Deepsix

by Jack McDevitt

  “We are indeed,” Hutch said.

  “Just a moment, please. I’ll notify Captain Clairveau.”

  Marcel showed up within seconds. “Hutch,” he said, “it’s good to see you.”

  “And you, Marcel.”

  “How’d you get down off the elevator? What happened?”

  “Tell you when we get there. Everything’s in order here. We are approximately one hour ten minutes from rendezvous.”

  “Good.”

  “How are things at your end?”

  She got more interference.

  “…on schedule.” He refined the previous data, giving them the exact position where the scoop would arrive. And he transmitted some visuals. “As you can see, the whole thing looks like a sack made out of chain-link netting. Here’s the opening. A nice circular front entrance. More than wide enough for you to fly through. It’ll be facing east, and it’s near the bottom of the sack. Once you’re inside, there’ll be fifty meters of empty net below you. The collar will close. Just nestle in, set down the best way you can, and leave the rest to us.”

  “We will.”

  “We may have some more very minor adjustments to the coordinates, depending on how the atmosphere affects the net, but don’t worry about them because we’ll take you every step of the way.”

  “Do we have a precise time yet?” she asked.

  “It’ll reach its lowest point of descent in exactly seventy-four minutes and…” He paused. “…thirty seconds. Immediately after that, it’ll start back up again.” Another hesitation. “Can you make the altitude?”

  “Probably. If we can’t, don’t wait for us.” MacAllister paled. He needed reassuring, and she nodded confidently. “Just kidding, Mac. We’ll do this with ease.

  “Keep in mind,” she added, “I have no easy way to navigate this thing. I’m not even sure which way is west anymore.”

  “You’re doing fine. Although I’d like you to cut your speed by about thirty klicks and come left another eight degrees.”

  Hutch complied.

  “That’s good. I’ll stay with you. How’s the weather?”

  “A trifle overcast.”

  Hutch quietly pulled back on the yoke, relying only on the lander’s aeronautical capabilities to get to ten thousand meters. She would conserve her spike until she needed it.

  Marcel transmitted more images of the lower section of the net. It would be hanging almost straight down out of the sky. Facing in her direction. “When you see it,” he explained, “it’ll be moving southwest at 180 kph. Its course will be 228 degrees—228.7. We’ll bring you in close. When I tell you, engage the spike, and just float in.”

  “Marcel,” she said, “I would not have believed this was possible.”

  “With a Frenchman”—he grinned—“everything is possible. Gravity will have hold of it by the time you get there, but we’ll already be in braking mode.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’re going to take you in just before we begin to move the shaft back out again.”

  “And you say the opening’s fifty-three meters across?”

  “That’s correct. Half a football field.”

  “Can’t miss,” said Hutch.

  “That’s what we thought.”

  She said quietly, almost not wanting anybody to hear, “I do believe we’re going to pull this off.”

  Nightingale looked down at the storms smeared across the sky. They were daubed with fire. Eerily lit black clouds boiled up into the higher altitudes.

  He was having trouble controlling his breathing. Whatever happened, they would not be able to go back down there. God help him, he did not want to die out here. And he did not want the others to know how he felt. They were all scared; he realized that. But they seemed better equipped to deal with it.

  Please, God, don’t let me go to pieces.

  Marcel’s voice crackled in over the receiver, instructing Hutch to cut back speed or adjust course or go a bit higher. The voice was level and cool. Unemotional. Confident.

  Easy enough for him to be confident. Nightingale would have given anything to be with Marcel at this moment, safely tucked away on one of the superluminals.

  Hutch had said nothing about his behavior in the elevator, as far as he knew, to the others. Nor had she mentioned the incident to him, except to reply to his expressed regret. Yet he could read the disappointment in her eyes. The contempt. Years before, when MacAllister had held him up to worldwide ridicule, he’d been able to rationalize his behavior. Anybody could pass out under stress. He’d been injured. He’d not had much sleep during that period. He’d—

  —whatever.

