How Dark the World Becomes (22 page)

“Painting us?” Marfoglia asked beside me in a frightened whisper, so the kids wouldn’t hear.

“Target-acquisition radar,” I answered, my mouth dry.

“I’ve got him on the CA radar,” Turncrank said. “Oh . . . ,” he added quietly, his voice changed, tired and dead-sounding, “it’s way too small to be a ship.” 

Ping looked at him, looked up at the screen, and then—suddenly calm—took a long, slow look around him at the control room of the
Long Shot.

“I really love this ship,” he said quietly, to no one in particular. 

The screen went white. There was a simultaneous thunderous explosion that I felt as much as heard, and the ship rocked hard to the side, almost tearing my restraining straps off the acceleration couch. Then the control room went black as the power failed, and we were alone in the darkness, the only sounds being the tortured metallic groans of the
Long Shot
breaking up and the screams of its passengers and crew. 

I’m not certain, but I think I must have been one of those screaming.

SEVENTEEN

Marfoglia was holding my hand in the darkness. Or I was holding hers. Who knows? At the moment you think you’re facing death, you grab for life, wherever you can find it. 

The worst of the metallic groaning had stopped, and I didn’t hear any telltale hiss of escaping atmosphere, so that was good. The kids were both crying, but that meant they were alive, and Marfoglia was almost compulsively squeezing my hand, so she was, too. 

“We should engage the auxiliary power, Jim,” I heard Ping say. “Jim?”

No answer. 

“Oh no,” Ping said in the darkness.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. That was a pretty boneheaded question under the circumstances, but Ping knew what I meant.

“Jim’s hurt,” he answered. “Unconscious, but he’s alive. Hold on a second . . .”

Half a dozen dim emergency lights came on around the cabin. I looked over at Marfoglia and the kids first. Marfoglia was terrified but dry-eyed and keeping it together. Not sure where she got it, but she had some sand in her, that was for sure. I saw a cut on her forehead and some blood, but not a lot. A few small things floated free in the control room, things that had come loose in the explosion, and one must have clipped her. Beside her, Barraki and Tweezaa sobbed, almost hysterical with fright. 

“Hey, settle down, guys,” I said, mostly to Barraki, because he was older and Tweezaa would follow his lead. “We’re okay. We’re alive and we’ve got air.” I patted Marfoglia’s hand with my free left hand and then let go with my right. “You take care of them, okay? I’m going to see if I can help Ping.”

She nodded. 

I unstrapped and let myself float up to Ping, who was hovering over Turncrank’s couch. I started rotating slowly as I moved, and as soon as I was level with them, I started drifting back “down” toward the acceleration couches and off to one side, which meant we must be tumbling, and centrifugal force was pushing me gently out toward the hull. I grabbed a railing to steady myself and took a look at Turncrank. His neck was pretty obviously broken. Ping looked up at me.

“Should we straighten his head?”

“Yeah, he’s having trouble breathing. But we’ll need to use something to secure it. If we get jolted again, we don’t want it flopping around.” I pulled the belt out of my slacks and we used that across his forehead to hold his head steady once we’d straightened it. 

“What hit us?” I asked while we were working on Turncrank. “He said it was too small for a ship. It meant something to you two. What?” 

“A missile. It detonated perhaps a thousand kilometers out. It had to be that far or the collision-avoidance radar would have picked it up sooner, even something that small.”

“Would the blast travel that far through vacuum?” I asked. 

“There is no real blast concussion in vacuum at all, just a great deal of gamma radiation, heat, and light. The missile has a thermonuclear warhead which pumps a high energy x-ray laser—once. It is the laser that kills, not the blast. They call it a ‘fire lance.’”

“So the big explosion?”

“Our hydrogen reaction mass and the ship’s atmosphere all mixed up . . . that and some explosive decompression.”

“What about your main power plant? Could that have gone up, too?” I asked, but he shook his head.

“If the fusion reactor had gone critical, we would not be here talking. It was already shut down; we only use it to pump the jump capacitors. Coasting like this we just use the LENR generators. Unfortunately, the explosion took out the forward generator, and we’ve got no live circuit to anyplace else on the ship, so we are on emergency battery power.”

