by Wil McCarthy
She moved a few meters in to give everyone space to come through behind her, which presently they did, one by one. Sasha was carrying the oxygen cannister, and as soon as he was through the door, everyone was grabbing up the thin hoses from him and connecting them to the masks' inlet valves, refreshing their air supplies lest the recyclers go foul on them. The children managed this task as well as any of the adults, and once again Malye felt a surge of pride. She gave them a childish “high sign”, wishing she could actually say something, but of course she didn't dare take the mask off for even a moment.
In fact, the moment had arrived for them all to get into their pressure equivalence garments. And quickly, for the Gateans might follow them in here at any moment. No time for modesty; she undid the sash and shrugged her shoulders, dropping her robe to the floor. Despite repeated whining from the refugees, they had never been given any undergarments to wear, and for once this was a good thing, as there was nothing left for her to remove. She unfurled her orange emergency suit, found and undid its zipper. The air was starting to bother the more sensitive parts of her skin, so she pulled the suit on over her feet and knees and thighs as quickly as she could without actually hurrying, and then got her arms through the sleeves and hauled the zipper up all the way to her chin, just under the bottom of the mask. A little Waister air leaked under the edge of it, stinging her eyes momentarily.
Around her, the others were stripping and dressing as well. There was a bit of furtive ogling going on, probably normal enough even in circumstances like these, but mostly everyone was focused on the task at hand, focused on survival and escape and the distant hope of rescue.
Malye still felt naked, vulnerable. The suit was porous, really just ordinary cloth that pulled against the skin with an atmosphere's worth of pressure, and despite its toughness it was thin. The last time she'd worn a suit like this, as Pinega succumbed to the Waisters' fire and flew apart around her, she'd taken an extra few seconds to throw her uniform on for protection, to help guard both herself and the suit's all-important fabric. But now, the idea of pulling on that loose, flapping robe seemed ill-advised, even ludicrous. They would have to face the vacuum bare-arsed, an unpleasant prospect.
But what other prospects did they have? The alternative was to sit around in the dayroom until somebody murdered them, which she felt sure would not have been a long wait at all.
When everyone was dressed, they began buddy checks, just like an emergency drill. Air meters, seals, zippers, loose articles... Really, they weren't ready for this at all. But the checks were finished in another minute, and they left their robes on the floor behind them and moved on down the corridor, secure in the knowledge that nobody was in a truly panicked state, that nobody was going to bleed out and die the moment they hit vacuum.
The door at the corridor's far end had a curious look to it, stiff and shiny as if it were thicker than an ordinary membrane. Even so, it bulged outward slightly at its center, and Malye thought she could hear it creaking faintly with the pressure, just at the edges of audibility. Perhaps it was her imagination. She often wondered if a great deal of what she sensed around her might not have its roots in imagination.
Hear the colors, little Malye!
Again, it fell to Malye to step through the doorway first. She did so, and immediately felt herself pushed through the membrane with considerable force. She saw stars, literally; the blackness of space whirling out in front of her, all around, and she was thrown out into it by the pressure differential across the door membrane. Full atmosphere on one side, full vacuum on the other. Damn! But presently, she felt herself slowing, and through the slightly foggy mask she could see that she was surrounded by tendrils of structural fog, or mechanical fog, or whatever it was they called it. It had a gentle grip on her, and was reversing the push she'd been given.
She looked down, and, seeing nothing but stars beneath her feet, gasped in a sharp breath through her mouthpiece. The airlock's exterior was just a wide, oval-shaped depression in the side of the planetoid, no wider than a train car and no deeper than Malye was tall. Waving with barely-visible fog tendrils, like something from a holie documentary about ocean life on Earth or Astaroth or one of the Barnardean worlds. And she was looking straight down, past the lip of the depression and down along the world's rocky face.
Holders Fastness was a vertical wall from which she hung like a decoration, and at two gees' worth of spin gravity, the stars whirled past her with alarming swiftness. If she fell, it would be in a straight line and at a constant velocity, but the world would spin on without her, the surface receding, falling away. From the world's point of view, coriolis forces would whip her down and out into space. Would she fall past the cucumber's tip, fall forever into the void? Or would the tip beat her to it, swinging around in a few minutes to smash down upon her, a wall of rock from which there could be no escape?
She shuddered and moaned, but she did not fall. And since she did not fall, she calmed, realizing that the fog tendrils' gentle grip was going to hold her up.
As she was thinking this, something soft and heavy slammed into her back, knocking the breathing air from her lungs, shoving her another meter forward. The stars reeled, and she half expected to fly out to join them. But again, the fog held her up. Awkwardly, she turned to see Nikolai behind her, jerking and struggling among the tendrils.
She drew a ragged breath. Ialah's names, they had to get away from the doorway, or else the next person through would slam into Nikolai, shoving him into Malye once again, and in all probability knocking her past the ends of the fog. Or could the tendrils stretch to catch her? No, that wasn't something she wanted to test.
