Том Светерлич - The Gone World

“I’m boiling,” he said when his eyes focused on Moss, plaintive, and he fell to his knees in front of her. “There’s too much fire,” he said. “Help me, please.”

Moss kept her distance, but she wasn’t afraid. She knew his mind was gone. Hyldekrugger watched her, vaguely. He coughed up blood, but his blood was mixed with silver, and more silver rose in his mouth and overflowed his lips. “You ain’t real,” he said. “You ain’t even real, it’s just me here.” But as she left him, he called out, “Help me, you’ve got to help me!” until the wind overwhelmed his words and the blizzard enveloped him.

Moss felt the QTNs now, too—that first heat of interior chemical burn she remembered from before her crucifixion. She hurried. The Vardogger trees were on fire around her. She walked the flaming path until sparks of blue caught her attention and she saw Libra like a black gash on the horizon. At the dome where Hyldekrugger’s sentinels had kept their watch, naked men stared toward the sky, their mouths filled with silver. Crewmen of Libra , the survivors of the mutiny, Cobb among them, their lives suspended in the Terminus, dribbling silver from their mouths to coat their bodies in gleaming streams. Above them hung bones and specks of meat and veins traced delicately in the air, lungs and a heart and other organs displayed, and skin fluttering in the wind like a silk banner waving at the death of mankind. Hyldekrugger was already a ghost to her, and this was what remained of his followers; all the death they waged was a levee against the tide, but the levee had broken and left them wasted in the flood. As Moss neared the ship, she noticed that Libra ’s hull was enclosed in ice; long spikes encased the bow like a jagged carapace and would have encased the stern, too, were it not for the flashes of blue radiating from the B-L, melting it back. Moss left the Vardogger path only when she could touch the hull. She followed along the hull until she found the gangway stairs that led to the airlock and found the red-thick blood that had been painted there, and the fingernails.

The black river would be painless.

She shook these thoughts. The airlock was iced over, so she struck at the ice with the metal cuff that locked her suit’s glove to her sleeve. She thought of the first time she had stepped through this airlock: the swift loss of gravity, Hyldekrugger holding her.

In the brig for eleven years , she reminded herself, fearing the immortality of being stuck in Libra ’s Gödel curve. No room for error. She would have to attack the B-L drive, somehow spark the cascade failure. If she failed, she might not ever know she’d failed; she would be in the loop with no one to ever retrieve her.

QTNs accumulated in her, she felt them like pinpricks. She struck at the seal of ice, frantic, I have to get inside this thing , she thought, away from the Terminus. And then what? That first time inside Libra , after she had lost gravity, after Hyldekrugger caught her, she remembered that Hyldekrugger had waited for the sound of gunfire before moving from the airlock. Someone murdering the bull nuke , Moss remembered, the officer responsible for the nuclear reactor. He must have been trying to spark the cascade failure.

If I move quickly , she thought.

I might be able to move into the engine room before the gunfire.

I might be able to intervene, at that crucial moment, to save the bull nuke’s life .

She could protect him while he caused the failure.

Moss chipped away the ice. She took hold of the hatch, using her body weight to push until she felt the lock slip and she was able to open the iron door. She took a deep breath, readying to move quickly. Libra ’s entry was a circular black void, and when she climbed through, she was engulfed in flame.

Fiery air, liquid waves roiling through the airlock. She was bucked by a lurch in the ship, alarms clanging. We’re falling. Her suit was fire-resistant, but the flames had wrapped her in a cocoon of light, and she felt her skin warming. She could burn alive. Another jolt, tossing her. Libra crashed in a roar of tearing steel. Her head hit a wall, cracking her visor. The smoke of the electrical fire filled her faceplate, and she choked, coughing, her eyes burning.

She covered the faceplate crack with her gloves as best she could, but smoke still streamed in, blistering her. Her gloves were scorched. Her suit had melted in spots; the multilayer insulation was rated to a high degree of Celsius, but the engine-room fire would incinerate her. She crawled along the floor, as low as she could get to avoid the smoke, but the air was black where it wasn’t fire. Her suit was on fire now, the flames burning through her layers of protection. She felt the heat and screamed, I’ll burn, I’m going to burn alive—I’ll be in this loop, I’ll burn forever.

She saw blue light within the fire. She felt mounting tension, the immense crack of electric shock: the B-L misfire. As Moss floated upward, the fire and smoke disappeared, the conflagration gone in an instant except for the flames still crawling along the legs of her suit. She hit the ceiling, bounced. The fire-suppression system belched a stream of foam that doused her suit fire. No gravity. She was in the loop now, certainly. She must have entered at a different point from before, this time during the ship’s crash. Am I stuck in the loop? It was like wondering if she was stuck in a dream.

Then everything happened too quickly. The two-tone clangor of the Power Plant Casualty alarm rang through the ship, but Moss was out of position, her suit stiff with the foamy fire suppressant. She scrambled, but the clatter of gunfire cut down her hopes. She was too late, everything was playing out as before. That gunfire meant the bull nuke had been shot. She wasn’t in time to save him, to help him start the cascade failure of the B-L drive.

She tried to remember.

After the sound of gunfire, Hyldekrugger had brought her into the engine room. That’s where Moss went now, hoping she might be able to pick up where the bull nuke left off, thinking she might be able to figure out the control panel. The engine room was just as she’d seen it that first time, the silver containment vessel of the nuclear reactor, the B-L drive in its own compartment. The body of the bull nuke floated above the control panel, gluey blood in a long bubble from the bullet wounds in his gut.

She pushed the body aside, took off her scorched gloves, her helmet, let them float away. The control panel was a gray metal morass of switches and knobs, meters and blinking lights. It had been built in the 1970s: no AI interface, no digital screens. Again Moss was seized by a dreamlike frustration. She had to accomplish a task but didn’t know how, had to spark a cascade failure but didn’t know which switches to flip. Try anything— but, No, that won’t work. There were fail-safes. The whole thing would just shut down, requiring an override code from an engineering officer.

Hyldekrugger hadn’t wanted to stay in this room, she remembered, because Patrick Mursult would be here soon, a Navy SEAL in the frenzy of mutiny. We don’t want to fight him, not here. The nuclear reactor rattled, a grinding whine, and the lights of the ship went out, casting her in pure darkness.

There had been a flashlight, she remembered. She floated to the near wall, feeling Velcro, feeling metal tools attached there, things she couldn’t recognize in the dark. She recognized the shape of a flashlight when her fingers found the lens. She pulled it from the Velcro, turned on the light.

I need help , she thought. I need to find Remarque before they kill her. How?