by Colin Harvey
A minute or so later, Karl felt the ship turn in a wide circle, and then Fenris filled the monitor, which was on forward view. The ship plunged toward it.
TWENTY-FOUR
Loki's systems raised the lee-side shutter to reveal a half-shadowed white ball from which banners of water vapour streamed out the four thousand kilometres to them, before passing them by. "Have you started the reactor dump?"
"I have," Loki said. "I have set the fuel rods to degrade so that the material all flows together within an hour and a quarter. By then we must be in position on the far side from here so that we're sheltered from the blast. This will be a far bigger explosion than that which destroyed Ship – assuming that the reactor doesn't explode when it hits Fenris."
After about a minute Loki said, "The safety protocols have been overridden."
The ship reverberated with the clang of the explosive bolts jettisoning the reactor toward Fenris' shadowed side and the engines, deprived of power, died. Karl leaned back in his seat and exhaled. He then leaned forward at the acceleration – a tenth of a g – from the thrusters.
They passed the reactor at a tangent, but so close that Karl fancied that he could read the manufacturer's warning printed on the side of one of the pipes. As he watched the five-metre-square block slowly fall away behind them, he breathed a sigh of relief. They were still almost three thousand kilometres away from the comet, but closing on it at over nine hundred a minute.
The others had stayed silent while the Winter Song careered around the sky over Fenris, but now they cried, clapped, laughed, or – in Arnbjorn's case – leaned over Ragnar.
The construct said, "I estimate that if the reactor survives the impact, it will take approximately seventy-eight minutes for it to become critical and detonate."
The thrusters slowly pushed the ship northward, away from the slowly rotating, ungainly block of pipes and metal hurtling toward Fenris. Loki fired the forward thrusters again and again to slow the ship's headlong rush, but it was a futile battle – they had less than a sixtieth of the thrust available from the main engines, and had been travelling at more than sixteen kilometres a second faster than the comet when they had dumped the reactor.
"This is going to sound stupid…" Bera said.
"But?" Karl prompted.
"We need to slow down, and be on the far side…"
"And?" Karl said.
"What if we just scraped along Fenris?" Bera said. "Used it as a brake?" She pantomimed sliding one palm over the back of her other hand.
"It would smash us to pieces." Orn had leaned closer to listen.
"Do the two halves of ship separate?" Coeo said. "The part we're in, and the part the engines were in?"
Karl looked ahead, to where a faint puff was the only sign of the reactor crashing into the ice with almost unimaginable force. That's just a taster of what awaits Isheimur, he thought.
"Loki?" he said.
"We have no use for the engine pod," Loki said. "Without a reactor it is just dead weight. As an alternative, I could – if I spun us right around, void one of the pod's water tanks and the reaction from that would slow us slightly. It would leave us critically short of raw material for the hydrogen for the thrusters, but…"
"Do it," Karl said. He turned to where Ragnar had been lowered to the floor by his son. "How is he?" Karl said. Arnbjorn shook his head and resumed tending his patient, who lay still but for his chest, which rose and fell. "Don't quit now," Karl muttered. "Hang on a while longer, Ragnar."
Bera squeezed his hand on her way past to help Arnbjorn.
On the monitor, ghostly giant fingers of steam writhed and plucked at the ship, which now sailed through the thick of the comet's tail.
A judder marked the venting of much of the several thousand tons of water they had carried from all the way from Jokullag. Soon after they began passing the tiny ball of ice. "You're getting very close," Karl said, as Fenris loomed nearer and nearer.
"You implied that my urge for self-preservation might outweigh my loyalty," Loki said. "I do not feel emotion any longer, but I still have some vestiges of the time I spent in your skull. The echo of the emotion that I feel is resentment at such an implication. So I am endangering myself as well as you, in the name of the greater good."
A range of microcosmic mountains barely a hundred metres high loomed. The base of the engine pod scraped the peak, hurling a skittering Arnbjorn across the deck where he collided with a panel and lay still – luckily everyone else was strapped in.
As the ship tilted downward, Loki fired the engine pod's ventral thruster to lift it, and the crew-pod's dorsal thruster to press that end down, lifting the engine pod further. Somehow the ship missed plunging rear-first into the next mountain; instead they careered toward the peak beyond, hitting it hard enough to rip the latticed gantry connecting the pods loose, and again needing the now-leaking thruster to fire another burst. A third such scrape loosened the gantry further, and moments later, the ventral thruster exploded, blowing much of the pod to pieces. A fourth such scrape wrenched the entire remainder of the pod and the gantry free of the command pod. Loki fired the dorsal and left lateral thruster and missed the bulk of the wreckage by a whisker.
Alarms buzzed and honked across the command deck, until ceasing abruptly. "I have turned them off," Loki said. "The situation is that we are holed on decks three, six and seven, and losing air badly on decks five, seven and eight. Seals on the stairwell doors will keep the air on this deck secure."
"Bera, check on Arnbjorn, would you?" Karl said. "Coeo, Orn, with me. We'll patch the holes as best we can." They ran down the corridor to the stairwell, and leaning into the doors, squeezed through the constricting exits.
