Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Emma Stoney:

  The three of them beat a hasty retreat back to the dome.

  Cornelius dragged off his suit, went straight to his softscreens, and started working through the data.

  Malenfant patiently gathered up the discarded equipment. He hooked up their backpacks to recharge units. And then he got a small vacuum cleaner to suck up the loose dust.

  Emma grabbed his arm. “I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

  “We’ll all be finished if we forget the routines, the drills, our procedures.”

  “We lost Michael. We all but kidnapped him, brought him all the way to this damn asteroid, and now we lost him. His oxygen will expire in—” She checked.” — ten more hours.”

  “I know that.”

  “So what are you going to do? “

  He looked exhausted. He let go of the cleaner; it drifted to the floor. “I told Cornelius he has one hour, one of those ten, to figure out what we’re dealing with here.”

  “And then what?”

  He shrugged. “Then I suit up and go in after the boy.”

  Emma shook her head. “I never imagined it would come to this.”

  “Then,” Cornelius said coldly, “you didn’t think very far ahead.”

  “Your language is inhuman,” Emma said.

  Cornelius looked startled. “Perhaps it is. But to tell you the truth, I’m not sure Michael is fully human. He’s been one step ahead of us since we arrived here. It may be he knew exactly what he was doing when he walked through that portal, where he was going. It was his choice. Have you thought of that?”

  An air-circulation pump clattered to a stop.

  Malenfant and Emma stared at each other. After so many weeks in the O’Neill and the hab bubble, she’d gotten to know every mechanical bang and whir and clunk of the systems that kept her alive. And she knew immediately that something was wrong.

  She followed Malenfant to Cornelius, who was sitting on a T-chair by the hab’s mocked-up control board. The softscreen display panels were a mess of red indicators; some of them were showing nothing but a mush of static.

  “What’s happened?”

  Cornelius turned to Malenfant, the muscles around his eyes tight with strain. “It looks like something fried our electronics.”

  “Like what? A solar flare?”

  “I doubt it.”

  Malenfant tapped at a softscreen. “We’re not in any immediate danger. The surface systems seem to have gone down uniformly, but a lot of the hab systems are too stupid to fail.”

  Emma said, “Have we taken a radiation dose?”

  “Maybe. Depending what the cause of this is.”

  “My God.”

  Cornelius had produced an image on the softscreen.

  It was a star field. But something, an immense shape, was occluding the stars, one by one. In the middle of the black cutout form, a light winked.

  “That’s a ship,” Malenfant said. “But who—”

  With a mechanical rattle, all the hab’s systems stopped working, and silence fell.

  Cornelius turned to Malenfant. “Too stupid to fail?”

  Emma felt hot, stuffy, and her chest ached. Without the air circulation and revitalization provided by the loop systems, the carbon dioxide produced by her own lungs would cluster around her face, gradually choking her.

  She waved at the air before her mouth, making a breeze, fighting off panic.

  The softscreen image, relayed by some surface camera, fritzed out.

  “I think we’d better suit up again,” said Malenfant.

  June Tybee

  June lay loosely strapped into her couch. She was one of ten troopers in this big circular cabin, which was one of five stacked up at the heart of Bucephalus. The troopers in their armor looked like a row of giant beetles.

  Her suit, after weeks of practice, felt like part of her body, even the bulky helmet with its thick connectors. The suit was colored charcoal gray, nearly black. Asteroid camouflage. It had been a relief for June when the order had come, just before the brilliant flash of the EMP bomb, to close up her visor. The troopers ought to be rad-shielded, here at the heart of the ship. But it didn’t do any harm to be wrapped in the suit’s extra shielding.

  Now the covers on the cabin windows snapped open. The windows were just little round punctures in the insulated, padded walls. But they were enough to show her the stars — and something else.

  A shape, charcoal black and massive, came swimming into her field of view. It looked like a barbecue brick that somebody had been taking potshots at. But there were structures on the surface, she saw: little gold domes, what looked like a spacecraft, a glimmer of electric blue.

