The Wellstone (24 page)
chapter sixteen
crash day
Conrad’s hands were back in his pockets, but he withdrew them now and crossed his arms again. “I won’t cooperate with this. I won’t put on a space suit, and I certainly won’t let my image push someone else out of that buffer.”
“Have you ever been dressed by Palace Guards?” Bascal asked him. “I have, and believe me, they’re not household servants.”
“No concern,” Conrad said.
Bascal sighed. “Fine. Have it your way. This is a pointless gesture, but I understand it well. You know exactly what’s going to happen, but you want it on
my
conscience.”
“Your what?” Conrad snapped.
“Oh, don’t start. If I didn’t care about you ungrateful shits we’d never have done any of this. I’d leave you under the parental jackboot, for a thousand fucking years. Guards, dress this man in a space suit, please. And put him in the fax.”
“Guards,” Conrad tried, “you’re supposed to keep us from hurting each other!”
But the robots paid no attention to him. Somewhere in the balance sheets of their programming, they’d somehow concluded that this course of action—this culling of
Viridity
’s crew—was both in the prince’s best interest, and in compliance with the king’s commands. Or at least in the prince’s best interest; having allowed all this irreversibly crazy shit to happen, maybe they’d had to cut their losses and give up on old instructions. He would have loved the chance to cross-examine them about it— to determine once and for all how these monsters conceptualized the world—but it was a vain hope indeed.
They
were
rough, dressing him. They seemed to know which way his joints could bend, and how much pressure his flesh could take without bruising, but at the same time they showed zero regard for his comfort or dignity, for his half-full stomach and bladder, for his ability to draw a proper breath. They worked quickly, slapping the paper-doll cutouts of wellstone film onto his front and back and sealing them together somehow with their fingertips, which apparently doubled as matter programmers. The boots and gloves were trickier and more painful, and the loose, bucket-shaped helmet was the worst of all, because it was still opaque, and seemed to suffocate him even before they’d sealed it on.
“Clear, clear!” he shouted, then, “Transparent!”
But there wasn’t any voice interface. The wellstone couldn’t hear him. Fortunately the robots switched it on somehow, and the whole suit turned to clear plastic around him, just before the neck seam was fingered shut and sealed beneath his adam’s apple. And then he was cartwheeling through the air, the blank fax plate looming before him, and he had just enough time to curse before ...
Pop!
... he was tumbling out of the fax again, into total chaos. Film and dust. Darkness, bodies. Splintered wood and crumpled wellstone, lit only by the dim yellow corner markers of the fax machine itself, and by starlight streaming in from ...
Spinning through the mess, Conrad struggled to make sense of what he was seeing. They had crashed, obviously, and the stars outside weren’t wheeling visibly, so presumably the
fetula
had slammed into something solid. Something heavy and immovable. The barge. But they were
alive
, or Conrad was anyway, so they obviously hadn’t smacked into it head-on. Which meant ... the magnetic braking had worked?
Conrad struck some yielding surface, sank in for a moment and then bounced away. Moving and spinning more slowly now. There was nothing resembling a ceiling or floor here, no walls or windows. The braking program had called for a peak deceleration of 260 gee—six and a half “train wrecks” according to Conrad’s mechanics textbook—and under that shock the wood and wellwood of the cabin had been pulverized. From what he could see— which wasn’t much—there weren’t any pieces left larger than his arm. But after that peak, the
fetula
should slow down rapidly. And as it stopped and reversed, the field strength was supposed to reduce by a factor of a million, so the final docking—the actual physical impact between
fetula
and barge—would be slow and gentle.
This vaguely curving flatness to his left—was that the outer hull of the barge? A tiny section of a great, kilometer-long cylinder? Yes, he could see it now:
Viridity
lay crumpled against the barge like a wadded-up rag. The sail would be flat against the barge’s hull, lightly bonded to it, and the wellstone film enclosing D’rector Jed’s cabin had mostly held together, but had burst at the seams, leaving puffy, labial openings through which the air had fled, and through which splinters of wood and other material were now streaming out into the void of space.