  This time he’d failed in a more visible way. In a way he could rationalize neither to others nor to himself. When it was over, if he survived, he’d make for Scotland. And hide.

  “Marcel, this is Abel. Deepsix is beginning to disintegrate.”

  Marcel put the climatologist on-screen. “How? What’s going on?”

  “Major rifts opening in the oceans and on two of the continents. Several volcanoes have been born on Endtime. There’s a fault line east of Gloriamundi. One side of it has been shoved six thousand meters into the air. It’s still coming up. There are massive quakes in both hemispheres. We’ve got eruptions everywhere. A couple have even shown up in the Misty Sea, not far from the lander’s last position.”

  “They should be safe. They’re pretty high.”

  “You think so? One just let go in Gloriamundi. Some of the ejecta will go into orbit.”

  “Show me where they are,” he said. “The Misty Sea volcanoes.”

  Kinder was right: Two were close to the lander’s flight path. But he couldn’t reroute them in any significant way. Not if they were going to be in place when the net arrived. Best just to ride it out and hope.

  “Thanks, Abel.”

  Kinder grunted, one of those pained sounds. Then someone pressed his shoulder, handed him a note. He frowned.

  “What?” asked Marcel.

  “Hold on.” The climatologist looked off to one side, nodded, frowned again, talked to the individual. Marcel couldn’t hear. Then he came back to the monitor. “Northern Tempus is doing an Atlantis.”

  “Sinking?”

  “Yes.”

  One of the screens was focused on Wendy’s hull. Marcel saw movement, but it happened so quickly he wasn’t sure he hadn’t imagined it. “Thanks, Abel,” he said.

  He was still watching the screen. A shadow passed across Wendy, and one of her sensors vanished. A communication pod broke open and its electronic components spilled into the void. He switched over to the AI and picked up Bill’s voice in midstride: “…to several forward systems. Intensity seems to be lessening…” The voice failed, and the image flickered and went off. It came back, long enough for Bill to add the word assess; then it went down again.

  Nicholson, in the command chair, took a report that communications with Wendy had failed.

  He asked a technician whether she could restore them.

  “Problem’s not on this end, Captain,” she said. Another technician was running the visuals backward.

  Nicholson looked at Marcel. “What the hell’s happening over there? Can you make it out?”

  “More rocks, I think,” said Marcel. “It’ll get worse as Jerry gets closer.”

  The screen remained blank.

  “What happens if we don’t regain contact?”

  “We don’t need to. Bill knows what to do. All the AIs do. As long as there’s no emergency that requires us to make adjustments.”

  Canyon sat in a pose one could only describe as relaxed attention. “So this was your first time outside a ship, Tom. Why don’t you tell us what was running through your mind when you went through the airlock?”

  Scolari willed himself to relax. “Well, August, I knew it was something that had to be done. So I just made up my mind to do it.” It was a stupid response, but he had suddenly lost all capability to think. What’s my name? “I mean,
it wasn’t something we could just walk away from. It’s a life-and-death situation.”

  He looked over at Cleo, who was gazing innocently at the ceiling.

  “And how about you, Cleo?” said Canyon. “It must have been pretty unnerving looking down and not seeing anything.”

  “Well, that’s true, August. Although to be honest I never felt there was a ‘down.’ It’s not like being on the side of a building.”

  “I understand you got hit by a storm of meteors. How did you react to that?”

  “I was scared for a minute,” she said. “We just hid out until it was over. Didn’t really see much.”

  “Listen,” said Scolari, “can I tell you something on my own?”

  “Sure.”

  “Everybody was scared out there today. I never knew when part of me might just disappear. You know what I mean? And even without the rocks, I don’t like not having something solid underfoot. But I’m glad I did it. And I hope to God those four people come back. If they do, it’ll be nice to know I had a hand in it.” He managed a smile. “Me and Cleo and the others.”

