The city side doors opened. With a collective sigh of relief, the whole herd tumbled out into the entryway.
Central City was built underground, a series of lens-shaped hollows, kilometers across, known as Sub-Bubbles. The tourist dome sat on the surface, fifty meters directly above one edge of a lens, connected to the interior’s ground level by a long ramp running between the surface level and the airlock. The city side of the airlock complex had been designed with tourists in mind. One whole wall was made up of huge view windows that canted in from the ceiling toward the floor, overlooking Amundsen SubBubble, affording a splendid vista of the bustling city below.
Except now the view windows were shattered heaps of glass on the ground and jagged knife-edges sprouting up from window frames. A sooty wind swept into the overlook chamber.
The city below looked like a war zone. Smoke billowed up from at least three separate fires, only to be caught in a violent wind that flattened it into the sky blue ceiling of the bubble. Wind.
Nothing scared a Conner more than a leak. Lucian forced the worry from his mind. Either the repair crews were handling it or they weren’t. Lucian’s gaze left the ceiling and he looked down at the city again. The lush greenery that the city took such pride in was still more or less there, but whole garden sections had slumped over. Landslides had carried off hillside trees.
Mobs swirled about here and there—whether in panic or in some attempt to deal with the fires and other crises, Lucian could not tell. The lighting in the city was dimmer than it should have been. The emergency lights were on in places. Swirling smoke darkened everything. Many of the tall, graceful towers for which the city was famous had been felled or badly damaged. From what Lucian could see, the high-rent districts of the dome slopes had taken a lot of punishment.
Perfect, Lucian thought, glancing back at his charges. Just what these people need to see. “Come on, folks. Turn left and out the down ramp to the main city level. Let’s get down and back to the hotel.” Don’t give them time to think, his father’s voice whispered. Not when thinking will lead to panic. Get them home. He counted noses. There were still twenty-eight. Good. At least he didn’t have to go back through the lock after stragglers.
Lucian led the group down the access ramp, a long spiral walkway leading down from the overlook chamber. As with the chamber itself, the wall facing the dome interior was made entirely of glass. That was both for the benefit of tourists and because there was nothing cheaper than glass on the silica-rich Moon. Whatever the reason, it left Lucian leading twenty-eight people, most of whom barely knew how to walk in low gee, down an incline littered with razor-sharp fragments of glass, trying to stay out of a howling wind that blew through where the glass wall should have been. Somehow he got them down without anyone slicing open an artery.
The route back to the Aldrin Inn was at least short and direct. There was no sign of the bus that was supposed to be waiting to take them back. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. The periphery of the main level was littered with boulders and parts of buildings shaken loose from upslope, clogging the roads with debris. He urged his charges into a brisk walk back toward their hotel.
Even in that short walk Lucian saw enough to scare him badly. Amundsen SubBubble, at least, was in pretty bad shape. Every house, every building, seemed to have soaked up some damage. There was an obstruction in the road every few hundred meters. Abandoned cars, debris fallen from buildings, felled trees and broken tree limbs were scattered everywhere.
Finally they reached the Aldrin Inn. The big building seemed utterly intact. A small knot of people standing outside the entrance was the only sign here of anything out of the ordinary. By the looks of things, the place had been evacuated, and the guests were just now being allowed back in.
Lucian, standing in the middle of the rubble-strewn road, looking at the hubbub around the hotel, felt something being shoved into his fingers. He looked into his hand. A British twenty-pound note. He realized Mrs. Chester was standing next to him.
“Thank you so much, young man,” she said. “I’m so glad we’re all down safely.”
Lucian looked at her blankly. A tip. The woman had tipped him for saving her life. Without him, they’d still be a panicky mob up in a leaking dome.
At least it served to tell him he had discharged this responsibility. They don’t tip you until the job is over. He dropped the twenty-pound note, let it flutter to the ground, and walked away without saying a word.
And he had actually been thinking of tourists as people.
To hell with being a guide, he thought, glad that he had the day job to fall back on. He upped his pace to a dogtrot. He had to get to Traffic Control.
From the Aldrin Inn, Orbital Traffic Control should have been an easy five-minute walk. But the quake had turned everything upside down: even at a brisk jog, it took Lucian nearly half an hour to thread his way through the jammed intersections, powered-down slideways, and accessways cut by sealed airlocks.
Jesus Christ, Earth. Lucian stopped in his tracks and stared at nothing. Earth. He had managed to forget about the planet for a moment in the panic of the quake. Down here, they won’t know. Even if they did happen to see it through a monitor, they won’t believe it. Nobody knows. No one at Traffic Control will understand what’s happening.
Orbital Traffic Control was a madhouse. He could see that much through the smoked-glass windows that divided the control center proper from the administrative area. Too many people were standing, waving their arms, arguing silently into their headsets behind the soundproof glass. Too many consoles were on, too many lights glowed flame red instead of green.
Lucian flashed his ID at the control center entrance. By the time the sentry system cleared him through to the interior, Vespasian had spotted him and was on the way over, waving for Lucian’s attention. Lucian ignored him, grabbed a headset out of the rack and looked for an empty console. There, in the corner. There were things he had to check.
But Vespasian cornered him before he got halfway across the room. “Goddammit to hell, Lucian,” he began without preamble. “We’re in a helluva spot. All our navigation systems crashed all at once, right after the quake. Primary, backup, tertiary. All of them. Every damn ship is off course out there—the ones that haven’t vanished off the radar altogether. None of our course corrections work. We can’t figure out what—”
“The system’s working, Vespy,” Lucian cut in. “It’s just trying to compute for a gravity well that isn’t there anymore. Earth’s gone.”
Tyrone Vespasian was a short, heavy man of uncertain Mitteleuropean origins and very certain opinions. “What the hell are you talking about?” he snapped. “That’s ridiculous!”
“I mean the damned planet’s not there anymore!” Lucian walked over to the console with Vespasian right behind him. He ignored the older man, sat down at the console and powered it up. He found himself staring straight ahead, concentrating hard on the job at hand, excluding everything from his thoughts except the need to get this console on line.
“Earth can’t just vanish,” Vespasian objected. “I mean, jeez, sometimes I wish the damn groundhogs would go away, but—”