Bely’s world might have allowed him twenty-five thousand days of life, of which a third were already gone; a century would have given him only thirty-seven thousand. Demeaning numbers all, when placed before the lamp of a questing human mind. A debilitating fact that a thoughtful mind found intolerable.
As he gazed at the old starship, at the crude effort that had gone into making it work, he was dismayed by the unnecessary backwardness it had brought across the dark from Old Earth. It was that shameful backwardness that he was at last leaving behind for a new life, the contemplation of which had begun to produce in him the first moments of calm, considered happiness that he had ever known.
He could not know that the ship still carried some of Old Earth’s death inside it, cunningly shielded, and timed to show itself before it could be discovered. He could not know that Josephus Bely still had a gun at his head, and aimed much better than a storm.
That he could not know these things, or that it was Bely who was about to take his new life from him, was a mercy that came to him as a burst of white light and disintegrating heat that he was unable to feel or reflect upon for more than an instant at the one-way passage through the event horizon of death.
As the thermonuclear Shockwave started through the habitat, there was nothing left of Ondro that might have looked back with anger and regret at what had been taken from him.
34
A jolt stirred Josepha in her sleep. She fell and cried out, then opened her eyes and found herself floating off the bed. She grabbed the edge and held on. A distant vibration continued for five or six minutes, and was followed by a more powerful shock.
Still half-asleep, she ordered the lights to go on, but they did not respond. She looked around in the night glow of the walls, then remembered that Ondro had left very early to visit the forward engineering level, where he wanted to help examine an old starship hulk that was being brought in. The invitation had intrigued him, because this was the vessel that had carried the first Cetians from Old Earth.
She had tried weightlessness downstairs in one of the exercise areas. It was not unpleasant, but the unexpected falling sensation had surprised and frightened her.
She pushed off, drifted over to the partly open window, and saw that there was no light on the residential level. A few lights shone, and seemed to be gathering, as if they were all going to the same place, like schools of fish in a black lake.
So much was strange here, she thought for a moment, that it might be nothing at all—but the sudden weightlessness seemed very wrong.
A figure moved in from her right. She tightened her hold on the window, then saw it was Jason, who had been given the apartment down the hall.
“What is it?” she asked. He reached out to the window and pulled himself closer. She tried to see his face in the shadows as he held on to the frame.
“Doors don’t work,” he said.
“What is it?” she asked again.
“There’s been an explosion of some kind,” he said, “in the forward area fifty kilometers away.”
“How do you know?” Josepha asked, looking more closely at him. As her eyes adjusted to the glow from the walls behind her, she saw that there was a vacant look in his face. “What is it?” she demanded.
He covered his eyes with one hand. “All of the habitat’s forwards is destroyed,” he said, “and the blast has altered our sun orbit…we’re heading directly for Ceti.”
“How do you know this?” she asked again.
“My neighbor down the hall,” he said. “You met her yesterday—Avita Harasta. Through her Link she’s learned mat we are all to go to the rear docks at once.”
“Ondro!” Josepha cried out, feeling weak. “He went forward this morning.”
“There’s nothing there, nothing at all. That’s what Avita said.”
“Maybe he didn’t get there,” Josepha said, rejecting the possibility that he might be dead.
Jason reached out to her with one arm and steadied her motion. “He would have been there within an hour of leaving here. When did he leave?”
“Three hours ago, at least,” she said.
“Maybe,” Jason started to say, but the word caught in his throat.
“What?”
“Maybe he left to come back before the destruction.”
“Please,” a voice said behind them.
Josepha turned her head and saw a slender shape floating in the doorway to her bedroom. After a moment she recognized Avita Harasta.
“Please excuse my coming in,” the woman said, “but all the doors have now opened, and we are being warned to leave at once, before the effects of the explosions make it impossible.” Avita touched her head as if in pain. “You may follow me. I know where to go. There are vehicles on the engineering level just above us.”
“I almost went with Ondro,” Josepha said, “but he insisted on not being treated as an invalid.” If he was dead, she thought, then it had all been for nothing.
Jason was breathing heavily, clearly upset and undecided about what to do.
“Maybe he’s alive somewhere,” she said, holding back her own tears.
He pulled her to him with his free arm, and they hung in the window for a moment. Josepha heard a strange, distant howl.
“Please,” Avita Harasta said again, “you must come with me now, or you will not know what to do.”
“What has happened?” Josepha asked.
The woman said, “Large detonations in the forwards. Disruptions in our power and gravitational systems.”
“Did we strike something?” Jason asked.
“No,” Avita Harasta said. “It was in the ship that was taken in for study. Large bombs. That’s what the Link is telling me.”
“But why?” Jason asked. “Was it an accident?”
“I don’t think so,” the woman said, and Josepha knew that the old ship had brought the bombs, and that they would not have gone off by accident.
She looked at Jason, and knew that he had also guessed that it was her father’s hand that had reached after her into the sky.
