He entered Central and gave the screens the usual daily once-over. They were only six weeks from perihelion now, and with every advancing kilometer the comet accelerated them toward almost certain doom. Carl called up the few remaining views available from weathered relays on the surface.
Worse today. Much worse.
He selected a camera looking toward the dawn line. Far away, ivory streamers boiled from promontories that caught the sunrise. The sun slit the sky from the ice, a spreading line of chewing brilliance. Golden fingers stretched between the horizon hills and lit the first smoke of morning. Where the slanted sun found fresh ice, gouts of pale blue and ruddy-green erupted. High above waved plasma banners, auroras already more vast than any seen by Amundsen or Peary.
They had spun Halley again, to even the thermal load. Jeffers had mounted an array of absorbent panels to partially control the outgassing and use it for some crude navigation, but in this howling chaos it was impossible to get even a good fix on the stars and tell how they were doing.
Sailing into the storm, he thought. And no compass to steer by.
Halley was no more a ball of ice. Instead it resembled a snowy land mysteriously pocked and acned, all trace of man erased. Countless centers of more-active gas sublimation had riddled the dusty plains, ripping free to join the high vacuum. Layers of heavier particles smeared the hollows. Occasional brown patches of dust suddenly blew away, joining the swooping upward lift of the bright yellow-green coma, visible to Carl as a diffuse haze that stretched across the sky. As he watched, a slow darkening rippled through the gauzy glow, an outward wave from some eruption of dust on the sunward side.
“Pretty bad,” Jeffers said at his elbow. He had grown even leaner in the sleep slots, his skin sallow. “Particle per sec is up three times over what it was last week.”
“It’ll rise almost exponentially from now on,” Carl said. He gave this as a fact when it was only Virginia’s prediction; she had been so accurate lately there hardly seemed a distinction any longer.
“Lost the last of the velocity meters.”
“Not surprising.”
“Just clean blew away.”
“Temperature.”
“The night side’s at two hundred eighty Kelvin atop the dust beds. Dayside’s ’bout fifteen degrees higher. Clapein’ big gradient.”
The thermal load was crucial. As the surface warmed steadily, heat seeped into the core. Over most of Halley, the dust layers would act as a thermal blanket, but only for so long. “What’s the reading at the ice level?”
“Looks to be about eighty degrees colder than the surface.”
“Plenty.”
“Yeah, for now.”
Ice was elastic. The warmer surface expanded, stretched—and cracked. The unrelenting pounding of the launchers had undoubtedly stressed the ice far down into Halley. With the warming would come relieving pressures, fracturing. How much? No numerical simulation could tell them. Halley was already honeycombed by the insect burrowing of humankind. It might crack open entirely, a last wheeze belching forth all the puny human parasites that had afflicted it.
As they watched, pearly gout broke the crusted surface and exploded into a swirling cyclone symphony of excited colors: pea green, violet, sulfur yellow.
“Vidor woke up yet?”
“I ordered him started, but it’ll be another day.”
“Well, no rush anymore. His castle’s gone.”
Jeffers pointed to a slumped mass near the dawn line. The ornate, corbelled, and stranded artwork had been Vidor’s masterwork in ice, sculpted three years after the equatorial battle. For its task—structural support for Shaft 20—it could have been a square box, an igloo. Vidor had added parapets, towers, silvery arabesques, scalloped walls, and blue-white, airy bridges. Now…
“He won’t expect it to still be here.” A sand castle lasts only until the next tide.
“How many you bringin’ out?”
“Everybody,” Carl said. “Except the ones so dead there’s no real hope of saving them, of course.”
Jeffers twisted his mouth around in a familiar, skeptical line. “The med-techs can handle those new treatments?”
“Virginia’s got mechs helping. Speed-trained them with that experimental method of hers.”
“What’d you decide ’bout the ones with partial brain damage?”
“They won’t be much use, but they deserve revival.”
“Yeah. They paid for their tickets, might as well see the finale.”
Some had opposed his decision, but he had swept their objections aside. The rational argument was that with the maximum possible crew awake, they could deal with crises better. Carl’s private motivation, though, was entirely emotional. If Halley split, cracked, burst into a gaudy technicolor plume, at least they would all live out each moment, and face the end as they had begun an expedition. A crew.
That’s something, he thought. Beats sleeping to oblivion.
He frowned. What was that poem Virginia had pointed out to him?
I really shouldn’t think of the program as Virginia, but it’s impossible not to. JonVon doesn’t exist anymore. And what was that poem she quoted yesterday?
Right. Damn right.
“Sir?”
Carl turned, not recognizing the voice.
It was Captain Miguel Cruz.
“Uh…” Carl stared at the man, unchanged from his memory. The jaw was still as solid, assured. The eyes looked out steadily, inspiring confidence. Even the blue tint from slot sleep could not disguise that.
Still, something about the man looked awkward, blocky. Cruz wore shoes, and stood as if gravity mattered.
“I wanted to report for duty,” Cruz said. “I’m not fully recovered yet, but I’m sure. there’s something I can.”
“No, no, you—rest. Just rest,” Carl said quickly. He hadn’t realized the warmings had come so far. Someone should have warned him!
Cruz spoke with a faint accent… Earth speech. “Sir, I’d prefer to be on duty. Perhaps—”
Carl shook his head, embarrassed. “Look, Cap’n, don’t call me sir. I’m Carl Osborn, you may remember me, a spacer. I—”
“Of course I recognize you. I’m somewhat conversant with events since my death,” Cruz said with a faint smile. “I’ve read the log—it’s incredible—and… I think calling you ‘sir’ is quite appropriate.”
Carl stared at the man for a long moment, not knowing what to say. Despite his harrowing illness, Cruz looked… young. Unseasoned. “I… thought, sir, that after you’ve had a few days to recover, you could reassume command.”
Cruz looked at the flurry of data and views of the surface on a dozen screens nearby. “It would take me months to even understand what’s going on. Your tools, techniques, and… Coming here, I saw a woman in Shaft Two who looked like a flying fungus!”
“That’s a weirder, sir,” Carl said. “They live about two klicks down Shaft Two in their own biosphere.”
“But that green stuff—it was even in her hair!”
“It’s a symbiont that retains fluids and increases oxygen processing—I don’t know the details.”
Cruz shook his head. “Incredible. As I said, I haven’t a clue about how things are.”
“But I was hoping…”
“I see,” Cruz said with dawning perception. “Now that we’re back in the inner solar system, you thought perhaps I could help negotiate something with Earth?”
“No sir, we’ve realized that’s a dead end. I only… well, you’re the captain!”