Karl toggled the radio on his suit as he exited onto deck three; "Loki, what did all that do to our velocity? And what air, water and fuel for the thrusters do we have to get us through the next, what, four hours?" He grabbed pieces of panel, a plastic bag, anything that would fit flat over the holes in the hull.
"Three hours forty-two minutes, Karl," Loki answered. "We can use the water tanks on decks ten and eleven, and split them into hydrogen for the thrusters, and fresh oxygen for us. Where you are patching the minor holes, those decks should still be habitable, but I fear that the decks with significant breaches are now vacuum."
"Velocity?" Karl repeated, grabbing a desk, and tipping it over against a wall where tiny fragments were hurtling through gaps.
Still fourteen kilometres per second faster than Fenris, although the explosion will accelerate the fragments. But we do not need to ride your comet down, we are re-entering under our own impetus."
"Trajectory?" Karl said.
"I will keep working to flatten it, Karl."
"Shit," Karl said, realising that if it needed flattening, they were in too steep a trajectory.
"Indeed."
They gathered on the bridge, a weary, bedraggled collection. Karl's head was bowed, and his shoulders slouched. Bera gripped his arm, wincing and touching her clavicle with her free hand. "The belt cut into me when the ship whiplashed us," she said to his raised eyebrow. "But we're still alive," she added fiercely. Coeo's right hand hung at an awkward angle.
The pitted hulk that had been the Winter Song sailed on, facing frontward, forward thrusters firing constantly. The timer counted down the seconds, showing two thousand left to detonation, then a thousand, still counting down, the comet falling away at a rate of fourteen kilometres per second, until it was barely visible even on the monitor and the counter read seven hundred. Then when it was over fifty thousand kilometres away a white, blinding pulse overloaded the screen so that it blanked momentarily.
When it reset, the comet was shearing apart in a glittering chrysanthemum of shards.
The watched its shattering silently until Loki said, "The core detonated seven hundred seconds early. Clearly its collision with Fenris damaged it." It added, "But it could have exploded much sooner."
No longer falling away, the largest
fragment closed the gap on the racing ship so slowly that it was almost imperceptible. Smaller pieces moved faster; minutes after the explosion the Winter Song juddered under a hail of pellets. Then larger pieces rocked it violently, and finally a giant invisible hand seemed to take the ship and shake them, trying to tip them out. Just when Karl thought that the hull must crack under the strain, the shaking subsided.
They were weightless, only their harnesses holding them in place. Karl unclipped his. "Time to check for damage," he said. A clamour of voices volunteered to accompany him. "Orn," said Karl. "The rest stay." The clamour resumed. "Oi!" Karl bellowed, and they fell silent again. Karl held up his forefinger: "Ragnar's too frail," he said and held up his index finger: "Arnbjorn's needed to ensure succession." Ring finger: "Coeo's required to spread the word to his people that peace has broken out." Little finger: "Bera stays here to provide first aid."
Ignoring her hissed "First aid? What am I, Nursemaid Bera?" Karl joined Orn who was waiting in the doorway to the corridor, which they had never replaced.
They bounced feather-light out of the cabin and Orn muttered, "I think they're just a little annoyed with you."
Karl laughed. "That was the idea. Gives them something to complain about, rather than just brooding."
"That was rubbish, wasn't it?" Orn said. "All that talk of succession, and spreading the word among Coeo's people – we're dead, aren't we?"
Karl ignored him. "We need to find materials to plug the holes with."
They bumped down the littered corridor under the dim emergency lighting, and checked the rooms, finding enough suitable pieces of plastic and metal for their purposes. With a few almost empty sealant tubes from which they squeezed the last drops, a thirty-centimetre-square metal plate was converted into a makeshift tray. Repeating the operation over a dozen times gradually reduced and then finally ended the hiss of air rushing through the cracks and holes. "Karl," Bera called from the bridge doorway. "We're getting close now, you'd better finish up."
Returning to the bridge, the white globe of Isheimur completely filled the lee-side front window, and individual mountain ranges and lakes were clearly visible. "How far away are we?" Karl said.
"Less than eighteen thousand kilometres," Loki said. "Just over ten minutes to planetfall." Karl noticed that Loki had turned off the counter, and realised he should have done that days ago. Damned thing's become an obsession.
Bera passed strips of rock-eater meat to Karl. "You must be hungry."
Even now Karl wasn't sure that he was quite hungry enough to eat rock-eater, but he ate it, trying not to think of condemned men eating their last meal. "Tastes as good as always," he said, and Bera giggled.
"Give the worker some smoked lamb," Arnbjorn said, offering some to Orn, who took a handful into his vast paw. Karl also took some with a grateful nod. "Pappi?" Arnbjorn said, offering his father the lamb. Ragnar shook his head slowly. At some point they had helped him into a seat, but he looked worse than ever with his head lolling to one side.
Karl thought, He seems to have aged a decade or more since the stroke. I wonder how much he held age at bay before by sheer willpower alone.