  There were whoops and shouts, and June felt her heart thump with anticipation.

  It was Cruithne. They had arrived.

  But then a series of bangs hammered at the hull of the carrier. She knew from experience what that was: blips of the attitude-control thrusters. But such a prolonged firing was unusual.

  She felt a ghostly shove sideways. It took a while for a ship the mass of Bucephalus to change course. But right now it was trying mighty hard.

  And something new came sailing past the window. It was a golden sphere, rippling and shimmering. It was inexplicable: beautiful, even graceful, but utterly strange — a golden jellyfish swimming up at her out of the darkness.

  Suddenly it came to June where she was, what she was doing, how far she was from home. The Bucephalus suddenly seemed very fragile. Fear clutched at her chest, deep and primitive.

  Emma Stoney:

  “Jeez,” Malenfant said, his radio-transmitted voice crackling in

  her ear. “It’s the cops.”

  Emma was out in the open, locked into her suit, staring at the sky.

  The ship was like nothing she had seen before.

  It was a squat cylinder with a rounded snub nose. She could see no rocket nozzles at its flaring base. It had two giant finlike wings on which were marked the letters USA, and it had a USASF roundel and a Stars and Stripes painted close to the base. There were complex assemblies mounted on some parts of the hull: an antenna cluster, what looked like a giant swivel-mounted searchlight. The hull was swathed with thick layers of insulation blankets, pocked and yellowed by weeks in space.

  Somehow it disturbed Emma to see that huge mass hanging over her in the Cruithne sky: a sky she had become accustomed to thinking of as empty save for the stars, the gleam of Earth, the lurid disc of the sun.

  A few yards ahead of her a firefly robot was maneuvering, working its pitons and tethers, in a tight, neat circle, over and over, its carapace scuffed and blackened with dust. It was scrambled, like the equipment in the hab module.

  But their suits were working fine. Malenfant had gotten into the habit of burying the suits under a few feet of loosely packed regolith. Just a little more protection, he always said. Now Emma was starting to see the wisdom of that.

  “He’s coming down over the pole,” Malenfant murmured now, watching the ship. “Looks like a single-stage-to-orbit design. See the aerospike assembly at the base there? The base would serve as the heat shield on reentry. It’s one big mother. How could they assemble it, fly it so quickly, chase us out here?”

  Cornelius shrugged, clumsy in his suit. “Shows how seriously they take you. Anyway now we know what happened to the electronics.”

  “Oh,” said Malenfant. “An BMP.”

  Emma asked, “BMP?”

  “Electromagnetic pulse,” Cornelius said. “They set off a small nuclear weapon above the asteroid. Flooded our electronics with radiation.”

  “My God,” Emma said. “How much of a dose did we take?”

  They had no dosimeters, no way to answer the question. Emma felt her flesh crawl under her skinsuit, as if she could feel the sleet of hard radiation coursing through her body.

  “Anyhow it was seriously dumb,” Malenfant said. “It’s made it impossible for us to talk with them.”

  “Maybe they
thought they had no choice,” Cornelius said. “They didn’t know what they were flying into here, after all—”

  And then Emma saw something new: a sac of water, encased in rippling gold fabric, sailing up from the surface of Cruithne toward the intruder.

  Malenfant clenched a fist. “God damn, it’s the squid. The ones who stayed. They’re fighting back.”

  Emma’s heart sank. They were doomed, it seemed, to a battle, whether they wanted it or not.

  Sparks burst from complex little clusters along the hull of the ship. The great ship began to roll, deflecting ponderously. But it wasn’t going to be enough.

  The converging of the two giant masses, in utter silence, was oddly soothing to watch, despite her understanding of the great and deadly forces involved: they were like clouds, she thought: complex clouds of metal and water and fabric.

  The water bomb’s membrane snagged on some projection on the ship’s hull. The water within gushed out, blossoming to vapor in a giant, slow explosion. The ship was set tumbling erratically, nose over tail, and the membrane, crumpled, fell away. Emma could see more sparks now as the pilots blipped their attitude thrusters, struggling to bring their craft under control.

