Robert Reed: Marrow

The bridge’s machinery was failing. A safe-mode took Virtue racing downward, trying to save the precious car.

Miocene had delayed her son just enough.

Washen stared at Till, watching an impossible thought play itself out on that appealing face. How could this happen? What great purpose did it serve? In a voice meant for someone else, Till asked, “Now what do I do?”

If there was a reply, Washen didn’t hear it.

But something must have been heard, or at least thought. Because without hesitation, Till flung himself into the open door, and a moment later, the door closed and the bridge jerked sideways one last time, it and the Spine shattering just beneath the camp’s diamond blister, plunging sideways toward the burning face of Marrow.

Eventually the liquid hydrogen would fall.

Captain spoke about making plans. About taking cover, or perhaps finding a car that might survive the storm. But Washen didn’t take part in the plan-making, occupying herself by sitting with her legs crossed, watching nothing but the slow patient turning of her clock’s little hands.

Asaleen thought she was crazy.

Again, to himself, Locke spoke comfortably about death’s embrace.

Promise, then Dream, tried to thank Washen for pulling them off Marrow. “We never thought we’d be anywhere else again,” they confessed. “And you did your best.”

Even Golden joined them, offering his weapon in surrender, then spending the next few minutes watching Marrow boil and explode.

Finally, Washen closed her clock.

And with a nonchalant importance, she rose.

Everyone watched as she stepped out into the open and looked up. But wasn’t it too soon for the cold rain? Then they saw her waving at something overhead, and every captain and both of the Waywards looked up together, watching in stunned silence while a fleet of whale-shaped vessels began to slow, making ready for a hard landing.

Pamir was first to step out.

Perri and ten armed harum-scarums followed.

Aasleen immediately recognized Pamirs craggy face, and she laughed, and she said, “What is this? Don’t you know there’s a flood coming?”

Pamir lifted his eyebrows, grinning. Then he took his first good look at Marrow.

“Oh, I turned off that flood.” he remarked in a casual voice. “Long ago,” he said. “A lake of hydrogen inside that big long tube of vacuum… well, it evaporates as it falls. Believe me, we swam through what’s left of it, and we probably won’t get two drops here.”

Sounding insulted, Dream asked Washen, “What about your threat? About sending down that killing flood?”

“I’m not that cruel,” Washen replied. “I don’t murder helpless worlds.”

Pamir shook his head and threw a long arm around Washen, pulling her close. “You wouldn’t have?”

“I just like to tease worlds now and again,” she added, smiling and weeping in the same instant, thinking that never in her long, strange life had she ever felt so tired…

Each of my engines screams and spits fire, and those titanic, withering energies translate into the gentlest of nudges. I hear nothing but a quiet coaxing voice trying to whisper me nearer to that swollen, dying sun. And I obey the voice. I obey even when I foresee a collision with its tenuous atmosphere. Even as I feel pricks and little deaths within my body, I obey the simple laws of motion and force and inertia, dipping nearer to the sun, and nearer… a bracing, wondrous fear taking hold of me…

An engine dies.

Then, two others.

Deep inside me, a series of hard bright explosions collapse fuel lines and fuse screaming pumps. The surviving engines continue to burn, but softer now. The gentle nudge has diminished to a gentle breath from behind and beside me.

But still, I fall toward the sun.

My fear loses its wonder.

Gradually and thoroughly, a wild panic seizes me.

With a sudden clarity, I watch the great war against my engines. Every act of violence is too small to matter, or slightly misplaced, or simply ill-timed. The cumulative effects are slow to gather, hard to perceive. Finally, in agony, I rally myself trying to come to the aid of my companions.

Perhaps in tiny ways, I am felt. Heard. Believed.

A Remora considers a thousand valves, and as I whisper my advice, she closes the only valve that does lasting good.

A magnetic bottle, billions of years old and never ill, fails abruptly, at the best possible moment, spewing shards of anti-iron into a spiking facility working at full throttle.

Human engineers assassinate AIs who won’t listen to reason, then replace the machines at their posts.

Debris clogs a minor fuel line.

Harum-scarums attack my engines as if their brilliant fire and light are personal affronts to them.

One stubborn engine is tilted in the opposite direction, then fed all of the fuel that it can possibly consume.

And finally, the leech habitat is torn from the fuel tank’s ceiling, then shoved crosswise into the gaping throat of an enormous fuel line…

Two more engines sputter, good as dead.

But still I can nearly taste the sun, feeling its heat and breath against my great skin… and a moon-sized lump of iron and nickel plunges into my side, cutting deep but leaving me intact… lending just enough momentum to keep me out here… to make me miss the sun by what, when I consider the vast distances that I have covered, is nothing…

I miss by nothing.

And a little later, still celebrating my very good fortune, I pass near a tiny and black and enormously massive something… and again, my trajectory changes… and peering past the curtain of stars and whirling planets. I can see where I will be going next…

Blackness, again.

The sunless nothing, again.

And in a strange, almost unexpected fashion, I realize this is where I want to be…feeling as though I am happily falling toward home again…

“Try talking.”

“Hello?” said a sloppy, slow voice.

“Sorry. It’s still too early, madam. I’m well aware. But you deserve to know what’s happened, and what’s happening now, and what you can expect when you get legs again. And a real voice. Not sounds made by a mechanical box.”

“Pamir?” she squeaked.

“Yes, madam.”

“Am I… alive, still…?”

“We found your remains, and the other captains’, too. Most of them, at least.” Pamir nodded, even though the patient couldn’t see him. “Your heads were stacked inside one of your little rooms. Waiting for trial, I suppose. If Miocene had had her way…”

“Where’s Miocene?”

“Your best friend? Your favorite and most trusted colleague?” He allowed himself a harsh laugh, then admitted, “Miocene died. And let’s just leave it there for now. Explanations can wait a few days.”

“My ship?”

“Battered, but recovering. Madam.” Silence.

“Her mutiny managed to fail,” he promised. “There are pockets of resistance. Gangs and loners, and that’s about it. There’s no way to bring up reinforcements now.”

“Who… who do I thank…?”

Pamir offered silence.

“You?” she asked.

Again, silence.

Finally, betraying a stew of emotions, she said, “Thank you, Pamir.”

“And Washen, too.”

A confused sound rose up from the box. Then the Master muttered, “I guess I don’t understand very much. Do I?”

“Barely anything. Madam.”

A pause. Then, “Who else do I thank?”

“The Remoras,” he said.’And the harum-scarums. With help from another hundred species, plus a few million machine intelligences, too.”