Genie will have a cow, he thought while he clambered about like Tarzan. Rerigging would need a lot of work, and the berth was likely now one shroudsman fewer. He considered hacking out the tangle with his reefing knife—he felt, for some reason, a savage and unreasoning fury—but that was not a task one carried out alone, on the edge of a great sail, with no tether. Ratline was no man to quail at risks, but he drew the line when the risk was bootless.
He was breathing hard when he finally reached the catline and wrapped legs and arms around it. Without a tether, to lose his grip now would mean to lose everything. He may have gone outside in the hail expecting, as ’Kiru had thought, to die; but that did not mean that, faced with the prospect, he would help speed things along.
The Stone
There is a human proverb to the effect that trouble comes in threes. In part, the proverb is parthenogenic, since one stops counting after three and begins anew, yet there may be a reason why so many cultures have held the number sacred.
The loss of the foresail vane was not so critical as the loss of the Number Two CoRE magnet. From a higher perspective, neither was the loss of Raphael Evermore, though this only demonstrates the inadequacy of heights for proper perspectives. In any event, no one could be sure as yet that Evermore had been lost. No sooner had Ship reported that Number Two Engine was off line than Gorgas set Corrigan to recompute their course. Satterwaithe, if anything, was pleased and winked at the navigator, for the sails nearly made up for the lost engine power. They would hit Jupiter Roads at a higher speed than was proper, but could likely decelerate against the Jovian magnetosphere. When, a few minutes later, they lost the vane and perhaps the tangled fores’l as well, Satterwaithe was vexed but not yet entirely discouraged.
But if in the uproar, they had forgotten the atoll, The Lotus Jewel had not. It was, in a manner of speaking, her own discovery and she felt a proprietary interest in it. The scanning radar swept back and forth through the cone of their forward trajectory, searching above and below the plane of their approach. Whenever she saw a body with a bad-looking vector she would ping it with the track radar. They were close enough now that single pings did not require power diversion, which was good; but that meant they were close enough that passage followed closely on detection, which was not so good.
“We have yaw,” The Lotus Jewel announced when Number Two went down—for a mild vertigo had informed her of the loss of thrust on one side of the ship. (The vane tangle on the fores’l did not affect her. Because Ship lacked a handshake, none of the sail feedback was analoged to her sensing equipment; which is to say that none of the sails’ behavior made any sense to her.)
In that moment of diversion, when the engine had gone down and the sail tangled, Ship saw a stone on a bad approach. The vector was so tight onto them that it seemed to The Lotus Jewel as if a hot needle had been jabbed suddenly into her palm. “Stone!” she called. “Azimuth, eleven o’clock. Altitude, one degree and dropping, dropping. Closing in fourteen. Thirteen…”
“Engines!” Satterwaithe said. “Starward juke. All rockets. Full power. Now! Now!”
The engine room did not know what had occasioned the order, but Bhatterji and Miko heard something in Satterwaithe’s voice that they had never heard before and they dropped their cold, mutual silence and sprang to their boards. Ship had heard the order too, and had already begun swinging the high impulse rockets into position. That was autoinitiating, which was undesirable in an AI, but it gained them two seconds of the eleven they had left, so no one complained.
At nine seconds, the rockets locked in.
At eight seconds, they belched chemical fury, exhausting their fuel in a single mighty burn. If The Riv’ ever did make it to Galileo, she would need tugs and hawsers to bring her to dock, but no one complained about that, either.
The ship’s disk massed a great deal, and needed time to overcome its inertia. The rockets strained to shift her bulk even while Satterwaithe ordered the trailing shrouds pulled in to rock the ship into the smallest possible profile against the oncoming stone. But The Riv’ was ever a ship sluggish to the helm. Neither cages nor sails had the concentrated, brute force of the juke jets. Okoye obeyed the order from the bridge, even though Ratline was still Outside and Rave was unaccounted for. There comes a time when one does what one must and action becomes a kind of anesthetic.
