“Negative,” the ship replied. “The rotation of the platform makes that impossible.”
“What’s the largest object handy? The sun? Obviously, yes. Can you lock onto that?”
“Intermittently,” the ship agreed.
“Good. Do it, and engage the grapples as soon as possible. This platform is damned heavy, but with the ertial shield we may be able to drag it out of place. At least a little. Perhaps a little is all we need. Now then, please paint a line on the interior to mark the thickness and position of the dome.”
“Instruction unclear,” the ship replied apologetically.
Blast it, his old house had been well accustomed to half-nonsense commands like that. “Paint a line, you! Show me where the dome is, the edge of the dome against your hull!”
“Like this?”
A pinkish red area the size of Bruno’s torso appeared on the inner surface of the hatch. Was this what he wanted? He waited for a moment and verified that yes, indeed, the circle was growing. Soon it became a hollowed-out oval, roughly as deep as Bruno’s hand and encircling an area as large as his body. It swelled outward slowly as the side of the ship sank its way in through the diamond structure of the dome.
“When this completely encircles the hatch,” he said, pointing to the pink line, “stop burrowing and await further instructions. I’m going to open this door and exit the ship. Er, exit you. When I come back in and close the door, break contact immediately and take us out of here. Let the dome decompress, and just grapple to anything you like. If there’s no target handy, use the backup thrusters.”
“Understood, sir.”
The outside of the painted line advanced past the corners of the hatchway. The inside of the line soon followed, leaving the hatchway completely clear. The sizzling sound switched off; the door was fully inside the dome, and so, with hardly a thought in his head, Bruno threw the latches back and heaved the door open, then leaped out.
Sunlight struck him like a physical blow. There is heat, he had time to think, and there is heat. Solar energy at fourteen thousand watts per square meter—ten times Earth normal— was something the body had no immediate response for. It was exactly like being thrown into a fire; his eyes pinched closed of their own accord, his hair singed and crisped and smoked on his scalp, and he collapsed immediately to the di-clad neutronium deck, thrashing and gasping. Fortunately, the deck was relatively cool, and his shirt and tights—which were cream colored and fairly reflective—had some minimal climate-control capabilities that saturated right around the time his sweat glands finally opened up and began pouring out rivers of lukewarm saline. These factors helped keep him from more serious injury for the six seconds it took the sun to “set” behind the platform’s edge.
He heard voices nearby. “It is a ship; look!”
“What’s that door doing there? Who is that? That’s not a robot; that’s a man!”
“My God, I think he stepped out in the daylight.”
Bruno sat up and, to his surprise, let out a very undignified scream. “Ow! Ow! Goddamn it, that hurts!” His face and hands felt sunburned already, and his eyes, when he opened them, were blinded by sweat and huge, glowing blobs of color.
“Sir?” a voice said, now just a meter or two away. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Bruno said, though this was far from certain. Once again, his thoughts settled on Tamra. He picked himself up. “Bruno de Towaji, at Her Majesty’s service.”
His vision began to clear slightly, and the burning of his skin eased somewhat as the air began to cool. His sweat-soaked clothes began to feel heavy and cold, which was wonderful. He looked around. In the glow of wellstone lights set around the dome’s perimeter, he saw four shiny tents surrounded by solar collectors and neat rows of scorched, plastic discs the size of dart boards. Various charred debris—shoes and hats and crumbly brown scrolls of paper—littered the deck around him. Nearby was the skeleton he’d seen, and a little ways off, in the lee of a tent, was another skeleton he hadn’t. And immediately surrounding him, crowding right up against him, were four figures dressed head to toe in suits of thick, silver-white cloth that left only their faces exposed. He took each of them in with a hurried glance.
It’d been a long time. The first face he identified as belonging to Wenders Rodenbeck, the playwright-cum-lawyer. The second—identified more by his hulking body than his Asian features—was the policeman Cheng Shiao. The third was one of Tamra’s courtiers, the woman named Tusite. Hardest of all was the fourth, a quite familiar-looking young lady. She had the same copper eyes and sandalwood skin as young Vivian Rajmon, and with a start he realized it was Vivian, grown up nearly all the way.
But where was Tamra? Putting all else out of his mind, he pointed to the open hatchway of his ship, which hung ridiculously outside the dome, like some shiny, barrel-shaped lamprey. “This way,” he said. “Climb aboard, and quickly. I’ll assist Her Majesty. Where is she?”
Cheng Shiao stepped forward and grabbed Bruno firmly by the elbow. “Philander,” he said in quick, precise tones, “it is my sad duty to inform you that Her Majesty gave her life in the effort to save others. Let’s away from this place, quickly. You’re in terrible danger.”
Bruno felt as though he’d been slammed in the chest with a croquet mallet. “What? What? Instruction unclear. What did you say?”
Shiao’s face was grimly serious. “Her Majesty Queen Tamra-Tamatra Lutui, in the person of her last known copy, is dead. I’m more sorry than you know, Philander.”
He said some other stuff after that, various irrelevancies about ships and danger and impending death, none of which registered on Bruno. If not for Shiao’s firm grip on his elbow, he’d have sunk to the deck and stayed there, waited for the sun to come and burn him away. But Shiao’s grip didn’t compromise, didn’t allow him to fall. He was dragged back toward the waiting ship and pulled through the hatch.
Only when the hatch was closed, and Sabadell-Andorra broke contact with the platform’s dome and lurched toward the sun at a thousand-gee acceleration, and the sickening inertial imbalances caused Shiao to lose equilibrium…
Only then was Bruno de Towaji permitted to faint.
Of historical note is the fact that within milliseconds of Bruno’s head striking the edge of the fireplace, a nasen beam passed through the diamond cladding of the platform, breaching it. The resulting neutronium spill eradicated all traces of the structure itself, including the bones of one Tamra-Tamatra Lutui, and had the Sabadell-Andorra been propelled by any of the technologies that were standard at the time, there is little doubt that it would have been eradicated as well.
Bruno knew he wasn’t dead when he heard Muddy walling. Oddly, though, what Muddy was saying was not “Poor me,” or “I am afraid,” but “Tamra! Tamra!! Oh, God, how I’ve failed you!” This was how he knew he and Muddy weren’t really so different after all.
“He’s waking up,” a too-husky version of Vivian Rajmon’s voice said. “Cheng, come here; he’s waking up.”
“No,” Bruno said without opening his eyes. “No, there’s no point in that.”
“Are you all right, Bruno? We’ve put some salve on your burns, but your hair will need to be shaved…”
Resignedly, he opened his eyes, which already ran with tears, and promised to run with many more before they were through. “Hello, Vivian. God, how beautiful you’ve become! What a young lady! It’s good of you to care for me, really; thank you. It’s quite unnecessary, though; my life is over. I’m about to kill myself.”