by Emily
"The whole system begins to drop back. It puts us in free fall."
"Did we want that?"
"Zero gee, Mac. It makes everything weightless. Until they restart the engines, which of course they had to do pronto. But it gave Randy time to get Hutch aboard."
"I'll be damned." "Probably that, too."
One of the shuttles moved in just ahead of the Star and used a laser to cut through the Alpha shaft. This divided the system into two sections. The Star and Zwick remained attached to the trailing portion, whose length was reduced to a more manageable eighty kilometers; the other two vessels remained connected to the balance, which was over two hundred kilometers long, and which they could not hope to control. But other shuttles rendezvoused fore and aft to set Wendy and Wildside free, leaving the separated pieces spinning off into the dark.
The Star and Zwick, carrying what remained of the shaft, the net, and its four passengers, continued maneuvering cautiously toward orbit.
Hutch was still trailing behind the linkage. "Randy," she was saying, "you did a helluva job."
Nicholson came on the circuit to inquire after the welfare of his passenger Mr. MacAllister. And belatedly of the others. Whoever they might be, thought Kellie. The Star was planning a celebration in their honor.
Canyon showed up, en virtuo, to inform Kellie she was on live, and to ask if she was all right.
"Pretty good," Kellie told him. He tried to conduct an interview, and she answered a few questions, then pleaded exhaustion. "Mac would enjoy talking to you," she added.
When at last they achieved orbit, they didn't need anyone to let them know. Their weight simply melted away. This time for good.
Marcel, sounding as cool and collected as he had through most of the crisis, congratulated them on their good fortune. "I thought," he said, "you might like to hear what's going on in the main dining room."
They listened to the sound of cheers.
The sky was black. Not the smoky debris-ridden sky of the dying world below, but the pure diamond-studded sky that one sees from a superluminal.
Nightingale, still cautiously hanging on to the net, gave her a nervous little wave, as if he didn't want to show too much emotion.
She was drifting toward him. "Hi, Hutch," he said. "I didn't freeze."
No, you didn't, she thought. And she said: "You were outstanding, Randy."
"Welcome to the accommodations, Hutch," said Kellie.
And Mac: "Nice to have you aboard. Next time you'll want to reserve a better seat."
Lights moved among the stars.
"You all right?" risked Nightingale. He reached for her, and she felt a sharp pain in her left shoulder when she responded. But what the hell.
"I'm fine," she said.
"I'd never have dropped you." Nightingale's voice sounded strange.
She nodded yes. She knew.
"I'd never have let you go. Not ever."
She took his head in her hands, gazed at him a long time, and kissed him. Deep and long. Right through the Flickinger field.
"There they are." Embry pointed at the screen and Frank enhanced the picture. They were still far away, but she could make out Hutch, even amid the tangles. One of the others, Kellie probably, waved.
Frank set course and reported to Marcel that he was about to pick up the survivors.
Embry had already been on the circuit with them. "Be especially careful with Hutchins," she said. "I think she's got a problem."
"Okay, Doc," said Frank. "We'll be careful."
They closed on the net.
"Get Hutchins first. Just pull up alongside her. I'll bring her in."
"You need help?" asked Frank.
"It wouldn't hurt."
The situation demanded a human pilot, so Frank looked around for a volunteer. He'd gotten the impression, from bits and pieces of things said, and from nonverbal clues, that Drummond didn't like the idea of going outside. Janet Hazelhurst caught his eyes and eased out of her chair. "Just tell me what to do," she said.
Drummond tried to look as if he'd been about to offer, but had been too late.
Hutch watched the lights coming. It was okay to relax. She closed her eyes and floated. The shuttle came alongside, and she could hear voices on the circuit. Somebody was cutting through the tether, taking her off the net.
The pain in her shoulder got worse. Now that she was safe.
Hatches closed somewhere. More lights appeared. Bright and then dim. Lowered voices. Pressure on the injured shoulder. Restraints. A sense of well-being flooding through her.
Somebody was telling her it was over, she was okay, nothing to worry about.
