Winter Song

by Colin Harvey

  "Maybe we can dig it out?" Orn said. "We could go out the lateral side airlock." He had found a second lock, on deck nine, which would have been beneath the frozen surface of Jokullag. "And we could use those spacesuits you found down on de:k six."

  "The ones I've been busily cutting up to make into shirts?" Bera said.

  "You weren't given all of them," Karl said. "There's one left for each of us." Karl turned to Coeo, "Will you

  go with Orn, and help him?"

  Coeo didn't answer immediately. "I will," he said at last.

  Karl knew how difficult it was for the adapted man to fit into something that must have seemed suffocating. "Thanks," he said.

  The next fifteen minutes were tense ones, Karl staring at the ticking counter, which now read one hundred and fifty-eight hours to planetfall. They could loop around, in theory, but Karl was acutely conscious of time passing. But a worse scenario was that they couldn't restart the engines at all, and would sail serenely past Isheimur.

  "We're here," Orn said. "The view's beautiful."

  Never mind that, Karl thought. "Can you see the vent?"

  "Yeah," Orn said. "The weight of the ship jamming it onto about the only bloody rock on this ice-ball has buckled it. Coeo has a small blowlamp, which he's turned onto the ice just below the rock."

  Fifteen, then twenty, then twenty-five more tense minutes passed. Orn muttered occasionally, but otherwise the men worked in silence. Karl resisted the urge to ask questions, instead letting them work undisturbed.

  Orn said, "We've cleared the rock. Loki should be able to melt the ice safely, but the vent itself is buckled. We can't fix it without equipment we don't have."

  "OK," Karl said. "Get back in." He said to Loki, "As soon as the airlock cycles, re-start the engines."

  "Understood," Loki said.

  When the engines fired, there were a few minutes' further delay as Loki melted the last of the ice away, and returned the Winter Song to its position of almost drilling into the comet, but then they were under way, with their usual hundredth of a gee deceleration.

  Karl bounded down the stairs to the lock to greet the returnees. As he had feared, Coeo was shaking with either fatigue or nerves – or both. "You did a wonderful job," Karl said as the adapted shucked himself out of his suit, and tried not to wrinkle his nose at the rank smell of panic-sweat. Poor bugger must be claustrophobic in that suit, he thought.

  He still worried about Coeo throughout the day. The adapted man spent most of his time on his own, either in the gym, or in one of the seats, talking to Loki. Karl knew the folly of trying to overcome centuries of bitterness on both sides and make him one of a virtual family, but he was equally worried that Coeo might become so isolated that the adapted man deteriorated mentally.

  "What does he talk to you about?" Karl asked Loki. The counter read a hundred and forty-two hours, he noted absently.

  "He questions me," Loki said. "He's like a sponge, soaking up knowledge. He asks about Isheimur as it was before the settlers arrived, as it is now, and how it might change. I have been perfectly truthful on the first two, but exaggerated the effects of the blast."

  "What else?" Karl said.

  "The current situation in human-space – about which I have been perfectly honest, since you did not tell me to lie – and human history."

  At the end of his shift, Bera took over the watch, oozing into her seat. "I've got my sewing," she said dryly. "Like a good little seamstress."

  "Should I do the sewing?" Karl said, and was rewarded with a sardonic glint.

  "You know the answer to that."

  "How about Ragnar?" Karl ignored the snort from the old man, who watched them. Karl glimpsed Ragnar opening his mouth, and held up a warning finger.

  "You know that that isn't going to happen in our lifetimes," Bera said.

  "I'm willing to learn," Karl said. "Honestly."

  "I know you are," Bera said. "But it's faster for me to do it. So I do."

  "So it's not that you're the only one sewing?" Karl said. "That's making you unhappy?"

  "Not just that," Bera said. "But it's all I seem to do."

  "What would you like to do?" Karl said.

  "I don't know!" Bera growled, but her voice rising with each word. "That's just it!" She drew in a lungful of air, and some calm with it. "I'd like to walk under the twin suns again, Karl. I know that it's unreasonable, but I just can't help it."

  "I understand," Karl said. He wanted to hold her, and comfort her, but with Ragnar there, that was impossible. "I'm used to sailing on my own, but sometimes even I get cabin-fever. Sometimes there's nothing for it but to tough it out."

  Ragnar cleared his throat. "You know," he snarled, and held up a quivering hand, "some of us would sell our soul to be able to hold a needle and thread."

  Karl had no answer to that, but instead left the bridge, and walked down the stairs to the gym. As he half-expected, Coeo was in one of the exercise wheels striding from step to step."You're setting a fast pace," Karl said. "Good to see you're staying in shape."

  "I should," Coeo said between breaths, "be fitter… than… before we… took off."

  "You're expecting to have to run when we land?" Karl said.

  "Perhaps." Coeo pressed a button on the wheel rim, and it slowed slightly. "It helps me to think, this machine," he said, breathing a little more freely.

  "You don't have enough time to think?" Karl entered the other wheel, next to Coeo.

