She squeezed Ivo’s hand, lost for words but trying to let him know that she didn’t blame him. He hadn’t forced her to join him. The ground was so close now that Carla could see the structure of the rock, the surface of coarse lumps and concavities about the size of her fist. It looked exactly like powderstone. Ivo’s bold plan to grab a sample here might even have worked, if not for the blunder that had rendered his air blades as suicidal as any hardstone chisel.
The flames were rising again, and gaining on the Mite. Carla checked the clock; the low point was still four chimes away. She turned down her cooling air as far as she could while still sensing some flow across her skin, but the effect on the height of the flames was slight, and soon overtaken by the Mite’s descent. She could feel the heat coming off the blazing ground now, worse than anything her own body could inflict on her.
She shut off the air completely.
The flames faltered, then winked out, leaving the Mite gliding over the starlit landscape. Carla felt a rush of euphoria, but time and geometry were not on her side. Once she and Ivo had both lost consciousness, their deaths would be guaranteed. Even if they were still alive at the point where it was safe to turn on the air again, they’d be oblivious to the chance to save themselves.
She stared at the useless air blades atop the workbench, angry now. Ivo had seen his grandchildren; maybe the folk saying was right after all. That sense of completion had made him careless with his own life, and now his sloppiness was going to kill her too. She thought of grabbing the stupid tools and aiming them at the ground, going out in a blaze of glory that would carve her own name into the sagas.
She saw the whole scene from outside her body: she was silhouetted against the inferno she’d made, one blade in each upper hand, the tubes that fed them running down into the Mite. It was a striking image, no doubt about that—but there’d be no witness to record her defiant pose.
The tubes.
She turned to Ivo; he was slumped in his harness, eyes closed. What was she waiting for—his permission to tear the device apart? Carla wrenched the tube off the right-hand blade, then reached down and pulled the other end free from the outlet of its air tank. With her lower hands she groped inside the bottom of the Mite, finding the clock whose dials she’d been checking. The mechanism was completely exposed; Marzio, bless him, hadn’t sealed it away behind decorative panels that would only have made repairs more difficult.
She could feel the shafts that led out to the dials: she was disoriented for a moment, but the one for counting flickers was easy to distinguish by its speed, and the one for pauses not much harder. Once she had those two fixed in her mind, the shaft she wanted—the shaft that turned once every chime—was easy to find.
She probed the space between the back of the clock face and the gear at the base of the shaft. The separation was more than the thickness of the air tube. Better more than less—but the fit would not be tight enough to keep the tube in place by friction alone.
She felt her way deeper into the flying workbench and found a rack of vials, a stock of reagents that Ivo had intended to use in his calorimetry experiments. Each vial was sealed with a thick blob of resin. Carla sharpened her fingertips and sliced the top half off one of the seals, then daubed the sticky resin over the shaft. She did the same with a second seal, using it to coat the center of the gear. Her body was starting to protest against the heat now; mites were crawling beneath her skin, and some pointless instinct was trying to tempt her with visions of a cooling bed of sand.
She bent the air tube, bringing the two halves together so the corner was crimped to an impassably narrow fold—probably not air tight, but the flow it allowed would be a tiny fraction of the flow through the unobstructed width. Then she passed the tube down to her lower hands and pressed the folded end against the resin-coated shaft.
Laboriously, she began wrapping the tube into a spiral, threading the long tails in and out of the narrow spaces of the clock. The tube fought against the curvature and broke free. She sliced off more resin from two more vials and spread it over the gear and the tube. Her skin was stinging all over now, and points of light were moving across her vision.
The tube stayed in place, curled five times around the slowly turning shaft. Carla pulled apart the join between her cooling bag and its supply tank, and interposed the crude timer.
She opened the valve on the air tank slowly, afraid that too much pressure would tear the tube free. She stopped at the point she remembered by touch—well short of fully open, but where she’d last felt enough air flowing across her skin to make some difference. Nothing was coming through the pinch, and there’d been no tell-tale bounce of the tube unraveling.
She was dizzy now, too disoriented to trust herself to check anything she’d done, let alone try to change it. The lights behind her eyelids swarmed and chittered. She tried to picture Carlo, his body pressed against her, but then part of her refused to be fooled or comforted and the image of him spun away into the whiteness.
25
Carla shuddered and vomited a thin sludge into her helmet. She felt as if every scant of her flesh had been pounded with a mallet. She opened her rear eyes and looked down to see blue flames flickering over the gray rocks beneath her. Again? She was about to start buzzing hysterically, before her mind cleared enough for her to realize that the fire didn’t have to be a bad sign at all.
She reached for the clock, afraid that the tube might have become caught in the mechanism and jammed it, but far from being stuck the dials showed a later time than she’d dared to hope for. The Mite had passed its lowest point. She was alive, and she was moving away from danger.
She quickly turned Ivo’s air back on. The flames rose up in response, but she persisted until the heat became threatening, then she cut the flow back a fraction.
Ivo didn’t move. He’d shut off his air long before she had. Carla shivered but refused to start mourning him. A few lapses later the flames went out completely, so she set his cooling bag to full strength. The tube that had saved her life had broken away from the clock shaft and was floating around in front of her in an irritating loop, so she reconnected her tank directly to her bag and stowed the tube inside one of the Mite’s small storage compartments.
Ivo stirred and began rolling his head, as if trying to unkink his neck muscles. Carla let him be until he opened his eyes and appraised the situation for himself.
He reached for her hand. We’re ascending?
Yes.
He didn’t ask her to explain what had happened. After a while, he took his hand away and began loosening his harness.
Carla’s first instinct was not to intervene; if he’d been injured by the ordeal he might need to move to make himself more comfortable. It was only when he was entirely free of the harness and on the verge of pushing away from the Mite that she understood and grabbed hold of his arm. She was not at her strongest, but he was in no condition to resist her.
She took his hand again.
Better that I die, he wrote.
Carla didn’t know what to say to that, but she resisted the urge to slap him across the head. He’d made an honest mistake that had put them in danger, but they’d both survived. He’d undermined the Gnat’s chances of capturing the Object, but a future mission could always try again, better prepared. And though his reputation would be marred by this débâcle, he’d still been instrumental in the fact that the Gnat had flown at all.