by John Varley
I think I blacked out for a few moments. I remember seeing the huge chunk of ice spinning away from us. We were spinning, too, end over end. Three people were piled almost on top of me. In their yellow suits I couldn’t be sure who they were, but the inside of one of the helmets was coated in blood.
I knew we weren’t accelerating, because I could just see the front of the bus, and people and debris were piled up there, too. That meant that the tumble was what was causing the one gee or so I was feeling. The bus had become a centrifuge, still rising toward who knows where. But eventually gravity would stop us, if we weren’t crushed by more flying ice, and we’d start to fall. I suspected that even if the bus and passengers survived hitting the surface, there no longer was much of a surface down there. What I could see out the window was a jumble, glimpsed between spinning ice cubes from just a few feet across to monsters big enough to sink the Titanic. It was the spring melt on a big river, a whirlpool in a giant’s margarita blender. We’d be smashed to bits.
How many minutes? There might be time, as long as we kept rising.
But could I move? I was almost buried.
In addition to the three suited bodies, there was a welter of stuff you always find in a bus. Carry-on luggage, a few oxygen bottles shaken loose from beneath the seats, bottles of drinking water, even a crushed sandwich. Because of the centrifugal gravity, what had been the back of the bus was now my floor. Well, I had to try.
I levered myself up on my right elbow and reached for the back of the seat in front of me with my left hand, and pain lanced from my shoulder all the way to my fingertips. The adrenaline was wearing off, I guess, and I found that any attempt at moving my left arm gave me so much pain I almost blacked out again. I started shoving at the people in front of me with my right arm, and one of them raised its head.
“Who is that?” I shouted. I grabbed a shoulder and shook it, and the figure squirmed around and looked at me, blearily. It was Dekko. Good. He was a big, strong boy; he could help me out of this.
He put his arm under his face and lay back down, looking like he planned to take a nap. Not just now, me boyo.
“Wake up, you lazy ass!” I shouted, and punched him several times. He looked up again. One pupil was larger than the other. Concussion, I guess. Well, there wasn’t time to worry about that, I needed him out of the way, and I needed his help. A little more punching and swearing got him up, on hands and knees.
“Pull this one over there,” I told him, and after I repeated it several times he got the idea. The unknown person’s leg was jammed under the third body, and when Dekko gave it a hard pull, there was a scream. It sounded like Tina. I saw her leg was twisted horribly. Dekko let her go.
“Don’t stop!” I shouted. “Screaming is good! Screaming means she’s still alive! But we don’t have much time. Pull her out of there, whatever it takes!”
He did, and she screamed again, and I shuddered, and shouted, Sorry, sorry, sorry, hon, but I’ve got to get to the controls!
She stopped screaming, and I knew it wasn’t because it had stopped hurting but because she had passed out. Oh, god, Tina, I’m so sorry.
“Now give me a hand, Dekko, I’ve got to get out of here.”
He did, and it was my turn to scream. My left leg was jammed under the seat, and I stared in horror as I realized my knee was bending the wrong way. The pain was indescribable, worse than anything I’d ever felt, making my arm and shoulder seem insignificant.
“Can you fly, Dekko?” I gasped.
“Huh?”
“Can you … never mind.” Even if he could, which I doubted, he was in no shape to do it. Unless someone up front was seeing to it, and I couldn’t assume that, it was going to have to be me.
“Pull me out, you son of a bitch. Just fucking yank, okay?” I gritted my teeth as he grabbed my right arm and pulled.
Blacking out was a mercy this time, but all the pain was still there when I swam back into the light. My lower leg was flopping around, but Dekko was supporting me with my right arm over his shoulder. I got my good leg under me, standing on the unidentified third person, and stood more or less erect.
“Dek, is there a first-aid kit anywhere that you can see?”
He looked around, vaguely.
“A box with a red cross on it. I don’t know if I can do this without morphine.”
