David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

Virginia didn’t dare call on comm. She turned in every direction, telling herself not to panic, to be systematic—and found him at last directly overhead, a doll-sized dot.

Rendezvous took only a few moments. He came swimming toward her, braked, they locked hands and touched helmets. She had expected a moment of celebration, for surely they were out of the danger zone by now, but all he said was. “Now comes the hard part.”

“What?”

“Getting back to Halley.”

“Won’t someone…” She was going to say, come after us? when she realized that obviously nobody would be thinking about a rescue in the midst of a battle. The Ubers and their allies had undoubtedly covered the shafts, bottling in anyone who could help. Besides, how many knew they were out here?

“How far away are we?”

Carl held up a small tube, pointed it at Halley’s acned, dwindling disk, and read off, “Twenty-three point four kilometers. And increasing at about three kilometers a minute.”

“So far!”

“A lot of slugs hit the platform.”

“These suits…”

“They have a big range. The real problem is getting back before our air runs out.” He gestured toward their inventory logs, running in color-coded lines down both sleeves of their suits. “Haven’t got a hell of a lot.”

“How much delta-V can I get?”

Carl did the calculation in his head, frowned, and resorted to his faceplate for a check. “Not much.”

“We can still get back, can’t we?”

“Yeah… only we’ve got to make up this three klicks per minute. It’ll take nearly all the juice we’ve got. Then we have to go the thirty or so klicks back to Halley…”

His voice trailed off into a frustrated gesture as he punched in fresh figures on his board, attached at a waist pop-out. Virginia bit her lip. All this was going so fast, and she had no time to think.

Carl stopped, typed in more, pressed his lips together until they were white. “Looks bad.”

“How bad?”

“Neither of us is going to make it back in time for fresh air.”

“Neither?”

“Can’t be done. That three klicks a minute takes a big bite out of our fuel.”

“Then…” A dark foreboding, the underlayer she had felt for days now, swelled up in her. They were all going to die. Fate had managed everything so they would each face some excruciating death, alone and afraid, out here in the oblivious cold abyss…

“We can overcome that three klicks per, but that leaves just a small velocity. The comet’s gravity won’t help much. It’ll take hours to get back to Halley.”

And it’s getting worse as we talk. Each second takes us further away. Out into the emptiness, to join the frozen souls of the Edmund. Onlywe have to die, first…

“Can’t one of us take both jet packs?”

Carl shook his head. “They’re integrated, remember! Can’tpop one out without rupturing the air seal.”

She didn’t remember, had never known that, but her mind skated quickly now, skittering over what she knew of dynamics. If there was some way…

“Wait. Only one of us has to get back, get some help. Isn’t there some way to trade momentum between the two of us?”

Carl looked puzzled. His face was grizzled and tired, dark circles rimmed his eyes. He looked older and more worn than she had ever seen hi, even at the peak of the plagues. He shook his head mutely, lips still tightly pressed, his eyes full of despair.

She remembered something from long ago…fished for it…caught the fragment of n idea.

“Wait. There’s something…”

Halley hung suspended in the consuming dark, its rotation long stolen by Man, its face now lit by his fitful fires.

Carl watched the battle progress as he made his long approach. It was over three hours since he had separated from Virginia. By agreement they had kept comm silence. It had made the journey lonely and frustrating, for he could hear the scattershot shouts of the struggle, harsh cries and strumming sidelobes of microwave pulses—all without getting any clear idea of what they meant, of how the battle flowed. He had tried to concentrate on the blurted cries, not only because he needed to know the situation when he landed, but to quell his own anger.

He scanned the looming landscape with a telescopic projection on his faceplate. Bodies of dead Arcists lay sprawled near the equator. Laser gouges pocked the hillsides, but now the Arcist lasers seemed to be knocked out. He spotted one broken into a shattered tube. The launchers had proved more effective than the clumsy welder-lasers. Farther to the south Carl could see a line of Arcists forming up around five microwave pulsers. The engagement would focus down there.

The Ubers were moving out, skirmishing. They swept south from the equator, pursuing ragtag parties along a line of hummocks and rusty slagheaps. Everybody was keeping down, hiding in plumes of dust, using what shelter there was. The Ubers seemed better trained. They used fire-and-maneuver effectively, two figures shooting personal weapons at a nearby position while a third moved up to the next covered spot.

She knew I’d never agree, so she didn’t even discuss it.

Virginia’s idea was elegant and she had understood its implications from the instant it occurred to her. He recalled it all clearly, ruefully…

Carl had thought of them linking belts, then his firing his jets until they were exhausted. Virginia would then separate, leave him, ignite hers, and reach Halley. Even that would not provide much margin. Worse, it would be tricky, because his jet would not fire directly along the axis of the two-body system. That meant she would have had to waste fuel vector-keeping.

Virginia’s alternative was simple. They tethered with a hundred-meter line and Carl took an accurate sighting on potato-shaped Halley—ten times bigger than the moon was as seen from Earth, but a hundred and five kilometers away and shrinking visibly, swiftly. Carl had programmed his suit to give a clear beep whenever his velocity was aligned opposite to the Halley vector. They pulled the line between them taut, and Carl was about to start his jets—when Virginia fired first.

“Hey!” he had cried. “Shut down!”

—No, this is better— I ’ll expend my reserve.—

“Dammit! Stop!”

—No, Carl-think it through.—Already they had begun to revolve about each other as Virginia’s jets built their angular momentum.

“I’m going to fire, too,” he shouted.

—That’s stupid. Waste your reserves and we’ll both die. Just hang on.—

“No, I can’t.”

—I’m like a pig on ice out here. You can match velocities and make the trip with minimal fuel. And you’ll handle yourself better when you come down in that madhouse. You know that’s true. I’m not being self-sacrificing here. Far from it. I’d botch it and we’d both end up as icicles.—

“I mass more than you,” be had raged. “I’ll pick up a lower velocity than you would—so I’ll take longer. That’s simple dynamics.”

—I’m talking skill here, not Newton’s laws. You can do it Carl, and you know very well that I can’t.—

“Dammit, I won’t let you—

—Too late.—Across the hundred meters she waved cheerily as the stars wheeled behind her. The tether linked them, navel to navel. Centrifugal force bent him backward, as if he were suspended from his belly button.

He struggled to think clearly against the steadily pressing hand. There had to be a way to stop her. “You can’t.”

—I’m triggering on the signal.—

“What?” So she had set up the came vector-seeking program, only hers marked a spot on the opposite side of their circle than his. His beeps had been coming regularly, uselessly, and now—