Charles Sheffield - Dark as Day

“Yes.” The rush of adrenaline after he recognized Magrit Knudsen made his statement true.

“Then come on. He wants you there for what may be the finish. We have to go up a level. That’s where the others are.”

Alex rose to his feet and followed her, out of the apartment and up a flight of stairs. She led him into what was clearly some kind of facility control center. The room was dominated by a three-dimensional display as big as any that Alex had ever seen. It showed an image of a section of Jupiter’s clouded outer layers under extreme magnification. Alex could make out individual pixels in the vortices and cloud banks.

Bat was seated on the floor, immobile and staring at the display. On his left, doll-sized compared with his bulk, sat Milly Wu. Behind Bat, hovering nervously over him with hands clasped together like a praying mantis, stood Ligon’s chief scientist, Bengt Suomi.

Magrit Knudsen walked forward and said, “Any success?”

Bat did not move or speak. It was Suomi who answered, “Just the opposite, I’m afraid. We had close contact until a couple of minutes ago. Then something happened between the ships, and now they are diverging.”

Alex walked forward to stand next to Milly Wu. Now he could see in the display what the others were staring at so intently: two bright points of light stood out against the face of Jupiter. As he watched, they moved infinitesimally farther apart.

Milly Wu glanced at Alex and said softly, “Birch’s ship is on the right. Janeed Jannex and Paul Marr have been chasing him. They spent hours in close contact, but now they’re separating. Looks as if they’ve lost him.”

Hours? Alex wondered how long he had been asleep and out of things. Bengt Suomi said suddenly, and with a tremor in his voice, “Range-rate data show that Birch’s ship is still descending. He’s going down, all the way — there’s no possibility he can pull out of it now. The scooter still has a chance. Its tangential velocity component may take it clear of Jupiter. Even so—”

“Even so,” Bat said, “the people in the scooter will die. Sebastian Birch will die. And very soon we will all die.”

We will all die. Alex felt the shiver of a second adrenaline rush through his whole body. What was Bat talking about? The man’s reputation was for understatement, not wild exaggeration. Sebastian Birch was surely going to die — his craft continued to plummet straight downward. Janeed Jannex and Paul Marr’s ship might not be able to alter course in time to escape. But all die? — including Bat? Including Alex himself?

Alex glanced from face to face. He said, “I don’t understand.” He was ignored. Bengt Suomi’s dark-browed glare, Bat’s stoic gaze, Milly Wu and Magrit Knudsen’s wide-eyed stares; they told him nothing. He turned back to the display, just in time to see the speck of light representing Sebastian Birch’s ship wink out and vanish.

Bat said, “Birch is dead. His ship and signal relay have burned up in Jupiter’s atmosphere. I bid you all farewell. We begin to die — now.”

Alex’s chest tightened. The whole room seemed to move into a state of suspended animation as everyone took in a deep breath and held it. The moment lengthened. It became seconds — half a minute — a whole minute.

Finally, Bengt Suomi gave the high-pitched, tittering laugh of a man who never laughed. Bat exhaled hugely and said, “Except that we are not dead. We are not dying. We are alive, and I was terribly wrong. I built a city of speculation upon a shallow bank of improbability, which now has crumbled and collapsed. I offer my sincere apologies.”

“Apologies? Apologies that we are alive?” Suomi gave a nervous shuffle, like a little dance. “No, I’m the one who was wrong. Some mistake in my group’s experiments, something in our data. According to our calculations, the catalytic reaction and phase change should have begun instantaneously. The estimated expansion rate was many kilometers a second. We should have observed visible effects as soon as Birch’s ship lost hull integrity. We must repeat the work at once and find out where we were in error.”

Alex burst out, “What the hell is this all about? Dead, not dead. Who were you talking about? It doesn’t make sense.”

Magrit Knudsen added, “Really, Bat. You’ve outdone yourself. You warn of the coming apocalypse, you drag us out of bed — and all for nothing.”

Bat ignored both of them. “Yes,” he said, speaking only to Bengt Suomi. “The work must be repeated. Tonight.” He glanced at a readout beside the big display. “Or, to be more accurate, this morning. We must pursue and discover the flaw in our logic. As soon as we have an explanation, I promise that everyone here will share it.”

He stood up, easily in spite of his size. Alex, glancing again at the display, saw that the remaining bright dot of light was still there. It was close to the edge of Jupiter’s disk.

Sebastian Birch was dead. Janeed Jannex and Paul Marr were going to live. According to Bat and Bengt Suomi, everyone else was going to live, although according to some unexplained logic they all should have died.

As Alex’s adrenaline rush faded and died, his tired brain was sure of one thing only: no matter how many people in the room had some idea what was going on, one person present did not.

Milly functioned well on very little sleep. As a teenager that had first pleased her, then worried her when she learned of the disastrous sleepless experiments in the early part of the century. Now she simply accepted it as a piece of given good fortune, like a naturally beautiful or a naturally healthy body.

Bat had dismissed Milly, Alex, and Magrit Knudsen — there was no other word for his abrupt ending of the meeting — until he and Bengt Suomi could explain what had happened, or failed to happen, as Sebastian Birch plunged to his death on Jupiter. Milly, who had dozed on and off during the long hours of the scooter’s pursuit, now felt far too wired to sleep.

She made sure that she was on-call for Bat’s meeting, whenever and wherever it took place, and went off to her own apartment. It possessed a secure line to Jack Beston at the Argus Station, and she had something important she needed to ask him and possibly to tell him.

The system took a while to locate him, then he was glaring out of the screen at her in a green-eyed rage.

“What the hell have you been doing? I’ve left messages all over Ganymede, telling you to call.”

The Ogre was in his foulest mood. Somehow that was reassuring. She decided that, whatever happened, she would keep her own emotions under control.

She said, “I’m not sure what I’ve been doing, because the only people around here who seem to know aren’t telling. But I think that a few hours ago I came close to being killed.”

That was intended to shock him, and it did. His expression changed from anger to concern. “You were attacked?”

“Not by anything I recognized.”

That was enough for the Ogre. He had a short attention span for anything that did not directly involve the Argus Project. He said, “So long as the incident didn’t affect your work. Did you lose anything because of the Seine outage?”

“What Seine outage?”

His eyes went from half-closed to wide open. “Where the hell have you been for the past half-day, in an alternate universe? The whole Seine network went down for seven minutes. It failed here, in the Belt, on Earth — everywhere.”

“When was this?” Milly felt as though she had indeed been in a different universe, ever since the moment she staggered out of her cubicle looking for food and encountered the Great Bat.

“Six hours ago. Two this morning. We’ve been sweating blood ever since, trying to recover project data.”