“Red …”
It was hopeless. The guy was a mental basket case, able to follow simple orders but helpless if the task required thought or discrimination. I was lucky he was still conscious. I looked out the window to my right.
Good news: We were still rising, and the longer we did that, the longer before we started falling again, and the more time I’d have to steer us out of this.
Bad news: There was another huge hunk of ice closing in on us.
“Braceyourself, Dekko!”
“Brace …”
I wrapped my good arm around a seat-back handle and pressed Dekko against a wall, and the iceberg hit us. It was nothing like the first impact, which was good, as this chunk was a lot larger than the first. The side of the bus kissed the ice, and there was a horrible grinding noise, and one of the windows starred, like the big window up front, and I closed my eyes.
“Mom and Dad and Mike, I love you.”
Then the grinding stopped. I peeked at the window and saw it was holding. They are triple thickness, high-impact, and have a tough layer of clear supervinyl between them. I didn’t hear a hiss of escaping air. The iceberg was still out there, unaltered in its course by colliding with our puny little vehicle, and we were moving slowly away again.
One more bit of good news: The friction against the berg had slowed our rotation down a bit. I figured I was standing in about three-quarter gee.
I looked up toward the front of the bus, which was now my ceiling. They say the first step is always the hardest, and this time it was literally true.
I looked down, and saw that Dekko had sat again and seemed to be asleep. Not good, with a concussion, but there was nothing I could do except get him to medical treatment as soon as possible. There had to be emergency help on the way …
But maybe not. If we had been hit this hard as far away as we were, it didn’t look good for Forward Base, NEMO, and even Main Base. This thing could even be affecting Clarke Centre; they might be too busy to come after an SOS from us.
Maybe we were on our own.
Don’t cry, Podkayne, time to be a big girl. There are still things you can do.
I reached up and grabbed one of the seat handles on the right side of the aisle, just at the limit of my reach, set my right foot on another seat, and started to pull myself up. The seat broke free of its bolts, which must have been almost severed already, and I fell back on my ass, with a seat on top of me. Pain shot through me, and suddenly I was shouting.
“Okay, Taliesen, now I’m mad! You think you can jinx me? Well, fuck you!”
I must have got a burst of adrenaline and just a moment of superhuman strength, because I tossed the seat off me like it was made of cardboard, got my good leg under me and my good hand on another seat back, and chinned myself up, screaming in pain and rage. I put my foot on a seat back and raised myself high enough to grab the next seat back. I tested it before putting my full weight on it, then pulled myself up.
The next step was easier. The closer I got to the middle of the bus, the less “weight” I would feel from the spinning. I took another step up the improvised ladder the seats provided, then another. I was into half a gee now, and the step was easier, and the next one. It seemed I could feel the difference in weight from my head to my feet, and it might even have been true.
One more step, and around a quarter of a gee. Lighter than Mars, this was going to be easy … until I reached the middle and had to make my way down. I put that out of my mind and lifted myself another step. I looked out the window.
Impossible to tell if we were rising or falling. I’d get a glimpse of the surface, and it seemed about as fa
r away as it had been the last time … and then something vast and red hove into view. The ship went through another rotation, and I lost it, then it was there again, looming, crystalline, terrifying. I think I may have screamed.
It was Grumpy. The whole mountain, freed from the ice, could now be seen to be cylindrical in shape, with the former fairy lights now shining like laser beams instead of fireflies. We were going to be crushed; I knew it. The whole damn thing had somehow rocketed into space and now it was headed down, and I was between it and Europa.
This time I did cry, helplessly, unable to move in any direction, waiting for that final impact.
One rotation went by and no impact. Another. And another. Still no impact. I chanced a look out the window. Grumpy didn’t look any closer. Could it be farther? Could the whole damn thing still be headed up, into space?
Didn’t really matter, did it? Nothing I could do about it. In an emergency, you put the things you can’t do anything about out of your mind and concentrate on what you can do, which, in this case, was continue on toward the front of the bus. So I lifted myself one more step, and a hand reached out and grabbed me by my dislocated shoulder.
