"Esther!" The traffic controller's voice rose as he tried to reach the transport pilot.
J.D. and Zev propelled themselves into the traffic control cubicle, J.D. pale with shock, Zev excited.
"What happened?"
"The missile," Thanthavong said. "Was it armed?"
"It can't have exploded," Victoria said. "We'd . . . we'd know." She dove for the hard-link and desperately demanded real-time information on Starfarer's status.
Arachne responded sluggishly, but it did respond. The campus and the wild side both maintained their air pressure:
neither cylinder had been seriously breached. They had been built well, to retain their integrity under the stress of the spin, the pull of the solar sail, the unknown changes of transition.
Equally important, the starship remained magnetically bound to the cosmic string, gathering energy.
"We're still docked!" The transport pilot's voice sounded hollow and feverish. "I don't believe they—I'm going to—"
If the transport undocked now, Starfarer would pull it into transition, like a rowboat caught in the wake of a cruiser. But
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the transport possessed insufficient mass to survive transition alone.
"Don't let them loose!" Victoria shouted to the controller. "What? Why?"
"It's too late—we're loo near transition' Get everybody back inside!"
The controller locked the transport into the docking module. The pilot swore at him, swore at their pursuers, swore at EarthSpace and Starfarer and scientists.
But at the same time she understood what was happening;
she understood the danger. No one knew for certain what the conditions might be outside the starship between the point when it vanished from space-time and the moment of its reappearance. Esther slammed the transport's hatch open, and, still cursing, ordered her passengers back into Starfarer.
Victoria searched the display. Arachne sent confused and erratic signals.
"The missile must have hit us a glancing blow," Victoria said.
"They can't have planned to do this," J.D. said. "How could they . . . ?"
"They are very determined to get what they want." Zev did not sound like the innocent J.D. had described.
Thanihavong hovered beside Victoria.
"Arachne's called in the damage control team," Victoria said. "But the cylinder's not seriously breached and the missile didn't detonate. Maybe it wasn't armed. Maybe it was only meant to cripple us. At least we're still on course- I hope there isn't an eight-point-five earthquake zone right over where it hit . . ."
Staring at the display, Thanthavong suddenly gripped Victoria's shoulder.
"It hit us directly beneath the genetics department," she said. "The gene stocks . . . sensitizing viruses . . ." She drew back, turned, and pushed off toward the exit. "I've got to get down there—"
Victoria went with her. J.D. and Zev followed close behind. They passed the transport waiting room, where the outbound passengers milled around in anger and outrage and despair.
They reached the hill leading to the floor of the cylinder.
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At first everything appeared normal in the interior of the starship.
Victoria saw the destruction around the genetics building.
It was as if someone had placed a circle of land on a plate. and tossed it, so it fell back almost into place, but collapsed and jumbled. The earth, so recently covered with the lacy green of new grass, broke open to reveal streaks of harsh red clay. Saplings and bushes lay uprooted, flung against each other, in irregular concentric circles leading outward from the point of damage.
The cracks in the earth cut across a hill, the hill that housed the genetics department.
Victoria plunged down the slope at a dangerous speed, leaving the other three behind. First she pulled herself along the handholds, nearly in freefall, then she took great leaping strides through microgravity, and then she ran, toward the earthquake zone, toward the broken streaks of earth.
The impact flung Kolya against the wall of the tunnel. He slid toward the floor, half-stunned. The body of the starship moaned around him, the bonded rocks grinding together beneath the stress—of transition? Or had Iphigenie been forced to reverse the sail? He did not know whether to feel joy or grief. He turned on the radio in his spacesuit, but heard only confused fragments of talk. The web remained useless.
Kolya heard the faint high hiss of escaping air.
Startled, he flanged his helmet shut and hurried to Griffith, who lay half in, half out of his spacesuit. Kolya struggled, but soon realized he had no chance of getting Griffith into the suit. He grabbed a survival pouch from the emergency rack, dragged Griffith free, and manhandled him into the sphere. He sealed it and activated the oxygen reserve. The government agent remained unconscious.
1 did far too expert a job on him, Kolya thought.
He tried to drag Griffith in his silver sphere all the way to an elevator, so they both could escape to the surface. After ten meters he knew it was hopeless. Griffith, though not a large man, made a heavy, awkward weight in the full gravity of the starship's lowest level.
The sound of escaping air grew fainter as the atmospheric pressure fell.
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Kolya felt a low, grinding vibration. The baffles were sliding shut. The elevator was already closed off. With one final burst of exertion, Kolya dragged Griffith beyond the moving baffle. He did not want to leave him, but he could do him no good if they both were trapped between airtight doors. Kolya plunged through the narrowing space and ran toward the airlock. Behind him, the misaligned panels shrieked in their tracks with a high-pitched squeal that traveled through the ground, vibrated into his body, and pierced his hearing.
I'll have to travel around the outside of the ship, Kotya thought, and find an undamaged entrance—or go all the way to the axis, if need be—and bring help. From outside, I might detect the position of the air leak, the extent of the damage.
He hoped he would be able to tell what had happened, what caused the impact.
Am I still willing, he wondered, to fling myself into the void and hope our pursuers will stop to rescue me? I will probably never know the answer to that question. By now our escape or capture must be sealed.
Kolya entered the airlock and started its sequence. The inner door slid shut, but refused to close the final few centimeters. Kolya shoved it until it caught, then waited impatiently while the airlock cycled. He held tight to the grips, afraid the lock might open prematurely and fling him out into space with the last of the air. It evacuated properly. At his feet, the hatch leading onto the outer skin of the starship opened halfway and stuck. He climbed down and squeezed through, no easy matter in the bulky pressure suit.
He lowered himself onto the inspection cables and headed for the next nearest of the access hatches that dotted the ship's exterior. With the outer surface of the starship at his back, he crawled rapidly over the cables like a four-legged spider.
Only the cables lay between him and space.
The spin took him in view of the saithouse, the furled silver sail, and the magnetic claws that reached to the cosmic string. Both claws and string should have been invisible: the claws, an energy field, had no substance, while the cosmic string had enormous mass but only the single dimension of length.
Yet Kolya perceived an odd, pointillist image: two flexing arms like tentacles, grasping a distant, slender thread. He could only see it when he observed it from the comer of his
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vision. Perhaps he imagined it all; perhaps he saw some perfectly natural phenomenon. Could Hawking radiation appear in the visible spectrum? Kolya did not pretend to understand cosmic string, or Hawking radiation for that matter.