Authors: Gary Gibson
‘I have to go,’ she murmured to his silent body, then she exited the command bridge.
She pulled up an offline map of the
Ingersoll
even as she exited the command deck. It showed her the location of the nearest escape-pod bay, which was close to her own
and Bash’s quarters. The fabricator and engineering bays were further away, located towards the stern.
The corridor beyond was lined with cupboards and storage spaces. She searched through them for a spacesuit or a breather mask, or anything else that might keep her and Bash alive while they
traversed the depressurized sections of the ship.
As she searched, she became more frantic, able to feel the seconds ticking by. And yet there seemed to be nothing. But there had to be, surely, somewhere.
On hearing something clunk and scrape further around the curving corridor, followed by a kind of electronic chittering, she felt her panic grow greater.
Then she remembered those orange boxes mounted at various points around the ship, containing emergency breathers and other survival equipment.
She turned around, pushing herself away from the source of the chittering and heading towards the drop shaft. With relief, she could see two of the orange boxes mounted next to the opening.
The chittering grew closer and she looked behind her, back along the curve of the corridor, and heard the sound of metal scraping on metal.
At a yank of the cord attached to one of the boxes, it dropped open. She quickly pulled on the emergency breather found inside, then extracted another one from the second box. After that, she
dropped down the shaft and passed through an emergency pressure field to get into one of the depressurized zones.
As she glanced back up, she saw something loom across the far end of the drop shaft. It possessed cutting implements that reminded her of mandibles, and a dozen eye-like sensors that rotated
towards her. It began to drag its immense bulk inside the shaft, clearly intent on pursuit.
Gabrielle screamed, inside her mask, and kicked her way down the airless corridor towards Bash.
as I dare,> sent Megan.
Gabrielle came to another pressure field that sealed off the stretch of corridor that had been home to her and Bash since they had left Redstone.
She pushed on through this field, then yanked her mask down: no point in wasting air she might need soon. Making her way back inside the cabin, she quickly strapped the second mask over
Bash’s mouth and nose, before beginning to tug him towards the door.
He came to his feet easily, drifting forward to bang into the wall next to the door. Gabrielle grabbed him around the waist and worked hard at pushing and pulling him out into the corridor,
cursing silently.
Already she was sweating. There had to be a better way of doing things, she was sure.
Gabrielle was panting heavily from the effort. They had passed back into vacuum, and she wore her mask again, but she was using up its minuscule supply of air much too fast. It wasn’t far
from the cabin to the nearest escape-pod bay, but it had taken twice as long to get Bash there as she would have liked.
things
– are already inside the ship, and I almost ran into one.> She hammered the palm release by the bay door, and it slid open.
Gabrielle sent, then she manoeuvred Bash inside.
Menus and animated panels appeared around the escape pod even as she dragged him towards it. Getting it open, she shoved him inside. She was breathing heavily now, and the minutes left on her
breather mask’s readout were rapidly ticking closer and closer to zero.
She peered in at Bash, hoping against hope that maybe – just maybe – this might be the time for him to show some hint of his earlier awareness. She wanted, more than anything, to
hear him tell her whether she was doing the right thing, or even acting like a stupid idiot. Instead, he just stared mindlessly past her.
‘Goodbye, Bash,’ she said anyway, from inside her breather. ‘And thanks for saving my skin. Twice.’
She sealed the door and set the escape pod to launch. A red light began to strobe as the pod slid into a launching tube, but by then she was already on her way to the engineering section.
Gabrielle worked her way through the ship until she reached the main fabricator bay, which was filled with huge, industrial-scale machinery that could manufacture anything from
cutlery to replacement drive-spines for the hull. The engineering section lay on the far side of this, and she made her way down a narrow aisle between the fabricators, ducking beneath feed pipes
and thick bundles of cable.
The ship suddenly shook around her with sufficient force to tear one of the fabricators loose from the brackets holding it to a wall. The huge machine floated free, drifting towards her and
tearing cables and pipes loose as it came. It looked as if it probably massed at least a couple of tonnes, and she scrambled to get out of its way. But the zero gravity made any movement that much
harder, and she was still far from adept at manoeuvring under such conditions.
The huge machine sideswiped her, and sent her spinning. She let out a cry of pain, but at least managed to keep it together enough to avoid getting crushed between the machine and the wall
towards which it was drifting.
Something didn’t feel quite right with her arm, and she pulled it close to her chest as she passed into the engineering bay, looking around in the hope of spotting more of the orange
emergency boxes. She really, really needed to swap her breather for a fresh one, since she had, at best, only a few minutes of air left.
Then she spotted some mounted on a wall inside the fabricator bay – just a moment before the drifting fabricator crushed them beneath its weight.
Oh, damn
.
Trying to reach for a handhold with her injured arm, she nearly screamed from the pain. It felt like being stabbed with a red-hot razor.
She was now left with a stark choice. She could turn around immediately and make her way to the aft launch bay, and the escape pod there. But with the fabricator blocking her way, that would
mean a long detour that would cost her precious minutes.
Or she could stay here and set the nova mine to detonate, at the risk of asphyxiating herself before she could get to safety.
She glanced at the readout on her mask, and then wished she hadn’t.
Screw it
. She’d known all along that she probably wasn’t coming back from this trip alive.
