“Really?”
“Yes. Really. Not bad for a man who shouldn’t exist. I just hope the effort will turn out to have been worth it.”
“You’re still worried about what will happen at the other end?”
“We’re going to pop out of this tunnel much faster than the system was ever designed to deal with—like an express train hitting the buffers at full tilt.”
“You have a bunch of people at the other end, right? People like Skellsgard?”
“Yes,” she said, “but I don’t know how much good they’re going to be able to do. Even if we could warn them… but we can’t even get a message through to them. You can’t bounce signals up the pipe while there’s a ship in it. Not according to the book, anyway.”
“Won’t they have any warning at all?”
“Maybe. Skellsgard has equipment to monitor the condition of the link—but I don’t know if it’s going to be able to tell her that the link itself is collapsing. But she also told me about something called bow-shock distortion. It’s like a ripple we push ahead of ourselves, a change in the geometry of the tunnel propagating ahead of the transport. They have equipment to pick it up, so that they can tell when a ship is about to come through the portal. I think it gives them a few minutes’ warning.” Auger scratched at a crusty residue that had collected in the corner of one eye. It felt dense and geologic, hard and compacted like some mother lode of granite. “But that won’t help us,” she said. “They’ll have even less warning than usual because we’re going so much faster than we should be.”
“There must be something we can do,” Floyd said.
“Yes,” Auger said. “We can pray, and hope that the tunnel doesn’t speed us up any faster than we’re already moving. Right now we might just walk out of this alive. Any faster, and I think we’ve had it.”
“If we get to that point, would you mind not telling me? The coward in me would rather not know.”
“The coward in both of us,” Auger said. “If it’s any consolation, Floyd, it’ll be quick and spectacular.”
She checked out the numbers again. No act of denial could avoid the fact that they were now travelling thirty per cent faster than the ship she’d taken on the inbound leg of the journey. The ETA now had the total trip taking less than twenty-two hours. Of that time, about sixteen hours had already passed. And they were not getting any slower.
“Floyd,” she said, “do you want to take a break? I can fly the ship for a while.”
“In your condition? Thanks, but I think I can keep my eyes open for a few hours more.”
“Trust me: it’s going to take both of us to get this thing home.”
Floyd studied her for a moment and then nodded, relaxed his grip on the joystick and almost immediately slumped back into his couch and into a deep sleep. It was as if he had given himself permission to slip into unconsciousness, after holding it at bay for so long by a sheer act of will. Auger wondered how many hours at sea had honed that particular skill and wished him sweet dreams, assuming that he had the energy to dream. Perhaps unconsciousness would be the kindest state for both of them to be in, when the end approached.
“Find a way out of this,” she said aloud, as if that might help.
The four hours that followed were the longest she could remember. She had taken the last of the UR pills, hoping that this was the right thing to do. For the first hour, she felt a shrill, slightly unnerving clarity of mind. It was like the ringing caused by a finger circling the wet rim of a wine glass. It felt fragile and not quite trustworthy, making her wonder if she was, indeed, making the right decisions, even when they felt absolutely, unquestionably correct. When, at last, that bell-clear intensity began to dull and she started to feel foggy-headed, unable to focus on any particular problem for more than a few seconds, it came as a kind of relief. At least now she had objective evidence that her thought processes were likely to be impaired. She could factor that dullness into her activities, allowing for it wherever possible. It was, she supposed, a measure of her lessening hold on reality that she could even consider this a minor victory.
The ship was moving even faster now: fifty per cent above conventional tunnel speeds, and still accelerating. By now, Auger had enough of a grasp of the numbers to estimate their emergence speed, and the news was not cheering. They would hit the Phobos portal at twice the expected rate, and even that was likely to be an underestimate, since the rate of acceleration was itself beginning to quicken as the geometry of the pinched tunnel underwent convulsive readjustments. The apparatus in the recovery bubble would never be able to cope with that kind of momentum. The transport would smash through the arrestor cradle and the glass sphere of the bubble, then smear itself against the plasticised walls of the chamber a couple of kilometres inside Phobos. It would be a very lucky day if anyone made it out of that mess alive, let alone Auger and Floyd.
Spectacular? Hell, yes.
But the speed hurt them in other ways. The forward-looking sensors had already been damaged by tunnel collisions, but even in those areas that were not affected by blind spots, the sensors could not peer far enough ahead to give ample warning of micro-changes in the tunnel structure. Obstacles and wrinkles that the guidance system could normally have coped with—steering around them with finessed, calibrated, fuel-conserving bursts of steering thrust—now came upon the ship too quickly for it to respond in time. The ship was still managing to dodge the worst of them, but the effort was draining the steering jets at a worrying rate.
But even that was not the main thing on Auger’s mind. For a while, she did not even think about the problem of slowing down, or the bullet in her shoulder, or the Slasher activity in Paris.
She thought about Floyd, and how she was going to explain things to him.
