The Collapsium (41 page)

Vivian gave an absent nod. “Yes, that’s what Mother said. But couldn’t he just, you know, create his own moment of peace? Why should he need to take Grammy’s? When I was older, I think I would wake up sometimes, wondering if that God of hers were looming over
me
, ready to steal my dreams or my morning breath or something. What a puny motive! He doesn’t get to do much of that anymore, and I’m glad about it.
History’s greatest thug; phooey, I disown him! The day I stand at his throne I’ll place him under arrest; I swear I will.” She cast a gloomy look at the bloodstained deck. “Rest in peace, Wenders Rodenbeck. Rest, all the victims of this atrocity.”

And there was other talk as well: Was Declarant Sykes still looking for them? Should they attempt to render the ship invisible? That wouldn’t work, of course—it’d simply let the sunlight through, to poach all the remaining people inside.

Bruno’s grief had now become unbearable; finally it commanded his attention. He ignored the whole discussion, simply throwing an arm over his face and weeping, weeping, his tears seeming to come from an endless reservoir somewhere. He’d been powerless, all those years ago, to save Enzo and Bernice de Towaji when the Old Girona Bistro fell down on them. He
knew
they were dying in there,
knew
there was time to save them if only, if only … And so, today, had he been helpless to save Wenders. And Tamra, yes—how very grievously he’d failed
her
! Perhaps he was, quite simply, powerless after all. Perhaps all his deeds and accomplishments were so much illusion, just chance and foolish self-deception. It seemed a plausible enough notion, at that moment.

“What do we do with the … body?” someone asked.

“It seems to have gelled. Look, it’s a solid mass. Weird. Into the fax with it, I’d say.”

“I’ll do it. Here.”

“Oh, God! Oh, God! Save us! Hasn’t there been enough? Deposit us in some safe location before you dash off on this mission!” That sounded like Tamra’s friend Tusité. Bruno forgave her the outburst; Tamra surrounded herself with all manner of silly people, but very few of them were
weak
. It didn’t imply weakness, to bend and break under the strain of these events. Indeed, quite the reverse—it was only
human
, part of the basic mammalian wiring, to feel terrified when helpless. And to grieve for one’s Queen, yes, as for no other thing except, perhaps, one’s own children.

He wanted to comfort her. He wanted to be comforted. He wanted comfort, period. But he sensed, he knew, that no
one would have anything to offer but their own grief, and perhaps some platitudes.
Such a tragedy. We all loved her so well and so personally, each in our own way
. How trite! How monstrous! Platitudes existed for this very purpose; to underscore the dreary, hopeless banality of human suffering. Should he carve a pyramid with his bare hands? Circumnavigate a world? Would that
help
? Even for himself, he had no words or thoughts of wisdom, only platitudes.

And then Muddy’s voice spoke up. “There
are
no s-s-safe places, madam, and no chance to look for them if there were. Time is of the essence if we’re to foil this … madman’s plot.”

That
got on Bruno’s nerves: Muddy’s tone was, as ever, grating and whiny and filled with terrified self-pity. And yet, there he was, acting to save the Queendom while Bruno himself sniveled and sobbed on the couch. How humiliating! How base! The thought only made him cry harder.

“Mercury isn’t a small place,” Vivian Rajmon observed.

“Indeed,” Muddy said, “and we’ve only a few minutes to decide where to begin.”

“We look for deep-black solar collectors, you said. Superabsorbers?”

“C-c-correct. But even those will be small, compared to the size of a
world
. Even with the best sensors and algorithms, we are hindered by simple geometry. Searching the entire surface could take hours.”

“Hours,” Cheng Shiao brooded. “With Sykes ready to open fire upon us at any time. I’m surprised he hasn’t already!”

“Perhaps he isn’t looking,” Vivian said. “Perhaps he’s busy hatching some new villainy.” Then she paused, and came over to Bruno’s bedside. She put a hand on his shoulder, squeezed. “It must be hard, Declarant: all of us drawing upon you so desperately, in
your
hour of need. Even your own duplicate is doing it! But we’ll be there very soon. Will you join us for a moment?”

