His imagination was gibbering with images of the pursuit Sam and Octal were putting together behind him. Bubbling up from
that strange core of conviction was the knowledge that he didn’t have time to wriggle about looking for a wider gap. This
was it, his one chance.
He levered himself back down to the widest part of the gash, and wedged himself securely between the puckered furrows of ice,
then took the thermal inducer from his belt. It was a dark orange cylinder, twenty centimetres long, sculpted to fit neatly
into his gauntleted hand. All scavengers used one: with its adjustable induction field it was a perfect tool for liberating
items frozen into ice, or vacuum-welded to shell sections.
Joshua could feel his heart racing as he datavised the field profile he wanted into the inducer’s processor, and ordered his
neural nanonics to override his pacemaker, nulling the adrenalin’s effect. He lined the thermal inducer up on the centre of
the gap, took a deep breath, tensed his muscles, and initiated the program he’d loaded in his neural nanonics.
His armour suit’s lights flooded the little glaciated valley with an intense white glare. He could see dark formless phantoms
lurking within the murky ice. Pressure ridges that formed sheer planes refracted rainbow fans of light back at the collar
sensors. A gash that sank deep into the shell section’s interior, a depth hidden beyond even that intrusive light’s ability
to expose.
The thermal inducer switched on simultaneously with the lights, fluorescing a metre-wide shaft of ice into a hazy red tube.
At the power level he used it turned from solid to liquid to gas in less than two seconds. A thick pillar of steam howled
past him, blasting lumps of solid matter out into the Ruin Ring. He fought to keep his hold on the ice as the edge of the
stream grazed the armour suit.
“See you, Joshua,” Sam’s datavise echoed round his brain, laughing derisively.
The thermal inducer snapped off. A second later the rush of steam had abated enough to show him the tunnel it had cut, slick
walls reflecting the suit’s light like rippled chrome. It ended ten metres down in a polyp cave. Joshua spun round his centre
of gravity, fists hammering into the still bubbling ice, clawing desperately for traction on the slippery surface as he dived
head-first down the tunnel.
Madeeir
’s laser struck the ice as his boots disappeared below the floor. Stalagmites blew apart instantly under the violent energy
input, ice vaporized across an area three metres wide. A mushroom cloud of livid steam boiled up into space, carrying with
it a wavefront of semi-solid debris. The laser shone like a shaft of red sunlight at its centre.
“Got the little shit!” Sam Neeves’ triumphant exclamation rang in the ether.
The laser blinked out. Slush splattered against the space-plane’s foam-encased fuselage. A second later it reached the
Madeeir
, pattering weakly against the alithium struts. Reaction-control thrusters flamed momentarily, holding its position steady.
Once the storm of vapour had dwindled away,
Madeeir
refocused its sensor suite on the vibrating shell section. There was no ice left among the building’s foundations, the scouring
had plucked the tiles free as well, even some of the low-lying walls had been razed by the blast-wave of steam. A roughly
circular patch of the polyp floor glowed a dull vermilion. The sheer power of the laser saved Joshua. The soles of his armour
suit had been caught in the initial blaze of photons, melting the mono- bonded-carbon boots, boring into the tough black membrane
of the SII suit underneath. Even the miraculous Lunar technology couldn’t withstand that assault. His skin had charred, broiling
the meat, singeing bone.
But the steam which had erupted so violently absorbed a great deal of the laser’s power. The seething gas also distorted the
beam, and it didn’t just surge outwards, it also slammed down through the tunnel, punching at any blockage.
Joshua hurtled out of the gash in the polyp cave’s roof, cannoning into the floor, bouncing, arms flailing helplessly. He
was almost unconscious from the pain in his feet, the analgesic block his neural nanonics had erected in his cortex was faltering
under the nerve impulse overload. Blood was spraying out of his soles from the arteries which hadn’t been cauterized by the
heat. The SII suit redistributed its molecules, flowing around the roasted feet, sealing the broken blood vessels. He hit
the cave roof, recoiling. His neural nanonic circuits were visualizing a physiological schematic of his body, an ÉcorchÉ figure
with feet flashing urgent red. Neatly tabulated information that was neither sound nor vision was pulsing into his consciousness,
telling him the extent of the wounds. He really didn’t want to know, the gruesome details were acting like an emetic.
