by Wil McCarthy
The floor, no, the entire lander jerked upward and to one side. The lights went out. Miguel fell into the padding, and Beth tumbled in on top of him. Both cried out, and instinctively he wrapped his arms around her.
“What happened?” He shouted. “What happened?”
Beth struggled against him. “We've had a deuterium leak since the plasma wave hit. Damn, I didn't think it would run out so fast. Let me get to the panel.”
Miguel's grip remained tight. “We've run out of fuel? We've stranded ourselves?”
“Miguel, let me go. Let me get to the panel.”
“Why? What can you do?”
“Let me go!”
Her breasts felt hot against his bare chest. Her hair had tumbled across his face. White light spilled in through the viewport, casting shadows across her. She had never looked so beautiful.
Regretfully, Miguel unlaced his fingers and loosened his grip on her. She flopped against him for a thrilling moment, then rose a bit. But rather than rising fully, she paused, and then settled back down into his lap again.
“The panel lights have gone blank,” she said, with an oh-yes-of-course sort of tone. “The batteries shorted, and the generators have no fuel. Right. We are stranded, Miguel. We can't do anything. We can't even call for help.”
He should answer her intelligently. He should let her up, and get up himself, and they should find a way to fix the lander and get out of here. But Lordy, he just couldn't help himself.
He kissed her. She had no reaction to that, so he kissed her again, and again, and then his hands were roaming across those beautiful curves he'd admired for so long.
“Miguel!” She cried out, struggling in his arms.
His heart sank. Hormones had betrayed him after all, seizing him in this moment of weakness. What troubled realms had they just cast him into?
“Miguel,” Beth said, turning her face toward his, brushing long hair out from between them. “The first aid kit said 'limited physical activity.' Let me do it.”
Suddenly, her mouth moved against his skin, and her hands roamed across his curves, quickly finding the bulge in his pants, and the means to free it from bondage. Her breath shuddered, her voice moaned with unfettered desire.
Astonished, Miguel could not think what to do. Could not think... Did not need to. His muscles still felt weak, but his blood burned, it boiled inside him. And Beth's muscles were doing just fine. He sat back into the chair's thick padding and let his hormones take over.
~~~
“Doctor Manaka?”
A hand shook Yezu, firmly. He opened his eyes. Techman Chase stood beside his bunk. Or hovered, actually, in this planetoid's abominably weak gravity.
“Yes? What?”
“Doctor, your spectral analyses are complete. You asked me to wake you when the data was ready.”
“Oh.” He rolled away, covering his eyes against the light. “I've changed my mind. No, wait. I haven't.”
“You sure?”
Rising, Yezu gave a weary nod. “Yes, thank you. I'm afraid my stronger guilt defeats my strong intent. I've monopolized your computer long enough.”
Chase snorted. “You certainly have. If there were any gravity around here, Captain would be pacing holes in the floor. As it is, he's bouncing around, making everybody crazy. He loves to keep a few trajectories in his pocket, just in case we need to move in a hurry, but this time we just haven't had the chance to compute any.”
“Go any direction,” Yezu said, tiredly swinging his feet out, then grabbing the edge of the bunk to steady himself when, nearly weightless, they continued to swing past the “down” position. “I bet you a pound of centrokrist you'll never come to grief.”
Chase shook his head. “Bet me all you like. Captain won't believe it unless it comes out of the computer.”
“Ech. I find that odd, considering the quality of your computers.”
“Now, now,” Chase said. “Be nice. We've been very accommodating to your needs, I think.”
“Of course. Of course you have.”
Malhelan computing revolved around the quaint and practically useless notions of central processing and random-access digital memory. One had to feed the computers endless streams of didactic, excruciatingly explicit instructions to get them to do anything at all, and even then the slightest error sufficed to bring them, messily, to a halt. The systems employed a number of elaborate schemes for trapping and correcting errors, but these didn't help much. Dressing up a stone axe, as he sometimes said to Chase and the others, did not make it steel.