A hand gripped his elbow. He turned—he’d gotten quite good at turning in zero gravity without having to hold onto anything—and saw Xmary there in the dimness: barefoot in camp culottes and cutoff tee shirt, with her hair poofed out by static electricity and the clear, shiny membrane of space suit swollen around her like a girl-shaped balloon.
Behind her, holding her in unseemly ways, were Bascal and Karl. And beside them was a single, battered Palace Guard. Conrad didn’t see the other one anywhere. Had it been pulverized? Ejected into space? Dangling from the remaining guard’s foot was Ho, wearing what looked in the poor light like a very frightened expression. Conrad—who was too stunned to be afraid—felt a moment of smugness about that, but when he followed Ho’s gaze to one of the wellstone’s ripped openings, he saw a human-shaped form outside, shrinking and struggling against a backdrop of stars. The missing guard?
No! Jesus and the little gods, that was
Martin
, thirty meters away and still going. Conrad could just barely make out his face, twisted into a breathless scream while the arms and legs flailed, pulling and pushing at nothing, swimming helplessly against the vacuum.
“Gods!” Conrad shrieked at the others. “Help him! Throw him something!” But the others couldn’t hear him—there were no radios in these crude, makeshift suits, and the vacuum around him absorbed the sounds of his voice like a smothering pillow. The Palace Guard— if it was even alive—clearly wasn’t going to help, and a cursory look around told Conrad there was nothing in here to throw, nothing but dust and splinters, a few jagged lightning bolts of former pine log.
Could Martin catch some pieces of wood, and turn around and throw them behind him? Use them for propulsion? Shaking off Xmary’s grasp, Conrad snatched up one of the fragments and hurled it in Martin’s direction. The throw went wild, though, striking the filmy edge of the rip and spinning away into the void.
A wet fog began to form on the material in front of Conrad’s face, and he realized he was breathing very heavily, using up his limited oxygen supply. He forced himself to slow down, take this whole thing more carefully and thoughtfully. He wiped uselessly at his face bubble, but of course the fog was on the inside. Slow down. Slow down.
He took up another, bigger hunk of wood. He moved, very deliberately, right into the opening, so that its suggestive lip-edges were pressing lightly against the balloon of his own space suit. He cocked his arm back, making sure he had room for the swing, and then he lined up on Martin and let fly. This time the shot was good: straight on target and with virtually no spin. Martin saw it coming, and grabbed at it, and seized it firmly the way a drowning man might. Climbing it, practically.
But that was it. He didn’t turn around, didn’t try to throw it. All Conrad could see of his face now were the whites of his eyes, which seemed impossibly wide and round. He didn’t understand what Conrad was trying to do, and Conrad couldn’t tell him. Did he expect to be reeled in on a line? Was he thinking at all, or simply flailing in a blind panic? The white, wet fog began to expand once more against clear wellstone, and Conrad had to force himself, again, to slow down his breathing.
There
were
cables out there somewhere: the seven-hundred-meter wellstone guylines that had connected cabin to sail. He fantasized briefly about tying one of these around his waist, and then leaping heroically into the void to snag Martin in a footballer’s two-armed waist hug. He hunted visually for several seconds, his eyes adjusting to the wrinkled gray-black of wellstone sail against the unlit rails and poles and smooth whiteness of the barge’s hull, and the dappled blackness of the larger universe. He quickly found what he was looking for: a snarl of ribbonlike material protruding from beneath the crumple of
Viridity
’s mortal remains.
He reached for it, then realized he’d have to step outside to get it. Then realized there were no
ends
; he’d have to untangle eighty meters of line just to
think
about jumping. And then he’d have to jump, and then he’d have to climb back down the ribbon, hand-over-hand, probably fighting with a panicky Martin Liss every centimeter of the way. And then he’d be back where he started, right here at the edge of
Viridity
’s crumple.
And the thing about that was, he didn’t have enough air. The atmosphere in these suits was pure oxygen—or supposed to be, anyway—but the pressure was really low. The total
amount
of oxygen was meager, and already he could feel the difference. Already the suit was losing its ability to sustain him, and in another few minutes its oxygen would be gone, and if he hadn’t found some way into some habitable space inside the barge, then he would suffocate, and he and Martin would both be dead.