At seven seconds MS The River of Stars had begun to ascend; and The Lotus Jewel had sent another ping at the stone.
At six seconds she had captured and processed the bounceback. “Brace for impact!”
“More pitch!” cried Satterwaithe at the joystick. “Thus. Thus.”
“There is no God but God,” said Corrigan.
“We’re going to miss,” said Akhaturian.
Gorgas stared into the plotting tank, where a small red blip closed in on the green dot of the ship. He could convince himself that it was all happening in there, in a miniature world that was not quite real.
At four seconds, below in his stateroom, Bigelow Fife could think of nothing else but to hold ’Siska Wong as close as he could and to curse Eaton Grubb. He might have been aboard the cutter, even now escaping, had it not been for the interfering cook. He vowed that if ’Siska died because of it, he would hunt the man down and kill him.
At three seconds, Mikoyan Hidei pulled away from her board, there being nothing more to be done, and saw that Ramakrishnan Bhatterji sat beside her with his eyes closed, almost as if he were sleeping.
At two seconds, Eaton Grubb, sitting in the galley, the inmost room of the inmost deck, gripped Twenty-four deCant’s hand and smiled at her to show it wasn’t near as bad as it sounded. But he squeezed her hand much too tightly for the smile to be effective.
At one second, Eugenie Satterwaithe stood down and, turning, saw that Gorgas had grabbed firm hold of a monkey bar.
After all that—after several lifetimes’ worth of fourteen seconds—the impact itself seemed an anticlimax. There was a brief rumble, as of distant thunder, heard dimly on the bridge, with great clamor in the Long Room, hardly at all in the galley, and not at all in the engine room.
Bhatterji opened his eyes. “Well, that was a big to-do over nothing,” he said without looking directly at Miko.
Above, in the sail control room, Nkieruke Okoye had a slightly different perspective. The impact had clanged above her head as if God Himself had skipped like a schoolgirl across the hull. She could believe that it was a big to-do, but not that it was nothing. “Ratline,” she called. “Are you still there?” The video feed from his suitcam said he was, or at least that his suit was. She received no joy on the bounceback.
Systematically, she verified the readouts from his suit and saw that they were consistent with a living occupant. What she did not see were the bits and scraps of paper behind her that wafted hesitantly toward the portal to the Sail Prep room.
Gorgas stood by the plotting tank with his hands behind his back. One hand gripped and massaged the other in restless motion concealed from the other deck officers by his body. From time to time both hands quieted into fists. “Damage report?” he enquired.
“Hull is breached in three places,” Ship reported. “The ship is losing air to space.”
“Close air tight doors,” the captain ordered. “Form a containment around the breaches. Engines, what is your status?”
A series of distant thuds told him that Ship was sealing off the leaks. A schematic blinked up on one of the sistines and a series of black bars appeared marking the cordon.
“Engine Two is down, but is repairable,” Bhatterji reported. “Some of the hobartium used to rewind the CoRE magnet had inadequate properties. If we back off on the operating parameters—”
“This vessel,” reported Ship, “does not have sufficient braking acceleration to assume HoJO. Manual cutoff prevents restart of Number Two engine.”
Gorgas blinked at the uncalled-for comment. “Quite properly so, if the magnet has been damaged. Sails, what is your status?�
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“I can’t raise Rave,” Okoye said. “I’ve got no signal from his suit.”
Gorgas gestured to The Lotus Jewel and made sweep motions with his hand. The sysop understood and conducted a radar sweep of the region of space into which Evermore had most likely been flung. “I understand, Sails. We are searching for him. What of the sail itself?”
Okoye’s response was a long time in coming. At least it seemed so to Satterwaithe and Corrigan, for what scrolled up on the bridge repeater was less than heartening.
“Fores’l vane is snapped and useless. The fores’l itself is tangled, magnetic footprint reduced with loss of acceleration. And, captain…?”
“There are no sails,” insisted Ship. “Reliance on sails is delusional behavior.”
