My timing was exquisite, for the sonic pulse arrived just as I had finished speaking, a hard and sudden jolt, as if the elevator had just hit a bump in its two-thousand-kilometre-per-hour ascent.
‘We’re still safe, aren’t we?’ asked the wife, her voice only a knife-edge from hysteria. ‘If the cut is below us… Oh God, I wish we’d been backed-up more often.’
Her husband looked at her snidely. ‘It was you who told me those flights to the scanning clinic were too expensive to make a habit out of, darling.’
‘But you didn’t have to take me literally.’
I raised my voice, silencing them. ‘I still think we’re in a lot of danger, I’m afraid. If the relaxation wave is just a longitudinal compression along the thread, there’s a chance we’ll ride it out safely. But if the thread starts picking up any kind of sideways motion, like a whip…’
‘What the fuck are you,’ the man asked, ‘some kind of engineer? ’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Another kind of specialist entirely.’
More footfalls on the stairs now as the rest of the group came up. The jolt must have convinced them something was seriously wrong.
‘What’s happening?’ asked one of the southerners, a burly man a foot taller than anyone else in the elevator.
‘We’re riding a severed thread,’ I answered. ‘There are spacesuits aboard this thing, aren’t there? I suggest we get into them as quickly as possible.’
The man looked at me as if I were insane. ‘We’re still ascending! I don’t give a damn what happened below us; we’re fine. They built this thing to take a lot of crap.’
‘Not this much,’ I said.
By now the servitor had arrived as well, suspended from its ceiling rail. I asked it to show us to the suits. It should not have been necessary to ask, but this situation was so far beyond the servitor’s experience that it had completely failed to detect any threat to its human charges. I wondered if the news of the severed thread had reached the orbital station. Almost certainly it had — and almost certainly there was nothing that could be done for the elevators still on the thread.
Still, it was better to be on the upper part of the thread than the part below the severing point. I imagined a thousand-kilometre-high section below the cut. It would take several minutes for the top of the thread to smash into the planet below — in fact, for a long while it would seem to hang magically, like a rope trick. But it would still be falling, and there was nothing in the world that could stop it. A million tonnes of thread, slicing down into the atmosphere, laden with cars, some of them occupied. It would be a slow and quite terrifying way to die.
Who could have done this?
It was too much to believe that it didn’t have something to do with my ascent. Reivich had tricked us in Nueva Valparaiso, and if it hadn’t been for the bridge attack I would have still been trying to assimilate the fact of Miguel Dieterling’s death. I couldn’t imagine Red Hand Vasquez having anything to do with the explosion, even though I hadn’t completely ruled him out of the frame for my friend’s murder. Vasquez just didn’t have the imagination to attempt something like this, let alone the means. And his cultist indoctrination would have made it very hard for him to even think of harming the bridge in any way. Yet someone appeared to be trying to kill me. Maybe they had put a bomb aboard one of the elevators rising below, thinking I was on it, or would be on one of those below the cut point — or maybe they had fired a missile and misjudged the point to aim for. It could have been Reivich, but only in the technical sense — he had friends with the right influence. But I’d never figured him as someone capable of an act of that ruthlessness: casually wiping out of existence a few hundred innocents just to ensure the death of one man.
But maybe Reivich was learning.
We followed the servitor to the emergency space suit lockers, each of which held one vacuum suit. They were of antique design by spacefaring standards, requiring the users to physically insert themselves in the garment rather than have it enfold around them. They all appeared to be one size too small, but I donned my suit quickly enough, with the dexterous ease with which one might slip on a suit of combat armour. I was careful to hide the clockwork gun in one of the suit’s capacious utility pockets, where there should have been a signal flare.
No one saw the gun.
‘This isn’t necessary!’ the southern aristocrat was saying. ‘We don’t need to wear any damn—’
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘when the compression wave hits us — which it will do any second — we could be flung sideways with enough force to break every bone in your body. That’s why you need to be wearing a suit. It’ll offer some protection.’
Maybe not enough, I thought.
The six of them fumbled with their suits with varying degrees of confidence. I helped the others, and after a minute or so they were ready, except for the huge aristocrat, who was still complaining about the fit of the suit, as if he had all the time in the world to worry about it. Troublingly, he began to eye the other suits in the closet, wondering perhaps if they were all truly of the same size.
‘You don’t have time. Just get the thing sealed and worry about cuts and bruises later.’
Below, I imagined the vicious kink in the thread racing toward us, gobbling the kilometres as it climbed. By now it must have already passed the lower elevators. I wondered if it would be violent enough to fling the car off the thread.
I was still thinking about it when it hit.
It was much worse than I had imagined it would be. The elevator jerked to one side, the force of it slamming all seven of us against the inner wall. Someone broke a bone and started screaming, but almost immediately we were flung in the opposite direction, crashing against the clear arc of the picture window. The servitor broke loose from its ceiling rail and fell past us. Its hard steel body daggered into the glass, but though the glass fractured into a webwork of white lines, it managed not to break. Gravity fell as the elevator decelerated on the thread; some element in its induction motor had been damaged by the whiplash.
The southern aristocrat’s head was a vile red pulp, like an over-ripe fruit. As the whiplash oscillations died down, his body tumbled limply around the cabin. Someone else started screaming. They were all in a bad way. I might even have had injuries of my own, but for the moment adrenalin was whiting them out.
The compression wave had passed. At some point, I knew, it would reach the end of the thread and be reflected back down again — but that might be hours from now, and it would not be so violent as before, its energies bled into heat.
For a moment I dared to think that we might be safe.
Then I thought about the elevators below us. They might have slowed down as well, or even been flung off the thread completely. Automatic safety systems may have come online — but there was no way to know for sure. And if the car below was still ascending at normal speed, it would run into us very soon indeed.
I thought about it for a few moments before speaking, raising my voice above the moans of the injured. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But there’s something I’ve just thought of…’
There was no time to explain. They’d just have to follow me or take the consequences of staying in the elevator. Not even time to get to the elevator’s emergency airlock; it would take at least a minute to cycle all seven — or six now — of us through it. Besides, the further we could get away from the thread, the safer we’d be if there was a collision between the elevators.
There was really only one option.
I retrieved the clockwork gun from my suit pouch, gripping it clumsily in my gloved fingers. There was no way to aim it with any precision, but thankfully, none was called for. I merely pointed the gun in the general direction of the fracture pattern left on the glass by the falling servitor.
Someone tried to stop me, not understanding that what I was doing might save their lives, but I was stronger; my finger pulled the trigger. In the gun, nano-scale clockwork unravelled, unleashing a ferocious pulse of stored molecular-binding energy. A haze of flechettes ripped from the barrel, shattering the glass, creating a widening network of fractures. The window puckered outward, straining, and then broke into a billion white shards. The storm of air hurled all of us through the ragged opening, into space.
I held onto the gun, clinging to it as if it were the only solid thing in the universe. I looked around frantically, trying to orientate myself relative to the others. The wind had knocked them all in different directions, like the fragments of a starshell, but though our trajectories were different, we were all falling downward.
Below was only planet.
