Spectacular? Hell, yes.
But the speed hurt them in other ways. The forward-looking sensors had already been damaged by tunnel collisions, but even in those areas that were not affected by blind spots, the sensors could not peer far enough ahead to give ample warning of micro-changes in the tunnel structure. Obstacles and wrinkles that the guidance system could normally have coped with—steering around them with finessed, calibrated, fuel-conserving bursts of steering thrust—now came upon the ship too quickly for it to respond in time. The ship was still managing to dodge the worst of them, but the effort was draining the steering jets at a worrying rate.
But even that was not the main thing on Auger’s mind. For a while, she did not even think about the problem of slowing down, or the bullet in her shoulder, or the Slasher activity in Paris.
She thought about Floyd, and how she was going to explain things to him.
Because with the tunnel unzipping behind them, Floyd was going to find it very difficult to make his way home. There would no longer be a hyperweb connection between Phobos and Paris; no way for him to make that return trip. Even if the two of them somehow survived the next few hours (and she preferred not to think about the odds of that), Floyd would still find himself marooned countless light-years from E2 and—more importantly—three centuries upstream in a future that didn’t even regard him as a genuine human being, rather a very detailed living and breathing copy of one… a copy of a man who had lived and died in a time when the world still had a chance to fix the mess it was in. A man so happily ordinary that he hadn’t left the faintest trace of himself in history.
Around two hours after he had slipped into unconsciousness, Floyd stirred beside her. There was no telling what had woken him: it could have been the increasingly rough ride, or the emergency klaxon that had just come on, accompanied by a recorded female voice calmly informing them that they were about to lose steering control.
“Is that as bad as it sounds?” Floyd asked.
“No,” Auger said. “It’s worse. A lot worse.”
The guidance system had depleted most of the reaction mass in the steering jets. What was left would be good for about ten minutes… at most. Less if their speed kept increasing, which it showed every intention of doing. By Auger’s reckoning, the pinch at the end of the tunnel had nearly caught up with them, and the pinch was still showing definite signs of acceleration. Maybe if she had Skellsgard’s grasp of hyperweb theory, imperfect as it was, she might have been able to explain why that was happening and how it related to the underlying metric structure of the collapsing quasi-wormhole. Not that such knowledge would have been particularly useful in any practical sense, but…
“If we can’t steer,” Floyd said, “won’t we crash into the walls? I mean, more than we’ve already been doing?”
“Yes,” Auger said. “But the system reckons that we’re only one hour from Phobos now—maybe less, depending on how much more we accelerate. There’s a faint chance that the ship might hold together long enough to get us there, even with complete loss of guidance control. Emphasis on the ‘faint.’ ”
“I won’t pencil in anything for next week.”
“It’s going to be bumpy—worse than anything we’ve experienced so far. And we’ll still have the small problem of hitting the portal at two and a half times normal tunnel speed even if we make it that far.”
“Let’s just deal with one thing at a time, shall we? That friend of yours—Skellsgard?”
“Yes,” Auger said.
“She sounded as if she knew what she was doing. She’ll find a way out of this, if we can hold together until the end.”
Poor Floyd, she thought, if only you knew what things are really like. The future might have been crammed with miracles and wonders, but it also offered truly awesome opportunities for screwing up.
“I’m sure you’re right,” she said, doing her best to sound reassuring. “I’m sure they’ll think of something.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“Final warning,” the soothing feminine voice said. “Attitude adjustment control will cease in ten… nine… eight…”
“Brace yourself, Floyd. And if you have any lucky charms, now might be the time to start sweet-talking them.”
“Attitude adjustment control is now off-line,” the voice said, with a kind of cheery resignation.
For a deceptive ten or twenty seconds, the ride became dreamily smooth again. It was as if they had tobogganed off the edge of a cliff into the absolute stillness of midair.
“Hey,” Floyd started to say, “that’s not too—”
Then they hit something, the side of the ship grazing hard against the tunnel wall. It was a bigger jolt than anything they had experienced so far. They felt and heard an awful wrench as something large and metallic was plucked from the hull. Floyd grabbed the joystick and tried to correct their trajectory, but nothing he did had any effect on the oozing contours of the stress-energy display.
“It’s useless,” Auger said, with a stoic calm that even she found surprising. “We’re in uncontrolled flight now.” To emphasise this point, she released her own dead joystick and folded back the control console. “Just sit back and enjoy the ride.”
“You’re going to give up that easily? What if there’s still some fuel left in the tanks?”
“This isn’t a war film, Floyd. When the system says zero, it means it.”
After the first collision, there was another hiatus as the transport rebounded to the other side of the tunnel. Auger still kept an eye on the grid and the cascading numbers. The ship’s nose was beginning to point away from the direction of forward motion. There was going to be another bad jolt when they—
The impact came sooner than she had anticipated. It slammed through her like an electrical shock, snapping her jaw shut. She bit her tongue, tasted blood in her mouth. Warning lights flashed all around the cockpit. One of the surviving klaxons came on, barking a two-tone scream into her skull. Another taped voice—it sounded suspiciously like the same woman—said, “Caution. Safe design limits for outer-hull integrity have now been exceeded. Structural failure is now a high likelihood event.”
“Hey, lady!” Floyd said. “Tell us something we don’t know!”
But Auger had no idea how to turn off the automated voice messages. Almost as soon as the first one had ended, another chimed in, informing them that safe radiation limits for the crew had now been exceeded.
Then they hit again, and rebounded, and hit again, and then the nose of the transport came around through sixty degrees, so that the next kick imparted a sickening roll to their motion, which only became worse with the next collision. With each rotation, Auger was pushed into her seat and then dragged out of it, her entire body straining against the webbing. The wound in her shoulder, numb for hours, now began to reassert its presence. The stress-energy contours were flowing too fast to read, the interpretive system just as confused as Auger. Not that it made a damned bit of difference. When you had lost all control, flying blind was almost a mercy.
Something else was ripped away from the hull with a squeal of tortured metal. She felt a pop in her skull as the air pressure suddenly notched down.
“We just lost—” She did not have time to complete her sentence. Air shrieked out of the cabin, becoming thinner with every breath. Through blurred eyes, she saw Floyd’s panicked expression as his body was buffeted to and fro by the same cartwheeling motion that was shoving her in and out of her seat. She struggled to reach her good arm up, feeling as if she had to push a boulder out of the way. Her hand closed around the striped yellow toggle of the emergency mask hatch. She pulled it down, cursing the system that should have dropped the mask automatically. She pressed the hard plastic of the mask to her face and took a cold and instantly reinvigorating breath.