Century Rain Part 76

"I'm going to see if there's any juice left in those steering jets."

"We already tried that," Floyd said, lowering himself back into his seat and pulling the harness tight.

"They died on us."

"I know. But the system might have been reading empty even when there was a tiny amount of pressure left in the reservoir."

Floyd gave her an odd look. "You said it didn't work like that."

"I lied. I swatted down your suggestion because I was feeling nasty and petulant. Not that it would have

done us much good back then, anyway-"

"Of course not." He sounded hurt.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not dealing with this very well, OK? Believe it or not, this isn't a situation I

find myself in every day."

"Consider yourself forgiven," Floyd said.

"Look," Auger said, "all I need is a couple of squirts of reaction ma.s.s, just enough to kill our spin, or

even simply to alter it so that we have a different view."

"You might make things worse."

"I think we have to risk it." Her hand closed on the joystick. She flipped up the trigger guard and readied

her finger, trying to picture the orientation of the tumbling s.h.i.+p from the outside. Skellsgard had not told

her how to recover from a spin of this kind-the briefing had never envisaged that things could go this

splendidly, abjectly wrong-but all she had to do was change things slightly, just enough to bring

something else into view. Then, in a sudden fit of misery, she wondered what the point of that would be, given that she had already failed to make any sense of Floyd's initial impressions...

She squeezed the trigger. Instead of the usual sequenced percussion of steering jets, all she heard was a low, dying hiss that faded as soon as it had begun. Earlier, with the emergency systems blaring and the impacts making an unholy din, she would never have heard that feeble whisper of last-ditch thrust.

Would it be enough? She had felt nothing that would indicate a change of course.

But the angle of the light source-the scything fan of light that touched the cabin interior with each rotation-had altered slightly.

"All right," she said. "My turn to look now."

Auger released her seat harness, and with great effort and equal discomfort she managed to stand and

brace herself so that she had a view through the window. The s.h.i.+p continued to tumble. The light source flared hard into view, making her squint and avert her eyes in reflex. It was an intense white disk with the faintest tinge of yellow. It looked, in fact, a lot like the Sun.

Then Floyd's smudge came into view. She had to hand it to him: his description was on the mark. It was a ruby-red nebula, like a blow-up from an astronomical photograph, flecked with spangles of light, smears of brighter red and clotted with very dark patches, like dust lanes. Even as she watched, even before the rotation had pulled it out of view, a hard pink light flared within the cloud and died.

"I don't know what it is," she said. "I've never seen anything like it before." Then the rotation brought something else into view. It was a gently curved arc of rust-orange, fringed by a pale wisp of atmosphere. Unlike the smudge, this was something she had definitely seen before. She could even pick out the white scratches of the tethered dirigible lines, and the ribbon-bright channels of the irrigation network.

This was the other thing Floyd had seen.

"It's Mars," she said, hardly believing her own words. "The big thing-"

"And the light?"

"The Sun," she said. "We've come out around Mars. We're in the solar system."

"But you said..."

She looked at the light-pocked smudge again. Just as Floyd had described, it appeared slightly smaller

than the last time she had seen it-even though the smudge itself seemed to be roiling and expanding, like the cloud from an explosion...

And then the brightest light she had ever imagined-brighter even than the radiance of the wormhole throat-rammed through the smudge, like sunlight piercing a stained-gla.s.s window, and reached a crescendo like a second sun. Then it faded, dying like the last chip of the setting sun, and when darkness had returned, the smudge was completely dark, undisturbed by any smaller flashes.

"Where's Phobos?" Auger asked.

THIRTY-ONE.

There was nothing more that could be done to slow the s.h.i.+p's tumbling motion. Auger kept the shutter open, and periodically one of them would climb up and examine the view, but the safest and easiest thing was to stay strapped into their seats. Damaged as it was, the transport did not actually seem to be getting any worse: no more systems had broken down since their emergence around Mars, and the cabin pressure had stabilised at just under one-third of an atmosphere. It was too thin to sustain life, so they kept the masks on, but at least they did not have the chill of vacuum to contend with. With the battery-powered heaters still running, the ambient temperature was low, but not unbearably so.

