and her eyes hidden behind a pair of tortoiseshell, shadow-lensed RayBan Wayfarers. And hanging from her right ear, the fireheart earring. When she’d come down to breakfast, even her mother had been stunned speechless. All through the flight in to LaGuardia, where a State Department limo had been waiting, she hadn’t felt like herself. But that had been the idea.
The garage was the size of a fair-sized barn, home to a score of modern and vintage cars—some of which weren’t even legal to run anymore on the open highway—with a workshop attached behind. Which was where the path from the back of the house was leading her.
She had to grin, she dressed to total power and Cobri threw her a curve by meeting her in a location where one misstep would have her sprawled on her elegant posterior in a puddle of oil.
“It’s been a while, Lieutenant,” he said, checking a natural impulse to offer his hand, giving her an appraising glance while he cleaned off the morning’s grease and grime.
She stood her ground, framed in the doorway, with the afternoon light behind her, the strength of her body not muted in the slightest by her ensemble.
“Hardly that, sir,” she replied neutrally, “it only seems so.”
“You missed the funeral.” You planted him, she thought, without a second to waste.
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