The backup thrusters hummed; hundreds of tiny, temporary channels through the wellstone outer hull, accelerating heavy oxygen ions, one by one, to relativistic speeds. This, too, was probably illegaclass="underline" an exhaust much deadlier than the typical fusion helium, and deadlier at a much greater range, too. They could probably cook a human from a light-second away.
“Thirty’s-s-seconds to closest approach,” Muddy warned.
“Hmm. Here we go, then.”
“It’s been an honor working with you, sir.”
“Likewise,” Deliah chipped in.
“Oh, nonsense. I couldn’t have done any of this alone. We all have the greatest respect for each other, et cetera, et cetera.”
“Twenty seconds.”
He became acutely aware of his breathing. He wondered if it was loud, if it maybe should be a little slower and quieter.
“Ten seconds. Five. Four, three, two…”
And then, suddenly, there it was in the window above them—a long, slender piece glowing brightly with the familiar Cerenkov blue. The ertial shield hadn’t twitched in the slightest, hadn’t reacted at all. The collapsium itself seemed similarly unaffected, not falling in on itself in their wake or anything. They continued past, seeing more and more of it, the fragment growing longer and dimmer and loopier in the window view. Then the last of it trailed by, and they were in clear space again.
“Backup thrusters off,” Muddy said. The humming stopped.
Deliah let a long breath out. “That wasn’t so bad.”
“No,” Bruno agreed. Not bad at all. Some day, he’d have to work out the theory of it all, the precise interactions between collapsium and hypercollapsite. The weak link was surely the collapsium, it being so much less dense, so much more subject to gravity and inertia and the various other interactions of the zero-point field. His fear had been the crushing of its lattice, and its resulting reversion to a chain of heavy, disconnected, uncontrollable hypermasses capable of all sorts of harm. But perhaps the two could live together in harmony after all. At half a kilometer’s distance, anyway!
“Platform contact in two minutes,” Muddy said. He seemed to enjoy counting down event times—a task at once useful and easy and safe.
“Good,” Bruno acknowledged. “Can we have the telescope image back?”
Wordlessly, Muddy reached for his interface. The window reappeared, now showing a much larger, more detailed version of what they’d seen before. The dome was there, and the mirrored tents beneath it. Now there were other things visible as welclass="underline" light-energy conversion panels with cables running across the diamond deck until they slipped under the edges of superreflective cloth. Discs of various color arranged in neat rows outside the tents, as if occupied in some sort of experiment. And one image that was both horrifying and uplifting: the blackened, burned skeleton of a human being. Horrifying because, well, it was the blackened, burned skeleton of a human being. Uplifting because there was only one. Had the survivors dragged a fallen comrade outside, to burn rather than rot? It lent credence to the idea that there were survivors down there.
“My God,” Deliah said.
That initial view had been oblique, almost edge-on, so it was difficult to make out any telling details as the platform turned away, turned its other, blank side to face them.
Now the shipwreck as well betrayed new details; he could clearly make out the lines of an airlock in its iron skin, and a seam where two plates had warped apart. There was a neat, circular hole through the side, too, down low where it was nearly hidden by shadow. As the platform revolved—and grew, for they were approaching it rapidly—he could see a matching hole down low on the ship’s other side.
He experienced an instant chilling of the blood. He’d seen holes like that before, in the ruins of Sykes Manor. Holes created by a weapon, a nasen beam. That ship hadn’t crashed onto the platform, hadn’t limped its way here and quietly expired; it had been murdered in the very act of rescue!
“This is a trap,” he said, as coolly and evenly as possible. “Someone is watching the platform, waiting to pick off any ship that approaches.”
“My God!” Deliah squawked, with much greater conviction.
“I knew it!” Muddy wailed, suddenly tearful again. “I knew I’d get us killed! Declarant-Philander, there’s nothing we can do! No place else to grapple to, not in the time allotted!”
“To the collapsium fragment above us?” Bruno suggested quickly.
“No!” Deliah said. “It’s muon-contaminated—it’ll come apart in seconds.”
“We will rendezvous with the platform,” Muddy insisted. “Nothing can prevent that now, no matter what we grapple to. Inertia can only be bent so far.”
Bruno pounded a fist into his palm. “Blast it, a nasen beam isn’t easy to aim! How’s our oxygen supply?”
“Fine, sir,” Muddy wearily replied.
“Good. Set your thrusters on a program of random firing. Stay on trajectory, but let our arrival time float, plus or minus a few seconds. That may confuse the targeting mechanisms. They don’t have to miss us by much, so long as they miss us!”
Soon, an annoyingly staccato hum commenced in the outer hull. As before, no sense of motion resulted from it.
“Where is this nasen beam?” Deliah wanted to know.
Bruno shrugged. “I couldn’t say. On a ship, probably, and not too near, or we’d‘ve detected it already. It could be quite distant, in which case it likely wouldn’t fire until we’d matched courses with the platform. A known position—you see?— regardless of light-lag delays. If we complete our rescue quickly, the beam’s… controller may not realize we’re gone until after it’s fired.”
“Thirty seconds to contact,” Muddy whined. “I’m scared, Bruno. I don’t want to do this!”
“Turn us!” Bruno shot back, with sudden inspiration. “Make sure our hatch is facing the dome! And try to hit as close to the dome’s base as possible, without endangering the neutronium cladding. It’s all right to hit a little harder, just be sure we stick when we hit, so we can start melting through immediately. This is for your safely, Muddy; as you say, we will hit.”
“Ten seconds. Oh, God, can’t we just let them die?”
The impact was sudden and severe; Bruno was thrown against his restraints and slammed back into his couch again. Muddy shrieked, and even Deliah cried out in distress.
Bruno’s own fear was a brusque, impatient business. He was frustrated, more than a little bit angry at being forced to such extremity, and there was a substantial part of his mind that dreamily refused to believe any of this was happening at all. His thoughts, such as they were, were focused on Tamra. In those hurried moments as he threw off his harness and leaped for the door, his own safety concerned him mainly to the extent that it was linked with hers—he couldn’t very well save her if he got himself killed. So he moved very quickly until he was poised to open the door, then froze in place.
He welcomed the sizzling sound when it began; this well-stone chemistry would get him through to Her Majesty as quickly and safely as possible.
Muddy continued wailing. Hugo mewled. Deliah, rising from her own couch, asked, “Is there anything I should be doing right now?”
Bruno, in his singularly single-minded state, ignored them all. “Ship,” he said, as another inspiration struck, “are your grapples still locked on Venus?”