  Miles Chastain was cruising the shaft, moving deliberately from one ship to the next, inspecting the work of the Outsiders.

  Maleiva III was framed against the gas giant. The continents and seas were no longer visible, and the entire globe appeared to be wrapped in a thick black pall.

  He was impressed that so many had been willing to risk life and limb during the course of the operation. He’d heard about the other events, the complaints by passengers on the Star and by the science people on Wendy. He’d been through crises before, and he knew they tended to unmask people, to reveal who they really were, to bring out the best or the worst, whichever way an individual personality leaned. It was almost as if trouble stripped away the pretenses of daily life, the way Jerry Morgan was stripping Maleiva.

  He was somewhere between Zwick, his own ship, and the Evening Star, headed down the shaft toward the net. The actual pickup of Hutchins and her people would be made by John Drummond’s shuttle. Marcel wanted them out of the lander and the net as quickly as the transfer could be made. Miles’s responsibility was to stand by in case of need.

  He was alone. He’d returned Phil, the shuttle pilot, the assistants, and the Outsiders to the Star and had taken over the controls himself. He was approaching Zwick, which was facing him.

  When the signal came, and they began to draw the shaft out of the atmosphere, they would be moving it into orbit. Once that had been achieved, it would become possible to retrieve the MacAllister party.

  His message board lit up. Transmission from Zwick. Emma. Her usually sallow features blinked on-screen, but this time she was glowing. She invariably gave the impression, when she spoke to him, that she was thinking about something else, that she needed only give out instructions. That Miles himself was somehow inconsequential. Probably, he’d concluded on the way out, it resulted from dealing with too many VIPs. Everybody else became a peasant.

  “Yes, Emma,” he said, “what can I do for you?”

  “Miles, where are you located now?”

  “In front of you. Coming up.”

  “My schedule says you’re headed for the pickup.”

  “More or less. I’m just going down there to be available.”

  “Good. I want you to stop and collect us.”

  “Why?”

  “It’ll only take a minute.”

  “Why?” he asked again.

  “Are you serious? They’re about to do the rescue, or not, and you ask why we want to be there?”

  He sighed. She was right, of course. “Okay. I’ll dock in about six minutes.”

  “Good. And Miles, would you do something else for me?”

  He waited.

  “I want you to contact the other pilot, the one who’s going to make the pickup. Tell him we’d like to do a broadcast as they come on board. Ask if he’ll cooperate.”

  “Why don’t you do that yourself?”

  “Well, pilot-to-pilot… You know how it is. He’ll be more receptive if it comes from you. A lot of these people out here resent us. They think we’re in the way. Except when they need publicity for one reason or another. I just don’t want to miss this.” She was at emotional high tide. “It’s going to be the news story of the decade, Miles.”

  “Emma, did you know the shuttles can’t dock with each other? You’ll have to go outside to make the crossing.”

  “I didn’t know. But that’s not a problem.”

  “They’re going to be busy. I don’t think they’ll want to make time for a news team.”

  “Miles.” She came down a bit from her high. “I’d like very much for this to happen.”

  Frank the pilot looked up at Drummond. “John,” he said, “I don’t have any objection as long as they stay out of the way. How about you?”

  Drummond’s immediate instinct was to deny permission out of hand. But he couldn’t really give a reason why except that he disliked Canyon. Nevertheless, there was plenty of room in the shuttle, and he guessed it was prudent to get on the good side of the media. “Okay,” he said. “Tell them what you just told me.”

  Gravity had taken hold of the sack. The net gradually lengthened and began to tumble toward the troubled atmosphere. The collar was open and easy to see, and the people who’d rigged it had even managed to mark it with a system of lights. If there were no problems on board the lander, if the lander showed up at the time and place it was supposed to, the whole thing should be easy to pull off. Almost anti-climactic.

