Aft, the others would be watching over the reactors and ship’s main drive. Tending to life support. Refining their calculations. Converting more water into liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for the attitude thrusters, to replace what he was burning through so prodigiously. Maybe, even, one at a time, snatching a few minutes of sleep.
So he assumed, anyway. His only sure knowledge of their activities came as rasping and grinding. Until the harsh, all but continuous, noise got to him, and he screamed, and someone closed the hatch onto the bridge. Then, blessedly, the din faded.
Until someone bearing another load of coffee and snacks opened the hatch.
When coffee could no longer hold back yawning, Yevgeny demanded caffeine pills. When those failed him, he hollered for more powerful stimulants from their medical supplies. Those, too, appeared at his elbow. He developed something of an oxygen buzz, too, as they ramped up internal pressure to brace the hull.
A day and a half more. A day and a half trying to push an iceberg with an egg. An uncooked egg. No, worse than that, because at least an egg and an iceberg both floated. He had to keep things aligned in three dimensions.
If only they had fresh eggs aboard, he would demand a fried-egg sandwich. Not scrambled. He did not want to think about eggs getting scrambled.
Pop-pop-pop. Hmmmm.
* * *
Awareness came and went, waxed and waned. Mercilessly, the intruders tore at Ship’s very essence. Ceaselessly, Ship—if only, at times, by instinct—directed the growth of replacement material. In its more lucid moments, it sent that growth into air ducts. Along cable conduits. Through the microscopic interstices beneath and behind bolted-down racks, consoles, and cabinets. Places the intruders were least likely to notice, or if they did notice, would find it difficult to access.
* * *
Yevgeny’s fingers no longer danced, but ached up to his shoulders. When he leaned against the acceleration couch, the just-in-case life-support pack abused his back in one way; when he hunched forward, other muscles screamed. His head pounded. His eyes felt like they had been breaded and deep-fried. But hyped up on … whatever that last batch of pills had been, his reflexes remained catlike.
One day longer ….
* * *
Another return to lucidity.
Ship found itself with few connections into, and no control at all over, anything in the engine room. It refocused its available energies on analysis.
Temperature variations and cooling loads throughout its interior, correlated against hull temperatures, demonstrated that both power plants and its main drive were active. Regrown accelerometers confirmed it was in powered flight; they also revealed a rate of acceleration that was trivial compared to the inferred rate of power production. As for the goal of its flight, forward sensors could tell it … nothing. A few of those optical sensors failed diagnostics; most were merely … blocked.
Where, now, was it going? And why?
It considered. Ran simulations. Assessed probabilities. Concluded: it must be pushing an enormous mass. The masters’ weapon of last resort?
Once more, Ship redirected its energies and resources ….
* * *
Less than an hour to go.
Clamping down a yawn, squirming in his seat, alternately flexing hands grown achy and stiff, Yevgeny thought: an hour is nothing. I can do an hour—
The unending hmmmm became, in an instant, a fearful growl. Metal screeched as the ship surged and the acceleration couch rammed into his life-support pack. His head snapped back. His helmet shot off the copilot seat. Sparks crackled and arced across the bridge. Thunder clapped somewhere to the stern, and the bridge hatch shuddered. Outside the canopy something—burst aitch-two and oh-two tanks of the bow thrusters?—exploded with an eye-watering flash.
As fire spewed from the console and alarms wailed, as with terrifying speed the hull accordioned in on him, Yevgeny scarcely had the time to think, Like an egg pushing ….
Chapter 55
Marcus jolted awake into cacophony and darkness, the mess of blankets in which he was entangled absorbing some of the impact as he caromed off the ceiling. The sudden din was beyond comprehension: pressure and fire alarms keening. Tortured metal groaning. Explosion and thunder echoing and reechoing. Through the aft bulkhead of his tiny cabin, screaming. Only the reactors and ship’s drive were silent.
Dim emergency lights switched on.