  “Not enough,” Cornelius said.

  “What do you mean?” Emma said.

  “If the collision had been head-on the squid missile would have wrecked that thing. Cracked it open like an egg. But that sideswipe is just going to inconvenience them.”

  “You mean,” Malenfant said, “it will make them mad.”

  Now little hatches in the ship’s hull slid back, and tiny, complex toys squirted out into space. They swiveled this way and that, tight and neat, and then squirted in dead straight lines over the horizons.

  “Comsats,” said Malenfant. “For command, communications, control. So they can see all the way around the rock when they begin their operations.”

  Emma asked, “What operations?”

  “Taking Cruithne. What else?”

  And then the ground shook.

  They were all floating a little way upward, she saw, like water drops shaken off by a dog. When they landed they staggered. Emma thought she could feel huge slow waves working through the dust-laden ground.

  Malenfant snapped, “What the hell now?”

  Cornelius was pointing to the horizon.

  From beyond Cruithne’s dusty shoulder, an ice fountain was bursting upward. Droplets fanned out in perfectly straight lines, gleaming like miniature stars, unperturbed by Cruithne’s feeble gravity.

  “They’re hitting the squid,” she said. “Their domes—”

  “Yeah,” Malenfant growled.

  “How did they do that?” Emma asked. “How do you fight a space war?”

  Malenfant said, “Maybe they fired a projectile. Like an anti-satellite missile.”

  “No.” Cornelius pointed to the searchlight-type mount on the hull of the ship. “That looks like a laser-beam director to me. Probably a chemical laser, several megawatts of power, a mirror a few feet across.”

  Emma asked, “Could they fire it again?”

  “You bet,” Malenfant said. “The babies they developed for Star Wars back in the eighties were designed for thousands of shots.”

  Already the ice fountain was dying.

  Emma was glad some of the squid, at least, had been spared this, that they were on their way to the Jupiter-orbit Trojans, where they would be far beyond the reach of this heavy-handed military intervention.

  Unlike herself.

  “They’ll take out our habitat next,” Cornelius said. “Then trash theO’NeilL”

  “They wouldn’t do that,” Emma said. “That would kill us.”

  “They don’t know who’s firing at them. They’re going to shoot first—”

  “ — and let Saint Peter sort us out,” Malenfant said grimly. “Hell, it’s what I’d do.”

  Emma said, “Without the habitat, without O ‘Neill, we’ll be dead when the suits expire. Ten, twelve hours.”

  Cornelius said tightly, “I think we know that.”

  More hatches opened and tiny rockets hurtled out, trailing cables. The rockets fell over Cruithne’s tight horizon, and Emma saw sprays of regolith dust. The cables went taut, and the ship began to turn, grandly, like a liner towed by tugboats.

  “He’s harpooned us,” Malenfant said. “And now he’s winching himself in.”

  Another hatch was opening in the ship’s belly. She saw a rectangle of pale gray light, the figure of a person — a soldier — heavily armored. The soldier looked ant sized. For the first time she realized how big the ship really was.

  Cornelius moved. “We have to get away. Come on.” He dragged his tethers out of the regolith, lay down flat, and began pulling himself by his fingertips over the surface. He wasn’t even bothering to anchor himself, Emma saw.

  “Cornelius is in kind of a hurry,” she said.

  Malenfant said grimly, “I suspect he knows something we don’t. We’d better follow him.”

  Emma fell forward. Cruithne dust billowed around her, and she began to float-crawl forward, after the fleeing Cornelius.

  June Tybee

  June was ready by the closed hatch. Her harness, slung loosely about her suit, was attached to a guide rope that coiled loosely above her head.

  Just like taking a parachute drop, she thought.

  Except, of course, it wasn’t.

  The hatch slid open.

  Cruithne was framed in the hatchway: dark as soot, dimpled with craters of all sizes, here and there glistening blue or red. She could see the guide rope snaking, coils frozen in zero G, to a piton-tipped rocket buried in the dirt. There was no sense of gravity. It was like looking straight ahead at a wall, rather than down to a ground.