  "Lots of time, but much noise and…" Coeo waved a hand in the air as if to conjure the word. "Distractions."

  "Ah," Karl said. "Deep thought." He wasn't sure whether Coeo would understand the concept, but the adapted man nodded. "Exactly."

  "Why do…" Karl hesitated, unsure whether he was going to offend Coeo, then pressed on: "You ask Loki lots of questions. Why?"

  "To learn," Coeo said, as if it were obvious.

  "But why?" Karl said. "Simply for something to do?"

  "Partly," Coeo said. "But we have lost too much knowledge, my people. After we fall again, when we go home, I want to be a seer for my people. I want to be like you, to know everything."

  Tick. The timer had counted down to one hundred and nineteen hours when Loki stopped the engines again. "We're overheating," Loki said. "I think that the damaged vent is causing heat build-up."

  Karl felt his thoughts close up, as if the panic was squeezing the oxygen supply to his brain. "Can we fix it?"

  "Unlikely," Orn said. He had been visiting Ragnar on the bridge, just chatting – but he had been the one who had examined the vent. "It needs heavier tools than we have available. We need a portable version of the forge."

  "The fastest way is to let the engines cool down a little, and accelerate harder. And we have a little spare time. I originally allocated us seven hours, and even with the time we lost, we still have most of that."

  Tick. The timer passed a hundred hours to planetfall mark. It reached ninety-five, just as Karl handed over to Bera, when the engines died again.

  "Still overheating?" Karl said. An antique line of a song ran through his head, Hello panic my old friend, and he felt that familiar squeeze of his mind shutting down.

  "It will get worse, I'm afraid," Loki said. "I will need to take them off-line, for longer periods of time. But we still have that spare time, albeit less of it."

  "Good," Karl said.

  Tick. The timer read seventy-three hours to planetfall.

  "I will need to take the engines down for twenty minutes, and resume on fifty-three per cent, rather than fifty per cent of full thrust. Of course, that means that the heat will build up faster. But if we do not, we will pass the point at which we need to detonate the reactor and break Fenris up."

  "What would happen?" Ragnar said. "No," the old man added, shaking his head. While one side of his face still drooped, he moved more freely and spoke more clearly than before, but he was still only a shadow of the man he'd once been.

  "What?" Karl said.

&nbs
p; "Just thinking the unthinkable," Ragnar said, looking sheepish. "Sometimes as leader, you have to ask the stupid questions."

  Karl wanted to scream that he didn't want to be leader, he'd only ever wanted to go home, not end up in a box stuck to the face of an iceberg hurtling at a rock. His voice betrayed none of that when he said, "Ask."

  Ragnar said, "What would happen if we didn't vent the heat, but kept running the engines?"

  Loki said, "The engines would overheat and either burn out or blow up the reactor."

  "Ah." Ragnar gave an embarrassed shrug.

  "Sometimes the unthinkable really is the unthinkable," Karl said, with a smile. "Worth asking, though."

  "So we have a stark choice," Loki said. "If I do not run the engines, we overshoot. If I do run the engines they overheat, and we may overshoot unless I run them harder, in which case we overheat faster."

  Tick; and the timer read fifty-eight hours. This time the engines were off for twenty minutes. The time before they had been off-line for fifteen, the time before twelve, the first only ten minutes.

  Tick; forty-six hours.

  Karl said, "Are we still within the safe range to break Fenris up?"

  "It's diminishing," Loki said, "but we are still within range."

  "Good," Karl said, and a thought struck him. He looked around, but Arnbjorn was busy on the other side of the deck, hopefully out of earshot. "You wouldn't lie to me, would you?" The download had, after all, lied to the others at Karl's instigation, selected half-truths admittedly, but still not the whole truth.

  "I would not," Loki said. "What purpose would it serve?"

  "If you tell me that we still have time, then I agree to you taking the engines down so they don't blow. From your point of view, better we sail past the point at which we have to brake than perish in a fireball, surely?"

  "I hadn't thought of that," Loki said. "We could of course, loop back around to Isheimur. In theory."

  "Assuming we don't run out of air or fuel," Karl said. Got to stop this paranoia.

  "If I lied to you and said that I wasn't, would you know?" Loki added, "That way lies insanity, Karl. I assure you we are within parameters for jettisoning the reactor. I will tell you when we are not."

  Tick; thirty-six hours. The engines were silent for thirty minutes. Karl had barely slept for the last three nights, and his gut stabbed with invisible knife-wounds. Either his circulatory and digestive nanophytes had died, or had simply been overwhelmed by the stress he was under.

  Tick; the timer read twenty-seven hours, and was followed by thirty minutes' silence. Our velocity has dropped to just over twenty kilometres a second," Loki said. "Each individual second is less crucial than when we were at peak velocity."

  But not much less crucial, Karl thought.

  Tick; eighteen and a half hours. This time they were off-line for forty minutes. "We are approaching the point at which we have very little time to jettison the reactor and get around to the other side safely," Loki said.

