by Wil McCarthy
She grabbed the man by the breast of his fancy tunic, pulled him bodily from the acceleration cradle and then from the cabin, and shoved him back up the aisle in the direction of the main hatch.
“Hurry,” she advised. “I believe they're about to seal it.”
“What...” he said again, but Malye ignored him, stepped back into the cabin and folded the door closed behind her. The countdown clock just above the window read 052, and then 051, running inexorably downward. She climbed into the vacant crib and strapped herself in.
The man and woman in the cribs across from hers looked back at her with wide eyes, as if she were herself a Waister come to destroy them. As if they wished to flee from her, but their crib restraints prevented it. Well, probably they were frightened before, and Malye had just exacerbated the problem.
“Pinega is not so hollow as Tyumen and Batamay,” she said to them in a blunt attempt at reassurance. “It's smaller, but it's a good, solid rock. Probably a better place to be right now.”
The two did not appear reassured. Well, diverting and defusing citizen panic was an almost reflexive part of any police work—an impulse not of kindness but of simple expedience, and hardly vital in this instance. She could always work on them later, if the need arose. The countdown timer said 021, and then 020...
If the things she'd been hearing were true, these people, and Malye herself, would all be dead in a few hours anyway. Sibir has been vaporized, Yamish has been reduced to rubble... Both of those were Lesser Worlds of considerable size.
008... 007... 006...
She prepared herself for the invisible sack of potatoes. How many today, fifty kilograms? A hundred? Maybe more than that; the flight time she'd specified was Sprint class, for emergency travelers only. She'd never used it before.
I hope he wasn't a friend of yours, she thought suddenly at the people across from her. And then the ferry dropped away from its docking port in the surface of Tyumen. The view outside the window had been blank, a dark reflection of the cabin itself, but now there was blackness out there, dappled with starlight. The stars moved across the view as the ferry reoriented for boost, and briefly Malye caught a glimpse of Aye at the window's corner. It was the more distant of Sirius system's two stars, over three light-hours away—the Thousand Lesser Worlds orbited Bee and Bee alone—but it was by far the larger and hotter of the two, and the blue-white dot was fiercely bright, even the edge of it enough to make Malye squint, despite the window's rapid polarization. On the other side of the ferry, the light of Bee, dimmer but so very much closer, would be burning its way through closed windowshades, illuminating the cabins bright as day shift.
One of the men in the cabin with Malye, the one who was not next to her, gasped and choked at the sudden weightlessness. She hoped to Ialah he wouldn't be sick—most Sirians took to null gravity easily enough, but there were always homebodies and delicate types who never left their spinning worlds, never ventured too close to the axis, never faced a gee level below point three or so, and many of these had chosen today for their first journeys abroad. A pity for their traveling companions, especially on the sprint lines.
But then the fusion motors groaned to life and crushed them all back in their restraints. Six-gee boost, she judged. Ialah help them, maybe even seven, and for a while Malye had nothing to worry about except breathing while the invisible sack of potatoes, fully as heavy as her own body, nestled firmly on her chest. Inhale, exhale, rest. Inhale, exhale, rest...
If that guy gets sick now, she thought, he'll choke on it. But he didn't get sick, he just gasped and panted under the invisible weight, hyperventillating until she thought he would probably pass out. But he didn't do that either, and so a kind of smothery routine settled over them all. Inhale, exhale, rest... Time passed neither slowly nor quickly, but with terrible effort, as if they had to heave each passing minute off their chests using nothing but lung power. Heavy gee was like food poisoning or an ethyl hangover, in that there was no escaping the misery; one simply accepted it, and waited. Praise Ialah for the oxygen-rich atmosphere, at least.
Eventually, after about thirty minutes, the pressure let up, and null gravity returned like a light switching on, and then that hapless traveler did get sick, as noisily and messily as Malye had ever seen anyone do it.
