Gubber looked up into the sky. Comet Grieg was not visible from here, but there was more to see than that. This was the last they would see of Hades as it had been. By the time they all emerged, Hades would stand on a new world, on a new Inferno, a world that would be changed beyond all recognition, a world in the act of evolving toward new hope—or collapsing altogether.
“Come along, Tonya,” Gubber said to her. “It’s time to go.”
Tonya followed him down into the shelter. Gubber led the way, wondering what the new world of Inferno would be like.
WITH ONE FINAL effort, Caliban hauled the cargo roller up out of the water. It had taken far longer than he had expected to pull the clumsy thing across the lake bed. Then he popped the seal clamps and threw back the lid. Simcor Beddle scrambled out of the roller far more eagerly than he had climbed in, his breath coming in racking gasps that seemed to convulse his whole body. Perhaps the breathing mask had been low on air. Perhaps Beddle was claustrophobic. Perhaps he was in such appallingly poor shape that merely climbing out of the roller exhausted him. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now, except getting away. The only question was how.
Caliban was by no means certain that the aircar he had stolen from the Ironhead motor pool had enough speed to get them clear of the impact area in time. They would have to be several hundred, if not thousand, kilometers clear of the impact zone before they were safe. Even then, they would have to land and find some sort of shelter. Caliban had no desire to pilot an aircar while a massive supersonic shockwave was tearing through the sky. Anything in the air that was not torn apart would undoubtedly lose control and crash. So how to—
“Sweet burning stars!” Beddle cried out. Caliban looked at him, and saw that he was looking straight up, into the early night sky.
Caliban looked up as well—and found himself torn between absolute wonder and utter terror. There it was, directly overhead: the first, the largest fragment, a fat dot of light growing visibly larger even as he watched. And there, behind it, like beads on a string, haloed in a faint nimbus of dust, the other fragments, trailing off like beads on a string toward the north. There was a flash of light, and Caliban could see the farthest-off fragment break into two as another set of splitting charges went off.
Time was not short. Time was gone. And there was no way to escape before those wondrous terrors in the sky came down.
But wait a moment. Prospero. Prospero had to have been planning to cut it nearly this close. He would have stayed until the last possible moment, in order to gloat over his victim, and to make certain that Beddle had no chance at all to escape.
Prospero’s aircar. He would have flown in on something that would give him a chance to escape. “Come on,” he said to Beddle, and grabbed him, none too gently, by the collar.
He hurried Beddle along and practically threw him into Prospero’s aircar. It was a small, trim, two-seater job. Caliban sat down at the pilot’s controls—and suddenly understood how Prospero had planned to get away. This aircar was capable of reaching orbit.
“Strap yourself in,” Caliban said as he powered up the craft.
Beddle fumbled with the straps, and had to try two or three times before he managed to get the buckles to hook up. Perhaps it was the first time Beddle had ever put on his own seatbelt. “Ready,” the human said nervously.
Caliban made no reply. He brought the aircar up to hover power, taxied it out from under the camouflaged roof of the hangar, and kept moving forward until they were over the lake itself, the hover effect throwing up a shimmering mist of water that enveloped the car. Caliban lifted the car just enough higher so as to get above the hover mist, and look about at the landscape that was about to die. In a few minutes, all of this would be erased for all time. He and Simcor Beddle would be the last beings ever to look upon it.
Caliban lingered a moment longer, and moved the throttle forward, pointing the nose of the aircar up and to the east.
The east, thought Caliban as he guided the aircar toward the hope of safety. East. Home of the dawn, and new beginnings. He wondered if he would live long enough to see another sunrise.
“ALL FRAGMENTS ON course,” Unit Dum announced. “All fragments are descending well within their intended parameters. The operation is proceeding according to plan. Impact of the first fragment in five minutes, twenty-two seconds.”
Fredda Leving felt her heart pounding, her mouth going dry. They were going to do it. They were actually going to do it. This mad idea had moved from improbable theory to undeniable fact. They were about to drop a comet on their own world. She found herself amazed by the boldness, the courage, the desperate willingness to try something—anything—in order to save the planet. It was not the sort of action the universe expected out of the Spacers. It was not the sort of thing Spacers would ever do.
And it suddenly occurred to Fredda that perhaps they were not Spacers anymore. The world of Inferno was about to change beyond recognition. Perhaps the people of that world were going to change as well.
And that thought inspired a most un-Spacerlike reaction in Fredda. Spacers were supposed to be cautious, conservative, and frightened of change. But the thought of change did not scare Fredda. It excited her. She was impatient for it. She glanced at the countdown clock and decided she wanted the next five minutes and ten seconds to pass as quickly as possible.
She couldn’t wait for the future to get there.
DOWN THEY CAME, streaking in toward the planet at impossible speed. Twelve of them, moving in unison, in concert, like beads on a string, spread out on a north-south line, moving through the dark and the silence and their destiny.
The first fragment reached the upper limit of the atmosphere, and suddenly the time for dark and silence was over. The comet fragment struck the upper air at close to double orbital velocity, and all at once the forward surface of the fragment was aglow with the fires of immolation. Down thundered the massive piece of sky, a blazing torch that tore a hole in the atmosphere, smashing a column of superheated air out of its way as it hurtled toward the ground.
At the speeds the fragment was traveling, it took all of ten seconds for it to traverse the atmosphere. But before it could strike the ground, the second fragment slammed into the atmosphere, ramming through the massive shock wave produced by the first. The second fragment screamed groundward at a slightly more oblique angle, and thus had further to move through thicker air. The first fragment struck the ground just as the second was midway through its atmospheric transit, and just as the third was striking upper air.
Atmospheric contact had induced a massive energy release of light and heat, but the violence of hard-surface impact made what had come before seem utterly trivial by comparison. The first fragment slammed into the ground with incredible force, smashing the surface out of existence as it blasted apart into a million, a billion pieces, shards of rock and ice and steam dust roaring outward at supersonic velocity.
The second fragment struck with equal destructiveness, and the third, and the fourth, one after another, twelve massive hammers wielded by some forgotten god of war. It was a rain of stone and ice and fire that marched steadily north across Terra Grande from the shores of the Southern Ocean to the borderlands of the Polar Depression.