The air was thick and heavy, and he couldn’t get it into his lungs. The darkness weighed on him and began to creep in at the edges of his vision.
“There’ll be a bump.” Hutch sounded desperately far away. “We’re using the lander to pull.”
The fake wooden floor rose up and hit him. Gave him a good push. That was okay. Let’s hustle.
HUTCH AND NICK watched as the lander grew smaller, headed toward the Memphis’s open cargo hatch. Bill was in charge now and he had to take it slowly because they needed a soft landing at the other end.
“What do you think?” asked Nick.
“He’s still breathing,” she said. “I think we’ll be okay.” Ahead of them the Memphis was lit up. The lander moved steadily toward it, trailing the washroom on its long tether.
Behind her, another piece of the Wendy folded up and drifted off.
TOR FLOATED IN the dark, barely conscious, shut into a remote corner of his brain. His lamp must have gone out. He had trouble remembering where he was. His breathing was loud and labored, and his heart pounded. Stay conscious. Keep calm. Think about Hutch. Out there in the starlight. He tried to imagine her naked, but the picture wouldn’t come.
He clung to the sink. It was cold and metallic and cylindrical, and he didn’t know why it was important that he not let go. But he didn’t. It was his anchor to the world.
The darkness was somehow darker and thicker than ordinary darkness. It was something behind his eyes, shutting him down, walling him off in a separate cave somewhere, as if he were no more than a witness, an observer, already a disembodied spirit vaguely aware of distant voices calling his name. The voices were familiar, belonged to old friends he hadn’t seen in decades, his father long gone, dead a quarter century ago in a skiing accident of all things, his mom who’d taken him for walks down to Piedmont Square to feed the pigeons. He’d had a small blue wagon, Sammy Doober it had said on the side, named for the comic strip character. Sammy with his fox’s nose and his balloon.
Hutch.
Her shining eyes floated in front of him. The way she’d looked four years ago at Cassidy’s. He remembered the way she had kissed him, her lips soft and urgent against his. And her breasts pressed against him.
He loved her. Had loved her from the first time he’d seen her….
An ineffable sorrow settled around him. He was going to die in here and she would never really know how he felt.
ALYX SAT ALONE in the lander watching as the Memphis got bigger. She had tried to speak to Tor, to encourage him, let him know that they were close, and she’d heard something, but she couldn’t make out any words. She was terrified for him, and she wanted to tell Hutch that she thought Tor was in bad shape, but she didn’t dare use the circuit because she didn’t know how to switch to a private channel and she was afraid Tor would overhear her. So she called George instead, telling him—unnecessarily—to be ready.
“Just get him here,” said George.
That was Bill’s task, of course. The AI guided the lander, moving so slowly that Alyx wanted to scream at him, demand that he hustle it up.
“Alyx.” Bill’s voice was calm, as though nothing unusual were happening. “Get ready to release him.”
She grabbed her shears and went through the airlock, carefully following Hutch’s instructions not to lose contact with the hull at any time.
It had surprised her that she found it so easy to go outside. When Hutch had first described the plan, she’d become frightened, and Hutch had looked at her until Nick assured her it was okay, she could do it. She’d realized it had come down either to her or George doing it, and Hutch wanted George on the receiving end because somebody was going to have to break open the box.
When she’d originally gone outside, to wait for Hutch to throw her the cable so she could secure it to the antenna mount, she’d surprised herself with her own fearlessness. Things had been getting a little scary at the time, and Hutch threw her the cable, and she’d picked it off and tied it down like a champ.
Now she was repeating the action, climbing up onto the cabin roof while the Memphis came closer. She dropped to one knee and glanced back at the washroom. It was pale green in the starlight.
Washroom to the stars.
“Alyx,” said Bill. “When I tell you—”
“I’m ready.”
There was some play in the cable. She opened the shears, caught the cable between the blades, and waited.
“Now,” said Bill.
She pushed down on the handle. Tried again.
The cable resisted.
“Is it done, Alyx?”
She briefly debated trying to untie the knot. But it would take too long. She summoned everything she had and squeezed again. The line parted. “Done,” she said.
“Good.”
Next she untied the remaining cable and threw it clear of the lander. “That’s strong stuff.”
“Go back inside,” said Bill. “Quickly.”
Alyx resented being ordered around by an AI, but she understood the need for haste. She turned, hurried back to the hatch, and climbed into her seat. The restraint harness slid down, the airlock closed, and she heard the hiss of incoming air. Then the seat pushed against her as thrusters fired and the vehicle changed direction.
She tried to remember a moment anywhere in her life in which she’d felt so good about herself.
GEORGE WATCHED THE box as it drifted toward him. It was an unseemly object, trailing pipes and cables and pieces of shelving. A last few ice crystals floated away. It had gone into a slow tumble, and he began to doubt that it would make it through the cargo door.
Bill kept lights focused on it, from the lander and from the Memphis itself. George got out of the way.
It was coming faster than he would have expected.
He glanced back at the web he’d erected, reassuring himself it was secure.
He’d been listening to the commlink and knew it had been several minutes since any intelligible sound had been heard from inside the box.
Abruptly Hutch’s voice crackled through the silence: “George, are you ready?”
“Standing by,” he said. “It’s coming in now. About thirty seconds away.”
“Okay. We’ll be there as quickly as we can.”
He watched it approach, watched it rotate slowly around its central axis. The lander was circling and coming back, and Hutch and Nick were off in the distance, near the Wendy, but they were coming, riding one of those rocket belts. They were big enough now that he could see them. See their lights anyhow.
“Ten seconds,” said Bill. “Clear the entry.”
Damned idiot machine. Did it think George was going to stand there and play tag with the box? He listened to the gentle hum of his suit’s power and became conscious of the air flow whispering across his face.
“Five.”
There was a trace of pride in the AI’s precision. At exactly the specified moment the box drifted through the door. It bumped the upper edge of the frame, sailed through the bay, and plunged into the net. Not quite dead center, but close enough.
George ran toward it. “Bill,” he said, “shut the door and give us some life support.”
He told Tor he was inside the Memphis, he was safe now, air in a minute, while he began disentangling the washroom from the net. Tor didn’t answer.
When he got it clear, he pushed it to the deck. “Okay, Bill,” he said. “Gravity up.”
Getting gravity back was not a calibrated business. For technological reasons that he’d heard but never understood, it tended to be on or off, at whatever setting. Bill gave him the standard quarter gee.
The cargo door closed and air returned slowly into the bay. George knelt over the box, waiting for the lights on the status board to go green.