The Collapsium (36 page)

Deliah’s eyes widened, drawn upward to something above and behind Bruno. “Look!” she said.

He turned, and immediately regretted the wave of nausea this sudden movement brought. But he saw what she was pointing at: a little dome of blue at the bottom edge of the window, with three brightish pinpoints hovering above it. Uranus and its moons? The dome climbed and grew in the view; in half a minute, the whole planet would be visible.

He reached out to give Muddy’s leg a shake. “Wake up. Wake up! You’ll want to see this. At least, I think you will …”

Muddy, who was fully reclined in his couch, groggily opened his eyes. “What? What’s that? Oh. Mmm. You’re very kind to wake me, Lordship, but actually, I’ve seen planets before.” And with that he turned away and fell back into stuporous sleep.

Impressive views have a way of saturating the mind; the
planet was visible for a good twenty minutes, but never so large or close as that first stunning glimpse. And really, the planet didn’t have any features to speak of, just a uniform, powder-green haze sinking down for thousands upon thousands of kilometers. The world was huge, able to contain a dozen Earths, but it shrank quickly, becoming a little ball and finally a bright green speck before disappearing down the other side of the window.

An hour and a half later, they crossed the orbit of Saturn, which of course was completely uneventful since the planet was nowhere nearby. An hour after that, they passed Jupiter’s similarly empty orbit. Against the starscape soon afterward, they spotted a few bright, fast-moving specks that proved, under the enhancement of wellstone telescopes, to be asteroids. That was good for a few minutes’ distraction, in the hour and a half it took them to reach the orbit of Mars.

Then the pace of things started to pick up. The ship was slowing down dramatically, now cruising at barely an eighth of its thirty-thousand-kilometer-per-second peak velocity, but the inner planets were a
lot
closer together than their outer cousins. Earth was barely twenty minutes beyond the Red
Planet, and
Sabadell-Andorra
had started picking up random bits of radio noise. Nothing useful—just data bursts and occasional, panicky voices—but it made clear that they’d reentered civilization, and that civilization, though deprived of both its communication networks and the more primitive means of physical travel, nonetheless still had some fight in it.

They encountered their share of gravitational anomalies, too: Iscog fragments and free-floating neubles ejected from some industrial site somewhere. Their course jinked around in a way that worried Bruno. Finding the sun was not too difficult, but finding Tamra’s little di-clad neutronium work platform in the sun’s glare might very well be. Especially if their own course was misplotted. It wasn’t like they could ping the Iscog for their precise location. These thoughts made him impatient.

Still, the view above them was naught but stars, the sun invisible below their feet, the planets hidden by distance and geometry. Even civilization was large, consisting mostly of empty space. Even an inertialess grappleship needed some time to cross through. To reach the orbit of Venus took them another twelve minutes, by which time they’d shed 95% of their velocity and were rapidly shedding the rest. Mercury was deep in the sun’s gravitational sink, farther from Venus than Earth was. They’d need thirty-six minutes more to reach it. From there, though, it should only be a few more minutes to reach the platform where Tamra and her entourage supposedly awaited rescue. Assuming their course was proper …

Once again, Bruno shook Muddy awake.

Once again, Muddy responded groggily and tried to go back to sleep.

“Oh, no, no,” Bruno said this time. “I don’t know what you took, or how much, but I’ll wager it wasn’t what
I’d
picked for you. So okay, you’ve had a little break from yourself, but you get up and fly this ship now, Declarant-Philander; you’ve yet to teach me how to do it myself. Go on, take something to wake up if you like, but we need you at the controls.”

“Hmmpf,” Muddy replied, opening bloodshot eyes to peer at him. “Where are we?”

“Just sunward of Venus. We’ve just about half an hour to go, and you’ll need to start scanning for Tamra’s platform.”

“Hmmpf,” Muddy said again, though in a livelier, more interested way. “That far, are we? Yes, I s-s-suppose I
should
be getting up, despite all the misery that entails. I can take a pill, you say?”

“Muddy, so long as you’re awake and alert you can take any damned thing you please. We’ll sort your problems out later, right?”

“All right, yes.”

