Грег Иган - Schild’s Ladder

Rasmah vanished from the scape, and Tchicaya felt her shaking him by the shoulders. "Get up!"

He complied, momentarily disoriented.

"What?" he asked. "What do you think they’re doing?"

"I don’t know, but we have to be prepared for the worst." Rasmah grabbed her can of suit spray and hurriedly coated him. "Now spray me. Quickly!"

Tchicaya did as she’d asked. "The worst? What are you expecting?"

"They’re headed for the engines, aren’t they? Can you think of a benign explanation for that? I want you to go straight to the shuttle."

" Why ? You’re not turning protective on me, are you? I’ve backed up last night. Even if we die here, I’m not going to forget you."

Rasmah smiled, and shook her head. "Sorry to be unromantic, but I’m thinking about more than us. If these people manage to remove the Rindler , someone has to be around to protect the far side. No one else I trust is any closer to the shuttle."

Tchicaya started pulling on his clothes. "Then come with me."

"No. Until we know what’s happening, it’s better we split up. They might have done something to the shuttle, it might be a lost cause. Better that only one of us goes there, while the other tries to stop them doing anything at the hub."

Tchicaya felt a surge of resentment, but this argument made sense, and she wasn’t ordering him around for the sake of it. They had to move quickly, and it was pointless quibbling over who did what.

He asked the ship for a view of the shuttle. It was still docked in the usual place, and it appeared to be intact, though that hardly ruled out sabotage.

"You’re going up after them?" he said.

"If the builders trust me enough to let me out there."

"How did those six get outside? Assuming Branco didn’t toss them out."

Rasmah finished dressing. "They’re on the tether that holds the module with the instrumentation workshop. They must have been pretending to be working on some sensor that needed to operate in vacuum." She glanced around the cabin with an air of finality, as if she was putting her memories of the place in order.

Tchicaya ached to hold her, but he didn’t want to make it harder for them to part. As they stepped out into the corridor, he said, "If this all goes wrong, where will we meet?"

"My closest backup is on Pfaff. If it stops getting reassurance signals from here, that’s the one that will wake."

"Mine too."

"That’s where we’ll meet, then." She smiled. "But let’s see if we can achieve a swifter reunion."

They’d reached the stairs. Tchicaya said, "Be careful."

"Of all the things I came here to be, that was never on the list." She took his face in her hands, and touched her forehead to his. Tchicaya listened to her breathing. She was excited, and afraid, and she hadn’t followed her own advice about adrenaline. She didn’t want to be calm, for this.

Then she released him, turned, and bolted up the stairs without another word.

As Tchicaya took the stairs down toward the walkway, he asked the ship to show him the instrumentation workshop. There was some kind of half-assembled sensor sitting on the main platform, open to space, but he could see no obvious clues as to what Murasaki and the others intended. What did they think they were going to do at the hub? Hot-wire the engines and drive the Rindler away? That was never going to happen. It would be a simpler task than taking control of the whole ship, but not by much. Assuming they were being wildly optimistic, though, what good would it do their cause if they succeeded? Whisking everyone away from the border would only delay the work of both sides.

As Tchicaya panned around the workshop, he saw a dark, powdery stain on the floor, by the airlock.

"What’s that?" he asked the ship.

"Blood."

The whole workshop was always in vacuum, and it would take much more than a minor act of carelessness to cut yourself through a suit.

"Can you show me when it was spilt?"

The ship showed him recorded vision from fifteen minutes before. As Santos stepped through the airlock, blood dripped from his fingers to the floor. His suit was only just beginning to silver against the cold; Tchicaya could still see his face. One nostril was full of red and black clots, only contained by the membrance of the suit, and the lid of one half-closed eye was encrusted with blood. He looked as if he’d been smacked in the face with an iron bar. Had he been in some kind of struggle with the others? It was bizarre.

On the walkway, Tchicaya saw Kadir coming toward him. They approached each other warily. Kadir spread his arms in a protestation of innocence. "I’m not with these lunatics! We disown them!"

"Do you know what this is all about?"

"I know that they opposed the moratorium, but I don’t have a clue what they think this will get them. Birago’s joined them now, but he’s the only one I really knew. The others were never very communicative. They claimed they were travelers like you, but they were never at ease with anyone but each other. Whatever the faults of travelers, if you express an opinion they find unusual, they tend not to stop in midconversation and stare at you as if you’d sprouted wings."

"Where’s Birago?" Tchicaya asked.

"Last I heard, he was standing guard at the entrance to the workshop, trying to stop anyone getting through and going after them."

"But he won’t say what they want? There’s no threat, no conditions they’re trying to bargain for?"

Kadir said, "I think this has gone beyond bargaining."

"Is the Right Hand secure? Could they have used it, done something with it, without the rest of you knowing?"

Kadir shrugged. "The records say it’s done nothing for days. But Birago helped build it. I don’t know what he was capable of doing."

They parted. As Tchicaya reached the end of the walkway, Rasmah spoke in his head. "The builders let me out. I’m up on the cable." Even through an unvocalized radio channel, her Mediator made her voice as expressive as ever; she sounded both nervous and exhilarated, as if she almost welcomed the chase. "I’m a fair way behind our mutineers, but I think I’m gaining on them."

"You’re outnumbered, and they’re completely deranged." Tchicaya told her about Santos’s appearance.

"Suljan and Hayashi are heading for another tether. They begged Branco to let them out before, but he fobbed them off, he said there was no need. I guess the builders changed their mind."

Tchicaya jogged through the bottom level of his own accommodation module. He was still three modules away from the shuttle. "So they thought they could deal with it, but then they realized they couldn’t?" He struggled to make sense of this. The tethers clearly weren’t made of anything smart enough to impede the rebels, or dispose of them directly; the insides of the modules were endlessly reconfigurable, but it probably never occurred to the builders that these cables would require any property but tensile strength. "What were they pinning their hopes on?" he mused. "Picking them off with debris-clearance laser? You’d think that would either be technically feasible, or not."

"Maybe they had some last-minute moral qualms."

"These people are either trying to hijack the ship, or to destroy it, and they’re free to send backups wherever they like. Their memories are in their own hands. I doubt Branco would have had any scruples about vaporizing them, if it were possible."

Rasmah said, "He might have been outvoted."

Tchicaya asked the ship to show him an image of her. The lone figure was only about five or six meters up the kilometer-long cable, but she was ascending rapidly: gripping the slender braid of monofilaments with her knees, reaching up, dragging her body another arm’s-length higher. At least at the hub she’d have a negligible velocity; if she ended up floating, he’d have plenty of time to reach her in the shuttle.