Resurgence hu-5

by Charles Sheffield

  “Snow and ice residue in the firing chambers.” Hans Rebka had fallen to his knees behind Nenda’s chair. “They don’t like that at all.”

  “Nor do I. Let’s hope it’ll boil outa there in a minute or two.”

  Darya, struggling to remain on her feet and watch her assigned display, saw the image of Marglot visibly shrinking. The upward thrust continued and the ride gradually became smoother. The possibility of continued life no longer seemed unthinkable.

  Nenda went on cheerfully, “Well, unless something else happens we have it made. We’re on our way to orbit. That was a lot easier than I expected. Once I’m sure we have orbital velocity I’ll take us out beyond one of the poles. Safer to watch the show from there, all the junk will be flyin’ out round the equator.”

  A show it was certainly going to be. The ship was ascending faster and Darya could see a substantial fraction of the entire planet. The swath of violent volcanic activity was spreading, growing wider while she watched. Far away from the equator, rocks like ruddy sparks emerged in shotgun volleys from the riven surface. Each one had to be at least as big as a house. If any were to hit the Have-It-All, Nenda’s optimism wouldn’t mean a thing.

  Julian Graves came wandering on unsteady legs from the aft part of the ship. “What is our status? During that last convulsion I felt sure that we were doomed.”

  “Nah. Rattled us up a bit, that was all. We’re in fine shape. The hard part was gettin’ enough speed to take us to orbit. We have that, so everythin’ else is easy.”

  “If we have reached orbital velocity and we are free to maneuver, why are we not heading at once for the Bose node entry point?”

  “Too dangerous. The Bose node is close to Marglot’s equatorial plane. We got to wait ’til the planet’s spin-up is over before we can head for the node.”

  “I see. Very well. I rely on your judgment as captain. I will pass the word to the others. Everyone has held the station you assigned, but all are wondering as to our fate.”

  “Tell ’em the worst is over. They can sit back and enjoy.”

  Graves glared but said nothing. He went staggering away along the corridor, supporting himself against the metal walls and grabbing at the stems of missing light fixtures.

  “That was a lie.” Hans Rebka was back on his feet and once more standing behind Louis Nenda.

  “Not all of it. We are at orbital speed, and I am takin’ us toward the pole.”

  “You know what I mean. It’s not dangerous to head for the Bose node. That’s half a million kilometers away and it’s nowhere near the equatorial plane. Chances of our being hit are negligible.”

  “Could be. You proposin’ to go to Graves back there an’ tell on me?”

  “No.”

  “Thought not. You’re as nosy as I am. How often do you get to see a whole planet fly apart? But what’s causing it, that’s what I’d like to know.”

  “Maybe we can answer that.” Hans Rebka turned to Darya. “Do you remember what we were told by Guardian of Travel about the middle of Marglot?—though of course, we didn’t know at the time that it was Marglot.”

  It was a struggle for Darya to think back. Their hours on Iceworld seemed years ago. “Isn’t there some sort of vortex in the middle of Marglot? A big one, once used to change the rotation rate.”

  “Used once, and used again. That’s what’s happening now. The question is, where will all this end? What will be left of Marglot if the spin rate keeps going up?”

  “I don’t give a toss what happens to Marglot, though I admit I want to watch it go blooey.” Nenda swiveled his chair to face the other two. “I’ll give you another question. I don’t trust the universe when it starts arrangin’ things for my convenience. But just when we need it, Marglot speeds up its spin rate—in time to give us the added outward push we need to ascend to orbit. How come?”

  Darya didn’t think that Nenda expected an answer, but Hans Rebka was nodding. “We’re not looking at the case of a benevolent universe, and this isn’t coincidence. We owe our good luck to Ben Blesh.”

  “He froze to death on Marglot.”

  “I don’t think so. He found his way back to Iceworld. Remember, Darya, we had the option of returning there? He did it. And now, from Iceworld, he is controlling events within Marglot.”

  “So he saved our asses? Pity we’ll never get a chance to thank him. You believe that something Blesh did is responsible for all that? Sooo-eee.”