Actually, by the suit that was covering the shoulder, but it hurt, anyway. I was almost into the zone of weightlessness at the middle of the bus, and cowering in the space between two seats, suitless, was our old friend Cosmo. During the time he could have been getting into his suit he had been running up and down the aisles, and I guess it was sheer luck that he’d been in the middle when the big impact sent everything spinning to either end. He’d managed to hold on, but his suit was twenty feet behind me, in the pile of debris and bodies I’d just left.
“It’s okay,” I said, through gritted teeth. “We’ve still got pressure. You’ll be all right. Just let me go, okay?”
He didn’t say anything, but with monomaniacal determination he reached out with his free hand. It took me a moment to realize what he was up to. He had hold of the zipper. He intended to peel me out of the suit and put it on himself.
Well. I promised myself right then to never watch his show.
His hands were shaking so much he couldn’t seem to grip the zipper pull. I didn’t think it would be possible for him to unzip me now that I was pressurized, but it was the thought that counted. His intent was to leave me naked to the elements.
So I clocked him, right on the face, right on his broken nose. It felt so good, I clocked him again, same place, ignoring the pain in my shoulder, and again, and again …
His grip relaxed for a moment, but he was still intent. He grabbed at me again. I was a lot better at maneuvering in very low gravity than he was, and squirmed out of the way. I reached behind me, groping for something, anything.
What I connected with was Slomo, wearing his suit, crouched in the seat across from Cosmo. He handed me what I think was a camera tripod, and I took it, and smashed it down over Cosmo’s head.
He let me go, shook his head, and reached for me again. My first blow had ripped a good part of his scalp open. I smashed him again and maybe I heard bone crack. It was hard to tell. He let me go, though, and floated gently down against the back of his seat and didn’t move.
Dead? Ask somebody who gives a shit.
I looked back at Slomo, trying to catch my breath. He had a camera in his hand, and another clamped to a seat top, pointing forward.
“You’re filming this?”
“It’s something to do.”
“Should I hit him again? That would look good at my trial. That make you happy?”
“It’d make me very happy, but there won’t be a trial, and you know it.”
“I’m not giving up. Can you fly?”
“Not even by flapping my arms.”
I sighed, grabbed his camera from his hands, and shoved it toward the front of the bus. It gained speed rapidly, and banged against the back of the driver’s seat.
“Hey!”
“Get off your lazy ass and help me down there, and you can start filming again. Go down there on your own, I’ll drop Cosmo on you, I swear to God. My left arm and my left leg are broken, so be careful or I’ll rip your eyes out.”
I’ll give him this: Once I got him moving, he was good at improvising. He quickly found a length of yellow nylon rope in his kit bag and tied one end of it to a seat back. Then he grabbed me carefully by my good shoulder and pushed us both into the zone of weightlessness. We got turned around, feet toward the front, and he wrapped the rope around himself, under his ass and around one arm, and grabbed me with his other arm, and we lowered through increasing weight.
Along the way we saw several people strapped in, some moving, some not.
I saw Senator Wu looking grim, with one arm around his daughter, who was crying quietly. Brynne was unmistakable with those big breasts stretching the front of her e-suit. She was out cold, hanging forward from her seat straps.
Ambassador Baruti’s legs were broken. A jagged point of bone had punched through one leg of his suit from the inside. There was a lot of blood around him, and he was holding a makeshift tourniquet in place. He grimaced at me and gestured to the front of the bus.
“Go, go, Podkayne! I’ll be all right.”
Nothing I could do, and in a few seconds Slomo’s feet touched down on the pile of debris in front, and he set me down gently on my good leg.
“Clear this stuff away,” I told him, and he set about it. Part of the debris was Nigel, Cosmo’s agent, who I hadn’t said three words to the whole trip, who was moving but groggy, and Slomo got him to help.
