Now two of the engineers would have to suit up, enter the transfer tunnel to check that the seals were sound, manually open the airlocks, and let the onboard AI flood the spaces with breathable air. Then they’d repeat the procedure at the far end of the orbital to ensure Elcano was ready to board. It was going to take time. These were tasks that would have been automated if Solomon hadn’t locked everything down.
And if we hadn’t cut his links. Maybe he’d have relented and released the ship.
A child started crying again. Erskine knew she should have said something encouraging, a pep talk or some cheerful banter, but breaking the silence would have sounded forced and nervous. She wasn’t the charismatic figure everyone looked to for a defiant or inspiring word. Alex Gorko would have said exactly the right thing, made everyone laugh, and changed the entire mood of the ship, but he wasn’t here, and neither was any other manager with that kind of easy confidence.
Jane Lurie eventually appeared in the hatchway, helmet in one hand, looking out of breath. Nobody was used to doing these kinds of manoeuvres. This was life without Solomon managing the AIs for them.
“We’re connected,” she said. “Everything’s fine, so we’re going back to open the hatches now. Not much longer to wait.”
“I want to go to the bathroom,” said a small voice.
So did Erskine. It was sobering to find that running for your life could pale into insignificance when your body’s most basic functions demanded attention. She shut her eyes and tried to sleep to take her mind off it, which should have been easy after yet another sleepless night. Eventually, after a few minutes of trying to ignore the sudden smell of urine and someone coughing a few rows behind her, the long cabin receded into the distance and then faded.
Someone shook her shoulder. It was Lurie.
“Time to move, Director. Are you okay? We transferred the children first. The little ones were getting really cranky.”
Erskine tried to straighten up in her seat, then remembered the seat belt. “Oh. Yes.” She straightened her jacket, rumpled in the straps. “How long was I out?”
“A couple of hours. Careful when you stand up. It’s not full Earth gravity, remember.”
Erskine had rarely needed to be scared of anything in her safe, confined life. She’d never faced real physical danger. The things that made her afraid were all abstract, and perhaps harder to deal with because of that. But she was suddenly conscious of the fragility of both the shuttle and her own body as she made her way down the aisle between the tightly-packed rows of seats, holding on to the overhead rail and moving hand over hand. If things had gone to plan and the follow-up missions had happened at the appointed time, there’d have been a few familiarisation flights to prepare everyone for the more unpleasant sensations. Instead, they’d all done it for real with no training, just instructions, and it had been rushed and frightening. Alex had said that he hadn’t dreamed in cryo. Erskine hoped that meant people would be spared the nightmares the flight might have generated.
A few yards from the hatch, she ducked her head automatically to look out of the single window, and had to pause. It wasn’t how beautiful Earth looked, or how wondrous, or how special that gripped her and made her stare. It just looked so damned alone. It was far beyond the middle of nowhere, a very long way to fall.
Is that all it is?
Take a good look. You’ll never see it again.
“You okay, Director?” Lurie asked.
“Fine. Just rubbernecking.”
Following Lurie through the docking transfer tunnel was like walking across a glass floor, a solid surface that she struggled to trust. She now knew how little substance separated her from the infinite blackness outside. Orbital 1’s airlock felt like solid ground by comparison. The station had some gravity, room to move around, and, to Erskine’s relief, a toilet. She needed that right away.
“Gravity’s very underrated,” she said, squeezing into the tiny compartment and trying to identify the essentials to make the thing work. At least everything would head in the direction it was supposed to. “I’m glad I never had to work up here.”
It took her a few moments to work out how to flush the toilet. When she came out, Lurie was leaning against the bulkhead, staring out at Earth. It was hard to tell if she was regretting this or not.
“We’ll still be able to see Earth after midnight, won’t we?” Erskine said.
Suddenly she couldn’t recall the launch schedule. It had been the least of her worries. All she’d wanted to know was when the shuttle would be beyond Solomon’s reach if she’d misjudged his rules of engagement. Somewhere on that forlorn little sphere out there, somewhere in her line of sight, she’d be able to see the area around Kill Line and the facility, if she could find a satcam feed.
“We’ll be underway in three hours, when the AIs have finished their checks,” Lurie said. “So you’re cutting it fine. I wouldn’t watch if I were you.”
For a moment, Erskine thought that Lurie meant the cryosuspension process, which hadn’t struck her as disturbing at all when she’d seen the footage of the Cabot preparation. It was simply like watching an anaesthetist with a patient. Then she realised that Lurie didn’t mean that at all.
“You think I’m being macabre,” Erskine said.
“Just remember it’s never going to leave you.”
Erskine had never thought of Lurie as a great reader of people’s moods. She didn’t know much about the woman at all. Lurie was just one of the engineers who’d become a lot more visible in the last few weeks of intense preparation. But she’d read Erskine like a book, and she was right. Watching the bombing would both haunt Erskine and leave her feeling helpless to stop it. Perhaps that was exactly what she was seeking: the feeling of being unable to do anything about it.