"Good," she said, not sure to whom she was speaking.
"You look all right, Skipper."
Skipper? She opened her eyes and tried to pierce the haze.
Embry.
"Hello, Embry. Nice to see you again." Randy was still there, off to the side, staying close. Then he became indistinct, as did Embry, the restraints, the voices, and the lights.
From Nicholson's bridge, Marcel directed the fleet of shuttles. They deployed near the Star and Zwick and cut them free of the shaft. At Beekman's suggestion, they salvaged six samples, each four meters long. Five were intended for research, and one would go on display at the Academy. At Nicholson's request a smaller piece was picked up and earmarked for exhibition on the Star.
Another shuttle approached the connecting plate and separated it from the net and from the stump of the Alpha shaft. It hovered momentarily while its occupants inspected the symbols engraved across its face. Then they cut it neatly into two pieces of equal size. Shortly thereafter, Wendy approached and took both pieces into her cargo hold.
The remaining fragments of Alpha, and the net, floated away into the dark.
Because time was pressing, no immediate attempt was made to return the captains to their respective ships. Miles, in fact, was retained as acting captain on Wendy. Hutch, of course, was in no condition to be sent back to Wildside. Guided from the bridge of the Star, the shuttles were taken into whichever bays were convenient, and, with little more than a day remaining before the collision, the fleet began to withdraw.
By then conditions on the planetary surface had become so turbulent that the orbiting vehicles were themselves at hazard. Marcel guessed that much of the data coming in from the probes had been lost after Wendy's communications went down. This assumption was confirmed by Miles. "They are not a happy group over here," he said.
Beekman sympathized. "You can't really blame them. Some of them have been preparing twenty years for this mission, and they lost a substantial piece of it." He gazed steadily at the banks of screens, which displayed views of the impending collision, taken from an array of satellites.
Marcel really didn't give a damn. He'd been through too much over the two weeks. He was tired and irritable, but they'd gotten Kel-lie and the others back, and that was all he cared about. Chiang Har-mon had died down there. One of Hutch's people had died, one of Nicholson's passengers, and one of his crew. One of Nicholson's pilots had died during the rescue. In the face of that, it was hard to work up too much regret that they had lost some details on the formation of high-pressure fronts during a planetary traffic accident. "We'll do better next time."
Beekman pursed his lips and looked thoughtful. "There'll be no next time. Probably not in the life span of the species."
Too bad, thought Marcel. But he didn't say anything.
It seemed as if the entire atmosphere of Deepsix had become one massive electrical storm. Blizzards swept the equatorial area, and giant hurricanes roared across the Coraggio and the Nirvana. A mountainous tide soared thousands of meters above nominal sea level. The range along the northern coast of Transitoria, which had held back the tides so long, vanished beneath the waters.
The worlds moved inexorably toward each other. But it was a mismatch, thought Hutch, a pebble falling into a pond.
She watched from her bed in the Star's dispensary. She'd required minor surg
ery for a torn muscle and a broken rib, and they didn't want her moving around for a bit. With his hands wrapped Randy sat off to one side, wearing a shoulder brace. Mac was off somewhere giving an interview; and Kellie was down getting some goodies at the snack bar.
Hutch's link chimed. Canyon's voice: "Hutch, I'll be down to see you later. Meantime, I thought you'd like to know we're a big hit back home. They're a couple days behind, of course. Last we heard, the whole world was listening while the tide broke through and got the whatchamacallits. They think you don't have a chance now. Wait till they see the finish. You guys will be celebrities when you get back."
"Nice to hear," grumbled Nightingale.
"Anyhow, our numbers are through the roof."
"Sounds as if you'll do pretty well yourself, Augie," said Hutch.
"Well, I can't see that it'll hurt my career any." His eyes literally Hashed. "Wait until they get to the lander!"
"Yeah," said Nightingale. "That sure was a hoot."
Canyon kept going: "Incidentally, you folks have acquired a sobriquet back home."
"I'm not sure I want to hear what it is," Hutch said.
"The Maleiva Four."
