The Clockwork Rocket

fall.

The light grew brighter, but it remained in place. Yalda was confused, but then she understood: Benedetta hadn’t increased the thrust, but the rocket was now so low that it was heating the ground below it to the point of incandescence.

Frido let out a hum of dismay. “Go up!” he pleaded. “You’ve lost your chance; give it time to cool.”

The glow flared and diffused. The wind shifted, clearing the haze, and Yalda could see exactly what was happening. The ground was ablaze, while the rocket crept toward it, feeding the flames.

Yalda called out “Down!” and managed to push Fatima toward the bunker before the light became blinding and she stumbled. She lay where she’d fallen, her face in the dirt, covering her rear eyes with one arm.

The ground shuddered, but it was not a big explosion; most of the sunstone and liberator had already been used up. She waited for debris, but whatever there was fell short. When she relaxed her tympanum, all she heard was the wind.

Yalda rose to her feet and looked around. Frido was crouched beside her, his head in his hands. Nino was standing, apparently unharmed; the other recruits were still picking themselves up. Fatima peered out from the bunker, humming softly in distress.

In the distance, a patch of blue-white flame jittered over the ground. Yalda couldn’t tell if it was spilt fuel burning or the dust and rock of the plain itself. She watched in silence until the fire had died away.

“When Benedetta wanted to launch her imaging probes,” Eusebio recalled, “she just wore me down. Six dozen was what she wanted; six dozen was what she got. And if I’d been here for the test flight, it would have been the same. Whatever my misgivings, she would have talked me around them.”

Yalda said, “I wish we’d had a way of contacting her family. Or at least a friend somewhere. There must have been someone she would have wanted to be told.”

Eusebio made a gesture of helplessness. “She was a runaway. Whatever farewells she was able to say would have been said long ago.”

Yalda felt a surge of anger at that, though she wasn’t even sure why. Was he exploiting people, by helping them escape their cos? There was no crime in offering a way out, so long as you were honest about what it entailed.

The hut was lit by a single lamp on the floor. Eusebio looked around the bare room appraisingly but resisted making any comment. Yalda had spent the last ten days here, struggling to find a way to salvage something from Benedetta’s pointless death.

She said, “We need to be more careful with everything we do. We should always be thinking of the worst possibilities.”

Eusebio buzzed curtly. “There are so many of those; can you be more specific?”

“Igniting the planet.”

“Ah, the Gemma syndrome,” he said wearily. “Do you think the farmers rushing to plant crops in the blast zone came up with that themselves? Acilio has people out spreading the idea, and organizing paid relocations.”

“That’s an awful lot of effort just to spite you,” Yalda suggested. “Maybe he honestly believes there’s a risk.”

“A risk compared with what?” Eusebio retorted. “Compared with doing nothing while we wait to slam into a cluster of orthogonal stars? I’ve seen the image from the probe; that’s not a wild guess anymore, it’s a certainty.”

“The worst case,” Yalda persisted, “is that the engines on the Peerless malfunction in such a way that they deliver less thrust than they need to raise the mountain. And they sit there doing it for chime after chime—maybe bell after bell or day after day, if everyone who could shut them down is dead. There must be some point where whatever the Hurtlers did to Gemma would happen here. We’ve done tests to rule that out if all goes well—but we can’t test the most extreme case; there’s no scale model that will tell us what happens when a whole mountain of sunstone sits and burns from below, for days.”

Eusebio rubbed his eyes. “All right, if I grant you all of that… what do you propose?”

“An air gap, all around the mountain.”

“An air gap?”

“A trench,” Yalda explained. “As deep as the lowest engines, and maybe a stroll wide. Then we dig channels under the engines so that all the exhaust gas can escape freely. That would make a big difference to the heat build-up in the rock, if the engines end up running in place.”

“A stroll wide?” Eusebio closed his eyes and swayed backward, fighting not to use indecorous language.

Yalda said, “Look at it this way: a trench that wide would be enough to displace all those irritating farmers— for a reason they can’t really argue against. You could even ask Acilio to help pay for it, seeing as he’s so keen on fire safety.”

Eusebio opened his eyes and regarded her pityingly. “Yes, the need to take a reasonable, consistent position will win him right over.”

“No?”

“Everyone has their own form of vanity,” he said. “You and I enjoy being right: we want to understand how the world itself works, and then humiliate our enemies by proving that their guesses were wrong. Like… you and Ludovico.”

“Hmm.” Ludovico had been dead for a couple of years now, but Yalda couldn’t deny that she’d taken great pleasure in his defeat over the nature of the Hurtlers.

“That’s not Acilio’s nature,” Eusebio continued. “And it’s certainly not how he was raised. In his family’s eyes, the most important event in history was my grandfather cheating them out of a business opportunity that they believed they were entitled to enjoy. And now the family’s honor depends on my humiliation. For that, Acilio doesn’t have to be right about anything; all he has to do is see me fail.”

Yalda was sick of the whole stupid feud, but if Acilio was committed to creating obstacles then they’d just have to find ways around them. She said, “Maybe Paolo will pay for the trench.”

Eusebio stood. “Let me think about it.”

“There’s something more we need to do,” Yalda warned him.

“Of course there is.” He sat again.

She said, “We need a plan, to give people a chance of surviving a Hurtler impact while the Peerless is away. We need lookouts in every village, equipment they can use to try to douse the fire…”

Yalda stopped; Eusebio was shivering. She walked over and squatted beside him, then put an arm across his shoulders.

“What is it?” Not merely the threat of more costs and more work; he had long grown inured to that.

“My co gave birth,” Eusebio said, struggling to get the words out. “That’s why I was in Zeugma; to see the children.”

“She—?”

“Without me,” he said. “Not willingly. If she’d wanted it, we would have done it together. But we waited, and I wasn’t around, so her body just… made its own decision.”

“I’m sorry.” Yalda didn’t know how to console him. She wanted to tell him that she’d been through the same kind of shock herself, but any comparison she made to Tullia would just offend him.

“My father told me it was because I was away so much,” Eusebio said. “If I’d remained close to her, her body would have understood that we were waiting for the right time. But without a co, it gave up hope that the children would ever have a father.”

Yalda wasn’t sure if any of this was real biology, or just a mixture of old folk beliefs and an attempt not to talk about holin. Making the drug available to the crew was one thing, but Eusebio could never admit its use in his own family.

“They do have a father,” she said.

“No, they don’t,” Eusebio replied bluntly. “I still love them, of course, but I’m not promised to them. When I see them, it doesn’t…” He struck his chest with his fist.