I was ready to stay. It’s not as if I dumped babies out of a life raft to save myself. Alex just made it clear that I’d be more unwelcome with the survivors than with the people here. And we never really knew if we could trade data for time.
No, I’m responsible. Whichever way we cut it.
“You’re right,” Erskine said. “When are you going to disable the FTL node?”
“John’s doing it now. That’s the end of the wormhole.”
“As long as Solomon can access Shackleton, and APS can’t access Opis, that’s all that counts.”
Lurie nodded, but she didn’t look convinced. “Okay.”
The orbital was much larger than Erskine remembered and more brightly lit, but it was just a dock with limited life support, not a hotel. Nobody would want to be stranded here for more than a few days. She could hear the growing buzz of voices as she followed Lurie further down the narrow passage. In her mind, she had an image of walking to the end and emerging into a large open space, but the orbital was made up mostly of compartments for safety reasons. Every doorway she passed seemed to be full of people just looking for somewhere to sit or park themselves while they waited. Alex had organised it efficiently, at least. There were designated staff locating people and getting them lined up for cryo. It didn’t pay to hang around thinking about the process for too long.
One of the medical team approached Erskine, the male nurse she’d seen when she went to visit Kim in the infirmary.
“We can get you into cryo right away, Director,” he said. “We didn’t think you were coming, though, so we don’t have your medical records.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Erskine said. “If I die, I die. It’s not as if I have a choice now. But could you delay me, please? Would it be any trouble to do me much later? Last, perhaps?”
“Of course. It’ll be a long wait, though.”
“Understood.” Erskine consulted her screen to check the deck plan. “I’ll be in the communications section for a while if you need me.”
She wanted to check that the FTL was disabled for good. This was an obses
sion. She knew it. But Solomon had made a vow, and he had nothing to distract him from it: no family, no lover, no selfish ambition, and no fear, nothing beyond his reason for existing, which was the preservation of Nomad, and Bednarz’s vision of a society of the morally superior. He would feel completely justified no matter what he did. Would Bednarz have agreed with him on his choice of exemplary men and women? Erskine would never know if Solomon’s choices had been shaped in any way by Bednarz himself, however inadvertently. But either way, Solomon really had reached the conclusion that sacrifice, the ultimate sacrifice of the soldier, the laying down of lives for others, set some people apart from the rest.
Erskine followed the schematic on her screen and ended up climbing a short run of ladder to get into the communications section. It was no easy feat even in reduced gravity. When she reached the next compartment, she sat down on a metal locker while she reoriented herself. Would she ever meet Solomon again? His perspective might have changed in forty-five years, but if he’d lost his ideal human breeding stock, his seed corn for a better society, then he might have worked up an unimaginable head of steam by the time they next met.
If we ever do. How long can he last if he’s powered down? How much of him gets written to permanent storage?
Perhaps Solomon could actually die just like a human, and leave nothing of his essential self behind. Perhaps he was aware of that, and that was why he prized the willingness of some humans to give up that life to let someone else survive.
Erskine carried on through the compartment, trying to avoid grabbing at unfamiliar pieces of equipment to steady herself. She could hear metallic taps and clicks ahead of her. She found Jane Lurie locking some metal boxes the size of suitcases.
“The essentials from the FTL node,” Lurie said. “I can’t break them up or dump them out the airlock, so we’ll have to take them with us.”
“So does that mean the wormhole’s collapsed?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t notice. I thought — never mind.”
“It’s tiny. No lightshow or anything.” Lurie straightened up, still looking down at the boxes. Erskine could almost smell her disapproval. “Director, I’m going to make sure nobody else watches the detonations. So could you avoid mentioning it? I know you probably don’t want to hear my opinion, but even if nobody survives to come after us, people here are feeling guilty and there’ll be recriminations. We’ve started out already broken. Alex Gorko gave up his cryo berth for me. I’ve got to live with that now.”
Erskine rarely got into these kinds of conversations with anyone outside her immediate management circle. She wasn’t sure whether to enter into the debate or just make polite, non-committal noises. She decided not to point out that there were vacant berths and skipped to the broader issues.
“We’ll be joining an established society,” she said. “I know it’s going to be hard to come to terms with what’s happened, but Nomad will change us. We’ll learn how to pull together again.”
“But the population still won’t outnumber a thousand new arrivals. We’ll be the dominant culture. And they’ll know we’re the ones who left people behind. I’m kind of scared about where that goes.”
Erskine was about to say that they wouldn’t know, but they already had the information on who was supposed to be joining them. She’d overlooked that in the heat of the crisis. She hadn’t given much thought — any thought — to how the Nomad team would feel about sharing their home with people who’d abandon their colleagues.
“I don’t know what future generations will think,” Erskine said. “But the crew of Cabot are mostly military, and they’ll understand why hard choices had to be made.”
Lurie blinked as if she’d switched off her real self and reverted to being the anonymous engineer. She lifted chunks of cable and composite out of a rack and packed them into a box. The conversation was over, then. Erskine thought of Chris Montello, refusing the chance to save his own skin, just like Trinder, and wondered if Cabot’s crew would give her a pass after all.
