YES, blinked the reply.
How to get it out, though? How’d they get out if the rescue people didn’t show? There’s got to be an emergency contingency—
LOCATION OF LIFEBOATS?
PLEASE CLARIFY
ESCAPE SPACECRAFT?
SECTIONS 3, 6, 9 & 12—PERIMETER 4.
HEAVY LOAD LIFTING EQUIPMENT?
NONE.
What? How do they—
HOW TO MOVE CRYONIC UNIT FROM MAIN CHAMBER TO ESCAPE SPACECRAFT?
MAGNEPLANE GUIDEWAY—ORANGE LINES
Baker released a breath of pent agitation and fear. The console waited a few seconds, then shut off. He ran back to Delia’s capsule. The exertion warmed him.
An hour. A whole damn’ hour. Circus could be slag by now. And I’m not even loaded.
The cryonic unit slid down the corridor, floating several millimeters above the orange line painted along the center of the magnetized floor. Baker sat atop the capsule, watching the lackluster scenery pass.
Following Baker’s directions, the cryo-capsule, its massive tangle of
peripheral equipment, and the superconducting sheet upon which it rested, moved quickly along the guideway on Meisner-effect fields. It slowed and turned, then regained speed.
A double set of doors slid open and the cryonic unit levitated into the shipping dock. Jumping off, Baker ran to the escape ship and looked inside. He took less than a second to decide that the fates were against him. He sat down against the bulk of the cryonic unit.
No cargo space. Just acceleration couches and two engines. What else could go wrong?
A telltale ticked frantically in his ear. His shoulders drooped.
Impurity overload in the rebreather accumulators. Now I’m going to suffocate. Circus’s probably gone from orbit again, one way or another, and the psychfighters are after me. I might as well take one of those engines and use it to defrost Dee, for all the good it’d do either of us.
He looked at the twin engine pods on the twenty-meter long wedge-shaped ship and breathed the thick recycled air. I’m sorry, Dee. I got you this far and now I’ve got to put you back before your batteries run out. I should’ve died back there.
His hands slipped from his thighs to the magneplate. The twin engine pods in his field of vision twisted and blurred.
Something hiccoughed in his breathing tube.
I didn’t get you back, did I Delia? Sorry. Sorry. I should have loved you more when I had the chance.
The pods came back into focus. His forehead burned.
A chance.
A buzzer sounded far away in his earpiece, then grew louder, closer, until it shook him to awareness.
Twenty minutes!
He scrambled to leap off the cargo carrier. The emergency oxygen bottle that cut in to revive him would probably not even last that long.
The port engine pod rattled open under the force of his frantic efforts. He ripped at loose cables and unscrewed fuel fittings. Why do I keep using these chances to live?
He climbed into the cockpit of the ship and actuated the systems dump. A light flashed the words “Emergency Engine Jettison.” A warning siren wailed noiselessly in the vacuum, and with a floor-shaking thump, the port
engine dropped from its housing.
I’m an ass. I’ll probably be shot at or Vallied the minute I come out the chute, or I won’t be able to hottail it sideways.
He pushed the cryonic unit to the end of the magneplane guideway and left it hovering. He tried not to hyperventilate.
C’mon, there’s got to be a crane or something around here. The engine housing’s big enough to hold the blasted thing, but how do I get the engine out of the way and the—
A vernier rocket stared him in the face. His gaze darted to the low rail on which the escape rocket rested.
Don’t stop to think about it.
He jumped into the cockpit and charged the engines.
Do it now!
The vernier rocket on the starboard side fired, sliding the boat sideways off the track. He laughed and hit the braking rocket. A short impulse shoved the fuselage a few meters backward. He looked behind him and fired the vernier very lightly a couple more times.
Close enough.
The empty port engine pod hung over the cryonic unit. Pieces of the guide rail lay scattered across the floor. He ran back to the unit, powered up the magneplane, and eased the load into the engine housing. With it levitating inside, he closed the pod hatches and locked them.
Finally.
The lifeboat checklist took a minute to run through. The air in his mouthpiece again started to taste stale. The launch ramp doors parted, a star-filled sky appearing ahead of him. He alerted the onboard computer to compensate for the single engine and the different mass of the cryonic unit.
The kick of the starboard engine slammed him back in his seat. He cleared the exit hatch and hottailed across the plain, the rim of the crater nearly a kilometer behind him. When the last liter of oxygen whispered into his lungs, he fought the urge to suck in as much air as he could and held his breath with grim force.
With one free finger he started cycling the air inside the cabin. The pressure rose. With every bit of his concentration centered on holding the boat safely on attitude, he had no chance to unfasten his helmet.
“ Circus,” he said with his last exhalation, “this is Baker. Stand by to receive payload.”
Circus’s touchdown area appeared over the short horizon. He stared at the smooth circle of molten rock.
Overhead, in synchronous orbit, hung a score of psychfighters. Baker watched six of the tiny blips vanish from his radar scrim and reappear directly around him. No battleship, though. The anti-matter pod worked. Where is Circus?
He hit the braking rocket and slowed the lifeboat to a gentle landing on the dusty crater floor. The psychfighters landed around him in a threatening circle. Something exploded aft of him and in the control panels.
Vallis!
He reached up to wrestle with his breather. Numb fingers, unable to grasp, fell to his sides.
Swimming in air. And I can’t get to it.
One of the psychfighters hovered over the escape ship, descending. The black of space blurred over Baker’s entire field of vision, his last impressions those of the fighter still a dozen meters overhead and of a clanking sound shaking the boat. He took a last, useless breath.
Going can be so soft. Gentle tugging into black, like an insistent lover urging, drawing, pulling me to that dark bed.
Chapter Eleven 2175
Virgil dreamily traced patterns on his chest. As through a thick haze, he watched the gray and blue form sputter away from him.
So soft. To awaken without screaming because the death was so good. The dead man inside me botched it. I could have changed things, but I stayed to watch. He died so softly, now I float so softly. A tender airflow cools me. This is the quest’s end. No cocoon of gauze to keep me from flying. Naked and adrift.
“Virgil?”
It’s the brave that die a thousand times. They know the quest is worth it. To lie unfettered, free.
“Virgil.”
All yearning past, no shield to seek, I drift uncaring. Gentle white and scent of steel.
“Virgil.”
Sent of steel. Cent stealing. Centuries stolen from me.
“Where am I?” He twisted about. Something blue-gray and tubular vanished through a hatchway. His arm hit a padded handhold and he grabbed tight.
“You are safe, Virgil, but you must get to the medical bay. Delia Trine is in the final stages of resuscitation—”
Delia?
Virgil ran a hand over his bristly scalp. “I saw the vultures close in. I saw what the dead man inside me did. I died with him.”
“Please proceed to the medical bay. You are currently in the recovery room.”
Virgil looked around him. The soft white walls, thickly padded, seemed totally enclosed. A door hissed and opened inward. Virgil kicked off to fly into the next room, the computer bringing him up to date.