“You can talk.”
The harness released him. The tumbling continued, but because it was now regular and confined to one axis of rotation, Floyd was able to push himself out of the seat without too much difficulty. He used one arm to brace himself against the cabin wall, and another to lever himself closer to the window, keeping one foot hooked around the rest at the base of the seat.
“Careful, Floyd,” Auger said, as he pressed his face to the glass. “Do you see anything out there?”
“There’s a bright light off to one side,” he said. “I can’t see it directly. But there is something else out there.”
“Describe it.”
“It comes into view once every rotation. It’s like…” He adjusted his position, the effort etched in his face. “A bright smudge. Like a cloud, with lights in it. Lights around it, as a matter of fact. Some of them moving, some of them flashing. There are dark things in front of the cloud, moving outwards.”
She tried to visualise whatever it was he was seeing, and drew a comprehensive blank. “That’s it? That’s all you can see?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Well, what colour is it?”
Floyd looked back at her. “I don’t know. I’m not exactly the guy to ask when it comes to colours.”
“You mean you’re colour-blind?” Despite her fears, she couldn’t help but laugh.
“Hey, isn’t that a little rude?”
“I’m not laughing at you, Floyd. I’m laughing at us. We make quite a pair, don’t we? The colour-blind detective and the tone-deaf spy.”
“Actually, I meant to ask you about…” But Floyd trailed off. “Auger, you may not want to hear this, but damned if that thing doesn’t seem to be getting smaller.”
Whatever Floyd was seeing, it bore no relationship to anything Auger had been told to expect during her mission briefing. It meant, surely, that something very odd and unanticipated had happened to them.
She felt a prickle of comprehension, like an itch at the back of her head. “Floyd, I think I have an idea—”
“There’s something else out there as well. It’s very big. I can just see the edge of it.”
“Floyd, I think we’ve slipped into a different part of the hyperweb. Skellsgard said there was no way any other tunnel could intersect with the one we were in… but what if she was wrong?” Auger forced herself to calm down and speak more slowly. “What if there was a junction, and we found it by accident when we were bouncing around back there? Or what if we hit the wall so hard we actually punctured it and slipped through into an adjacent part of the network?”
“Are you listening to me, Auger?” Floyd said, staring at her as if she’d gone completely insane. “I’m telling you there’s something really, really big out there.”
“The light source?”
“No. Not the light source. It’s on the other side of the sky. It almost looks like…”
Auger reached out to the console panel again. “Get back in your seat. I’m going to try something hopelessly optimistic.”
“My kind of girl. What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to see if there’s any juice left in those steering jets.”
“We already tried that,” Floyd said, lowering himself back into his seat and pulling the harness tight. “They died on us.”
“I know. But the system might have been reading empty even when there was a tiny amount of pressure left in the reservoir.”
Floyd gave her an odd look. “You said it didn’t work like that.”
“I lied. I swatted down your suggestion because I was feeling nasty and petulant. Not that it would have done us much good back then, anyway—”
“Of course not.” He sounded hurt.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not dealing with this very well, OK? Believe it or not, this isn’t a situation I find myself in every day.”
“Consider yourself forgiven,” Floyd said.
“Look,” Auger said, “all I need is a couple of squirts of reaction mass, just enough to kill our spin, or even simply to alter it so that we have a different view.”
“You might make things worse.”
“I think we have to risk it.” Her hand closed on the joystick. She flipped up the trigger guard and readied her finger, trying to picture the orientation of the tumbling ship from the outside. Skellsgard had not told her how to recover from a spin of this kind—the briefing had never envisaged that things could go this splendidly, abjectly wrong—but all she had to do was change things slightly, just enough to bring something else into view. Then, in a sudden fit of misery, she wondered what the point of that would be, given that she had already failed to make any sense of Floyd’s initial impressions…
She squeezed the trigger. Instead of the usual sequenced percussion of steering jets, all she heard was a low, dying hiss that faded as soon as it had begun. Earlier, with the emergency systems blaring and the impacts making an unholy din, she would never have heard that feeble whisper of last-ditch thrust.
Would it be enough? She had felt nothing that would indicate a change of course.
But the angle of the light source—the scything fan of light that touched the cabin interior with each rotation—had altered slightly.
“All right,” she said. “My turn to look now.”
Auger released her seat harness, and with great effort and equal discomfort she managed to stand and brace herself so that she had a view through the window. The ship continued to tumble. The light source flared hard into view, making her squint and avert her eyes in reflex. It was an intense white disk with the faintest tinge of yellow. It looked, in fact, a lot like the Sun.
Then Floyd’s smudge came into view. She had to hand it to him: his description was on the mark. It was a ruby-red nebula, like a blow-up from an astronomical photograph, flecked with spangles of light, smears of brighter red and clotted with very dark patches, like dust lanes. Even as she watched, even before the rotation had pulled it out of view, a hard pink light flared within the cloud and died.
“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
Then the rotation brought something else into view. It was a gently curved arc of rust-orange, fringed by a pale wisp of atmosphere. Unlike the smudge, this was something she had definitely seen before. She could even pick out the white scratches of the tethered dirigible lines, and the ribbon-bright channels of the irrigation network.
This was the other thing Floyd had seen.
“It’s Mars,” she said, hardly believing her own words. “The big thing—”
“And the light?”
“The Sun,” she said. “We’ve come out around Mars. We’re in the solar system.”
“But you said…”
She looked at the light-pocked smudge again. Just as Floyd had described, it appeared slightly smaller than the last time she had seen it—even though the smudge itself seemed to be roiling and expanding, like the cloud from an explosion…
And then the brightest light she had ever imagined—brighter even than the radiance of the wormhole throat—rammed through the smudge, like sunlight piercing a stained-glass window, and reached a crescendo like a second sun. Then it faded, dying like the last chip of the setting sun, and when darkness had returned, the smudge was completely dark, undisturbed by any smaller flashes.
“Where’s Phobos?” Auger asked.
THIRTY-ONE
There was nothing more that could be done to slow the ship’s tumbling motion. Auger kept the shutter open, and periodically one of them would climb up and examine the view, but the safest and easiest thing was to stay strapped into their seats. Damaged as it was, the transport did not actually seem to be getting any worse: no more systems had broken down since their emergence around Mars, and the cabin pressure had stabilised at just under one-third of an atmosphere. It was too thin to sustain life, so they kept the masks on, but at least they did not have the chill of vacuum to contend with. With the battery-powered heaters still running, the ambient temperature was low, but not unbearably so.