“I want Billy-Bob! Dad, I want my Billy-Bob! You wouldn’t let me go back for him…”
There was nothing Holle could do, not until this shuttle was unpacked. She estimated there were forty people crammed in here, shoved in by herself and Helen Gray, forty in a cut-down one-use-only minimum-mass landing glider meant to take twenty-five tops. She could barely move because of the people around her, people pushing against her back and belly and pinning her legs, their bodies around her head. It was a crowd in three dimensions, people shoved up against each other every which way.
And of those forty, many, ten or fifteen, had been seriously injured. People had grossly swollen limbs, hands, feet, faces. A little boy cried out, over and over, that he was blind. One woman was coughing up sprays of blood in huge racking convulsions, her lungs obviously torn; the people around her were trying to shove her through the crowd toward a wall, to keep her from covering the rest with her blood and snot and phlegm.
A screen on the shuttle’s control console, relaying an image from a camera in the airlock, showed Venus, an alien figure in a bright white spacesuit inside the hull, in an environment of cabins and food packets and drink cartons and drifting toys, laboring to make Halivah habitable again. They were lucky Venus had been out of danger. Holle made a mental note. From now on there had to be somebody in a pressure suit at all times, a faceplate snap away from independent life support.
Until she could get out of here Holle could do nothing but endure. She tried to tune out the weeping and the rasping breaths.
“If I get my hands on the asshole who thought it was a good idea to take off a fucking hull plate I’ll rip out what’s left of their lungs with my bare hands…”
“It’s OK. He’s fainted, that’s all. I didn’t notice, he can’t fall over in this crowd. He’s just fainted. As soon as we’re out of here he’ll be fine.”
“No, you’re wrong. This man’s dead. Jay’s dead! Look at him!”
“I can’t see! Dad, why can’t I see?”
There was a hammering on the shuttle hatch. Holle glimpsed Venus through the thick window, clumsy in her stiff pressure suit, hauling at the handle.
The hatch opened. Holle felt her ears pop, and she had a spasm of fear about more air loss, but the pressure drop was only slight. The people closest to the hatch immediately started to spill out, with gasps of relief. Once out they turned and helped Venus pull out those who followed. Soon there was a cloud of bodies drifting away from the hatch, in pairs and threes.
As soon as she could move, Holle shoved her way ahead of the rest. It was an immense relief to reach the comparatively open space of the hull, to stretch her arms and legs wide, to breathe in air that smelled clean if faintly metallic, air straight from the emergency reserve tanks.
She looked around. Venus had backed off to the fireman’s pole, where she had tethered herself and was dismantling her pressure suit. Helen Gray was at the shuttle lock, supervising the evacuation. Holle glanced along the length of the hull, and saw that a similar unpacking was going on at the lock that led to the cupola, another fan of weary, injured people working their way out into the open air. Grace Gray was screening those who emerged, and gently diverting the injured.
A baby floated by. Naked, its skin so swollen it had become twice its size, it was obviously dead. Holle couldn’t recognize it, didn’t know if it was Magda’s baby, the baby she had failed to save. For a second she froze, guilt and doubt and a kind of hideous self-consciousness pressing down on her.
“Holle.”
Venus, down to her cooling undergarment, was watching her steadily. Venus who’d known her since she was a kid, Venus from the Academy. Holle pushed her way over and grabbed on to a handhold. “You OK?”
Venus laughed. “Me? Hell, yes. Just another EVA for me. What happened in here?”
“A rebellion of the shipborn.”
“They smashed open the hull. It’s a miracle you weren’t all killed. What was it, some kind of suicide pact?”
“No,” said Helen Gray. She came drifting over from the shuttle lock to join them. “I think they were trying to tunnel out.”
“ Tunnel out?”
“Out of the sim… It was all those ideas of Zane’s.”
Holle said, “We never took this stuff seriously enough. Bloody Zane. Well, we took it to Wilson often enough, and he didn’t listen, and it cost him his life.”
“Maybe not,” Venus said. “I saw shuttle A. It detached from the hull, actually undocked. This was before the pressure hull blew out.”
Holle shook her head. “Typical Wilson. He probably had that move planned for years.”
Venus described the sabotage she suspected. “The shuttle was wrecked. But I think Wilson might have survived-I saw him bale out, or anyhow somebody in his pressure suit. If his SAFER holds out he’s probably back at one of the locks already.”
But Holle was only half-listening. “You say the shuttle was destroyed.” One of their two shuttles, gone just like that. All because of Wilson and his incompetence and craven selfishness.
Venus was grave. “We’ll have to figure out how to get by without it.”
That baby corpse drifted across Holle’s eyeline, buffeted by stray breezes in the new air. The loss of a shuttle didn’t matter a damn if they couldn’t get through today.
Helen touched her arm. “Holle? I think my mother’s getting overwhelmed. I’ll go help her.”
Holle nodded. “I’ll come with you. Venus, can you handle the rest?”
For one second Venus held her gaze, and Holle could see the challenge in her eyes. Suddenly this was a key moment, the start of a new chapter. Who was Holle to be giving the orders? But Venus backed off, subtly. “Sure. What ‘rest’?”
“Get together a work crew. We need to nail down the basic systems. Ensure the integrity of the hull around that patch. The explosive decompression might have caused some flaws elsewhere. And check over the ECLSS systems. The hydroponic beds-”
“They ought to be OK,” Helen said. “The plants can stand an hour or so of vacuum; the loss was only a few minutes.”
“All right. Check them anyhow. What else?”
“How about positioning?” Venus said. “We just had an air rocket venting out the side of the hull. The GN amp;C systems should have compensated, but I don’t know if the verniers fired to push us back.”
“If they did, I didn’t hear. Check it out. We don’t want to drift into the warp wall.”
“We’d better have somebody ready to meet Wilson if he does come back.”
Holle shrugged. “Cuff him to a stanchion. We’ll deal with him later. Venus, anything else you can think of, just handle it.”
Venus was down to her underwear. “I’ll grab a coverall and get on it.”
“OK. Oh, and Venus-” She moved closer to her, and murmured, “Get a party and do a sweep through the hull. Collect the dead. These drifting corpses. Shove them somewhere out of sight for now, up on Wilson’s bridge, maybe. And log the survivors. Come on, Helen. Let’s go help your mother.”
88
The crushing in the cupola had been even worse than in shuttle B. People were emerging clutching their ribs and struggling for breath, and one couple were holding a limp little boy, desperately pummeling his chest and breathing into his mouth.
Among these drifting survivors was Zane, looking cowed, frightened. Holle felt a surge of savage anger. She wondered which of his alters had come out to help him cope with this crisis he had done so much to trigger. And there was Jeb Holden, one of Wilson’s closest associates, a brute of a man now naked and blood-smeared. He pulled away from the rest, evidently looking for a blanket, something to cover his body.
Grace, hanging on to a handrail, was trying to get the apparently unharmed to help her, while she sorted the rest into rough groups according to their injuries. Her coverall front was sprayed by blood and bits of grayish flesh. Chunks of somebody’s lung, Holle suspected. Grace was functioning, but she looked bewildered. Holle always had to remind herself that Grace wasn’t a doctor, even though for sixteen years since the Split she had been trying to fill the hole left by Mike Wetherbee.