  All that. Nenda’s gesture included everything outside the Have-It-All, but one feature dominated everything else. The ship had spiraled out and out and up and up, until Darya found herself looking down at Marglot from above. She could span the whole sphere with one hand. Except that it was not a sphere.

  Marglot had become a fat ellipsoid. While parts of the world still showed the pristine white of undisturbed snowfall, a broad central belt glowed red and was shot through with sulfurous yellow flames. Marglot was developing its own planetary ring, a disk of hot ejecta expelled by violent vulcanism.

  The others on the ship were drifting back into the control cabin, where the only remaining large display screen was located. They were silent as the central girdle brightened and Marglot continued to change in shape. The polar flattening and central bulge were too obvious to miss.

  Hans Rebka was talking to no one in particular when he said, “Less and less at the poles, and wider and wider at the equator. Does it go on until the whole planet flattens into a pancake?”

  Of course, it was E.C. Tally who answered. “It does not. An ellipsoid of revolution is a possible shape for a solid gravitating body only up to a limiting spin rate. Beyond that rate, instabilities grow exponentially and dissociation is certain. A threshold for the disintegration of Marglot must be reached in the near future.”

  “Not true, E.C.” Nenda turned up the gain on the display. “Take a peek. It’s already here.”

  The planet was changing. The spheroid had widened to become a fat disk of matter. Now that disk was dividing into three distinct lobes. The inner regions glowed white-hot, proof of enormous energies generated and released.

  Nenda went on, “See what you got down there? It’s Builders, one, Masters of Cold, zero. The whole damned place is doing a meltdown.”

  It was far from over. Darya could see more rifts developing within the three lobes of the shattered disk. Waves of compression and rarefaction built new nodes of compacted matter and left dark striations between them. They formed and dissolved chaotically as she watched.

  Julian Graves had moved to stand next to Darya. He had his hand on her shoulder for support, although he was probably unaware of it. He said quietly, “The death of a world. But we are not witnessing genocide. That occurred before our arrival.”

  Marglot no longer existed. It had become streams of molten matter, flowing down from what had once been the poles to the equator, then spun off into space. The central region was no longer red-hot or white-hot. It flared blue. The middle of Marglot had turned from a liquid core to a plasma, ionized gas at a temperature of tens of thousands of degrees.

  And still it was not over. Within the center of the blue-white maelstrom another shape was coming into view. A spinning darkness obscured the stars beyond. As the whirlpool of matter outside it was expelled, the vortex grew in size.

  Finally it stood alone as a column of absolute black. And then, while Darya’s eyes were still trying to recognize its reality, it vanished.

  The vortex was gone. Marglot was gone. In their place stood three great lobes of super-heated matter within a broad expanding ring.

  Even Louis Nenda seemed overwhelmed—until he leaned back in his chair and said, “Well, there’s a first so far as I’m concerned. I guess we’d all rather be here than there. Nothing could live in the middle of that lot.”

  “Maybe not.” Sinara Bellstock had moved to watch the big display along with all the others, clustering into the remains of what had once been a control cabin as fine as any in the Orion Arm. But
she had hauled along the small piece of communications gear that Nenda had assigned to her. She still wore the earpiece, and she seemed to be listening to something.

  She went on, “Maybe no one can live there for very long. But I’m picking up a distress signal, and it’s from one of our suits. It shows weak but definite vital signs. And unless the range and direction are wrong on my readout, it’s coming from the middle of that.” She pointed to the display of the glowing disk. “Ben Blesh is alive in there, in the place where nothing should be able to survive.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Revolution

  It was still the ship’s “conference room,” even though in its gutted condition it could have passed as a bare cargo hold. And the room was still being used for a “conference,” if that word could include a bitter argument plus insubordination by junior staff that verged on mutiny.

  “I was not placed in charge of this expedition for the purpose of making popular decisions.” Julian Graves had his back to the wall in both senses, leaning against a metal partition that had once held conference displays. “It was my responsibility to bring us safely to the Sag Arm; it is no less my responsibility to take us home again.”