“How we doing on oxygen?” I asked.

“Oxygen is not our problem—heat is. We will freeze to death long before we suffocate.”

That was encouraging.

“What about Mogo? We gonna hit it?” I asked. 

He shrugged.

“I cannot tell how much the explosion changed our trajectory, but the odds are it was not enough to put us in the capture zone. We will do a pass-by later today, and, without making a correction to put us in a stable orbit, we will slingshot back out. We will probably end in a cometary orbit around the primary with a period of a hundred years or more.”

I thought that over. 

“How long?” I asked.

“Perhaps twenty-four hours at the lowest settings which will keep us alive. Possibly a little longer if we pick up some radiated heat from Mogo as we pass it.”

*   *   *

Turncrank woke up a little while later, but he was in bad shape. His spinal cord must have been badly damaged, and everything below the neck started shutting down. Marfoglia floated beside him and talked with him, held his hand, and after about an hour he died. She hadn’t cried before, but she did then. 

The control room wasn’t all that big, and it just didn’t feel right with Jim Turncrank’s body lying there beside us. No way to get rid of him, but Ping and I moved him over to a long locker and settled him in. It wasn’t a real burial, of course, but it felt a little bit like one when we closed the door and the latch clicked. Ping and I floated there for a while, just looking at the locker. 

“He seemed like a pretty solid guy,” I ventured after a minute. Ping nodded.

“He had a terrible life. I never saw him take it out on anyone else, though. He could not tell a joke to save his life, but I got him to laugh at mine now and then.”

What do you want people to remember about you when you check out? That you made a lot of money? That you dressed well? Or maybe that you never took your troubles out on someone else. It’s worth thinking about now and then.

Jim was gone, but we were still here—for a while. Twenty-three hours left and counting. It was already cold enough you could see your breath. Barraki and Tweezaa were huddled together for warmth, we had both of our blankets wrapped around them, and Marfoglia floated with them, her arms around them as well. 

Pointless. Just delaying the inevitable; just prolonging our misery, and I’m not one to pointlessly prolong misery. You may have noticed that I’m not one to give up easily, either, but I was close to stumped this time. 

Think,
I told myself.
Work the problem through.

“If there’s no one in orbit around Mogo, we’re dead no matter what we do, right?” I asked Ping. “Because they couldn’t get to us in time anyway.” 

He nodded.

“Okay. So we
assume
there’s someone in orbit, because that’s the only bet that can possibly pay off.”

“Very well,” he agreed. “We will assume that.”

“Now, if there’s someone in orbit, and they don’t see us, we die anyway. How soon do they have to see us?” I asked. Ping thought for a moment.

“By now we are about ten hours out from Mogo orbit. Say another two or three hours to make a partial transit. Then, either we hit Mogo itself, or the gravity slingshot takes over, and we begin our course to exit the inner system.” 

“Okay, so about twelve hours, tops?”

He nodded again, and then shrugged.

“So what?”

“I’m just trying to see what we have to work with. Whatever we do, we know that we can invest half our battery power in it, right? Because after twelve hours, we’re finished anyway, and it doesn’t matter.”

“All right,” he agreed, nodding. “I do not know what good it does us, but yes. For the sake of argument, we can use up half our battery power.”

“Okay. We’ve got half our battery power to use, and we need to attract the attention of whoever is out there in orbit around Mogo. How do we do that?”

He just looked at me. 

“Come on,” I insisted. “There’s got to be some way.”

“Well, I cannot think of any,” he said, “and it is not as if I do not want to. Assuming somebody is out there, they will have sensors. They may pick up our wreckage on active radar, but there is nothing we can do to help or hurt our chances there; they either do or they do not. What we can do is try to show up on their
passive
sensors, and we do that by emitting energy.”

“And we’ve got some energy,” I said. 

“Yes, but no way to emit it.”

Marfoglia drifted over to join us.

“What are you two talking about?” she asked.

“We’re organizing our rescue,” I answered, and for the first time since the attack, Ping smiled.

“I like the way you look at things, Sasha,” he said.

“Is there a chance?” Marfoglia asked, hope showing in her face.