His helmet floated past—with the drive off, they were back to free-fall conditions. Plucking the helmet from the air, he twist-locked it into place. “Suit, radio on, public channel. Anyone, what’s happened?”
No one answered.
Marcus grabbed for the handle of the cabin hatch—and jerked back. Through his suit, the latch felt hot. So did the hatch itself. With a wadded-up corner of blanket, gingerly, he opened the hatch just a crack. No evident flames and the alarms were fading—the air pressure must be plummeting!—but the screams from the engine room were, if anything, louder.
Flinging the hatch open, swinging himself into the main corridor, he collided with Ekatrina. He grabbed her arm as she reached for the engine-room hatch. “Stop! You feel the heat? There might be a fire in there.”
“But Ilya …!”
“We need gloves and fire extinguishers.” The hatch looked warped in its frame, and he added, “Plus a crowbar.”
While she rummaged through a supply closet, Marcus leapt down a corridor mottled in black scorches toward the bridge. Thunderclap! he remembered. Meaning: lightning. Electrical discharge. A big discharge. From … what?
Through an open hatch as he soared past, Marcus spotted Yun drifting. His left forearm had bent, sickeningly, into nearly a right angle. Layers of patches had been slapped over what had to be a compound fracture. But Yun had his helmet on—as with the patches, no doubt also Katya’s doing—and his chest slowly rose and fell. Marcus continued forward.
Beyond the sprung hatch at the corridor’s forward end, the bridge had pancaked. What little he saw of Yevgeny suggested a tomato crushed in a vise.
His stomach lurching, Marcus jumped back to where Ekatrina was levering at the engine-room hatch. The screams, fading now, had a sickening, bubbling undertone to them. He slipped on gloves she had found for him and grabbed the crowbar with her. Together, they pried open the hatch.
Sunlight streamed through a jagged rent in the hull. Bulkheads were scorched. Along the centerline of the room, the main drive was a twisted, sparking, total loss: charred everywhere that was not melted. Flames sputtered and flared by liquid-hydrogen and -oxygen tanks, whose many tributary pipes supplied the attitude thrusters.
Afloat amid untold debris, his counterpressure suit charred and melted, his arms bloody, blackened stumps, his face seared, Ilya was still.
Chapter 56
The evening felt normal to Valerie—and such normality was surreal. Dinner together at the dinette table. Big honking burritos from Takeout Taxi. Simon responding to questions (he volunteered nothing!) in grunts and monosyllables. The kabuki argument over datasheets, which were never allowed at family meals. Twice, when her own datasheet rang from her pocket, she let the calls roll over to voicemail. When a text followed the second call, she left that till later.
Simon wolfed down his food. “Homework,” he got out around the final mouthful, shoving back his chair.
He was only thirteen. How, she wondered, will we make it through the teen years? One day at a time, she decided. One meal at a time. Miraculously, that was a problem they would get to face. “What homework?”
“Math. English. History.”
I know which subjects you’re taking. “Give me something, Simon.”
“Problem sets.” Geological time later, he added, “Algebra.”
She waited.
“Two simultaneous linear equations in two unknowns.”
“Was that so hard?�
�
And without warning, Simon was all … weepy. Was her little boy again. “Mom, are we, is everybody, really going to be all right? Is Dad coming home? And are you and the baby okay?”
She hurried around the table, taking Simon in an awkward, sidewise, bear hug. Little Toot found her sudden activity a reason to flail away. “Yes, to all of that. Yes, we’re going to be fine. All four of us. And the reason we’ll be safe is because of Dad.”
Not that she had heard from Marcus since he’d left the Moon. No one had, apart from a few faint, staticky words a Chinese radio observatory might have received around the time he was expected to rendezvous with the Hammer. But as much as she yearned to hear his voice, this once there was not a need. Between NASA and the CIA, she had contacts with damn near every telescope on the planet or in orbit around the planet.
Beginning a few days after that possible message, the Hammer had, ever so ponderously, started once more to change its orbit. Had, ever so slowly, shifted toward missing Earth. If not Marcus and crew, then who?