35
First Councilman Blackfriar was deep in thought, striding across the green fields of the hollow, when he felt a distant trembling in his feet. He stopped and listened.
The sunplate flickered at the far end of the hollow. He had never seen anything like it.
“What is it?” he asked within himself.
The Link gave no answer, as if the great Humanity II intelligences had suddenly been struck dumb.
The sunplate died.
Emergency lights came on across the hollow, but these too began to flicker as the ground trembled. Blackfriar lost his footing as gravity ceased, and fell forward above the grass.
“An explosion in the forwards,” the Link said to him. “Deaths are increasing as the explosion passes through us.”
“What kind of explosion?” Blackfriar demanded as he grabbed some tall grass to steady himself.
“Thermonuclear,” said the Link. “Twenty megatons, at least.”
“What?” he asked, startled and unable to imagine how it could be.
“There is no question,” the Link replied.
“Damage?”
“Still worsening. Nothing remains of the forwards.”
Blackfriar looked around. The only lights remaining were along the roads and pathways of the inner surface. He glimpsed dark human shapes drifting around these bright islands.
Blackfriar felt fearful for the first time in the nearly two centuries of his life. How could this be happening? He had been a child when the mobile had begun to grow by adding level after level around the core, and he had never seen a malfunction of any note; the accreting systems could deal with anything.
He felt a sudden denial that this could be a deliberate act, born of some deeply seated insanity that had broken out among his people.
“What is being done?” he asked.
“Nothing can be done.”
“What will happen?”
“The Shockwave will not penetrate the core hollow, but it will do damage around it.” The Link seemed to be struggling to stay in touch.
“How much is gone?”
Gone.
The thought brought an unfamiliar sense of loss. Only the passing of time and the eclipse of his earlier selves had even remotely resembled this feeling. It came into him like a steel bar piercing flesh.
“A third of our structure,” the great intelligence said. “Seven million and forty-seven individuals are dead. Of these, four hundred eleven thousand were incubating fetuses, and five hundred thousand were children in nurseries. Nine hundred thousand gilled people were boiled in their waters; one million one hundred thousand flying folk died in their heated skies; two hundred thousand ten people were crushed in their valleys; five hundred thousand and six forest peoples were burned—“
“Stop,” Blackfriar said softly, unable to listen to the numbing roll call, knowing that the Link would spare him the details while continuing to tally the lost link connections exactly, and that these numbers could only increase beyond the seven million and forty-seven already counted. The intelligence had never undertaken such a task, and was itself threatened with severe damage.
“Thousands trapped on various levels will soon die…”
“Voss—where are you?” Blackfriar shouted into himself, hoping that the Link would count him safe.
“I saw it happen,” Rhazes replied, “from the colony transport. We had just left when it happened. Forwards was amputated.”
Blackfriar felt relief at hearing his voice.
“Why—why did it happen?” Blackfriar asked, hanging on to the grass as implications cried out in his mind. “What was it?”
“Nuclear explosives,” Rhazes said. “They had to have been aboard the old starship we took in for study. I can’t think where else they might have been. We have nothing that could have made this happen.”
“Can we recover?” Blackfriar asked as the hollow trembled again.
“Possible,” the Link responded, “if we can restore drive controls. Their destruction with the forwards sent out a spurious drive burst which braked us in our sun orbit. We are now on a collision course with Ceti IV. We must repair the drive and change our sunward course away from the planet.”
“More detail,” Rhazes said.
“The Shockwave passed through us in about twelve minutes,” the Link said after a delay. “Its force was deflected, and partly reduced, by the central asteroid core, but heat penetrated most of the thirty levels. Sections of levels are intact in the rear. Most of our survivors are in the core. Air, water, heat, and gravity have failed. Before long the survivors will begin to feel the effects of these losses. Thousands are trapped in pockets, suffering from radiation burns and blindness, and will not last long.”
“What shall we do?” Blackfriar asked. Lights were dying in the hollow around him. He looked upward across the great space and saw that large areas on the far surface were completely darkened.
“Repair the drive,” said the Link, “search for survivors, and treat their injuries.”
“Is it the drive or the controls?” Rhazes asked.
Again there was a long delay, and Blackfriar realized that sectors of the great mentality were gone.
“The auxiliary drive may work,” the Link said at last, “if it has not been fused, and if it can be engaged and controlled.”
“How much time do we have to find out?” Blackfriar asked, clinging to the high grass as more lights winked out. The open space of the core was beginning to seem like a great cave, in which the survivors might have to light fires to see.
“Twenty-five hours, thirty-two minutes, and ten seconds,” the Link said.
“It will be enough time,” Voss said, “to rescue only a few thousand people.”
The Link said, “First priority must be to prevent our collision with Ceti IV.”
“If we lose nearly everything,” Rhazes said, “we may never be able to rebuild.”
As he heard Voss and the Link within himself, Blackfriar realized that the intelligence had never been in peril of its own existence.
