Cracking the Sky (17 page)

“Can’t we take the other marble?” Kyle interrupted. “I could use the arms to tear my way in—”

Henry shook his head. “The thruster died last week. It’s not repairable. I ordered another one, more advanced. It’ll be on the next ship, the one you’re supposed to leave on.”

Kyle winced. More things were breaking and less was being done to fix them as the base lurched towards the end of its useful life. He had no idea what to tell Lark to do. “Lark, can you tell me exactly what happened? I’m sure you said, but I wasn’t in here to hear it. It’s hard to visualize without outside cameras.”

“Suriyah sent a remote cam right after I called her. But it’ll be thirty minutes; it had to prep itself before it launched. The leftside grabber broke months ago. Henry and I tied it down. I checked it before I went out. It’s even on the ship-check sheet since it’s been trash so long.”

Kyle looked at Henry, who sighed.

“Well, it
was
tied down, I checked! I was going to the midline of the Styx. You got the vines growing in both directions, Dad, and now it’s weaving a kind of net. It looks really good. I’m trying to study the autotrophic processes in the healthier plants. Something is . . . changing; they’re becoming more active as we get further away from the sun. You’d expect them to be slower since it’s colder. I want to understand before we have to leave.”

Suriyah and Paul were drawing in the corner, looking at the stilled video images and working on a slate. Their whispering was distracting. Kyle moved closer to the mike. “Okay, honey, but how’d you get stuck?” He winced. She hated it when he called her “honey.” Sixteen- year-old girls were touchy.

To her credit she ignored the slight. “I . . . I don’t know. The arm must have broken free. I got too close. Anyway, a pretty thin leaf-vine got stuck in it, and I wasn’t going very fast, but it jerked the marble and shifted my course. That’s when the real problem came with the arm; anyway, that’s when I could tell it was dangling freely, and since I was still moving it caught more stuff, and then slammed me into a big vine. I tried to use the topside arm, and I . . . I . . . just got it tangled, too. So I decided I’d try and thrust out of here, and I put it at full power.”

Lark sounded defensive; she wasn’t supposed to use full power in the creepers. “You didn’t have a choice, honey.” Damn it—there was that word again. What was wrong with him? “It was a good choice, Lark.”

“It wasn’t good. The marble was too stuck, and the topside arm broke, and I didn’t get out. That was when I called Suriyah.” Lark was quiet, then she said, “There’s a big vine blocking the door, Daddy. It’s feeling around the edges, but the heat leakage has it stopped. But I can’t even go EVA to cut myself free.” There was a tremor in her voice.

“We’ll figure it out. Henry and Suriyah and Paul are working on something right now.”

Kyle paced. Suriyah had shooed the others out, so only the four of them, and Lark’s frozen face, remained. Kyle talked to Lark off and on, encouraging. She was getting impatient. Kyle felt lost. This wasn’t fair—they were supposed to be having a party. His fists clenched as he kept pacing, nervous. What was taking so long? Why wasn’t Lark already on her way home?

The remote camera was in place, its feed playing on one large wall. As the camera flew closer around
Shooter
, the damage to two of the arms was clear. One was missing half its length.
Shooter
was so enmeshed in creeper it looked like it was purposely tied down.

After two hours, Henry keyed Lark, and said, “Okay, we’re ready to go. Turn on your video.”

Lark’s frozen image had looked angry. The animated face that replaced it in the live feed looked calmer, serious. The whites of her dark eyes were red. Lark didn’t show any hesitation as she followed Henry’s advice, setting the small directional thrusters to given angles and strapping herself in. There was a limited amount of propellant for the little thrusters; the antimatter was confined for use in the main engine.

Kyle’s eyes stayed on the camera feed. There was a puff of propellant release, the burn of the thrusters, and the little marble pushed forward, rotating, pulling the sheet of creeper forest slightly; a tug of war. The tangle of ship and creepers moved. Lark yelped.

She’d turned off the thrusters.

Her voice was quivery, scared. “It didn’t sound right. The arm . . . the bottomside arm sounded like it might rip off right below my feet!”

“Damn,” Henry swore. “All right. Don’t crack the bubble. Damn engineers should’ve designed the arms to be released from inside.”

