Iain Banks - The Algebraist

“Sal!” Taince shouted at him. “There isn’t time!”

“No, there is, I’ll go,” Sal said, still backing off.

“Stay fucking here, Sal,” Taince said, dropping and deepening her voice. Sal seemed to hesitate but shook his head and turned and ran.

Taince leapt and made a grab for him but he’d moved too quickly. He vaulted a stalagmite and ran towards the gap Fassin and Taince had squeezed through earlier. Taince dropped to one knee and pulled the gun. “Stop, you fucking coward!”

There might, Fassin thought, have been half a second when Taince could have fired, but she dropped the gun and stashed it in her fatigues as Sal sprinted, ducking through the gap and away. Taince looked at Fassin. Now her face had gone blank, he thought. “Still a possibility,” she said, and quickly stepped out of her fatigues. She wore a one-piece underbody the same colour as her skin, so for just a moment she appeared to be naked. She reattached the top and trousers of the fatigues, snapping them tight to test that they held. “Right,” she said. “Now, this ties to your ankle.”

The straps on the backpack held, and Fassin did too, wrists tied to them but taking his own weight and Taince’s on his hands and fingers initially because he didn’t trust the straps, and the knot tying Taince’s trousers to his ankle held as well, and Taince was holding on fine as she shinned down over him and onto the fatigues and down with him twisting his neck and shoulders out and round so he could just about watch her progress and watch Ilen too, as though as long as he kept watching her she’d be all right, but then there was a ground-quake, shaking the ship, not badly, but enough to bring Fassin out in a cold sweat as he hung there, hands, palms, fingers slipping until it really was the straps and the straps alone holding him, and below him, below Taince, still just out of reach, Ilen moved one more time and fell over the edge and away into the darkness.

Taince made a lunge and Fassin felt the link between them jerk as she clutched vainly at the girl and made a noise like a gasp or a hiss. Ilen dropped away into the shadows, tumbling slowly, her hair and clothes fluttering like pale, cold flame.

Ilen must have still been mostly unconscious because she didn’t even scream as she fell, so that they heard her body hit the strip of vanes far below, long seconds later, and might even have felt the impact through the fabric of the ship.

Fassin had closed his eyes. Let Sal be right, let this not be happening. He tried to grip the edge of the hole again, to take the weight off the straps.

Taince just hung there for a while. “Lost her,” she said quietly, and the way she said it Fassin was suddenly terrified that she was going to let go too and drop after Ilen, but she didn’t. She just said, “Coming back up now. Hold on.”

She climbed up and over him and helped him out. They looked down but couldn’t see the body. They spent a few moments sitting side by side, breathing hard, with their backs against one of the stalagmites, a bit like they’d sat earlier, back at the flier. Taince untied her fatigues and put them on. She took the gun out.

Fassin looked at it as she stood up. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

She looked down at him. “Not kill the fuck, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She sounded calm now. She nudged one of his feet with her boot. “We should get back.”

He stood up, a little shaky, and she held him by one arm. “Did our best, Fass,” she told him. “Both of us did. We can grieve for Ilen later. What we do now is we go back to the flier, try to find Sal, see if we can get comms, get the fuck out of here and tell the authorities.”

They turned away from the hole.

“Why have you still got the gun out?” Fassin asked.

“Sal,” Taince said. “He’s never been this humiliated. Never let himself down like this. Not to my knowledge. Grief and guilt. Does things to people.” She was doing some sort of breathing-exercise thing, taking quick breaths, holding them. “Faint chance he’ll think… if no one ever knows what happened here…’ She shrugged. “He’s got a gun. He might wish us harm.”

Fassin looked at her, unbelieving. “You think? Seriously?”

Taince nodded. “I know the guy,” she told him. “And don’t be surprised if the flier’s gone.”

It was gone.

They walked out to the gap in the hull and found the flier there in the faint light of a false dawn coming from one thick sliver of sun-struck Nasqueron. Sal was sitting looking out at the chill expanse of desert. Before they approached, Taince checked her military transceiver again and found that she had signal. She called the nearest Navarchy unit and gave a brief report, then they walked across the sand to the flier. Their phones were still out.

Saluus looked round at them. “Did she fall?” he asked.

“We nearly got her,” Taince said. “Very nearly.” She was still holding her gun. Sal put one hand over his face for a while. In his other hand he was gripping a thin, twisted, half-melted-looking piece of metal, and when he took his hand away from his face he started turning the metal fragment over and over in both hands. His gun lay with his jacket, on the back seat. “Got through to the military,” Taince told him. “Alert’s over. Just wait where we are. There’s a ship on its way.” She got in the back, behind Sal.

“We were never going to save her, Tain,” he told her. “Fass,” he said as the other man got into the other front seat beside him, “we were just never going to save her. We’d only have got ourselves killed too.”

“Find the rope?” Fassin asked. He had a sudden image of taking the twisted piece of metal that Sal was playing with and sticking it into his eye.

Sal just shook his head. He looked dazed more than anything else. “Went over on my ankle,” he said. “Think it might be sprained. Barely made it back. Thought I could use the flier, get it through the stuff hanging above us and find a way over the top of all that wreckage, back to where it all happened, but the hanging stuff was more solid than it looked; came out here to try and signal.” The piece of twisted metal kept going round and round in his hands.

“What is that?” Fassin asked after a while.

Sal looked down at it. He shrugged. “From the ship. Just something I found.”

Taince reached round from behind him, wrenched the piece of metal from his hands and threw it away across the sand.

They sat there in silence until a Navarchy suborb showed up. When Taince went out to meet it, Sal got out of the flier and went, limping, to retrieve the fragment.

I was born in a water moon. Some people, especially its inhabitants, called it a planet, but as it was only a little over two hundred kilometres in diameter “moon’ seems the more accurate term. The moon was made entirely of water, by which I mean it was a globe that not only had no land, but no rock either, a sphere with no solid core at all, just liquid water, all the way down to the very centre of the globe.

If it had been much bigger the moon would have had a core of ice, for water, though supposedly incompressible, is not entirely so, and will change under extremes of pressure to become ice. (If you are used to living on a planet where ice floats on the surface of water, this seems odd and even wrong, but nevertheless it is the case.) This moon was not quite of a size for an ice core to form, and therefore one could, if one was sufficiently hardy, and adequately proof against the water pressure, make one’s way down, through the increasing weight of water above, to the very centre of the moon. Where a strange thing happened.