“We’re about halfway there,” I answered, which was something of an exaggeration, but sometimes you need to keep people positive, just so their brains keep ticking. I brought her up to speed on what we’d figured out so far. The fact that it was a long shot there even was somebody in orbit didn’t seem to occur to her. Or maybe she just looked at it the same way I did. 

“So the problem is, how do we convert our battery power into an emission their passive sensors can pick up?” I finished. 

“Well,” Ping said, “and that is the difficulty. I already tried to transmit on the emergency sets, but according to the readouts still working, we have no antennae. Even transmitting radio white noise, without an antenna to direct the transmission, you could only pick us up for a hundred kilometers or so.”

“Better than nothing, though,” I said, but he shook his head.

“No, their CA radar—that’s collision avoidance—would pick up our wreckage long before then. So if we get that close, we are safe, but if not . . .”

Yeah, and what are the odds of coming—by chance—within a couple hundred klicks of another ship while coasting past a gas giant? Not worth calculating. 

“Okay. If not radio, what?”

“Thermal—heat,” he answered. “But that takes more energy—too much energy. Commercial ship thermals are set to pick up stars and brown dwarves. Warships are better—they don’t like to talk about it, but I’ve heard some of them can detect main thruster burns at a light-second or more. But what we’ve got here is just a
room
heater.” He shook his head. 

“Light,” I said. “They can detect light.”

He nodded. “Yes, but we cannot make it. Or rather, we can make it in here, but nobody out there can see it through the hull, and there are no portholes in the control module. It is just a solid composite sphere attached to the front of the ship. The only holes in the sphere are the access door and the circuit trunks, and those lead back into the ship, not outside. The trunks all self-sealed as soon as the main hull lost pressure, and cut the lines, or we’d all be dead.”

“Okay. Can we get to the outside by going through the access door?”

He shook his head again.

“The hull is evacuated. We have two pressure suits in this compartment, but there are five of us, and there is no air lock, so if we crack that access door, the oxygen is gone and everybody dies but the two people in suits. I suppose we could draw straws.”

“Nope. Not an option,” I said. “Barraki and Tweezaa can’t manage the job by themselves, and nobody gets in a suit unless it’s them.”

Marfoglia looked at me oddly when I said that. I shrugged. Way it is. 

“You said there are no windows,” Marfoglia said to Ping. “But I think I remember one.”

“The access hatch has one, but it just shows you the interior corridor; it does not open on the outside,” Ping answered.

“Well, what’s that flickering light shining through it?” she asked.

*   *   *

The flickering light, it turned out, was the reflected glow of Mogo, blinking on and off as the wreckage tumbled and brought the planet into and out of view. 

How could a planet come into and out of view of an interior window? It wasn’t an interior window anymore. The control module had broken completely free from the main body of the ship and was tumbling. When we looked, we could catch glimpses of the main wreckage of the
Long Shot
receding from us. 

That was bad news, in a way. The wreckage was the biggest radar signature around. The farther we got away from it, the more chance there was that, even if someone saw
it
on radar, they’d miss
us
. 

But it did give us an outside window, and that gave us an outside chance. I almost wanted to kiss Marfoglia for noticing it. But—you know—just out of gratitude. 

It took the better part of another hour, but we rigged up the highest intensity light we could, secured it to the window, and backed it up with whatever reflective surfaces we could find, to direct as many photons as possible out that little circle of clear composite material. We rigged a capacitor pumped from the battery and set it to discharge and strobe once every two minutes. After about ten minutes, Ping did a battery check and some calculations.

“Eight hours,” he said. “No more. Then the battery’s dead. As it is, we’ll start losing intensity after six hours or so.” 

Marfoglia looked at Ping and then at me. 

“What do you think, Sasha?” she asked.

“I guess it’s all our decisions, but I vote to keep the light going as long and as bright as possible. If no one finds us, what does an extra couple hours of heat buy?”

Marfoglia and Ping nodded, and that was that. 

Four hours later and I wasn’t so sure. I was developing a fantasy that, once it looked like there was no hope, we should crank the heat up and get warm one last time. I was so cold, I was almost anxious to run out of hope. Getting warm seemed more important.