“There's still some food in the galley, if you'd like to eat while you work.”
Yezu waved his hand dismissively. “Not hungry, thank you.”
Chase nodded, more from impatience, Yezu thought, than out of any real sense of politeness. He turned and, bracing a foot against one of the bunks, shot through the hatch and away down the length of Rockhammer's central corridor.
Yezu slid from his bunk, drifted for a moment before finding stability in the near weightlessness. His stomach churned. He wondered when he would get out of this rotten place, when circumstances would again let him find his work and his comfort in the same vicinity. Not soon, he supposed.
Minutes later, he found himself at the computing station he thought of as “his,” the one with the window and the telkom and the almost-sensible layout of controls and displays. In point of fact, the crew shared this little niche in the same way that they shared the galley and the showers and the gruesome “sanito” facilities. But Yezu hogged the station whenever he could, and complained when he could not, and for the most part, the crew humored him in this. His projects had frequently kept the computer at a deathly crawl anyway, so they'd found little need for the workstation.
“Queen to king's knight four,” Yezu said into the telkom plate, holding down the RECORD/TRANSMIT button. “Good morning, Tomus, or have you had your morning already? Good evening, then, or maybe I should just say 'good.' Unfortunately, I have precious little 'good' to speak of myself. The living conditions have really begun to wear me down. Oh!”
He took his finger off the button. What in heaven's name... Outside “his” window, he could see a peculiar smudge of white, about the size and shape of his thumb, with a much brighter speck at its center. He depressed the button again.
“Well, one of our friends has come back for a visit. From the look of things, I'd say his course is on a line with Rockhammer's current position. Moving which way? I cannot tell. Hold on while I inform the bridge.”
He pressed some other buttons. The “INTERKOM” light came on. No picture appeared on the screen before him, though, no doubt because he hadn't tripped the right controls. Well, to blazes with it.
“Bridge. First Officer speaking.”
“Navel of the world. Manaka speaking,” Yezu said, following the informal protocol of Rockhammerian humor. Had he been farther forward, he'd have said “nipple” or “cake-hole.” Farther aft, he'd have named a less pleasant anatomical feature.
“Go ahead.”
“Have you spotted the, uh, bogey outside my station?”
The First Officer cleared his throat as if preparing to deliver a criticism. “Repeat and confirm, Manaka. Bogey at two-seventy by ought? Range presently indeterminate?”
“Yes,” he sighed. He tired of the Malhelans' professional banter, their steadfast refusal to speak normally when discussing matters pertaining to Rockhammer's maintenance and operation. Still, refusing to go along with the joke would get him nowhere. “Bogey at two-seventy by zero zero. Range indeterminate. I confirm.”
“Acknowledged. Bogey is on our scopes. Radar soundings indeterminate at this time.”
Yes, of course. The ellipsoids did not reflect radio waves in the same way they did visible light, so that Rockhammer's old-style radar equipment gave decidedly questionable readings at times. This left them with little means, other than patience and sharp eyes, to determine the objects' ranges and velocities.
�
�If it helps,” Yezu said, “the ellipsoid has brightened and shifted colors. It appears distinctly bluish in hue.”
“Acknowledged. We confirm your observation.”
He sighed. So early in the day, conversations like this one did not amuse him.
“Manaka out.” He switched communication modes, went back to his Centromo transmission. “Tomus, these Malhelans can wear me farther down in an hour than convention lectures could in a four-day weekend. Really, Wedge has a completely different personality. Count yourself luckier than I. Now, where were we? Have I moved yet? Yes, I have.”
The computing station had grown brighter, and bluer. He looked up, into a dazzling blaze of sapphire light outside his window. It filled the entire view, swelling and brightening rapidly.
“My God,” he said, “Talina. Be happy, my love, wherever you are. Tomus, I believe that thing is going to hit us.”
He stared silently for a few moments. Such a pretty shade of blue, such a pretty—
His universe ended.