“Listen, all who can hear me!” Rhazes cried out. “You must try to reach the rearward docks, individually and in groups, helping as many as you can along the way. I will enter the auxiliary drive chamber and determine if the manual controls work.”
“They do not respond to manual command,” the Link said. “Repair drones are now at the drive area, assessing damage.”
“If nothing works,” Rhazes continued, “I’ll bring this vessel to the docks and ferry off everyone who gathers there.”
“Launching all intact vessels,” the Link said.
“Can we trust its information?” Blackfriar asked Voss.
“No way to tell how much of it is gone, how much of its monitoring is synchronous memory feed and how much is direct.”
“How many people can we move across fifty or more kilometers to the docks in zero g?” Blackfriar asked. “We’ll use all the internal vehicles we can find, of course…how could this have happened?”
“I think I can guess,” Rhazes said, “that the explosions occurred shortly after the old starship was docked in the forwards. There was no reason to suspect there was any danger from the ship, which I’m sure was scanned thoroughly. The record of those scans, destroyed now, would probably show shielded cocoons inside the vessel. But again, there was no reason to have been suspicious about what was hidden in them.”
“So it had to be deliberate,” Blackfriar said.
“Yes—at the last possible moment, before we would have a chance of even suspecting that nuclear explosives were aboard.”
“But why?” Blackfriar asked, feeling his throat go dry as he realized that there had been no reason to even imagine such an action from so backward a world.
But now, he realized, there would never be an end to this catastrophe, even if he and others survived. There would be no way to forget or forgive such a crime.
“How many people are with you, Voss?”
“A hundred and fifty-five. All our colonists for Ceti. They wanted to survey the areas where they might settle.”
“Keep them safe,” Blackfriar said as he reached down with his left hand, grabbed more grass, and began to pull himself across the meadow toward the nearest kiosk. He tried not to think that the people aboard the colony shuttle might be the only ones who would survive.
Lights still flickered bravely on the inner surface. A few stayed on stubbornly. He shivered as he pulled himself along above the ground, feeling half-hypnotized by the shock and unreality of what was happening. His life had given him little experience with feelings of sorrow, pity, or panic, except at the personal level, and in moments of time that grew smaller as his life lengthened. He knew the extremes of emotions as distillations to be found in great dramatic works of art, where one might experience and understand them in safety.
This has not happened, a part of him insisted as tears surprised him in his eyes. We came too close to this world, his thoughts whispered, and he knew by the evidence of circumstance that Bely had set off these explosives. They would have been discovered, but Bely had set them to leave no time for caution, after he had given permission for the ship to be examined. Bely had made sure. No other explanation seemed to make sense, except that it had been an accident of some kind…
A strange stillness came over Blackfriar as he neared the elevator kiosk. The Link had not spoken for some minutes now. He assumed that it was repairing itself, but if it failed, then the link with Voss and all the surviving citizenry would be cut off, and everyone would be on their own.
“Voss?” he asked, hoping that at the very least this function was still working.
The sudden isolation made him feel empty. He had never been really alone within himself, except for periods of rest and privacy; but even then he had been aware of a background to his mind, not only the sense that his body’s health was being monitored
, but also the security of a shared culture.
He came to the kiosk and pulled himself into the elevator. He took a handhold and pressed down manually. As the lift descended, he feared that he would might step out into a lethal environment. The inner hollow had survived the blast and Shockwave, so there was good reason to think that the far region of the first and other levels beyond the hollow might be intact. Emergency barriers might have closed in time to soften the sweep of the Shockwave as it came aft.
Power was steady. The lift’s lights did not flicker as he waited. It came to a stop and the door opened. He breathed the incoming air with caution, then pulled himself out.
The long passage that wrapped around the hollow was black at his right, but still bright at his left. He heard a whistling sound. A track car crept out of the darkness of the forwards and pulled to a stop. Three bodies sat in the open cab, charred beyond recognition.
He stared at them, spared by their facelessness, but not by their smell.
He waited for the shock to pass. Then he unhooked the corpses, pushed them out, and pulled himself into the vehicle, securing the belt around his waist.
The car would not move when he touched the plate. The floating bodies at his right seemed to be waiting to get back into the car. He touched again, and the vehicle shot ahead.
As he raced forward through the engineering level that wrapped around the core, he caught occasional sight of the inner landscape to which the rocky core’s exterior was sky. It hung low, not more than a few hundred meters above industrial facilities and laboratories. People were standing outside these in large groups, obviously puzzled by the Link’s silence, waiting to learn what had happened.
What many or most of them did not know was that fifty kilometers behind him, their world came to a ragged end and was open to space. He wondered how many inner locks and bulkheads, on all the thirty levels, had held as the Shockwave had pushed through, searching out soft, living organisms.
His world would not die all at once. It would perish slowly if not deflected from its collision with Ceti IV. But the struggle to limit damage and rebuild could begin only after deflection back into a sun orbit.
Cave of Stars (Macrolife Book 2) Page 13
