by Colin Harvey
Karl had Loki activate a counter on the monitor screen, one whose red digits showed the four hundred and seventy-seven hours, eighteen minutes and rapidly decreasing seconds to planetfall.
Only later would Karl realise what a mistake that was.
Soon after starting, Orn said, "I'll go and see what drugs I can get out of this nanoforge to help treat Ragnar."
Arnbjorn had helped Ragnar to a seat, and as Orn left, the younger man looked up. "Looks like Orn's got a new toy," he said with a grin. "You won't see him for the rest of the voyage."
On the second day with time already hanging heavy, Karl drew up a watch, ensuring that he and Bera were on different shifts. "We still get to spend eight hours a day together off-duty," he said to her disappointed look, although she voiced no complaint. "You'll be on midnight to eight, the first half with Ragnar, the second with Coeo. Though time's nearly meaningless on board." Assigning the crew to watches gave the day structure and them responsibility – even if Loki was capable of running the ship on his own.
"What shift will you take, Gothi?" Arnbjorn said.
Karl searched the honorific for traces of irony, but could find none. "Sixteen hundred to midnight," he said, and caught their approving nods. Little by little, they'd shown that they knew about his changed relationship with Bera; not toward him – his position was unambiguous – but by their sudden deference to her. At times he could almost sense them thinking. Do we joke with her? Call her Gothi-kona, as if she's his wife? But his keeping Bera on a separate watch showed them that he would treat her like any other crew-member.
Even with the new schedule, time dragged for people who were used to working, or lately walking, from dawn to nightfall. So while Bera was on watch, Karl rose early and scoured the eleven decks. To his delight he found a small gym in the ship's cavernous bowels.
"You are joking?" Orn said later, when Karl told them his new idea. "Do I look as if I need exercise?" The devil's ride that Ragnar had led them on had all but melted the flesh from Orn's frame, left him a wasted shadow of the once-bulky man Karl had known.
"You do," Karl said. "To stop muscle wastage in micro-gravity. Or do you fancy hiking across country carrying ten men on your shoulders with your legs buckling under the strain?"
"It can't be that bad!" Orn said. Arnbjorn and Ragnar looked on, grinning.
"Oh, but it can," Karl said. "You want to suffer a heart attack? Cramps? Brittle bones? And why should the others have to do it, but you don't?"
"Why should they?" Orn said.
Karl belatedly realised that he'd made it a test of his own authority, but couldn't be bothered to play games. "OK," he said. "You're on your own. We'll take longer watches to cover your absence, and when you're hurting on the ground we'll leave you to die, like we would a stranger." He turned and walked away, ignoring Orn's protesting shouts.
The next day Karl paced the inside of an exercise wheel when Orn accompanied Ragnar into the gym. Orn helped Ragnar into a walking frame, setting it to the minimum level, then climbed aboard an exercise bike, all while studiously avoiding Karl's gaze.
When he had finished, and was on his way out, Karl stopped by the bike. "Thank you," he said to Orn, and nodded to Ragnar.
The old man's face still drooped on one side, and his words were so slurred they were barely intelligible. "You play a dangerous game, Gothi," he growled, giving Karl a lopsided grin.
"I don't play games," Karl said. "I meant what I said. I'm not a man who can throw dissenters out of the airlock, so if a man refuses my order, all I can do is walk away."
"Making him outlaw," Ragnar said. "Sooner or later, it's a tactic that will backfire."
"Maybe."
On the fifth day, Loki said, "I've found the crew records."
"What took you so long?" Karl said. He was only half-joking.
"There is a lot of corrupted data. I'm not sure whether it led to the datarealm's attacks, or whether it's a result of the Idiot wiping a lot of the memory banks to stop us accessing them."
"Why?"
"I'm assuming that it was some sort of electronic scorched-earth policy. If it couldn't stop us taking over the ship, it would leave us without information."
"So what have you learned?"
"They originally hoped that the Sardar – as they called the Winter Song – would fly again. So while the lake was still melted, they filled the fuel tanks with water, and decreed that nothing essential to space-flight was to be stripped."
"Hah," Karl grunted, in acknowledgement and surprise. "That's it?"
"There is considerably more," Loki said. "When they realised how unlikely it was that they would be able to get back to civilisation – for that was the problem, not that they couldn't take off, but that they were lightyears off-course and hopelessly lost.
"The decision was made to adapt Coeo's ancestors to make them as self-sufficient as possible, while never sacrificing the ship – so the veneration of it began. Do you want to hear the rest? The personal testimony of the captain and crew, as they slowly froze, starved, or choked to death on the thin air, one after the other of them taking what they called The Long Walk?"
"No thanks," Karl said. "How long did they last?"
"Long enough to speed-grow the first generation, and teach them what they could. Four years, the last survivor held out before taking The Long Walk into the snow."