  The mutineers were Torran Veck, Sinara Bellstock, and Teri Dahl. They stood shoulder to shoulder against the opposite wall.

  “We were told that Louis Nenda was in charge of this ship.” Torran Veck was for the moment the spokesman for the three, if for no better reason than that he was the only one tall enough to look Julian Graves straight in the eye. “Nenda should still be in charge. The Have-It-All is his ship and not yours.”

  “Louis Nenda was permitted to bring his ship only with the explicit understanding that it would be part of the expedition’s available resources. I relinquished command to him while we attempted one difficult and specific act; namely, he had to get this ship off the surface of Marglot. He did that—brilliantly. But as soon as that was done, command decisions reverted to me.”

  “Nenda didn’t,” Torran said, and the other two nodded agreement. “Didn’t get us off Marglot, I mean. We spoke to Louis Nenda. He says that if it hadn’t been for the centrifugal force assist, the ship would still be down there—or more likely, he thinks, it would be a white-hot blob floating somewhere in the middle of a mess of planetary debris. Ben Blesh got us away from Marglot.”

  “I am not seeking to diminish his contribution. But if we fail to return to the Orion Arm, Blesh’s sacrifice will have been in vain.”

  “His sacrifice? You talk as though he’s already dead. He’s not. Ben’s out there. Unconscious, and maybe close to death, but he’s alive.”

  “I know. But we cannot risk this ship, and with it our only hope of returning to the Orion Arm, for any member of this expedition. You, or me, or Ben Blesh.”

  “He saved all of us. You won’t even try to save him.”

  “Not at the cost of rendering pointless our whole journey to the Sag Arm, including the loss of Lara Quistner and our own close escape from death. Don’t you see that what we have learned exceeds any of us in importance?”

  “What have we learned? You can’t even tell us.”

  “Not yet. We have a group attempting such an analysis at this very moment. However, our success or failure to understand is not the issue. There are other minds in the Orion Arm, great minds who will take what we give them and go beyond any deductions we are able to make. I am truly sorry. I realize that Ben Blesh was your fellow group member.”

  “He was more than that. He was our close friend.”

  Julian Graves knew that to be an exaggeration—he had watched the survival specialists and sensed the strong rivalries within the group; but he was wise enough not to challenge the statement. He merely said, “I was not his close friend, but I am a member of the Ethical Council. The prospect of Ben Blesh’s death, while we are forced to stand by and watch, pains me no less than it does you. However, I must not—dare not—endanger this ship and all that we have done in a rash attempt to secure his survival.”

  Torran glanced at Sinara. They had orchestrated this in advance, and carefully. He had made the accusations, now she would move it to the next stage.

  Sinara took two steps toward Julian Graves. “Suppose we could find a way to save Ben that did not endanger this ship at all? Suppose that it merely meant a delay of a day or two in entering the Bose node?”

  “I think I know what you have in mind. Professor Lang, Captain Rebka and I already explored that possibility. A day or two’s delay would be tolerable. Ben Blesh’s suit, like all the suits, has built-in thrustors. They can be used for in-space maneuvering. We thought, perhaps we can simply wait for him to fly out of the region where the planetary debris is located. Then he can rendezvous with the Have-It-All in a safe location. The problem is that Ben Blesh is unconscious, and the equipment needed to control his suit remotely, from this ship, was stripped out and left behind on Marglot. No one ever dreamed that we might need it.”

  “We also spoke with Professor Lang and Captain Rebka, and they told us about your discussion. They thought that a delay in entering the Bose node would not be an issue.”

  “It never was. No one likes living in a ship in the derelict condition of this one, but everyone would endure it gladly for a few extra days if it meant we could save Ben Blesh.”

  Sinara said promptly, “Then we ask for a two-day delay in entering the Bose node. We also seek your permission to attempt a rescue mission for Ben.”

  “Didn’t you hear me? Any danger to this ship—”

  “There will no danger to the ship. At worst, you will lose three space suits and three members of the survival team group. We feel that it is our right to try to save our colleague and friend, provided that it endangers no one but ourselves.”