  Such had been her proficiency in the zero G drills that she had been selected in the first wave. And so here she was in the hatchway of a spacecraft, and she was facing an asteroid.

  Oh Christ oh Christ…

  Someone slapped her on the back. She didn’t allow herself to hesitate. She gave her harness one last tug, floated forward, and pushed hard out the hatch.

  She was floating between two vertical walls, as if crossing between two buildings, following the coiling cable. And when she looked down—

  She looked down and saw stars.

  To left and right, above, more stars. Space, above her and below her and all around her. The confinement of her months inside Bucephalus fell away, and the scale of the universe opened out from a few feet to infinity. She felt her stomach churn. Nothing, no amount of training or simulation, nothing had prepared her for the reality of this, of drifting in space.

  They should have tried, though, she thought.

  She clutched her weapon to her chest, focused on it to the exclusion of all else. Such weapons were her specialty — in fact she had trained others in their use. The gun was distorted in her view by her curved, tinted faceplate. It was a combination laser rifle and projectile weapon — ordinary bullets, the clips and barrels modified to take account of the vacuum. Big trigger for gloved fingers. A fancy graphite lubricant that wouldn’t seize in the vacuum. Big modular parts for easy repair. LED display to show her the laser’s power — right now, of course, it was fully charged. …

  The transfer could only have taken a minute. It seemed much longer.

  Here came the asteroid at last, its detail exploding, filling her faceplate. She saw how its surface was sculpted by craters, circles on circles, like the beach after the rain, like that day in Florida with Tom. But this beach was black as coal, not golden, and the sky was black too, not washed-out blue, and she was a long way from Florida.

  Her radar pinged in her ear, warning her she was close.

  She spread out her arms and legs, starfishing, as she’d been trained. She couldn’t tell from looking how far she was from the surface; the closer she got, the more craters and ragged holes she could see, so the surface texture was the same on every scale—

  what w
as the word,/racta/?

  It came as a shock when her hands pressed against soft, crumbling dirt.

  She felt herself tipping. Then her knees and toes hit together. It felt as if she were clinging to a wall — and oh shit, she was bouncing, floating back into space. She scrabbled at the asteroid.

  She was panicking.

  She shut her eyes and took a deep breath.

  She opened her eyes, reached for the pitons dangling from her belt, dug one into the surface, then a second, a third. Rapidly, efficiently now, she hooked her tethers to the ropes, tested them with quick tugs, and then — another deep breath, a moment of concentration — she ripped her harness clear of the guide rope, and she was no longer connected to Bucephalus.

  She dug her piton out of the ground, moved her tether, crawled forward. And here she was, mountaineering up the face of an asteroid. The belly, arms, and legs of her suit were already streaked and stained black, and she had to stop every few minutes to wipe the shit off her faceplate. It was like crawling over a broad, soot-strewn hill, as if after some immense forest fire.

  She could see the Bucephalus hanging in the sky like some complex metal sun. More troopers were coming down to Cruithne, sliding down the wire in absolute silence.

  Holy cow, she thought, I made it. Her spirits lifted. Tommy, Billie, this will make a hell of a story for you and your kids. I hope somebody is recording this.

  She saw a subsatellite sailing over her head, a little metal spider with glistening solar panels, filmy antennae. It spun and jerked, angling down in a straight line toward the horizon until it passed out of her sight. The gravity of Cruithne was too weak for useful orbits, so the subsats were using small thrusters to rocket their way around the asteroid. The lifetime of the sats was only a few hours, limited by their fuel, but that ought to be enough; if the asteroid wasn’t secured by then they would all be in trouble anyhow.

  When she looked back Bucephalus was already hidden behind the close horizon. It was as if she were alone here.

  She ought to wait. The orders, for now, were just to spread out over the first few hundred yards, and then to move steadily over the asteroid, keeping line-of-sight contact on a buddy basis. Then they would converge on the various installations.