The AI was beginning to irritate Gorgas. It had no right to psychoanalyze humans, especially as it was drawing conclusions from incomplete data. “Belay that, Ship. Yes, Okoye?”
“Um, Ship’s other avatar tells me that the remaining sails are being poisoned by an ion haze of elevated temperature.”
“That’s what it is…” whispered Satterwaithe, who studied her console more diligently.
“An ion haze!” said Gorgas.
“Yes, sir,” said Okoye, “but Sails cannot suggest a source.”
Gorgas too was puzzled. He looked to Satterwaithe. “Master? You have the most experience. Could it be coronal ejecta?”
Satterwaithe shook her head. “We’ve observed no flares on the sun, nor intercepted word of any. Jovial ejecta from the Io Tube are too cold to poison the sails.” Her fingers danced across the virtual control panel and conjured a false-color map of the magnetic field, courtesy of the Sails avatar. The poisoned areas were highlighted orange. Corrigan and Akhaturian had come up behind her.
“Biosystems?” Gorgas continued. “Damage report?”
“No disruptions, cap’n,” Grubb responded. “Slight drop in air pressure in some areas of the ship, is all. That would be around the hull breaches. Should come back to normal once the air-tight doors are dogged.”
“Thank you. Be sure to conduct a visual of all doors. Medical? Any injuries to report?”
Wong’s voice teetered on the edge of hysteria. “You mean besides Rave? I can’t locate his medbot signals at all. I think he’s…I think he’s…”
Akhaturian, still standing behind Satterwaithe, turned away from the screen on which the doctor appeared. The doctor was overreacting. Rave would turn up. He had lost radio contact for some reason, that was all. From sail’s edge, it would take him twenty or thirty minutes to reach the personnel locks on the hull. Only ten minutes had yet gone by the clock. Another ten or twenty, and he’d be knocking at the door.
Gorgas glanced at the sysop, who had removed her cap. The Lotus Jewel slowly shook her head. “Some small objects in that general direction,” she said, “to judge by the brightness of the echoes. Should I ping them?”
Gorgas sorted and considered possibilities. One of the echoes might indeed be the boy. Yet, on the vector the sysop showed him and with the ship’s propulsion impaired, any rescue or—more likely—retrieval was infeasible. Was the cutter operational? Grubb had mentioned it, but he needed both Satterwaithe and Corrigan, the only two qualified pilots, here with him. Too bad. Evermore had been a likely lad, but he was not the first human to be sacrificed to the Void.
Oh grant Thy mercy and Thy grace
To those who venture into space.
Surreptitiously, Gorgas crossed himself. “No,” he said. “Maintain bearing.” Wong, with a convulsive gesture cut her connection.
Satterwaithe, distracted a moment by Gorgas’s order, nodded her agreement with it before turning back to her analysis of the magfield. Corrigan, the ship’s navigator, knew how the facts lay, and did not protest the order, either. The Lotus Jewel might have been inclined to argue, for the facts of navigation meant less to her than the loss of a young boy, but she held her peace, for she had seen Gorgas cross himself and knew that the man had reached no casual decision.
Poor Rave. She thought that she ought to have given him what he had so clearly longed for. To scratch the itch that he could not reach himself. It was clear that the girl would not—and how cruel that was in retrospect! The second wrangler was—had been—younger than the run of men she had enjoyed and, being of Earth, was younger even than his years; and yet, he was not too much younger and for certain would never now be any older.
The Lotus Jewel did not love the young wrangler. It is not even clear that she had loved Corrigan, for she loved in an electrical sense: her charge moved opposite to her current. That is, she invited the love of others and the gratitude she felt on its receipt she confused with the thing itself. Even so, she thought that the boy had had too much voltage stored up and it ought to have been discharged, simply as a favor.
Up above, in the sail control room, the Igbo girl moved robotically, as if something inside her had also discharged.
“The poisoned areas,” Corrigan pointed out, “correspond to the locations of the engines. See here and here? Those are the engine sectors. The plasma is being caught and carried by the field lines.”