Chapter Nineteen
Tom ran to the viewport as light blossomed outside it, blossomed through to Wedge's interior despite the instant polarization of the glass. He had to close his eyes, turn his head aside, and even then the glare burned like hot sunlight. And then it faded, and he opened his eyes, and he saw a small star burning a little ways off from the Lacigo/Malsato pair. Right where the Aurelo cut around it. Right where the Malhelan ship Rockhammer had been parked.
Presently, the star dimmed to a cloud of murky gray vapor. Not large; he could easily cover it up with two fingers.
“Yezu?” he said quietly, uselessly. He skated backward, bounced lightly into the com station once again. Activated the telkom. Transmitted.
“Yezu?”
Distant, of course. He wouldn't hear a reply for hours. He wouldn't. Hear. A reply. He depressed the transmit button again.
“Come on, speak to me. I don't find this funny.”
Indeed, tears had begun to form and sting in his eyes. What an abysmally bad joke, not funny in the least.
Dade Soames appeared, looking stricken.
“What an abysmal joke,” Tom said to him.
“Tomus, were you watching that? Did you... Darkness, I...”
Tom attempted a smile. “That sewer rat, he hates to lose. I'd have beaten him in another three moves.”
Dade nodded. His facial expression peculiar, concerned. He reached a hand out toward Tom, paused, retracted it.
“I suppose I'll miss the whiny sound of his voice,” Tom remarked. Indeed, the universe already seemed a larger place, colder and emptier without Yezu Manaka to fill it. Tom choked, gagged on the bolus of this damnable thought. And the tears came forth.
~~~
Jafre stepped away from his window, back toward his desk and the telkom there, the telkom to which he had been almost surgically attached for the past fifty hours. All traces of that hellish light outside had faded.
Damnation! Lacigo and Malsato were on the other side of the sky right now, the whole planet of Unua standing between them and himself. And still the explosion was visible! How far out would conflagration like that be fatal? Could anyone in or near the Aurelo be left alive? He doubted it.
How many people dead up there, five hundred? Nine hundred?
He boiled, suddenly, with feeling akin to rage. How dare they? How dare these aliens shoot up his star system, murder his citizens? It was personally outrageous, personally unacceptable.
“Yes,” he said to Gerane on the other side of the telkom. Gerane, in the city of Brava, five thousand kilometers away. “I saw it.”
“Streets have been filling up again,” Gerane said with clear agitation. “Everyone wanted to get out and see the blue sky, and then nobody wanted to get back in the shelters again. Even after Lacigo set. All night long, wandering around, looking up at the stars. Like some quaking festival!”
“The explosion was not far below the horizon for you people,” Jafre said. “Correct?”
“Yes. Darkness, we're lucky it wasn't right overhead. That's all I need, half a million people staggering around blind.”
Jafre nodded at the telkom image. “Yeah. Yeah. Now listen to me: I don't want you running around with your head chopped off and your dick hard. Do you hear me? I find any panic over there and I'll see to it you dig tunnels out on Dua for the rest of your miserable life. Clear?”
“Crystal,” Gerane said. He did not look happy.
“Round up the civilians and get them back in the shelters. Do not let them out this time. I will not be held responsible for any further loss of life. Do you understand me? Have I made myself perfectly clear?”
“Yes. Perfectly.” The words crisp, distinctly angry now. And that was fine. Anger would harden Gerane, firm his resolve, and an explicit enemy, even if it was Jafre himself, would lend him the crucial sense of focus he would need in coming hours.
Jafre cut the connection without further ado, and punched in the code for Port Chrysanthemum, Director's office.
A man's face appeared on the screen. Wendall, that new secretary of Asia's. He looked as harried as everyone else Jafre had been speaking with lately.
“Get me Asia,” Jafre said. “Now.”
Wendall didn't nod, didn't speak, didn't appear to move at all. But his image vanished, and Asia Gill's took its place.
“Madame Director,” Jafre said formally.
