Something slammed into his shoulder. It was like being hit by a bullet. Still on his hands and knees, Gaeta was rocked back onto his haunches, then instinctively rolled and dropped flat onto his stomach. Wildly he checked the life-support displays. Nothing. All the lights were in the green.
“I’m pulling up the specs on the laser,” Habib’s voice came through. “Ten megajoule pulses, ten per second. That works out to a bit more than two kilograms of TNT in explosive power.”
“Christ! Like a hand grenade!”
Again that damned communications lag. Gaeta thought furiously: The suit’s armored, it’s been hit by ice chunks in the rings and taken tumbles snowboarding down Mt. Olympus. But a fucking hand grenade?
He felt a thump on his back and suddenly half his life-support telltales flashed into the red. Gesoo! The damned fucker hit my backpack! Gaeta disconnected the wire connecting him with the computer access port and began to crawl as fast as he could toward the laser’s slim mounting.
“I’ll rip that son of a bitch out by its roots!” Gaeta’s shout came through the speaker of Habib’s console.
“No!” Habib snapped reflexively. “Don’t damage the laser if you can avoid it.”
One of von Helmholtz’s technicians pushed through the crowd gathered around Habib’s console, his face drawn, sweaty. Grabbing Fritz’s slim shoulder, he said, “Life support’s gone critical.”
Jumping to his feet, von Helmholtz said, “We’ve got to get him out of there!”
Habib turned back to his console. “How do we shut down that laser?” he shouted.
“We can’t!” one of the engineers wailed. “The beast isn’t receiving any commands from us. It shut off its downlink antennas, remember?”
“My god,” Habib groaned. “He’s a dead man.”
Gaeta huddled around the strut supporting the laser, his heart hammering so hard he could hear his pulse in his ears.
Okay, he told himself. Simmer down. You’re safe here. The chingado laser can’t shoot you, you’re underneath it. Take a deep breath. Another. Slow down your heart rate. Fritz’ll never let you live it down; he’s getting all this on the life-support telemetry; he’ll say you crapped in your pants.
He squinted at the life-support readouts displayed on the inside of his helmet. Son of a bitch hit my air tank. It’s leaking. Gotta get out of here.
But if I move out from under this fregado laser it’ll start taking potshots at me again. Catch-22: if I stay here I’ll asphyxiate; if I make a run for the return pod I’ll get shot.
“Fritz,” he called as calmly as he could. “You got any ideas about this?”
Silence.
And Gaeta saw that the black snowstorm was closer than ever, almost upon him.
Cardenas and Negroponte walked determinedly from the biology lab to the mission control center. They had sent a hurried message to Wunderly, on Earth, and now were heading for Urbain to tell him that the creatures in Saturn’s rings were nanomachines.
Nanomachines. Cardenas still found it hard to believe. Why? she asked herself. You think you’re the only one in the universe who can handle nanotechnology? You’re not even the only one in the solar system.
But the instant they pushed through the unguarded double doors of the mission control center, her thoughts about nanomachines and alien intelligence evaporated. Cardenas could tell from the tension crackling in the air, from the huddles of engineers and technicians hunched in tight knots around consoles, that something had gone wrong.
“Urbain isn’t here,” Negroponte said. “He must be in his office.”
Cardenas barely heard her. She rushed to von Helmholtz and his crew, clustered around one of the consoles, while Negroponte headed for Urbain’s office alone.
28 May 2096: Actions
Timoshenko hovered in emptiness, staring at the slim line of the tether that attached him to the open hatch of the airlock. He didn’t remember attaching the tether. He thought he would simply drift away from the habitat forever.
I must have attached it automatically, he said to himself. Without thinking consciously of it. Just part of the routine of putting on a space suit and going outside.
He knew the tether was made of buckyball fibers. Strongest material known, he thought. My safety line. My link to life.
The tether led arrow-straight to the airlock built into the curving flank of the habitat. Timoshenko saw its huge bulk rotating slowly, carrying him with it, the mammoth cylinder studded with airlocks and observation ports. He hung there as if paralyzed and watched one of the maintenance robots scooting faithfully along its track.
Ten thousand men and women, he thought. I can kill them all. I can become a mass killer. Not as big a murderer as Stalin or some of the tsars, but at least I’ll have the distinction of killing everybody in my community. Every last one of them. One hundred percent.
Gaeta’s life-support telltales were blinking red. The leaking air tank had started a cascade of failures. Air pressure in the suit was slowly falling. The suit’s heater was automatically turning up the internal temperature to compensate. Gaeta tried to open the small emergency air tank; no response. Must’ve been blown away by the damned laser, he realized.
You got minutes, amigo, he told himself. If you don’t get off this glorified garbage truck and back to the transfer craft in the next fifteen-twenty minutes, you’re a dead man.
A flake of black snow plastered itself against his visor. Looking up, he saw that the storm had reached him. Black flakes of tholins were drifting down out of the cloud-laden sky.
Fritz’s voice crackled in his earphones. “You must leave the lander immediately and get to the escape pod before it’s covered with snow.”
“Right’” he replied. “But if I move this estúpido laser is going to zap me again.”
There’ll be no answer for twelve seconds, he knew. Fumbling in the pouches attached to the waist of his suit, Gaeta found the thin metal cylinder of the diagnostic probe for the uplink antenna. He snapped its wire off, then slowly got to his feet with a grinding of servomotors.
The laser started to swivel, but Gaeta grabbed its shaft in both his servo-reinforced pincers and pushed it upward until it was pointing at the sky. Then he forced the metal plug into the laser’s ball-and-socket mounting, jamming it in place.
“Okay, wiseass,” he muttered. “Let’s see you shoot me now.”
He could hear the laser mount’s gearing grind painfully, but the plug stayed jammed in the socket and the laser just vibrated slightly, like a horse trying to shake off an annoying fly.
Satisfied that he was safe for the moment, Gaeta scrabbled on his hands and knees back to the access hatch in the center of the roof. The lander’s roof was covered with slick black snow and it was getting rapidly thicker. As he started to push the accumulating tholins with his gloved hands, trying to clear the area where he’d dropped the comm link with Alpha’s central computer, he thought about his childhood in Los Angeles and how much he’d wanted to play in the snow when he was a kid.
“What are you doing?” von Helmholtz demanded sharply. “Get to the escape pod at once!”
“Got a job to do first, Fritz,” he said. And he clicked off his communications link.
He brushed more of the black snow off the roof. There! He found the comm line, still connected to the computer’s access panel. Picking up the loose end, Gaeta plugged it into his suit.
He was panting. Can’t be exertion, he thought. Air level’s getting low.
“Okay, computer,” he said, surprised that his throat felt raspy, “listen to me.”