~~~
Damn, if only she could nap. Or at least meditate, or settle into a good state of denial from which this cowardly flight of hers might not seem so incriminating. But instead she felt the full weight of her guilt, and in fact had nothing else to think about. Guilty and bored! And the other passengers in the cabin kept up a steady burn of angry, fearful glares.... It wore her down, driving her out within a few minutes to seek the bridge once more.
Looking neither left nor right, she unstrapped herself, floated over toward the cabin door, folded it open, extricated herself, and folded it closed again. Her movements were the easy glide a seasoned traveler, with none of the jerkiness or uncertainty that plagued so many, even in the Lesser Worlds. She got herself oriented in the aisle, and kicked off a handrail, launching herself up toward the bridge. Its hatchway tube was still open, so she simply funnelled herself into it and braked against the walls with her toes and the backs of her hands.
The pilot heard her, and turned around. “Hello,” he said.
The view up here was much better than from the cabin's window—nearly a full 180 degrees both left-right and up-down, through seven flat windows arranged at odd angles along the ferry's sharp nose, like flatscreens somebody had pasted up in a hurry. And the instrument panel gave small, distorted views along the length of the hull, and straight out the vehicle's stern, staring past the silent engine nozzles at a starscape that included a round, shrunken world—Tyumen—hanging before the three bright stars of Orion's waist.
Presently, something flashed on Tyumen's surface, a bright flicker that came and went almost too quickly for Malye's eyes to catch. There was another flicker, and another.
“What's happening?” she asked without alarm.
“On course for Pinega, as per your instructions,” the pilot said.
“No, I mean what's happening back there? At Tyumen?”
“Oh. I don't really know. There's some radio traffic about gamma-ray lasers; I guess they use them for propulsion. But those look like impact events to me. I dunno, maybe small particles sleeting in at relativistic speed. It's not just here; there's a real shitstorm preceding the Waisters everywhere they go. Which is everywhere.”
Malye felt a light, cold touch of fear run down her back. “Will we reach Pinega before they do?”
“I don't really know,” the pilot said again. “We have a substantial lead—believe it or not, they're nowhere near Tyumen yet—and we're coming up on our second burn in about ten minutes. But right now we're already approaching maximum safe velocity, with minimal response time for the collision warning system. If things start heating up I'll kick the burn in early, but I'm limited in what I can do because there really is a lot of particulate matter on this route, and I don't think a rescue tug could get to us if we came to grief.”
“You're handling this very well,” Malye observed.
“My job,” he said, and shrugged.
Tyumen began to flash more brightly, and Malye noticed for the first time that parts of its surface were glowing a dim, evil shade of red.
She thought about the young greenbar, dutifully standing watch in his empty corridor. Was he there still? Had he fled? Had he died? All those people running loose through the corridors, so many more than the ferries could ever hold. Malye had monstered her way to the front of every queue and mob, the black and burgundy uniform like a whip in her hand. So many obstacles in her way, each one a human being with his or her own life and history on the line.
Fifty million people lived in Tyumen. And she had abandoned them all.
Up ahead, through the pilot's little windows, space was clear and constant and unobstructed. All the Lesser Worlds were out there, too distant to
see, indistinguishable from the starry background. No sign of Pinega at all.
“There's a lot of activity back there,” the pilot remarked in an offhand way as he scanned his instruments. “Waister ships are moving in a little faster than I thought. Looks like Tyumen is really taking it in the skivs.”
Indeed, the pace and intensity of the flashing seemed to have increased even as Malye watched. The ruddy glow was brighter now, covering a larger portion of the surface.
Malye shook her head, slowly feeling the color sing across her tongue like tiny hot pokers. “My job was supposed to be to help those people, but I can do nothing for them. Nothing except run away and leave them to die. I think you can be so calm right now because you know you are helping.”
The pilot shrugged. “I don't know. Get us to Pinega, I guess—this isn't so terribly demanding. I used to fly a gas scooper out at Creta, coming off the inner moon, diving right down through the cloud tops and swinging back, usually for several passes. That's a difficult, dangerous job; people scorch it all the time. After a while, I noticed I didn't have any friends left.”
