In the unreal moments that followed, the elevator continued to climb smoothly.
‘No,’ the man said, doing his best to sound calm, but not quite managing it. ‘They must be wrong. They’ve got to be wrong.’
‘I hope to God they are,’ the woman said, her voice beginning to crack. ‘My last neural scan was six months ago…’
‘Damn six months,’ the man said. ‘I haven’t been scanned this decade!’
The woman breathed out hard. ‘Well, they absolutely have to be wrong. We’re continuing to have this conversation, aren’t we? We’re not all screaming as we drop towards the planet.’ She looked at her bracelet again, frowning.
‘What does it say?’ the man said.
‘Exactly what it said a moment ago.’
‘It’s a mistake, or a vicious lie, that’s all.’
I debated how much it would be judicious to reveal at this point. I was more than just a bodyguard, of course. In my years of service to Cahuella there were few things on the planet which I had not studied — even if that study had usually been motivated by some military application. I didn’t pretend to know much about the bridge, but I did know something about hyperdiamond, the artificial carbon allotrope from which it was spun.
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I think they could be right.’
‘But nothing’s changed!’ the woman said.
‘I wouldn’t necessarily expect it to.’ I was forcing calm myself, clicking back into the crisis-management state of mind my soldiering years had taught me. Somewhere in the back of my head was a shrill scream of private fear, but I did my best to ignore it for the moment. ‘Even if the bridge had been cut, how far below do you think that flash was? I’d say it was at least three thousand kilometres.’
‘What the fuck has that got to do with it?’
‘A lot,’ I said, managing a gallows smile. ‘Think of the bridge as being like a rope — hanging all the way down from orbit, stretched out by its own weight.’
‘I’m thinking about it, believe me.’
‘Good. Now think about cutting the rope midway along its height. The part above the cut is still hanging from the orbital hub, but the part below will immediately begin falling to the ground.’
The man answered now. ‘We’re perfectly safe, then? We’re certainly above the cut.’ He looked upwards. ‘The thread’s intact all the way between here and the orbital terminus. That means if we keep climbing, we’ll make it, thank God.’
‘I wouldn’t start thanking Him just yet.’
He looked at me with a pained expression, as if I were spoiling some elaborate parlour game with needless objections.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean it doesn’t mean we’re safe. If you cut a long rope hanging under its own weight, the part above the cut’s going to spring back.’
‘Yes.’ He looked at me with threatening eyes, as if I was making my objections out of spite. ‘I understand that. But it obviously doesn’t apply to us, since nothing’s happened.’
‘Yet,’ I said. ‘I never said the relaxation would happen instantly, all along the thread. Even if the thread’s been cut below us, it’ll take some time for the relaxation wave to climb all the way up to us.’
His question was fearful now.
‘How long?’
I had no exact answer for them. ‘I don’t know. Speed of sound in hyperdiamond isn’t very different than in natural diamond — about fifteen kilometres a second, I think. If the cut was three thousand kilometres under us, the sound wave should hit us first — about two hundred seconds after the nuke flash. The relaxation wave should move slower than that, I think… but it will still reach us before we reach the summit.’
My timing was exquisite, for the sonic pulse arrived just as I had finished speaking, a hard and sudden jolt, as if the elevator had just hit a bump in its two-thousand-kilometre-per-hour ascent.
‘We’re still safe, aren’t we?’ asked the wife, her voice only a knife-edge from hysteria. ‘If the cut is below us… Oh God, I wish we’d been backed-up more often.’
Her husband looked at her snidely. ‘It was you who told me those flights to the scanning clinic were too expensive to make a habit out of, darling.’
‘But you didn’t have to take me literally.’
I raised my voice, silencing them. ‘I still think we’re in a lot of danger, I’m afraid. If the relaxation wave is just a longitudinal compression along the thread, there’s a chance we’ll ride it out safely. But if the thread starts picking up any kind of sideways motion, like a whip…’
‘What the fuck are you,’ the man asked, ‘some kind of engineer? ’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Another kind of specialist entirely.’
More footfalls on the stairs now as the rest of the group came up. The jolt must have convinced them something was seriously wrong.
‘What’s happening?’ asked one of the southerners, a burly man a foot taller than anyone else in the elevator.
‘We’re riding a severed thread,’ I answered. ‘There are spacesuits aboard this thing, aren’t there? I suggest we get into them as quickly as possible.’
The man looked at me as if I were insane. ‘We’re still ascending! I don’t give a damn what happened below us; we’re fine. They built this thing to take a lot of crap.’
‘Not this much,’ I said.
By now the servitor had arrived as well, suspended from its ceiling rail. I asked it to show us to the suits. It should not have been necessary to ask, but this situation was so far beyond the servitor’s experience that it had completely failed to detect any threat to its human charges. I wondered if the news of the severed thread had reached the orbital station. Almost certainly it had — and almost certainly there was nothing that could be done for the elevators still on the thread.
Still, it was better to be on the upper part of the thread than the part below the severing point. I imagined a thousand-kilometre-high section below the cut. It would take several minutes for the top of the thread to smash into the planet below — in fact, for a long while it would seem to hang magically, like a rope trick. But it would still be falling, and there was nothing in the world that could stop it. A million tonnes of thread, slicing down into the atmosphere, laden with cars, some of them occupied. It would be a slow and quite terrifying way to die.
Who could have done this?
It was too much to believe that it didn’t have something to do with my ascent. Reivich had tricked us in Nueva Valparaiso, and if it hadn’t been for the bridge attack I would have still been trying to assimilate the fact of Miguel Dieterling’s death. I couldn’t imagine Red Hand Vasquez having anything to do with the explosion, even though I hadn’t completely ruled him out of the frame for my friend’s murder. Vasquez just didn’t have the imagination to attempt something like this, let alone the means. And his cultist indoctrination would have made it very hard for him to even think of harming the bridge in any way. Yet someone appeared to be trying to kill me. Maybe they had put a bomb aboard one of the elevators rising below, thinking I was on it, or would be on one of those below the cut point — or maybe they had fired a missile and misjudged the point to aim for. It could have been Reivich, but only in the technical sense — he had friends with the right influence. But I’d never figured him as someone capable of an act of that ruthlessness: casually wiping out of existence a few hundred innocents just to ensure the death of one man.
But maybe Reivich was learning.
We followed the servitor to the emergency space suit lockers, each of which held one vacuum suit. They were of antique design by spacefaring standards, requiring the users to physically insert themselves in the garment rather than have it enfold around them. They all appeared to be one size too small, but I donned my suit quickly enough, with the dexterous ease with which one might slip on a suit of combat armour. I was careful to hide the clockwork gun in one of the suit’s capacious utility pockets, where there should have been a signal flare.