“Not much.” She was scrabbling in one of the utility drawers and came out with a lantern. “Grab an e-suit and some air tanks. We’re leaving.”
“To go where?”
“The shuttle.”
THE HAWKSBILL WASN’T designed for convenience. The shuttle bay was down in cargo, which could receive life support, but seldom did. It depended on what the ship was hauling. Collingdale slipped into an e-suit, activated it, and pulled on a pair of air tanks. Kellie led the way through the airlock and down into the bowels of the ship.
“Power’s off here,” she said.
“What about the shuttle?”
“No way to know until we get there.”
He hadn’t had to move in a zero-gee environment in a long time, but the technique came back quickly. They passed along wire mesh, down a dark corridor, through the cavernous space in which Marge’s equipment had been stored, and crossed into the lower cargo section, which also served as the launch bay for the shuttle. The bulkheads were filled with equipment for working outside, laser cutters, wrenches, gauges, coils of cable, and with go-packs as well as more air tanks.
The shuttle rested atop its dock. She activated it with a remote. To his relief, lights came on, and the engine began to purr. She opened the hatch, but before they climbed in she aimed the remote at the airlock and pressed it.
Nothing happened.
“Door doesn’t work,” she said. “Hold on a second.”
He followed her across the bay. “You’ll have to open it manually,” he said.
“My thought exactly.” She sounded annoyed. Nevertheless, he found the wall panel before she did.
“Here,” he said.
She opened it and extracted the handle. He stepped in beside her and pulled it down. The inner doors irised open. They repeated the process, and an outer door rolled into the overhead.
He looked out at a river of dust and gas. It was one of the jets, streaming past, close enough to touch. The omega itself filled the sky behind them.
“It’s on top of us,” he said.
“Come on.” Kellie stayed cool. She moved through the weightless environment like a dancer, soared into the shuttle, and urged him to hurry.
Collingdale was no slouch either, and he climbed in quickly beside her and shut the hatch. And saw immediately the look on her face. “What’s wrong?”
“No power in the dock.” She rolled her eyes. “Should have realized.” She opened up again and got out. Collingdale needed a moment to understand. The shuttle was secured to its launch platform.
He jumped out behind her. “Has to be a manual release here somewhere.”
“I don’t see it.”
The airlock was filling with mist. “Time’s up,” she said. She broke away from the shuttle, grabbed two pairs of air tanks from the bulkhead, and floated one his way.
“What’s this for?” he asked. They were already wearing tanks.
“Extras,” she said. “We’re going to be out there for a while.” She pulled a go-pack over her shoulders.
“Kellie, what are you doing?”
“We’re leaving.”
“What? No! You can’t possibly get clear in that.”
“It’s all we have. We can’t stay here.”
“They don’t even know we’re in trouble.”
“They’ll know our signal’s been cut off.”
He took a last desperate look for the manual release, did not see it, concluded it was in the bulkhead somewhere, thought how they should have taken more time to familiarize themselves with the ship, and turned back to her. The cloud was literally coming in the open airlock. Coming after him.
“It’s not fast enough,” he said. The go-pack. “You can’t outrun it in that.”
She apparently had lost all interest in arguing. She grabbed his shoulder and pushed him toward the exit, simultaneously shoving the go-pack into his midsection. But it was hopeless.
In that terrible moment, he realized suddenly, as if everything that had gone before had been simply a problem to be solved, that there was no solution. That he was going to die.
All that remained was to choose the method.
“Get out, Kellie,” he said, and pulled away from her. He went back through the doorway and into the lower cargo section.
“What are you doing, Dave?” she demanded.
He found her lamp floating near the shuttle, turned it on, and began to search through the equipment.
“What are you looking for?”
“A laser cutter.” And there they were, three of them, neatly stored side by side above a utility shelf at the dock. “Get as far away as you can,” he said. He held the cutter up where she could see it and started for the engine room.
Her eyes widened. She understood perfectly what he had decided. She pleaded with him over the circuit, threatened him, told him he was a damned idiot. He wished her luck, told her he was sorry, and shut down all channels.
That would end it. She’d give up and do what she could to save herself. Through the airlock with an extra set of air tanks but a go-pack that wouldn’t be able to take her far enough fast enough to outrun the cloud. Or to outrun what he was about to do.
He regretted that. In those last minutes he regretted a lot of things.
CARRYING THE LAMP and the laser, he hurried through the lower decks and the airlock they’d left open and emerged at last on the bridge. Here and there lights still worked, and the electronic systems were trying to come back. Once, the artificial gravity took hold, throwing him to the deck. Then it was gone again. Moments later, he thought he heard Bill’s voice, deep in the ship.
Somewhere, a Klaxon began to sound.
He needed the remote, but he’d left it below in cargo. Or maybe Kellie still had it. There was usually a spare, and he searched through the storage cabinets for it. But he didn’t see one. Well, he’d have to do without. Find another way. He ducked out of the bridge and headed aft.
He’d lived on the Hawksbill for two months, but the ship had changed in some subtle way. These dark corridors, with their shadows and their silence, were unfamiliar, places he’d never been before.