“So you became a ferry pilot, nice and safe,” Malye said, appreciating the irony.
“Yeah. Even sprinting like this is tea and biscuits to a scoop run. An eight-year-old could do this job.”
Eight-year-old. Malye felt guilty and alone, and the words were a sharp reminder of home. Vadim was always climbing on things. Walls, pillars, hallway fixtures... “Bring me a set of traction shoes,” he'd pleaded with her before she'd left for Tyumen. “It's almost my confirmation day.” But she hadn't wanted to encourage the habit, and had gotten him a flash receiver kit instead. What had happened to that kit?
“I have an eight-year-old,” she said to the pilot, “a little boy, who would be thrilled to hear you say that. And a five-year-old daughter.”
“Yeah? That's nice.”
Behind them, Tyumen flared so brightly it saturated the little holie screen. Malye squinted, waiting for the brightness to abate, and eventually, after a few seconds, it did. When she could see Tyumen again, peeking out behind the engine cones, it took only a fraction of a moment to see that something was seriously wrong: a huge crack ran all the way across the cratered, gray-brown surface, its width a major fraction of the planet's diameter.
“Oh,” she said, feeling cold inside.
Up inside the crack, she could see staccato flashes, blue-white pinpoints casting off yellow sparks, like a welding torch. She was seeing into the planet, looking up inside its all-too-hollow core, watching something burn and sizzle in what must already be a near vacuum, all breathing air fled through the sundered floors. Could that be a meltdown, a fission core gone critical, spilling molten fuel disks out into space? A dozen fission cores? What else would burn like that in hard vacuum? Or perhaps it was some weapon of the Waisters', some climbing, burrowing thing that would ferret out every living soul from the warrens and atria of this world.
“This is happening too fast,” the pilot said, his eyes on the instruments. Malye could see the edge of his frown, could watch it drawing deeper. “Something's moving in past Tyumen, heading this way. I'm going to give us another kick in the skivs, okay? You have to get back to your crib. Now.”
Tendrils of unease lapped at Malye's heart, ice blue and flickering like nuclear fire. “Are we going to make it out?”
The pilot turned. “Lady, I'm going to hit the engines in about twenty seconds, whether you're in your crib or not. Is that sufficiently clear?”
One thing about Andrei Brakanov's daughter was that if you told her something twice, she got it. Malye was back in her cabin and buckling herself in with a second and a half to spare.
Her cabin-mates didn't even bother to stare at her now, didn't even bother to pant or groan as the invisible sack of potatoes settled in, as the engines flared and squeezed them all back into the cribs' soft padding. Their attention was riveted on the starscape outside the window, on the tiny, intermittent flashes of light that were visible out there. Empty space, out past Bee's stellar north. Not many worlds to destroy up there, and none at all nearby. What was flashing?
And then suddenly she knew, and wished to Hell someone had thought to close the damn window shade so she didn't have to watch this. Even a monster could know fear, could know it better and more keenly, perhaps, than anyone else in all the worlds. Fear was white, and tasted like batteries, and sounded like nothing at all.
Noiselessly, something was sweeping through the space around them, kilometer by kilometer, some great invisible beam. Destroying, one by one, the hundreds of ferries that had debarked from Tyumen in its final hours, and fled.
~~~
The rest of the flight was a blur for Malye, a confusion of spinning and falling and more spinning, of crushing weight and sudden jerking motions. She could not imagine what the pilot was doing, what threats he believed he was dodging. If the Waisters could crack open a Lesser World with so little effort, surely they could crack open a passenger ferry. Malye expected to breathe vacuum at any moment. But the hours had passed, slowly/quickly, in a blur, and somehow the ferry had arrived at Pinega in one piece.
