by Colin Harvey
In the moments when you were sure that it was dead, but before entropy could send the systems crashing to the ground, you reached out with arms quickly grown infinitely long. You caught the first struggling ziggurat as it wobbled in its path, and pushed it on its way as before.
More and more, as a juggler will catch balls tossed to him, you manipulated the data structures, wherever possible keeping them going as before, at least until you could work what each one of them did. It took hours of subjective time, but then you realised what bothered you about this faux-world – there were no suns in here, so it was impossible to sense the passage of time.
Then you saw that one of the vast columns of numbers was changing. It was a clock, a mission clock counting off the gigaseconds since the start of the mission.
For a long time, you concentrated on keeping the myriad systems going, learning how things worked one object at a time. Only when you were sure of what you were doing, did you start to actually change arrangements, gradually taking control of the Winter Song.
Soon, you forgot all about the passage of time. The data was just so fascinating. This was what you were made for, you belatedly realised.
It took a voice to interrupt your reverie. A familiar voice.
Too many of the protocols needed to complete the operation were either activated by parts of the instrumentation that had been cannibalised on the ground, or worse by the datarealm, Karl finally realised.
Dreading what he might find, he re-inserted the jack.
The cyberscape seemed much as it had before, insofar as one databerg looked just like another, and infostreams were as indistinguishable to him as faces to a blind man.
"Loki!" Karl called, the name a symbol hurtling into the void, shrinking with distance, smoke streaming from them. "Loki!" He cast another copy of the symbol, and then new ones: "Where are you?"
"Here!" came an answering shout, and a sigil loomed out of the void, hurtling at Karl so quickly that he had to duck, but luckily it flashed past him. He breathed a sigh of relief. "I need to be able to communicate with you without jacking in. Any suggestions?"
"There's a speaker on the console for radio messages," Loki said. "Have Orn re-wire it so that it hacks into the jack connection, and it'll pass as a voicecomm."
Karl put Orn to work, removing the jack first.
After a few minutes Orn pronounced the work done. A flat, metallic voice echoed from the speaker: "Finally."
Karl said, "Do you have control of this bloody thing, or is there another ambush waiting just around the corner?"
"I've got control," Loki said, voice echoing through the cabin, metallic and harsh and nothing like the voice that had been in Karl's head these last months. Still, the implications were such that Karl exhaled with sheer relief, and silently clenched his fist.
"Then let's make up for lost time, and push this rock to Isheimur," Karl said. The ship rotated through ninety degrees and nudged forward on thrusters. Then the engines kicked in, gradually growing in volume.
Karl felt the tiniest push of acceleration against his back, and closed his eyes, trying to achieve some mental equilibrium. The acceleration wasn't anywhere near strong enough to require him to sit, but he needed to gather his wits; he seemed to have been in perpetual motion for hours without a break, but he realised that it had actually only been minutes, and he was suffering from a weird sense of temporal displacement. Now he needed to be absolutely focused upon the task, if they were to have any chance of survival.
"Ice weighs slightly less than one kilogram per cubic metre at standard gravity," Loki said. "So a cubic kilometre masses one megatonne. This comet's diameter at twelve point five eight kilometres means that it masses almost two thousand megatonnes…"
"How much does the Winter Song mass?"
"Just under a megatonne," Loki said.
Orn, still loitering nearby, whistled. "It'll be like an ant pushing an elephant!"
"Not quite so bad," Karl said. "We're not pushing it from a standing start, just nudging it to alter its course. Even at a fiftieth of a gee, which is about all we can manage for more than a few minutes, we'd have a lateral velocity of sixty metres a second after five minutes. In the time we have to planetfall, we should have enough time to correct the course divergence."
He wasn't as sure as he was making out. There was a margin of error of only a few hundred metres for the launch co-ordinates. More than that, and by the time it had travelled several million kilometres, the comet would fly harmlessly by Isheimur. Even more important was that the trajectory was accurate to within a fraction of a degree or they were doomed.
"How long until we need to fire the engines?""Fortyeight minutes," Loki said, raven's caw voice still grating. "I assume that we don't need the odd few seconds, which have in any event almost elapsed now."
It took Karl a moment to realise that the construct was joking. "Humour from a machine," he murmured.
"Actually, I was serious," Loki said. "You don't call up every result of a search, do you?"
"Hmmph."
"I am concerned about one of the lateral thrusters," Loki said. "It's working, but only intermittently, and when it does it's only at barely forty per cent efficiency."
"It'll have to do," Karl said.
"It sounds odd actually hearing his voice." Bera stood beside Karl, resting her hand on his shoulder.
"Did you think he was a figment of my imagination?" Karl said, laughing.
"Only in the very, very small hours, when sleep didn't come easy. Then you start to doubt everything, even yourself." For the first time Karl realised what a colossal investment of faith Bera had made in him. He must have looked upset, for she squeezed his shoulder and said, "Do you think I could tell just anyone something like that? Take it as a very indirect measure of how much I think of you."