Because with the tunnel unzipping behind them, Floyd was going to find it very difficult to make his way home. There would no longer be a hyperweb connection between Phobos and Paris; no way for him to make that return trip. Even if the two of them somehow survived the next few hours (and she preferred not to think about the odds of that), Floyd would still find himself marooned countless light-years from E2 and—more importantly—three centuries upstream in a future that didn’t even regard him as a genuine human being, rather a very detailed living and breathing copy of one… a copy of a man who had lived and died in a time when the world still had a chance to fix the mess it was in. A man so happily ordinary that he hadn’t left the faintest trace of himself in history.
Around two hours after he had slipped into unconsciousness, Floyd stirred beside her. There was no telling what had woken him: it could have been the increasingly rough ride, or the emergency klaxon that had just come on, accompanied by a recorded female voice calmly informing them that they were about to lose steering control.
“Is that as bad as it sounds?” Floyd asked.
“No,” Auger said. “It’s worse. A lot worse.”
The guidance system had depleted most of the reaction mass in the steering jets. What was left would be good for about ten minutes… at most. Less if their speed kept increasing, which it showed every intention of doing. By Auger’s reckoning, the pinch at the end of the tunnel had nearly caught up with them, and the pinch was still showing definite signs of acceleration. Maybe if she had Skellsgard’s grasp of hyperweb theory, imperfect as it was, she might have been able to explain why that was happening and how it related to the underlying metric structure of the collapsing quasi-wormhole. Not that such knowledge would have been particularly useful in any practical sense, but…
“If we can’t steer,” Floyd said, “won’t we crash into the walls? I mean, more than we’ve already been doing?”
“Yes,” Auger said. “But the system reckons that we’re only one hour from Phobos now—maybe less, depending on how much more we accelerate. There’s a faint chance that the ship might hold together long enough to get us there, even with complete loss of guidance control. Emphasis on the ‘faint.’ ”
“I won’t pencil in anything for next week.”
“It’s going to be bumpy—worse than anything we’ve experienced so far. And we’ll still have the small problem of hitting the portal at two and a half times normal tunnel speed even if we make it that far.”
“Let’s just deal with one thing at a time, shall we? That friend of yours—Skellsgard?”
“Yes,” Auger said.
“She sounded as if she knew what she was doing. She’ll find a way out of this, if we can hold together until the end.”
Poor Floyd, she thought, if only you knew what things are really like. The future might have been crammed with miracles and wonders, but it also offered truly awesome opportunities for screwing up.
“I’m sure you’re right,” she said, doing her best to sound reassuring. “I’m sure they’ll think of something.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“Final warning,” the soothing feminine voice said. “Attitude adjustment control will cease in ten… nine… eight…”
“Brace yourself, Floyd. And if you have any lucky charms, now might be the time to start sweet-talking them.”
“Attitude adjustment control is now off-line,” the voice said, with a kind of cheery resignation.
For a deceptive ten or twenty seconds, the ride became dreamily smooth again. It was as if they had tobogganed off the edge of a cliff into the absolute stillness of midair.
“Hey,” Floyd started to say, “that’s not too—”
Then they hit something, the side of the ship grazing hard against the tunnel wall. It was a bigger jolt than anything they had experienced so far. They felt and heard an awful wrench as something large and metallic was plucked from the hull. Floyd grabbed the joystick and tried to correct their trajectory, but nothing he did had any effect on the oozing contours of the stress-energy display.
“It’s useless,” Auger said, with a stoic calm that even she found surprising. “We’re in uncontrolled flight now.” To emphasise this point, she released her own dead joystick and folded back the control console. “Just sit back and enjoy the ride.”
“You’re going to give up that easily? What if there’s still some fuel left in the tanks?”
“This isn’t a war film, Floyd. When the system says zero, it means it.”
After the first collision, there was another hiatus as the transport rebounded to the other side of the tunnel. Auger still kept an eye on the grid and the cascading numbers. The ship’s nose was beginning to point away from the direction of forward motion. There was going to be another bad jolt when they—
The impact came sooner than she had anticipated. It slammed through her like an electrical shock, snapping her jaw shut. She bit her tongue, tasted blood in her mouth. Warning lights flashed all around the cockpit. One of the surviving klaxons came on, barking a two-tone scream into her skull. Another taped voice—it sounded suspiciously like the same woman—said, “Caution. Safe design limits for outer-hull integrity have now been exceeded. Structural failure is now a high likelihood event.”
“Hey, lady!” Floyd said. “Tell us something we don’t know!”
But Auger had no idea how to turn off the automated voice messages. Almost as soon as the first one had ended, another chimed in, informing them that safe radiation limits for the crew had now been exceeded.
Then they hit again, and rebounded, and hit again, and then the nose of the transport came around through sixty degrees, so that the next kick imparted a sickening roll to their motion, which only became worse with the next collision. With each rotation, Auger was pushed into her seat and then dragged out of it, her entire body straining against the webbing. The wound in her shoulder, numb for hours, now began to reassert its presence. The stress-energy contours were flowing too fast to read, the interpretive system just as confused as Auger. Not that it made a damned bit of difference. When you had lost all control, flying blind was almost a mercy.
Something else was ripped away from the hull with a squeal of tortured metal. She felt a pop in her skull as the air pressure suddenly notched down.