Pinega, already under siege. Malye found her way out of the ferry port and sprinted down the corridor, steadying herself against the walls when the floor shook beneath her, which was often. Breathing only in tortured gasps—she was no runner—but home was still so far away; she had to get to a tube station. She had to—Elle and Vadim were in danger. What she could do for them she wasn't quite sure, but by Ialah she would do something, get them to shelter somewhere. As high up in the planetoid as the corridors would take them, as far from the surface as humanly possible. If the children came to harm it would be because Malye's body had been vaporized and could no longer serve as a shield.
Time passed. She took a tube, got out, took another. The burgundy uniform no longer a whip in her hand, no longer seen by the people who fled past her in random directions. She lashed out at them, punching, kicking, screaming at them and shouldering them out of her way. Fewer people, though, fewer with every passing minute. Everyone was finding a place to hide, a place to curl up and die as the planet boiled around them.
Malye's gasping became worse. She began to see spots and stars and shooting comets in front of her eyes, and it occurred to her finally that there was something wrong with the air. Specifically, that there was not enough of it. Shouldn't the depressurization alarms be going off if the air were thinning? But no, even the lights were dim, all the warren's systems flickering and sputtering and shutting down. How much air? It was hard to tell, dangerously hard.
She forced herself to slow down, lest she pass out and be no help whatever to Elle and Vadim. Home was close now. She turned down a familiar corridor, hurried down it as quickly as she dared, turned again, and again.
In her own neighborhood, now. She slowed further, the decision as much a physical as a logical one.
Finally, she arrived at her own front door. Jabbed it with the printed part of her thumb, and the door rolled open partway and froze. Malye threw herself against it, squeezed into the open space it left, about two handsbreadths wide. She grabbed smooth walls on the far side and heaved herself through the gap, stumbling into her living room like something that had popped from the neck of a pressurized bottle.
Elle stood howling in her bedroom doorway, her face a red mask of terror and outrage. Grigory kneeling beside her, making hush-hush motions. Vadim simply stood by with his hands in his pockets, observing the scene with a detached curiosity that belied his age. He looked up at Malye as she staggered into the room.
“Mother! Papa, mother's here!”
Grigory looked up, his face curiously blank. Malye's ears popped.
“The warren is losing pressure,” she said to her husband by way of greeting. She hurried past him to the emergency locker, unsealed it, flung its little door open. The lights went red, and now an emergency buzzer sounded.
“Malyene?” Grigory said, clearly taken aback
by her sudden appearance. He looked pale, confused.
“Don't stand there gawping,” Malye snapped. “Get into your vacuum gear.”
“Dearest, how did you get here? We heard... I heard... that Tyumen was destroyed. That nobody made it out.”
Rummaging through the locker's contents, compact and indecipherable, every item folded or boxed or rolled into a tube, Malye finally came up with a large, round bag of tough fabric. A rescue ball, large enough even with the integral air recycler to hold a typical adult male, if he hugged his knees, or to hold two children, in any unruly heap at all. Hurriedly, she unzipped the ball and, kicking strewn emergency gear out of her way, leaped to where the children stood side by side. Their father still with them, having risen to his feet but otherwise done nothing.
“Get into your vacuum gear,” Malye repeated angrily. Her ears popped again. Black dots swam across her field of vision. The decompression seemed to be happening faster now. A faint but noticeable breeze blew in the direction of the half-open door. “Damn you, hurry!”
Vadim was eyeing the rescue ball with knowing unease. “Mother, I'm not going in there. I'm getting a mask!”
Malye didn't bother arguing, but simply blocked her son's escape, and reached past him to grab Elle, who was still purple-faced and screaming, and now struggling as she realized just what her mother intended to do. Ialah, how could she carry on like that without fainting in the thin air? But suddenly Elle folded to the floor and went limp, making a dead weight of herself, so that Malye had to hoist her and stuff her bodily into the flaccid rescue ball. At the last moment, Elle began to kick and flail again, but by then it was too late; she fell fully inside the bag, her rear end thumping against the metal floor plates. She screeched again, even more loudly.
