Charles Sheffield - Starfire

Lopez and Celine fell silent. The sea boiled and the land burned, while drifting black smoke intermittently hid the forlorn yellow-clad figure on the beach. The bodies of marine animals of all sizes darkened the lifeless shore of the gulf. Mobiles, most of them no bigger than a cicada, flew over and under the water, seeking targets. Their small size provided some immunity from particle bundle impact.

But you can’t shrink a human down to cicada size, Celine thought. And humans are what this is all about. Am I looking at my own future on that screen, and the future of everybody on Earth? Will only the machines be left as observers in another month or two? Come on, Nature. Let’s get this over with — one way or another.

In front of her, the Kerguelen Island data showed the bundles arriving more and more frequently. After a fifty-year journey through interstellar space, the particle storm from Alpha Centauri was ready to show its power.

Maddy had heard the official Sky City line: When the storm hit, you would be better off here than anywhere else on Earth or off it. The defense system would concentrate on protecting Sky City, Cusp Station, and the field generators, even if it was effective nowhere else. You should be especially safe if you stayed near the rear face of the disk, the one that pointed away from Alpha Centauri. The city was a hundred and ninety meters thick. Every centimeter of that thickness would help to slow or stop the flying particle bundles.

Maddy had listened to all that and been unpersuaded. She was not a specialist on the effects of high-speed particle bundles, but she knew a lot about human nature. You tried not to worry people by telling them things they could do nothing about. Sky City might be safe, or it might prove very unsafe. Now, as she left the information center and wandered toward the rear face, she was starting to tilt toward the second opinion.

She could see the marks left by the bundles that had made it through the defense system. The wall seals, designed to protect the city from micrometeorite impacts, had no trouble closing the holes. However, the seal marks sat not only in the forward walls of chambers. For every one of them, another matching mark could be found in the rear. The particle bundles could not be stopped by a wall. They came into a chamber, crossed it, and went right out the other side.

Her idea was confirmed as she approached the rear face of Sky City. There were no fewer holes here than in the information chamber, close to the front. What there were — because people had come to the rear-facing chambers, seeking safety — were more casualties.

The first one that Maddy saw was an old man with an injury to his right hand. The particle bundle had drilled a neat hole through his palm, removing flesh and bone with surgical precision. There was no blood, and you might easily have missed the wound if the man were not holding his hand out in front of him. He was suffering the triple effects of shock, painkillers, and sedatives. He sat on the floor, arm extended, jaw sagging, tears trickling down his cheeks. Whoever had provided the painkillers had moved on, leaving the man alone.

Maddy went over to where he leaned against the wall. “Are you all right?”

Stupid question. Of course he wasn’t all right. He stared at her and mumbled something.

“What? Say that again.”

Maddy bent close. She heard his faint words: “I came to Sky City because it’s easy on your heart.”

“Do you feel dizzy? Are you in pain?”

“Extend your life for fifty years, they told me. Safer than the telomod treatment, they said. No danger of cancer. I flew up to Sky City because my heart wasn’t good.”

“Is someone coming back for you?”

“Look what they did to me.”

It was no good. She wasn’t getting through. Maddy raised the old man to his feet, and he offered no resistance.

“Come on.”

Taking most of his slight weight, she led him on a spiral course downhill toward the city perimeter, until she came to an open area filled with people. It had been converted to a makeshift emergency room.

Maddy set the old man on one of the beds and placed his wounded hand where it could easily be seen. As she was straightening up, a woman in a pink housecoat approached.

“You can’t leave him here.” The woman was perfectly made up and wore expensive jewelry, but she had suffered her own narrow escape. She had a swath cut through her red hair, a cylindrical furrow that missed her scalp by a fraction of an inch. “These are private quarters. We have no space for strangers.”

Maddy said mildly, “If you can explain that to him, I’m sure he’ll leave.”

“This is disgraceful. We paid for the best location on Sky City, and we were promised safety and security. And do we have it? We do not.”

“I’m sure that Sky City is the best possible place to be.” Sometimes the official line had its uses. “The defense system will protect us better than anywhere else.”

“That’s not good enough. Do you see what happened to my hair? That particle thing might easily have hit me. I am going to file a formal complaint with Bruno Colombo.”

“I think you ought to do that. I doubt if he’s busy.” Maddy turned before the woman could reply. She went on her way, heading toward the rear face.

She thought, You might easily imagine, spending time with John Hyslop and his group, that everyone on Sky City is supercompetent and superdedicated. But even here you can find stupidity and selfishness. She recalled Gordy Rolfe’s words when he first hired her for the Argos Group: “You might say, well, if people weren’t so dumb, we’d have no reason to exist, but I like to think of it differently. Sure, we take money from stupid people. But we also give service. We protect them from doing something even dumber with their money.” Someone with Maddy’s skills would make a living on Sky City with no difficulty.

If, that is, you and Sky City and Earth survive. Maddy looked at her watch. Forty-seven minutes to the storm peak. How much of the chaos around her was the fault of Gordy Rolfe and the Argos Group, delivering defective materials to Sky City? If she lived, she was going to find out.

A sharp ping sounded, and Maddy saw a streak of blue light just a couple of feet in front of her face; another particle bundle through the defenses. ’All the evidence suggested that she was no safer here than up near the front of Sky City with John Hyslop. So why wasn’t she with John, where she most wanted to be?

Not hurrying, Maddy began her return to the engineering information center.

From the private diary of Oliver Guest.

The RV jacket worn by Seth Parsigian was less than totally satisfying. It provided clear visual and auditory signals, but for me, attuned as I am to olfactory and tactile stimuli, Sky City remained no more than a hollow shadow of reality. Attempts to draw supplementary information from Seth proved a waste of time.

“Smells of what?’ I said.

“I dunno.” Seth paused in the empty corridor and sniffed loudly. “I told you, it stinks like something’s been burnin’. Feathers, mebbe?”

“Feathers! You’re up in space, and you smell burning feathers?”

“Well, you were the one who asked. Don’t worry; it’s usually that way on this level.”

We were approaching Cargo Bay Fourteen. Clearly, Seth knew the area well, while to me much of the region was terra incognita. I was aware of his distaste for wearing the RV jacket, so it was no surprise to learn that some of his Sky City roaming with Maddy Wheat-stone had been done without my vicarious participation.