I’m standing on the deck at forty-five degrees. I think I’m going to be sick.
The down beneath my feet is less than a whisper. I give silent thanks for superconducting ceramics, piezoelectric trusses, all reinforcements brute and magical that keep this little worldlet from crumbling to dust while the Chimp plays havoc with the laws of physics. I offer a diffuse and desperate prayer that they’re up to the task. Then I’m falling forward, upward, out: Hakim and I smack into the forward bulkhead as a rubber band, stretched to its limit, snaps free and hurls us forward.
Surtr roars in triumph as we emerge, snatches at this tiny unexpected prize shaken free of the larger one. Jagged spiders leap away and vanish into blinding fog. Wireframe swirls of magnetic force twist in the heat, spun off from the dynamo way down in the giant’s helium heart—or maybe that’s just the Chimp, feeding me models and imaginings. I’m pretty sure it’s not real; our eyes and ears and fingertips have all been licked away, our windows all gone dark. Skin and bones will be next to go: warm basalt, softening down to plastic. Maybe it’s happening already. No way to tell any more. Nothing to do but fall out as the air flattens and shimmers in the rising heat.
I’m saving your life, Hakim. You better fucking appreciate it.
***
Yeats was wrong. The center held after all.
Now we are only half-blind, and wholly ballistic. A few eyes remain smoldering on the hull, pitted with cataracts; most are gone entirely. Charred stumps spark fitfully where sensors used to be. Eri’s center of mass has snapped back into itself and is sleeping off the hangover down in the basement. We coast on pure inertia, as passive as any other rock.
But we are through, and we are alive, and we have ten thousand years to lick our wounds.
It won’t take anywhere near that long, of course. The Chimp has already deployed his army; they burned their way out through the slagged doorways of a dozen service tunnels, laden with newly refined metals dug from the heart of the mountain. Now they clamber across the surface like great metal insects, swapping good parts for bad and cauterizing our wounds with bright light. Every now and then another dead window flickers back to life; the universe returns to us in bits and pieces. Surtr simmers in our wake, still vast but receding, barely hot enough to boil water this far out.
I prefer the view ahead: deep comforting darkness, swirls of stars, glittering constellations we’ll never see again and can’t be bothered to name. Just passing through.
Hakim should be down in the crypt by now, getting ready to turn in. Instead I find him back in the starboard bridge, watching fingers of blue-white lightning leap across the hull. It’s a short clip and it always ends the same way, but he seems to find value in repeat viewings.
He turns at my approach. “Sanduloviciu plasma.”
“What?”
“Electrons on the outside, positive ions on the inside. Self-organizing membranes. Live ball lightning. Although I don’t know what they’d use as a rep code. Some kind of quantum spin liquid, maybe.” He shrugs. “The guys who discovered these things didn’t have much to say about heredity.”
He’s talking about primitive experiments with gas and electricity, back in some prehistoric lab from the days before we launched (I know: Chimp fed me the archive file the moment Hakim accessed it). “We’re the guys who discovered them,” I point out; the things that clawed at our doorstep were lightyears beyond anything those cavemen ever put together.
“No we didn’t.”
I wait.
“They discovered us,” he tells me.
I feel a half-smile pulling at the corner of my mouth.
“I keep thinking about the odds,” Hakim says. “A system that looks so right from a distance and turns out to be so wrong after we’ve committed to the flyby. All that mass and all those potential trajectories, and somehow the only way out is through the goddamn star. Oh, and there’s one convenient ice giant that just happens to be going our way. Any idea what those odds are?”
“Astronomical.” I keep a straight face.
He shakes his head. “Infinitesimal.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” I admit.
Hakim gives me a sharp glance. “Have you now.”
“The way the whole system seemed primed to draw us into the star. The way that thing reached down to grab us once we were inside. Your lightning bugs: I don’t think they were native to the planet at all, not if they were plasma-based.”
“You think they were from the star.”
I shrug.
“Star aliens,” Hakim says.
“Or drones of some kind. Either way, you’re right; this system didn’t just happen. It was a sampling transect. A trapline.”
“Which makes us what, exactly? Specimens? Pets? Hunting trophies?”
“Almost. Maybe. Who knows?”
“Maybe buddies, hmm?”
I glance up at the sudden edge in his voice.
“Maybe just allies,” he muses. “In adversity. Because it’s all for one against the common enemy, right?”
“That’s generally good strategy.” It felt good, too, not being the bad guy for a change. Being the guy who actually pulled asses out of the fire.
I’ll settle for allies.
“Because I can see a couple of other coincidences, if I squint.” He’s not squinting, though. He’s staring straight through me. “Like the way the Chimp happened to pair me up with the one person on the whole roster I’d just as soon chuck out an airlock.”
“That’s hardly a coincidence,” I snort. “It’d be next to impossible to find someone who didn’t—”
Oh.
The accusation hangs in the air like static electricity. Hakim waits for my defense.
“You think the Chimp used this situation to—”
“Used,” he says, “or invented.”
“That’s insane. You saw it with your own eyes, you can still see—”
“I saw models in a tank. I saw pixels on bulkheads. I never threw on a suit to go see for myself. You’d have to be suicidal, right?”
He’s actually smiling.
“They tried to break in,” I remind him.
“Oh, I know something was pounding on the door. I’m just not sold on the idea that it was built by aliens.”
“You think this whole thing was some kind of trick?” I shake my head in disbelief. “We’ll have surface access in a couple of weeks. Hell, just cut a hole into Fab right now, crawl out through one of the service tunnels. See for yourself.”
“See what? A star off the stern?” He shrugs. “Red giants are common as dirt. Doesn’t mean the specs on this system were anywhere near as restrictive as Chimp says. Doesn’t mean we had to go through, doesn’t even mean we did. For all I know the Chimp had its bots strafing the hull with lasers and blowtorches for the past hundred years, slagging things down to look nice and convincing just in case I did pop out for a look-see.” Hakim shakes his head. “All I know is, it’s only had one meat sack in its corner since the mutiny, and he’s not much good if no one will talk to him. But how can you keep hating someone after he’s saved your life?”