Kyle had never heard Henry cuss. He closed his eyes briefly. “They’ll all be retired by now. Can we try again?”

“Sure, but something else.” Henry directed the camera feed, again, to almost circle the knot of creeper.

*

Three more hours, two more failures.

A blast of the main motor fried a path through the vines, but the arms weren’t positioned to push the marble backward. Lark’s wriggling had put the marble almost on its side, but how could that change the position of the arms? And the vines were growing back into the charred path.

If an arm tore loose, if the shell was breached, Lark still had a pressure suit. That, they decided, wasn’t the problem. The problem was shrapnel, if the base of an arm sprang loose under high tension.

By the last try, the room was full again. Christy Base was in on it, engineers and pilots tossing out and rejecting ideas. Paul had been hauled off to bed by his parents, Kate and Jason, and they had come back to watch. Suriyah was crying. “Quit forcing it. That girl is in an egg—don’t break it open. She’s got time—no need to kill her now. Go eat,” she said to Kyle and Henry. “Tell Lark to sleep. Food and rest will help you all think.”

Kyle didn’t want to go, but Suriyah ignored his protests and Henry showed the log of everything they’d tried to Kate and Jason, and asked them to look for other ideas.

Kyle couldn’t sleep. He checked on Lark, who was sleeping. He wandered the halls, lost and tired. Finally, he climbed the ladder to the telescope platform on top of the base. The scope was almost useless since the cloud cover had increased over the past five years, but he remembered showing Lark her first view of the Earth from here.

Right now, the sky was unusually clear. Charon was dead overhead, a great black shield still showing details of landscape in the sunlight reflected from Pluto. The Styx rose like Jack’s beanstalk . . .

They still couldn’t build a Beanstalk, an orbital tower, on Earth. Their materials weren’t strong enough. But Charon and Pluto were mutually tidally locked—unique within the known universe—and light enough that a Hoytether™ had been strung between them. A Hoytether™ was an array of strands, some left looser than others to take up the slack if nearby strands broke. It already looked like a trellis. And then the games those students were playing with plant DNA paid off, and Styx was born.

*

Kyle found the bubble in the scope. It hung motionless, huge in the viewfinder, like a soap bubble caught in a white rose bush. Unreachable. His daughter.

He must have dozed. Henry’s hand poking him startled him. “Jason said you were up. I thought you’d be here.”

“This isn’t going to work, is it?”

Henry climbed the rest of the way up the ladder and slowly sat down on the observatory floor next to Kyle. The only light shone up from the door where the ladder came in, and the semi-darkness somehow made Henry look even older than usual.

“Did you find her with the scope?”

Kyle nodded.

“I’m afraid to force her free. It’s wasting power, and I don’t trust that little marble.”

Kyle pictured Lark dying slowly over days, alone, knowing she was dying. “When this happened, I thought it meant she’d be late for her party. I thought she was irresponsible.” He twisted his hands together, stretching his long fingers, fidgeting. “Can we cut her free from here somehow? Do we have any remotes that could do that? Can we make one?”

Henry pursed his lips. “She’s all tangled up. Good chance of cutting her free and having her float off into space, unable to steer.”

“There’s no way to repair the other marble? You’re sure?” Kyle asked.

“I’m sure.”

“Can we try?”

Henry looked at him gently. “We can try something—I just don’t know what yet. Keep thinking.”

“She can’t climb down to us,” Kyle jumped up and started pacing again. “Can I climb to her? Cut her loose?”

“It’s a hundred sixty klicks and a bit.” Henry cocked an eyebrow. Both men were quiet for long moments. “We have ten days.”

“Damn. No, it won’t work. She’ll run out of air on the way down.”

“She can plug into the vines. She just can’t do that with the suit she’s wearing. We’ll have to modify a suit and bring it to her.”

It had stopped sounding impossible. A hundred sixty kilometers straight up, in low and dwindling gravity . . . “It will be a hard climb. I’ll go.”

“We’ll both go,” Henry said.

Climbing with Henry would be
slow
. “Can you to stay in communications and direct the climb?”

“Jason can direct. I’m going.” Henry stared up at the huge telescope. “I still pass my physical every year. I know more about what might work out there than you do. You need me. So does Lark. And two people have a better chance of getting there than one. What if you get out there alone and you get tired or hurt?”