He caught another burst of gravity, stumbled, rolled, and came up running. Not bad for an old guy. Then it died again.
He could hear the sound of hatches closing. Sealing off compartments.
He had to open one, and then a second, to get into the engine room. They both closed automatically behind him.
The good news was that the lights were on and the jump engines had power. The fusion unit was down, dark, silent, useless. But that didn’t matter. He had what he needed.
He felt oddly calm. Almost happy. He might not succeed in damaging the cloud, but he’d strike a blow. Make it recognize he was there.
And he wondered if, somewhere deeper than his conscious mind had been able to go, he had foreseen this eventuality, had almost planned it. It accounted for his intense interest in the Hawksbill, his drive to have Julie explain everything.
The possibility strengthened his resolve, suggested that he would be successful after all, that there was something at work here greater than he knew. A destiny, of sorts. He didn’t believe in such nonsense, and yet now, in these final moments, it was a possibility to which he could cling.
He found the manual controls and flicked them on. Watched lights come up. He told it to activate the engines. Go to jump.
A voice, not Bill’s, responded. “Unable to comply. The unit is not charged.”
“Override all injunctions.”
“Unable to comply.”
“This is Juliet Carson. Override.”
“Please enter code.”
Well, he’d expected it. But the system was designed to prevent tinkering, and not outright sabotage.
There was an explosion up front somewhere. Near the bridge.
He aimed the laser cutter, ignited it, and took a long look at the engine. The design of these things hadn’t changed much since his day.
He applied the torch to the metal and prayed for time. Cut through the outer housing. Cut through the protective shell. Get to the junction box, the same device that had failed in the fusion engines.
It was hard work because he needed the lamp to see into the housing. So he had to use a hand to hold the lamp, and a hand to hold the cutter, and a hand to keep from floating away.
But finally he was in.
And it was simply a matter of removing the flow control, and power would pass into the system and start the jump process. Or in this case, because the protective bubble wasn’t adequately charged, it would release some antimatter fuel and blow the ship into oblivion. Maybe, if he was extraordinarily lucky, it would find a vulnerable spot in whatever system controlled the cloud. And put it out of action, too.
It wasn’t much of a chance, but it could happen.
He thought of calling Kellie, of telling her how sorry he was, of letting her know it was moments away. But it would be better not to. More compassionate. Let it come as a surprise.
He would have preferred to wait until he got deeper into the cloud. But he had no way of knowing when the power would fail altogether. And then he’d have nothing.
Another Klaxon started, and shut down. He sliced the flow control.
LIBRARY ENTRY
Sometime within the next few days, the civilization which refers to itself as Korbikkan, which we call Goompah, will be wiped out. The omega will collide with their world and devastate its handful of cities while we sit watching placidly.
So far, there is no word of any serious action being taken on their behalf, no indication we have planned anything except to try a decoy, and if that doesn’t work, which it clearly won’t, we’ll make it rain, and then claim we tried to help. The problem is that the effort, such as it is, is being run by the usual bureaucrats.
It’s too late for the Goompahs, I am sorry to say. And the day is coming when another crowd of bureaucrats of the same stripe will be charged with rescuing us from the same unhappy result. It gives one pause.
— Carolyn Magruder Reports
UNN broadcast
Monday, December 8, 2234
chapter 43
On the ground at Roka.
Monday, December 8.
DIGGER HAD JUST finished inserting a projector under the roof overhang of a shop that sold fish when the news came.
“They’re off the circuit.” Julie’s voice. “All channels.”
It was probably just a transmitter glitch. But a terrible fear clawed at him. He should have refused to let her go. He’d known from the beginning that he should have kept her away from that thing. He could have simply raised so much hell that they’d have backed off. If Collingdale wanted to go, let him go. But let Bill take him. Why did he have to have Kellie along?
“Digger? Do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t mean there’s a major problem.”
“I know.” He was standing on top of a storage box, and he didn’t want to come down. Didn’t want to move. “Pick us up,” he said. “I’ll get Whit.”
Whit tried to be reassuring, thing like this you always think the worst, she’s a good pilot. They decided where they’d meet, and Digger passed the word to Julie. An hour later they were back on the Jenkins, leaving orbit.
THE RUN OUT to the cloud took four hours. It was a frantic four hours for Digger, who tried tirelessly to raise the Hawksbill, and for the others, who didn’t know what to say to him.
When they arrived in its vicinity, they found the box kite, cruising quietly ahead of the omega, gradually pulling away from the giant. Bill reported that he was in contact with the surveillance packages the Hawksbill had been using to monitor the omega.
“But I do not see the Hawksbill itself,” he added.
There was no wreckage, no indication what could have happened.
They must have gotten too close.
Each of them, in turn, said much the same thing. Even Digger admitted the ship was lost, had to be lost, no other explanation for it. Yet he could not believe Kellie was gone. She was too smart. Too alive.
“They’d have let us know if they were in trouble, wouldn’t they?” he demanded of Julie.
