Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

“Peter!”

I heard a click.

And then the floor lurched.

I clattered into one wall, an impact that knocked the wind out of me. Some of the lights failed; I heard a bulb smash with a remote tinkle. There was a remote rumbling, as if an immense truck was passing by.

There was a second’s respite. I saw Lucia on the ground. She was sheltering her baby. They were both gray with dust.

Then rock fragments started hailing down from the ceiling, heavy, sharp-edged. I pushed myself away from the wall, crawled over to Lucia, and threw myself over her and the infant. I was lucky; I was hit, but by nothing large enough to hurt.

The rumbling passed. The rock bits stopped falling. Gingerly I moved away from Lucia. We were both gray with dust, and her eyes were wide — shock, perhaps — but she and the baby seemed unhurt.

I heard running footsteps, shouts. Torchlight flickered in the dimly lit corridor.

Rosa was at the cleft in the rock, pulling away rubble with her bare hands. I could see a hand, a single hand, protruding from beneath the debris. It was bloody, and gray dust clung to the dripping crimson.

I ran over. My battered legs and back were sore, my lungs and chest hurt from where I had been thrown against the wall. But I dragged at the rock. Soon my fingers were aching, the nails broken.

Rosa, meanwhile, had taken a pulse from that protruding hand. She took my arm and pulled me away. “George, forget it. There’s nothing we can do.”

I slowed, jerkily, as if my energy was draining. I let the last handful of rubble drop to the floor.

I took Peter’s hand. It was still warm, but it was inert, and I could feel how it dangled awkwardly. I felt inexpressibly sad. “Peter, Peter,” I whispered. “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.”

Running footsteps closed on us. Hive workers, of course, drones, most of them women, all of them dressed in dust-covered smocks. Faces swam before me in the uncertain light, gray eyes troubled. I grabbed Lucia’s hand, and she clung to me just as hard. “Go,” I shouted at the drones. “Get out. There may be more falls. Take the stairs. Go, go …”

The drones hesitated, turned, fled, and we followed.

The long climb up stairs of cut stone and steel was a nightmare of darkness and billowing smoke. It got worse when more drones joined us, and we became part of an immense file of women, children, a few men, all clambering up those narrow, suffocating stairwells. The power was down in some sectors, and by flickering emergency lights I glimpsed people running, collapsed partition walls, smashed glass. In the hospital areas, and in the strange chambers where the mamme had lived, squads of people were working busily, pushing beds and wheelchairs out of damaged rooms. But the air thickened rapidly, and it became stiflingly hot; the ventilation systems must have failed.

I just pushed my way through the mobs of drones. My only priority was getting out of there: myself, Lucia, and the baby, for not once did I release her hand.

It was only when I got aboveground that I got a clear sense of what was happening.

Peter had placed his Semtex skillfully. He had broken open the upper carapace of the Crypt. The result was a great crater, collapsed in the middle of the Via Cristoforo Colombo, with a plume of gray-black tufa dust hanging in the air above it. Workers from the nearby offices and shops, clutching their cell phones and coffees and cigarettes, peered into the hole that had suddenly opened up in their world. There was a remote wail of sirens, and a lone cop was doing his best to keep the onlookers away from the hole.

And the drones simply poured out of the crater, in baffling numbers, in hundreds, thousands.

Dressed alike, with similar features, and now obscured by the dust, they looked identical. Even now there was a kind of order to them. Most of them came out over one lip of Peter’s crater, in a kind of elliptical flood. At the edge of the ellipse were heavier, older women, some of them with their arms linked to keep out strangers. At the center of the mass were the younger ones, some cradling infants, and here and there I saw hospital workers carrying the heavy chairs of the mamme-nonne . Nobody was in the lead. The women at the fringe would press forward a few paces, blinking at the staring office workers, and then turn and disappear back into the mass, to be replaced by others, who probed forward in turn. As they reached the buildings at the sides of the road the flowing ellipse broke up, forming ropes and tendrils and lines of people that washed forward, breaking and recombining. They probed into doorways and alleyways, swarming, exploring. In the dusty light they seemed to blur together into a single rippling mass, and even in the bright air of the Roman afternoon they gave off a musky, fetid odor.

As the shuttle skimmed low over the surface of the frozen planet, it was the circle of the dead that first struck Abil.

Not that, in those first moments, he understood what he was seeing.

Captain Dower was piloting the shuttle herself, an effortless display of competence. The planet was far from any star, and the shuttle was a bubble, all but transparent, so that the hundred tars and their corporals flew as effortlessly as dreams over a plain of darkness. Below, Abil could see only the broad elliptical splashes of paleness picked out by the flitter’s spots. The ground was mostly featureless, save for the subtle texture of ripples in the ice — the last waves of a frozen ocean — and, here and there, the glistening sheen of nitrogen slicks. Dower had said the ocean of water ice had probably frozen out within a few years, after the Target had been ripped away from its parent sun by a chance stellar collision, and then the air rained out, and then snowed.

Abil looked into the sky. This sunless world was surrounded by a great sphere of stars, hard as shards of ice themselves. In one direction he could see the great stripe that was the Galaxy. It was quite unlike the pale band seen from Earth: from here it was a broad, vibrant, complex band of light, littered with hot young stars. The Third Expansion of humankind now sprawled across tens of thousands of light-years, and had penetrated the dust clouds that shielded much of the Galaxy’s true structure from Earth. When he looked back the other way, the fields of stars were unfamiliar. He wondered where Earth was — though surely Earth’s sun would be invisible from here.

Once, all of humanity and all of human history had been confined to a single rocky world, a pinpoint of dust lost in the sky. But since humankind had begun to move purposefully out from the home planet, twenty thousand years had shivered across the face of the Galaxy. And now, in the direction of home, every which way he looked he was seeing stars mapped and explored and colonized by humans. It was a sky full of people.

His heart swelled with pride.

Captain Dower called, “Heads up.”

Abil looked ahead. The spots splashed broad lanes across the ice, diminishing to paleness toward the horizon. But they cast enough light that Abil could see a mountain: a cone of black rock, its flanks striped by glaciers. All around it was a broad, low ridge, like a wall around a city. The diameter of the rim walls must have been many miles. There was some kind of striation on the plain of ice inside the rim wall, a series of lines that led back toward the central peak.

Dower turned. Her metallic Eyes glinted in the subtle interior lights of the shuttle. “That’s our destination. First impressions — you, Abil?”

Abil shrugged inside his skinsuit. “Could be an impact crater. The rim mountains, the central peak—”