She searched around until she located the nova mine’s cradle. It consisted of a cylindrical framework covered in warning stickers.
Pulling out the control card Tarrant had given her, she hunted around until she found a slot on the cradle’s underside that looked about the right size. She slid the card in, entered
Tarrant’s code in the menu that appeared in response, then confirmed.
Words materialized in the air. MINE DETONATION CONFIRMED. STELLAR CORE COLLAPSE IN THIRTEEN HOURS.
Thirteen hours, she reflected. Would the Wanderer be able to jump out of the system to safety before then? Only, perhaps, if it actually knew the mine had been triggered. It might not.
She thought about what had just happened. The nova mine, which had until this very moment been cruising through the corona surrounding this system’s sun, had just performed a superluminal
jump that took it deep inside the star’s core. In the brief moment before it was reduced to a wisp of superheated gas, the exotic singularity at its heart had triggered a stellar core
collapse that would consume not only the star itself, but all its planets and moons, as nearly ten billion years’ worth of stored energy was released in one single, titanic instant.
Gabrielle laughed giddily to herself.
Stellar core collapse
. She had just murdered a star. How many people in history could say that?
She glanced at the readout in the corner of her breather mask, and saw that she had less than sixty seconds of air left. She pushed her way back over to the entrance to the fabricator bay, and
saw that the rogue fabricator had now drifted back against the wall to which it had previously been secured. That left a narrow gap that looked as if it might be just wide enough for her to squeeze
through.
And if she could manage that, maybe she could still reach the nearest escape pod.
She squeezed her way through, praying that the machine wouldn’t shift again and crush her. She remembered the lessons Megan had given her back at the research outpost on how to use her
implants, and she now succeeded in projecting an external array feed on the inside of her breather mask as she struggled. It showed her how the
Ingersoll
’s hull was now a blur of
activity, like a corpse infested by maggots.
She then noticed a dozen or so of the alien machines dragging something out of an enormous wound torn in the
Ingersoll
’s hull. After a moment, it hit her that this was the
ship’s nova drive.
Her air ran out just as she reached the passageway at the far end of the fabricator bay. Sucking in her last dregs of oxygen, she wondered how long she had before she lost consciousness. Thirty
seconds? Or even as much as a minute?
She pushed off hard. If she could just make it to . . .
She turned the next corner, and found herself confronted by a monster from the very depths of her nightmares. Directly between her and the escape-pod bay, she registered a churning mass of
blades and struts, surrounded by blackness.
Her lungs were hurting more than she thought possible. Meanwhile, the machine-monster was busily tearing through the walls and bulkheads all around it, like a buzzsaw through soggy paper.
It suddenly turned and reached out for her. Instinct made her kick her way out of its reach, but this motion carried her up and out through the great rent it had already torn in the hull. She
was now outside the
Ingersoll
, where the icy cold of deep space began infiltrating through her skin and burrowing its way into her bones.
She then caught sight of a corpse drifting close by a drive-spine. It looked as if it might be Kathryn, the woman who had once attended to her.
She tried to call out Megan’s name, in the last moments before her lungs froze solid.
Megan watched helplessly as the
Ingersoll
was torn to shreds. She also saw the nova drive being dragged out of the hull.
As its components started to drift away from what was left of the
Ingersoll
, the Wanderer began reverting to its former appearance. There was something hypnotic about the sight, like
watching a sponge reform inside a tank of water after it had been segmented in a blender.
For the moment, it seemed to be ignoring her and the Magi ship. It now had what it wanted – what it had always wanted.
When she spotted an escape pod tumbling out of control, she instantly gave chase. It took her half an hour to retrieve it.
The Magi ship formed an airlock bay, and drew the drifting pod inside it. When she activated the pod’s door mechanism, it hissed open to reveal Bash inside. He, of
course, betrayed no awareness that Megan was even there.
Perhaps, she speculated, Gabrielle might still be alive, trapped somewhere inside the wreck of the
Ingersoll
. . .
No
, declared the Librarian.
We managed to reactivate part of the
Ingersoll
’s external array, and we sighted her body drifting outside, but still near the
ship.
Megan closed her eyes for a moment, resting her forehead against the side of the escape pod.
‘What about the nova mine?’ she asked, lifting her head back up. ‘Do we know if she . . . ?’
We detected an anomalous neutrino burst from this system’s sun within the last few minutes
.
This indicates that the mine has been triggered, which means we have perhaps half a
day before the sun turns nova.
‘And Bellhaven?’
We detected no sign of a tach-net transmission being sent towards the Accord. If there genuinely is a mine around Bellhaven’s star, it has not been activated.
Megan laughed from sheer relief, her hand pounding the door of the pod. Perhaps, she thought, there never had been a mine. It would be just like Tarrant to try and bluff her.
Then she thought of Gabrielle again, and the laughter caught in her throat.
‘What about the Wanderer?’ she asked. ‘Will it be able to jump out of this system before the nova occurs?’
Unlikely, since it does not have the means to ramp up the energy levels necessary for even a short-range jump. It might be able to build new components capable of powering the drive, but not
before the star detonates.
‘You did it, Gabrielle,’ she said softly, feeling her eyes well up with tears. She quickly stepped inside the pod before letting emotion overwhelm her completely, and began gently
coaxing Bash out of it. They had a long journey home ahead of them.