Yellowknife broke the connection. Some minutes later, a man called from the nearspace imaging console. "Lifeboat's moving sir. It's already outside their fold radius."
Snitzius looked at Peter. Peter nodded.
Peter spun his pogo around its axis and looked back. The Hans Moravec was rotating much more rapidly now, unrolling cable from the grooves lathed into its iron surface, and while he watched, the two modules receded visibly into the starry depths. Fully deploying the skyhook would take hours, even at top speed. Sophia Gorganis would be wondering what they were doing.
The more she wondered, the better. Peter grinned and thought of a snake charmer. Keep the cobra's attention. Then call in the mongoose.
It took most of two hours to reach the lifeboat, even at the top speed the pogo could achieve, with two extra fuel tanks lashed ahead of the nozzle. Yellowknife was staying well away from the Hans Moravec. Peter would have liked to speak further to Cy, but with all of Yellowknife's attention focused on them, the two Sangruse alternates were keeping their transmitters silent.
Peter did keep his suit receiver on the main comm frequency between the two starcraft. If nothing else, it was entertainment:
"Snitzius, you're deploying the skyhook. You can't use it here; Longshadow is tidally locked. What are you trying to pull?" The annoyance Peter heard in her voice could not quite mask its new uncertainty.
"I am trying to make you angry," Snitzius replied, his voice wry. "I've found that you are beautiful when you're angry."
Peter arrived at the lifeboat to find that the Governor General's observers were already there, drifting beside the tiny molded-foam craft, their rifles at loose ready. The lifeboat had only two seats and would not hold them all. Peter nodded to the two observers and pivoted the pogo around so that he could grasp one of the lifeboat's rear stabilizer fins. The two men began unfolding a wrinkled transparent envelope from a bundle, and pulled it around the nose of the lifeboat, working their way back until they had encased the full length of the four-meter lifting body. With themselves inside, they triggered an atmosphere canister, and the work bubble inflated, embracing the lifeboat and the men hovering outside it.
The observers opened the lifeboat's lock, and Cy Aliotta emerged, still in his rumpled brown pants and half-open shirt, looking tired but otherwise unhurt. Cy clapped Peter on the back, which set Peter drifting away, to bounce against the glistening transparent wall of the bubble. "Got work to do, boy," Cy said, grinning. He then closed his eyes and vomited violently.
Nutmeg rubbed her hands together with delight, and brought up the comm console of the skyhook traverser in which she rode. "Nelson, you down there?" she called, speaking through a tight laser link to the traverser docked with the module at the opposite end of the skyhook cable.
"Threader here," the other man replied. He sounded doubtful, to Nutmeg's amusement. Nelson Threader was a damn good pilot, but he had no sense of fun. And they ain't never made fun in a box this big.
The Hans Moravec was paying out the cable as rapidly as the system allowed. The two modules were keeping a fairly steady rate of revolution thanks to automatically measured pulses of both modules' railgun thrusters, but the Moravec's periphery was pulling over two G's. Even at the bridge, which was much nearer the big ship's axis, the acceleration was over half a G.
"Ready to go skeet shooting with a crazywoman?"
She wished the laser link had video. Fun was always more fun when you were having it with somebody right there beside you, even if they were just on a tombstone.
"This isn't skeet shooting," Nelson said.
She laughed wildly. "Sure it is! Except we're the skeet…and the skeet shoot back!"
Peter floated quietly in the work bubble, trying to look absorbed in what was occurring in front of him. What had begun as a shapeless grey mass of vomit had spread out into a matrix of thousands of hexagonal cells less than half a centimeter wide. At its center the cells had spread out and flowed together into a simple textual display and keyboard like something from the days before Millennium. Cy rattled his fingers on the keyboard and watched endless lines of nanolog code stream by on the display. Cameras on several sides were evidently piping the operation back to the Yellowknife.
