Ears throbbed with pain. Then no more sounds. Air all gone.
He launched himself downward. There was a self-sealing airlock there, already closed. That kept the whole ship from vac’ing out from a single breech.
But it was a long way down and purple flecks danced at the corners of his eyes. They made crazy, enticing patterns and he spent some time trying to figure out what they were trying to say. The dirt below looked no closer and his arms in front of him flapped fruitlessly, like clothes drying in a warm breeze.
In his mouth a metallic, flat bite. The taste of the void.
Purple flies filled his vision. Then a sharp spark of yellow.
Lightning. Playing in the bowl. Licking at bodies as if tasting them.
He dodged away from the slender fire. It missed him and seared the bulkhead beyond.
Ears drumming, fighting to keep his throat closed, chest searing. The soil was closer, in fact very close, and then it hit him in the face. His lungs convulsed but he refused to open his mouth, let his last ball of breath escape into the emptiness.
Scrambling, tumbling, off balance but going on anyway. Across the powdery dirt. Streamers of vapor bursting from the ground, a gray fog.
Ears pounding, hammering his head. In his sinuses, spikes of agony.
The square lock, wobbling. Hard to keep it in focus, stand it upright by tilting his head. While his legs plunged and worked, pounding him forward.
Hands out in front. They hit the lock door and punched a big red plate. The emergency entry dilated. He dived through it.
The first sound he heard was a whisper, then a high-pressure roaring. His ears popped. Only then did he wonder about the others in the dome.
By the time he got his bearings back, it was too late. The other four in the dome never made it to the lock.
Two went through the big hole in the dome and were forever lost. The lightning had fried two more.
Nobody knew whether the lightning was a mech weapon or just natural. Despite the damage to their internal electrocoupling, Argo’s tech recorded the two selves in enough detail to provide Aspects in future chip-life.
Small consolation, Toby thought. He felt guilty for not thinking of the other four, for not helping them.
Not much time for guilt. Cermo pressed him into a gang to repair the dome, to slap on pressure patches, to secure ship’s atmosphere for the next attack.
But there wasn’t any attack. The mechs had taken severe losses from Argo’s automatic defenses. She was an old ship but still pretty agile.
People celebrated like it was a victory. Toby wondered if maybe the mechs had just decided to let Argo go on, into more dangerous territory. Let the Eater do their job for them.
The thought gave him a sinking sensation, like stepping off into a metallic-tasting chasm. Into the void.
EIGHT
The Aperture Moment
“What’s your favorite dish?” Besen asked.
“Huh? Oh—the nearest.” Toby noticed that he was shoveling in cauliflower with yellow cheese melted over it. Not his favorite dish, but then he hadn’t been tasting it anyway.
“Some gourmet you are.” She wrinkled her nose at him.
“Look, I don’t want to have good taste, I just want things that taste good.”
He finished the cauliflower and looked for anything that might be left. The best thing about communal eating was that at the end of the meal extras got passed around. A quick eater got more, and Toby was always hungry. Even when they were zooming down toward a huge disk of white-hot fire, he responded to the rumble in his stomach.
“You don’t look concerned,” Besen said.
Toby studied her face. The deaths only hours before had been acknowledged in a ship-wide ceremony. Now, by necessity, they got back to business, teams repairing the damage, a bustle of purpose. Besen was not one to give a lot away, but he could read the tightening around the edges of her mouth, the slight high-strung cant of her head.
“No point in worrying.” He took her hand across the table and squeezed. “Bigger heads than ours are working on this thing.”
Besen bit nervously at her lip. He leaned across the table and gave her a light kiss on the brow. “Ummmm,” she said, but didn’t stop chewing.
“We’re going to make it. I can feel it in my bones.” He could do no such thing, but he had to cheer her up.
“Do you really think so?”
“Sure. Uh, could you reach me those potatoes?”
“What an animal! Facing death, and he wants to eat.”
“Only smart thing to do, seems to me.”
“My stomach feels tight. I can’t get anything down.” She lifted a pea pod with her chopsticks, bit off a fraction, and put it back.
“Well, maybe some other recreation will take your mind off things.” He gave her a blank face.
“Some other—oh. You beast!”
“I hear it’s good for the circulation.”
“First food, then—no, I will not jump into the sack with you while we are flying into the teeth of, of—”
“No need to throw a duck fit.”
“Well—I mean—it’s so totally inappropriate.”
He pretended to consider the question deeply, complete with a profound scowl. “Ummm. What’s a better way to vote in favor of there being a future? That’s what the whole thing points toward, after all.”
She snorted. “I thought it was about love.”
“That, too. But when we’re all candidates for the bone orchard—only who’s going to bury us here, when there’s no dirt for a cemetery anyway?—the oldest human ritual is a, well, a gesture of faith. Faith in the future.”
“So sex is faith now?” She was starting to grin, which had been his aim. “You have an odd religion.”
“I worship at the altar of my choosing,” he said with a staged haughty air.
“And what’s that about the oldest ritual? I can think of some more uplifting ones.”
Toby consulted with Isaac, who was a gold mine of ancient terms, in the space of a heartbeat. “They used to call it ‘the beast with two backs’—so maybe you have a point.”
Besen gave him a grin that began wickedly and slid into a tentative shyness. “You were really just joshing me out of my mood, weren’t you?”
“Um.”
“You don’t like to admit it, but you are very kind, in your own way, behind that fake toughness.”
“You have unmasked me, madam.”
“Ummm.” She eyed him speculatively. “How much time is it, until we get really close to the disk?”
“I can’t tell. The Bridge is too busy to give out details, and we’re swooping in along a complicated kind of spiral, so—say, why do you want to know?”
“Well, if there really is enough time . . .”
“You hussy! Here I was just trying to cheer you up—”
“Oh, forget it. You can’t take a little ribbing yourself.” She poked him in the chest with a finger. “Come on, Romeo, let’s see what the wall screens tell us. I guess you’ve used up your supply of romance for the week.”
“Then I’ll have to stop off and pick up my next allotment. Where do I go?”
“Don’t think I can’t tell you where to go—get moving.”
He had managed to kid her out of her jittery depression, but the raging cauldron visible on the big Assembly Hall screen was enough to bring it all back. He put his arm around her as they stood with a large crowd of the Family, watching the harsh glare of the disk seem to spread and wriggle as they drew nearer.
“Where are we going in all this?” Besen asked, wonder and fear mingling in her tone.
“I don’t know. I can’t even guess.”
“The disk, it’s like a huge world or something.”
“A world is nothing here, a fly speck.”
“But I can see clouds down there. And that twisty thing, it almost looks like a river.”
“Almost ain’t the same as is. Those clouds are really plasma that would boil away your hand in an eye-blink. That river, my faithful Aspect tells me, is some kind of magnetic knot that’s gotten caught up in the disk as it churns around.”