"I must admit, utlander," Ragnar said slowly, fighting to shape the words clearly, "I misjudged you. But for all that, I regret nothing. If I hadn't had you nursed back to health, and then chased you, we wouldn't be sitting here now, having this marvellous adventure. I'd never have seen the stars." He sighed, seeming exhausted by his speech, but then continued, "If you can buy us time, we'll make peace, even if I have to bang heads together." A thin line of drool had escaped the stricken side of his mouth, and as he slapped away Arnbjorn's attempt to wipe it for him, Karl pitied those stuck at Skorradalur with an infirm Gothi. Ragnar continued, "And our new friend Coeo has offered to share coldweather survival techniques."
Karl stared, lost for words.
"We've been trying to work out what the effects will be on the adapted men of Fenris slamming into the South Pole," Bera said. "Luckily, there will be no more than a handful that far south, but there's bound to be some fallout."
Karl thought that the understatement of the century, remembering the antique video of Thorshammer slamming into Earth seven centuries before. A three kilometre-wide rock weighing forty billion tonnes smashed into the Mediterranean twenty times faster than a bullet, creating an inferno of vaporised rock and super-heated wind that incinerated most of Italy, Tunisia and Libya.
Karl nodded. "How does he think that they can ride it out?" He and Coeo had already discussed it while he was conjoined with Loki, but it wouldn't hurt to go over it again.
Loki translated the question for Coeo, who picked rock-eater from between his vast canine and the next tooth, and stared at it for inspiration, before answering. "Heading for higher ground will offset the higher temperatures and air pressure. It should be OK."
Karl nodded. Should be OK? he thought. Coeo, you're gambling with your people's future; I'm not sure that it's something that I could do. But then Coeo was adapted – who knew what changing the body did to the mind?
Karl thought of what was likely to really happen and wished he could tell them that when the comet landed it would throw up enough water vapour and debris to occlude the suns' light for weeks, perhaps months. That the ensuing winter would stretch into spring, maybe even into the Isheimuri summer, a full standard year away. This might be Isheimur's year without a summer. Crops would fail, even the grass might die back, and millions of animals, settler stock and native fauna alike would die. Famine would follow.
Karl hoped that he was being pessimistic, but he wasn't sure.
"Look." Beside him, Bera pointed to the windscreen where Isheimur's atmosphere lit up with dozens, scores, even hundreds of tiny flashes popping off all across the hemisphere. Her arm hooked through the strap on the other side, she wrapped her nearest arm around him. "It's beautiful," Bera said as a smudge that was a bigger piece of debris streaked across Isheimur's sky.
"Like you," Karl said.
"Flatterer." Bera snuggled closer. "I want to be near
you… in case, well you know." She looked down. In case we're killed, she meant.
"Fenris is still gaining on us," Coeo said, looking up from the monitor. "Will it hit us?"
"Negative," Loki said. "It will be close, but it will hit the atmosphere ninety seconds behind us."
"Tell us again, Gothi," Arnbjorn said, "What will happen if someone answers all these messages that you've been sending about?"
"Hard to tell," Karl said. "If they're Formers, we'll be reliant on you to argue the case for Coeo's people. If they're Tropists, we'll need to make them aware of the adapted men, and convince them that you've worked out how to co-exist." He didn't add that in all likelihood, one side would probably need to be re-settled, voluntarily or not. It seemed to him that long-term coexistence was unlikely at best, but Karl was used to thinking in decades or even centuries. He said, "The worst alternative is that we might draw the group who originally ambushed me.
"Although," he added, "two sets of colonists may distract them from any thoughts of finishing me off. And of course, no one may come at all." It seemed the least likely outcome to Karl, but it had to be faced.
The ship groaned and shook. Loki crackled, "We've just hit the edge of Isheimur's exosphere. The ride is about to get very, very rough."
"Buckle up, everyone," Karl said, and Arnbjorn helped Ragnar.
"Karl Allman," Ragnar called, voice quavering.
"Yes?"
Ragnar cursed. "You and our friend Loki will have to learn to recite my words for me." He took a deep breath, and when he spoke, his voice had grown stronger, fighting the dull roaring outside.
"And when the Gods left Isheimur,
They cast a bolt from the sky…"
"Oh, no," Karl whispered, trying to keep his face straight. "Not epic verse, please!"
"Hush!" Bera poked him in the ribs. "Show some respect." She bit her lower lip, and let out a small snort of laught
er, which she quickly stifled.
Ragnar paused and Karl thought he had stopped, but the old man was merely drawing breath.
"Years crawled by with old truths forgot,
Until a man fell from the sky, lived 'spite all the odds,
He saw the truth, espied the chance,
To fling the bolt back at the Gods!"
Ragnar finally finished – or his voice gave up against the steadily increasing roars and rattles from inside and outside the ship – Karl couldn't be sure which. Ragnar said something and Coeo began speaking in a regular cadence that implied that it too was a poem.
When he finished, Coeo unclipped his harness and staggering toward Ragnar, offered the settler his hands. Ragnar hesitated, but then held his out. The two men slowly clasped hands. The moment over, Coeo fell into his seat.