Hutch nodded, called Embry on Wildside, and asked for advice.
"Best would be not to go near anything local," she said.
"That'll give us some very hungry people."
Embry wasted no time becoming irritated. "Better hungry than dead."
There was a long silence. "If you really have to do this," she continued, "have someone sample the stuff first. A very small sample. Very small. Give it some time. A half hour, at least. If he doesn't throw up, or get diarrhea-"
"Or fall over," said MacAllister.
"— or fall over, you're in business." Embry took a deep breath. "Hutch," she said, "I feel guilty about the way things turned out."
"It's okay. You didn't cause the quake."
"Still… Well, anyhow, I wanted to wish you luck. Anything I can do, I'm here."
"I know."
They'd covered eleven kilometers that first day. Not bad, considering they'd gotten a late start, had to detour around the crevice, and were walking through snow.
They had, of course, no bedding. Nightingale made himself as comfortable as he could, lay back in the firelight, and wondered if his body would ever feel right again.
They decided to forget trying to divide the nineteen-hour days into standard temporal terminology, because nobody was ever quite sure what nine o'clock actually meant. Instead they thought in terms of dusk and dawn, noon and midnight. There were roughly nine hours of darkness, which they divided into four watches. Midnight came when Morgan's World rose.
Nightingale unstrapped his oxygen converter and laid it beside him, where it would continue to work, without pressing into his shoulders. He slept for a while, woke, noticed that the fire had burned down, heard someone throw a fresh branch onto it, slept some more, and eventually found himself gazing up at the stars.
Morgan had moved over into the west. It was framed within a stellar rectangle. A couple of stars lined up under the rectangle, providing it with a stand or stem. To primitive people, he thought, it would have become a constellation. A flower, perhaps. Or a tree. Or a cup.
Morgan. It was a commonplace name for a world-killer.
It glittered through the branches, the brightest star in the sky.
Clouds were approaching from the west. By the time Chiang knelt beside him and told him the watch was his, the only visible light was the fire.
He checked his cutter and put on the night goggles. They'd stopped atop a ridge where they could see for kilometers in all directions. Tomorrow they'd cross a narrow basin and begin a long uphill climb into dense forest.
A few flakes drifted onto his arm.
Nightingale glanced over at the sleepers. MacAllister had punched up a mound of snow to serve as a pillow. Kellie seemed to be dreaming, and he judged by her expression that it was not altogether unpleasant. He suspected Hutch was awake, but she lay unmoving, with her face in shadow. Chiang was still trying to get comfortable.
Ordinarily, he would have hated the guard duty assignment. Nightingale liked to keep his mind active. Time not spent in a book or doing research or attempting to solve a problem was time wasted. He had no interest hanging about in a wilderness for two hours peering into the dark. But that night, he stood atop the ridge, watching the snow come down. And he enjoyed the simple fact that he was alive and conscious.
Marcel brought Wendy back to Deepsix. He felt better if he could stay closer to the people on the ground. They were just completing their first orbit when Beekman came onto the bridge. "Marcel," he said, "we've finished the analysis of the material we took from the artifact."
"And…?"
"They're enhanced carbon nanotubes."
"Which are what?"
"Precisely the sort of material you'd want to have if you were building a skyhook. They're extremely light and have incredible tensile strength." Beekman lowered himself into a chair and accepted some coffee. "We'll be taking back a whole new technology. Probably revolutionize the construction industry." He looked quizzically at the captain. "What's wrong?"
"I don't like the plan to get our people off the ground."
"Why?"
"There are too many things that can go wrong. Tess may not fly. They may not even get there in time. There may be some incompatibility between the capacitors and the onboard spike. Another quake could bury the damned things beyond recovery."
"I don't know what we can do to change any of that."
"I'd like a backup option."
Beekman smiled patiently. "Of course you would. Wouldn't we all? What do you suggest?"
"The ship going to Quraqua. The Boardman. It's big, loaded with construction equipment. Mostly stuff they're going to use to put together the ground stations. I looked at the manifest. It has hundreds of kilometers of cable." Marcel laid emphasis on the last word, expecting Beekman to see immediately where he was headed.
"Go on," Beekman said, showing no reaction.
"Okay. If we were to get some of the cable off the Boardman, and tie together about four hundred kilometers of it, we could attach one end to a shuttle."
"And crash the shuttle," finished Beekman.
"Right. We take it down as far as it'll go, which would be within a couple of kilometers of the surface before we'd lose it. It crashes. But the cable's down. On the ground."
"And we use it to haul them out."
Marcel thought it seemed too simple. "It won't work?"
"No."
"Gunther, why not?"
"How much does the cable weigh?"
"I don't know."
"All right. Say it's on the order of three kilograms per meter. That's not very heavy."
"Okay."
"That means one kilometer of the cable would weigh in at about three metric tons."
Marcel sighed.
"That's one kilometer. And this thing is going to stretch down from orbit? Three hundred kilometers, you say?"
He did the math in his head. The cable would have to be able to support roughly nine hundred metric tons.
"You see the problem, Marcel."
"How about if we went for lighter material? Maybe hemp rope? They've got hemp on board."
Beekman made a noise in his throat. "I doubt the tensile strength of rope would be very high. How much do you think a piece one meter long would weigh?"
So they sat, drinking coffee, staring at one another. Once they called down and talked to Nightingale, whom Marcel knew to be the security watch. Any problems? What time did you expect to leave in the morning? How's everybody holding up?
That last question was designed to elicit a comment from Nightingale on his own physical condition, as well. But he only said they were fine.
Marcel noticed that he was beginning to feel disconnected from those on the ground. As if they were somehow already lost.
XIV
Walking through these woods, filled with the creatures of an alternate biosystem, constitutes an unusual emotional experience. They are all extinct, or shall be within a very few days. The sum total of six billion years of evolution is about to be erased, leaving nothing behind. Not so much as a tail feather.
And good riddance, I say.
— Gregory MacAllister, Deepsix Diary
Hours to breakup (est): 226
All the sunrises on Deepsix were oppressive. The sky was inevitably slate, and a storm was either happening or seemed imminent
Kellie Collier stood atop the ridge, surveying the woods and plains around her. In all that wilderness, nothing moved save a pair of wings so high and far as to present no detail to the naked eye. Through binoculars, she judged it to be not a bird at all. It had fur and teeth, a duckbill skull, and a long, serpentine tail. As she watched, it descended into a patch of trees and emerged moments later with something wriggling in its claws.