Vernor Vinge: Across Realtime

Past the huge careen doors, a light glowed dimly, and Wili saw that the place was the equal of anything in Pasadena, though there were no obvious art treasures or golden statuary lying about. They led him up (not down! What sort of jefe put his lowest servants on an upper floor?) a wide staircase, and into a room under the eaves. The only light was the moon's, coming through a window more than large enough to escape by.

"~Tienes hambre?" the woman asked him.

Wili shook his head dumbly, surprised at himself. He real-ly wasn't hungry; it must be some residual effect of the stunner. She showed him a toilet in an adjoining room and told him to get some sleep.

And then he was left alone!

Wili lay on the bed and looked out over the forest. He thought he could see a glint from the Vandenberg Dome. His luck was almost past marveling at. He thanked the One God he had not bolted at the entrance to the mansion. Whoever was the master here knew nothing of security and employed fools. A week here and he would know every small thing worth stealing. In a week he would be gone with enough treasure to live for a long, long time!

Captain Allison Parker's new world began with the sound of tearing metal.

For several seconds she just perceived and reacted, not trying to explain anything to herself. The hull was breached. Quiller was trying to crawl back toward her. There was blood on his face. Through rents in the hull she could see trees and pale sky. Trees?

Her mind locked out the wonder, and she struggled from her harness. She snapped the disk pack to her side and pulled down the light helmet with its ten-minute air supply. Without thinking, she was following the hull-breach proce-dures that had been drilled into all of them so many times. If she had thought about it she might have left off the helmet - there were sounds of birds and wind-rustled trees - and she would have died.

Allison pulled Quiller away from the panel and saw why the harness had not protected him: The front of the shuttle was caved in toward the pilot. Another few centimeters and he would have been crushed. A harsh, crackling sound came clearly through the thin shell of her helmet. She slipped Quiller's in place and turned on the oxygen feed. She recog-nized the smell that still hung in her helmet: The tracer stench that tagged their landing fuel.

Angus Quiller straightened out of her grasp. He looked around dazedly. "Fred?" he shouted.

Outside, the improbable trees were beginning to flare. God only knew how long the forward hull would keep the fire in the nose tanks from breaking into the crew area.

Allison and Quiller pulled themselves forward... and saw what had happened to Fred Torres. The terrible sound that had begun this nightmare had been the left front of the vehicle coming down into the flight deck. The back of Fred's acceleration couch was intact, but Allison could see that the man was beyond help. Quiller had been very lucky.

They looked through the rent that was almost directly over their heads. It was ragged and long, perhaps wide enough to escape through. Allison glanced across the cabin at the main hatch. It was subtly bowed in; they would never get out that way. Even through their pressure suits, they could now feel the heat. The sky beyond the rent was no longer blue. They were looking up a flue of smoke and flame that climbed the nearby pines.

Quiller made a stirrup with his hands and boosted the NMV specialist though the ragged tear in the hull. Allison's head popped through. Under anything less than these circumstan-ces she would have screamed at what she saw sitting in the flames: an immense dark octopus shape, its limbs afire, cracked and swaying. Allison wriggled her shoulders free of the hole and pulled herself up. Then she reached down for the pilot. At the same time, some part of her mind realized that what she had seen was not an octopus but the mass of roots of a rather large tree which somehow had fallen downward on the nose of the sortie craft. This was what had killed Fred Torres.

Quiller leaped up to grab her hand. For a moment his broader form stuck in the opening, but after a single coor-dinated push and tug he came through - leaving part of his equipment harness on the jagged metal of the broken hull.

They were at the bottom of a long crater, now filled with heat and reddish smoke. Without their oxygen, they would have had no chance. Even so, the fire was intense. The for-ward area was well involved, sending rivulets of fire toward the rear, where most of the landing fuel was tanked. She looked wildly around, absorbing what she saw without fur-ther surprise, simply trying to find a way out.

Quiller pointed at the right wing section. If they could run along it, a short jump would take them to the cascade of brush and small trees that had fallen into the crater. It wasn't till much later that she wondered how all that brush had come to lie above the orbiter when it crashed.

Seconds later they were climbing hand-over-hand up the wall of brush and vines. The fire edged steadily through the soggy mass below them and sent flaming streamers ahead along the pine needles imbedded in the vines. At the top they turned for a moment and looked down. As they watched, the cargo bay broke in half and the sortie craft slumped into the strange emptiness below it. Thus died all Allison's millions of dollars of optical and deep-probe equipment. Her hand tightened on the disk pack that still hung by her side.

The main tank blew, and simultaneously Allison's right leg buckled beneath her. She dropped to the ground, Quiller a second behind her. "Damn stupidity," she heard him say as debris showered down on them, "us standing here gawking at a bomb. Let's move out."

Allison tried to stand, saw the red oozing from the side of her leg. The pilot stooped and carried her through the damp brush, twenty or thirty meters upwind from the crater. He set her down and bent to look at the wound. He pulled a knife from his crash kit and sawed the tough suit fabric from around her wound.

"You're lucky. Whatever it was passed right through the side of your leg. I'd call this a nick, except it goes so deep." He sprayed the area with first-aid glue, and the pain subsided to a throbbing pressure that kept time with her pulse.

The heavy red smoke was drifting steadily away from them. The orbiter itself was hidden by the crater's edge. The explosions were continuing irregularly but without great force. They should be safe here. He helped her out of her pressure suit, then struggled out of his own.

Quiller walked several paces back toward the wreck. He bent and picked up a strange, careen shape. "Looks like it got thrown here by the blast." It was a Christian cross, its base still covered with dirt.

"We crashed in a damn cemetery," Allison tried to laugh, but it made her dizzy. Quiller didn't reply. He studied the cross for some seconds. Finally he set it down and came back to look at Allison's leg. "That stopped the bleeding. I don't see any other punctures. How do you feel?"

Allison glanced down at the red on her gray flight fatigues. Pretty colors, except when it's your own red. "Give me some time to sit here. I bet I'll be able to walk to the rescue chop-pers when they come."

"Hmm. Okay, I'm going to take a look around.... There may be a road nearby." He unclipped the crash kit and set it beside her. "Be back in fifteen minutes."

They started on Wili the next morning. It was the woman, Irma, who brought him down, fed him breakfast in the tiny alcove off the main dining room. She was a pleasant woman, but young enough to be strong and she spoke very good Spanish. Wili did not trust her. But no one threatened him, and the food seemed endless; he ate so much that his eternal gnawing hunger was almost satisfied. All this time Irma talked -but without saying a great deal, as though she knew he was concentrating on his enormous breakfast. No other servants were visible. In fact, Wili was beginning to think the mansion was untenanted, that these three must be housekeeping staff holding the mansion for their absent lord. That jefe was very powerful or very stupid, because even in the light of day, Wili could see no evidence of defen-ses. If he could be gone before the jefe returned...