Finally, at these words, Bruno felt the flow of tears begin to ebb. Not so much because Vivian had requested it—although he’d had a little soft spot in his heart for her since
she was eleven years old—but because he didn’t want to arrive at their destination and have Marlon see him weep. Absurd, of course, since Marlon had probably seen
Muddy
weep for twenty continuous years, had in fact coaxed tears from a Bruno until he
became
a Muddy, over and over and over again. But he supposed the mind didn’t need to work rationally, so long as it worked.

“Oh, forgive me.” He sniffed, wiping his eyes and nose with a sleeve.

“Of course,” she said gently. “Of course we do.”

He consoled himself with one thought: that the Sabadell-Andorra Earthquake had been an accident, an act of God. Inevitable, really, and buried back in an age when death—especially by accident—was still the norm. These more recent deaths were something else entirely:
caused
. He glanced up: Mercury was fully visible, already as large as a mottled gray apple in the view, and growing visibly.

He sat up and tried wanly to bring some of the iron back into his voice. “Do … forgive me, please. The loss of so many, including Her Majesty, has … well. Yes. You know as well as I. But of course we’ll be to the planet in a few minutes, unbalanced or no. An unfortunate property of time is that it can’t be made to wait.”

Then, after a moment’s reflection, he said, “Our enemy, of course, has the same problem. Things are moving quickly. If
we’re
as quick, we may very well land safely. Visually, Marlon will be looking straight into the sun for us, which ought to confuse even quite sophisticated sensors. And gravitationally … well, let’s just say this ship has an unusual—and decidedly minimal—signature. And if he really isn’t looking, if he
does
presume us dead, we may be able to slip right in.”

“He’ll see us in
orbit
,” Shiao protested, “if we’re forced to scour the surface for signs of him.”

Bruno, still sniffling a bit, pinched himself on the chin. “Hmm. Well. We needn’t search the
entire
planet, surely. He must have his energy converters on the daylight side right
now, after all. And his beam weapons as well, since they can’t fire through the planet.” He sat up straighter. “In fact, he must have had collectors on the daylight side
continuously
for the past several weeks. Either that, or very, very large batteries, and since the former is much easier …”

“What’s to say the power source is near the base?” Shiao asked skeptically.

“Efficiency,” Deliah said, ticking the answers off on her fingers. “Safety. Cost. Time. Light-lag. Marlon may be a good faker, but in private he is—demonstrably!—not a very patient person. He’s gone to a lot of trouble over this, but I doubt he’s gone to any
extra
trouble, or put up with any suboptimal equipment, or otherwise made things harder on himself than they absolutely need to be.”

Fighting dizzy nausea, Bruno nodded. “Indeed. I quite agree.”

Muddy was huddled at one of the hypercomputer interfaces, tapping figures in madly. “Mercury completes a revolution every fifty-eight days, an
orbit
every eighty-eight. Daylight lasts eight and a half weeks at the equator, so we’re looking pole to pole in an arc from the eastern terminator to thirty degrees west of the noon line. But to be consistent with observations, the g-gravity lasers couldn’t be within, er, thirty degrees of the north pole, whereas from the
south
 …”

Bruno looked up again, saw the planet there in the bow window, fully illuminated from edge to edge like a full but strangely altered moon because they were flying toward it almost straight up out of the sun, their grapples locked on the planet’s equator. Indeed, the planet was as wide as a dinner platter, and widening rapidly.

“The base should be s-s-somewhere in here,” Muddy said, and on the window a green, crosshatched area the shape of a kidney bean appeared, covering less than a fifth of the planet’s sunward face. “Initiating telescopic survey.”

Shiao glared up anxiously through the window. “How long will this take? Should we think about plotting an orbit solution?”

“I am still experiencing widespread malfunction,”
Sabadell-Andorra
answered. “Gravitational stresses have fractured millions of my wellstone fibers.”

“Oh, God,” Deliah said. “Is hull containment in danger?”

“Not imminently. Unless there are further stresses. But my computing power and reliability are markedly degraded.”

“Oh, well, no problem about
that
.” Deliah’s voice dripped irony.

Then Muddy spoke up. “Survey complete. There are a number of reflective prominences right
here
, surrounded by a bank of s-s-superabsorbers.”

On the window, superimposed over the planet’s surface and the bean-shaped highlight, a red X appeared.

“Yes? Goodness, lock the grapples to it,” Bruno said, his blood rising. Part of him hadn’t really expected to find anything—their chain of suppositions
was
rather long—and another part had expected, long before now, to be burned out of the sky by some silly weapon or other. But logic existed for a reason, because it carried you inexorably toward truth. When properly applied, of course, but by now that was a matter of long habit.

