Canyon kept going: "Incidentally, you folks have acquired a sobriquet back home."
"I'm not sure I want to hear what it is," Hutch said.
"The Maleiva Four."
"By God," said Nightingale, "who thought that up? Magnificent, August. My compliments to the cliche unit."
When he was gone, she looked at Nightingale severely. "You were awfully hard on him. He means well."
"Yep. But he'd have been happier if we'd fallen off the goddam thing."
"Why do you think that?"
"Better story."
Mac came into the room, carrying flowers, which had been grown in the Star nurseries. He beamed down at Hutch and held them out to her. "You look good enough to have for lunch," he said.
She accepted a kiss and smelled the bouquet. They were yellow roses. "Gorgeous. Thanks, Mac."
"For the Golden Girl." He gazed at her. "What are they saying? The medical people?"
"They'll let me up tomorrow." She turned her attention back to Nightingale. "You," she said, "should ease up. Let people do their jobs and don't be such a.crank."
"I enjoy being a crank."
Roiling clouds of immense proportions billowed out of Maleiva Ill's atmosphere. Fireballs erupted and fell back. And erupted again. The entire black atmosphere seemed to be expanding, fountaining into the sky, a burning river beginning to flow toward the placid disk of the gas giant.
"Here it comes," said Mac.
Nightingale nodded. "Everything that's loose anywhere on Deep-six is being ripped out now and sent elsewhere." His voice was quiet. Resigned.
Mac shifted in his chair. "There's no point getting sentimental over a piece of real estate," he said.
Nightingale stared straight ahead. "I was thinking about the lights."
"The lights?" Hutch's brow furrowed.
"I don't think we told you. Forgot in all the rushing around. At Bad News Bay. We saw something out in the water. Signaled back and forth."
"A boat?"
"Don't know what it was."
Steam was pouring off Deepsix. Fire and lightning swirled across the vast expanse of its clouds.
Kellie came back with donuts and coffee.
MacAllister was still there a half hour later when Marcel, Nichol-son, and Beekman came by to see how she was doing. Hutch thought all three looked tired, happy, relieved. They shook hands all around. "We're glad to have you back," Marcel said. "Things looked a little doubtful there for a while."
"Did they really?" asked Mac. "I thought we had it under control all the way."
Nicholson beamed at him. "We're planning a little celebration tomorrow," he said. Hutch caught the flavor of the remark, that dinner with the two captains was an Event, and that they should all feel appropriately honored. But he was trying to do the right thing. And what the hell, it was a small enough failing.
"I'd be delighted to attend," said Mac.
"As would I." Hutch gave him a warm smile.
Marcel introduced Beekman as the manager of the rescue operation. "Saved your life," he added.
Hutch wasn't sure what he meant. "You mean all our lives."
"Yours, specifically. Gunther came up with the zero-gee maneuver."
Tom Scolari called, and his image formed at the foot of her bed. He was wearing dark slacks and a white shirt open to his navel. Sending somebody a message, looked like. "Glad you came through it okay," he said. "We were worried."
"Where are you now, Tom?"
"On Zwick."
"Good. Did you get interviewed?"
"I don't think there's anybody out here who hasn't had a chance to talk on UNN. Listen"-his eyes found hers, and glanced over at Mac-"you guys put on one hell of a show."
"Thanks. We had a lot of help. Not to mention your own. I understand you're a pretty good welder."
"I'll never be without work again."
"Next time you tell me not to do something," she added, "I'll try to take you more seriously."
He grinned and blew her a kiss. "I doubt it."
She woke up in the middle of the night and noticed they were no longer accelerating. It was, finally, over.
EPILOGUE
Cataclysms too vast to be defined as quakes threw forests and mountain ranges skyward, as much as twenty thousand meters, where they were caught between competing gravity wells, and eventually swept off. Tidal effects literally ripped Maleiva III apart. The swirl of gas and debris surrounding the world had become so thick that it blinded the opticals. The placid snow-covered plains around the tower, the baroque temple that had seemed almost Parisian, the lights at Bad News Bay, the memorial and the hexagon, all disintegrated in the general ruin.
Wherever fractures or faults existed, the rock was shredded, torn free, and hurled upward. The planet bled lava. The mantle disintegrated, exposing the core. Energy release was so titanic that it could not be viewed directly. Scientists on board Wendy, finally able to concentrate on the event they'd come to see, cheered and began to think about future papers.
Shortly before the collision, Maleiva III exploded and burned like a small nova. Then the light dimmed, and it dissolved into a series of individual embers curving through the night, falling finally into Morgan's cobalt gulfs, where they left bruises. _
Within hours, the shower of debris was gone from the sky, and only the bruises remained to mark the incident. Meantime, Morgan would continue on its way, barely affected by the encounter. Its orbit would not change appreciably. Its massive gravity would eventually scramble a few moons elsewhere in the system. But that was a couple of centuries away.
Hutch had assumed the dinner was to be in honor of the Maleiva Four. At first it seemed that way. They were introduced to the crowded main dining hall individually, applauded, and seated at the captain's table. Everyone wanted to shake their hands, wish them well, get their autographs.
They were invited to make speeches. ("But we'd appreciate it if you kept your remarks to five minutes." When Nightingale ran over, Nicholson took to glancing ostentatiously at the time.) And everyone got a picture taken with one or another of the rescuees.
There were also pictures from the adventure itself, and hundreds of these were put forward to be signed. Some were of the Astronomer's Tower (which no one was any longer calling Burbage Point), others were from the interviews on the ground conducted by August Canyon, still others of the long empty corridors in the hexagon atop Mt. Blue. Here was Nightingale seated beside a campfire early in the trek, and Hutch hanging from the net as seen through the telescopes on the rescue shuttle. There was Gregory MacAllister shaking hands with well-wishers on their arrival at the Star. Someone had gotten a portrait of Kellie posed against a sky overwhelmed by Morgan's World. She looked beautiful and defiant, and it rapidly became the favorite of the evening. Eventually, it would become the jacket for Deepsix Diary, MacAllister's best-selling account of the episode.
Despite all this, the evening belonged, not to the Four, but to their rescuers. The three captains, Marcel, Nicholson, and Miles Chastain, took round after round of applause. Beekman and his team were credited with working out the general strategy. John Drummond, who did much of the orbital calculations, took a bow. And the cheers for Janet Hazelhurst were deafening.
The Outsiders were invited to stand, while the band played a few bars from a military anthem. The shuttle pilots were introduced. And Abel Kinder, who was credited with keeping the weather sufficiently calm until the rescue could be effected. Phil Zossimov, who developed the collar and the support rails that would have made things so much easier. Had they, as he commented wryly, only had an opportunity to work.
And there was finally a moment to remember those whose lives had been lost. Colt Wetheral, pilot of the Star lander. Klaus Bomar, the shuttle pilot. Star passenger Casey Hayes, who, as MacAllister pointed out, had died trying to salvage one of the landers. Chiang Harmon of the science research team. And Toni Hamner, who would not have been there at all, said Hutch, except that she stayed with a friend.