  Frank disagreed. “The collar only looks big because we’re right on top of it. And we’re descending at the same rate it is. The lander’s going to be approaching at a more or less constant altitude. The net goes down and it comes up. The pilot’s got to time things so she hits it at precisely the right moment. If she misses, that’s the ball game.”

  They rode quietly. The physician, Embry, stared moodily out the window. Janet Hazelhurst was thumbing through the onboard library, apparently just turning pages. Drummond was sipping coffee, lost in his thoughts.

  “Eighteen minutes to rendezvous,” said the AI. “We are on schedule.”

  The net continued to unfurl as it dropped toward the clouds. Drummond saw no tangles.

  Frank slowed their descent. “This is as low as we want to go,” he said.

  Drummond nodded. “So far, so good,” he told Marcel.

  Another shuttle appeared and drew alongside. “The media have arrived,” said Frank.

  Drummond activated his e-suit and went into the airlock, from which he watched two people move clumsily out of the other spacecraft. They floated across the few meters separating the shuttles, and he took each by the hand and pulled them inside.

  Canyon wasn’t as tall as Drummond had expected, but there was no missing that mellifluous voice. He introduced himself with quiet modesty. “And this is Emma Constantine,” he said, “my producer.”

  “We’ll want to set up here,” Emma told him, “if that’s no problem.” She indicated a section adjacent the airlock. “We’d like to do a quick interview with you before the rescue.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “August will be asking you how you plan to go about this, who’ll be going out with you—”

  “Wait a minute,” Drummond said. “I’m not going out. Frank’s going to do that.”

  “Oh.” She turned away from Drummond, and her eyes suggested he had just vanished from human memory. Canyon smiled at him and shrugged.

  Frank saw something he didn’t like on his navigation screen. “Everybody into their seats,” he said. “Buckle down.”

  Nobody had to tell Canyon twice. He dived for the nearest chair. Emma was a little slower.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Drummond.

  “Debris field.” As soon as his passengers were locked in he began to accelerate.

  The AI was talking to Frank, but the pilot had switched the conversation over to his earphones, obvious
ly intending to avoid alarming the passengers. That alarmed Drummond.

  “Everybody sit tight,” said the pilot. “Nothing to worry about.” They began to accelerate. “They’re behind us,” he explained. “We’re going to outrun them.”

  “How bad is it?” asked Drummond.

  Frank looked at one of the screens. “It’s a pretty big swarm. Coming fast. We wouldn’t want to be there when it arrives.”

  Behind Drummond, Canyon was talking into a microphone. He caught snatches of it:“…rescue vessel in trouble…” “…meteors…” “…harm’s way…” Suddenly the microphone was thrust in his direction. “…speaking now to John Drummond, who’s done most of the planning for this effort. He’s an astronomer by trade—”

  “A mathematician,” Drummond said.

  “A mathematician. And how would you describe our situation at the moment, Dr. Drummond?”

  Drummond was impressed. He was speaking to an audience of probably several hundred million. Or would be when the signal reached home. How to describe the situation? He began to talk about the dust and debris that accumulates in a gravitational field. “Especially one around a body this massive.” Morgan’s image was on one of the monitors. He glanced at it.

  Something banged off the hull. Drummond tightened up inside and became immediately concerned that the several hundred million viewers would see that he was terrified. “Are we broadcasting pictures, too?” he asked.

  Emma, seated off to one side, nodded. They were.

  It seemed suddenly to be raining on the shuttle. A hard staccato rattled across the hull.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Canyon softly, in a voice that underscored Drummond’s fears, “you can hear what’s happening.”

  “How big is it?” asked Marcel.

  “Big. Thousands of kilometers across. Frank’s on the forward edge of it. But he’s moving pretty quick and should be clear in a few seconds. I’ve also sent a warning to Miles.”

  “What about Zwick?”

  Actually, he already knew the answer to that. His screens showed the swarm moving directly across the media ship’s position. And, of course, unlike the shuttle, Zwick was unable to run.