Greg Egan - The Eternal Flame

How long could someone survive without cooling? Tamara shuddered, trying to remain hopeful. She tied their cooling bags together, then took a moment to get her bearings. They were spinning now, and they’d lost the beam, but it wouldn’t be hard to navigate back to the mountain by sight alone.

She pressed her helmet against the woman’s. “You’re safe now,” she promised her. “Just rest if you like. There’s no hurry to wake.”

Had the woman used up her air jet’s tank, then resorted to the cooling air as a substitute? But then, why was the jet gone entirely? The situation only made sense if there’d been no jet in the first place. The woman had fallen into the void with nothing to help her. She’d improvised with the bag’s air canister and managed to cancel out some of her velocity, but when she’d lost consciousness the canister had escaped from her hands.

Tamara put the mystery aside and concentrated on reducing their spin. Once the stars were no longer reeling around her, she took sight of the mountain’s peak and fired the jet, starting them on their way home.

Ada met them by the airlock.

“How is she?” she asked Tamara.

“Still not conscious.” Tamara began untying the safety rope that had bound them together. “Any reports yet? Of people gone missing?”

“No.” Ada bent down and helped remove the woman’s helmet. “I think I know her,” she declared in surprise.

“Would she have been on fire watch?”

Ada said, “I doubt it.”

The woman began to stir. Her eyes were still closed, but she started flailing her arms weakly.

Tamara was overjoyed. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Do you remember what happened? Where did you fall from?”

The woman didn’t answer.

Ada said, “We should contact her co. We should contact Macario.”

41

Carla looked up at the starlit mountain stretched out above the fire-watch platform. The ladder she’d just descended and the platform’s bulky support ropes converged in the distance into a single slender wisp. From this vantage, an alert watcher could hardly miss a flash of orthogonal matter against the rock’s muted tones, and even a lamp carried out onto the slopes would be sure to catch the eye. But any fine detail in this sweeping panorama that brought no light of its own to the scene would probably be lost in the gloom. A small team working by starlight might well come and go unnoticed, right under the gaze of the most vigilant observer.

Tamara nudged her and handed her the spyglass, then showed her where to look. Carla swept her magnified gaze back and forth several times before finally seeing it: a tent—or hammock—suspended from the rock, a circle of fabric attached at a few points on its rim, sagging down in the middle. On close inspection the camouflage pattern dyed into the fabric looked surprisingly crude—but she’d run the spyglass over the same spot twice without noticing a thing. When she’d first heard Macaria’s account of the hideaway it had sounded preposterous, but now she had to admit that the kidnappers had merely been unlucky. If one of their captives hadn’t escaped, they might have remained undetected.

She couldn’t see any hint of movement in the tent, but if Carlo was under guard he’d be wise to lie meekly still. Macaria had never heard his voice in this airless prison, but when she’d managed to tear open her own confining sack she’d glimpsed another just like it before she’d slipped out past the edge of the tent and fallen into the void.

With impressive—albeit nearly fatal—self-discipline, Macaria hadn’t even tried to detach the air tank from her cooling bag until the spin of the Peerless had put her out of her captors’ line of sight—and if she’d continued in free fall, she would have been too distant to be seen with the naked eye when the mountain came full circle. It was possible that the kidnappers believed she was dead and that her corpse had drifted away undetected. Then again, the mere fact of her escape was sure to have put them on edge.

Carla passed the spyglass to Patrizia and helped her aim it toward the tent, silently thanking Silvano for sending most of the fire watch on a search of the mountain’s interior. If Ada and Tamara had had to explain themselves in order to get access to the platform, they might as well have put out a bulletin describing Macaria’s rescue and listing all the options for their next move.

Under threat of death, Macaria had told the kidnappers where she’d hidden her copies of the tapes, but she’d had no way of knowing whether Carlo had done the same. Would they have released her in the end, if she hadn’t escaped? Perhaps the kidnappers had been waiting for the vote, waiting to get a sense of how much support they had among the travelers, before weighing up their options for that final step. Carla tried to take some comfort from their hesitation. However strong their commitment to their cause, and however fearful they were of being punished, killing another person could not come easily to anyone.

Macaria, Macario and Ada were waiting for them back in the observatory’s office, having already made their own reconnaissance trip.

Tamara said, “The six of us are enough. We can do this.”

Patrizia glanced at Carla, then protested, “Surely if we take this to the Council, they’ll appoint police—”

“Word would get out,” Ada said flatly. “We can’t risk telling anyone else.” They had even kept Amanda in the dark, knowing that their enemies were likely to be watching her closely.

“I counted six attachment points for the tent,” Tamara said. “Probably hardstone stakes driven into the rock, but we wouldn’t need to pull them out, we could just cut the fabric away around them. Do all six at once, and everything spills. Then if we let ourselves drop alongside the tent, one of us is sure to be able to snatch up Carlo. Macaria thinks the guards will have air jets, but even if they don’t there’s likely to be only one or two—and I’m prepared to take spares to offer them, if they’re needed. So if this all goes smoothly, no one gets hurt and Carlo comes home safely.”

Carla tried to analyze the scenario objectively, even as she pictured Carlo free-falling into the void. If the guards were caught by surprise this way, they were unlikely to have a chance to harm him. Outnumbered, but not trapped, their wisest move would be to flee rather than take any kind of stand.

“How do we get so close, undetected?” she asked.

“They can’t have lookouts everywhere,” Tamara replied. “Starting from here, we go straight out onto the surface, and then we travel as far as we can while sticking to the slope. The guide rails around this airlock won’t take us all the way to the tent, so we’ll make the last step with air jets. They’ll be expecting someone coming the easy way, following the rails from their own nearest airlock; they won’t be gazing out at the stars, searching for silhouettes. And if we come in from on high as fast as we can, they won’t have much chance to see us and react, whichever way they’re looking.”

“Coming to a halt against the surface isn’t an easy maneuver,” Carla pointed out.

“Is there anyone here who didn’t pass safety training for the fire watch?” Ada inquired.

Nobody owned up to that. It was true that the safety exercises included a soft landing on the spinning slope—using an air jet to hold yourself in place long enough to get a handhold on a guide rail—but avoiding an audible thud against the rock hadn’t been part of the assessment criteria.

Carla looked around the room, trying to judge what the response would be if she asked Tamara to heed her wishes and call off the rescue. The kidnappers hadn’t harmed Macaria, even after she’d given them the tapes and was of no further use to them. If this raid went badly, anything could happen.