THIRTY
Auger woke to intense turbulence, the ship shaking and shimmying as if only an instant away from swift annihilation. Through blurred, gummed eyes, she glanced at the principal instruments, remembering as much as she could of Skellsgard’s technical briefing. The situation was acute: far, far worse than when she had gone to sleep. According to the numbers—and again, a lot depended on her imperfect interpretation of those dancing, tumbling digits—the collapsing end of the tunnel had almost caught up with them. Simultaneously, it had accelerated them even faster. It was as if they were caught in the pressure wave in front of an avalanche: pushed ahead, but with an ever-dwindling lead that would soon see them engulfed.
The ship was showing signs of mortal damage. Many displays were simply dead or showing only static. Some dials were inactive, jammed against their limits. Others were wheeling around like dervishes, spinning like the altimeter in a dive-bomber. The guidance display on her side of the cabin revealed ragged blind spots in the flowing contours of its stress-energy grid. In her mind’s eye, she visualised critical machinery—sensors and guidance mechanisms—ripped clean away from the hull, trailing sizzling hot electrical ganglia with them. Warning lights were flashing, and yet the klaxons were mysteriously silent.
“Floyd,” she said, her mouth sluggish and dry. “How long was I under?”
“A few hours,” he said. He still had his hand on the joystick, and as she watched he made tiny, precise adjustments.
“A few? It feels like—”
“More than a few? It was probably more like six, or maybe even twelve. I don’t know. I guess I lost count.” He looked at her, his face a study in exhaustion. “How do you feel, kid?”
“Better,” she said, rubbing experimentally at the wound. “Groggy… sore… but better. The UR must have eased the inflammation, taken care of the bleeding.”
“Does that mean you’ll hold together until we reach the end of this funfair ride?”
“Should do,” she said.
“But you’ll still need help when we arrive?”
“Yes, but don’t worry about that. If we get there, they’ll take care of me.”
The ship veered violently, then knocked hard against something and slid on a sideways trajectory with an ominous bone-crunching rumble. Floyd grimaced and pulled the joystick hard over. Auger heard the sequenced pop of the steering jets and wondered how much propellant Floyd had already consumed holding them together until now.
“I was out for twelve hours?” she said, his words just sinking in.
“Maybe thirteen. But don’t worry about me. The time simply flew by.”
“You did good getting us this far, Floyd. Seriously, I’m impressed.”
He looked at her with a genuine and rather touching surprise, as if the last thing he had been expecting was praise.
“Really?”
“Yes. Really. Not bad for a man who shouldn’t exist. I just hope the effort will turn out to have been worth it.”
“You’re still worried about what will happen at the other end?”
“We’re going to pop out of this tunnel much faster than the system was ever designed to deal with—like an express train hitting the buffers at full tilt.”
“You have a bunch of people at the other end, right? People like Skellsgard?”
“Yes,” she said, “but I don’t know how much good they’re going to be able to do. Even if we could warn them… but we can’t even get a message through to them. You can’t bounce signals up the pipe while there’s a ship in it. Not according to the book, anyway.”
“Won’t they have any warning at all?”
“Maybe. Skellsgard has equipment to monitor the condition of the link—but I don’t know if it’s going to be able to tell her that the link itself is collapsing. But she also told me about something called bow-shock distortion. It’s like a ripple we push ahead of ourselves, a change in the geometry of the tunnel propagating ahead of the transport. They have equipment to pick it up, so that they can tell when a ship is about to come through the portal. I think it gives them a few minutes’ warning.” Auger scratched at a crusty residue that had collected in the corner of one eye. It felt dense and geologic, hard and compacted like some mother lode of granite. “But that won’t help us,” she said. “They’ll have even less warning than usual because we’re going so much faster than we should be.”
“There must be something we can do,” Floyd said.
“Yes,” Auger said. “We can pray, and hope that the tunnel doesn’t speed us up any faster than we’re already moving. Right now we might just walk out of this alive. Any faster, and I think we’ve had it.”
“If we get to that point, would you mind not telling me? The coward in me would rather not know.”
“The coward in both of us,” Auger said. “If it’s any consolation, Floyd, it’ll be quick and spectacular.”
She checked out the numbers again. No act of denial could avoid the fact that they were now travelling thirty per cent faster than the ship she’d taken on the inbound leg of the journey. The ETA now had the total trip taking less than twenty-two hours. Of that time, about sixteen hours had already passed. And they were not getting any slower.
“Floyd,” she said, “do you want to take a break? I can fly the ship for a while.”
“In your condition? Thanks, but I think I can keep my eyes open for a few hours more.”
“Trust me: it’s going to take both of us to get this thing home.”
Floyd studied her for a moment and then nodded, relaxed his grip on the joystick and almost immediately slumped back into his couch and into a deep sleep. It was as if he had given himself permission to slip into unconsciousness, after holding it at bay for so long by a sheer act of will. Auger wondered how many hours at sea had honed that particular skill and wished him sweet dreams, assuming that he had the energy to dream. Perhaps unconsciousness would be the kindest state for both of them to be in, when the end approached.
“Find a way out of this,” she said aloud, as if that might help.
The four hours that followed were the longest she could remember. She had taken the last of the UR pills, hoping that this was the right thing to do. For the first hour, she felt a shrill, slightly unnerving clarity of mind. It was like the ringing caused by a finger circling the wet rim of a wine glass. It felt fragile and not quite trustworthy, making her wonder if she was, indeed, making the right decisions, even when they felt absolutely, unquestionably correct. When, at last, that bell-clear intensity began to dull and she started to feel foggy-headed, unable to focus on any particular problem for more than a few seconds, it came as a kind of relief. At least now she had objective evidence that her thought processes were likely to be impaired. She could factor that dullness into her activities, allowing for it wherever possible. It was, she supposed, a measure of her lessening hold on reality that she could even consider this a minor victory.
The ship was moving even faster now: fifty per cent above conventional tunnel speeds, and still accelerating. By now, Auger had enough of a grasp of the numbers to estimate their emergence speed, and the news was not cheering. They would hit the Phobos portal at twice the expected rate, and even that was likely to be an underestimate, since the rate of acceleration was itself beginning to quicken as the geometry of the pinched tunnel underwent convulsive readjustments. The apparatus in the recovery bubble would never be able to cope with that kind of momentum. The transport would smash through the arrestor cradle and the glass sphere of the bubble, then smear itself against the plasticised walls of the chamber a couple of kilometres inside Phobos. It would be a very lucky day if anyone made it out of that mess alive, let alone Auger and Floyd.