“Then why is there no poisoning here?” Satterwaithe asked, indicating the disk’s trailing quarter.
“Engine Three is firing orthogonal, across the short diameter of the field. The other engines—note that the color is dimmer here, where Number Two was shut down—the other three have been firing radially ever since we turned the ship, across the field’s long diameter. Miko…” Corrigan called the engine room on his hushmike. “Could you place a copy of the plume pattern on viewscreen F? Thank you.” He waited another moment until the display appeared and then, because Ship could not coordinate them, superimposed the two data sets manually. “There, you see it?”
Satterwaithe was convinced. She turned to face Gorgas. “We need to throttle down the engines, or we’ll lose the sails entirely.”
“Further reduction in engine braking will not be permitted,” Ship announced.
Ivar Akhaturian shook his head. “We really need that handshake.”
In his youth—a youth that had been distressingly brief—little Timmy Ratline had delighted in skipping stones across the lake behind his parents’ summer home. He liked the way they would skim the water, bouncing and splashing, almost as if they were attempting flight. At nearly a hundred kiss, the stone that grazed The River of Stars had gone past too quickly for him to see. Yet he could mark its progress by the splashes it raised in its wake.
Splashes?
The notion puzzled him as he made his way down the furling brace. He had fashioned himself a new tether from his equipment belt, but proceeded cautiously, lest friction against the cable burn through the webbing.
Below him, an aurora of greens and blues shimmered. The “splashes,” he saw now, were geysers, where the hull had been breached, and air spumed from the vessel as from a broaching whale. A mutant whale, for he saw there were five such geysers. The gasses froze into a rime that glimmered in the shadows and sublimed where the sunlight caught it out. Elsewhere, the engine plumes, creeping up the maglines like vines up a trellis, stripped and ionized the oxygen and nitrogen, and flowers bloomed in the somber colors ghosts were said to favor. It was one of the most terribly beautiful sights he had ever seen.
Reaching the crosstree at last, Ratline paused to catch his breath. He was directly over the ship now, a few hundred meters. He could see where the errant stone had struck: one mangled spot near the forward glacis, two more on the rise of the hull, and—oddly enough—two more on the aft quarter where the hull sloped away again. Ratline grunted in sour humor. Poor Genie. If she hadn’t juked the ship, the stone would likely have missed completely or, at the very worst, made only that first gash. He wondered who on the crew would be weasel enough to point that out and decided that it would be the cheerfully malicious tale-spreader in the galley.
He found the channel switch with his tongue and flipped it to the command
circuit. “Cap’n,” he said, meaning as he always did Eugenie Satterwaithe, “Ratline here. I’m Outside. We got air geysers. Three of ’em. And two more spots that might be slow-leaking. The biggest one looks like it’s just over the Sail Prep room.” But all he heard on the bounceback was static. He looked again at the swirling ghosts of ionized air and the auroras that ran through them and doubted that anyone had heard him.
As he peered down at the great disk, nostalgia seized Ratline around the throat and he thought to drop freely to the hull as he had done so often in his manhood. And so he unbuckled himself from the furling brace and, planting his feet on the crosstree, dove headfirst toward the hull intending that, at the last moment, he would flip feet first and touch down.
And yet a strange thing happened. As he fell, the ship began to slide away beneath him and he realized that his instincts had played him false. The ship was declerating sideways and the vector sum was not quite through the mast, but possessed a marked radial component. He felt as a man might who, jumping from a tall building, sees the safety net shuffling to the side.
The first distant thud distracted Okoye from her board, where she was following Ratline’s progress via his suitcam pictures. The signal was breaking up, however, and when she turned back to the screen it was entirely broken. She switched the receiver to another channel, wishing just this once that she was The Lotus Jewel and expert in all forms of communion. Was something interfering with the signal or had it been cut off at the source? She could not believe the latter. Anything that could destroy Ratline would take half the Middle System with it. She remained at her station, for the shroudmaster was still outside.
The Wreck of the River of Stars Page 44
