Calm down. Easy. Easy. It was his voice, but not his—an older voice, steady, amused. Take it easy.
He did, forcing first his breathing back to a sane rate, then willing his heartbeat to slow, then focusing his vision and his mind.
Didn’t she use some voice command? That wouldn’t work here in space. No air, no sound—Savi had told them that. Or perhaps Harman had. Daeman was learning from everyone these days. How then? He forced himself to relax a step further, and then closed his eyes and tried to recall the image of Savi flying them all away from the iceberg that first night flight.
She passed one hand under this low cowl, near the handgrip, to activate things.
Daeman moved his left hand. A virtual control panel flashed into existence. Able to use only his left hand, closing his eyes when he had to remember more clearly, Daeman moved his fingers through control sequences on the multicolored virtual panel. The forcefield flicked on and pressed him down against the cushions. A second later, a roar startled Daeman into looking up, but it was only air flooding into the secured space, just as he’d commanded with his fingers. With the air, came a voice, “Manual or autopilot mode?”
Daeman tugged his osmosis mask up a bit, almost wept as he breathed in the first sweet air he’d tasted in a month, and said, “Manual.”
The control grip flicked into place, surrounded by a virtual aura. The stick felt solid in Daeman’s left hand.
Forgetting the tie-downs until he saw the elastic bands rip free and fly into space, Daeman lifted the sonie ten feet above the metal terrace, twitched the stick, fed power to the rear thrusters, went off course, quickly realigned before smashing into metal instead of window, and hit the semipermeable square doing thirty or forty miles per hour.
Caliban was waiting on the ledge inside. The monster leaped for Daeman’s head and his trajectory was perfect, but the forcefield was on. Caliban bounced off and tumbled into the empty air at the center of the tower.
Daeman made a wide turn, getting used to the steering, twisted the control stick to add more power. The sonie was doing sixty or seventy miles per hour when Caliban looked up, the beast’s bleeding eyes went wide, and the bow of the sonie plowed into the monster’s midsection, sending him flying across the open tower space and crashing into girders and glass on the far side.
Daeman would have loved to stay and play—the want of it ached more in him that the screaming pain from his right arm—but his friends were dying below. He banked the sonie and dived straight down toward the city floor more than ninety stories below.
He almost didn’t pull up in time—the sonie sheered turf, cut through kelp, and sent dead grass flying—but then Daeman got the thing flying level and cut back on the speed a bit. His twenty-minute flailing trip from the firmary took him three minutes on the flight back.
The entrance wall was not quite wide enough for the sonie. Daeman backed the hovering machine up, gave it more throttle, and made the semipermeable entrance permanently permeable. Shards of glass and metal and plastic followed the sonie as Daeman flew it between dark, empty healing tanks. He winced as he caught a glimpse in some of those tanks of the dead white bodies of those humans they hadn’t saved in time. Then he was stopping the sonie, killing the forcefield, and jumping out next to two more bodies on the floor.
Harman had left the blue thermskin suit on Hannah, keeping only the osmosis mask for himself in the final minutes. The man’s naked body looked bruised and pale in the reflected light from the sonie’s headlights. Hannah’s mouth was open wide, as if in a final, futile effort to force more air into her lungs. Daeman didn’t waste time to see if they were alive. Using only his left arm, he scooped each of them up and laid them in the two couches on either side of his own. He paused only to jump out again, throw Savi’s pack in the back couch, and to toss the gun onto the armrest of his own couch before he was back in place and activating the forcefield.
“Pure oxygen,” he said to the sonie as the air-rush began. The clean, cold air became thicker, making Daeman’s head swim it was so rich. He fumbled in the virtual control panel, setting off several caution alarms before finding the heat. Warm air radiated from the console and various vents.
Harman began coughing first, then Hannah a few seconds later. Their eyes flickered, opened, finally focused.
Daeman grinned stupidly at them.
“Where . . . where . . .” gasped Harman.
“Take it easy,” said Daeman, slowly moving the sonie toward the firmary exit. “Take your time.”
“Time . . . the time . . .” gasped the older man. “The linear . . . accelerator.”
“Oh, fuck,” said Daeman. He’d forgotten about the onrushing structure, never once looked up or over his shoulder in space to see it coming.
Daeman twisted the sonie’s throttle full open, slammed through the hole where the membrane had been, and accelerated toward the tower exit.
There was no sign of Caliban in the tower. Daeman slewed a wide curve, threaded the needle through the tower exit pane, and climbed from the outside terrace into space.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” breathed Harman.
Hannah screamed—the first sound she’d made since being fished out of the healing tank.
The two-mile-long linear accelerator was so close that the wormhole collection ring at its bow filled two-thirds of the sky above them, blotting out sun and stars. Thrusters were firing in quad-pods all along its absurd length, making final course corrections before impact. Daeman didn’t know the names of everything at that moment, but he could make out every detail of the gleaming cross-braces, polished rings now cratered with countless micrometeorite strikes, racks of cooling coils, the long, copper-colored return line above the main accelerator core, the distant injector stacks, and the swirling, earth-and-sea-colored sphere of the captured wormhole itself. The thing grew larger as they watched, blotting out the last of the stars above, and the shadow of it fell across the mile-long crystal city beneath them.
“Daeman . . .” began Harman.
Daeman had already acted, twisting the throttle ring full over and looping up and over the tower, the city, the asteroid, diving for the great blue curve of the Earth even as the linear accelerator covered the last few hundred meters behind them.
For an instant the city towers were above them as the sonie looped, and then just slightly behind when the hurtling mass struck the city and the asteroid, the wormhole sphere crashing into the towers and the long city a second or two before the exotic-metal structure of the accelerator itself. The wormhole silently collapsed into itself and the accelerator seemed to accordion neatly into nothing, but then the full force of the impact became apparent as all three of the humans turned in their couches and craned their necks to see behind them.
There was no sound. That struck Daeman the hardest—the pure silence of the moment. No vibration. None of the usual earthly clues that some great cataclysm was taking place.
But taking place it was.
The crystal city exploded into millions upon millions of fragments, glowing glass and burning gas expanding outward in all directions. Great, ballooning balls of flame bulged outward a mile, two miles, ten miles, as if trying to catch the diving sonie, but then the huge fires seemed to fold inward—like a video image running in reverse—as the flames consumed the last of the escaping oxygen.
The city on the opposite side of the asteroid from the impact was propelled off the surface of the stony worldlet, coming apart in a thousand discrete trajectories as the glass and steel and pulsing exotic materials flew and blew apart, most sections celebrating their own separate orgies of destruction, punctuated everywhere with more silent explosions and self-consuming fireballs.