The Clockwork Rocket

splendor, but when I looked down on your world it was small as a pebble.

The room shuddered; Yalda was thrown sideways in her restraint, her euphoria banished. She looked to the gyroscopes at the center of the room, struggling to interpret their quivering. She’d sat with Frido and Eusebio, calculating the motion of these devices under all manner of calamities, but now her mind was blank and she couldn’t match what she was seeing to any of those predictions.

Babila caught her eye with a series of symbols on an outstretched palm: One engine failed, but we’ve recovered. That made sense; if the rocket had remained unbalanced and the mountain had started tumbling, the axes of the gyroscopes would have ended up far from their starting markers. The machines feeding the other engines had detected the incipient swerve, and those positioned to compensate were doing so.

One feed had malfunctioned, out of three dozen. That was no worse than the proportion of recruits who’d pulled out. The machinists responsible for it wouldn’t even leave their benches to attempt repairs while the engines were still producing extra thrust, laboring to overcome the world’s gravity. This was failure at a level they’d anticipated, not an emergency. It could wait the six chimes until their weight became normal.

Yalda checked the clock; a single chime had passed. The Peerless would be about a separation above the ground now. She longed for a window—and some magic that would make it worthwhile by granting her a view through the flames—but even the lucky people in the highest observation chambers would only be able to see the distant horizon, gradually shrinking until it was obscured by the glare of the exhaust. By the time their path had curved sufficiently to allow them to look back on their starting point, the world really would appear as small as a pebble.

The room lurched again, a sickening swing abruptly curtailed. Yalda steadied herself and peered anxiously at the gyroscopes; the rocket remained level. Had a second engine cut out, or had the first recovered spontaneously? Even two dead engines didn’t threaten their stability, but ongoing failures at this rate certainly would. Whatever had happened, the machinists on site would leave their benches now, make inspections and report.

Yalda looked across at Frido; he signaled tersely: Patience. Until they had more information there was nothing the navigators could do. The Peerless was still under control, and still ascending at close to the target rate. If that much of their luck continued, in two more chimes they’d reach the point where they could shut down all the engines without fear of plummeting back to the ground. In a wide, slow orbit around the sun, they could assess the situation and make repairs. Dispiriting as such a setback would be, better a delay and some damage to morale than have the Peerless turn into a spiraling firework.

For a third time, the rocket staggered and then caught itself. Yalda felt as if she were back on the footbridge over the trench, paralyzed by the sight of the abyss beneath her—and watching the ropes that supported her snapping one by one. Where were the reports from the machinists? She stared at the bank of paper tape writers connected to the signaling ropes. Though the devices had never been used outside the Peerless, they’d proved invaluable during the construction phase. Only adjacent chambers were connected directly, but messages that needed to go farther could be relayed from chamber to chamber. These particular units had been tested thoroughly—most recently when the machinists had first reached their stations prior to the launch.

Finally, one writer began disgorging a message. Babila could reach it without leaving her bench; she grabbed the end of the strip and peered at it, frowning, before the message was complete. Having the thing print actual symbols would have made it too complicated, so they’d devised and memorized a simple code that could be transmitted by tugging on either of two ropes.

From chamber four, Babila wrote on her palm, stretching her hand to fit more words. Feed stopped. Waiting. Chamber four was out at the rim; the message had reached them via two intermediaries.

That would have been the first failure, with the machinist following the protocol and delaying inspection until the thrust was reduced and movement became easier. But then almost immediately, another message arrived: From chamber three. Feed stopped. Investigating.

Chamber three was also at the rim, right next to chamber four. What source of failure, Yalda wondered, could depend on proximity? Dust from construction rubble—somehow missed in all the inspections—shaken out of its hiding place and rendered airborne by the vibrations?

That made no sense, though. Coarse enough debris might jam the clockwork—delaying the feed’s opening in the first place—but Yalda was sure there was no part of the machinery where grit in the cogs could cause the feed to close once it was already open.

Chamber four, then chamber three… she wasn’t going to wait to learn where the third failure had been. She held up her hand to Babila. Message to chamber two, and all its neighbors: Make a full inspection.

Babila started working the ropes. Frido caught Yalda’s eye.

Sabotage? he asked. His face bore an expression of disbelief. This was not a scenario they’d anticipated.

Just being cautious, she replied. Whatever the cause of the first two failures, it could do no harm to test the assumption that their proximity was more than a coincidence.

Yalda turned to the clock; in a couple of lapses they would reach planetary escape velocity. The protocols dictated that three failures was the limit; one more and she’d have no choice but to shut down all the engines as soon as it was safe and let the Peerless drift around the sun until they’d diagnosed and remedied the problem.

Another of the tape writers started up. This one was out of Babila’s reach; she unstrapped herself and lumbered across the floor, pausing to strengthen her legs with extra flesh from her torso. As she read the message her tympanum twitched, as if she couldn’t stop herself silently cursing. Then she turned away from the machine and wrote across her chest: From chamber two. Intruder sighted. Pursuing.

Yalda and Frido joined her in spreading the news—first to those chambers that were close to number two but where the message would not have been seen already. The rope system was faster than any messenger on foot, but it was beginning to seem hopelessly slow and unwieldy.

When they’d finished Yalda stood beside the tape writers, disoriented and frustrated. An intruder? Accepting the notion was difficult enough, but her role made it even harder to bear. She should have been running through the feed chambers trying to catch the saboteur, not hanging around here playing message clerk.

Six chimes from ignition—precisely on schedule—the other feeds proved that they were operating flawlessly by cutting back the rocket’s thrust from two gravities to one, all the while smoothly maintaining the balancing act compensating for the dead engines. The Peerless was four times as far from the center of the world now than it had been at launch—and moving almost five times faster than it needed to be to continue its ascent indefinitely. To the astronomers tracking their flight from the ground, the journey would appear to be proceeding uneventfully. One more jammed feed, though, and the whole world would have known that they were in trouble.

Yalda tentatively relaxed her tympanum; the hammering of the engines was still unpleasant, but it wasn’t intolerable.

“I think speech is viable again,” she shouted at her companions.

What? Babila wrote on her chest.

Yalda turned to Frido. “So who’s the number one candidate to send in a saboteur?”

Frido’s expression made it clear that he knew who she had in mind, but he still balked at the idea. “Six gross casualties, all innocent people…?”

“If it was Acilio, he wasn’t trying to murder us,” Yalda replied. “If that had been the aim he would have sent someone after the gyroscopes; he could have crashed the Peerless when it was barely off the ground, and made a big display of it for everyone watching from Zeugma.”

“So he wanted us drifting?” Frido suggested. “Demoralised by the engine failures, hanging around in orbit until we’d taken every feed apart and inspected every component a dozen times. Nobody dead, but enough of a setback to humiliate Eusebio.”

“Who’s this Acilio?” Babila asked.

“A Councilor in Zeugma,” Yalda explained wearily. “His grandfather and Eusebio’s grandfather had a business