“But I do not see the Hawksbill itself,” he added.
There was no wreckage, no indication what could have happened.
They must have gotten too close.
Each of them, in turn, said much the same thing. Even Digger admitted the ship was lost, had to be lost, no other explanation for it. Yet he could not believe Kellie was gone. She was too smart. Too alive.
“They’d have let us know if they were in trouble, wouldn’t they?” he demanded of Julie.
“Maybe they didn’t have time. Maybe it happened too quickly.”
For a while, they lived with the hope that the cloud was between them and the Hawksbill, that it had somehow blocked off the ship’s transmissions as it was now preventing a visual sighting. But Digger knew the truth of it, although he would not accept it, as if refusing to do so kept her chances alive. He walked through the ship in a state of shock.
Julie invited him onto the bridge, tried to find things for him to do. In his heart he damned Collingdale, and damned Hutchins for sending him.
He could not have told anyone what time of day it was, or whether they were actively searching or just going through the motions, or whether there was anyplace left to look. He listened to Bill’s reports, negative, negative, to Marge and Whit talking in whispers, to Julie talking with Bill and maybe sending off the news to Broadside.
And he became aware that they were waiting for him to say the word, to recognize that there was no way the Hawksbill could be intact without their knowing, that it was hopeless, but that they would not stop looking until he told them to do so.
There was always a chance they were in the shuttle, he told himself. The shuttle could easily be hidden among all the jets and dust and shreds and chunks of cloud, its relatively weak radio signal blown away by the electrical activity in the area.
It was possible.
THE FIRST INDICATION there might be something out there came in the form not of a radio signal, but, incredibly, of a sensor reading of a small metal object, glimpsed briefly and then lost.
“Metal,” said Julie. “It was small.”
“The shuttle?”
“Smaller than that.”
The return of hope was somehow painful. He could lose her again.
“Where?” demanded Digger.
“Hold on.” The area around the cloud was a vast debris field.
Bill drew a vector. “Somewhere along that line.”
They picked it up again. “I believe,” said the AI, “it’s a set of air tanks.”
Air tanks? Then somebody was attached to them, right?
“Negative,” said Bill. “Tanks only.”
They tracked them and took them on board. Saw the Hawksbill label on the shoulder strap. Noted that they were exhausted.
“They’re out there,” said Digger. Julie nodded. Empty tanks meant someone had used them for six hours, then discarded them. You only did that if you had a spare set of tanks.
At least one of them was still afloat.
They checked the time: ten and a half hours since the signal had been lost. Six hours to a set of tanks.
How many spares could you carry?
Then Bill announced he’d picked up a radio signal.
KELLIE BURST INTO tears when they hauled her inside. Tough, stoic, always in control, she let them remove her tanks and go-pack and shut off the suit, and she made no effort to restrain her emotions. Her right arm was broken, and she had a few torn ligaments and a bunch of bruises, but she was alive and that was all that mattered.
She smiled weakly at Digger and told Bill she wished he were human so she could kiss him.
Bill promptly appeared, his younger, lean, devil-may-care version, with dark hair and dark skin and dark eyes that literally flashed.
“He’s gone,” she said of Collingdale. “He stayed with the Hawksbill.” She explained how it had lost power, how Collingdale had refused to abandon it, had decided they couldn’t survive, that he would ride it inside the cloud and detonate the Hazeltines.
“It doesn’t look as if he did any lasting damage,” said Whit.
“No,” agreed Bill. “The cloud will make its rendezvous with Lookout.”
Julie looked puzzled. “How’d you get clear? Of the blast and the cloud? You couldn’t have done it with that.” She was looking at the go-pack.
Whit handed her a painkiller, and they were taking her back to the med station.
“There was a plume,” she said. “A jet stream. It only took a few minutes to get to it, and it blew me out of the neighborhood pretty quick.” She looked at her arm. “That’s where I took the damage.”
ARCHIVE
The gulfs between the stars overwhelm us, as the eons overwhelm our paltry few years of sunlight. We are cast adrift on an endless sea, to no purpose, with no destination, bound where no one knows.
— Dmitri Restov
Last Rites
LIBRARY ENTRY
Mary,
I’m sorry to tell you that we lost David this morning. We all admired him, and everyone here shares your grief. I’m sure you’ll be receiving official notification from the Academy in a few days.
It might console you to know that he died heroically, in the best of causes. His action here appears to have thrown the omega off schedule and thereby bought some time. It’s likely that many who would have been lost at the Intigo will survive as a result of your fiancé’s efforts.
— Julie Carson
December 8
PART FIVE
lykonda
chapter 44
Near Avapol.
Friday, December 12.
THE SKY WAS blanketed by Marge’s rain clouds. Three of her chimneys were up and running. The fourth would be erected that night on an island forty klicks off the west coast, midway between Mandigol and Sakmarung. Over the last two days, no one in Hopgop or Roka, or in the four cities located in the center of the isthmus, had seen the sun, the stars, or the apparition.
It was still visible from T’Mingletep and Savakol in the south, and from Saniusar in the far north. There, the Goompahs watched the omega grow visibly larger each night. It filled their sky, a terrifying vision, grim and churning and lit within by demon-fire.
Digger sat, concealed within his lightbender, in a pavilion in the middle of a rainswept park. The park was deserted, as were the surrounding streets. Whit was out positioning projectors. He’d gotten good at it, and obviously enjoyed the work.
They’d done the calculations again, and the cloud was not compensating for its new position, was probably unable to compensate, and would consequently reach Lookout when it was early afternoon on the Intigo. Since it was coming out of the night, that meant it should expend most of its energy on the far side of the world.
Halleluia! Add that to the cloud cover Marge was putting up, and the Goompahs had a decent chance.
“Don’t get too confident,” Whit had warned him. “Conditions here will still be extreme.”
Digger had seen only the shimmering haze of Whit’s lightbender, and considered how difficult it was to communicate when you couldn’t see people’s expressions. Was he becoming seriously pessimistic? Or cautious? Or was it just a reflex that you never claim victory lest you tempt the fates?
“And don’t forget the round-the-world mission,” he’d added, apparently determined to dampen the mood. He’d been like this since they’d lost Collingdale. The others had expressed their regrets, had been sorry; but Collingdale reportedly hadn’t been easy to get to know. Digger, in fact, had barely had time to say hello as he passed through the wedding and took Kellie and the Hawksbill out to chase the omega. Kellie had spoken little about him since her return. He hoped she was too smart to assign any guilt to herself for the loss, but she had made it clear she didn’t want to talk about the experience.