  “I am sorry, but you have ceased to make sense.” Julian Graves’s furrowed brow betrayed his bewilderment. “Three suits, and the three of you?”

  “It is simple enough. This ship is sitting high above the plane of debris, far from the danger zone.”

  “It must remain beyond that zone.”

  “We know. We also know, from the suit signals, exactly where Ben is located. He is deep within the zone of danger, surrounded by all kinds of fragments big enough to destroy this ship. We asked Louis Nenda if it would be possible to fly the Have-It-All on a vector that would exactly intersect Ben Blesh’s projected suit position.”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “We didn’t ask him to do it, Councilor—we only asked if it would be possible. He said it would be easy. He also said he could establish that velocity vector when the ship was far away from danger. We ask you to agree to that, and only that.”

  “With what useful result?”

  “Once the Have-It-All is moving at the right speed and in the right direction, the three of us, in our suits, leave the ship. We fly on, to rendezvous with Ben Blesh. However, as soon as we leave the ship, the Have-It-All uses its engines to change direction. It stays well out of the plane of danger, and heads toward M-2, a million kilometers away. When this ship gets there, it loops around behind M-2. That planet is huge, it will serve as a shield to protect you from free-flying debris. This ship then returns on the other side of what was once Marglot’s equatorial plane. You will again be far enough out of that plane to be at no risk. And there you wait for us. We will fly through the danger zone in our suits, collect Ben Blesh, and bring him with us to safety.”

  “That sounds completely impossible.”

  “Some of it may be. It’s possible that we will die trying to reach Ben, or die trying to get back to the Have-It-All. But the trajectories are quite feasible if you believe E.C. Tally and Kallik and Atvar H’sial. All three performed the calculations separately at our request, and all assured us that everything we are suggesting is well within the Have-It-All’s capabilities. The engines are now operating at full efficiency, and given the ship’s reduced mass the maneuvers that we have described are easier than ever. Louis Nenda confirms th
is.”

  Julian Graves examined one by one the faces of the three people in front of him. He saw something that had not been there on the voyage out: absolute determination.

  He leaned his head back on the cold metal wall. “You know, sometimes I think that all young people are mad. And sometimes I am persuaded that the only real progress in the world comes from those who are mad.”

  He was slowly nodding. Sinara said, “I’m sorry, Councilor, but is that a yes or a no?”

  “It is neither.” Graves stepped toward the waiting trio. “You know, in my distant youth I believe that I was quite mad myself. I would like to think so. But before we discuss your suggestions further, let me ask one question. You mentioned Darya Lang, Hans Rebka, Louis Nenda, E.C. Tally, Atvar H’sial, and Kallik. Is there anyone on this ship, other than myself, whom you have not already consulted regarding your proposed rescue mission?”

  * * *

  The final five minutes seemed to stretch for ever. Sinara stood in the Have-It-All’s one remaining useable airlock, next to Teri Dahl and Torran Veck. They were suited, waiting, ready to go—and, inevitably, there was one more briefing.

  “Ideally, you would dive in perpendicular to the plane of debris.” Hans Rebka was the speaker. “That would minimize your time there, and also your risk of collision with lumps of rock and solidifying magma. Unfortunately, Ben Blesh is heading out on a radial path, directly away from where Marglot used to be. That would make your trajectory at right angles to his, and if you were lucky—or unlucky—enough to run into each other, the impact would kill all of you. So Louis Nenda will fly—”

  “Not me,” Nenda interrupted. “J’merlia will pilot this one. He can slice things finer.”

  He went on, ignoring Hans Rebka’s irritated look. “J’merlia will take the Have-It-All in on a path that’s close to radial, same as Blesh’s. So you’ll be enterin’ the debris belt at almost a grazin’ angle, an’ not much faster than Blesh is goin’. You’ll approach him at only a few hundred meters a second. Your suits can handle that speed change easy enough. So you’ll slow down, take him in tow, an’ get the hell out of there. While all that goes on, the Have-It-All zips out an’ away an’ off toward M-2. ’Course, there’s a disadvantage to doin’ it this way. If you—”