“Don't argue. There isn't time. See that cable? Press the end of it against my back. Right here.”
He does, and I try not to jump as the probes slide in and find their resting place. Valens is a hell of a lot more gentle. “Now the collar.” It comes out through gritted teeth.
Gabe hesitates, one hand on the nape of my neck. I'm numb from the waist down, my legs deader than tingling. I can't feel the ship yet. Dick, can you make this work for me? “Jen, this is a lousy idea.” The collar hangs in his other hand, connecting cables dangling.
“What are you doing?” Richard, concerned. He projects trajectories into my inner sight, as I know he must be doing for Leah. Red line for the asteroid, orange for the Huang Di ascending now on a curve. Green line for the Leonard Cohen. Fat blue stationary dot is the Montreal. “The Chinese pilots are wired faster than you are, Jen.”
“I know,” I answer them both, and turn my attention to Gabriel. “Once that's on, I think I'm going to lose consciousness. Catch me. Watch me. All right?”
He shakes his head. I see Wainwright following our conversation from the edge of her eye. “I'm losing two daughters today. And a damn good friend.”
“You're losing nothing if I can help it, mon coeur.” He meets my eyes. I look down first, studying my knees. Awkwardly, I reach out and lift first the left and then the right leg onto the couch. It's like handling a still-warm corpse. Heh. Done that, too. Somewhere far away, I can feel other things — a pulsation like an ache in my belly, a rumble like the trembling in your calf muscles from hiking uphill.
Gabe takes a breath, and I speak first.
“Gabriel.” The tone in my voice stops him short. “Wire me into this fucking machine right now.”
I feel more than see him nod as cold metal brushes the back of my neck. A lancing moment of pain, a wrenching disconnect…
… and I am swimming among the stars.
Richard.
“Right here, Jenny.” He opens up to me: space, the stars, the weight of the world and the arcing curve of the Huang Di, the asteroid, the soap-bubble of a shuttle that Leah presses to its maximum — or, more likely, Koske does, while my goddaughter runs navigation. Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce.
You know, Marie is my middle name. How do the Chinese pilots do it, Dick?
“Plan in advance.”
Set the jump in advance?
“Line of sight. Do you trust me that much?”
I trust you that much. You know what I want to do?
“Leah says to back off and let her handle it.”
Seal the airtight bulkhead doors. Evacuate everybody from the aft sections of the Montreal. Tell Leah to tell Trevor to pull the fuck up and let me handle this.
“There's nobody back there but a maintenance crew. Reactor is too hot; we've evacuated until we can take on coolant water.”
Sometimes synchronicity works.
You know where we're going, Dick?
“That's a ninety-meter rock, which — considering the atmosphere — will hit at something like fourteen kilometers per second. If we miss, it's not just Toronto. Cleveland. Buffalo. Most of Ontario and a chunk of the Midwest. Atmospheric blowout, it's called. Widespread fires.”
If we miss, Leah and Trevor get their chance to die like heroes. What are our friendly Chinese neighbors thinking? That's a hell of a way to deal with the competition, Richard.
“What do they care? They're leaving anyway.”
I didn't know a computer could sound bitter. If I were Trevor, I would match velocity with the Rock and push it aside. If I had time.
Which Trevor doesn't.
With my eyes blank, with my body numb and distant, with a mind full of the cold spinning depths of space, I focus all my attention, reach out an arm that's no more than a vision, and point. Richard.
Can you tell me when to stop us there?
“Can Gordon Lightfoot sing shipwreck songs?”
Who the hell is Gordon Lightfoot? Somebody with a shuttlecraft named after him, whoever he is—
“Never mind.”
— priez pour nous pauvres pécheurs, maintenent et à l'heure de notre mort.
Amen.
Amen.
Richard.
Go.
Amen.
2250 Hours
Thursday 21 December, 2062
HMCSS Leonard Cohen
Under way
The silence made it stranger.
Leah heard Koske's breathing, the dull thud of his heartbeat, the tick of the Leonard Cohen's hide shedding heat into the vast chill of space. She heard Richard's voice in her head and the myriad tiny intimate sounds of two human bodies moving in protective gear, amplified by a confined space. But that was all.
The Montreal hung motionless behind them, visible in rear camera displays and as a shimmering dot kilometers off the Leonard Cohen's stern. Leah had acquired visual contact with the asteroid, a slender bright crescent skittering across the motionless background of the stars, the flare of the Huang Di's chemical engines painting its topside red as the asteroid dropped from the starship like an egg from a dragon's belly, unholy in its silence.
She swore and fed course corrections to Koske, matching her best guess at the thing's velocity and its inexorable path to the stately blue globe below. “How long?”
“Leah,” Richard said in her head, and gave her better data. “From a friend on the Huang Di.”
We have friends on the Huang Di?
“Seven minutes to contact,” Koske answered, then glanced down as her new data lit up his screen. “No, seven and a half. Get your hat on, kid. It's too close for a nudge to do it. This could get rough.”
Leah was already suited, but the shuttle was under sustained burn and the acceleration made her clumsy. She clapped the helmet on and was pleased that her hands didn't fumble a catch. Adrenaline hissed through her veins and the world outside her body slowed about 40 percent. She had her hands on the controls in ninety seconds. Richard fed her more math. This won't work. There's no way this can work. Even if we intercept the rock, we haven't got the thrust at this distance to knock it off course. Even if we go into it at full velocity. It's just not enough ship and too much rock. “Lieutenant. Suit.”
“Can you fly this?” He looked at her for the first time, surprised.
“I just have to keep it pointed. Three minutes, go.”
Koske slapped the release on his helmet restraint and yanked it off the hook while Leah let her hands sit steady on the controls, tears burning the corners of her eyes. Fifty seconds. Genie's down there. Bryan. Ellie. God.
“I have it. Sorry about this, kid.”
“My name's Leah,” she said, and let the thrust pin her hands to the arms of her chair.
“Leah,” he answered, muffled through speakers as the globe of his helmet tilted to observe the instruments. She bit her lip as the silence resumed.
And gasped.
The golden-gray sunlit dot of the Montreal suddenly seemed to elongate, to blur, to vastly stretch. Her outline, gaudy with running lights, appeared in the shuttle's forward dorsal windows, cosmic and immense and silent. Her solar sails spread wide, gossamer gold-electroplated mesh on unfurled vanes that downflected like bowering wings, the embrace of a terrible gray dove, kilometers long.