Charles Sheffield - Dark as Day

The hatch sprang wide. Sebastian leaned out and pushed. Paul spun away, turning end over end. Jan could not tell if the tough material of the suit had been punctured, but his arms hung uselessly in front of him.

“Emergency opening, emergency closing,” Sebastian said calmly. “You don’t seem to understand, Jan. When a man has a job to do, he must do it. He cannot allow anyone to stop him.”

He closed the hatch. “Don’t bother me anymore with talking. We can talk when I’ve finished my task.”

The Mayfly and the Flyboy scooter moved on, side by side, but Paul was spiraling away from both with the momentum provided by Sebastian’s push.

Was he still alive? Jan sat rigid, until she heard harsh, pained breathing and the words, “Can’t — use hands. Can’t work suit controls.”

“It’s all right, Paul. I’m here. I’m coming to get you.”

If she was smart or lucky. She knew how to make large-scale maneuvers, but this called for delicacy. She edged the scooter slowly forward, then sideways. How was she going to bring Paul inside, when he could do nothing to help himself?

There would be no painless way to do it. The rotation of Paul’s body about its center of mass must be stopped. The only way she knew to cancel that rotation was by impact with the Flyboy. Already he must be suffering terribly, and she was going to make it worse.

“I’m sorry, Paul.” She felt like crying as the ship traveled the last twenty meters. The agony was her own, deep in her guts, as his shattered arms smacked into the edge of the scooter’s open hatch. He groaned at new and intolerable pain. But the collision had slowed his body’s rotation. She leaned across the seat, and at last she could reach out and pull him in.

She inspected his suit. The forearms showed deep cuts in the tough material, but they did not run all the way. Paul was going to be all right; rapid re-set and growth hormones would fix him, once they were back on Ganymede. He had to be all right.

She had a bizarre thought as she closed the hatch. Captain Kondo was going to kill her when he learned what she had done to his first officer. She repressed a hysterical laugh and looked outside the ship. Where was Sebastian?

While she had been occupied with Paul, the Mayfly had moved ahead of them. Free-falling under gravity it was heading for the exact center of Jupiter’s disk. The planet had swelled to fill the sky.

Jan set the scooter’s drive, hard enough to catch up with Sebastian’s ship but not enough to add crucifying weight to the pain in Paul’s arms. As she did so, a warning buzz sounded through the cabin.

“You can’t do that, Jan.” Paul was nursing his forearms, holding them across his chest. “That’s the autopilot. Trying to take over. Means we’re on a collision course.”

“With Sebastian’s ship?”

“With Jupiter.” Paul found the strength to nod his head forward, toward the giant planet. “Stop the override. You’ve got to give control to the autopilot.”

“But Sebastian.” The Mayfly was still in sight. “If we don’t go after him…”

Paul said nothing. After a long, miserable moment, Jan abandoned manual control. Immediately, the scooter fired its attitude control jets to turn them tangential to their previous path. A fraction of a second later, the main engines came on at maximum thrust.

The sudden weight was painful, even for Jan. For Paul it had to be indescribable. He said nothing, but as she turned she saw his white face behind the visor and the sweat on his forehead.

“Paul, I’m returning to manual.”

“Not unless you want to — kill both of us.” He spoke with difficulty, through hard-clenched teeth. “Trust the autopilot, Jan. It knows. Going to be touch and go, either way. We left it late.”

Glancing to the right she could see what he meant. The engines were thrusting them sideways, at two or three gees, but the ship was still falling toward Jupiter. There was infinite detail in those cloud layers — detail that Sebastian loved so much, and understood better than anyone else in the System; but entry into them meant death.

She looked up to the screen, changing its field of view to scan behind the scooter. A solitary red dot blinked its message. The Mayfly was still in free-fall, and already it had attained the outermost wisps of the Jovian atmosphere.

“Paul, we can’t just leave him there.”

“We have to — unless you know a way to change the laws of dynamics.” Paul straightened in his seat, groaning as the bones of his forearms grated to a new position. “You did your best, Jan, your very best. Everything that you possibly could do, you did. He wouldn’t let you save him. He didn’t want you to save him.”

“But why, Paul? What does he think he’s doing?”

It was a question for which Jan did not expect an answer; perhaps it would never have an answer. Their scooter, still descending, was racing along through the outermost layers of the atmosphere. A whistle of air sounded on the hull. Behind them, the view across the horizon revealed a tiny flicker of red, dropping into the towering mass of a thunderhead. Jan, forgetting their own situation, could not take her eyes off that point of light.

It fell and fell and fell; and then, suddenly, the Mayfly’s beacon signal was gone.

Jan caught her breath and closed her eyes. When she opened them again the control displays showed that the Fly-boy scooter was dangerously low. Drag on the ship was hindering the effectiveness of the engines in pulling them out of their descent.

“Paul.” She reached out, then had enough sense not to touch him. He had curled his body into its most comfortable position. “Paul, if we don’t make it I just want you to know. You couldn’t save Sebastian, but you saved me in all kinds of ways.”

“We’ll make it.” He was studying the control panel and the horizon ahead. “We’re holding our own in altitude. But I didn’t save you. You saved yourself.”

Jan felt warm all over. She pushed what she wanted to say into the back of her mind. It would keep. Instead she said, “If we’re going to make it, you need help. Tell me how to place a call for a medical vessel.”

As she followed his directions for an emergency call she saw that he was right. The scooter was slowly lifting away from Jupiter.’ She and Paul had begun a long journey, all the way around the body of the planet on a high swingby that would at last take them back toward Ganymede.

And then there would be a longer journey, one that three months ago she could not have imagined: a life without Sebastian. He was gone, gone forever. Life went on.

The last conversation that Alex remembered was short and simple.

As Janeed Jannex and Paul Marr rushed out, he said to Milly Wu, “What now?”

She shrugged. “We do what Bat said. We wait for him to show up.”

Alex wandered out into Sebastian Birch’s living room and flopped down on an easy chair. Perhaps it was sheer physical fatigue and lack of sleep, but he was filled with a sense of failure. He had been asked by Bat, with that strange urgency in his voice, to find and guard Sebastian Birch. It was not Alex’s fault that Birch had vanished, yet it felt like his fault.

Milly Wu sat down in a chair opposite. She shook her head but did not speak. Alex closed his tired eyes and tried to relax.

After what seemed like no more than a few minutes, someone gripped his upper arm. He looked up, expecting to see Milly. Magrit Knudsen was standing over him. Confused and still dopey with fatigue, he sat upright and stared around him. Milly Wu had vanished.

“Where the devil did you spring from?”

It was no way to talk to a superior cabinet officer three levels and more above you, but Magrit Knudsen didn’t react. “Bat called me,” she said. “You know, when that man stopped working for me I thought there would be no more midnight crises and alarms. I should have known better. How did he drag you in? Don’t bother to answer that. Are you awake?”