Asia glared. “Drop the shit, Jafre, I'm very busy right now. Did you see that explosion?”
“Everyone saw it, Asia. How is the station?”
“The station has been better. Lacigo was dead center above us when it went off, and we've lost a bunch of instrumentation. If you think that event was visually bright, you should have seen its emissions down in radio frequencies. Played hell with the electronics. It'll be a few minutes before we recover.”
“I think,” Jafre said, “That one of the eggies hit a rock in the Aurelo. Moving fast, I mean. Releasing a lot of energy.”
Asia nodded. “I think that, too.”
“If they can screw up like that, my light, they can hit Unua as well. Drive their fist right through the heart of Malhela. There'd be nothing left of us, nothing but handful of ships, plus the mines and prisons out on Dua. How many women and children are there off the Unuan surface right now? One hundred? With ninety of them right there on your station?”
She waved her hands at him, shutting him up. “I've been thinking the same thing. If Unua gets it, Chrysanthemum gets it as well, and suddenly there's no colony here at all. I'm going to move the station.”
“Can you do that?”
“The original engines are still intact,” Asia said, “and I keep small amount of antimatter in containment. My staff has always complained about the cost and the risk, but I thought it would be stupid to lose that capability.”
“Bravo, my dear. Bravo. Get out as quickly as you can. Have you had any contact with that bitch Lin Chelsea?”
“Yes. She's back in the inner system again, looking for some kind of shuttlecraft. Apparently she lost some people down near Malsato or something. I'm not sure of the details.”
Jafre seethed. “Damn her. Damn her. You tell her to get her ass back here. We need protection, and she's the closest thing we've got.”
“You tell her. She won't listen either way.”
“She might. I doubt her employers would be very happy if we transmitted a formal complaint.”
“You would do that?” Asia looked astonished. “In the middle of all this, an interstellar broadcast? Damn the cost, damn the consequences? Just to get her in trouble?”
“Yes. Absolutely. I need leverage on that woman. I need her, but she won't ever do what I tell her to do.”
Now Asia's eyes narrowed, her lips drawing together. “I smell hidden agenda, mister. What are you up to?”
He flashed her a look of annoyance, a warning beacon in the night. “Don't start with me, Asia. You've got a station to move, and I've got a bitch sta
rship Captain to speak with.”
He cut the connection. Quaking hell, but he wanted to rest. But like a machine, like a thing never permitted a moment's leisure, he was on the keys again, placing the next call. Not to Chelsea, not yet. He had first to look after the city of Fiera, and the mining stations at the poles and at the oceans.
So many people scurrying around the planet, and he'd be damned if he'd let any more get themselves killed while he was on duty.
~~~
Chelsea stared wearily at the holie screen in front of her. Crap and crap and more crap, why couldn't she just send a personality fax and have done? Jafre Shem demanded such a ridiculous share of her waking time, wanting constantly to be briefed, and comforted, and obeyed.
And now he'd stooped to petty threats in order to have his way. She felt sorely tempted to ignore him altogether, to let him vent his rage to the empty ether on whatever schedule pleased him most. But perhaps the man had some valid concerns, after all.
Yes, his planet faced a terrible danger. Yes, the technology at her disposal far outstripped anything Jafre had access to at home. But still, weaponless, and outfitted with only a rudimentary array of science instruments, Introspectia couldn't actually do anything to help the Malhelans, aside from jaunting around, recording and analyzing the events as they unfolded.
Indeed, she felt a terrible impotence about the entire situation, and a constant fear that this feeling would leak through to sully the confidence of her crew. How much more helpless must Jafre feel, cringing on the surface of his little planet, unable even to move out of the way should danger approach? His reaction to the stress manifested in unpleasant ways, but even so she should try to maintain a little empathy.
She was, after all, a sort of ambassador. And given the magnitude and importance of the circumstances, she felt the eyes of history looking back at her, watching every word, every decision with the cool, smug detachment that came from knowing how things would work out in the end. Oh, how critically they would dissect her!