Karl patted her hand. "I will."
The view of the comet in the monitor, though impressive – steam boiled from it – had quickly become stale. On an impulse, Karl said, "Loki, open the shutter covering the side window – the one leeward from the suns."
"Neither side is properly leeward," Loki said, "but I'll open the one away from Gamasol, as it's the more powerful star." The shutter slid up, and the edges of the corona slid past the side window, streamers of ice boiling in the vacuum, forming eerie, spectral banners.
"The comet should have a name," Karl said. "It's not just a comet any longer."
"Fenris." The name was two distinct syllables, the voice coming from behind Karl. He turned and stared at Ragnar, who was sitting, propped up by Coeo, of all people. The former Gothi looked old, and worn to only the nub of the once-vital man he'd been until recently. One side of his face was frozen into immobility.
"The destroyer of worlds?" Bera's scepticism was obvious in her voice.
"It might be," Arnbjorn said. "We hope not, but…"
"It's a risk," Karl agreed. "But if we do nothing, your people will slowly die. If we can add a decade or so to the colony's time, it may allow your people and Coeo's time to negotiate some sort of peace settlement. Because whether or not I'm there," Karl added, "you need to have reached a settlement to avoid dragging those who answer the beacon into one side or the other of a dirty little local war."
"I agree," Ragnar said. His speech was slow and hesitant, but it was already stronger than the time he'd spoken before. But each sentence was still molasses slow, each syllable separated by silent effort before and after it. "What is the troll-speak for 'we want peace', utlander?" His mouth formed a twisted half-grin as he said the last word.
Karl didn't say what he was thinking. Decades, perhaps even centuries will have to pass before your great-great-grandchildren and those of the adapted men will be able to fully trust each other – if ever. Still, at least it's a start. Instead he said, "Nice to see you've not given up the habit of living." Oddly enough, Karl meant it. The old man had tried to kill him and hunted him across half a world. But he had also twice saved Karl's life, and the crucible of
vacuum all around them had burnt off much of what had happened below.
Ragnar tried to speak, but his words were now too slurred to understand. Arnbjorn hushed him. "Rest, Pappi, you've done enough, mighty warrior." As if obeying him, Ragnar closed his eyes, and his head slid sideways.
Karl covered Bera's hand, which still rested on his shoulder, with his opposite hand. "I don't know quite how to say this–"
"Try opening your mouth," Bera said, and laughed. She sobered. "What?"
"I'd quite like to get things in order," Karl said. "I'm sure that everything will be all right, but just in case anything goes wrong… thank you. I mean it."
Bera's eyes widened. "You're not sure that this will work, are you?"
"I'm sure it will," Karl said, thinking, If you offered me odds of a thousand to one, I'd consider them generous. But he had to appear confident, or risk panic.
"What about your family?" Bera said. "Karla and Lisane and Jarl? All this way, and you change your mind?"
"Do you know," Karl said, swallowing the emotion that was threatening to overcome him, "I can barely remember their faces."
"Still," Bera said. "To risk never seeing them again, for what – a world of strangers who won't thank you?"
Karl shrugged. "I'm not doing it for their thanks."
"Why, then?"
Karl didn't answer straight away. He tried to find words that didn't sound pompous, but finally gave up worrying.
"Because it's right," he said. "And I'm not prepared to abandon you. This mad idea will probably kill us all, but if I do nothing the odds are immeasurably greater that you'll die, and I'm not going to let that happen."
They were silent, alone with their thoughts.
Bera said, "If we're putting things in order, I have something to say as well." She looked down, licked her lips, then blurted, "Do you know, that I'm actually a virgin?" Karl was silent, unsure of her point. "I've had sex, but no man has ever made love to me."
"I suppose not." Karl touched her cheek.
She pressed her face against his hand. "I'd like… I… there's one man, I really, really want…"
Karl looked across, but the others were preoccupied. He leaned toward Bera, who lifted her chin. He kissed her. She closed her eyes and kissed him back, and slid her arms around his neck.
Moving them was easy in zero-gravity – he kicked off from a chair and drifted through the doorway, into the corridor. He slid a hand under her blouse, and ran his fingers up her spine.
Bera groaned, and arched her back so that she pressed into him, changing their axis of rotation. Karl ended the kiss, and as they drifted, moved down to her chin, then her cheek, tracing a line of little kisses so minute that they barely touched her skin for more than a micro-second, down the side of her neck and into her clavicle. She pulled open her blouse and cupping her breast pushed the nipple toward him. Karl traced the areola with his tongue, swirling around and around in a clockwise direction.
Bera gripped his ear and between moans ground out, "I wish… that you'd… grow… some bloody hair… to hold on to." She scraped her nails down his back, pushing her hands away.
Karl kicked against a wall, and shoved them into a room off the corridor. It was the room in which Bera had stacked her impromptu nest of items for use on the ground.
As they sailed slowly toward the pile of objects, he lifted her up so that his face was pressed against the base of her breasts, and then moved down her stomach, still tracing the line of kisses, sliding his hands rhythmically up and down her back.
