The Collapsium (37 page)

The backup thrusters hummed; hundreds of tiny, temporary channels through the wellstone outer hull, accelerating heavy oxygen ions, one by one, to relativistic speeds. This, too, was probably illegal: an exhaust much deadlier than the typical fusion helium, and deadlier at a much greater range, too. They could probably cook a human from a light-second away.

“Thirty s-s-seconds to closest approach,” Muddy warned.

“Hmm. Here we go, then.”

“It’s been an honor working with you, sir.”

“Likewise,” Deliah chipped in.

“Oh, nonsense. I couldn’t have done any of this alone. We all have the greatest respect for each other, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Twenty seconds.”

He became acutely aware of his breathing. He wondered if it was loud, if it maybe should be a little slower and quieter.

“Ten seconds. Five. Four, three, two …”

And then, suddenly, there it was in the window above them—a long, slender piece glowing brightly with the familiar Cerenkov blue. The ertial shield hadn’t twitched in the slightest, hadn’t reacted at all. The collapsium itself seemed similarly unaffected, not falling in on itself in their wake or anything. They continued past, seeing more and more of it, the fragment growing longer and dimmer and loopier in the window view. Then the last of it trailed by, and they were in clear space again.

“Backup thrusters off,” Muddy said. The humming stopped.

Deliah let a long breath out. “That wasn’t so bad.”

“No,” Bruno agreed. Not bad at all. Some day, he’d have to work out the theory of it all, the precise interactions between
collapsium and hypercollapsite. The weak link was surely the collapsium, it being so much less dense, so much more subject to gravity and inertia and the various other interactions of the zero-point field. His fear had been the crushing of its lattice, and its resulting reversion to a chain of heavy, disconnected, uncontrollable hypermasses capable of all sorts of harm. But perhaps the two could live together in harmony after all. At half a kilometer’s distance, anyway!

“Platform contact in two minutes,” Muddy said. He seemed to enjoy counting down event times—a task at once useful and easy and safe.

“Good,” Bruno acknowledged. “Can we have the telescope image back?”

Wordlessly, Muddy reached for his interface. The window reappeared, now showing a much larger, more detailed version of what they’d seen before. The dome was there, and the mirrored tents beneath it. Now there were other things visible as well: light-energy conversion panels with cables running across the diamond deck until they slipped under the edges of superreflective cloth. Discs of various color arranged in neat rows outside the tents, as if occupied in some sort of experiment. And one image that was both horrifying and uplifting: the blackened, burned skeleton of a human being. Horrifying because, well, it was the blackened, burned skeleton of a human being. Uplifting because there was only one. Had the survivors dragged a fallen comrade outside, to burn rather than rot? It lent credence to the idea that there
were
survivors down there.

“My God,” Deliah said.

That initial view had been oblique, almost edge-on, so it was difficult to make out any telling details as the platform turned away, turned its other, blank side to face them.

Now the shipwreck as well betrayed new details; he could clearly make out the lines of an airlock in its iron skin, and a seam where two plates had warped apart. There was a neat, circular hole through the side, too, down low where it was
nearly hidden by shadow. As the platform revolved—and grew, for they were approaching it rapidly—he could see a matching hole down low on the ship’s other side.

He experienced an instant chilling of the blood. He’d seen holes like that before, in the ruins of Sykes Manor. Holes created by a weapon, a nasen beam. That ship hadn’t
crashed
onto the platform, hadn’t limped its way here and quietly expired; it had been
murdered
in the very act of rescue!

“This is a trap,” he said, as coolly and evenly as possible. “Someone is watching the platform, waiting to pick off any ship that approaches.”

“My God!” Deliah squawked, with much greater conviction.

“I knew it!” Muddy wailed, suddenly tearful again. “I knew I’d get us killed! Declarant-Philander, there’s nothing we can do! No place else to grapple to, not in the time allotted!”

“To the collapsium fragment above us?” Bruno suggested quickly.

“No!” Deliah said. “It’s muon-contaminated—it’ll come apart in seconds.”

“We
will
rendezvous with the platform,” Muddy insisted. “Nothing can prevent that now, no matter what we grapple to. Inertia can only be bent so far.”