The low-power transmitters created by the Sangruse Device inside both men's bodies were silent. Periodically, a few strands of Cy's disheveled straw-streaked gray hair drifted close enough to Peter to brush against his cheek. Peter then heard his Nautonnier's voice in his ears.
|I hope you're taking good notes. You never know when you'll be called on to do something like this.| The older man chuckled subvocally, a trick Peter had never mastered.
|Cy, I haven't the slightest idea what the hell you're doing!|
|Oh, come on, Peter. It's obvious! I'm putting on a damned good show.|
Nutmeg fidgeted in her acceleration cot, running endless simulations on the stone in front of her. Nelson was poor company; he responded to her chatter with dour one-word answers.
Both had headsets tuned to the communication channel. Both had been listening attentively to Sophia Gorganis' gradually escalating threats:
"You can't hit me with those buckets, codge. Can't happen. I'm 90 degrees to their plane of revolution. So pull 'em back in."
"If I can't hit you with them, Sophia, why worry?"
"I got where I am by worrying too much. And you've got five minutes to stop spinning and hit reverse, or I'll take out those modules."
"I'll see what I can do," Snitzius said.
This time, she was good to her word. Five minutes later, Nutmeg saw the missiles on her nearspace imager.
Incoming, said the emotionless voice inside her head.
"Nelson! One for you and one for me! She loves us both!"
Nelson Threader did not reply. Nutmeg stuck her tongue out at the speaker grille, and swore internally to pants him the first chance she got. Nearspace imaging plotted the radar positions as trajectories on the stone as the minutes passed. Her eyes and the eyes of the nanocomputer inside her watched the creeping green lines. Space was big, and big was good—nothing happened too fast to follow.
Radar lock. Incoming is a SLAM IX. Counting down to maneauver...
Heh. Creaky old granny of a missile! She licked her lips, and followed the count.
...Zero!
Her small hand closed on the thruster trigger. The railgun spoke with strong lateral thrust, and the module swung hard to one side on the cable. The missile arrived where the module would have been only moments before...
.. .and hit the curtain of iron pellets leaving the business end of the railgun. The missile's shaped charge became a forward-blossoming funnel of fire, which Nutmeg watched gleefully through the transparent periphery of the traverser. "We is playin' marbles now! Get your cat's eyes ready, Nelson!"
The other pilot was breathing rapidly, his exhalations intermittently breaking squelch on the comm link. Nutmeg followed the trace of the opposite module on her imager, watched it twitch abruptly from its smooth sweep, dodge the creeping trajectory of the second SLAM IX. She watched for the explosion, and saw nothing.
He stopped firing prematurely, the voice in her head explained. The pellets were beyond trajectory by the time the missile passed.
"Just like a man, Nelson! Can't crack a smile and come too soon!"
He made no response to that. Nutmeg hand a hunch as to why. The squelch broke a moment later. "Doing a radius, girl!"
The missile had pivoted on its center of gravity and was firing laterally to its path, coming around in as tight a curve as it could manage. Nutmeg's module radar reported lock, and plotted the trajectory on her nearspace imager.
Eleven minutes... Sangruse 7 informed her.
"Shit, Nelson, we could play Mastermind five times before that goddam thing gets here. Space war is a bore!"
"While you're getting ready for seconds, looks like we're getting the main course," Nelson called dourly. Nutmeg looked at the edges of her nearspace screen.
Ten more SLAMs were coming in.
Eighteen minutes, the Sangruse Device told her.
Things were getting interesting. Nutmeg pursed her lips.
They were almost out of cable.
The swarm moved back and forth inside the work bubble, like a cloud of steel-gray gravel. Each small fragment was a tiny cylinder four millimeters in diameter and six long, containing a miniature fan at its heart. Peter and Cy watched them break formation and reform again, Peter's hand lying casually on Cy's shoulder. The skin capacitance link between them was good.
The agents say it is difficult to continue to appear stupid, the Sangruse Device whispered in Cy's ear, to be echoed in Peter's as well. We are not used to this. We would prefer to rescue you now and be done.