Instead, she moved her arm upward, feeling the fog roll out of her way and then close behind the arm once more. Well, that was fine; she moved the other arm up there with it, and in a moment she was climbing, if awkwardly, up along the center of the depression. It was like air-swimming in a weightless tank, like water-swimming in gravity, like climbing a ladder made of soft gelatin ropes that oozed and parted and rejoined in her grip. Against the skin of her fingers the fog was a pressure and nothing more, no sensation of mass or texture, and the only other feeling was the disturbing numbness of the vacuum itself. Hands could survive an atmosphere's worth of pressure differential well enough, but there was nothing natural about the sensation.
The stars wheeled past.
Seeing her climb, Nikolai copied her movements just in time to get out of the way of Vere Sergeivne, who exploded through the membrane like a human projectile and was quickly seized and halted, only a part of her shoulder striking a part of his foot. Which was good, because while the two had become lovers, Malye doubted they shared any mad desire to fly off into eternity together.
Behind the mask, Vere's eyes were wide with sudden terror, but Malye and Nik both made reassuring gestures at her, and demonstrated the art of climbing. She was no fool, and her near collision with Nik had demonstrated the potential danger. She climbed out to the side, almost fast enough to avoid the next person through the membrane.
It went on like that until everyone was out, until they all clung to the surface of the depression like the peculiar creatures they were, far out of their normal element. Bugs nestling in a hole in the wall... There had been a close call there at the end; for some reason the children both came through the door more slowly than any of the adults had, and Konstant burst through right behind them, his collision sending them all flying. The fog seemed ready for this, however, and it caught and halted them all before they'd moved a meter.
So here they were, at the very edge of the world, dangling out over nothing at all. Malye was not at all happy with the situation, because in the long hours the refugees had spent planning their escape, this was supposed to have been the easy part.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
219::18
HOLDERS FASTNESS, GATE SYSTEM:
CONTINUITY 5218, YEAR OF THE DRAGON
Nikolai was able to put the platform together
with a speed and ease that Malye found surprising. It was largely a self-deploying mechanism, of course, folding out from its tiny package and taking firm grip upon the rockface with its three strong piton-wheels, but the process required considerable human supervision, lest something mechanically sensible but otherwise disastrous occur. Or so Nik had earlier insisted.
But he'd climbed up to the top of the depression and fired in a few spikes, and then it had seemed to take only a few minutes before he was dropping the guy wires down and opening the platform's floor gate.
Above them, about a hundred meters up and two or three meters off the cliff face, hovered one of the Gateans' light globes, spilling white light down through that wire-mesh ceiling, as the refugees climbed up toward it, one by one. At least they were not on the day side, blasted and blinded by sunlight! Every now and again, an object would swing past with the starscape, a nearby ship or a distant world, fully illuminated and reflecting brightly, and even that was enough to hurt the eyes that lingered too long.
Nikolai, kneeling above on the platform, helped each climber through the gate's square opening, sending eerie shadows cascading all around. The platform was nothing but slender, telescoping rods and mesh screens that supposedly rolled and flexed in one direction but not the other. It was like a larger version of the frying baskets people used for sliced potatoes and such, and under two full gees it certainly looked too spindly to support the weight of eight people. But Malye, who climbed aboard last, felt it bend and tremble beneath her only slightly.
There wasn't really room for eight people, however, and it was only a moment before she began to feel both claustrophobic and seriously in danger of falling. Bad enough to have a mask over her face and a breathing tube in her mouth, without elbows and masked faces pressing in from all directions, and nothing but a waist-high railing protecting her from the infinite void. Uneasily, they broke out Sasha's oxygen bottle again and shared from it, but the procedure was difficult and awkward and probably quite dangerous.
Malye was relieved when Nikolai finally pointed at the gate opening, and then lowered himself through it and back down into the fog tendrils. There was room enough for seven here, just barely. Malye watched the top of Nikolai's head bobbing as he climbed down, his bald, vacuum-bruised scalp gleaming each time it crossed the barrier between shadow and light.
He had to attach the guy wires, of course, and tighten them, or the platform would have nothing to press it firmly against the rock face, nothing to keep it oriented as it climbed upward toward the spin axis. Malye tried to watch what he was doing, but the shadows down below were simply too deep, the contrast too sharp for her to see. Until the bright object swung by again, briefly illuminating the airlock's depression like a bowl of foggy light, and Nikolai down in it, carefully unreeling the guy wires. But then the brightness was gone, the shadows returned, and it was much easier to look across the airlock, at the expanses of rock below and on either side of it.
The surface of Holders Fastness was smooth, almost glassy, which fit with her impression of what had happened to it in the war, back when it was still called Artya, and this was still Sirius system. Melted, distorted... In all, this world had probably fared better than most, else the Gateans would never have chosen to reoccupy it. And really, the surface was rather pretty with the starlight and globe-light gleaming off its highlights and inclusions. Like a semi-precious stone of gigantic proportions.
Movement caught her eye. She turned. To the left, just at the horizon, something was happening, something was moving. She peered through the moisture on the inside of her mask, straining for a better view.
Oh, Ialah.