“Grapples may harm the base,” Deliah said excitedly. “Disrupting local gravity, interfering with
his
grav-projection mechanisms … It could be just the edge we need.”

“A double edge,” Shiao cautioned. “It’ll alert him to our presence, and in fact pinpoint our exact location.”

“Irrelevant,” Muddy said. “Unless we mean to d-destroy the base using
ourselves
as a projectile, we must begin deceleration at once.”

Indeed, moments later the gravity switched off, and everyone went flying into the air as the
Sabadell-Andorra
wheeled around them, orienting its grapples toward the sun. Above, the window dimmed again to prevent the sunlight from searing them all. Then gravity returned, and they all came crashing back down in an assortment of uncomfortable ways.

“Blast,” Bruno said, pointing vaguely. “Everyone into your
couches, please. Unfold those, yes. We now have—alas!—enough seats to accommodate everyone.”

“Are we still heading for this ‘base’?” Tusité asked.

“We are,” Muddy confirmed. Then, in a rare display of manners for a de Towaji of any sort, he stuck out his hand. “I don’t believe we’ve formally met, by the way. I’m Muddy.”

“Tusité,” she returned quickly, accepting his hand into her own dark fingers with a reflexively dainty, ladylike grip. “No last name.”

“Me either,” Muddy said.

She looked puzzled by that—clearly she thought he was another Bruno, or at least another de Towaji. But what she said, albeit somewhat brusquely, was, “Charmed. I … apologize for screaming, a minute ago. It’s frightening, all this running and fighting and dying. But I do owe you my life.”

“Oh, none of that,” Muddy clucked. “We’ve all had our share of b-bad moments on this trip. Anyway, you owe him.” He nodded sideways at Bruno.

Tusité looked in Bruno’s direction and inclined her head. She looked as if her fright were only barely contained, but she nonetheless turned back to Muddy. “Mercury is hostile wilderness, true?” she asked. “So hot it’s full of molten metal? If we come down in the wrong spot, it could mean our deaths.”

“Indeed,” Muddy agreed. “But we’re aimed right for the center of the Declarant’s base. As we approach, I’ll be scanning for dangers. I’ll look for hollows beneath the rock, too—natural or otherwise—because that’s where we’ll find him. I’ll do my b-best to set us atop one of them.”

“Steering how?” she pressed anxiously.

“The guidance algorithm adjusts its course by sliding the grapple target to different parts of the sun.”

“I’ll bet we’re disrupting
that
, as well,” Deliah noted. “It’s illegal to grapple the sun because it can whip up flares and proton storms which affect the entire Queendom. I doubt anyone has ever given our poor photopause the sort of thrashing we’re giving it now.”

“Indeed,” Bruno said, “we have much to answer for.”

Everyone burst out laughing at that. Tight, anxious laughter, it was true, but still it surprised Bruno—he’d been serious. All week, he’d been tearing up the solar system as if he owned the place, grappling to anything handy regardless of consequence, helping mainly his own friends … But even Hugo, strapped as ever to the cabin’s floor, made mewling noises that were quite a good imitation of amusement.

“I’m sure we could all use a rest,” he grumbled, and everyone laughed at that, too.

“You’re planning to melt through solid rock?” Shiao asked. “He could be buried quite deep, couldn’t he?”

“Unlikely,” Deliah said. “For the same reasons already cited. His equipment needs to be on the surface—or to stick up
through
the surface, at any rate—and he’ll want to be close to it. It’s the same reason your eyes and ears are up next to your brain—so the signals don’t have far to travel.”

“So how deep should we expect to burrow?”

She shrugged. “Less than fifty meters, at a guess. Of course, at the rate this ship tunnels that could still take a pretty long time.”

“Three minutes to touchdown,” the ship noted.

“There’ll be a-a-access ports at the surface,” Muddy said, finally climbing onto his acceleration couch. His hands and voice were shaking, Bruno saw. He was going in to face his personal Satan. Was there ever a better reason to be terrified? “He never uses his ports, but they’re always there. I’ve seen his secret f-facilities elsewhere in the solar system, and I doubt he’d deviate much from pattern. We should be armed, by the way; we can expect a stiff resistance from robot guards. Captain Shiao?”