“Maybe they didn’t have time. Maybe it happened too quickly.”
For a while, they lived with the hope that the cloud was between them and the Hawksbill, that it had somehow blocked off the ship’s transmissions as it was now preventing a visual sighting. But Digger knew the truth of it, although he would not accept it, as if refusing to do so kept her chances alive. He walked through the ship in a state of shock.
Julie invited him onto the bridge, tried to find things for him to do. In his heart he damned Collingdale, and damned Hutchins for sending him.
He could not have told anyone what time of day it was, or whether they were actively searching or just going through the motions, or whether there was anyplace left to look. He listened to Bill’s reports, negative, negative, to Marge and Whit talking in whispers, to Julie talking with Bill and maybe sending off the news to Broadside.
And he became aware that they were waiting for him to say the word, to recognize that there was no way the Hawksbill could be intact without their knowing, that it was hopeless, but that they would not stop looking until he told them to do so.
There was always a chance they were in the shuttle, he told himself. The shuttle could easily be hidden among all the jets and dust and shreds and chunks of cloud, its relatively weak radio signal blown away by the electrical activity in the area.
It was possible.
THE FIRST INDICATION there might be something out there came in the form not of a radio signal, but, incredibly, of a sensor reading of a small metal object, glimpsed briefly and then lost.
“Metal,” said Julie. “It was small.”
“The shuttle?”
“Smaller than that.”
The return of hope was somehow painful. He could lose her again.
“Where?” demanded Digger.
“Hold on.” The area around the cloud was a vast debris field.
Bill drew a vector. “Somewhere along that line.”
They picked it up again. “I believe,” said the AI, “it’s a set of air tanks.”
Air tanks? Then somebody was attached to them, right?
“Negative,” said Bill. “Tanks only.”
They tracked them and took them on board. Saw the Hawksbill label on the shoulder strap. Noted that they were exhausted.
“They’re out there,” said Digger. Julie nodded. Empty tanks meant someone had used them for six hours, then discarded them. You only did that if you had a spare set of tanks.
At least one of them was still afloat.
They checked the time: ten and a half hours since the signal had been lost. Six hours to a set of tanks.
How many spares could you carry?
Then Bill announced he’d picked up a radio signal.
KELLIE BURST INTO tears when they hauled her inside. Tough, stoic, always in control, she let them remove her tanks and go-pack and shut off the suit, and she made no effort to restrain her emotions. Her right arm was broken, and she had a few torn ligaments and a bunch of bruises, but she was alive and that was all that mattered.
She smiled weakly at Digger and told Bill she wished he were human so she could kiss him.
Bill promptly appeared, his younger, lean, devil-may-care version, with dark hair and dark skin and dark eyes that literally flashed.
“He’s gone,” she said of Collingdale. “He stayed with the Hawksbill.” She explained how it had lost power, how Collingdale had refused to abandon it, had decided they couldn’t survive, that he would ride it inside the cloud and detonate the Hazeltines.
“It doesn’t look as if he did any lasting damage,” said Whit.
“No,” agreed Bill. “The cloud will make its rendezvous with Lookout.”
Julie looked puzzled. “How’d you get clear? Of the blast and the
cloud? You couldn’t have done it with that.” She was looking at the go-pack.
Whit handed her a painkiller, and they were taking her back to the med station.
“There was a plume,” she said. “A jet stream. It only took a few minutes to get to it, and it blew me out of the neighborhood pretty quick.” She looked at her arm. “That’s where I took the damage.”
ARCHIVE
The gulfs between the stars overwhelm us, as the eons overwhelm our paltry few years of sunlight. We are cast adrift on an endless sea, to no purpose, with no destination, bound where no one knows.
— Dmitri Restov
Last Rites
LIBRARY ENTRY
Mary,
I’m sorry to tell you that we lost David this morning. We all admired him, and everyone here shares your grief. I’m sure you’ll be receiving official notification from the Academy in a few days.
It might console you to know that he died heroically, in the best of causes. His action here appears to have thrown the omega off schedule and thereby bought some time. It’s likely that many who would have been lost at the Intigo will survive as a result of your fiancé’s efforts.
— Julie Carson
December 8
PART FIVE
lykonda
chapter 44
Near Avapol.
Friday, December 12.
THE SKY WAS blanketed by Marge’s rain clouds. Three of her chimneys were up and running. The fourth would be erected that night on an island forty klicks off the west coast, midway between Mandigol and Sakmarung. Over the last two days, no one in Hopgop or Roka, or in the four cities located in the center of the isthmus, had seen the sun, the stars, or the apparition.
It was still visible from T’Mingletep and Savakol in the south, and from Saniusar in the far north. There, the Goompahs watched the omega grow visibly larger each night. It filled their sky, a terrifying vision, grim and churning and lit within by demon-fire.
Digger sat, concealed within his lightbender, in a pavilion in the middle of a rainswept park. The park was deserted, as were the surrounding streets. Whit was out positioning projectors. He’d gotten good at it, and obviously enjoyed the work.
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