“We just lost—” She did not have time to complete her sentence. Air shrieked out of the cabin, becoming thinner with every breath. Through blurred eyes, she saw Floyd’s panicked expression as his body was buffeted to and fro by the same cartwheeling motion that was shoving her in and out of her seat. She struggled to reach her good arm up, feeling as if she had to push a boulder out of the way. Her hand closed around the striped yellow toggle of the emergency mask hatch. She pulled it down, cursing the system that should have dropped the mask automatically. She pressed the hard plastic of the mask to her face and took a cold and instantly reinvigorating breath.
She motioned for Floyd to do the same and waited impatiently while he located his mask and slipped it on gratefully. “Can you hear me?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said at last, but his voice sounded thin and distant.
“The blow-out’s stabilised. I think we’re down to about a third of normal operating pressure. We’ll need to keep—”
The words were jolted away from her as the careering, tumbling ship smashed itself against the wall again. She heard more chunks of hull ripping away. Most of the displays were by now either dead or showing nothing comprehensible. Auger tried to focus on the ETA, but even that kept changing, varying by tens of minutes with each rotation as the ship reinterpreted its tunnel speed. Another jolt followed, sending a compression wave up her backbone that whiplashed her skull against the back of the seat.
She blacked out for an instant, drifting back to consciousness through a bloody haze of red-tinged tunnel vision. Her hands seemed impossibly distant and ineffectual, anchored to her body by the thinnest of threads. Her thoughts were foggy, unfocused. She was dreaming this, surely? No, she wasn’t: she was in it. But even the prospect of imminent death had lost some of its edge now. Perhaps blacking out really wasn’t such a bad option after all…
She looked at Floyd and saw his head lolling from one side of the chair to the other as the ship rotated. His mouth was open, as if in a gasp of ecstasy or dread. His eyes were narrow, pink-tinged slits and fresh blood seeped from beneath his bandage.
Floyd was out cold.
The ship kept tumbling; tumbling and crashing and slowly dying. Auger tried to press herself more tightly into her seat, clutching the armrests and stiffening her torso against the padded back. From a distance, as if from another room, a woman’s voice said, “Warning. Final approach to portal in progress. Final approach to portal in progress. Please ensure all systems are stowed and all crew members are braced for deceleration procedure. Failure to comply…”
“Please shut the fuck up,” Auger said, and then prayed for unconsciousness.
The jolting and buffeting reached a climax. There was an instant—it couldn’t have lasted more than two or three seconds—when it seemed completely impossible that either the ship or its fragile human cargo would survive the next few heartbeats. The rapidity and severity of the collisions were just too severe.
But the end never came.
The tumbling continued, but—with the exception of the occasional thud or bump—the brutal collisions ceased. Even the tumbling settled down, becoming regular and almost tolerable. Once again, it was as if the transport had sailed off the edge of a precipice and was now in a deceptive free fall: a spiteful remission from the damaging impacts that were bound to resume at any moment.
But they didn’t.
“Numbers,” Auger mumbled through a bloodied, swollen tongue.
But the numbers told her nothing. The ship had finally become blind and senseless, unable to assemble any coherent picture of its surroundings. A change in the tunnel geometry, Auger thought—that was the only thing that could explain what had just happened. The collapse process must have somehow caused the end of the tunnel near the throat they were approaching to swell wider, increasing the diameter of the tunnel so that the transport had much further to travel between impacts with
the sides.
She could think of no other explanation. They had certainly not undergone the crushing deceleration that would have been necessary to halt them within the recovery bubble. And they were still tumbling. The ship hadn’t been caught or snared or arrested by anything.
But the tunnel would have had to swell ludicrously wide. They hadn’t suffered a serious impact for at least two minutes, just those minor knocks. Had the picture changed so dramatically that those were, in fact, the glancing impacts? Had the tunnel walls become softer somehow, better able to absorb the collisions?
Another thud, and then something even stranger: a drumlike pitter-patter of tinier thuds, like rain.
Then nothing.
Floyd made a groaning noise. “I wish those elephants would stop sitting on my head,” he said.
“Are you all right? What do you remember?”
“I remember thinking I needed a new career.” He touched the side of his head, straining to hold up his hand against the centrifugal effect of their tumbling motion. “Are we dead yet, or is it just me who feels that way?”
“We’re not dead,” she answered. “But I don’t know why not. We haven’t had a major collision for a few minutes, but we’re still spinning.”
“I noticed. You have a theory for this state of affairs?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing that makes any sense.”
It was, she realised, very quiet. The ship made little creaking and groaning sounds, but there were no klaxons blaring, no pre-recorded voices announcing impending disaster. It was exactly as if they were tumbling through…
“Can you make sense of those numbers?” Floyd asked, interrupting her train of thought.
“No,” she said. “The ship hasn’t got a clue where it is. What it’s showing would only make sense if we’d left the portal behind. Which, obviously—”
“Maybe if we opened the window shields, we might have a better idea,” Floyd suggested.
“You open those windows in mid-tunnel, you’ll be wearing dark glasses for the rest of your life.”
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