Khouri was halfway across to the waiting spider-room when she felt the wave of heat slap across her face, followed by the dreadful sound of the hull giving up its final ghost. The illumination in the cargo bay was gone now, as the Melancholia’s energy grid collapsed under the onslaught of the attack. But the spider-room’s interior was still powered up, its implausibly plush decor visible through the observation windows.
“Get in!” she shouted to Pascale, and although the noise of the ship’s death-throes was now tremendous, like a concerto played on scrap metal, somehow Sylveste’s wife heard what she said and clambered into the spider-room, just as a tremendous shock wave slammed through the hull (or what remained of it), and the spider-room exploded free of the moorings in which it had been locked by Volyova’s servitors.
Now there was a terrible howl of escaping air from elsewhere in the shuttle, and suddenly Khouri felt it tug against her, resisting her forward progress. The spider-room twisted and turned, its legs thrashing wildly, randomly. She could see Pascale now, in the observation window, but there was nothing the woman could do to help; she understood the room’s controls even less comprehensively than Khouri.
She looked behind, hoping and praying that she would see Volyova there, having followed them, and that she would know what to do, but there was nothing except empty access corridor, and that awful sucking stream of escaping air.
“Ilia…”
The damned fool had done just what they’d feared; stayed behind, for all that she had denied that she would.
With what little light remained, she saw the hull quiver, like a sounding-board. And then suddenly the gale that was pulling her away from the spider-room lost its strength; counter-balanced by an equally fierce decompression halfway across the cargo bay. She looked towards it, eyes already veiling over as the cold hit them, and then she was falling towards the gap where only a second earlier there had been metal—
“Where the—”
But almost as soon as she had opened her mouth, Khouri knew where she was, which was inside the spider-room. There was no mistaking the place; not after all the time she had spent in it. And it felt comfortable; warm and safe and silent; a universe away from where she had been up to the point when she could not remember anything more. Her hands hurt; hurt rather a lot, in fact—but apart from that, she felt better than she imagined she had any right to feel; not when her last memory had been of falling towards naked space, from the womb of a dying ship…
“We made it,” Pascale said, although something in her voice sounded anything but triumphant, “Don’t try to move; not just yet—you’ve burnt your hands rather badly.”
“Burnt them?” Khouri was lying on one of the velvet couches which stretched along either wall of the room, head against the curved cushioned-brass end-piece. “What happened?”
“You hit the spider-room; the draught pulled you towards it. I don’t know how, but you managed to climb around the outside to the airlock. You were breathing vacuum for five or six seconds at least. The metal cooled so quickly that you got frost-burns where your hands touched it.”
“I don’t remember any of that.” But she only had to look at the evidence of her palms to see that it must have been true.
“You blacked out as soon as you came aboard. I don’t blame you.”
There was still that utterly uncelebratory tone in her voice, as if all that Khouri had done had been pointless. And Khouri thought: she was probably right. The best that could happen to them was that they would somehow find a way to land the spider-room on Cerberus, and then see how long they could take their chances against the crustal defences. It would be interesting, if nothing else. And if not that, she supposed, then a slow wait until either the lighthugger found them and picked them off, or they died of cold or asphyxia, when their reserves expired. She racked her memory, trying to recall how long Volyova had said the spider-room was capable of surviving on its own.
“Ilia…”
“She didn’t make it in time,” Pascale said. “She died. I saw it happen. The second you were aboard, the shuttle just exploded.”
“You think Volyova made it happen deliberately, so that we’d at least have a chance? So we’d be mistaken for wreckage, as she said?”
“If so, I suppose we owe her thanks.”
Khouri slipped off her jacket, removed her shirt, slipped her jacket back on again and then tore the shirt into narrow strips with which she then bound her black, blistered palms. They hurt like hell, but it was nothing worse than the kind of pain she had known during training, from rope burns or carrying heavy artillery. She gritted her teeth and, while acknowledging it, put the pain somewhere beyond her immediate concerns.
Which, now she had to focus on them, made the prospect of submerging herself in the pain somewhat more tempting. But she resisted. She had to at least acknowledge her predicament, even if there was nothing obvious she could do about it. She had to know how it was going to happen, as it surely would.
“We’re going to die, aren’t we?”
Pascale Sylveste nodded. “But not the way you’re thinking, I’m willing to bet.”
“You mean we don’t land on Cerberus?”
“No; not even if we knew how to operate this thing. We’re not going to hit it either, and I think our velocity’s too high for us to go into any kind of orbit around it.”
Now that Pascale mentioned it, the hemisphere of Cerberus through the observation windows looked further away than it had appeared prior to the attack against the shuttle. They must have slammed past the world with the velocity which had not been negated from the shuttle’s approach pattern, hundreds of kilometres a second.
“So what happens now?”
“I’m only guessing,” Pascale said, “but I think we’re falling towards Hades.” She nodded at the forward observation window, at the pinprick of red light ahead of them. “It seems to be in roughly the right direction, doesn’t it?”
Khouri did not need to be told that Hades was a neutron star, any more than she needed to be told that there was no such thing as a safe close encounter with one. You either kept well away or you died; those were the rules, and there was no force in the universe capable of negating them. Gravity ruled, and gravity did not take into account circumstances, or the unfairness of things, or listen to eleventh-hour petitions before reluctantly repealing its laws. Gravity crushed, and near the surface of a neutron star gravity crushed absolutely, until diamond flowed like water; until a mountain collapsed into a millionth of its height. It was not even necessary to get close to suffer those crushing forces.
A few hundred thousand kilometres would be more than sufficient.
“Yes,” Khouri said. “I think you’re right. And that’s not good.”
“No,” Pascale said. “I rather imagined it wasn’t.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Sylveste thought of it as the chamber of miracles.
It seemed appropriate: he had been here less than an hour (he assumed, though he had long since ceased paying much attention to time) and in that period he had seen nothing that was less than miraculous, and much for which the term itself seemed mildly insufficient. Somehow he knew that a lifetime would not be sufficient to encompass a fraction of what this place contained; what it was. He had felt like this before, on glimpsing some vista of tremendous potential knowledge not yet learnt, not yet codified and shaped into theory. But he knew that those previous occasions had been pale foreshadowings of what he felt now.