The exit wound of the colliding chunk provided the widest and easiest way out. Sylvia and Bey accompanied a mass of flotsam, flying out into space with the last puff of internal air from the bubble.
Bey was unconscious. Sylvia, shaking with exhaustion, held him tightly and looked around them. The collection layer of the farm had been left far behind. The surviving farmers had moved their lifeboat close to the shattered bubble, and half a dozen of them were preparing to reenter through an air lock. They had a clear duty toward their missing fellows: rescue or space burial.
Sylvia could see the ship that she and Bey had arrived on. It floated a few kilometers clear of the bubble, apparently undamaged, its warning beacons a red glow against the stars. She was not sure that she had the strength to get there. She set out, dragging Bey along with her. When she was nearly there she saw a suited figure jetting across to help her. It was Aybee.
“Leo?” she asked.
“Inside. Banged up, but not too bad.” Aybee took over and hauled Bey along behind him. “How’s with the Wolfman here?”
“Hurt some.” She was shivering. “He should be all right. Where’s our other ship?”
Aybee waved his arm through a wide circle. “You tell me. The beacon’s not working. I don’t know how we’ll ever find it.”
As he passed Bey through the lock, Sylvia took a last look around. There was no sign of the ship Aybee had arrived in. It was lost somewhere in the darkness, indistinguishable from a million other pieces of stellar flotsam.
She collapsed as she stepped out of the air lock. In the past twenty minutes she had forced her body all the way to its physical limits. Any more help for Bey Wolf would have to come from someone else.
Bey woke up three times.
Pain was the first stimulus. Someone was hurting his face, stabbing again and again at his cheek and forehead. “A bit crude,” a voice said. “But it’ll do. Couple more stitches, I’ll be all done. You’re a mess. You hearing me, Wolfman? No beauty prizes for you.” The sharp pain came again, followed by a wash of icy fluid across his face. Bey grunted in protest and drifted back to unconsciousness.
The second time was more alarming. And more painful. He woke and tried to touch his throbbing left cheek. He could not do it. Something had him firmly held, unable to move. He began to struggle, to pull randomly against his restraints. He was too confused and dizzy to analyze what was happening or why, but he fought like an animal, straining as hard as he could. It was futile. He was working against straps designed to hold a human body secure under a ten-g acceleration. Exhausted after just a few seconds, he lapsed again into unquiet sleep.
Pain and consciousness came faster the third time, and with them—at last—vision. He was lying with his eyes open, staring at a woman’s face. It was only inches away from him, pale and still. There was a tracery of blue veins on the temples and the violet-black smudge of deadly fatigue below the closed eyes. He studied it, puzzled by its familiarity. Who was she? That rounded brow was well known to him. He tried to lift his arm to touch the delicate skull and the fine red hair. He could not do it. They were strapped side by side, lying on a single narrow bunk and securely held in position.
As he placed his fingers on the release mechanism of his harness, awareness returned. And with it, fear. He remembered. Violent impact. The panicky hunt for a suit. The fight for air. Sylvia’s appearance at his side just as that fight was lost.
He had a vague, surrealistic memory then of the nightmare ride through space, stars blurred points through a bloodstained visor.
“Sylvia!” She did not move.
Bey struggled free and sat up. He was again on the transit ship, and the McAndrew drive was on. They were moving with an indicated acceleration of a couple of hundred g’s. He was lying in the same bunk with Sylvia Fernald. On the other bunk, strapped in and wrapped like a cocoon from neck to ankles, lay Leo Manx. As Bey straightened up, Leo’s eyes rolled toward him.
“Where’s Aybee?” Bey asked.
“I don’t know. But the last time I saw him he was all right.” Leo turned his head slowly and gingerly. “It is Sylvia I have been worrying about. I cannot move, and I cannot see her monitors. How is she?”
Bey scanned the condition sensors, supplementing that with his own touch to her cheek and forehead. “Out cold, but everything shows normal. What happened to her? And to you, too? And where’s Aybee? And where are we heading?”
“Mr. Wolf, I am sure you can ask more questions than I can answer.” Leo Manx’s silky voice was gruff. He was either in much pain or terribly ill at ease. “I’ll do my best. Sylvia Fernald made a supreme physical effort when she saved you, but it was too much for her. She collapsed as she reached the ship. At my suggestion and with the medical system’s concurrence, Aybee extended her natural period of unconsciousness. She should sleep until we are close to the Marsden Harvester—our planned destination, where we should now find Cinnabar Baker. What was not my suggestion—” Leo Manx grimaced with displeasure and then with pain. “—was the idea that I would be bound here like an Egyptian mummy, unable to release myself. If you would be kind enough to free the harness…”
“What happened to you?”
“Broken ribs and broken legs. Aybee exceeded his duties and his authority when he anesthetized me and then did this.”
Bey moved to examine the telesensors for Leo Manx, spent a few seconds with the displays, and shook his head. “Sorry. The monitors agree with Aybee. You stay like that until it tells me something different. You should not move.”
“Mr. Wolf, I assure you that I am quite able to—”
“Don’t take my word for it. Try a deep breath.” Bey watched as Manx tentatively inhaled and gasped with pain. “Case closed. What about Aybee?”
Manx rolled his eyes toward the tiny console crowded against the cabin wall. Everything on the transit ships was a third the usual size. “It was my expectation that he would be with us on this ship. Clearly, he is not. But according to the signal there, a message is waiting for us. I have been looking at the indicator for some time, but unfortunately I cannot reach it.”
Bey went across to turn on the unit. As he did so he saw his own reflection in the display screen. Whatever Aybee’s talents, plastic surgery was not one of them. Bey’s face and forehead were crisscrossed with crude, ugly stitches, and the skin on his left cheek had been pulled down so far that the red socket of his eye was exposed. There was no chance that such a mess would heal cleanly. He would have to use one of the Cloudland form-change tanks. He switched on the set.
Aybee’s image showed no sign of either excitement or injury. He scowled out of the display like a bad-tempered baby. “I don’t know which of you will be watching this, but hi. If it’s you, Leo, I didn’t lie to you. I intended to come along as well. But the ship was awful crowded once I had you in your bunks, and with those ribs I knew you wouldn’t enjoy anybody cuddling up close to you, the way Sylv and the Wolfman were doing last time I saw ’em. So.” He shrugged. “I had to change my mind. And I haven’t found any trace of the other ship. I’ll look again, but if I’m delayed getting back there, don’t be surprised. Here’s a few things for you to chew on. First, the female farmer we talked to. She’s dead. We’ll never get any more about that woman she saw walking on the collection layer. Second, the farm can be saved, but the data banks are shot. So you should drop the idea that we can correlate the form-change problems with events on the farm and the collection layer. I was doing that when the bubble was hit, and I’ll tell you the only thing I’d noticed. The form-changes starting to go wrong coincided with a doubling of energy use on the farm. That fact’s for Wolf—you there, Wolfman?—and I hope you can make more out of it than I can. Bet you can’t, though. Here’s my last thought, and it’s for anybody who wants it. From all I can tell, the bubble was hit by a Cloud fragment, one that was traveling unusually fast and from an unusual direction. Bad luck, you say? Except that the farm had sky-scanning sensors, and the bubble had a standard response system. That fragment ought to have been given a little laser nudge when it was millions of kilometers away, and missed us by a nice margin.”