He struggled out of his couch, fell squarely atop a mewling Hugo, and made his way to the fax machine, which insisted on giving him a chilled electrolyte solution before dispensing any medication. From the look on Muddy’s face, it tasted none too wonderful.

“All right?” Bruno asked, when Muddy finally settled back down into his couch.

“Please, if you would, wait for the drugs to take effect.” Muddy’s voice was thick and slow.

“I’ll do no such thing. Begin scanning, please.”

“Well, aye, Your Lordship.”

“You’ve learned sarcasm in your years away.”

“And you’ve learned to be a prick. Beginning scan, sir. The ship is perfectly capable of doing this by itself, you know. Navigation and helm control, too. The instrument panel is just for fun, as I’m sure you’ve probably guessed. Well, it does make a
few
things easier—whoa. Scan complete; I’ve found a platform. Would you like a telescopic image?”

“Please.”

A holographic window appeared in the brick wall beside Bruno’s head. On it, he could clearly see a thin disc of opaque but gloriously shiny white. Di-clad neutronium, yes, spinning slowly in the sunlight. And, pinned to the bottom of the disc as if glued there, the somewhat larger shape of a police cruiser, whose battered hull had apparently reverted to native iron, its wellstone sheathing dead or inactivated.

“Is the dome intact?” Bruno asked rhetorically. The clear
dome that held in the platform’s air was pointed away from them at the moment, pointed straight down at the full fires of the sun.

“Looks like someone
did
get to them,” Deliah observed. “It must have been a hell of a trip.”

“And an unfortunate one,” Bruno said. “It doesn’t look as though that cruiser set down there peacefully. Look at that hull: the bending, the stress ripples. Do you see any lights on it?”

“I’m compensating for sunlight,” Muddy volunteered. “We’re looking almost straight down. There may be lights that are simply drowned out. But I’m doubtful—that iron looks partly melted to me.”

“Indeed,” Bruno said. “Any signs of air leakage?”

Muddy checked. “No, sir. No signs of air at all, not even traces in the immediate vicinity.”

“They might have spacesuits on,” Deliah said.

“There’d still be traces,” Muddy sniffed. “That hull’s been devoid of life for at least a day. Probably longer. The air blew out and crystallized, and the s-s-solar wind has carried away the evidence.”

“Well, then,” Bruno said. “Rest in peace, brave men and women of the Royal Constabulary. Here’s yet another tragedy to lay at the feet of Marlon Sykes.”

Deliah pointed. “Here comes the dome. It looks intact!”

The platform’s slow rotation was turning the shipwreck back down to face the punishing sunlight, and turning the dome—the only place that might yet harbor survivors—toward the cold blackness of space. Bruno’s heart sank. Intact or no, the dome’s contents would undergo brutal thermal cycles, heating up probably to several hundred degrees at peak, and then bleeding it all away again, bottoming out probably well below freezing. Living tissue did, of course, have its compensating mechanisms, its exothermic metabolism and its evaporative cooling, its circulatory system to refresh chilled or overheated tissues with milder fluids from the body’s interior. Ironically, human beings stood up to such punishment
better than many inanimate objects, better even than the clothing and shoes that should nominally be protecting them. Indeed, the Queen and her people had allegedly survived at least six revolutions of the platform before Deliah had lost contact with them. But
two weeks
? It seemed impossible that even the hardiest of humans could survive
that
.

Could the neutronium’s enormous mass serve as a heat sink? No, of course not—it had been basking out here in full sunlight for years! Its temperature would have equalized long ago, probably to something uncomfortably warm. Well, at least diamond was a good thermal conductor—it
would
pull heat from the sunward face, and radiate it away on the opposite side, in the cold shadows. That might help, though just how much …

As the platform continued to turn, its habitable side swung slowly into view, and Bruno could see—to his incalculable relief—that beneath the diamond dome were a handful of loose, soft-looking silver cones, like little tents made of reflective fabric.

“What’s inside those?” he demanded, pointing at them on the display. “Is anyone alive?”

“I’m not able to tell,” Muddy answered gruffly, with no real sign of relief or concern in his voice. This was one of his symptoms—apathy regarding anyone but himself and Bruno, who still
was
himself in some very meaningful ways. But apathy even about Her Majesty?

Bruno waved impatient hands. “They’re what, sheets of impervium cloth?”