Bruno pounded a fist into his palm. “Blast it, a nasen beam isn’t easy to aim! How’s our oxygen supply?”

“Fine, sir,” Muddy wearily replied.

“Good. Set your thrusters on a program of random firing. Stay on trajectory, but let our arrival time float, plus or minus a few seconds. That may confuse the targeting mechanisms. They don’t have to miss us by much, so long as they miss us!”

Soon, an annoyingly staccato hum commenced in the outer hull. As before, no sense of motion resulted from it.

“Where is this nasen beam?” Deliah wanted to know.

Bruno shrugged. “I couldn’t say. On a ship, probably, and not too near, or we’d’ve detected it already. It
could
be quite distant, in which case it likely wouldn’t fire until we’d matched
courses with the platform. A known position—you see?—regardless of light-lag delays. If we complete our rescue quickly, the beam’s … controller may not realize we’re gone until after it’s fired.”

“Thirty seconds to contact,” Muddy whined. “I’m
scared
, Bruno. I don’t want to do this!”

“Turn us!” Bruno shot back, with sudden inspiration. “Make sure our hatch is facing the dome! And try to hit as close to the dome’s base as possible, without endangering the neutronium cladding. It’s all right to hit a little harder, just be sure we
stick
when we hit, so we can start melting through immediately. This is for your safety, Muddy; as you say, we
will
hit.”

“Ten seconds. Oh, God, can’t we just let them die?”

The impact was sudden and severe; Bruno was thrown against his restraints and slammed back into his couch again. Muddy shrieked, and even Deliah cried out in distress.

Bruno’s own fear was a brusque, impatient business. He was frustrated, more than a little bit angry at being forced to such extremity, and there was a substantial part of his mind that dreamily refused to believe any of this was happening at all. His thoughts, such as they were, were focused on Tamra. In those hurried moments as he threw off his harness and leaped for the door, his own safety concerned him mainly to the extent that it was linked with hers—he couldn’t very well save her if he got himself killed. So he moved very quickly until he was poised to open the door, then froze in place.

He welcomed the sizzling sound when it began; this wellstone chemistry would get him through to Her Majesty as quickly and safely as possible.

Muddy continued wailing. Hugo mewled. Deliah, rising from her own couch, asked, “Is there anything I should be doing right now?”

Bruno, in his singularly single-minded state, ignored them all. “Ship,” he said, as another inspiration struck, “are your grapples still locked on Venus?”

“Negative,” the ship replied. “The rotation of the platform makes that impossible.”

“What’s the largest object handy? The sun? Obviously, yes. Can you lock onto that?”

“Intermittently,” the ship agreed.

“Good. Do it, and engage the grapples as soon as possible. This platform is damned heavy, but with the ertial shield we may be able to drag it out of place. At least a little. Perhaps a little is all we need. Now then, please paint a line on the interior to mark the thickness and position of the dome.”

“Instruction unclear,” the ship replied apologetically.

Blast it, his old house had been well accustomed to halfnonsense commands like that. “Paint a line, you! Show me where the dome is, the edge of the dome against your hull!”

“Like this?”

A pinkish red area the size of Bruno’s torso appeared on the inner surface of the hatch. Was this what he wanted? He waited for a moment and verified that yes, indeed, the circle was growing. Soon it became a hollowed-out oval, roughly as deep as Bruno’s hand and encircling an area as large as his body. It swelled outward slowly as the side of the ship sank its way in through the diamond structure of the dome.

“When this completely encircles the hatch,” he said, pointing to the pink line, “stop burrowing and await further instructions. I’m going to open this door and exit the ship. Er, exit
you
. When I come back in and close the door, break contact immediately and take us out of here. Let the dome decompress, and just grapple to anything you like. If there’s no target handy, use the backup thrusters.”

“Understood, sir.”

The outside of the painted line advanced past the corners of the hatchway. The inside of the line soon followed, leaving the hatchway completely clear. The sizzling sound switched off; the door was fully inside the dome, and so, with hardly a thought in his head, Bruno threw the latches back and heaved the door open, then leaped out.