Bera pushed down her leggings, and Karl slid them to around her ankles. With a kick she removed first one foot, then the other, the motion sending her and Karl spinning across the room. As they were about to hit the wall, Karl put out a hand to absorb the impact, and they hovered in mid-air, rotating around an axis that ran down an invisible line between them. Karl's tongue continued to kiss Bera's stomach, and then he moved lower, rubbing his lower lip against her bush.
She pushed his head down, and Karl's lower lip felt moistness. Bera groaned and parted her legs, and his tongue entered her, tasting her saltiness, feeling the richness of her fill his nostrils. She ground against his face, beginning to buck and writhe, sending them back across the room, end over end. Just as her shivers grew to spasms Karl stopped and eeled up the length of her body, her hands tearing off his furs as he did so, so that he too was naked.
He slid into her, felt her quiver as he did so, and gripping a bracket that had once held a shelf, thrust long and hard and slow, feeling her react in time. He gasped, "I can… have the nanophytes–" Bera put a finger to his lips and he was silent.
"Don't hold back," she said, then let out a long, low moan and wriggled to let him in deeper. She lifted her bottom so that he could cup her buttocks, and then, still clutching the bracket, he drove with long, slow thrusts, trying to blank his mind so that he wouldn't climax too early. Bera raked his back with her nails and whimpered, and Karl felt his control begin to fail as he pumped harder and harder and he lost himself in her, and in the moment.
They lay against one another. He could feel her heart fluttering like a butterfly. He stroked her back, breathed in the scent of their sex, and wished that they never had to move, that it never had to end.
But of course, it had to.
"We should go back," Bera said. "They'll miss us."
"Mmm," Karl replied, knowing it was true. He gathered his clothes.
They fell silent, alone with their thoughts.
Karl felt the gentlest tug of gravity. "It's started."
TWENTY-TWO
Afterward – as they prepared to blow Fenris to pieces – Karl was to think of the nineteen-day voyage as the Age of Waiting. That he had time to spend together with Bera, with little else to do but make love and get to know one another, was the only good thing to come out of it.
Karl was still suffused with a post-coital glow, and halfway through pulling his clothes on when the Winter Song shoved its colossal cargo toward Isheimur. The faint pull of gravity was no more than a ghost child's tug on the sleeve but still, they drifted to the floor, Karl spinning so that he landed feet first, Bera in an untidy heap. "We're on our way." Karl felt the need to say something, no matter how self-evident.
Bera nodded, flashing him a fleeting smile, dressing with more speed than tidiness.
Walking hand-in-hand onto the bridge with the curious bouncing gait that low gravity induced, Karl was sure that the others would notice a difference somehow, but on one side of the bridge Coeo stared into the steam boiling off the comet, while on the other Arnbjorn and Orn fussed over the still-prone Ragnar. All of them in their own way looked too preoccupied to even notice the lovers' absence.
Karl took his seat and looked around the bridge. Everything looked the same as before, yet subtly different. It's you that's changed. "Loki, give the others the timetable – as we discussed," he said aloud. That was their personal code for, Don't give them any bad news.
"Our journey will last nineteen standard days," Loki said, voice crackling over the antique speakers. "The first nine and a third days we'll accelerate at a hundredth of a standard gravity, which is about half-thrust. That's as much as we think the engines will take."
"Basically," Karl interrupted, "we're using the Winter Song as a million-tonne tugboat. The thing's built like a tractor anyway." He added, in an aside to Coeo, "I'll explain concepts like tugboats and tractors later."
"No need," Coeo answered, indicating the speaker. "I'm sure that I can learn from our invisible friend in the box."
"What happens at the end of nine days?" Arnbjorn said.
"We spend two hours manoeuvring around to the other side of Fenris, where we'll decelerate at the same rate for another nine and a third days, so that when we get to within a couple of hundred thousand kilometres of Isheimur, we've reverted to our current velocity."
"The faster we go, the sooner we get there," Karl said. "But the harder we'll hit – and the greater the energy th
at we'll release in the form of an explosion. Imagine the biggest blast you've ever seen, and multiply it by…" Karl shrugged. "I have no idea of what number to magnify it by – but if we release too much energy…"
"Boom?" Bera said.
"Boom," Karl agreed. "So we need to slow down. We could have shaved six days off the journey, but then we'd go in so hard and so fast that the debris thrown up by the blast would kill half the species on the planet."
"Why couldn't we accelerate at full thrust?" Arnbjorn said. "We could be home in half the time, then?"
"Not so," Loki said. "We would still need to decelerate, and while it would knock four days off the voyage, there is an eighty-six per cent probability that the engines would overheat."
"If you're worried about Ragnar's condition," Karl said, "Loki will give you the formula to synthesise anticoagulants in the nanoforge." He waved at the other seats. "So given that we have a few weeks to go, you might as well make yourselves comfortable, lady and gentlemen."