“Bunkerlite, I think, or some near equivalent. Super-reflectors, anyway.”

“They must have gotten their fax machine working,” Deliah said, and at least the relief was evident in
her
voice.

“So they could be alive,” Bruno dared to say. “
Sabadell-Andorra
, please attempt to establish radio contact. Muddy, are we on course to arrive there?”

“Nearly,” Muddy said. “We’ll need a minor adjustment. I’m moving the grapple anchor to Venus …”

“Not the inhabited areas, surely?”

“Uh, checking. No. Not the inhabited areas.”

“Still illegal,” Deliah noted.

The ship bucked around them; if they hadn’t been strapped to their couches, the companions would all have tumbled like tenpins.

“Now we are on course,” Muddy said. “Arrival in twenty minutes. There’s a problem, though—our course intercepts a loose fragment of Ring Collapsiter. What happens if that contacts the ertial shield?”

“Oh, I’m not certain,” Bruno admitted. “And I doubt very much that we want to find out. But we
do
have to pass this way. For my comfort, let’s miss this thing by at least a kilometer.”

“Aye, Lordship.” Muddy said. Then, “Unfortunately, we appear to be headed directly for it. We’ll miss by meters, if at all.”

“Heavens! Is there anything to hook to for a plane change? North or south, it doesn’t matter; we just need to get some small distance between ourselves and the plane of the Ring Collapsiter.”

“Oh, sir. No. We’ve spent the last sixteen hours pulling ourselves ever more precisely
into
that plane, and no, there isn’t anything near at hand we can grapple to, to pull us out of it again.”

“The poles of Venus, perhaps?”

Muddy burst into tears. “Alas, no! We have to strike our targets with a nearly perpendicular beam. Venus itself is out of our plane, but not
enough
out of it. We could attach to its equator, and given enough time … Pointless. We haven’t enough time.”

“Blast. Can we
stop
?”

“Not quickly enough, sir.” Muddy wiped at his tears—a futile gesture, since the flow of fresh ones hadn’t abated. “Remember, we’re at full deceleration already. Oblivion, what a miserable ass I am. What a perfect servant of Declarant Sykes. I’ve killed you at last, sir, within reach of your goal.”

“Oh, nonsense. Everyone makes mistakes. You’ve
my
distracted brain to do your thinking with, and that’s a burden I wouldn’t wish on Sykes himself. Time to impact?”

“Um, seventeen minutes.”

“Enough time to think of something. How about your emergency propulsion system? The compressed oxygen apparatus?”

Muddy brightened. “I’d all but forgotten about that. Yes! What a thought, that something of my design should prove useful.” He hammered a series of calculations into the interfaces before him. “There is enough time, yes. It’s very low thrust, in comparison with our present velocity, but if we activate it immediately, we’ll miss the collapsium by half a kilometer. Is that enough?”

Bruno tried to think of some way to confirm it, and finally—to his deep chagrin—was forced to shrug. “I don’t know, Muddy. I guess it’ll have to be.”

Bruno sweated some as the wayward fragment approached
. He pulled up images of it on a gravitational anomaly scanner; a thin loop of collapsium a thousand kilometers long. It should have appeared arrow-straight, just the tiniest slice of a huge circle stretching clear around the sun, but the piece had begun to pull in on itself, to twist, to curl. It seemed to be part of a ring much smaller than the collapsiter itself, one that might fit around the equator of Earth’s moon, or even a medium-sized asteroid. It was kinked in places, too, its structural rigidity slowly failing. In another few weeks it would probably curl enough to double back on itself, with probably calamitous results. Did it
have
a few weeks? He checked its trajectory and found it was indeed in a rather sedate solar orbit, with perihelion nearly a million kilometers above the chromopause. An orbit that might continue indefinitely, in the absence of disturbing influences.

There
were
influences, though; the nearby construction platform, for one. And his sensors picked up all sorts of other, indistinct mass concentrations at the edges of his detection range. No doubt there were a thousand other fragments just
like this one, caroming about in the limited space inside Mercury’s orbit. Eventually, this fragment would run afoul of one of those others, and its orbit would ratchet upward or downward. Eventually, one of them would surely fall straight in. There could be no doubt of that.