Sunlight struck him like a physical blow. There is heat, he
had time to think, and there is
heat
. Solar energy at fourteen thousand watts per square meter—ten times Earth normal—was something the body had no immediate response for. It was exactly like being thrown into a fire; his eyes pinched closed of their own accord, his hair singed and crisped and smoked on his scalp, and he collapsed immediately to the di-clad neutronium deck, thrashing and gasping. Fortunately, the deck was relatively cool, and his shirt and tights—which were cream colored and fairly reflective—had some minimal climate-control capabilities that saturated right around the time his sweat glands finally opened up and began pouring out rivers of lukewarm saline. These factors helped keep him from more serious injury for the six seconds it took the sun to “set” behind the platform’s edge.

He heard voices nearby. “It
is
a ship; look!” “What’s that door doing there? Who is that? That’s not a robot; that’s a man!” “My God, I think he stepped out in the daylight.”

Bruno sat up and, to his surprise, let out a very undignified scream. “Ow! Ow! Goddamn it, that hurts!” His face and hands felt sunburned already, and his eyes, when he opened them, were blinded by sweat and huge, glowing blobs of color.

“Sir?” a voice said, now just a meter or two away. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Bruno said, though this was far from certain. Once again, his thoughts settled on Tamra. He picked himself up. “Bruno de Towaji, at Her Majesty’s service.”

His vision began to clear slightly, and the burning of his skin eased somewhat as the air began to cool. His sweat-soaked clothes began to feel heavy and cold, which was wonderful. He looked around. In the glow of wellstone lights set around the dome’s perimeter, he saw four shiny tents surrounded by solar collectors and neat rows of scorched, plastic discs the size of dart boards. Various charred debris—shoes and hats and crumbly brown scrolls of paper—littered the deck around him. Nearby was the skeleton he’d seen, and a little ways off, in the lee of a tent, was another skeleton he
hadn’t. And immediately surrounding him, crowding right up against him, were four figures dressed head to toe in suits of thick, silver-white cloth that left only their faces exposed. He took each of them in with a hurried glance.

It’d been a long time. The first face he identified as belonging to Wenders Rodenbeck, the playwright-cum-lawyer. The second—identified more by his hulking body than his Asian features—was the policeman Cheng Shiao. The third was one of Tamra’s courtiers, the woman named Tusité. Hardest of all was the fourth, a quite familiar-looking young lady. She had the same copper eyes and sandalwood skin as young Vivian Rajmon, and with a start he realized it
was
Vivian, grown up nearly all the way.

But where was Tamra? Putting all else out of his mind, he pointed to the open hatchway of his ship, which hung ridiculously outside the dome, like some shiny, barrel-shaped lamprey. “This way,” he said. “Climb aboard, and quickly. I’ll assist Her Majesty. Where is she?”

Cheng Shiao stepped forward and grabbed Bruno firmly by the elbow. “Philander,” he said in quick, precise tones, “it is my sad duty to inform you that Her Majesty gave her life in the effort to save others. Let’s away from this place, quickly. You’re in terrible danger.”

Bruno felt as though he’d been slammed in the chest with a croquet mallet. “What? What? Instruction unclear. What did you say?”

Shiao’s face was grimly serious. “Her Majesty Queen Tamra-Tamatra Lutui, in the person of her last known copy, is dead. I’m more sorry than you know, Philander.”

He said some other stuff after that, various irrelevancies about ships and danger and impending death, none of which registered on Bruno. If not for Shiao’s firm grip on his elbow, he’d have sunk to the deck and stayed there, waited for the sun to come and burn him away. But Shiao’s grip didn’t compromise, didn’t allow him to fall. He was dragged back toward the waiting ship and pulled through the hatch.

Only when the hatch was closed, and
Sabadell-Andorra
broke contact with the platform’s dome and lurched toward the sun at a thousand-gee acceleration, and the sickening inertial imbalances caused Shiao to lose equilibrium …

Only then was Bruno de Towaji permitted to faint.

Of historical note is the fact that within milliseconds of Bruno’s head striking the edge of the fireplace, a nasen beam passed through the diamond cladding of the platform, breaching it. The resulting neutronium spill eradicated all traces of the structure itself, including the bones of one Tamra-Tamatra Lutui, and had the
Sabadell-Andorra
been propelled by any of the technologies that were standard at the time, there is little doubt that
it
would have been eradicated as well.