“My!” She breathed deeply. “Pretty torrid for midday—particularly after a hard night.”
“We do our best.”
“I go on shift soon. Let’s have a quick lunch.”
“Great.” He launched himself for their tiny kitchen, made workable only because they could use the walls and ceiling.
“There’s some hard copy on your printer, by the way,” Lani said, fetching some sauce used on the braised vegetables and mute-chicken from the evening before. “From Virginia.”
“Oh?’
He kicked over to the printer. Usually it was used only for emergencies or entertainments, not ordinary ship’s business.
It was a poem.
Carl studied it, frowning. “She’s getting better.”
Lani came over and read it slowly. “I’m always surprised anew,” she said softly. “Virginia truly is in there, somewhere.”
Carl shook his head. “She’s not in anything, really. She’s everywhere. The system has expanded far beyond just JonVon’s banks. She’s Halley now.”
Lani suddenly turned and embraced him. “We’re all Halley.” He breathed in the aromatic warm musk of her and felt an easing of old pains. Whydid it take me so long to see that this fine woman could be a whole world to me? And what if I never had seen it?
He felt Virginia around them all, sensed the entire community of Halley as a matrix threaded through the ancient ice. They were no longer buried inside, going for a ride. No Percells, no Orthos. They were a new, beleaguered society, a new way for a versatile primate to stretch further, to be more than it was. They were not merely in the center of the old dead ice, they were the heart of the comet.
“Yeah, I suppose we are,” he said.
VIRGINIA
It was a show that humans had never seen before, and quite likely never would again. The steady hammering of the launchers for over three decades had altered the infalling ice mountain’s orbit, shifting the nodes of the stretching ellipse. Earth’s orbit clung to the sun, deviating from a circle by less than two percent. But Halley’s eccentricity had been ninety-six percent even before the machines of men began their persistent nudging. Now the curve tightened with each passing hour, bringing a searing summer. Halley had never plunged this close to the eroding Hot.
The tunnels and shafts made excellent acoustic pipes. As ice around and surged against new frictions, the groans echoed deep into the core, waking sleepers—though there were few of those, as the crucial hour approached.
Plunging fifty kilometers nearer with every second, Halley rushed toward its ancient enemy. Each past encounter had stripped a skin of ice from the comet, but now it rumbled and wrenched with new forces that sought to break it on the anvil of its sun.
Virginia watched the howling, blinding storm through electronic eyes. As each camera died from the stinging blast of dust and plasma, she deployed another from deep vaults. The sun loomed twice as large as seen from Earth. But from the surface there was no incandescent disk to see. Halley spun, but saw no sunrise. Instead, a white-hot corona simmered overhead. A patch of seething brightness marked where the Hot’s outpouring met the ion flood exploding from Halley, and victory inevitably went to the Hot. Cracked, ionized, the gases turned, deflected aside, and swept around the small iceworld in a magnetized blanket. This roiling atmosphere had no loyalty to its parent, but instead raced outward.
Halley’s twin tails now unfurled across a span greater than Mercury’s orbit. The twisting, glimmering plasma banner held less water than many of Earth’s larger ponds, but the sun’s blaring light made it the most visible object in the solar system. Advanced inhabitants of a nearby star could have picked the nearly straight, shimmering curtains out from the central star. The dust tail, in contrast, was a curved reddish band, broken by dark lanes, sparkling with pebbles and micron-sized grains.
But those riding the parent ice mote could not see the most beautiful tail ever to grace a comet in all history. As it sped deeper into its star’s gravity well, the glowering coma of unbearable luminescence spread and devoured the whole sky. Blinded now, Halley could not even see its nemesis. The sky glared down everywhere.
Virginia had calculated this effect carefully, for it was the key. If she had allowed Halley to remain spinless, the sunward face would have soared toward the four-hundred-degree temperature that a solid body would have at this distance from the sun. Now, she watched heat-flux monitors buried tens of meters in the ice. As the warmth seeped deeper, she spun the iceworld faster to smooth out the effect, allowing the night side to radiate into the black of space.
But the black was fading. Soon the comet’s own summer air reflected sunlight down onto the shaded face of Halley from all sides, and temperatures rose faster as perihelion approached.
“How’s it look?” Carl watched Central’s screens with Lani at his side. “We’ve already blown off twenty meters of ice!” he said sharply. “How long’ll it take to rip us apart?”
Virginia sensed his rising level of conflict. He was a man who solved problems, and in this great crisis he had no role. Like the others, he was a helpless passenger on his own ship.
“We are safe,” she said reassuringly, using a thread of alto tones that made her voice richer than the original had ever been.
“The shaft seals?”
“Intact,” Virginia said, displaying views of the steel-capped lids in place two hundred meters inside each shaft. Beyond them, giant plugs of ice barred the Hot’s way.
“Stop worrying,” Lani said gently, putting a hand on Carl’s shoulder. “We might as well enjoy the view.”
Virginia thought later that it was particularly ironic that Lani’s words were punctuated by a long, rolling boom that penetrated into Central. The spherical room vibrated, creaking. Equipment popped free of holders.
“A cave-in,” Virginia announced, throwing an image onto the central screen. A milling mass of snow and ice jutted through tunnel walls, falling with aching slowness.
“Damn!” Carl said, his voice tight. “Where?”
“Site Three C, as our projection suggested.”
“Pressure.”
“Sealed tightly. No incursions.” Virginia analyzed Carl’s voice patterns and found a high level of tension. If only he would listen to Lani more…
The basic human reaction to events of immense size was to hunker down.
Virginia had noted this in the final days before perihelion. Her mechs roved the honeycombed tunnels, testing for leaks and sudden fountains of vagrant heat. Seldom did they meet anyone. Even Stormfield Park was deserted now, the carousel stopped.