At that moment, Conrad made a management decision of his own: he was not going to save Martin. There were unsavory little corollaries to this thought: Martin had understood and agreed to this particular risk. Martin was not key personnel—he didn’t have any specific skills or knowledge that could help keep everyone else alive. There were plenty more Martins where this one had come from—an inexhaustible supply. And anyway, Conrad didn’t like Martin. Didn’t
know
Martin, and after weeks of sharing the same cramped space together, that said an awful lot. But though he felt rotten inside, these shameful assertions were fleeting and beside the point; Conrad wasn’t prepared to get himself killed for no reason, for no net gain.
And it struck him then—a kind of premonition—that his life would never be entirely peaceful, that he would never
choose
a peaceful life. As he turned his back on Martin Liss, he realized that there would be others. In the immorbid infinity of his future, there would be others whom he would knowingly abandon to certain—and horrible—death. He was glad, suddenly, that there were no radios in these suits.
A hand gripped the meat of his elbow. Xmary again, and this time she held him so firmly that her fingers made contact nearly all the way around, causing the wellstone balloon around his arm to bulge into two separate, sausagey tubes.
He looked at her. She was pointing. The others were still connected to her in a human chain, with the Palace Guard at its far end, and Xmary was pointing through a different opening in the crumple of wellstone. Something was blinking out there, some sort of blue warning beacon shining up through the folded, beetle-black wellstone of the sail. And beyond the flashing light he could make out the edges of a circular, sail-covered depression. An airlock? A cargo hatch? Waste disposal chute? It hardly mattered, if it offered a way inside.
The guard wasn’t moving—its feet were still anchored somehow—so that left Conrad to lead the chain. Would the guard follow? It would have to, unless it wanted to scoop Bascal up and carry him personally. Which, come to think of it, was probably exactly what it
would
do if they took too long about this. Would it scatter the rest of them in the process, spinning them off into the void, or slamming the hatch in their faces?
The fog deepened on Conrad’s soap bubble of a helmet. That hatch was seventy meters away, and while the barge’s hull had rungs and rails and handholds all over it—as any real spaceship did—they were draped over with folded layers of sail. Fortunately, there was no air trapped between the layers, puffing them out, and the light magnetic bonding held the layers together as well as holding them down against the hull. Still, it looked like a hell of a climb, and it had to happen quickly.
All right, then. Trying hard to keep his breathing slow, trying not to think about Martin or Bascal or anything else, he moved toward the opening, groping with his free hand. Even in the dimness he spotted the rail before he felt it; closing his hand around it was like grabbing a window sash with the curtains down. And while the filmy material was light and flexible, it had no stretch to it. Pressing a few centimeters of it in around the rail, he had to push hard enough to straighten out wrinkles for meters in every direction. Fortunately, the stuff wasn’t slippery, and neither was the clear, balloony glove around his hand. Air pressure wanted to keep his fingers straight, but he was stronger than it was. The wellstone bulged over the backs of his fingers as he tightened his grip on the handrail.
“One,” he said to himself.
The next move was trickier, as it involved his right arm. He literally had to drag Xmary and the others along as he reached for the further handhold. But though they had inertia, they didn’t have weight. It took no real strength to move them, just precision and patience. He looked over his shoulder and saw the Palace Guard take a step, to keep the chain from tightening dangerously. He sighed. With that rock-solid footing, it could easily lead the way, dragging the rest of them along behind it. As it was, he supposed it could at least serve as a safety anchor.
His hand closed around the second rail. “Two.”
Rails three and four were much the same, although Xmary was finding her own grip on “one” with her free left hand. But by the time he got to six, the human chain hanging onto him was like a mutant centipede with half its legs torn off, moving in jerks and thrashes. It took more concentration to get his handholds right, especially since these rails were cocked toward him at a funny angle. There was a row of them leading directly to the hatch, though, and when he finally got onto it—and straightened the chain behind him—the going was easier.
