Beth waited with the others, sitting in reclining chairs in the common room, finally content to let the imagery come in through Shipnet. John sat near her, seeming to seek her attention from time to time, but she ignored him. Some things were best left unsaid, some concepts left alone, by all of them now. She glanced furtively at him and he caught her eye. "It's all right," he said. She turned away with evident difficulty.
The magnified image of Iris against a sky washed clean of stars splashed over her, and her attention was blissfully stolen by this familiar sight. She wondered if they shouldn't have left the little moon world by now, fled as far as they could from the Iridean system in the time that remained, but Brendan had insisted on staying. "This is going to be the greatest thing you ever saw," he told her, seeming childlike and excited, very much like a father she'd lost so long ago. "Even if we get killed, which I doubt, it'd be well worth seeing." So they stayed.
Li-jiang had sided with him in the decision. The Jana part of her, ever dominant, waited with keenly expressedanticipation. Perhaps the Demogorgon part held her horror at a world's destruction at bay. In any event, her mind was quiet.
Suddenly, it happened.
Iris hung silent in the sky for one moment more, and then it changed. The atmosphere around the north pole began to well upward slowly, bringing muddy clouds from the depths to brighten the once blue mantle. Eddies formed about the area, giant hurricanes that whirled ever outward, carrying clouds in their wake. A spiral pattern formed about the north pole, a blossoming flower that grew until it covered the northern hemisphere. It paused then, hanging fire for a few minutes, and swept on until the entire world was a boiling nightmare. The clouds twisted and roiled like smoke, coiling patterns within patterns that formed and disappeared within a minute.
The air over the pole seemed to bulge, and a great plume of gas sprang up, pushing outward into the dark sky, highlighted by the rays of the distant sun. A dim glow formed at its base, a glow that brightened steadily, swiftly. "It's working!" whispered Sealock in a voice that was yet loud enough to fill the entire room. No one else felt they would be allowed to speak. The sound of breathing was loud and irregular. The glow suddenly became an incandescent flare, blinding to eyes that had become adapted to the dimmer light, and Beth cried out, trying to turn her eyes away, unable to do so. The light blotted out everything else, and a dense beam of energy leaped up from the planet, hurling itself away into interstellar space. Someone seemed to cheer, a deep voice. Krzakwa? It didn't matter, now. A world was on the move, pushing itself into the depths once again.
Deep within the immense confines of the Mother Ship, far within Iris, things were beginning to happen. With the torchfire of the photon drive lit off, pushing with a still small acceleration, the multiple throats of the intake mast began to open wider. A whirlpool formed in the southern hemisphere as the reaction chambers drank down vaster amounts of hydrogen, converting them to unimaginable energies along the axial core. Just forward of Centrum's blue sphere, the control moment gyros, long still, began to spin again, counter to the direction of the planetary rotation. The world slowed fractionally and the rigid body of the lithosphere cracked like eggshell, shards buoyed aloft by the ringing tsunamis that crisscrossed the lowest stratum of the already boiling atmosphere. The gyros spun up, keening a wild, silent song, spinning ever faster, and then they tipped away from the equatorial plane . . .
Slowly, and at first imperceptibly, Iris was imbued with a will to go. Holding its fiery beacon aloft, the blue-white world seemed to shrug. The great clouds arrayed in waves swung across the globe faster now, and in close rank, as she began her turn. The emission beam of the drive described a slow arc against the background of the fixed stars. The gyros tumbled back to their neutral position and the turn stopped. Iris' axis of thrust was now pointed in its direction of travel. The intake throats opened still wider, swallowing gigatons of atmosphere, and the deceleration began to increase. The planet slowed in its course, things unimaginable transpiring within, while the humans on Ocypete watched its developing splendor. The heavens were ablaze, bathing their minds in an eldritch, violet glow.
Common sense was violated at once. The moons did not fly off wildly into space, but their orbits began to stretch into more and more eccentric ellipses. They corkscrewed away from Iris' equatorial plane, their apirideons pointing toward the apex of the world's diminishing motion. The world in their minds shrank imperceptibly. As its velocity was slowly canceled, Iris' relationship with the sun changed as well, dying down from its original hyperbola through parabola and ellipse to the precise, curved line that drove a chord through the tiny circle that was Mercury's orbit. And so, no different than a rubber ball dropped from a ten-story window, Iris began to fall.
The gyros tipped again, reorienting the thrust axis, and then it began to accelerate down, full-throat into the gravity well of Sol. Precisely controlled, as unnoticeable as the hour hand of a clock, the stars began to shift. Whipped about theirlord, Ocypete , Podarge , and Aello assumed even stranger orbits, following a high-order rosette as they began to precess. And, with the passage of time, they settled into ever lengthening ellipses, their apirideons tipping farther and farther into the northern hemisphere. The exhaust plume of Mother Ship grew ever brighter and the temperature began to rise. Somewhat more slowly, the badly disturbed ring particles held close to Iris' bosom followed suit, and the dazzling elastic band, no longer a thin line, began to stretch out and disperse.
Brendan and Li-jiang sat in the kitchen module of Deeps tar, whipping up one of an endless series of the small snacks and quick meals that had sustained them during the day and a half since it had begun. The long hours of observation were taxing them, leaving them increasingly tired. Gathering in this experience, the two of them tended not to sleep, whereas once the initial excitement had died down the others had returned to more or less normal sleep patterns. They munched on thick, creamy yogurt loaded with fruit and unnameable crunchy particles. Suddenly the ship lurched, and a deep, groaning rumble filled the room, a palpable presence from the world outside. A gyro started up above their heads. Li-jiang shook her head and wiped at the yogurt that had dribbled unto her chest. "Another one," she said. Brendan nodded abstractedly, gazing out the window at Ocypete's massively altered landscape. The hard radiation scattered from the photon beam had raised the ambient temperature to such a point that the highlands that composed much of the surface were subliming away and the inrushing pressure of air, for such the combination of noble gases, nitrogen, and CO could be called, was filling with white mist, undoubtedly methane vapor. "We should expect quakes," he said. "This place is undergoing a lot of stress."
"Too right. How much longer can we delay a lift-off?"
"Not much longer. I'd like to stay, but . . . we've got to get out of here in a few more hours. The peripheral particle cone of the exhaust is going to strike us by tomorrow noon atthe latest." He laughed.
"The fireworks'd be pretty to watch but painful to endure." The ship rocked slowly again and the plain outside crackled, electrostatic discharges released as the still supercold water ice was stressed. Temujin came up into the room looking worried and shaky. Moonquakes were serious business in the underground cities of Luna. " Bren? We're getting some kind of an attention-getting signal over the QCS."