‘Get to the spider-room,’ Volyova shouted, momentarily throttling down the thrust to permit locomotion around the ship. ‘The insulation will enable you to survive another few strikes.’
‘No!’ Khouri was shouting now. ‘We can’t! At least here we’ve got a chance!’
‘She’s right,’ Pascale said.
‘You’ll still have one in the spider-room,’ Volyova said. ‘Better, in fact. It’s a smaller target, for one. I’m guessing the ship will direct its weapons against the shuttle in preference, or it may not even realise that the spider-room is anything but wreckage.’
‘But what about you?’
She was angry now. ‘Do you think I’m the type to indulge in heroics, Khouri? I’m coming too; with or without you. But I have to program a flight pattern into the shuttle first — unless you think you can do it.’
Khouri hesitated, as if the idea was not totally absurd. Then she unbuckled from her couch, jabbed a thumb towards Pascale and began moving, as if her life depended on it.
Which, rationally, it probably did.
Volyova did what she had promised she would do, inputting the most hair-raising evasive pattern she could imagine, one that she was not even sure she or her companions would be capable of surviving, with peak bursts exceeding fifteen gees for whole seconds. But did it really matter now? Somehow, the idea of dying while already unconscious, in the warm, muggy torpor of geeinduced blackout, was preferable to being burned alive, in vacuum, in the invisible heat of gamma-rays.
Grabbing the helmet she had worn when she boarded the shuttle, she prepared to join the others, mentally counting down until the initiation of the evasive pattern.
Khouri was halfway across to the waiting spider-room when she felt the wave of heat slap across her face, followed by the dreadful sound of the hull giving up its final ghost. The illumination in the cargo bay was gone now, as the Melancholia’s energy grid collapsed under the onslaught of the attack. But the spider-room’s interior was still powered up, its implausibly plush décor visible through the observation windows.
‘Get in!’ she shouted to Pascale, and although the noise of the ship’s death-throes was now tremendous, like a concerto played on scrap metal, somehow Sylveste’s wife heard what she said and clambered into the spider-room, just as a tremendous shock wave slammed through the hull (or what remained of it), and the spider-room exploded free of the moorings in which it had been locked by Volyova’s servitors.
Now there was a terrible howl of escaping air from elsewhere in the shuttle, and suddenly Khouri felt it tug against her, resisting her forward progress. The spider-room twisted and turned, its legs thrashing wildly, randomly. She could see Pascale now, in the observation window, but there was nothing the woman could do to help; she understood the room’s controls even less comprehensively than Khouri.
She looked behind, hoping and praying that she would see Volyova there, having followed them, and that she would know what to do, but there was nothing except empty access corridor, and that awful sucking stream of escaping air.
‘Ilia…’
The damned fool had done just what they’d feared; stayed behind, for all that she had denied that she would.
With what little light remained, she saw the hull quiver, like a sounding-board. And then suddenly the gale that was pulling her away from the spider-room lost its strength; counter-balanced by an equally fierce decompression halfway across the cargo bay. She looked towards it, eyes already veiling over as the cold hit them, and then she was falling towards the gap where only a second earlier there had been metal—
‘Where the—’
But almost as soon as she had opened her mouth, Khouri knew where she was, which was inside the spider-room. There was no mistaking the place; not after all the time she had spent in it. And it felt comfortable; warm and safe and silent; a universe away from where she had been up to the point when she could not remember anything more. Her hands hurt; hurt rather a lot, in fact — but apart from that, she felt better than she imagined she had any right to feel; not when her last memory had been of falling towards naked space, from the womb of a dying ship…
‘We made it,’ Pascale said, although something in her voice sounded anything but triumphant. ‘Don’t try to move; not just yet — you’ve burnt your hands rather badly.’
‘Burnt them?’ Khouri was lying on one of the velvet couches which stretched along either wall of the room, head against the curved cushioned-brass end-piece. ‘What happened?’
‘You hit the spider-room; the draught pulled you towards it. I don’t know how, but you managed to climb around the outside to the airlock. You were breathing vacuum for five or six seconds at least. The metal cooled so quickly that you got frost-burns where your hands touched it.’
‘I don’t remember any of that.’ But she only had to look at the evidence of her palms to see that it must have been true.
‘You blacked out as soon as you came aboard. I don’t blame you.’
There was still that utterly uncelebratory tone in her voice, as if all that Khouri had done had been pointless. And Khouri thought she was probably right. The best that could happen to them was that they would somehow find a way to land the spider-room on Cerberus, and then see how long they could take their chances against the crustal defences. It would be interesting, if nothing else. And if not that, she supposed, then a slow wait until either the lighthugger found them and picked them off, or they died of cold or asphyxia, when their reserves expired. She racked her memory, trying to recall how long Volyova had said the spider-room was capable of surviving on its own.
‘Ilia…’
‘She didn’t make it in time,’ Pascale said. ‘She died. I saw it happen. The second you were aboard, the shuttle just exploded.’
‘You think Volyova made it happen deliberately, so that we’d at least have a chance? So we’d be mistaken for wreckage, as she said?’
‘If so, I suppose we owe her thanks.’
Khouri slipped off her jacket, removed her shirt, slipped her jacket back on again and then tore the shirt into narrow strips with which she then bound her black, blistered palms. They hurt like hell, but it was nothing worse than the kind of pain she had known during training, from rope burns or carrying heavy artillery. She gritted her teeth and, while acknowledging it, put the pain somewhere beyond her immediate concerns.
Which, now she had to focus on them, made the prospect of submerging herself in the pain somewhat more tempting. But she resisted. She had to at least acknowledge her predicament, even if there was nothing obvious she could do about it. She had to know how it was going to happen, as it surely would.
‘We’re going to die, aren’t we?’
Pascale Sylveste nodded. ‘But not the way you’re thinking, I’m willing to bet.’
‘You mean we don’t land on Cerberus?’
‘No; not even if we knew how to operate this thing. We’re not going to hit it either, and I think our velocity’s too high for us to go into any kind of orbit around it.’
Now that Pascale mentioned it, the hemisphere of Cerberus through the observation windows looked further away than it had appeared prior to the attack against the shuttle. They must have slammed past the world with the velocity which had not been negated from the shuttle’s approach pattern, hundreds of kilometres a second.
‘So what happens now?’
‘I’m only guessing,’ Pascale said, ‘but I think we’re falling towards Hades.’ She nodded at the forward observation window, at the pinprick of red light ahead of them. ‘It seems to be in roughly the right direction, doesn’t it?’