“I remember Denver flooding,” Jeb Holden said, and he coughed, spraying blood and snot. “I remember Gunnison and Alma. I remember how I fought my way onto this ship. Broke my knuckle on some fucking Candidate’s face. I remember the launch, all those fucking bombs. It was real! Can’t you stupid kids just listen-”
Max Baker silenced him with a slam to the head with his heavy wrench. Jeb went limp, floating.
They had got the last screw out. Now, Theo saw, that plate was held in place only by the pressure of the air within the hull. Since the launch they had all, including illegals and gatecrashers, been trained for decompression accidents. Theo knew that a hole the size of that plate, around a meter square, would drain the hull of its air in seconds-twenty seconds for the pressure to reduce to a tenth nominal, another twenty seconds for it to reduce by another factor of ten.
Steel stared into his face. His reaction seemed to mean as much to her as the reality of the moment. “Are you ready, Theo Morell? Ready to face your controllers?”
He tried to dredge up something to say, to stop this, at least to stall her. “You’ve won, damn it. You’ve beaten Wilson. Isn’t that enough? We can put the ship back together. We can talk about how we go forward, how we live together…”
Steel just laughed. Max took a jemmy and slid the edge under the loose plate. He braced himself on a bracket, ready to use his weight to pry it loose.
Theo looked at them, at Steel with her battered face, at fifteen-year-old Max Baker, at Magda Murphy, who even now held on to her baby. They could all be dead in seconds. “Steel, for God’s sake, I swear, I swear by my life, my mother’s-nobody’s lying to you. Not about this. The ship is real. If you take that hatch off you’ll kill us all.”
Steel began to say something.
But Max roared, drowning out any further talk, a lifetime of confinement and frustration redeemed in a single moment, and he slammed his body down on the jemmy. The plate flew back.
The decompression was an explosion, a deafening thunderclap.
Theo saw the loose plate whirl like a leaf and fly out through the hole in the wall. There was a tearing in his lungs, and a powerful pain in his ears, as if iron splinters were being driven into his head, and he remembered to open his mouth wide. People squirmed around him, but their screams were snatched away on the howling wind.
He faced the hole in the wall, a hole in the world, and the wind shoved him in the back. He saw the stars with his naked eyes. Even now he might have a chance, if he could hang on until the air was gone, the wind subsided, and find a pressure suit before he blacked out. But strong hands grabbed him and pinned his arms to his side and shoved him out, bodily.
He spun slowly. He saw the ship’s outer wall with its pocked insulation blanket, and the brightly lit hole, square and neat, receding from him. Suddenly he was beyond the wall- outside the hull, naked. A kind of fight was going on, people climbing over each other to stay inside the hull. But they were tumbling out after him. Theo saw a child, writhing, helpless in space.
He was cold. He couldn’t see anymore. The pain in his chest was agonizing, tearing, burning. He thought of his mother.
Something burst inside his head.
The decompression wind was already dying. The thinning air dumped its water vapor in a mist that pearled in the glow of the arc lights.
Holle kept her mouth gaping wide. The gases in her belly swelled agonizingly before escaping in an explosive fart. She knew she had only seconds of consciousness-ten seconds maybe, less given the way she was using up her oxygen in an adrenaline-fueled burst of action.
She looked around. She had thrown herself in among the rebels, and even before the hull breach she had started shoving them down toward the airlock to Shuttle B. Now those left here were drifting, convulsing, going limp. Frost formed over their mouths and noses, and their flesh swelled as water turned to vapor in their blood and tissues. Even now they could be saved. But Holle could not save them all.
One more.
She saw Magda Murphy, stranded away from the walls, the handholds. Magda had her mouth wide open, the way they had all trained for this contingency. Magda was straining toward her baby, somehow she’d let go of her, but she was out of reach. Astonishingly the baby was still alive, apparently still conscious. Holle saw her flex her tiny fingers.
Holle could reach either Magda or the baby. Not both. An instant choice. Magda could have more kids. She grabbed Magda, plucking her out of the air. Magda struggled feebly, reaching for the kid. Her vision fogging, her flesh crawling with pain, Holle hauled the two of them down to the shuttle lock.
This would never happen again, Holle promised herself. Never.
86
From her perch on the manipulator arm Venus saw the detached panel come tumbling out, and then bits of garbage and a spray of mist, and bodies that wriggled like landed fish. She was glad she was too far away to make out who it was, especially the children.
All this she saw from within the warmth of her suit, the hum of her life-support fans in her ears, immersed in her own slightly musty smell. She considered diving down there to help, maybe detaching herself from the arm and using her SAFER jet pack to plunge in among the tumbling people, wrestle them back into the light through that hole. But it would be a futile gesture. Even if they were not already dead there was no air in the hull, no way she could get them into shelter in time. And she’d probably just doom herself. Best to wait and then descend on the arm, and enter the hull in her suit, and see who was left to save.
If anybody. The thought hit her that nobody might have survived, nobody but her. That she might soon be crawling back into a hull become an airless tomb, alone, seventy light-years from Earth.
There was a sparkle of light in the corner of her eye. It was the shuttle, blipping its attitude engines. She felt an immediate stab of relief. Of course she wasn’t alone, at least somebody had survived in the shuttle. Now it must be maneuvering to dock with its dedicated port once more.
But she saw, shocked, that the vernier blips were pushing the shuttle away from the hull. The motors fired again and again, and exhaust products pulsed out of their tiny nozzles in brief fountains. But each tiny thrust was the wrong way; the shuttle accelerated away from the hull and toward the stars.
No, not to the stars. To the warp bubble. And Venus saw it. The shuttle had been sabotaged, the control circuitry reversed. Sabotaged purposefully to send whoever was hiding out inside it into the bubble wall.
At last whoever was aboard got the message. A new constellation of pulses shone around the rim of the shuttle, its stubby wings. You want to fly down, you used the controls that should take you up… But it was too late to kill the momentum already built up.
A figure in a pressure suit came squirming out of an airlock. Once free of the shuttle, it was propelled forward by a kick from a SAFER backpack. She recognized the suit, from the ident markings on the leggings. It was Wilson Argent’s.
It took long seconds for the warp tide to crumple the shuttle hull, like an invisible hand crushing a paper toy. When the pressure cabin gave way the atmosphere gushed out in a dazzle of water-ice crystals. A single body drifted in space, naked and slight, before falling into the warp barrier to become a bloody comet.
87
“It’s OK. Not long now, honey. We’ll get through this. It’s OK. Just hold my hand…”
“Oh God. Oh shit. Why did this have to happen why now? Why today? I can’t believe this is happening to me…”