Karl breathed out slowly, trying to imagine how that last Kazakh must have felt, his colleagues dead, his children alien. "Add their records to the mayday loop," he said. "They shouldn't be forgotten."
"Agreed," Loki said. "The records also explain an oddity about the nanoforge."
"Oh?"
"It's configured so that organic and inorganic materials are classed separately, and one can't be remade into the other. It's a constraint hardwired into it, so it explains why the crew left much of the ship unstripped. And why Orn is having trouble getting the forge to respond to particular commands."
"You mean it won't make a door into a steak, or vice versa?"
"Exactly – which limits your food stocks post-landing, should you wish to factor that in."
Karl looked around for Arnbjorn, and saw that he was on the other side of the bridge with a speaker in one ear, concentrating on listening to an audio tape. "You think that there'll be a post-landing?"
"I would estimate the odds of the ship surviving the landing as approximately three thousand to one, but I am taking my lead from you."
"As you should," Karl said. "We work on the principle that we'll survive the landing."
Karl turned and waved at Arnbjorn to attract his attention, and after several failed attempts called, "We should get Bera making us garments from any spare spacesuits, or other synthetic clothing." At Arnbjorn's puzzled look, Karl explained the problem with the nanoforge.
"So that's why it refuses Orn's instructions so often," Arnbjorn said. "But why do you want us to make new clothes?"
"The furs are organic," Karl explained. "We can use them to forge food from the patterns we've saved already."
"I'll talk to them when I finish my shift," Arnbjorn said. On his way back to his seat, the settler paused.
"What is it?" Karl said.
"What are your plans when we land?" Arnbjorn said.
To stay alive… somehow, Karl thought. "I don't know," he admitted aloud. "I wasn't planning on staying as Gothi, if that's what you're worried about."
Arnbjorn looked sheepish. "I did wonder," he said. "Not that you've done a bad job."
"It's my environment," Karl said. "But I know that Isheimur is yours. I'd be a fool to set myself up as leader down there."
Arnbjorn nodded, deep in thought. "Aye."
The next days passed in a dull haze of make-work and trying not to think of what lay ahead, a prospect made grimmer by lack of sleep – Karl's dreams were haunted by a vast, crushing object bearing down on him or by nightmares of being burned in a vast conflagration, so that he awoke leaden-limbed and sluggish of thought
.
Karl worried especially about Coeo. At least the settlers kept each other company, and he had Bera, but the young adapted man had followed Karl blindly and was alone. Without the benefit of constant activity he seemed to draw in on himself, although Karl made a point of talking to and involving him as much as possible.
Bera too increasingly withdrew to "their" room, losing herself in adapting the clothing they had scavenged from around the ship to replace their furs, while humming along to music from antique discs and a player scavenged from around the ship. Guilty at sitting watching her work, Karl helped as best he could, but most of his attempts at sewing pieces of fabric together were at best rickety, at worst they came apart, so Bera took them from him. "Stick to what you're good at," she said.
"Which is?" he teased. "Bossing people around?"
As she struggled with one particularly tough seam, she poked her tongue out and rested it on her philtrum. He thought, How did you ever think her plain?
She looked up. "What?"
"Nothing," he said, failing to smother a smile.
"I suppose you're good at one thing." She raised an eyebrow.
"Oh." He took the sewing from her and put it down. "In some ways," he said, "micro-gravity's better than weightlessness. You get almost all the benefits, like not weighing as much, but you still come to ground in the end."
He kissed her and they made love, slowly.
But afterward, he saw her gaze unblinking at the wall. "What's wrong?" he said.
"Do you miss them?" Bera said.
Karl didn't answer for almost a minute. When she opened her mouth to speak, he held a finger to her lips. "Every day," he said. "Just as, if you and I were separated, I'd move worlds and more to get back to you. Would you want me to be the man who forgets those who are important to him when they're out of sight?"
Bera shook her head, and smiled tremulously. "I… no, of course not. But it's hard, sometimes, living with ghosts. Sometimes it feels like they're all around me."
"How do you think it feels for me?" Karl said. He turned and returned the wan smile she flashed at him, and images of Karla, Lisane, Jarl – even the baby, though he'd never seen him or her – flooded his mind.
"Tell me what you're thinking," Bera said.
"I'm not sure that's wise," Karl said.
"No, I want you to."
"I was…" Karl started. "I was trying to work out how long it'll be before the birth; it's scheduled for about now." The menage had deliberately decided against learning the baby's gender, with the dissenting Karla accepting the majority view. If we don't survive, is this the universe's way of keeping the numbers balanced, my death for the baby's life? If so, whose death will Bera and the others offset?
He wondered whether his family would have understood what he was doing, assuming they ever learned his fate. He wasn't sure that he fully comprehended himself. Somewhere along the journey, perhaps meeting Coeo, perhaps their all saving each other's lives, he had assumed responsibility for them all.