"By God," said Nightingale, "who thought that up? Magnificent, August. My compliments to the cliche unit."
When he was gone, she looked at Nightingale severely. "You were awfully hard on him. He means well."
"Yep. But he'd have been happier if we'd fallen off the goddam thing."
"Why do you think that?"
"Better story."
Mac came into the room, carrying flowers, which had been grown in the Star nurseries. He beamed down at Hutch and held them out to her. "You look good enough to have for lunch," he said.
She accepted a kiss and smelled the bouquet. They were yellow roses. "Gorgeous. Thanks, Mac."
"For the Golden Girl." He gazed at her. "What are they saying? The medical people?"
"They'll let me up tomorrow." She turned her attention back to Nightingale. "You," she said, "should ease up. Let people do their jobs and don't be such a.crank."
"I enjoy being a crank."
Roiling clouds of immense proportions billowed out of Maleiva Ill's atmosphere. Fireballs erupted and fell back. And erupted again. The entire black atmosphere seemed to be expanding, fountaining into the sky, a burning river beginning to flow toward the placid disk of the gas giant.
"Here it comes," said Mac.
Nightingale nodded. "Everything that's loose anywhere on Deep-six is being ripped out now and sent elsewhere." His voice was quiet. Resigned.
Mac shifted in his chair. "There's no point getting sentimental over a piece of real estate," he said.
Nightingale stared straight ahead. "I was thinking about the lights."
"The lights?" Hutch's brow furrowed.
"I don't think we told you. Forgot in all the rushing around. At Bad News Bay. We saw something out in the water. Signaled back and forth."
"A boat?"
"Don't know what it was."
Steam was pouring off Deepsix. Fire and lightning swirled across the vast expanse of its clouds.
Kellie came back with donuts and coffee.
MacAllister was still there a half hour later when Marcel, Nichol-son, and Beekman came by to see how she was doing. Hutch thought all three looked tired, happy, relieved. They shook hands all around. "We're glad to have you back," Marcel said. "Things looked a little doubtful there for a while."
"Did they really?" asked Mac. "I thought we had it under control all the way."
Nicholson beamed at him. "We're planning a little celebration tomorrow," he said. Hutch caught the flavor of the remark, that dinner with the two captains was an Event, and that they should all feel appropriately honored. But he was trying to do the right thing. And what the hell, it was a small enough failing.
"I'd be delighted to attend," said Mac.
"As would I." Hutch gave him a warm smile.
Marcel introduced Beekman as the manager of the rescue operation. "Saved your life," he added.
Hutch wasn't sure what he meant. "You mean all our lives."
"Yours, specifically. Gunther came up with the zero-gee maneuver."
Tom Scolari called, and his image formed at the foot of her bed. He was wearing dark slacks and a white shirt open to his navel. Sending somebody a message, looked like. "Glad you came through it okay," he said. "We were worried."
"Where are you now, Tom?"
"On Zwick."
"Good. Did you get interviewed?"
"I don't think there's anybody out here who hasn't had a chance to talk on UNN. Listen"—his eyes found hers, and glanced over at Mac—"you guys put on one hell of a show."
"Thanks. We had a lot of help. Not to mention your own. I understand you're a pretty good welder."
"I'll never be without work again."
"Next time you tell me not to do something," she added, "I'll try to take you more seriously."
He grinned and blew her a kiss. "I doubt it."
She woke up in the middle of the night and noticed they were no longer accelerating. It was, finally, over.
EPILOGUE
Cataclysms too vast to be defined as quakes threw forests and mountain ranges skyward, as much as twenty thousand meters, where they were caught between competing gravity wells, and eventually swept off. Tidal effects literally ripped Maleiva III apart. The swirl of gas and debris surrounding the world had become so thick that it blinded the opticals. The placid snow-covered plains around the tower, the baroque temple that had seemed almost Parisian, the lights at Bad News Bay, the memorial and the hexagon, all disintegrated in the general ruin.