Steam was still gushing into the cave, building in pressure. He could actually hear the gale screeching its affliction. Caustic
probes of red light stabbed down through the gash in the ceiling, fluctuating erratically. He hit the polyp again, jarring
his arm. The knocks and spinning and pain were too much; he vomited. The SII suit immediately vented the acidic fluid as his
stomach spasmed. He cried out in anguish as the sour juices sloshed round in his mouth, rationality fading away. His neural
nanonics recognized what was happening and damped down all external nerve inputs, ordered the suit processor to feed him a
draught of cool, clear oxygen, then fired the manoeuvring pack jets at full power to stop his madcap oscillations.
The suspension couldn’t have lasted more than ten seconds. When he took notice of the sensor visualization again the red light
illuminating the cave had been extinguished, and the steam was rushing back out of the gap, currents tugging him gently back
up towards it again. He reached out an arm to steady himself against the ceiling. His fingers closed automatically around
a metal conduit pinned to the polyp.
Joshua did a fast double take, then began to scan the suit collar sensors round the cave. There were no ends in sight. It
wasn’t a cave, it was a passage, slightly curved. The conduit was one of twenty running along the ceiling. They had all broken
open below the gash, a familiar feathery fan of ragged photonic cables protruded.
His neural nanonics were clamouring for attention, medical data insistent against his synapses. He reviewed it quickly, quashing
the return of the nausea. His soles had burnt down to the bone. There were several options stored in the neural nanonics’
medical program. He chose the simplest: shut-off for nerves below the knees, infusing a dose of antibiotics from the armour’s
emergency pack, and shunting a mild tranquillizer program into primary mode to calm his inflamed thoughts.
While he waited for the drugs to start working he took a more measured assessment of the passage. The polyp had ruptured in
several places, water and a syrupy fluid had spouted in, freezing over the walls in long streaks, turning the passage into
a winterland grotto. They were boiling now, crusty surface temporarily turned back to a liquid by the retreating steam, frothing
like bad beer. When he shone the suit’s lights into the rents he could see tubes running parallel to the passage; water ducts,
nutrient arteries, sewage ducts—whatever, they were the habitat’s utilities. Edenist habitats were riddled with similar channels.
He summoned up the inertial guidance display, and integrated the passage into the data construct of the shell section. If
the curve was reasonably constant, one end would emerge from the section’s edge after thirty metres. He started to move up
the other way, watching the conduits. He didn’t have anywhere else to go.
The passage branched, then branched again. One junction had five passages. Ice clogged a lot of the walls, bulging outward
in smooth mounds. In several places it was virtually impassable. Once he had to use the thermal inducer again. The conduits
were often buried under frosted waves. The destruction had been as great down here as it had everywhere else in the habitat.
That should have warned him.
The hemispherical chamber might have held the central storage system for the offices above; there was no way of telling now.
The conduits which had led him loyally this far all snaked in through an open archway, then split at the apex three metres
over his head, running down the curving walls like silver ribs. There had been a great deal of electronic equipment in here
at one time: slate-grey columns, a metre or so high, with radiator fins running down the outside, the equivalent of human
processor-module stacks. Some of them were visible, badly vacuum eroded now, their fragile complex innards mashed beyond salvation,
battered ends sticking out of the rubble. Nearly half of the ceiling had collapsed, and the resulting pile of polyp slivers
had agglutinated in an alarmingly concave wall, as though the avalanche had halted half-way through. If gravity was ever reapplied
here, the whole lot would come crashing down. Whatever force had rampaged through the chamber when the habitat broke apart
had left total devastation in its wake.
Maybe it was deliberate, he mused, because it’s certainly very thorough. Maybe they didn’t want any records to survive?
