All aboard, Lianna mouthed from behind her faceplate.
It wasn’t just the radiance of the drive that would give them away. Even the heatprint of minimal life support would shine like a beacon against a cosmic background that barely edged above absolute zero. There were ways around that, of course. You don’t notice a candle held up against the sun, and the Crown of Thorns had been keeping itself line of sight between Sol’s edge and any pursuing telescopes: close enough to bury her heatprint in solar glare, not so close that she’d show up the moment someone threw an occlusion filter in front of their scanner. Another approach was to keep any warm bodies nested inside so much insulation that they’d be outside any reasonable search radius by the time their heatprint made it to the surface.
The Bicamerals didn’t like to take chances. They were doing both.
It was the same soccer ball all right.
Same webbing inside. Same ambience—Victorian Whorehouse Red, he thought with a grimace—shadows and wavelengths long enough to make even a corpse look pretty. Same company, with edits.
A clutch of umbilicals hung from an overhead plexus and spread throughout the webbing. Brüks grabbed the nearest and locked it into his helmet’s octopus socket. Lianna reached down from overhead, double-checked the connection, gave him a thumbs-up. Brüks sacc’ed comm and whispered a thank-you over the chorus of quiet breathing that flooded his helmet. Lianna smiled back behind tinted glass.
Moore climbed into the womb and sealed the hatch as the longwave dimmed around them. By the last of the light Brüks saw the soldier reach for his own umbilical. Then darkness swallowed them all.
Valerie was in here, too, hidden inside one of these mercurial disguises. Brüks hadn’t seen her enter—hadn’t even seen her on the deck—but then again, she could do that. She had to be in here somewhere, maybe in that suit, or that one over there.
He eyed the countdown on his HUD: two minutes, now. One fifty-nine.
He yawned.
They’d told him it would be easier this time. No seat-of-the-pants improvising, no panic-inducing suffocation. Just a breeze of fresh, cool anesthetic gas wafting through the helmet reg, putting him gently to sleep before the H2S strangled his very cells from the inside.
They know what they’re doing.
Fifty-five seconds.
An icon winked into existence next to the countdown: external camera booting up. Brüks blinked at it and—
“Let there be light,” Lianna whispered over the channel, and there was light: a blinding yellow sun, the size of Brüks’s fist held at arm’s length, blazing in a black sky. Brüks squinted up against the glare: a jagged sunlit tangle of beams and parallelograms hung overhead, sliced along a dozen angles by sharp-edged fissures of shadow.
Let there be a little less light, he amended, dialing back the brightness. The sun dimmed; the stars came out. They filled the void on all sides, a million bright motes that only managed to accentuate the infinite blackness between them. They disappeared directly overhead, eclipsed where the habs and girders of the Crown loomed like a junkyard in the sky. The sun turned the ship’s lit edges into a bright jigsaw; the rest was visible only by inference, a haphazard geometry of negative space against the stars.
The sky lurched.
Here we go…
Another lurch. A sense of slow momentum, building. Somewhere behind them, the ligaments that held the Crown together were burning through. Up ahead, the view listed to port.
They know what they’re doing.
The bow of the ship began to topple, slow and majestic as a falling redwood. Sunlight and shadow played across its facets, hiding and highlighting myriad angles as the stars arced past. The universe turned around them. The sun rose, reached zenith, fell.
Something glowed to stern, a corona peeking around a great black shape that blocked out the stars to stern: something finally tilting into view as a dozen insignificant rags of metal snapped and fell away. Brüks caught the briefest glimpse of dark mass, massive slabs of shielding, a great corrugated trunk thick as a skyscraper—
(Shock absorbers, he realized.)
—before a tsunami of white light struck him instantly, rapturously blind.
Floaters swarmed through his eyeballs like schools of panicked fish. Brüks blinked away tears, reflexively reached up, felt that strange, newly familiar inertia return to his arms—
—Free fall—
—before the sticky mesh released them to let his gloved hands swipe clumsily at his faceplate. He missed; his arms flailed, encountering nothing but the elastic bounce of the gee-web.
He wobbled gently, weightless, waiting for his vision to clear. By the time he could see again the panorama had been usurped by mere telemetry: an impoverished wraparound of numbers and contour plots and parabolic trajectories. Brüks squinted, tried to squeeze signal from noise through the cotton growing in his head: the Crown’s drive section was already kilometers to port and kilometers ahead, its lead increasing with each second per second. Tactical had laid a vast attenuate cone of light across the space before it, spreading from the abandoned drive like a searchlight. Ramscoop, Brüks realized after a second. A magnetic field to gather up ionized particles, a brake against the solar wind. A proxy for mass gone suddenly missing: no telltale change in acceleration, no suspicious easing back on the throttle. One measure among many, shoehorned in between the masking of heatprints and whatever stealthed this ship to radar. Moore had told him as much as he could understand, Brüks supposed. There would be more. Solutions to problems no baseline could even foresee, let alone solve. A careful clandestine exit stage left, while unwitting pursuers followed a bright burning decoy toward the land of the comets. All spread out across the curve of his own personal diving bell, numbers and diagrams and stick-figure animations for the retarded.
He only understood half of it, and didn’t know if he could trust the other half.
Maybe it’s not even real, he thought drowsily. Maybe it’s all just a comforting fantasy to keep me pacified in the back seat. Mommy and Daddy, telling nice stories to keep the children from crying.
They were still alive, at least. The exhaust hadn’t vaporized them outright. Only time would tell if radiation sickness might. Time, or—
He cast his eyes around the bubble of intel. He saw nothing that spoke obviously to the subject of gamma rays.
It would take a while, of course. You wouldn’t feel anything at first, certainly not in the few minutes left before everyone went down for the… night…
Fifty days to Icarus. Fifty days tumbling ass-over-entrails, powered down, ballistic, just another piece of inner system junk. Needle in a haystack, maybe, but nowhere near sharp enough to prick anyone who happens to look this way. Lots of time for those bright little shards to rot us out from the inside. We could die in our sleep and never know it.
His eyelids felt incongruously heavy in the weightless compartment. He kept them open, peered around at all those faces under glass, looked for smiles or frowns or any telltale wrinkles of worry that might be creasing more-enlightened foreheads. Angles and optics turned half the helmets into warped mirrors, hiding the faces within. Some tiny part of Daniel Brüks furrowed its brow in confusion—Wait a minute… aren’t the lights supposed to be off?—but somehow he could see Lianna, eyes already closed, her face smoothed either in sleep or resignation. He could see the back of Moore’s helmet, down past his own boots. He was almost certain that he could make out a pair of Bicameral eyes here and there, all closed, the mouths beneath moving in some silent synchronized chant.