Hans was pinned back in his seat by four gees of acceleration. It took all his strength to keep his hands in place on the controls. The Savior was turning and rising. The ship would clear the layer of blue fog. But they were not rising fast enough. The aft end, where the main drive was located, would pass through the spheres of blue at the edge of the grid patch.
Hans waited for an impact. He felt nothing, but he heard a change in the sound of the drive. A moment later the crushing force on his body lessened. The Savior was losing power. He called for Emergency Mode thrust, which ought to override any other command. Instead of punishing acceleration, the drive turned off completely. Hans felt himself in free fall, dropping with the ship toward the featureless surface.
He braced for an impact that might kill or maim. It never came. Falling in the light gravity of Iceworld, the Savior hit the ground, bounced, then hit again and skidded along the surface.
Hans glanced at the control read-outs. The hull had not been breached. All life-support systems showed normal readings. In principle the inside of the Savior was still the safest place on the planet.
Hans did not believe that for a moment. Something had touched the lower part of the ship, and seconds later they had lost the drive. Every other part of the ship might be equally vulnerable. He glanced across at Darya to make sure that her suit was fully closed.
“Come on.”
“Where?” But she was already standing up.
“Outside. We lost power, and I don’t know why. Until we know what happened I think we’ll be safer on the surface.”
How safe was that? Hans did not know, but already he was cycling the inner door of the airlock. It did not matter that all the air would be lost from the interior of the ship. When they came back in—if they came back in—air could be replaced.
The inner door was open. Hans had never closed the outer one, and he pushed Darya toward it.
“Go ahead.”
“Ben—”
“I’ll help him.” I lost one crew member, but I’m damned if I’ll lose another. “You go outside, make sure the outer door is clear.”
Hans was exposing Darya to an unknown risk, and she surely knew it. The surface could be even more dangerous than the Savior’s interior. She went without another word.
Hans moved to where Ben’s suited figure lay sprawled by the wall of the airlock. After the first impact as the Savior scooped up his body, Ben had then felt another four-gee force as the ship tried to rise toward orbit. Unlike Darya and Hans, he had not been cushioned in a well-designed seat.
The suit tell-tales showed that its integrity had been maintained. That was good, but had Ben survived the multiple shocks? Hans leaned over and shone the head beam of his own suit into the faceplate. Ben’s eyes were open, and the pupils contracted as the light struck them.
Alive.
Hans had no time to ask for anything more. He scooped up the suited body and headed for the outer door of the airlock. It was a three-meter drop from there to the surface, but—thank Heaven for low-gravity planets—he jumped and landed without difficulty.
Darya was waiting. She at once pulled him away from the ship. He did not resist. The flat plain of the grid patch, which had before been dark as the grave, was illuminated now by a faint blue.
Twenty paces from the Savior, Darya paused. Hans, still carrying Ben’s body, turned. At first sight the ship was just as it should be, standing at an odd angle on the smooth surface. But a line of blue flame licked at the outside of the hull, right down at ground level. The flame was not moving. The Savior was. While Hans and Darya watched, the whole hull sank downward slowly and steadily as though being absorbed into the surface of Iceworld.
Ignoring Darya’s cry of warning, Hans took a couple of paces back toward the ship. Once you were close enough you could see what was really happening. Just above the pale blue line of flame, the hull of the Savior was fracturing, cracking, turning to powder, and vanishing.
Logic said that they ought to turn and run, but to where? Hans could see that the whole grid area had become edged with blue light. He and Darya could move no more than a hundred meters or so in any direction without passing across that blue barrier. He turned to stare again at the Savior, and noticed a change. The lower half of the ship was gone, and the dust that it had become was slowly spreading outward. Already the outer edge smudged the surface five meters away from the vanishing hull.
Hans stared upward. Somewhere in the sky, hundreds of millions of kilometers away, the Pride of Orion would be monitoring their status. They should receive everything up to Hans’s order to Darya to head for the airlock. Since then there had been no time for spoken messages, but the beacon would automatically send out its signal for as long as it existed.
That existence would be for only a few more minutes. The chance of anything from the Pride of Orion arriving in time to help Darya, Ben, and Hans was a flat zero.
Hans brought his attention back to their surroundings. Another meter of the Savior had vanished, and the dust that the ship had been was oozing closer. It might be harmless, but that was not a risk they could afford to take. The boundary of the grid area was still alight with an ominous blue.
Hans took a deep breath. “Darya?”
He knew what they had to do. He just wanted to hear her voice.
“I’m here, Hans.”
“We can’t stay where we are. I screwed up, and I’m sorry. I thought the surface would be safe. I was as wrong as I could be.”
“We all were.”
“The ship is done for. We can’t go up. There’s only one thing left.”
“Hans, I know that. I know very well what we have to do.” She produced a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “This is my fault, not yours. I’m the one who wanted to come here, and I’m the one who said I wanted to see the interior of Iceworld. If I’m lucky, I’ll get my wish.”
It was an odd definition of luck, but Hans understood. The powdery layer had advanced to within a few meters of their feet. He said, “No point in waiting. Let’s hope we were right about the destabilizing field. I’m going to turn mine on now.”
“Me, too. Hans, I hope I’ll meet you on the other side—wherever that is.”
“You have to. Remember, you promised me there would be a better time? You can’t renege on that.”
Hans raised his gaze to the upper edge of his suit’s faceplate. He glanced in turn at each element of the control sites that would cause his suit to generate a cancellation field. The suit’s sensors, tracking his eye movements, turned the field on.
He had time for one more moment of worry. Would the field’s active radius be enough to include Ben, whose body Hans was still holding? If not, what would happen to both of them?
And then there was no time for either worries or actions. The weak gravity of the planet seemed to vanish. Hans was in freefall, still holding his burden, dropping down through the deadly surface of Iceworld and on toward the unknown interior.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The perfect embodied computer
E. Crimson Tally had been reluctant to talk at any length to Julian Graves and the others about the changes and improvements made since his first embodiment. That would sound too much like boasting.
For example, having attosecond circuitry seemed on the face of it like a good thing, something you would want all of the time. Years ago, within days of his initial embodiment and activation, he had learned otherwise. Yes, he could think trillions of times as fast as any organic intelligence, and with an accuracy and repeatability beyond their imagining; but as one consequence of that speed he had been obliged to spend almost all his time waiting, as he was now waiting. How would Darya Lang like it, if she asked E.C. a question and then had to hang around ten years before she had an answer?