She motioned for Floyd to do the same and waited impatiently while he located his mask and slipped it on gratefully. “Can you hear me?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said at last, but his voice sounded thin and distant.
“The blow-out’s stabilised. I think we’re down to about a third of normal operating pressure. We’ll need to keep—”
The words were jolted away from her as the careering, tumbling ship smashed itself against the wall again. She heard more chunks of hull ripping away. Most of the displays were by now either dead or showing nothing comprehensible. Auger tried to focus on the ETA, but even that kept changing, varying by tens of minutes with each rotation as the ship reinterpreted its tunnel speed. Another jolt followed, sending a compression wave up her backbone that whiplashed her skull against the back of the seat.
She blacked out for an instant, drifting back to consciousness through a bloody haze of red-tinged tunnel vision. Her hands seemed impossibly distant and ineffectual, anchored to her body by the thinnest of threads. Her thoughts were foggy, unfocused. She was dreaming this, surely? No, she wasn’t: she was in it. But even the prospect of imminent death had lost some of its edge now. Perhaps blacking out really wasn’t such a bad option after all…
She looked at Floyd and saw his head lolling from one side of the chair to the other as the ship rotated. His mouth was open, as if in a gasp of ecstasy or dread. His eyes were narrow, pink-tinged slits and fresh blood seeped from beneath his bandage.
Floyd was out cold.
The ship kept tumbling; tumbling and crashing and slowly dying. Auger tried to press herself more tightly into her seat, clutching the armrests and stiffening her torso against the padded back. From a distance, as if from another room, a woman’s voice said, “Warning. Final approach to portal in progress. Final approach to portal in progress. Please ensure all systems are stowed and all crew members are braced for deceleration procedure. Failure to comply…”
“Please shut the fuck up,” Auger said, and then prayed for unconsciousness.
The jolting and buffeting reached a climax. There was an instant—it couldn’t have lasted more than two or three seconds—when it seemed completely impossible that either the ship or its fragile human cargo would survive the next few heartbeats. The rapidity and severity of the collisions were just too severe.
But the end never came.
The tumbling continued, but—with the exception of the occasional thud or bump—the brutal collisions ceased. Even the tumbling settled down, becoming regular and almost tolerable. Once again, it was as if the transport had sailed off the edge of a precipice and was now in a deceptive free falclass="underline" a spiteful remission from the damaging impacts that were bound to resume at any moment.
But they didn’t.
“Numbers,” Auger mumbled through a bloodied, swollen tongue.
But the numbers told her nothing. The ship had finally become blind and senseless, unable to assemble any coherent picture of its surroundings. A change in the tunnel geometry, Auger thought—that was the only thing that could explain what had just happened. The collapse process must have somehow caused the end of the tunnel near the throat they were approaching to swell wider, increasing the diameter of the tunnel so that the transport had much further to travel between impacts with the sides.
She could think of no other explanation. They had certainly not undergone the crushing deceleration that would have been necessary to halt them within the recovery bubble. And they were still tumbling. The ship hadn’t been caught or snared or arrested by anything.
But the tunnel would have had to swell ludicrously wide. They hadn’t suffered a serious impact for at least two minutes, just those minor knocks. Had the picture changed so dramatically that those were, in fact, the glancing impacts? Had the tunnel walls become softer somehow, better able to absorb the collisions?
Another thud, and then something even stranger: a drumlike pitter-patter of tinier thuds, like rain.
Then nothing.
Floyd made a groaning noise. “I wish those elephants would stop sitting on my head,” he said.
“Are you all right? What do you remember?”
“I remember thinking I needed a new career.” He touched the side of his head, straining to hold up his hand against the centrifugal effect of their tumbling motion. “Are we dead yet, or is it just me who feels that way?”
“We’re not dead,” she answered. “But I don’t know why not. We haven’t had a major collision for a few minutes, but we’re still spinning.”
“I noticed. You have a theory for this state of affairs?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing that makes any sense.”
It was, she realised, very quiet. The ship made little creaking and groaning sounds, but there were no klaxons blaring, no pre-recorded voices announcing impending disaster. It was exactly as if they were tumbling through…
“Can you make sense of those numbers?” Floyd asked, interrupting her train of thought.
“No,” she said. “The ship hasn’t got a clue where it is. What it’s showing would only make sense if we’d left the portal behind. Which, obviously—”
“Maybe if we opened the window shields, we might have a better idea,” Floyd suggested.
“You open those windows in mid-tunnel, you’ll be wearing dark glasses for the rest of your life.”
“I always thought they suited me. Can’t you crank the blinds open just a crack? It might tell us something.”
She groped for an objection, but found none that she thought likely to convince him. Besides, he was right: at the very least it would tell them something, even if the information had no practical value. But she would still rather know where she was. It was, she supposed, a basic human need.
“I don’t even know if they’ll open,” she said, “after the pounding we took back there.”
“Just try it, Auger.”
She folded down the control console and found the switch that operated the armoured window shutters. Just when she had convinced herself that nothing was going to happen—that the shutters must be buckled tight—a fan of hard light cleaved the cabin in two. One of the shutters was broken, but the other was still operational. She allowed it to open to the width of three fingers, then held it at that position.
She squinted, raising a hand to shield her eyes. After more than a day in the subdued lighting of the cabin, the glare was intensely bright. But it was not the murderous electric-blue radiance of the tunnel.
The light blinked out.
The light returned.
“It’s timed with our rotation,” she said after a moment. “It’s as if there’s a light source to one side of us, rather than all around us.”
“Does that make any sense?”
“No. But then neither does the fact that we’re alive.”
Floyd’s seat was positioned too far from the window to let him see through it. “Can you see anything you recognise?” he asked.
“No,” Auger said. She allowed the shutter to open to its fullest extent, but she could still only tell that there was a light source somewhere outside. “I’m going to leave my seat, see if I can get my head closer to—”
“Easy, soldier. That’s not a job for someone in your condition.” Floyd was already trying to extricate himself from his seat harness, his fingers sliding over the complex plastic buckles.