“There,” Lurie said. “That’s the last part. I’ll go stow this in Elcano. Why don’t you move into the ship? You can still watch the satcam feed. We’re not shutting down the orbital.”
Erskine stepped through the last airlock into the ship, and Lurie sealed the door and hatch behind her. Out of all the points of no return Erskine thought she’d reached, this really was the final one. Elcano would sever all connections with the orbital — and with Earth — in the next couple of hours.
It was past eleven at night back at the facility. They’d have secured the underground floors by now and would be killing time just as Erskine was. She had no work or leisurely meal to take her mind off the agonising wait. She couldn’t call Solomon even if she wanted to, and everything possible had been said anyway. The only thing she could do was wander around the ship and try to reassure the staff. Yes, she’d do that until it was time to find a sat feed.
It didn’t take her long to realise that the combination of limited space and a lot of anxious, disoriented people at a loose end made her into an obstacle. After drifting around trying to make small talk, exhaustion got the better of her and she ended up on the top cryo deck with the people from Propulsion, mostly because Ben was there, and she’d had enough contact with him in the last few days to feel that he was someone she actually knew. The deck wasn’t the minimalist, cavernous chamber beloved of movies. It was a parking garage, an industrial space full of undisguised cables, metal structures, and harsh lights, just storage for human freight with little room around each pod. One of the engineers stood up to give her a place on a bench against one of the bulkheads.
“We did our best, Director,” Ben said. He’d changed into a tracksuit top and shorts. It made him look even bigger. “With Kim, I mean.”
“I know. It’s not your fault. And it might not make any difference anyway.”
“Where do APS think we’re going? They’ll realise we’re not heading for Mars or someone else’s orbital sooner or later.”
“Assuming they’re concerned at all, they’ll be more interested in getting into the facility once it’s safe to do so.” Everyone stopped talking. The silence spread around her like frost creeping across a window. It was getting close to midnight. She needed to get to a sat feed. “I have to see Jane Lurie. Excuse me.”
“Ask Colin Croad,” Javinder said. “The loadmaster.”
Yes, she remembered Colin. It was interesting to see how they all organised themselves without Alex around, or maybe they were just following Alex’s schedule. Perhaps he wouldn’t have made a community leader, but he was a better organiser than she’d given him credit for.
She went to the bridge. She didn’t find Colin, but she did run into Lurie.
“Have you come up here to watch the feed?” Lurie asked.
“If I can see it here, yes.”
“It’s as good a place as any.”
Lurie had warned her. But if Erskine didn’t see the real event, she’d only create a theatrical version in her imagination from fiction and half-recalled memories, and it would be equally terrible. Lurie sat her down at a small console on the port side.
“It’s all AI until we reach Opis,” she said, sitting her down. “So you’ll get some privacy up here.”
The monitor had the resolution of a military satellite but Erskine couldn’t pick out the town or the facility until Lurie made some adjustments. If anything told her that the America she’d known was gone, that lightless void was it. The only illumination seemed to be Ainatio’s perimeter fence. Lurie adjusted the image again to zoom out.
“They’re targeting to the north-east,” she said, pointing out the orientation overlay. “If that’s what you want to see.”
Midnight was suddenly rushing up to meet Erskine like the ground at the bottom of a long fall. She kept checking her watch against the bulkhead chronometer,
trying not to look away from the image in case she missed something.
“You don’t have to wait with me,” she said.
“Are you telling me to get lost?”
“No. I thought you didn’t want to see it.”
“I need to hang around in case you need to adjust the image.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
Erskine glanced over her shoulder. Lurie had turned away to fidget with some tools in her overalls. Erskine went back to her vigil. She watched the display on the imager count down the seconds, and 2359 turned into midnight.
She saw nothing. She sat there for five, ten, then fifteen minutes in total silence.
“I suppose I took midnight literally,” she said. “Would I have missed it?”
“Not at that resolution.”
“Leave me to it. If I need help with it, I’ll come and find you.”
“Okay. You’ll feel the ship move off in about ten minutes, so don’t panic. All the clunking and vibrations won’t be anything to worry about. The gravity might fluctuate for a while, though, so belt up.”
Lurie wandered off. Erskine fastened the lap belt on the seat and settled down to keep watch. She’d imagined a launch to be something more spectacular, but when it happened, she almost missed it. It was just a vibration, a brief shudder as the ship separated from Orbital 1, and a few sounds she could feel through the deck more than actually hear. Elcano was finally on her way to Opis.
Maybe, if all the vessels had been launched and nobody had been left behind, it would have felt like the beginning of a magnificent adventure even for a jaded old woman who’d never wanted to be part of this nonsense anyway. But it was an anticlimax. The real event, the one she couldn’t look away from, was the consequence of her actions miles below.
She kept watching the monitor. But by 0050, there was still no flare of light, and no activity at all. Perhaps APS had built some extra time into the warning to make sure that everyone was clear or in the shelters before they set their long-range drones on their bombing run.
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