Mei Nili, suspended in a flight sling above the viewport, stares with solemn eyes at the broken terrain twenty thousand kilometers away. The planet is dead, and that is what fascinates her. It is a dead thing alive with ghostly dust storms and vague, vaporous wraiths of frozen carbon dioxide and water. It is a dead thing, like her heart-what the archaic life called a heart, not the
muscular blood pump caged by ribs: That organ defies her unhappiness and
thrives, unconsciously squeezing life through her arteries and veins in the same way that the seasonal cycles blow the dry, cold winds across the shattered reaches of Mars. What is dead in her is the obscure heart, the source of joy and wonder that is more than she can say.
Mars slips out of sight as the vessel banks, the viewport spanning past the brown rim of the planet and garnering the numerous glint-fires of the void. Mei Nili's gaze breaks, and she looks impatiently across a cabin cramped with dented duct pipes, loose cables, and cascades of fern and red moss. Munk crouches like
a silver turtle over the command console and seems oblivious to her presence. "Where are we going?"
"Phoboi Twelve," the androne replies in a faraway voice. He is monitoring something and continues in a distracted tone, "Eighty-two million, four hundred sixtytwo thousand, fifty-seven kilometers. Excuse my silence for a moment, Jumper Nili. I have to chart a new trajectory. There are others ahead of us."
"Others?" Inertia swings her about as the vessel accelerates, and she cranes her neck to face the androne. "What are you hauling me into?"
Munk remains silent, hunched over the console.
"Have you logged a flight plan?" Mei calls above the vibrations of the magjets. "I know they haven't authorized this jump, but does Ap Com at least know where we're going? Hey, I'm talking to you. Did you even bother to requisition this ship?"
Munk keeps his silence, and the bulwarks clang with the stress of their steep descent.
Damn! she curses herself for her compliance. This boltdolt is going to kill us. For a moment, she believes that is the androne's intention-that he's gone brain-burst, which has happened to andrones dinged by one too many gamma rays. She thinks he's taking her with him into oblivion, maybe because she's adamantly refused him his precious interviews.
Then, let it all end here. She's not afraid to die, and a part of her even welcomes it, for at least this will finish the malevolent sadness that has squatted in the hollow of her loss too long now. And she doesn't regret at all how she treated the androne. What had he expected, coming unannounced to her private quarters? She figures now that she had been too fatigued in the dream den to know what she was doing and cringes with remorse at her unthinking obedience.
Mei glimpses again the amber limb of the planet through the viewport and recognizes the maneuver. Munk is flinging the vessel in a tangential arc along the rim of the planet's gravity well in a steep dive that will graze the upper atmosphere, gathering momentum in a slingshot trajectory, and hurl them toward their destination.
"Watch it, Munk," she calls, forcefully. "I don't think this ship can take that kind of torque."
Munk hears the brittle edge to her voice and wants to reassure her, but his full attention is on the microadjustments necessary to maximize the momentum of the ship. He would have preferred a sturdier vehicle and knows if he's not careful, the pressurized cabin will indeed rupture. So, he is careful. Long spells of navigating gravity gradients among Saturn's loping moons retrieving damaged andrones have taught him well the friable limits of machinery.
The clanging of the bulwarks diminishes and dies away, and the cry of the magjets quiets down as The Laughing Life banks into its hurtling trajectory.
"You're making me wish I hadn't come with you, Munk. What is going on?"
The androne, in free-fall, rises from the aquatic glow of the control console and fills the flight bubble of the cabin with his chrome-and-black alloy bulk. "I regret I could not inform you sooner, but this situation required me to act swiftly."
"What situation?" With blue-knuckled hands toughened by long spells of hard labor, Mei Nili unlocks her sling, hooks a strap to a wall clip, and fits her boots to the deck cleats so she can stand. "You just put my life in jeopardy. I hope you have a damn good reason."
"I am grateful that you came with me without any explanation at all. Of all
the jumpers, you are the only one I believed would accept my summons. I assumed-apparently correctly-you have the least to lose."
She resents his assumption and says so with a glower.
Among the forty-two jumpers who work for Apollo Combine, Mei Nili alone resisted his inquiries. She is known among the entire Deimos crew as a sullen person, and by surreptitiously researching the Combine's personnel files, Munk has discovered why. She grew up on a reservation on Earth and in her
sixty-eighth year lost her family in a landslide that entombed an entire village.
"Are you going to tell me why we're going to Phoboi Twelve? That's one of Ap
Com's, isn't it?"
"Yes. We have an ore processor there. It's gone down." "So? That's Ap Com's problem."
"Three other companies with vessels in the vicinity have declared salvage rights, and Apollo Combine has already written off the loss."
"That's standard. Now it's not even Ap Com's problem anymore." She brushes aside a drifting strand of fern coil. "What are you getting at, Munk? You said someone's life is at stake. Why in damnation are we out here?"
"To get to Phoboi Twelve as fast as possible, Jumper Nili. You see, the malfunction at the ore processor is a singular one. It began with a crude radio-band broadcast that I received four point fifty-nine minutes after transmission."
Mei's smooth face flinches with incomprehension. "Radio band? That is crude. But ore processors don't use that wavelength."
"Of course not. It's not an ore-processor signal. It's a human broadcast. The radio source is a human being."
Mei shakes her head and glances out the viewport at a brief dazzle of electric fire wisping past off the hull. "That's not possible. Phoboi Twelve is not outfitted for personnel. It must be an androne."
"No. It's a distress signal from a human being-an archaic human being."
With a puzzled frown, Mei stares up into the androne's crimson visor. "How can that be?"
"As I said, it is singular. Instead of gearing the ore processor with an expensive psyonic master control, Ap Com used wetware instead."
"That's illegal."
"They found a loophole, Jumper Nili. It is illegal to use living wetware. What they found was already legally dead."
"I don't understand."
"Apparently, a trove of cryonic heads from archaic times was found on Earth-" "Cryonic?"
"Yes. Human heads frozen in liquid nitrogen, sealed near the end of the archaic period in plasteel capsules impermeable to sublimation. They've been preserved intact for hundreds of Earth years, waiting to be reanimated."
"Is that possible? Wouldn't the cell structures have burst in the intense cold?"
"The cost of repair and reanimation of the cell matrix is high yet cheaper than the expense of manufacturing a psyonic master control for an ore processor."
Mei Nili's pale eyes widen as a sick, raw feeling pervades her. Too well she imagines the horror of encasement, the claustrophobic terror of the nightmare that killed her family. She cannot help but wonder again if they briefly survived their behemoth interment, for minutes or hours left bleeding, suffocating in the crushing dark? Too well she imagines the helplessness and
despair of a brain imprisoned in the spidery circuits of a rock factory. "That's monstrous."