Meyer saw the small spacesuited woman standing at the water’s edge, and Udat obligingly angled round towards her. Tension had condensed his guts into a solid lump. Swallowing inside a habitat, it had to be the craziest stunt in the history of spaceflight. Yet they’d done it!
We are in,Udat observed sagely. That’s halfway.
And don’t I know it.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING?tranquillity’s outraged broadcast thundered into the blackhawk’s mind.
Meyer winced. Even Udat ’s calm thoughts fluttered.
The woman is a political dissident being persecuted by the Kulu ESA,meyer replied with shaky bravado. Of all people, Ione Saldana should sympathize with that. We’re taking her where she will be safe.
STOP IMMEDIATELY. I WILL NOT PERMIT THIS. UDAT , SWALLOW OUT NOW.the force of the mental compulsion which the habitat personality exerted was incredible. Meyer felt as though someone had smashed a meat hook into his skull to pull his brain out by the roots. He groaned, clutching at the cushioning of his acceleration couch, heart pounding in his ears.
STOP!
“Keep going,” he gasped. His nose started to bleed. Neural nanonics sent out a flurry of metabolic overrides.
Alkad waded through the shallows as the blackhawk descended, gliding fastidiously round one of the cove’s small islands. She hadn’t grasped how big the bitek creature was. To see that almighty bulk suspended so easily in the air was an uncanny marvel. Its rounded nose was streaked with long frost rays as the sea’s humidity gusted over polyp which was accustomed to the radiative chill of deep space. A huge patch of water below the hull began to foam and churn as the distortion field interacted with it. She suddenly felt as though the horizontal was rolling. Udat turned through ninety degrees, and tilted sharply, bringing the portside wing of its life-support horseshoe down towards the water. An airlock slid open. Cherri Barnes stood inside, wearing her spacesuit. Orange silicon-fibre straps tethered her securely to the sides of the small chamber. She threw a rope-ladder down.
On the beach five figures were racing over the dunes.
Ione said: Kill her.
The serjeants pulled laser pistols from their holsters. Alkad Mzu already had her foot on the first rung.
Udat ’s maser cannon fired.
Monica Foulkes pounded hard across the sand, neural nanonics commands and boosted muscles meshing so that her body ate the distance effortlessly, a hundred and fifty metres in nine seconds. The prime order of the ESA’s Tranquillity operation was to prevent Mzu from leaving, that took precedence over everything. It didn’t look like Monica was going to get to the blackhawk in time, Mzu had started to claw her way up the rocking ladder. She reviewed which of her weapon implants would have the best chance; the trouble was most of them were designed for unobtrusive close-range work. And that bloody Lunar SII spacesuit didn’t help. It would have to be a microdart, and hope the tip penetrated. She was aware of the serjeants off to her left pulling out their laser pistols.
A metre-wide column of air fluoresced a faint violet, drawing a line from a silver bubble on the blackhawk’s lower hull to a serjeant. The bitek servitor blew apart in an explosion of steam and carbon granules. Fifteen metres behind it, where the beam struck the beach, a patch of sand became a puddle of glass, glowing a vivid rose-gold.
Over-hyped nerves sent Monica diving for cover the instant the beam appeared. She hit the loose sand, momentum ploughing a two and a half metre long furrow. There were two near-simultaneous thuds behind her as Samuel and Pauline flung themselves down. The second serjeant erupted into a black-grain mist with a loud burping sound as the maser hit it. Monica’s mind gibbered as she waited, head buried in the sand. At least with that power rating it’ll be quick . . .
A wind began howling over the dunes.
Samuel raised his head to see his worst expectation confirmed. A wormhole interstice was opening around the nose of the blackhawk. Alkad Mzu was halfway up the rope-ladder.
You must not take her from here,he pleaded with the starship. You must not!
The interstice widened, a light-devouring tunnel boring through infinity. Air streamed in.
“Hang on!” Samuel shouted to the two women agents.
COME BACK!tranquillity commanded.
Meyer, his mind twinned with the blackhawk, quailed under the habitat’s furious demand. It was too much, the storm voice had raged inside his skull for what seemed like days, bruising his neurons with its violence. Welcome surrender beckoned—to hell with Mzu, nothing was worth this. Then he felt local space twisting under the immense distortion which Udat ’s energy patterning cells exterted. A pseudoabyss leading into freedom opened before him. Go,he ordered. the cold physical blackness outside invaded his mind, plunging him into glorious oblivion.
A small but ferocious hurricane set Alkad spinning like a runaway propeller at the end of her precarious silicon-fibre ladder. “Wait!” she datavised in mounting terror. “You’re supposed to wait till I’m in the airlock.” Her digitalized vehemence made no impression on Udat . The air buoyed her up as though she had become weightless, swinging her round until the ladder was horizontal. Oscillating gravity was doing terrible things to her inner ears. Screaming air tried to tear her from the ladder. Neural nanonics pumped muscle-lock orders into her hands and calves to reinforce her grip. She could feel ligaments ripping. Collar sensors showed her the fuzzy rim of the wormhole interstice sliding inexorably along the hull towards her. “No. In the name of Mary, wait!” And then Dr Alkad Mzu was suddenly presented with every physicist’s dream opportunity: observing the fabric of the universe from the outside.
Monica Foulkes heard Samuel’s shouted warning and instinctively grabbed a tuft of reedy dune grass. The wind surged with impossible strength. Gravity shifted round until the beach was above her. Monica wailed fearfully as sand fell up into the sky. She felt herself following it, feet pulled into the air and sliding round to point at the interstice surrounding the blackhawk’s nose. The grass clump made an awful slow tearing sound. Her hips and chest left the ground. Sand was blasting directly into her face. She couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. The grass clump moved several centimetres. “OhdearGodpreservemeee!”
A long-fingered hand clamped around her free wrist. The grass clump left the sand with a sharp sucking noise, its weight wrenching her arm out towards the blackhawk. For an eternal second Monica hung splayed in the air as the sand scudded around her. Someone groaned with pained effort.
The wormhole interstice closed behind Udat .
Sand, water, mangled vegetation, and demented fish cascaded down out of the sky. Monica landed flat on her belly, breath knocked out of her. “Oh my God,” she wheezed. When she looked up, the haggard Edenist was crouched on his knees, panting heavily as he clutched his wrist. “You”—the words were difficult to form in her throat—“you held on to me.”
He threw her a nod. “I think my wrist is broken.”
“I would have . . .” She shuddered, then gave a foolish jittery laugh. “God, I don’t even know your name.”
“Samuel.”
“Thank you, Samuel.”
He rolled onto his back and sighed. “Pleasure.”
Are you all right?tranquillity asked the edenist.
My wrist is very painful. She’s heavy.
Your colleagues are approaching. Three of them are carrying medical nanonic packages in their aid kits. They will be with you shortly.