"You have too much time to think," Karl said, conscious that it applied to him as well. "But that won't last for long. Enjoy it while it does."
The next day, for the first time in nine days, the faint pull of gravity ended. It was as abrupt as if it had been switched off, the only harbinger the klaxon warning of the planned mid-point manoeuvre braying throughout the ship. Karl headed for the bridge, though it wasn't his watch. Orn and Arnbjorn turned as he bounced through the doorway.
"I'm going to fire us away from Fenris," Loki announced. "We'll be under one gee for twenty seconds, flattening our trajectory to a circumpolar orbit and coming down the other side." Loki paused before adding, "If I can persuade this recalcitrant thruster to behave."
"Still having problems with it?" Karl said.
"Yes… but considering how long the ship was buried beneath a frozen lake, it's a miracle that it's the biggest problem the ship is presenting us with. It's a testament to how robust the ship was."
"Agreed," Karl said.
"You should hear the rattles and creaks and groans down in the lower decks," Orn said. "Deck eleven sounds as if the rivets are going to pop out of the walls at any moment."
"Rattles and creaks just mean loose fittings," Karl said with a grin. "And if you took a spacewalk down to the engines, and went inside to the little emergency control hut, you'd hear a lot worse – except that the noise would blow your eardrums in about fifteen seconds flat."
Loki said, "I'm lowering the screens, as we're about to emerge into sunlight."
On the monitor Karl watched mountain ranges and abysses in miniature pass by, and then fall away as they cleared the comet's summit. "We'll no longer be able to transmit to the Hangzhou Relay," Loki said.
For the last ten days the Winter Song had beamed their Mayday to that site, in the hope that a distress call with a second signature might achieve more than Ship's original message on its own. "Make 'em think there's some sort of ships' graveyard in this system," Karl had said with a grin.
"Isn't there?" Coeo had replied. "How many of those – what were they called – Aye ships and the raiders were destroyed?"
Karl nodded acknowledgement and said to Loki, "You've allowed two hours to change position?"
"Two hours forty-five," Loki said. "If Fenris is like most other comets – and early indications are that this is so – then the sunward side will be considerably less regular than the lee side. We'll need most of that time to find a flat, regular secure plateau to land on."
Loki was correct. After two false attempts, with one of the ledges collapsing beneath the ship, Loki finally found a third plateau which held, but it took more than half an hour of jockeying the Winter Song, trying to offset the intermittent loss of thrust from one corner, before the ship settled, and Loki announced, "We're in position."
Loki raised the shadowside blinds on the sight of Fenris filling every window with a wall of dirty white. Ahead of them, the miniature mountains and valleys of their sanctuary surrounded tiny peaks that could have been kilometres high, but in reality were probably little taller than he was. Karl wiped the sweat from his forehead, and breathed a long sigh of relief. "It's time to resume our tugboat act, then?"
Loki said, "If we decelerate too quickly, the voyage will take much longer. Every minute we start early here adds seven minutes at the other end. But I suggest that we start thirty minutes earlier than originally planned, to allow us a margin of error. I am becoming concerned at the build-up of heat in one of the exhausts."
"Can we do anything to reduce the temperature?" Karl said.
"The best way is to let the engine rest for a while, but we have little time to spare. I will keep monitoring it."
"In that case," Karl said. "I'm going back to bed for an hour."
"Enjoy," Arnbjorn said with a grin.
Karl didn't answer, but bounced down the corridor to his room, where Bera sat on their bed. She looked up from working on the clothing. "Try this on." She threw a shirt at him, picking up a flexible tape measure. "Hold still, while I measure your leg length."
The ship suddenly bucked and heaved. "Quake," Karl said, changing into the new shirt. "Ugh, it's scratchy as anything. Not like the furs." He shrugged. "Still, they'll make an extra meal or so."
"Get used to it," Bera said. "There's not much I can do to make it less scratchy. You've grown used to wearing natural fabrics."
The ship shook again, more violently this time. "Is this going to keep happening?" Bera said. "The quakes, I mean."
"Get used to it," Karl said, echoing her phrase. He laughed as Bera poked out her tongue.
For the next three days the quakes grew ever worse, while chunks of ice flew off from the comet's surface as the twin suns' relentless heat worked away at the wall of ice on which the ship hung.
On the morning of the thirteenth day, Karl awoke to silence.
The engines had stopped.
TWENTY-THREE
Karl pulled clothes on and yomped to the b
ridge. "What's happening?"
Bera twisted in the command chair. "Loki's stopped the engines."
Static crackling from the speakers, Loki said: "A quake has shaken us loose of the plateau, and we have slid around and are resting at an angle. Our exhaust vent has jammed into a crevasse. I'm worried about damage, plus venting is unsafe."
"We can't just melt the ice?" Karl said.
"Possibly," Loki said. "But I'd like someone to assess the damage first."