Two or three Gateans were out there, Drones in sliver-colored pressure suits. Three of them, yes. They were tiny in the distance, impossible to make out in detail, but it seemed they were not quite in contact with the world's surface. Rather, they drifted along it in hazy bubbles of fog, as if it were doing the climbing for them, as if they were being carried along with no particular effort of their own.
And then Malye realized why they were so difficult to see—it was not the distance so much as the haze. Human-sized globs of fog raced alongside and in front of them, making shimmers and rainbows of the stars that swept past the horizon. Ialah, there were dozens of them, much larger than the surgical fog that had killed Viktor and Plate. And coming this direction!
She pointed, waving her finger urgently to alert the others. Weapons, attackers! When she was sure they'd seen, she threw herself down on her knees and peered through the floor gate. Nik! She couldn't see him, but down in the shadows of the airlock depression, something appeared to be moving spasmodically, as if he were down there dancing or fighting. And then suddenly there was a spray of dark liquid, breaking at once into tiny droplets that froze and danced and fell in the starlight, and Malye understood at once that Nikolai Ilyovot Kuprin was not down there any more. The dust of blood-red jewels spinning out into the light simply confirmed it for her, as she searched madly to see whether the guy wires had in fact been spiked to the surface.
They had.
Slamming the gate shut between her knees—as if this wire mesh could keep out a fog weapon!—she threw herself toward the back of the basket, toppling Elle and Sasha out of her way against the rails, and she fumbled for the controls that hung there at the back. Three fat buttons, marked UP, STOP and DOWN, on a slim pendant controller that hung flat against the mesh wall. She slapped the UP button as fast and hard as she dared, her fist pushing pendant and mesh up against the unyielding rock.
The platform lurched and shuddered and began to rise, its three piton-wheels firing pins deep into the rock, then expanding and roughing their surfaces for unshakable grip, then rolling a notch upward and firing again, the first set of pins collapsing on themselves and rolling back up into the mechanism. The motion was jerky but surprisingly swift, carrying them upward a full five meters in only a couple of seconds. The guy wires spooled out on their reels. Malye bit down again and again on her mouthpiece as the basket shook.
Ialah, what this would sound like of it weren't in vacuum! Malye knew a moment of raw, red terror, mingled with exhilaration and amazement that this contraption should work at all. Never had she seen such a thing, though Nikolai has insisted they were common enough in Sirian times. Her tongue tasted not of batteries but of cinnamon, sharp and biting but not unpleasant, not really.
But that moment passed, and once again she was helpless because the platform wasn't climbing nearly fast enough, and the fogs were swirling up on all sides. Ten seconds, maybe twenty, and—
Bright light flashed down from above, seeming to freeze everything in place. Malye could see each individual fog weapon standing out like filmy lenses against the rock and stars, and she could see the Gateans, now only seconds away, and she could see something else, as well: a wall of huge, flailing objects tumbling down the rock face from above.
After that, everything seemed to happen at once.
The light was reflecting off the hull of a ship that looked very much like a Gatean ferry, orange and phallic and vaguely organic in appearance. But it was enormously larger, and Malye understood it to be a Waister fleetship coming up over the horizon, so far away that it was in sunlight and yet still it filled a quarter of the sky.
The falling objects were Drones, Waister Drones, dressed up in gray hardsuits of some sort. Space armor. They looked like plated sausages with arms and legs attached in all the wrong places, and they were not falling at all, but running down the surface of Holders Fastness in full defiance of the laws of gravity and centrifugal motion.
Here and there, the glassy surface flashed and kicked up sprays of grit, which promptly fell out and down into infinity, and at some point Malye noticed that all the fogs were gone, and the Gateans as well, though she hadn't seen quite what had happened to them.
The Waister Drones swarmed down all around them, shaking both the platform and the rockface itself with their passing. The airlock depression, now brigh
tly lit with the reflected sunlight, filled up with Waisters. They swirled into it and cast themselves through the airlock membrane, not one at a time but by the dozens, almost as if they overlapped one another in space.
It was at approximately this time that Malye began to doubt her senses. What was happening around her was insane, impossible, and also too quick for the eye to follow, like it was all a series of optical illusions or—admit it!—hallucinations. And then, as suddenly as everything else had happened, the cliff was cast once more into relative darkness, as the Waister ship, growing huger and huger with each passing second, slipped into the shadow of Holders Fastness.
And still the ship approached, now a wall of shadow above them, illuminated in diffuse circles where the Gatean light globes reflected, but these circles kept shrinking and sharpening and the ship was like a world unto itself and it seemed it must crush them all against the rock face at any moment. And still it approached.
Malye and the others ducked, shrank back, cowered against the back side of the basket. Not even afraid, really; human brains simply weren't equipped for an experience like this. There was no programmed response except confusion, and that was not really a response at all.
Finally, the great ship slowed and stopped, a wall that filled all but the very edges of the sky, and Malye found her senses returning. She could turn and look straight across at the alien hull, its orange, ripply-smooth surface shot through with orange, ripply-smooth threads. Like a leaf, sort of.