All right, Dante, here I come.
He jumped across to the airlock and manually sealed the door behind him. It would not pressurize. He laid a charge against it, opened the outer hatch again, set the fuse and jumped outside. A bloom of metal shards, air, and chunks of shattered plastic blew outward. He waited until the shrapnel expended its momentum ricocheting around inside the airlock, then sped through the opening into an evacuated corridor.
Can’t go voiding every passageway to get around. Dee might be in one of them.
On the next set of pressure doors, he used his hand laser to cut away the forward seals enough to fill the small chamber with atmosphere. The inner set of doors opened easily. He kept his pressure suit on, but switched the respirator off and opened the mask to the outside. The air smelled stale and cloyingly sweet. When he saw why, he sealed the mouthpiece and resumed using internal oxygen.
Dead bodies lay scattered about the corridors, floating in the zero-gee axial section of the long polar tower, sprawled about in the gravity areas. Most of them had died by obvious or likely suicide. Some had killed one another in orgiastic violence.
He climbed inward toward the command center, hand over hand through a narrow tube, leading with his laser glove. He floated before the hatch. Partially ajar, it swung inward under the force of his shoulder. He hung back, waiting, then tossed a detonator from one of the charges inside the room. It exploded with a loud crack.
No reaction. Straight, here I come.
Baker kicked into the control center, raising the rifle as soon as he had cleared the hatchway. Only the seated dead greeted him. He spun around. Nothing but more mummies. Only one seat lay empty, its control panel as dark as the others.
Damn.
Keeping one hand on his rifle, Baker powered up the control station from the emergency batteries. Using what vid links still operated, he checked the tower portion of the habitat. Most of the compartments were open to space. Only the central shaft held atmosphere all the way through to the sphere itself, which appeared to be intact. That it still held an atmosphere surprised Baker more than the strange perspectives caused by the shifting beams of light reflected from the skewed mirror array.
I’ll never find him like this.
He searched the control station and adjoining compartments until he located a functional flying harness. Strapping it on, he rocketed down the axial tube toward the habitat sphere, making his way through hatches and airlocks. He shot through a final opening; the surface dropped away from him in all directions. He was inside the cavernous main enclosure of the habitat.
It was like no place he had ever been before. Larger by far than Fadeaway, Bernal Brennen was a nightmare of brown, dead, blasted farmland and blackened, burnt-out ruins. Light shifted about in crazy, seemingly random fashion. Looking at the arctic circle windows, Baker saw the reflected image of the star Tau Ceti first describe an arc, then jump several degrees, trace an ellipse, then appear here and there until it repeated the sequence.
He aimed the jet pack toward the center of the axis. Still weightless, he noted that the rotational rate of the sphere was slow—it probably imparted only a lunar gravity equivalent at the equator. Shadows and patches of light skipped, bent and skittered over the landscape as in some deathly monochrome kaleidoscope. Everywhere he looked lay white ash, gray land, and blackened buildings. He closed his eyes to the madly shifting light and cut his motor.
Now what, Sky King?
He switched on his outside microphones and turned them up to full amplification. The soft sounds of stillness reached him. Then something rustled. Somewhere, no farther away than the sphere’s radius of eight-tenths of a kilometer, a woman screamed.
Baker turned his head, trying to get a binaural fix. He found the task impossible. He opened his eyes and tried to see.
She screamed again. Baker heard a thick, heavy voice shout, “I find you, remember that! Then you find out. Can’t hide the rest of your life here!”
From his aerial vantage, he saw a white figure stumble across a half-plowed field and dive under a bush. It looked for all the world like a scabrous Delia Trine, naked and filthy. He craned his neck to watch the bush pass under him, but the field suddenly entered a patch of darkness and he lost his bearings.
Time to get a closer look.
He braked until he hung motionless along the axis. The sphere rotated about him in a majestic, dizzying pirouette. Changing his position, he fired the jet pack for one second. The engine kicked him off axis, allowing
the rotating winds of Bernal Brennen to influence him. Drifting slowly down from his lofty height, Baker encountered the gentle pressure of moving air that pressed him in a spinward direction. Even so, he still moved across the surface at a fast clip when he reached half a radius altitude. He readied the laser rifle and looked about him as he cut across patches of dark and light. Starshine lanced in at odd angles, occasionally blinding him.
“Hey, you!” the deep voice growled. Baker looked behind and below him to see a hairy, naked man climb out of a ravine shaking his fists. He slowly turned and powered upward and back, gaining altitude until he hovered a few hundred meters above the man. He could not remain weightless and be motionless relative to the sphere’s inner surface. He maintained power, which gave him the feeling of weight, of hanging from his jet pack.
“Dante!” he bellowed down on his outside speakers. “Jord Baker here. How did you survive the Valliardi Transfer?” A cloak of blackness fell across the area. A square of light passed through it, returning daytime.
“Made me die and die!” the filth-encrusted man shouted. “Punishment from God for not killing Wanderer. He gets dirty death for straying. I found his prize. Stole her from him!”
“I’m taking her back!” Baker answered, firing a blast at the naked man. He yelped and fell down, grasping the bloody hole in his left calf.
Baker tried to become oriented enough to find where Delia’s clone had hidden. The jigsaw starlight flashed back and forth across him, pounding in his head like glowing fists. Then he heard a buzz and a whine that dropped in pitch.
Out of fuel. I really need this crap.
He began falling, slowly, tangentially to the point at which he had been hovering. Since the atmosphere was rotating with the faster rate of the sphere’s inner surface, the breeze again wafted him spinward, urging him toward relative motion with the surface and greater acceleration rates.
He brushed a treetop, shattering the dead branches. It slowed him enough—rather, imparted more of the sphere’s motion to him—that when he hit the dusty square of a dead lawn, he rolled and bounced without much damage. He retrieved his rifle, discarded the depleted flying harness, and sought his bearings. A kilometer spinward and north of the equator, a slender figure jumped from a bush and into a house. He ran toward it, trying to maintain his footing despite the constantly shifting shadows.
He passed a pathway intersection to see Brennen running unsteadily toward him, favoring one leg. He raised his rifle and fired at the other leg. The man screamed and stumbled, pawing at his hip. Dust flew up around him, then darkness enveloped the scene.
“I get you, Hunter!” Brennen cried from the shadows. “I give you dirty death for pain!”
Baker smiled and said, “I’ll give you a clean one.”
Out of breath, his bones aching, the pressure suit at full dilation to evaporate sweat, Baker approached the house. A dry, shriveled body hung from the tree in front of it, a faded note pinned to its rotting jumpsuit. Baker strode past it and kicked open the door.