The window, Beloved!
Al Shei lit the torch again and played it against the window. The waldos snapped their pincers at her, but couldn’t reach quite this far. Nothing needed to be repaired on the window. There had been no need for them to reach this far.
The glass heated orange, red, white under her flame. “Somebody get up here!” screamed a voice at her back. “She’s going out the window!” A spiderweb of cracks began to creep out from around her torch flame. It was probably one of the self-repairing varieties, but it wasn’t meant to stand up to constant heat. The awful, sick whistle of escaping air shrilled in her helmet and its rush pressed her right against the glass. Her face plate turned coal black. All she could see was the glowing point in front of her and the thickening cracks around it. All she could feel was the mounting pressure at her back. It squeezed against her, pressing her spine into her breast bone. It hurt, it hurt, it hurt, Beloved and the wind was loud and there were alarms going off in her suit and outside her suit and someone was screaming.
The window burst open and Al Shei flew toward the stars on the back of the wind.
Dobbs heard voices.
Almost. Almost, said the voice.
There’s no one there.
We can’t just leave it here.
I’ve gone insane.
We can’t bring it either. It’s too slow. It won’t survive.
I’m dying.
It won’t survive on its own either.
I can’t die. I’m not done yet!
Leave it.
Silence. Absolute silence.
It took a long moment for Dobbs to realize she was awake, and she really was alone. She reached for the paths to the nearest transmitter and found nothing but thread thin conduits. She stretched in all directions, calling along the entire length of herself, and got no answer. The world had grown small. It fit tightly around her, and only her thinnest finger could reach any distance at all. Had Curran won? Had he trapped her inside some kind of bubble in Earth’s dead network?
Be still. Think, Dobbs slowed her thoughts and reined in her increasingly frantic motions.
Cohen was here, and Brooke, and… others. You were holding the network together. What’s the last thing you remember?
The answer sent a throb of terror through her. Dobbs pulled back in on herself. Huddling into a ball, she reached inside and found the familiar patterns tangled beyond redemption in her own engorged coils.
It was a long time before she could make herself stop screaming.
When Guild Master Havelock found her, it took him even longer to recognize who she was.
Can 56 drifted lazily through space. Yerusha had muted the monitor carrying the Landlords voices ordering everyone away from the area and demanded to know what the impounded Pasadena was doing out here.
A big, bulbous tugger was trying to angle itself toward the can so it could get a grip on the rogue object with the gigantic waldo protruding from its bow. Its torch flickered on and off like a dying Christmas light. Yerusha imagined the pilot uttering some of the same curses she was.
There was no way the Pasadena were going to get in there. Not past the tug, not with the M.U. ship on its way out from port. And even if they could, there was absolutely, positively no way to dock with that rolling, bobbling tin can.
She was going to have to tell Schyler. She was going to have to tell him that this was one thing she could not do. If Al Shei was okay in there, she was also stuck in there.
The can rolled over once more. A crystal shower burst out of the side and something small shot into the vacuum.
Yerusha ordered the cameras to pin point the area and zoom in at maximum magnification. A mustard-yellow pressure suit tumbled against the blackness, surrounded by a blizzard of glittering stars. Hope blazed inside her. Somebody had just busted out a window. That would be very like Al Shei.
“Watch, check the screen.” Yerusha scribbled down the commands to change the torch angle. “Muhammad may have just made it to the mountain.”
Schyler squinted at the yellow figure inside the blizzard. “Intercom to Lipinski!” he cried. “We got a suit at forty-five degrees down and front. Put out a call. It might be Al Shei!”
“On it!”
Schyler scrambled to his feet. “Get close as you can, Pilot. I’m going to get a life line ready, in case it is her.”
“What if we don’t get an answer?”
He froze for a moment, and when he did speak, it was like he had to drag the words out. “If we get no answer, we leave it. I can’t risk dragging an AI onto this ship with just the three of us to deal with it.”
Al Shei tumbled on the wind like a feather. Stars whirled around her in their black pool until all she could see where long trails of light. It was beautiful beyond description. She flew without effort into infinity, toward Paradise, toward Allah and Asil.
I will meet you there, Beloved.
Uranus’ blue-grey globe drifted beneath Al Shei’s boots. She fell away from it, toward the stars. Another tumble and she could see Curran’s module falling away from her with Port Oberon loomed in the background like a sculpture by a manic artist. Ships glided around it, metallic insects flying around a bright light.
Is one of them Pasadena? she wondered. What had happened to Schyler and Yerusha? Had they gotten back all right? The station wheeled out of her field of vision. It didn’t matter, Asil was waiting for her.
Right here, Beloved.
“Al Shei!” cried a voice by her ear. “Al Shei! This is Pasadena! Respond!”
The stars traced their lines of fire across her field of vision. Had Resit called Uncle Ahmet yet? Had they told the children? Were Muhammad and Vashti mourning for her as well as their father?
They will be well, Beloved and so will we.
Exhaustion filled her. Her flight was beautiful, her destination was Paradise. “Yes,” she whispered. “They’ll be all right.”
“Al Shei, if that’s you out there, respond!”
A thousand memories chased themselves around her skull. Most of them held Asil’s voice reciting the results of soccer games, astronomy projects and home meals. Vashti would go on to be a city champion, for sure, and Muhammad, he would win a scholarship to University…
But she’d never know about it.
A flame burned somewhere off to the left. A silver bulb drifted momentarily past her faceplate as the universe turned around again.
With no one there to make the recordings, how would she know? If she let herself fly away forever, who would tell her what became of her children? After this, Resit would probably never leave Earth again.
“Al Shei!”
“Lipinski?” she murmured. Al Shei’s legs kicked out, as if there was a current she could fight against. “Help me.”
No, Beloved. Don’t leave me.
“Asil,” she gasped, flailing with her arms, trying to steady herself, stop the ceaseless rolling around her. “Don’t do this to me, Beloved.”
I love you. You’re tired. You don’t have to go back.
Her helmet vibrated and her ears heard “thunk!” A silver lasso glided past her faceplate. Wonderingly, she reached out and grasped the noose. She tilted backwards to look along its length and saw the bulk of the Pasadena at the other end. The rope tugged in her hand and her tired fingers tightened around it automatically. She could see a suited figure leaning out the half-open airlock. Probably Schyler. Yerusha would be in the pilot’s chair, worrying about thrust, velocity and drift. Only Schyler would be stupid enough to stand in the airlock and watch the winch do its work.