David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

“Vidor woke up yet?”

“I ordered him started, but it’ll be another day.”

“Well, no rush anymore. His castle’s gone.”

Jeffers pointed to a slumped mass near the dawn line. The ornate, corbelled, and stranded artwork had been Vidor’s masterwork in ice, sculpted three years after the equatorial battle. For its task—structural support for Shaft 20—it could have been a square box, an igloo. Vidor had added parapets, towers, silvery arabesques, scalloped walls, and blue-white, airy bridges. Now…

“He won’t expect it to still be here.” A sand castle lasts only until the next tide.

“How many you bringin’ out?”

“Everybody,” Carl said. “Except the ones so dead there’s no real hope of saving them, of course.”

Jeffers twisted his mouth around in a familiar, skeptical line. “The med-techs can handle those new treatments?”

“Virginia’s got mechs helping. Speed-trained them with that experimental method of hers.”

“What’d you decide ’bout the ones with partial brain damage?”

“They won’t be much use, but they deserve revival.”

“Yeah. They paid for their tickets, might as well see the finale.”

Some had opposed his decision, but he had swept their objections aside. The rational argument was that with the maximum possible crew awake, they could deal with crises better. Carl’s private motivation, though, was entirely emotional. If Halley split, cracked, burst into a gaudy technicolor plume, at least they would all live out each moment, and face the end as they had begun an expedition. A crew.

That’s something, he thought. Beats sleeping to oblivion.

He frowned. What was that poem Virginia had pointed out to him?

I really shouldn’t think of the program as Virginia, but it’s impossible not to. JonVon doesn’t exist anymore. And what was that poem she quoted yesterday?

Right. Damn right.

“Sir?”

Carl turned, not recognizing the voice.

It was Captain Miguel Cruz.

“Uh…” Carl stared at the man, unchanged from his memory. The jaw was still as solid, assured. The eyes looked out steadily, inspiring confidence. Even the blue tint from slot sleep could not disguise that.

Still, something about the man looked awkward, blocky. Cruz wore shoes, and stood as if gravity mattered.

“I wanted to report for duty,” Cruz said. “I’m not fully recovered yet, but I’m sure. there’s something I can.”

“No, no, you—rest. Just rest,” Carl said quickly. He hadn’t realized the warmings had come so far. Someone should have warned him!

Cruz spoke with a faint accent… Earth speech. “Sir, I’d prefer to be on duty. Perhaps—”

Carl shook his head, embarrassed. “Look, Cap’n, don’t call me sir. I’m Carl Osborn, you may remember me, a spacer. I—”

“Of course I recognize you. I’m somewhat conversant with events since my death,” Cruz said with a faint smile. “I’ve read the log—it’s incredible—and… I think calling you ‘sir’ is quite appropriate.”

Carl stared at the man for a long moment, not knowing what to say. Despite his harrowing illness, Cruz looked… young . Unseasoned. “I… thought, sir, that after you’ve had a few days to recover, you could reassume command.”

Cruz looked at the flurry of data and views of the surface on a dozen screens nearby. “It would take me months to even understand what’s going on. Your tools, techniques, and… Coming here, I saw a woman in Shaft Two who looked like a flying fungus!”

“That’s a weirder, sir,” Carl said. “They live about two klicks down Shaft Two in their own biosphere.”

“But that green stuff—it was even in her hair!”

“It’s a symbiont that retains fluids and increases oxygen processing—I don’t know the details.”

Cruz shook his head. “Incredible. As I said, I haven’t a clue about how things are.”

“But I was hoping…”

“I see,” Cruz said with dawning perception. “Now that we’re back in the inner solar system, you thought perhaps I could help negotiate something with Earth?”

“No sir, we’ve realized that’s a dead end. I only… well, you’re the captain!”

Cruz’s smile was distant, reflective, as though he peered at something far away. “I was the captain of the Edmund , and for a brief time, while we tunneled in here and lived. But now Halley is a ship itself. It’s been sailing under her true captain for decades now. I…I am a passenger.”

“No, sir, that’s not.”

“Someday I aspire to become a ship’s officer. Not captain, however. And I shall not forget who held the helm for so long.”

Cruz held out a hand. Carl blinked, then slowly brought forth his and shook it.

All along he had hoped Saul’s wunderkinder could revive Cruz. Now they had done it, at the very last minute… and it was no panacea after all. He should have seen that. Cruz was right. Miguel Orlando Cruz-Mendoza was no older than the day he had died, but Halley was seventy years transformed by the hand of that clawing, cantankerous, blissfully ingenious and flagrantly stupid lifeform that was too stubborn to stay at home and forget about riding iceballs into oblivion.

To his own amazement, Carl realized he was already evaluating his former captain, weighing his potential place in the crew. Agood man, he thought. I’llput him to work.

Hours later he found himself returning from an inspection of some farm caverns and the new modular hydroponics spirals. They were cleverly arranged to extract waste heat from recycled sewage, which fed in overlapping helices around the outside. Ultraviolet poured from an axial cool-plasma discharge, and the huge plants had yearned inward toward it He admired the Promethean task of relocating the surface domes into the core, and was making his way back through Shaft 4 when a slow, grumbling crump jarred him away from his thoughts. It seemed to come from the walls themselves.

He tapped into his private line. “Jeffers!”

—I’m on it. Acoustics are pickin’ it up ever’where.—

“An explosion?”

—No pressure drop. I think it came from the surface.—

Carl called up a quick index-display of the remaining surface cameras. Most showed views of gossamer, upside-down Niagaras—roiling founts of vapor soaring from the ice and whipping in long arcs up into a shifting, gauzy sky. Solar ultraviolet ionized the gas. The sun’s particle pressure then turned these fountains outward, bending the flow into the ghostly streamers of the coma.

Above the far horizon a block of grainy ice tumbled end over end, a kilometer up in the sky. Nearby a huge jagged hole yawned, itself a source of fresh volatiles, green and ruby strands snaking from the pit in twisting filaments.

“Seismic outblow? Or maybe a patch of amorphous ice changing state suddenly.”

When the stressed crust ice gave way, it could rip free entirely. That instantly transferred the sun’s heating to fresh deposits, which hollowed new channels and in time would further deepen the cracks.

Jeffers said, —Yeah, looks it. Virginia was right ’bout that, too.—

“She said it wouldn’t happen very much until perihelion.”

—Well, I guess this’s just a taste of it.—

Carl nodded to himself and cast off. He passed parties of Weirds, swathed in green and purple growths, who scarcely took notice of him. They were checking the old seals for intrusions by older Halleyforms, which they would scrape away and replace with mutated, human-friendly forms the Sauls had worked out.