Cy's inner voice was quietly amused. |I’ll tell you when we're damned well ready to be rescued.|
Two more hours, said voices in both men's ears. That is an eternity.
|Only at nanoscale. Be patient with those of us at meterscale!|
"That's looking pretty good," the voice of the Governor General spoke in their headsets.
Cy Aliotta scratched his chin. "I like their coordination. They learn quickly. But the individual units are too big. Maybe wings are the way to go. Flies didn't evolve fanjets, after all."
"I'd advise you to pick up the pace a little," she said. "Jamie's monster seemed lots brighter than that—and more versatile."
Cy smiled. "I stripped out what we call the "wild card" code for taking conceptual initiative. We're going to add some back in, with new ring 0 constraints linked to your voiceprints. If you're in a hurry, I guess we could just tell Jamie's alternate that you're its new boss and be done."
Sophia Gorganis was silent for many seconds. Finally: "Two hours, guys. You get two more hours."
We know.
The Greased Pig was drifting parallel to the Hans Moravec, less than a hundred meters from its flat face. Jamie sat in the command couch. He was hungry but could not eat, and his hands shook if he took them away from their grip on the couch arms. In the couch beside him, a grapefruit-sized lump of slime clung to the cushions, with glistening tendrils running in every direction, to vanish into the shuttle's control machinery. It would only obey his orders, and it would not obey his orders unless he were in its immediate presence.
Through the forward windshields, Jamie noticed that the rotation of the great starship had slowed drastically. It was now barely creeping, paying out the last of its cable.
That was the telltale.
The waiting was destroying him. He realized that he was watching the slowing rotation of the Moravec with anticipation. Hoping to be done, hoping to be on with...it.
It. Murder. The misery redoubled. Outside, the scene was swinging around. He felt mild acceleration.
We're getting clear. Shall I count down? asked the voice in his ear.
"No. I am going to close my eyes and pray. Do what you must."
"Gotcha!" Nutmeg screamed, as the second missile exploded, considerably closer than the first. She heard debris rattle on the sides of the traverser, and flipped her visor down. Broken windows could be fatal up here.
Six minutes thirty seconds to incoming.
Nutmeg nodded. And about five minutes until the real fun started.
She looked back to the nearspace imager. Two of the missiles were targeted at the Moravec, with trajectories plainly ending on the flat face near the center, plus or minus fifteen meters. That could be bad, if they hit the cable...but if they didn't, it would be great cover. The big ship was slowing way down. Cover…hey, why not?
Cable fully deployed, the Sangruse Device V7 whispered in her ear. Numerous indicators on the command stone verified its news.
"Blow on number one impact," she ordered, and pushed down hard on a guarded button labeled ARM.
"Here comes trouble," Nelson muttered from the other end of four thousand kilometers of cable.
Fly a rocket too long, and all you can think is rockets. "Nelson, don't think of it like a rocket. Think of it like a gun!"
The first of the incoming missiles would reach Nelson's end of the cable. Nutmeg saw his module toss to one side on the radar, watched the missile flare. He's learning...
The second missile's trajectory merged with the big blotch that was the Moravec, with three more right behind it.
"Trouble? She'll know what trouble is in a second!"
IMPACT said the bold red letters on the nearspace imager.
DETACHED said even bolder letters on the command stone.
"Yeeeeeeehahhhhhhh!" screamed the tiny woman in the module's command couch, as she pressed the thruster trigger hard and held it.
The great flat face of the Hans Moravec was square-on in the Greased Pig's windshield when it happened, and Jamie saw it clearly: A linear explosion running the full eight hundred fifty meters of the slot cut in the asteroidal iron, where the skyhook's buckyrope cable was attached to the starship's vast body. The cable was one single continuous length, as it always had been, for the cable had existed before 22096 Gwyllion had been cut in half and given a Hilbert drive. No guying system would be strong enough to absorb the stress at the cable's center, so the cable was simply clamped into the slot by steel plates fastened down by explosive bolts. The bolts had all gone at once, in a bright linear display of yellow-white dots and ballooning debris.
