Russovsky compressed out of the air, grit and debris rushing together with a sharp hiss. The shape's eyes opened and shook a dusty head. The husks and shells of the dead hathol and firten puffed away from a gleaming black skinsuit. Russovsky wiped her cheek, hand coming away covered with a glittering gray stain. She looked around the empty shell of a building.
Gone. He is gone. Russovsky considered her memories, finding them filled with moments of parting. In some of the vignettes there were tears, impassioned words, something she remembered as ‹loss| sorrowlonging›. She did not think these last two humans had lingered, delaying their departure, hoping to squeeze a few more seconds from the grasp of implacable time. They had moved with admirable efficiency. They had taken her Gagarin away.
Now there was something disorderly in her cold, perfect thoughts. The aircraft, the battered old Midge, held meaning – something tantalizing at the edge of comprehension. She wished the ultralight would return. Russovsky raised her hands, feeling the echo, the vibration of its presence. The machine had stood here, just so, wheels pressing against the concrete. Minute indentations had been left in the aggregate. Tiny flakes of rubberlike material from the wheels lay on the floor. Even the air itself, troubled by the wind as it was, had not yet forgotten the shapes of the wings, the body, the landing gear.
A shadow remained, still visible to her eyes in the chaos boiling behind the individual molecules of gas in the air. An absence where the Gagarin should stand. Something in her revolted at the void, pressed her to summon forth creation from nothingness, to fill an emptiness in the hangar which echoed dissonantly with her colorless memories.
Russovsky spread her hands and wind howled in the chamber. A dark yellow cloud roared in from outside, borne around her by billowing, violent zephyrs. Sand and gravel and dust flooded in, caught up in a standing tornado roaring and shrieking in the cavity. The roof groaned and shook, panels cracking away. All three walls shivered and the concrete floor splintered and cracked and crushed into more dust and grit.
The shape closed her hands. There was a thrumming whoomp and the air congealed.
When Russovsky dropped her hands, the Gagarin stood before her, wings retracted, metal struts gleaming with a newly manufactured shine. Even the wheels were glossy black. The shape paced around to the side and opened the pilot's door.
These memories, these motions seemed proper – they seemed right – and Russovsky wondered when a flush of pleasure would fill her heart, rising in her breast like the dawn wind. She settled into the seat. The display before her was cold and dark. Slender fingers flipped a series of switches on the ceiling panel. The right hand flexed the stick, checking the resistance and response of the control surfaces. She rolled her shoulders back and forth, memories flushing with strength.
The display did not change. The engines did not ignite. There was no familiar chuckling hiss of hydrogen filling the fuel lines. Russovsky moved her hand across the panel again. Nothing. The machine did not stir to life, did not shiver awake to answer her will.
Is this disappointment? The memories held many examples, though they were distant and cold, untouchable. Sealed away behind layers of glassite. The machine does not work. There is no…fuel.
Russovsky scrutinized the memories with more care. A universe of mechanical systems was revealed, awareness of thousands of substances and chemical processes was uncovered. And with them, the slow, growing conclusion the human had not known enough about the intricacies of their manufacture to allow Russovsky – as she now stood – to replicate them, even with a firm grasp of molecular control.
Again, an emptiness where memory suggested there would be ‹furyragedespair›.
There was something inside the human which was not in the hathol, a brilliant unique spark which could not be ‹consumedknownunderstood›. Russovsky thought, considered and decided this was the emptiness she felt within. Something lacking which made even the carefully hoarded memories of the human Russovsky, as tightly held as Gretchen's children splashing in the pool, seem flat and lifeless. I am like the hathol and the firten, she thought sadly, only a mechanical process of electrons and chemical reactions.
Russovsky climbed out of the aircraft and walked to the hangar door. The sun was still high in the sky, but she turned and paced down to the edge of the landing field. Long blond hair luffed in the wind as she raised a seamed, weathered face to the sky. Far above, far away now, there was a shining bright speck. A gleam of metal and composite spiraling higher and higher into the black heavens.
Tendrils of hair began to break down, smashed by the radiation flooding from the blazing disk blazing in the west. Then the skinsuit turned gray and began to crack. The constant wind abraded Russovsky, chipping away at tools, djellaba, the threads of the kaffiyeh. Slowly, she eroded, eyes still raised to the slowly dimming spark high above.
Aboard the Turan
Smoke curdled in the air, seeping back into the space blown clear by the Webley's concussive blast. Thrown flat on the deck, Hadeishi's combat armor sizzled with waste heat from the impact of the flechettes. Four hand-size blotches glowed cherry-red on his breast and side.
Alarms continued to honk in the distance. All three corridors had been sealed off by the pressure doors. A half-heard, half-felt vibration was absent from the usual run of background noise aboard ship. The air circulators had shut down when environmental override isolated the level.
Among the uneasy crowd of his men, Ketcham slowly lowered the pistol. The blowback mechanism had already reloaded the firing chamber. The riggers at his side started to inch forward, emboldened by the sight of the stricken black-armored figure.
"Wait." Ketcham's basso voice carried easily in the smoky, troubled air. "He might not -"
Hadeishi's head moved. The suit speaker, mostly destroyed by the impact, made a distorted growling sound, then the control fabric adapted to the damage. "Uhhhh… that hurts."
The chu-sa levered himself up from the ground, the mirrored faceplate of his visor reflecting the crewmen shrinking back from his movement. Ketcham raised and sighted the gun again, his face blank with surprise. The refinery captain seemed equally shocked at having shot Hadeishi and at the chu-sa surviving the blast.
"There is no quarrel between us, Captain Ketcham." Hadeishi's voice was slurred and tinged with a buzzing edge of feedback. He was having trouble breathing. He wondered how many ribs he'd broken. The Nisei braced himself with both hands and stood up, swaying slightly. "I know what Fleet did to you, but I am not the Admiralty or the promotions board. I'm just a ship captain, as you were. All I want to do is talk."
"About what?" Ketcham bit out the words, his blood pressure rising again at the very mention of the word "Fleet." He usually accounted himself a patient, reasonable man, but the very sight of the Nisei's black combat suit inspired stomach-churning hate. But the absolute, unflappable confidence of the man standing in the middle of the passageway gave him pause. Unless he was insane, no officer – much less a commander – was going to put himself in harm's way like this, not without an enormously good reason.
Hadeishi gingerly prodded the impact points on his armor. Hissing cherry-red slivers of metal poked from the outer layer. A heat haze trembled around them. He decided they were better left alone. "Captain, you should put on a breather mask."
Without the vents going, the smoke from the RSM rounds was beginning to percolate down the corridor. Most of the miners already looked a little green around the gills. Ketcham noticed the danger and backed up, waving his men back. They scrambled down the hallway in a confused mass, pushing and shoving each other.