Thorn and Spektor had left Torus-2, the distributor module in the centre of the port, and headed for one of the external locks not far from the shuttle. White and massive, with opened loading hatches, it rested in the sunlight. The frozen arm of the manipulator loomed high above them, bent abruptly at the elbow and disappearing into the cargo zone. Huros-ED-4 hung motionless by its anchor platform. With his gaze fixed on the blocked joint, there was something unsettling about his posture. Only at the very last moment did he move slightly to the side so that they could get a glimpse of the damage. Of course his behaviour was not the result of cybernetic peevishness, as a Huros doesn’t even have the beginning of a notion of selfhood, but his images were now surplus to requirements. From now on what mattered were the impressions that the helmet-cameras sent to the control room.
‘So?’ Haskin asked. ‘What do you think?’
‘Bad.’ Spektor gripped the frame of the manipulator and drew herself closer to it. Thorn followed her.
‘Odd,’ he said. ‘It looks to me as if something’s brushed against the arm and torn this gaping hole, but the electronics seem to be undamaged.’
‘Then it should move,’ Haskin objected.
‘Not necessarily,’ said Spektor. She spoke English with a Slavic smoothness, rather erotic, Thorn thought. A shame, in fact, that he couldn’t stay another day. ‘The impact must have released lot of micro-debris. Perhaps our friend is suffering from constipation. Did the Huros perform an environmental analysis?’
‘Slight contamination. What about the splinters? Could they have caused the blockage?’
‘It’s possible. They probably come from the arm itself. Perhaps something’s got twisted, and it’s under tension.’ The astronaut studied the joint carefully. ‘On the other hand, this is a manipulator, not a pastry fork. The object would have been seven or eight millimetres long at the most. I mean it wasn’t an actual collision, it should really be able to cope with something like that.’
‘You certainly know your way around these things,’ Thorn said appreciatively.
‘Party trick,’ she laughed. ‘I hardly deal with anything else. Space debris is our biggest problem up here.’
‘And what about this?’ He leaned forward and pointed to a spot where a tiny, bright shard protruded. ‘Could that come from a meteorite?’
Spektor followed his outstretched index finger.
‘At any rate it comes from the thing that hit the arm. The analyses will tell you more.’
‘Exactly,’ said Haskin. ‘So get a move on. I suggest you get the thing out with the ethanol blower.’
‘Have we got one of those?’ Thorn asked.
‘The Huros does,’ Spektor replied. ‘We can use his left arm, there are tanks inside and nozzles on the effectors. But it’ll take two of us, Vic. Have you ever worked with a Huros?’
‘Not directly.’
‘I’ll show you. We’ll have to turn him off partially if we want to use him as a tool. That means one of us will have to help stabilise him, while the other—’
At that moment the manipulator stirred into life.
The huge arm stretched out of the loading-space, pushed backwards, swivelled, grabbed the Huros-ED and shoved it away as if it had had enough of its company. Thorn automatically pushed his companion downwards and out of the collision zone, but couldn’t keep the robot from striking her shoulder and whirling her around. At the last second Spektor managed to cling on to the frame, then the manipulator crashed into Thorn, dragged him away from her and from the ring and catapulted him into space.
Back! He had to get back!
Fingers flying, he tried to regain control over his steering nozzles. He was followed by the pirouetting torso of the Huros-ED, which was getting closer and closer, as Haskin and Spektor’s shouts rang in his ear. The robot’s abdomen hit his helmet. Thorn somersaulted and started circling helplessly as he was slung over the edge of the ring-level and hurtled from the space station at terrifying speed. He realised with horror that in attempting to protect his companion he had lost his only chance of saving himself. In wild panic he reached around him, found the switches for the steering nozzles, turned them on to stabilise his flight-path with short blasts, to slow his circling trajectory, found he couldn’t breathe, realised that his suit had been damaged, that it was all over, waved his arms around, tried to scream—
His scream froze.
Vic Thorn’s body was carried out into the silent, endless night, and everything changed in the seconds of his death, everything.
19 May 2025
THE ISLAND
Isla de las Estrellas, Pacific Ocean
The island wasn’t much more than a rocky outcrop, set on the equator like a pearl on a string. Compared with other nearby islands, its charms were rather modest. In the west a quite impressive cliff rose from the sea, crowned by tropical rainforest, which clung dark and impenetrable to jagged volcanic slopes, and was inhabited almost exclusively by insects, spiders and an unusually ugly species of bat. Streams had dug cracks and gorges, collected into waterfalls and poured thundering into the ocean. On the eastern side, the landscape fell in terraces, intermingled with rocky elevations and largely bare. You would have looked in vain for palm-lined beaches. Black basalt sand marked the few bays that gave access to the interior. Rainbow-coloured lizards sunned themselves on stone pillars amidst the crashing waves. Their day consisted of catapulting themselves several metres into the air and snapping for insects, the meagre climax of an otherwise unclimactic repertoire of natural spectacles. Overall, the Isla had hardly anything to offer that didn’t exist in more beautiful, bigger and higher forms elsewhere.
On the other hand its geographical location was impeccable.
It actually lay exactly at the middle of the Earth, where the northern and southern hemispheres met, 550 kilometres west of Ecuador and thus far from any air routes. There were no storms in this part of the world. Major accumulations of cloud were a rarity, lightning never flashed. During the first half of the year it sometimes rained, violently and for hours at a time, without the air growing particularly cooler. Temperatures hardly ever fell below twenty-two degrees Celsius, and usually they were significantly higher than that. Because the island was uninhabited and economically useless, the Ecuadorian parliament had been more than happy to lease it, for the next forty years in return for an invigorating boost to the state economy, to new tenants whose first job was to rename Isla Leona as Isla de las Estrellas: Stellar Island: island of the stars.
Subsequently part of the eastern slope disappeared under an accumulation of glass and steel that promptly united the fury of all animal conservationists. But the building had no effect on the island’s ecology. Flocks of noisy seabirds, unperturbed by the evidence of human presence, daubed cliff and architecture alike with their guano. The creatures were untroubled by ideas of beauty, and the humans had their minds on higher things than swallow-tailed gulls and ringed plovers. In any case, not many people had set foot on the island for a long time, and everything indicated that it would remain a rather exclusive place in future as well.