Pretty soon we got to the driver. His head was resting on his chest, twisted to one side, his neck obviously broken, and his forehead caved in. I swallowed back nausea as we lifted him aside and a bit of skull and brain tissue fell forward onto the control panel. I never even knew his name.
No time for tears or vomiting. I scrambled into the copilot’s seat and strapped in.
“Go see what you can do for the injured,” I told Slomo and Nigel, and they took off. “Try to get them to the middle of the bus. I may be slamming us around a bit.”
I cleared the control panel in front of me. It was the driver’s side, the port-side windshield panel, that was spiderwebbed with cracks; the one on my side was intact. I could see out, and what I saw was the churning surface of Europa, moving upward in front of me, then the horizon upside-down, then deep space, then the slowly shrinking bulk of Grumpy overhead, then blackness, then the horizon right-side up, then moving ice again. Repeat as needed, until impact.
How high was I? Still rising? At what velocity?
The control panel wasn’t a lot of help. Big areas of it weren’t working, and there were so many red warning lights I had a hard time sorting them out. But I saw something out the right-side window that was not very encouraging. The bus had four sets of double tracks, all steerable, one at each corner. Floating out there was the right-forward set, still attached to the bus by a few electrical cables but clearly torn away from the undercarriage. I could see hydraulic lines that had been severed. My panel told me the front-left pair were gone, too.
That wasn’t a problem if I could just set us down someplace where the ground was stable. But as long as those tracks were still attached to us, any maneuvering I did was likely to set them thrashing about dangerously.
Systems status report:
Internal power: good. Pressure integrity: critical, but intact. Oxygen supply: good. Radio: malfunction. Who needs a radio, anyway? Emergency beacon: on, and sending. Tracks: right rear, okay; left rear, okay; left front, not reporting; right front, hydraulic pressure zero.
External power: stern main engine, testing, testing … AOK.
Bow main engine … not reporting.
I had a nasty feeling that the bow main engine was floating somewhere out there with the left-front track assembly. And that was not good news.
All these buses had two bubble-powered engines, mounted underneath, one in front and one in back. They enabled vertical t
akeoff, and could swivel in any direction. Aim them to the stern and you went forward. Aim them forward to decelerate. A child could do it, and I had, since I was twelve.
But if the front engine was gone and I applied power from the rear engine, all I’d do would be to increase the spin.
Carefully, I engaged minimum power to my remaining engine, just a whisper, as I turned the stick to the left. Slowly, the ship began to turn, through 180 degrees, until my rear engine was facing the direction of spin. The loose track out there to my right swung around and banged into the side of the bus, and I winced, but no new pressure alarms sounded. Now power up … slowly … whang goes the track assembly as it tries to wrap itself around the bus.
I stopped the spin in about twenty seconds. We were now falling weightlessly, along with a hell of a lot of spinning icebergs, but at least we were all heading in the same general direction, which was …
Down. We’d reached the top of our powerless trajectory and Eu-ropa’s mild gravity was pulling us slowly back to her icy bosom. My remaining instruments were stuttering and flashing erratically, but it was clear that the surface was getting closer. We had about three minutes.
What to do, what to do?
How long had it been? It seemed an age, but I reckoned it had all happened in less than ten minutes. My knee and my shoulder were in agony, and now that I was here, now that I’d stopped the spin, I couldn’t seem to think straight. I turned around.
“How’s it going back there?”
“Not good,” Slomo shouted back. “I’ve stopped Baruti’s bleeding, but he’s in a bad way.”
“Is there anything we can do, Podkayne?” Senator Wu shouted.
“I’m open to suggestions. We really need to set down, but I’ve only got one engine, and if I use it I’ll just set us spinning again.”
“Why land?” came a faint voice.
“What’s that? Tina?” She had been all the way in the back, but with the spin gravity gone she’d made her way to the front. She didn’t look good, with her twisted leg and the inside of her helmet almost totally covered with blood.