Then the skyhook was free again, as it had been when it was made two hundred years before. Free, and flying. Free, and rotating, and swinging in several different axes. Jamie blinked. The glittering line that was the cable caught the sun for a moment and vanished.
"It gets rough now," croaked the slime ball in the other couch. The shuttle pitched backwards as though pelted by debris, and began to tumble in three axes, away from the Moravec. Jamie was thrown violently against the couch's web, wretching and sobbing.
"Blank your mind," the slime ball ordered.
Jamie struggled, reaching for inner silence.
Ping!
"I don't know if this is quite as good as it should be, but..." Cy watched the swarm of winged nanorobots thread manueavers around the work bubble, travelling four abreast in a writhing ribbonlike path that looped around the lifeboat and the two apprehensive observers.
The voice in their headsets was ever more impatient. "It'll do. We're out of time. We can work out the details once you're back on board and we're headed for Canada. Have you trained them to recognize my voice?"
Cy nodded. "They know it perfectly…helped by the fact that it's quite distinctive. They will obey it unquestioningly, and you can delegate control to others if you choose. They can reproduce themselves at a doubling rate of approximately an hour. That's more rapid, I think, than Jamie's alternate could manage, due to its greater complexity."
"I'll need to test their obedience," Sophia Gorganis said.
"Of course. They have internal receivers tuned to this frequency. Tell them to do something."
"Stop!" the woman's voice said in their headsets. The winged robots ceased motion instantly. "Gather in a spherical volume!" she said, excitement rising in her voice. The robots complied, creating a meter-wide sphere in space near the edge of the bubble's transparent shell.
"Kill your creators," she said flatly. The sphere dissolved into tens of thousands of individual flying specks, which descended on Cy and Peter and covered them, feet, hands, and face, as with a writhing woolen shroud.
The missiles targeted on the skyhook modules went wide, for the skyhook was gone, spinning like a mad baton into a separate orbit, revolving as it had while tethered to the Hans Moravec but also tumbling.
"Give control to the computer, Nelson! I don't think any missile ever made can match us now! The rest is just physics—and we only get one pass!"
"Done, Margaret," Nelson replied, in a voice more irritated than relieved. Nutmeg closed her eyes and told her copy of Sangruse 7 to shut down her semicircular canals. The wild acceleration lost its hold on her ears, and she watched
the radar. The Hans Moravec was receding. Yellowknife was coming up fast. Neither of the modules would come within two thousand klicks of the glittering spherical ship, which, they knew, was more than enough distance to avoid triggering its automatic defense systems.
Now, how many things could Sophia Gorganis watch at once? And which would she respond to?
Jamie Eigen was weeping. He opened his eyes, to see only stars outside the windshield. A lifetime of sorrow had inflated to fill him completely. His lip was bleeding from his biting it. His teachers had been correct, so long ago: Hell was truly all there in a single moment.
We are now five thousand kilometers beyond Yellowknife. Blank your mind.
Jamie could only continue weeping. Silence was beyond him.
Ping!
Wracked with sobs, Jamie could barely force his eyes open, and tears blurred the view through the windshield. Now Longshadow lay full before them, its pale yellow-brown sunlit face a fierce light in the cabin.
We are six thousand kilometers to the other side of Yellowknife. Blank your mind.
Jamie groaned.
Ping!
We are eight thousand kilometers beyond Yellowknife. Blank your mind!
Heaven have mercy!
Ping!
We are in orbit around Hell. Blank your mind. You do not wish to know what we are doing.
Ping!
Outside the forward windshields was the Greased Pig's twin, tumbling slowly in space against the shining blue of Hell's sunlit hemisphere. The shuttle's broad back was blackened as though by intense heat. Jamie knew what they were doing, and it sickened him. He imagined not doing it, and that sickened him even more. There was no escape.
One down. Blank your mind.
Ping!
Something exploded nearby, sending searing light into the Greased Pig through its forward windshields. It only lasted a few seconds before Sahan Grusa spoke again:
The Cunning Blood Page 38