Hakim’s vanished from the bridge. I hear the soft whine of his roach receding at full throttle. I duck out into the corridor, grab my own roach from its socket, follow. There’s really no question where he’s headed; I’d know that even if the Chimp hadn’t already laid out the map in my head.
Way back along our starboard flank, something’s knocking on the door.
***
He’s in the prep compartment by the time I catch up, scrambling into an EVA suit like some panicky insect trying to climb back into its cocoon. “Outer hatch is breached,” he tells me, forgetting.
Just meters away. Past racks and suit alcoves, just the other side of that massive biosteel drawbridge, something’s looking for a way in. It could find one, too; I can see heat shimmering off the hatch. I can hear the pop and crackle of arcing electricity coming through from the other side, the faint howl of distant hurricanes.
“No weapons.” Hakim fumbles with his gauntlets. “Mission to the end of time and they don’t even give us weapons.” Which is not entirely true. They certainly gave us the means to build weapons. I don’t know if Hakim ever availed himself of that option but I remember his buddies, not so far from this very spot. I remember them pointing their weapons at me.
“What are we doing here?” I gesture at the hatch; is it my imagination, or has it brightened a little in the center?
He shakes his head, his breathing fast and shallow. “I was gonna—you know, the welding torches. The lasers. Thought we could stand them off.”
All stored on the other side.
He’s suited up to the neck. His helmet hangs on its hook within easy reach: a grab and a twist and he’ll be self-contained again. For a while.
Something pounds hard on the hatch. “Oh shit,” Hakim says weakly.
I keep my voice level. “What’s the plan?”
He takes a breath, steadies himself. “We, um—we retreat. Out past the nearest dropgate.” The Chimp takes the hint and throws an overlay across my inner map; back into the corridor and fifteen meters forward. “Anything breaches, the gates come down.” He nods at an alcove. “Grab a suit, just in—”
“And when they breach the dropgates?” I wonder. The biosteel’s definitely glowing, there in the center.
“The next set goes down. Jesus, you know the drill.”
“That’s your plan? Give up Eri in stages?”
“Small stages.” He nods and swallows. “Buy time. Figure out their weak spot.” He grabs his helmet and turns towards the corridor.
I lay a restraining hand on his shoulder. “How do we do that, exactly?”
He shrugs it off. “Wing it for fucksake! Get Chimp to customize some drones to go in and, and ground them or something.” He heads for the door.
This time the hand I lay on him is more than a suggestion. This time it clamps down, spins him around, pushes him against the bulkhead. His helmet bounces across the deck. His clumsy gloved hands come up to fend me off but there’s no strength in them. His eyes do a mad little jig in his face.
“You’re not thinking this through,” I say, very calmly.
“There’s no time to think it through! They might not even get past the gates, maybe they’re not even trying, I mean—” His eyes brighten with faint and ridiculous hope. “Maybe it’s not even an attack, I bet it’s not, you know, they’re just—they’re dying. It’s the end of the world and their home’s on fire and they’re just looking for a place to hide, they’re not looking for a way in they’re looking for a way out—”
“What makes you think that inside’s any less lethal to them than outside is to us?”
“They don’t have to be smart!” he cries out. “They just have to be scared!”
Fingers of faint electricity flicker and crackle around the edges of the hatch: heat lightning, maybe. Or maybe something more prehensile.
I keep Hakim pinned. “What if they are smart? What if they’re not just burrowing on instinct? What if they’re the ones with the plan, hmm?”
He spreads his hands. “What else can we do?”
“We don’t give them the chance to breach. We get out of here now.”
“Get—”
“Ditch the ice giant. Take our chances in the star.”
He stops struggling and stares, waiting for the punchline. “You’re insane,” he whispers when I fail to deliver.
“Why? Chimp says we’re almost through anyway.”
“He said that half an hour ago! And we were an hour past predicted exit even then!”
“Chimp?” I say, not for the AI’s benefit but for Hakim’s.
“Right here.”
“Say we max the wormhole. Throw out as much mass as we can, shortest path out of the envelope.”
“Tidal stress tears Eriophora into two debris clouds of roughly equal mass, each one centered on—”
“Amend that. Say we optimize distance and displacement to maximize velocity without losing structural integrity.”
I can tell by the wait that there are going to be serious confidence limits attached to the answer. “Eriophora is directly exposed to the stellar envelope for 1300 corsecs,” he says at last. “Give or take 450.”
At 2300 Kelvin. Basalt melts at 1724.
But the Chimp hasn’t finished. “We would also risk significant structural damage due to the migration of secondary centers-of-mass beyond Eriophora’s hardlined displacement channels.”
“Do we make it?”
“I don’t know.”
Hakim throws up his hands. “Why the hell not? It’s what you do!”
“My models can’t account for the plasma invagination overhead or the electrical events on the hull,” the Chimp tells him. “Therefore they’re missing at least one important variable. You can’t trust my predictions.”
Down at the end of the compartment, the hatch glows red as the sky. Electricity sizzles and pops and grabs.
“Do it,” Hakim says suddenly.
“I need consensus,” the Chimp replies.
Of course. The Chimp takes his lead from us meat sacks when he gets lost; but looking to us for wisdom, he wouldn’t know whose to follow if we disagreed.
Hakim waits, manic, his eyes flicking between me and the hatch. “Well?” he says after a moment.
It all comes down to me. I could cancel him out.
“What are you waiting for? It was your fucking idea!”
I feel an urge to lean close and whisper in his ear. Not just Chimp’s sock puppet now, am I, motherfucker? I resist it. “Sure,” I say instead. “Give it a shot.”
Wheels begin to turn. Eriophora trembles and groans, torqued by vectors she was never designed for. Unfamiliar sensations tickle my backbrain, move forward, root in my gut: the impossible, indescribable sense of down being in two places at once. One of those places is safe and familiar, beneath my feet, beneath decks and forests and bedrock at the very heart of the ship; but the other’s getting stronger, and it’s moving...
I hear the scream of distant metal. I hear the clatter of loose objects crashing into walls. Eriophora lurches, staggers to port, turns ponderously on some axis spread across too many sickening dimensions. There’s something moving behind the wall, deep in the rocks; I can’t see it but I feel its pull, hear the cracking of new fault lines splitting ancient stone. A dozen crimson icons bloom like tumors in my brain, Subsystem Failure and Critical Coolant and Primary Channel Interrupt. A half-empty squeezebulb, discarded decades or centuries or millennia ago, wobbles half-levitating into view around the corner. It falls sideways and slides along the bulkhead, caught up in the tide-monster’s wake.