“I’m in good shape!” Kyle protested. “I work out every day.” He’d be fifty in ten weeks.

“It’s going to take more than physical conditioning to save Lark.” Henry didn’t have to say she was more likely to listen to him than to Kyle.

“It’s going to be one hell of a climb. It will take endurance.”

“And brains.”

Kyle sighed. “Okay. So I have endurance, and you have brains. Is that it?”

“No, I have more experience in the Styx.”

“I’m in better shape.”

Henry didn’t even seem to hear him—he was looking up through an observatory window, where the interworld forest floated above them.

*

Suriyah fought them, convinced both men were crazy. “You will die out there! Find another way. That vine is alive—I tell you it’s alive. It suffers us to study it, but it will not let you climb it.” She stood over the little altar she kept in a corner of the galley and recited a prayer to Kali and burned sandalwood incense. Afterwards, she refused to talk to them for hours.

Lark was silent when Kyle said he was coming to get her. “I’m bringing Henry,” he added.

“See you in a few days.” She turned off the video abruptly, freezing her picture with a blank expression on her face. He couldn’t tell if she was happy he was coming for her, or what she thought about Henry coming along.

Kyle turned off the frozen picture.

Preparing took two long days, and many conversations back and forth between Little Siberia and Christy Base. Kyle was tired and frustrated. Lark was quiet for hours at a time. Since the video was almost never on, he couldn’t really tell how she was doing.

“There’s more damn gadgets in this suit than any sane engineer would’ve designed,” Henry complained.

Kyle stepped back to check the way the suit fit on Henry. It was an Adventurer-class suit, left behind after the initial run of programs broadcast from Pluto had lost ratings in favor of faster and more deadly endeavors. Originally made for someone with wider shoulders than Henry’s, it fit well otherwise. The ankles were baggy. Considering the work they did, the suits were a miracle. But they were still two inches thick everywhere, full of sensors and smart chips and wires and air tubes. Henry looked bulky and awkward.

“It’ll do. You might be grateful for the help.”

“I will
not
.” Henry hated using the adventure suits. “Damn parasites. People who won’t go into the world on their own want to ride our dangers. Let ’em make their own dangers.”

It had been Paul’s idea.

Kyle had been fetching something for Henry when he passed Paul in a hallway. The boy had looked up and said, “You’re using the Tourist-class suits, right? Let’s broadcast it! It’ll be like
Real Space Dangers
when they saved the crew of the
Orpheus
. You’ll be heroes!”

Kyle remembered the river rafting show where Han Davidson had been sucked into a sinkhole. Endless views of dark, swirling water while Davidson drowned. Kyle mumbled something noncommittal and kept right on going to find the saw blade he was looking for.

Paul interpreted that as assent, and arranged for network coverage before Kyle had a chance to talk to Henry. They would have taken the tourist equipment anyway. The suits had pockets and belts and straps to let the men take their fill of tools, and they had been designed for a thin atmosphere. They were flexible, versatile. The equipment
was
outdated compared to current adventure suits, and
of course
there were too many readouts and controls, but far better for this venture than the standard surface suits.

Audience thirst for real adventure shows was high; live rescue of a lost maiden would be popular. Now that the networks knew about the rescue, and the suits, they threatened to refuse access to the communications gear if they didn’t get to broadcast. Henry wanted to take the suits anyway, and let the networks sue them. Kyle pointed out that he needed to publish to survive, and he needed the networks for that. Besides, money from the networks beat a lawsuit. Jason had the common sense to improve Paul’s original wide-open offer and bargain real money for Henry, Lark, and Kyle, as well as support pay for the other people living in Little Siberia.

“When we get back, Paul gets assigned kitchen duty for three years,” Henry said.

“He won’t be here for three years. His family is leaving on the next ship with us. So give up and focus.”

After a final suit-check, Kyle and Henry stepped into the lock, towing nets of gear behind them. They sweated inside the slick suits. The outside temperature was -235c. It took twenty minutes for the base computers to decide the suits had adjusted enough to open the door. They were still sweating when they stepped out onto the sea of ice surrounding Little Siberia. To their right, solid and clear methane crystals the size of houses were half-covered with blown ices and snows. Paths to the left led to Creeper Fields.