No ground to fall to.
His breath rasped in his ears, fast as a heartbeat. “You said we were in orbit.”
“We are. Not around Earth.”
The ship—the Crown of Thorns—spread before him like the bones of some city-size monster. The broken spoke hung directly ahead, a tangle of struts and tubes suffused in a glittering sharp-edged halo: bits of foil, crystals of frozen liquid, little shurikens of metal with nowhere else to go. Things moved in that mosaic of light and shadow. Metal spiders swarmed across the wreckage, spot-welding with incandescent mandibles, spinning webs to suture shattered pieces back together. Tiny starbursts sparkled across the metalscape in waves.
Not bent. Not torqued. Broken. Snapped clean off. Horrified, Brüks took in the sight of a slender silver cable, its diameter barely that of a human finger: a lone tendon, miraculously intact, emerging from the amputated stump and stretching across vacuum to anchor the massive barrel-shaped hab at his back. If not for that one frail thread…
“You knew about this, didn’t you?” He gulped air. “You’ve been hooked into ConSensus all along…”
Moore hung off a handhold, utterly unconcerned by the billions of light-years stretching away beneath his feet. “In my experience, it’s generally better to ease people into these situations a little at a time.”
“It’s not my exp—exper—” His tongue was swelling in his mouth. He couldn’t seem to catch his breath. Nowhere was up, nowhere was down—
“My air—”
Something smacked the sole of his boot; absurdly, down clicked back into place. Moore was in front of him, hands on his shoulders, squeezing through the suit: “It’s okay. It’s okay. Close your eyes.”
Brüks squeezed them tight.
“You’re just hyperventilating,” Moore said from the darkness. “The suit’ll thin the mix before you run any serious risk of passing out. You’re perfectly safe.”
Brüks almost laughed aloud at that. “You—” he managed, “are The Boy Who Cried Safe…”
“You must be feeling better,” Moore observed.
He was, a little.
“Try opening your eyes. Focus on the ship, not the stars. Take your time. Get your bearings.”
Brüks opened them a crack. Vacuum and vertigo came flooding in.
Focus on the ship.
Okay. The ship.
Start with this spoke. Truncated, cauterized, one of—one of six (the others apparently undamaged), radiating from a spherical hub like the skeleton of an impoverished bicycle wheeclass="underline" no rim, nothing but a tin can at the end of each spoke. A few minutes ago those spokes had been slinging their habs around like stones on strings; now they just hung there. A smaller baton—a giant’s femur skewered through the midpoint—hung equally motionless just fore of the Hub. (Counterspinning flywheel, probably. To neuter the torque.)
Fifty meters long at least, those hollow bones. This insane Ferris wheel stretched over a hundred meters from side to side.
But it was an ephemeral contraption of twigs and straws next to the wall of metal looming behind it. The drive section. Seen from dead-on it would be a disk: a whole landscape turned on edge, a hard-edged topography of ridges and trenches and right angles. But out here on the wounded rim, Brüks could see the mass piled up behind that leading edge: not so much a disk as a core sample extracted from some artificial moon. The striated faces of sedimentary cliffs, carved in metal; monstrous gnarled arteries twisting along the patchwork hull, carrying rivers of fuel or coolant. The arc of a distant engine nozzle, peeking past that metal horizon like a dull sunrise.
A cylindrical silo squatted dead center atop the drive section. Cargo hold, perhaps. The Crown’s backbone emerged from its apex like a sapling sprouting from the stump of a great redwood. All this forward superstructure—the Hub and its habs, the flywheel, a hemispherical nose assembly bristling with antennae—none of it mattered in the shadow of those engines. Just a few fragile twigs in which meat might huddle and breathe. Fleas clinging to the back of a captive sun.
“This thing is huge,” Brüks whispered to Moore. But Moore wasn’t there anymore; he was sailing spread-eagled across the gap between this dangling hab and its severed spoke. Moore was deserting him for an army of spiders.
Something tugged on Brüks’s tether. He turned, icewater trickling along his spine, to see what new master held his leash.
“You come with me,” Valerie said.
She yanked him across the void like bait on a hook, faster than even his brain stem could react. By the time it reached out to snatch a passing holdfast—before it could even look around to find one—they were already arcing through clouds of jagged tinsel. Torn scaffolding reached out as he tumbled past; miraculously, none tore his suit.
He was falling down a well—Not a well. The spoke. The broken spoke. He could see its ragged mouth receding above him. He hit bottom, landed hard on his back; elastic inertia tried to bounce him off but a pile-driver slammed against his chest and held him fast. Blood-orange light pulsed at the edge of his eye. He sucked in great panicky gulps of air, turned his head.
The pile-driver extended from Valerie’s shoulder. Her other hand worked controls set into the dropgate they’d landed on. Crimson light flashed at two-second intervals around its edge.
“Moore—” Brüks gasped.
“Wastes too much time on you already, Cold Cut. He helps with repairs.” A hatch split open in the center of the dropgate. Valerie pitched him through one-handed. Something caught him like a catcher’s mitt on the other side: a resilient membrane, stretched between hoops of tensile ribbing. Vacuum sucked at that translucent skin, stretched it tightly convex between those reinforcements.
Valerie sealed the hatch behind them. The little tent inflated instantly, its skin relaxing as the gradient leveled.
Tingling in the fingers of Brüks’s left hand; clenched tight, he realized. He forced them open, was vaguely surprised to see a little piece of shrapnel floating on his palm. Its edges weren’t entirely jagged. The metal had flowed and congealed in spots, like candle wax.
He must have grabbed it in passing.
The tent split like a clamshell. Valerie dragged him out before it had fully opened, pulled him along a tunnel of pale watery light. A headless brown serpent convulsed along its length, coils slapping the bulkheads with random energy: some kind of elastic cord, thick as his wrist and intermittently studded with little hoops. The rungs of a ladder, too far apart for merely human reach, strobed past on the bulkhead. Occasional flourishes of yellow-and-black hazard striping, flashing by too quickly for any glimpse of whatever they warned against. Brüks craned his neck, eyes forward. Sometime in the past few seconds Valerie had raised her visor. Her face was gray in the shade of her helmet, all planes and angles. Bones and no flesh.
The spoke ended in a slotted dome, like one of those antique telescopes left to rot on mountaintops after astronomy had moved offworld. Most of that slot was blocked by the socket on the other side. They ricocheted through the gap that remained.
They emerged into the space between two concentric spheres: a silvery inner core, like a great blob of mercury three meters across; an outer shell, dull and unreflective, containing it. Some kind of grille split the space between into hemispheres, joined crust to core at the equator. Valerie dragged him across the bowl of the aft hemisphere: around a cubist landscape of cargo modules, past the mouth of a gaping tunnel at the south pole (the spine of the ship, Brüks realized; shadows and scaffolds receded down its throat); past the ball-and-socket assemblies of other spokes, arrayed around that opening like a corolla. Brüks caught flickers of motion through the equatorial grille—personnel in the other hemisphere, otherwise occupied as Valerie dragged him to his fate—but in the next instant they were diving down another one of the Crown’s long bones and the faint tinny voice he might have heard through his sealed helmet—