Mark called out pressures and flow rates. Teresa counted seconds as the blurriness encroached again. “Move, you dumpit bitch. Move!” She cursed the massive, awkward orbiter.
“I found the station.” Mark announced. “Jesus. Look at that.”
Through a narrowing tunnel Teresa glanced at the radar screen. She gasped. The bottom assembly was more than five kilometers below them and receding fast. The tether had stretched suddenly, like a child’s rubber toy. “Damn!” she heard Mark Randall cry. Then Teresa had difficulty hearing or seeing anything at all.
This time the squidgy feeling went from her eyes straight back through her central sinus. The blaring of new alarms mixed with strange noises originating within her own skull. One alert crooned the dour song of a cooling system gone berserk. Unable to see which portion, Teresa flicked switches by touch, disabling all the exchange loops. She had Mark close down the fuel cells as well. If the situation didn’t improve before they ran out of battery juice, it wouldn’t matter anyway.
“All three APUs are inoperable!” Mark shouted through a roar of crazy noise.
“Forget ’em. Leave ’em turned off.”
“All of them?”
“I said all! The bug’s in the hydraulic lines, not the APUs. All long fluid lines are affected.”
“How do we close the cargo bay doors without hydraulics?” he protested through rising static that nearly drowned his words. “We won’t… able to… during reentry!”
“Leave that to me,” she shouted back. “Close all lines except rear hypergolics, and pray they hold!”
Teresa thought she heard his acknowledgment, and a clicking that might have been those switches being closed. Or it could have been just another weird sensory distortion.
Without hydraulics they couldn’t gimbal the main maneuvering rockets. She’d have to make do with RCS jets, flying blind in a chiarascuro of distortion and shadow. By touch Teresa disengaged the autopilot completely. She fired the small jets in matched pairs, relying on vibration alone to verify a response. It was true seat-of-the-pants flying, with no way to confirm she was moving Pleiades farther from that dangerously overstretched tether, or perhaps right toward it…
Sound became smell. Roiling images scratched her skin. Amid cacophonous static Teresa thought she actually heard Jason, calling her name. But the voice blew away in the noisome gale before she could tell whether it was real or phantom — one of countless chimeras clamoring from all sides.
For all she knew, she was permanently blind. But that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the battle to save her ship.
Vision finally did clear, at last, with the same astonishing speed as it had been lost. A narrow tunnel snapped into focus, expanding rapidly till only the periphery sparkled with those eerie shades. Screaming alarms began shutting down.
The transition left her stunned, staring unbelievingly at the once-familiar cabin. The chronometer said less than ten minutes had passed. It felt like hours.
“Um,” she commented with a dry throat. Once again, Pleiades had the nerve to start acting as if nothing had happened. Red lights turned amber,- amber became green. Teresa herself wasn’t about to recover so quickly, for sure.
Mark sneezed with terrific force. “Where — where’s Erehwon? Where’s the tether?” A few minutes thrust couldn’t have taken them far. But the approach and rendezvous display showed nothing at all. Teresa switched to a higher scale.
Nothing. The station was nowhere.
Mark whispered. “What happened to it?”
Teresa changed radar settings, expanding scale again and ordering a full-spectrum doppler scan. This time, at last, a scattering of blips appeared. Her mouth suddenly tasted ashen.
“There’s… pieces of it.”
A cluster of large objects had entered much higher orbit, rising rapidly as Pleiades receded in her own ellipse. One transmitted an emergency beacon, identifying it as part of the station’s central complex.
“We better do a circularization burn,” Mark said, “to have a chance of rescuing anybody.”
Teresa blinked once more. I should’ve thought of that.
“Check… check all the tank and line pressures first,” she said, still staring at the mess that had been the core of Reagan Station. Something had rent the tethers… and all the spars connecting the modules, for good measure. That force might return anytime, but they owed it to their fellow spacers to try to save those left alive.
“Pressures look fine,” Mark reported. “Give me a minute to compute a burn. It’ll be messy.”
“That’s okay. We’ll use up our reserves. Kennedy and Kourou are probably already scrambling launchers—” She stopped, ears perked to a strange tapping sound. Another symptom? But no, it came from behind her. She swiveled angrily. If that damned Spivey had come back…
A face in the rear window made Teresa gasp, then she sighed. It was only their inadvertent hitchhiker, the space-suited crewman, his helmet still pressed against the perspex screen.
“Hmph,” she commented. “Our guest doesn’t look as pissed off as before.” In fact, the expression behind the steamed-up faceplate beamed unalloyed gratitude. “He must have seen Nearpoint come apart. By now it may already be in the atmos…”
She stopped suddenly. “Jason!”
“What?” Mark looked up from the computer.
“Where’s the upper tip? Where’s Farpoint!”
Teresa scrabbled at the radar display, readjusting to its highest scale on autofrequency scan — taking in the blackness far from Earth just in time to catch a large blip that streaked past the outer edge of the screen.
“Sweet Gaia… look at the doppler!” Randall stared. “It’s moving at… at…” He didn’t finish. Teresa could read the screen as well as he.
The glowing letters lingered, even after the fleeting blip departed. They burned in the display and in their hearts.
Jason, Teresa thought, unable to comprehend or cope with what she’d seen. Her voice caught, and when she finally spoke, it was simply to say, “Six… thousand kilometers… per second.”
It was impossible of course. Teresa shook her head in numb, unreasoning disbelief that Jason would have, could have, done this to her!
“Kakashkiya,” she sighed.
“He’s leaving me… at two percent of the goddamn speed of light…”
□ It was Atē, first-born daughter of Zeus, who used the golden apple to tempt three vain goddesses, setting the stage for tragedy. Moreover, it was Atē who made Paris fall for Helen, and Agamemnon for Breises. Atē filled the Trojans’ hearts with a love of horses, whose streaming manes laid grace upon the plains of Ilium. To Ulysses she gave a passion for new things.
For these and other innovations, Atē became known as Mother of Infatuation. For these she was also called Sower of Discord.
Did she realize her invention would eventually lead to Hecuba’s anguish atop the broken walls of Troy? Some say she spread dissension only at her father’s bidding… that Zeus himself connived to bring about that dreadful war “… so its load of death might free the groaning land from the weight of so many men.”
Still, when he saw the bloody outcome, Zeus mourned. Gods who had supported Troy joined those backing Hellas, and all agreed to lay the blame on Atē.