Wherever fractures or faults existed, the rock was shredded, torn free, and hurled upward. The planet bled lava. The mantle disintegrated, exposing the core. Energy release was so titanic that it could not be viewed directly. Scientists on board Wendy, finally able to concentrate on the event they'd come to see, cheered and began to think about future papers.
Shortly before the collision, Maleiva III exploded and burned like a small nova. Then the light dimmed, and it dissolved into a series of individual embers curving through the night, falling finally into Morgan's cobalt gulfs, where they left bruises. •
Within hours, the shower of debris was gone from the sky, and only the bruises remained to mark the incident. Meantime, Morgan would continue on its way, barely affected by the encounter. Its orbit would not change appreciably. Its massive gravity would eventually scramble a few moons elsewhere in the system. But that was a couple of centuries away.
Hutch had assumed the dinner was to be in honor of the Maleiva Four. At first it seemed that way. They were introduced to the crowded main dining hall individually, applauded, and seated at the captain's table. Everyone wanted to shake their hands, wish them well, get their autographs.
They were invited to make speeches. ("But we'd appreciate it if you kept your remarks to five minutes." When Nightingale ran over, Nicholson took to glancing ostentatiously at the time.) And everyone got a picture taken with one or another of the rescuees.
There were also pictures from the adventure itself, and hundreds of these were put forward to be signed. Some were of the Astronomer's Tower (which no one was any longer calling Burbage Point), others were from the interviews on the ground conducted by August Canyon, still others of the long empty corridors in the hexagon atop Mt. Blue. Here was Nightingale seated beside a campfire early in the trek, and Hutch hanging from the net as seen through the telescopes on the rescue shuttle. There was Gregory MacAllister shaking hands with well-wishers on their arrival at the Star. Someone had gotten a portrait of Kellie posed against a sky overwhelmed by Morgan's World. She looked beautiful and defiant, and it rapidly became the favorite of the evening. Eventually, it would become the jacket for Deepsix Diary, MacAllister's best-selling account of the episode.
Despite all this, the evening belonged, not to the Four, but to their rescuers. The three captains, Marcel, Nicholson, and Mil
es Chastain, took round after round of applause. Beekman and his team were credited with working out the general strategy. John Drummond, who did much of the orbital calculations, took a bow. And the cheers for Janet Hazelhurst were deafening.
The Outsiders were invited to stand, while the band played a few bars from a military anthem. The shuttle pilots were introduced. And Abel Kinder, who was credited with keeping the weather sufficiently calm until the rescue could be effected. Phil Zossimov, who developed the collar and the support rails that would have made things so much easier. Had they, as he commented wryly, only had an opportunity to work.
And there was finally a moment to remember those whose lives had been lost. Colt Wetheral, pilot of the Star lander. Klaus Bomar, the shuttle pilot. Star passenger Casey Hayes, who, as MacAllister pointed out, had died trying to salvage one of the landers. Chiang Harmon of the science research team. And Toni Hamner, who would not have been there at all, said Hutch, except that she stayed with a friend.
They set up a buffet. The ship's best wines were uncorked. And Captain Nicholson announced that TransGalactic would pick up the tab. Passengers and guests were responsible only for whatever gratuities they might choose to leave.
Late in the evening, Hutch found herself alone on the dance floor with Marcel. When she'd arrived, fourteen standard days before (had it really been so recently?), he'd been only a colleague, an occasional voice in the cockpit, a person she'd seen at a seminar or two. Now she thought of him as the Gallant Frenchman. "I've got some news for you," the Gallant Frenchman said. "We got the results back on the scan of the shaft. It's three thousand years old."
She was in his arms, in the exotic style of the time. Everybody's arms felt good, his and Mac's and Kellie's and Tom Scolari's and Randy Nightingale's. Especially Randy Nightingale's, the man who would not let go.
Three thousand years. "So we were right."
"I'd say so. It was a rescue mission. The hawks were doing what they could to get a nontechnical people out of harm's way. Or at least to give their species a chance to survive elsewhere."
"Where, I wonder?"
Marcel placed his lips against her cheek. "Who knows? Maybe one day we'll find them."