David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

—Carl.—A female voice. He turned to see Lani approaching from the north with Keoki Anuenue and a score of the big Hawaiian’s people. —The Ubers had the Blue Rock Clan bottled up, but we found a way out with the weirders, Ingersoll’s guys.—

They helped? The crazies? It was slowly sinking in. “Great. I… Look, help me find a mech that’s fueled.”

—Where’s Virginia? I looked—

“Find a mech!”

—Okay, check the inventory.—

“What?”

—We’ve got mech control up and running again. See?—

She transferred the manifest readout directly to his viewplate and he instantly saw the code numbers of two standby transports flashing green. —Here,—Lani said, coasting over to one of them. Her face was drawn but determined behind a spattered helmet. —I’ll bootit up.—

Carl joined her, punched up the mech’s status readout.

—Those black guys, who’re they?—Lani asked.

“I dunno.”

—You don’t? We all thought you and Virginia must havebrought them. The mech purred to life. Carl shook off questions and got oxygen. Nothing else mattered. The madness of men was now only a backdrop. The goddamned politics could wait.

One step at a time… time is running… dunno how much oxy she had… think it through… each step…

Carl programmed the transport for high boost, stubby fingers punching in commands with a deliberate slowness. Lani insisted on going along and he wasted no time arguing. They lifted off with Lani in the side-rider pod.

Virginia had left their centre of mass with the same speed as Carl—slightly less than four kilometers per minute—but in the opposite direction. Their separation lay over three hours in the past. That meant he had to recoup nearly a thousand kilometers at high thrust, then search the space for a weak, steady vector-finding signal…

Speed. Speed was all that mattered now.

Hours later Carl brought the mech in for a rough landing at the glassy entrance to Shaft 3. He was ragged with fatigue, but he had Virginia. The world tilted blearily as he dismounted, unsteady from the varying accelerations of the past hours.

Almost there. Just get her inside…

He slipped clumsily on the ice and dropped her. Lani helped. Everything was foggy, slow-motion.

Only when gloves caught her, pulled the limp, space-suited form away from him, did he see the others. They wore black suits and no tabards, with tight helmets that showed only eyes through narrow slits. He switched among comm channels but they did not respond.

They were eerie, silent. And identical. The one carrying Virginia swiveled and sped quickly for a shaft entrance, now cleared of ice. Carl stumbled after, slipping.

Down the shaft. Walls slid by like sheets of rain descending as he watched, impassive, numb a creeping slackness stealing into his arms and legs. He was well past the point of caring about himself, and concentrated only on the body that a black-suited figure carried before him. Everything moved with ghostlike speed and silence.

They cycled into a lock, Carl leaning groggily against the bulkhead as pressure popped in his ears and the world of sound came flooding back, the rustle and murmur of talk swirling around him once more, after many hours of an embalmed isolation. He staggered through the portal, brushing aside hands that tried to steer him.

Scores of moaning casualties. Medics with blood-soaked gloves.

Virginia. Got to see… she needs… got to…

The man carrying her set her gently down on a med couch. A team had been waiting. They attached oxy-prep hoses, leads for diagnostics stripped off her suit, all beneath the pale enameled light that showed her bloodless face in terrifying detail, seamed and rutted like a collapsed landscape.

A torrent of voices, liquid words flowing past him in vortices, without trace…

Carl shambled forward, ignoring the restraining hands. Got to be with her…got to…

The man next to him put a steadying grip on his shoulder. Carl turned slowly. Then the figure in black loosened his glossy helmet, started to lift it, gasped, and, in an old familiar way, sneezed.

Another rocking sneeze resounded before the ebony helm was off. Saul blinked away spots before his eyes. He had to clamp down with biofeedback to stop another tickle that threatened to get him started again. Now was not the time for his confounded allergy-symbiosis system to rear up. He’d had enough troubles since the cave-in—what seemed like days ago-and right now every second counted.

Carl Osborn was blinking at him, his dented, grimy, old-fashioned spacer helmet dangling from one hand. “But… but… you were dead!”

Saul shrugged. “I was, in a sense. But like an old weed, I keep popping back.” Carl deserved an explanation, but right now there wasn’t time to give him one. Saul bent over Virginia’s waxy, pale form and read the paten diagnostic attached to her blue-tinged throat. An oxygen infuser hissed as it worked directly over her carotid artery.

No good , he realized, sickly. Oh, Virginia—

In spite of his stopped-up nose, he clearly caught the scent of burning. For an instant, flames once again licked the century-old cedars on Mount Zion.

No! Not this time!

He knew in an instant that there was only one hope. It’s come to this, my love. I must experiment even with you.

One thing was certain. He had to get rid of Osborn, for the man would surely interfere with what Saul had to do now.

“Don’t just stand there, Carl. Get topside, quick! Keoki and Jeffers need you. Tell Ould-Harrad I’m holding him to his word not to destroy any equipment, just the launcher foundations, as we agreed.”

“Destroy…Ould-Harrad…” Carl shook his head, obviously exhausted and confused. Out of the muddle he seized a priority and held on to it obstinately. “No. I’m staying with Virginia.”

Desperately, Saul felt the seconds passing. “Ishmael! Job!” he called. “Get Commander Osborn topside, now. He’s needed up there. Get him to work!”

Carl turned and braced, as if to fight to stay. But the force went out of his limbs when he saw the two strong-limbed youths bearing down on him—identical and smiling with a grin he knew all too well. “I don’t believe it,” Carl whispered. “They… they’re clones… ofyou! But how…”

The hissing of the hall door cut off the rest of Carl’s words. Saul ran down the hallway, carrying Virginia in his arms, gripping the green Halleyvirid carpet with his toes and speeding toward the one place there might be a chance to save her life.

Carl would never have allowed this, he thought, knowing that the man loved her—in his own way—as much as Saul himself did. He’s needed above, and what I am about to try would get me barred from the AMA.

He whistled the code that opened the door to Virginia’s lab and dived inside.

While JonVon’s diagnostic program probed the fringes of Virginia’s slowly dying brain, he stripped off his surface gear.

The helmet, hip-pack, and skin-paint combination were one of the gifts from Phobos that he had kept to himself. Months ago he had used a pretext to set the autofactory to produce a dozen sets—enough of the modern models to equip his ten “boys” and himself.

After the cave-in, when he had found his way to the surface blocked, he had returned and gathered his cloned replicas. Just before they set off, though, a message from Suleiman Ould-Harrad had arrived. The ex-spacer offered to lead Saul down secret tunnels known only to his weird clan, and to help strike where Sergeov least expected it.