Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

“Platform contact in two minutes,” Muddy said. He seemed to enjoy counting down event times—a task at once useful and easy and safe.

“Good,” Bruno acknowledged. “Can we have the telescope image back?”

Wordlessly, Muddy reached for his interface. The window reappeared, now showing a much larger, more detailed version of what they’d seen before. The dome was there, and the mirrored tents beneath it. Now there were other things visible as well: light-energy conversion panels with cables running across the diamond deck until they slipped under the edges of superreflective cloth. Discs of various color arranged in neat rows outside the tents, as if occupied in some sort of experiment. And one image that was both horrifying and uplifting: the blackened, burned skeleton of a human being. Horrifying because, well, it was the blackened, burned skeleton of a human being. Uplifting because there was only one. Had the survivors dragged a fallen comrade outside, to burn rather than rot? It lent credence to the idea that there were survivors down there.

“My God,” Deliah said.

That initial view had been oblique, almost edge-on, so it was difficult to make out any telling details as the platform turned away, turned its other, blank side to face them.

Now the shipwreck as well betrayed new details; he could clearly make out the lines of an airlock in its iron skin, and a seam where two plates had warped apart. There was a neat, circular hole through the side, too, down low where it was nearly hidden by shadow. As the platform revolved—and grew, for they were approaching it rapidly—he could see a matching hole down low on the ship’s other side.

He experienced an instant chilling of the blood. He’d seen holes like that before, in the ruins of Sykes Manor. Holes created by a weapon, a nasen beam. That ship hadn’t crashed onto the platform, hadn’t limped its way here and quietly expired; it had been murdered in the very act of rescue!

“This is a trap,” he said, as coolly and evenly as possible. “Someone is watching the platform, waiting to pick off any ship that approaches.”

“My God!” Deliah squawked, with much greater conviction.

“I knew it!” Muddy wailed, suddenly tearful again. “I knew I’d get us killed! Declarant-Philander, there’s nothing we can do! No place else to grapple to, not in the time allotted!”

“To the collapsium fragment above us?” Bruno suggested quickly.

“No!” Deliah said. “It’s muon-contaminated—it’ll come apart in seconds.”

“We will rendezvous with the platform,” Muddy insisted. “Nothing can prevent that now, no matter what we grapple to. Inertia can only be bent so far.”

Bruno pounded a fist into his palm. “Blast it, a nasen beam isn’t easy to aim! How’s our oxygen supply?”

“Fine, sir,” Muddy wearily replied.

“Good. Set your thrusters on a program of random firing. Stay on trajectory, but let our arrival time float, plus or minus a few seconds. That may confuse the targeting mechanisms. They don’t have to miss us by much, so long as they miss us!”

Soon, an annoyingly staccato hum commenced in the outer hull. As before, no sense of motion resulted from it.

“Where is this nasen beam?” Deliah wanted to know.

Bruno shrugged. “I couldn’t say. On a ship, probably, and not too near, or we’d‘ve detected it already. It could be quite distant, in which case it likely wouldn’t fire until we’d matched courses with the platform. A known position—you see?— regardless of light-lag delays. If we complete our rescue quickly, the beam’s… controller may not realize we’re gone until after it’s fired.”

“Thirty seconds to contact,” Muddy whined. “I’m scared , Bruno. I don’t want to do this!”

“Turn us!” Bruno shot back, with sudden inspiration. “Make sure our hatch is facing the dome! And try to hit as close to the dome’s base as possible, without endangering the neutronium cladding. It’s all right to hit a little harder, just be sure we stick when we hit, so we can start melting through immediately. This is for your safely, Muddy; as you say, we will hit.”

“Ten seconds. Oh, God, can’t we just let them die?”

The impact was sudden and severe; Bruno was thrown against his restraints and slammed back into his couch again. Muddy shrieked, and even Deliah cried out in distress.

Bruno’s own fear was a brusque, impatient business. He was frustrated, more than a little bit angry at being forced to such extremity, and there was a substantial part of his mind that dreamily refused to believe any of this was happening at all. His thoughts, such as they were, were focused on Tamra. In those hurried moments as he threw off his harness and leaped for the door, his own safety concerned him mainly to the extent that it was linked with hers—he couldn’t very well save her if he got himself killed. So he moved very quickly until he was poised to open the door, then froze in place.

He welcomed the sizzling sound when it began; this well-stone chemistry would get him through to Her Majesty as quickly and safely as possible.

Muddy continued wailing. Hugo mewled. Deliah, rising from her own couch, asked, “Is there anything I should be doing right now?”

Bruno, in his singularly single-minded state, ignored them all. “Ship,” he said, as another inspiration struck, “are your grapples still locked on Venus?”

“Negative,” the ship replied. “The rotation of the platform makes that impossible.”

“What’s the largest object handy? The sun? Obviously, yes. Can you lock onto that?”

“Intermittently,” the ship agreed.

“Good. Do it, and engage the grapples as soon as possible. This platform is damned heavy, but with the ertial shield we may be able to drag it out of place. At least a little. Perhaps a little is all we need. Now then, please paint a line on the interior to mark the thickness and position of the dome.”

“Instruction unclear,” the ship replied apologetically.

Blast it, his old house had been well accustomed to half-nonsense commands like that. “Paint a line, you! Show me where the dome is, the edge of the dome against your hull!”

“Like this?”

A pinkish red area the size of Bruno’s torso appeared on the inner surface of the hatch. Was this what he wanted? He waited for a moment and verified that yes, indeed, the circle was growing. Soon it became a hollowed-out oval, roughly as deep as Bruno’s hand and encircling an area as large as his body. It swelled outward slowly as the side of the ship sank its way in through the diamond structure of the dome.

“When this completely encircles the hatch,” he said, pointing to the pink line, “stop burrowing and await further instructions. I’m going to open this door and exit the ship. Er, exit you . When I come back in and close the door, break contact immediately and take us out of here. Let the dome decompress, and just grapple to anything you like. If there’s no target handy, use the backup thrusters.”

“Understood, sir.”

The outside of the painted line advanced past the corners of the hatchway. The inside of the line soon followed, leaving the hatchway completely clear. The sizzling sound switched off; the door was fully inside the dome, and so, with hardly a thought in his head, Bruno threw the latches back and heaved the door open, then leaped out.

Sunlight struck him like a physical blow. There is heat, he had time to think, and there is heat . Solar energy at fourteen thousand watts per square meter—ten times Earth normal— was something the body had no immediate response for. It was exactly like being thrown into a fire; his eyes pinched closed of their own accord, his hair singed and crisped and smoked on his scalp, and he collapsed immediately to the di-clad neutronium deck, thrashing and gasping. Fortunately, the deck was relatively cool, and his shirt and tights—which were cream colored and fairly reflective—had some minimal climate-control capabilities that saturated right around the time his sweat glands finally opened up and began pouring out rivers of lukewarm saline. These factors helped keep him from more serious injury for the six seconds it took the sun to “set” behind the platform’s edge.