  "What happens if we blow the comet within a hundred thousand kilometres of Isheimur?" Orn said. He, like the others, was spending more and more time on the bridge, even when it wasn't his watch. It had become like a black hole, sucking them toward it and the view of the monitor and the un-shuttered window with its monotonous wall of white.

  Tick; the timer passed the ten-hour countdown. When it changed to nine hours fifty-nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds, Karl breathed a sigh of relief. Another milestone passed.

  His relief was short-lived. The engines quietened minutes later. Karl said, "What happens if you keep them running for just a few more hours?"

  "We're already at risk of them seizing," Loki said. "I would rather they seized while closed than at full thrust."

  Twenty minutes later Loki fired the engines, and micro-gravity again replaced the near-weightlessness of Fenris.

  The next five hours stretched like toffee.

  Bera was the last person to arrive on the bridge. Her face was thin and drawn, and dark circles beneath her eyes showed how little she had slept the last few nights. Even their desperate love-making failed to give her more than temporary solace.

  She took a seat beside Karl, and he felt a hand slide tremulously into his.

  "OK?" he whispered.

  Her head dipped quickly twice. "I'll be glad when the waiting is over."

  "It nearly is," he said. "What's our velocity?" he asked Loki, for the other's benefit.

  "It has just dipped under thirteen kilometres per second," Loki replied. "We are just under two hundred and thirty four thousand kilometres from Isheimur, close enough that we should begin jettisoning the reactor."

  "Agreed," Karl said.

  The roar of the engines died away and for a few seconds silence hung over them all like a shroud. The thrusters whooshed, their tone higher than that of the main engines. For a horrible moment nothing happened, and Karl thought, We're stuck fast! Then they lurched clear of whatever obstruction had snagged them.

  They flew south this time, completing another quarter of an anti-clockwise orbit started when they began deceleration. At the pole they slowed, and Loki nudged the Winter Song back down to where they hovered centimetres above the surface, before nudging the comet with the ship's crown. Loki fired the main engines again, and a slightly straining whine denoted that they were on full power.

  "That's the last time we'll hear them," Karl said. "Strange. I'd begun to hate the sound of those engines, and now I'm almost sad to think that."

  "I'm bloody not," Bera said. "Don't be so sentimental, you old fool." She grinned, and he smiled back.

  Karl hadn't noted when Loki had started, but after several minutes he said, "How long do you intend to keep this up?"

  Loki said, "Seven point six zero one minutes."

  The time dragged – then, without warning, the ship slid sideways across the comet's ragged surface, the scraping so loud they had to cover their ears. "What are you doing?" Karl yelled.

  "We have completed the course adjustment," Loki said. "We'd wandered slightly as a result of the changes to our braking programme, and would have sailed through Isheimur's upper atmosphere. Now the comet should score a direct hit on the pole, and puncture the underground reservoir to one edge of the cap." It added, "I am now firing the right lateral rear thruster, and left lateral forward, in effect turning us. The main engines have seized while on, as I feared."

  Karl swallowed, his mouth dry, and wiped his palms on the legs of his suit. "Arnbjorn, you, Coeo and Orn suit up, and bring ours back, please."

  "Helmets as well?" Arnbjorn said.

  "Bring them, but no need to put them on," Karl said. "Yet."

  When the others returned, Arnbjorn helped Ragnar into his suit while the others changed quickly. The cockpit had held, but to the scraping noises were added ominous cracking sounds. Sooner or later we're going to hit a shard that'll punch a hole in the cockpit. Shit, shit, shit! What do I do now? "Loki, how long will it take to dump the reactor?"

  "It will take about two to three minutes to unlock all the bolts, then a few seconds to dump it."

  With a lurch, the Winter Song broke through a ridge, but even as the other crew members cheered, the ship crunched into the next one and held for a fraction of a second, before breaking free, and in the process slamming them back into their seats. The Winter Song flashed across the ragged polar icecaps of Fenris, so close to the micro-peaks that Karl could see every ridge, every striation in the icy surface.

  If we hit the surface full frontal at this speed, there'll be nothing left of us, however reinforced the hull is, he thought.

  "I will take us out for about fifteen minutes," Loki said.

  "We'll never stand it," Karl said. "We must be doing four or five gees."

  "Six point three seven seven," Loki said. "In sixteen seconds we have gained a kilometre a second away from the comet."

  "Then… turn… us… around," Karl grated. The pressure was crushing, and he feared for the others, e
specially Ragnar.

  "I have put us into a parabola," Loki said. "We need to initially head away from Fenris, to give us time to jettison the core and move as far around the comet as possible. If we do not put up with this discomfort–"

  "Discomfort!" Arnbjorn yelled, the effort making the tendons on his neck distend. "It's killing my father!"

  If we do not put up with this discomfort," Loki crackled again, "we'll slam into Fenris so hard none of us will survive." Arnbjorn screeched and Loki said, "I am truly sorry for the strain this is putting Ragnar under, but I see no way to avoid it."