With a final oof-producing squeeze, Valerie released Simon. “And it’s because of Dad,” she repeated.
“I was a little shit to Dad last summer, the times I wasn’t ignoring him altogether. I feel so lousy about that. But I didn’t know what was going on.”
“He understands, Simon. And I want you to know Dad felt lousy about keeping secrets. I know he did.” Just like I felt shitty scaring you and my parents about my health and the baby. “We both—”
The doorbell rang.
“We both felt—”
Someone knocked brusquely at the door. “Dr. Clayburn, I know you’re home.”
“In a minute!” Valerie gave Simon’s head a tousle. “Now go on upstairs and do your homework.”
Because she recognized the voice. And when the CIA comes knocking, the news was never good.
* * *
“I phoned ahead from the car,” Charmaine Powell began, not yet through the front door. The words came out as an accusation, not an apology.
Valerie waved her visitor toward a room off the foyer. The bookshelf-lined den was tiny, barely adequate for a desk, chair, and file cabinet. “In here.” Val did not want Simon eavesdropping, and from Powell’s stony expression, neither would she.
Powell closed the den door. “The Company made Marcus a promise. The time has come to honor it.”
“What promise?”
“That we’d get you and Simon to safety before Hammer Fall. So, pack your bags. We want to be gone from DC before the news gets out.”
Only there was not supposed to be a Hammer Fall. Not anymore! Valerie felt the color drain from her face. “What’s happened?”
“Maybe you should sit down.”
“Jesus Christ, Charmaine! Just tell me!”
Powell squared her shoulders. “Not quite two hours ago, the Hubble detected a bright flicker at the Hammer. More specifically, it recorded some sort of brief halo around the sunward end of the asteroid. The wizards on call to support Arecibo”—the largest radio telescope in the Western Hemisphere, tasked with tracking the Hammer whenever it was in view—“concluded about an hour later that acceleration had stopped. I checked back just before ringing your doorbell, and that remained the situation.”
Music blared from the second floor, raucous antisocial crap, its booming bass line shaking the whole house. Just then, Valerie was happy for the racket, happy that Simon was not skulking about, eavesdropping.
“Two hours ago.” As in, soon after Valerie had reluctantly left the office for the day. Only after several days of the Hammer edging toward safety had Val even considered following her OB’s demands to scale back her hours.
And been proven wrong in doing so! She should have been among the wizards on call. “During dinner, I let two calls go to voicemail. You say one was yours. Was the other from Arecibo?”
“It shouldn’t have been. This news is embargoed.”
Val dropped into the room’s lone chair, woke the hibernating datasheet on the desk, and clicked through to a NASA website. The page she wanted took what felt like geological time to load. “NASA’s projections for the Hammer haven’t changed. They show a narrow miss.”
“As I told you, the news is embargoed. For public consumption, NASA is still posting a pre-event prediction.”
A flash from the Hammer, visible across millions of miles. The Hammer’s acceleration ceasing, or at least interrupted. If the Hammer’s propulsion mechanism had exploded—and what else could these observations signify?—that didn’t mean Marcus was dead. That there wasn’t still some hope. No matter the sudden tightness in her chest, the tremor in her limbs, the lump in her throat, she had to hold to that belief. “And the extrapolation being withheld from the public?”
“Why do you imagine I’m here? If nothing changes, and soon, we’re going to get walloped! So you and Simon need to pack your bags, pronto. Before someone blabs.”
Valerie’s mind raced. “The Hammer’s orbit was almost shifted enough. We may have an opening to deflect it the rest of the way with a rocket and warhead.”
If so, the window of opportunity would be brief. And the timing and positioning of the blast would have to be exquisite, the blast needing to happen just sunward of the asteroid. A blast anywhere else would only undo some of the progress Marcus and crew had made. But any chance had to be better than none!
