David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

—We can dispose of them.—

“How?”

—Same as we do for you, once things settle down. Easy. Launchers all built, no big labor needed now. We send you all to sleep slots.—

Virginia, Lani, Jeffers—they all stared at him, listening, saying nothing. He had led them for years, for billions of miles, to come to this—a somber, stupid Waterloo. Outflanked. Outsmarted.

And to grind it in, Sergeov cackled dryly and said, —Comes Earth, then we decide on who to wake up. You make trouble now, maybe you never come out of slots? Eh?—

They had been the worst two days of her life. They seemed to stretch back for millennia, back to sunny bright days when Saul had lived, and love had carried her forward of its own momentum, overriding difficulties, smoothing over the furrowed surface of a life that was, when she managed to think of it, perpetually sharp and desperate and tight-stretched.

Saul’s contorted body had imbedded its image in her mind, a silent, grotesque rebuke. He had looked so strange, so eerily different in death, as if he were another person. Peaceful, despite his wounds. Younger.

So many struggles…

If she had been closer, had thought faster, run harder—

No. Stop that . She knew this was a deadly spiral, that nothing could come of an endless cycle of guilt and pain.

But such easy realizations did not free her. She sat amid the currents of anger and frantic talk and raw emotion…and clasped her hands, rubbing them incessantly, unable to move or think or even let the upwelling grief spill out into tears.

It was useless, anything she did, so pointless and stupid. She did not care if she sat forever this way, surrounded by the slowly gathering musky damp of the regenerating dome. The plants were space-hardened, able to withstand quick decompressions and chills, far better adapted, through a half-century of human handiwork, than was mankind itself.

Others tried to help. Lani was a hovering presence, soft sibilants in an engulfing stillness. Carl made his awkward gestures, said the conventional things. It was all wooden, distant, faces under glass.

The fact that the crazy Ubers and their allies were holding them all inside Dome 3 made no difference, really. She was as uncaring as the silent frosted ice outside, where figures gyred the launchers into new, well-padded directions, their muzzles pointing to different constellations. She watched the distant puppets do their irrelevant things, without caring what it meant. Earth was a more welcome target than Mars, certainly—but not because she thought they would succeed.

Nothing had ever worked on this doomed expedition. Earth would find some way to counter them. Was the scheme to cast off in balloonlike aerobrake vehicles? Hollow steel shells that, under the hard-ramming pressure of braking, needed only the slightest flawed asymmetry to twist and shear and shatter—no, Earth would see that opportunity quite well. A laser bolt, particle beam—anything that punched a hole in the shell would end them all in a fiery orange-red caldron. She had no faith in Sergeov’s fevered astronomical dream.

Or in the Mars maneuver, either. She had kept Carl’s secret, never told anyone. We live by believing fictions…

But Sergeov’s lie was worse. It would bring no dead world alive, and they would all wind up just as doomed.

What if the comet head was directed to actually collide with Earth itself, as she had heard some Ubers discussing openly on the comm? What would become of soft skies and hazy Hawaiian afternoons? She closed her eyes and shook her head. Maybe humans should go out the way the dinosaurs did.

“Virginia?”

It was Carl, pale and drawn, gain trying to make some contact. She blinked up at him. “Time to eat again?”

“No, I just—look, I could really use some help.”

“Doing what?”

“Figuring way out of this.”

She said wearily, “Sergeov’s got us trapped. Do you want to dig out through the waste tunnels? Using garden trowels?” The Ubers had caved those in quite effectively.

“There must.”

“You tried the autochutes? The conveyors?”

“Sure. Yesterday. He’s got people blocking them.”

She frowned. It was hard to think in the old way… “My mechs. If I could get control function over them from here, on a remote…”

“You tried that yesterday,” he reminded her gently.

She looked up, feeling a surge of irritation. “Oh yes. They’ve changed the T-matrix inputs. Sergeov was smart enough to do that right away. I could only fix that from the big console at Central, or my lab. I have to be there in person.”

They were silent. She could see Carl’s frustration building in his face.

Jeffers came over hurriedly, strain showing in his face. “Somethin’s happenin’—they’ve cranked up that laser again.”

Carl launched himself in a long glide for the top of the processing hut, fifty meters away. Virginia was tempted to lapse back into neutral and let the world wash over her. But instead she sighed and stood up. She kicked off and followed the two men in a slow coast.

“They’re firing at somebody!” Carl called from his vantage point. Virginia snagged a guy wire and arced to a hard landing atop the hut.

“See?” Carl pointed. “Sergeov’s up on that rise, there. He’s shooting at people coming from the south.”

Fly-speck figures swept rapidly across the gray, streaked plain. “Who?” she asked.

Lani landed next to her. “Arcists, I figure,” she said. “Quiverian’s folk. They’re still down there to the south, living in their quake rubble. It’s natural they’d oppose an Earth flyby. But with the Ubers holding the launchers, they’ll get cut to pieces.”

“You’re sure?”

“I can’t see.”

A huge gout of steam erupted from the base of the hill where the Uber laser sat. The cloud enveloped the hill in a shroud of fog. Before it could swell further and dissolve, another blue spark ignited at the base, sending a ball of white skyward.

Virginia said excitedly, “The Arcists are using their big laser. It’s hard to aim, but if they just hit the hill itself—”

“They’ll blind the Uber laser crew with the vapor,” Lani said. “Yeah!”

Figures moved on the horizon, their tabards too small to distinguish in the dust they kicked up. Virginia had never thought very much about tactics in near-zero gravity, but she could see the logic behind the slowly converging horns of the Arcist movements. Their pincers closed toward the equatorial string of launchers. Sergeov’s people struggled in the launcher pits. The big, awkward flinger modules were difficult to move quickly, particularly in declination. They began to nose down toward the south, but their long, slender barrels turned with agonizing slowness.

“Look,” Carl said, pointing. “The Arcists are trying to sweep by us. We’ll get free if.”

But then a second Uber laser opened fire from a distant hill, flinging spheres of steam up from the plain. Even a near miss blew the tiny figures up and away from the sudden gusts.

“Why don’t they attack from the sky?” she asked.

“Sergeov’s probably got some small radars with him. He can pick them out if they’re isolated up there. On the ice, it isn’t so easy. And the dust helps shield them.”

“Yeah,” Jeffers said. “How’d you like to be hangin’ up there, naked as a jaybird? Feels a lot better to have some ice between you and that big burner.”

The attackers sought shelter. They fired small weapons of limited range—flechettes, e-beam borers—but merely raised small puffs from the Ubers barricades Some used portable microwave borers, presumably tuned to disrupt human cells, but the beams tanned out too broadly at this range Now and then, those inside the dome heard faint clicks, the microwaves softly tickling their inner ears.