The manoeuvring pack rotated him, allowing him to perform a complete survey. Over by the archway, a tongue of that viscous
brownish fluid had crept in, stealing along the wall until the temperature drop congealed it into a translucent solid. A regular
outline was just visible below the gritty surface.
He sailed over, trying to ignore the debilitating effect his maimed feet were having on the rest of his body. He had developed
a splitting headache despite the tranquillizer program, and he’d caught his limbs trembling several times as he drifted along
the passage. The neural nanonics had reported his core temperature dropping one degree. He suspected a form of mild shock
was tightening its malicious grip. When he got back to the spaceplane he was going to have to use the medical nanonic packages
to stabilize himself straight away. That brought a grin. When! He’d almost forgotten about Sam and Octal.
He was right about the frozen liquid, though. Up close, with the suit lights on full, he could make out the definite shape
of one of the grey electronics pillars. It was in there waiting for him; waiting patiently for over two and a half thousand
years, since the time Jesus was nailed to the cross on a primitive, ignorant Earth, immaculately preserved in grubby ice against
the insidious decay so prevalent in the Ruin Ring. Every circuit chip, every memory crystal, just waiting for that first current
of electrons to reawaken them. His Strike!
Now all he had to do was get it back to Tranquillity.
* * *
The communication band was devoid of human data traffic as he perched on the lip of the passage, and all his suit communication
block could pick up was the usual background pop and fizz of Mirchusko’s emissions. He’d experienced a strange kind of joy
just seeing the Ruin Ring again after retracing his course down the passage. Hope had dwindled to that extent. But now he
felt a stubborn determination rising up against the tranquillizer program muffling his mind.
It was impossible to see his spaceplane or the
Madeeir
from where he was, the passage lip was fourteen metres below the soil seam, a maggot hole in a sheer cliff face. Looking
down he could see the ochre silicon envelope thirty-five metres below. And he still didn’t like to think of the force it would
take to snap something that thick the way he snapped biscuits.
This part of the shell surface was exposed to the sunlight, a pale lemon radiance, alive with flickering ever-changing shadows
cast by the unceasing swarm of Ring particles. His inertial-guidance unit was projecting a course vector into his mind, a
warm orange tube stretching out to vanishing point somewhere in the Ring ahead of him. He datavised the trajectory into the
manoeuvring pack, and its jets pulsed, pushing him gently away from the passage, slipping silently down the imaginary tube.
He waited until he was a kilometre and a half from the cover of the shell section before changing direction, then headed out
at a steep angle to his previous course, facing into the sun, nozzles firing continually, building velocity. What he was actually
doing was raising his orbital altitude in respect to Mirchusko. A higher altitude would give him a longer orbital period.
When he halted he was still in the same inclination as the
Madeeir
and the shell section, but five kilometres higher. In their lower, faster orbit, the ship and shell section began to overhaul
him.
He couldn’t even see them any more. Five kilometres of particles was as effective a shield as the output from a military electronic-warfare
pod. The neural nanonics kept flashing up a graphic overlay for him, a small red circle around the shell section, his one
tenuous link with salvation. He had never been so far from the spaceplane before, never been so achingly alone.
His armour suit’s communication block began to pick up first scraps of datavised exchanges between Sam and Octal, unintelligible
bursts of digital code with a curious echo effect. He was glad of the diversion, using his neural nanonics to try and decrypt
the signals. His universe seemed to fill with numbers, galactic constellations of colourless digits, all twisting elusively
as he loaded tracer program after tracer program, searching for a pattern.
“… no chance. It’s built for landing security, no telling what’ll… on a planet. A thermal inducer would just anneal the… ”
That was Octal’s datavise, emitted from a suit block. It made sense, he was the younger, fifty-two; Sam would be sitting comfortably
back in the
Madeeir
directing his junior to recover what they could from the spaceplane.
Joshua felt a shiver run down his ribcage. The cold of the gas giant’s environment was reaching in through the SII suit to
close around him.
Sam’s datavise: “… the tail where the tanks… anything large would have to be…”
Octal’s datavise: “. . . there now. I can see some kind of cradle he’s… can’t be for… ”