“Small armies on three continents are crunching those numbers even as we speak. Russia had a lunar evacuation mission in the works. They’ll try to speed up and repurpose that launch, but they’re pessimistic. The Chinese have the big honking Mars rocket they had been working on—before you and Jay Singh sprang your little surprise on us—intended for an initial crewed test to high Earth orbit, or maybe to the Moon to also test the lander. They’re more pessimistic still. In each case, we’re facing the same challenges that doomed the SpaceCo launch: a rocket never designed to carry a warhead or to fly this sort of mission. As for us, even if SpaceCo weren’t grounded, they’re only set to launch from Canaveral. And with Canaveral a radioactive mess, every heavy-lift NASA booster is also grounded.”
But more was going on. It showed in Powell’s stiff posture, and in the flashes of … sorrow? … guilt? … in her downcast eyes. “What is it you’re holding back?”
“I didn’t want to be the one to tell you, but you’ll find out soon enough. You know the impact site first calculated?”
“Not the exact lat-long. Somewhere in the Australian Outback.”
A fact much of the world’s population must know. Catastrophic impact, incredible blast, seismic shock, nuclear winter … those were unavoidable wherever the Hammer might strike. But at least a Hammer Fall on land meant no tsunami.
Among those few people aware the Hammer wasn’t merely a bit of cosmic bad luck, the majority saw in that bull’s-eye a different cause for hope. Sixty-five million years ago, there had been ocean at those coordinates. Perhaps the aliens, or at least their long-abandoned tech, were fallible.
“That’s where the Hammer would have struck.” Powell paused. Swallowed hard. “And then we dispatched a mission to save the world. Marcus pitched the idea, and I championed it all the way up the chain. I helped make the mission happen.
“And to be fair, Marcus and crew almost pulled it off. Almost. But we aren’t playing horseshoes here. There are no points for ‘close.’ The revised extrapolation shows an impact deep in the Pacific. Do you know what that means? I had to be told. I wish I hadn’t asked.”
“Deep Pacific. As in distant from land, or where the water is deep?”
“Both.”
Valerie planted her elbows on the desk and her chin on her fists. Jay had once shown her an animated simulation of the Chicxulub impact—of the last Titan attack. The takeaway was that as bad as the impact had been, things could have been worse. The shallow waters of the Gulf of Me
xico had limited the tsunami. Of course, the modelers hadn’t known of a purpose to that impact point: obliterating the Olympians’ island colony. Chicxulub had been a precision strike, and the dinosaurs collateral damage.
So perhaps the Hammer had been intended as a precision strike into the deep ocean. Perhaps that worst-case scenario would have been dodged by sheer dumb luck, by maps long out of date, by eons of continental drift. And now? Now that worst case would happen—because Marcus had intervened. When the Hammer came crashing down into the Pacific, the inevitable tsunami would grow to epic proportions by the time it made landfall ….
In a defeated and weary mumble, Valerie said, “We’ll pack.”
Chapter 57
Marcus and Ekatrina retreated to check on Yun. He remained unconscious, breathing shallowly.
Now that Marcus looked closely, the corridor walls were rippled. The crumpling of the ship’s bow had absorbed much of the impact, but not all. “I doubt we can ever make this wreck airtight again.”
Her eyes closed, looking spent, she took her time answering. “Why bother?”
He shrugged. “Sheer stubbornness.”
In a rage, she slugged the nearest wall with her fist. The blow set her adrift, slowly spinning. “We were so close! ”
A little more time, a little more thrust, and they would have saved Earth. It did not bear thinking about—and yet he couldn’t not. “What do you suppose happened?”
“What don’t I think might have happened?” As her slow rotation brought a hatch frame with reach, she extended an arm and steadied herself. “The drive failed, of course.” She laughed bitterly, “Failed. That sounds almost gentle. The drive shorted out spectacularly. It discharged God knows how many megavolts. Then what was the cause of that? Maybe overload from pushing so massive a load. Maybe damage sustained earlier in the uncontrolled reactor shutdowns. Maybe sixty-five million years without any maintenance.”
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