"We're safe, for now," Auger said. "All we have to do is sit tight until someone figures out where we are."

"And someone will manage that?"

"Count on it. They'll be scouring every centimetre of s.p.a.ce looking for us right now. Even if there isn't a working transponder on this thing, they'll find us with their own sensors. It will only be a matter of time."

Her confidence had a thin, brittle edge to it, like ice that might break at any moment.

"I take it from this that you have a theory about how we survived?" Floyd asked.

"Aveling's people must have taken the decision to destroy Phobos," she said. "That smudge of dust and gas is all that's left of the moon. We must have hit a little debris coming through it, but not enough to do us any harm."

"They blew up a whole moon? Isn't that rather drastic?"

"It was the only way to save us," she said. "They must have picked up our bow-shock distortion and realised that we were coming in much too fast to decelerate into the recovery bubble. But the bubble's only function was to maintain vacuum at the wormhole throat. If they got rid of the pressurised chamber -and Phobos with it-then they wouldn't need the bubble. We'd have been emerging into vacuum anyway."

"But you said they wouldn't have much warning of our imminent arrival," Floyd said.

"They must have had a procedure in place for just this contingency," she said. "Emergency evacuation measures to get everyone off the moon in a couple of minutes. Nuclear demolition charges sewn throughout the whole thing, ready to take it apart at the press of a b.u.t.ton, giving us a clear route to s.p.a.ce."

"All that, in a couple of minutes?"

"There's no other explanation, Floyd."

"Well, I can think of one off the top of my head: somebody else blew up that moon, and our arrival didn't have a d.a.m.n thing to do with it."

"No, Floyd," she said patiently, as if lecturing a child on some arcane matter of the adult world. "n.o.body else blew up that moon. That's not the way we do things around here. We may be in a state of crisis, but no one in their right mind..." Then she froze, and made a small clicking noise in the back of her throat.

"Auger?"

"f.u.c.k. I think you might actually be right."

"And there was me kind of hoping I'd be wrong."

"There were explosions in that debris cloud," she said, remembering the staccato flashes of light, "as if something was still going on there. As if they were still fighting."

"Who could have blown up that moon?"

"If it wasn't deliberate, if it wasn't set off by demolition charges, then only the Slashers could have done it." She followed the slow, fatigued churning of her exhausted mental processes. She was too tired to think clearly, or else she would never have considered the possibility that Phobos might have been blown up for her benefit. "That last flash," she said. "The really bright one?"

"Yes?"

"I think that was the wormhole dying. We were surfing the collapsing end of it all the way home. We popped out, then the collapsing end of the pipe hit its own throat. It was like a stretched rubber band snapping back on itself. I think the blast took out all the combatants left near the debris cloud."

"And my way back home?"

"It's gone. The link is finished."

"I figured as much."

"I'm sorry, Floyd," she said.

"You don't have anything to apologise for. I got myself into this every step of the way."

"No, that isn't true. I have to take some of the blame. I should never have let you cross the censor, and I

definitely shouldn't have let you get aboard this s.h.i.+p."

"Face it, kid: you'd never have got home without me."

She had no answer for that. He was right: without Floyd's help, she would have died somewhere along

the now-collapsed thread of the hyperweb, dashed to pieces in an unwitnessed fireworks display.

"That still doesn't make it right," she said. "I've ripped you away from everything and everyone you ever knew."

"You had no choice."

She touched her wound. It was hot and tender again, as if the inflammation had begun to return. The UR

she had taken was not the kind that stayed inside the body for ever. The little machines had probably dismantled themselves by now, donating their essence into the chemical reservoir of her body. She had a.s.sumed that she would be getting expert medical attention as soon as the s.h.i.+p popped into the recovery bubble.

"Are you all right?" Floyd asked.

"Just a bit crisp around the edges. I'll handle it."

"You need medical attention."

"And I'll get it just as soon as they pull us out of this can."

"If they're looking for us," Floyd said.

"They will be. Skellsgard will have told Caliskan that we're on our way back and also that we have important information."