She shrugged. “We're here; we might as well.” The kilometers-long piece of stone below orbited a common center of gravity with a larger mate she could see shining, a spurious star, above the bleak, dead mass they had just close-scanned.
She altered their course again, feeling the delicate mastery of her skills that she had regained and enhanced these past megaseconds. This was something that used her abilities fully, challenged them, honed them.… But soon it would all be gone. She didn't regret the decision they had made in gambling on the long shot; but she did regret that it would do them no good—that the satisfaction of this moment would only leave her more hungry, when their last chance and this ship were gone.
They closed with the second planetoid. Chaim put the results of the reconnaissance scan on the screen almost perfunctorily, below the actual view of naked stone framed in the ship's viewing port. A binary … it was hopeless, the original factory had not been part of a binary system. Their long-range instruments must be going bad on top of everything else. She watched morosely over his shoulder as the readings began to appear, lining up as she had learned to expect them, high in iron and nickel ores. Anticipating zero on hydrocarbons and metal alloys, she looked out at the barren scape below them before she saw the actual figures.… She blinked, and looked again. “Chaim.” She reached out, her hand brushed his arm unthinkingly.
He glanced up. “Oh, God,” he breathed. “Oh, God.…” His arm knotted and trembled. A pragmatic, colorless dawn was breaking across its surface; the growing light glanced from the bristling discontinuity of towers and domes. She tore her eyes away from the sight of them: The readings continued to come, and looking down she saw that they were not zero anymore.
“Ninety-five,” Chaim murmured. “Look at that! Look! We've found it! Geez Allah, we're rich!” He caught her hand, pulling her toward him, sending them out in a spin until they rebounded from the control room's ceiling. “He was right, the old man was right, God damn him … he finally did something for me!”
She heard her own laughter echoing through his shouts, echoing through the ship—her own laughter, as alien as a voice out of deep space. Chaim's arms closed around her, she felt suddenly as solid as steel, as ephemeral as bubbles. She pulled his face toward her own and kissed him.
He stared, speechless, as she broke away again. He kissed her back, eyes closed, arms tightening, pressing himself against her with sudden urgency.
She broke away and struggled back toward the panel. “I—I'll take us down.” She felt her blood sweep to the ends of her body and recoil through every artery, capillary, vein; dazed by a feeling as strong as terror, that was not. Her hands stumbled over the instruments.
Chaim nodded, clearing his throat. “Sure … Let's see what we've got.” He settled down to the instrument panel beside her, his voice husky. “Look at that; there's no radiation leaking at all. It must be in perfect shape!” He grinned, abruptly reoriented.
She felt her own excitement change form again as she looked down at the readings beside him. The figures twitched unexpectedly on the screen, still plagued by the random fluctuation that had been with them from the start. It struck her as ironic that after a gigasec this factory was in better shape than their own equipment. Her eyes tracked on across the readings, caught again. “Chaim, look. It looks like there's something in orbit here besides us.”
“Another ship?”
She nodded, pointing at the screen.
“Showing any power?” He peered past her.
“No …”
“Hm.” He let himself drift again abruptly. “Must be a derelict; doesn't look like much. We can check it out later, see what's left of it. But first I want to see that factory!”
She didn't argue.
She brought the ship in as close to the source of their readings as she could, handling the difficult rendezvous perfectly with only half her concentration. They went through the ritual of suiting up, emerging through the lock onto the airless surface of another unfamiliar world, seeming to move through it all for the first time. The planetoid rolled sunward into another fleeting day, and the light of distant Heaven silvered the razed stone surface of the docking field, limned the eerie insect-silhouette of the
“I know. But there's no radiation.” He repeated the reading like a prayer. “The reactor has to be intact. That's still worth a ship and then some … it's still worth plenty! And look at the waldoes, they haven't been touched. I know a factory back home that'd pay a mint just for those.”
They crossed the distance toward the factory's evaporating shadow in bounds that seemed effortless, her body as light as her spirits. The airlock that faced on the empty docking field gaped open in a cry of perpetual astonishment; but this time the morbid image did not stay in her mind. They passed on through it into the factory's fractured cavern.
Near the entrance their spotlights picked out the broad access tunnel that led down into the planetoid's insulating heart, where the factory's hundreds of workers had lived before the war. Passing it by, they moved on into the plant itself. Dim illumination suffused the interior from the broken wall to their right, and gradually their eyes adjusted to the darkness. Looking up, Mythili saw cranes and unnameable appendages dripping like stalactites from the ceiling high overhead, the shadowy walls and partitions that broke the space into a maze of soundless mysteries through which they drifted like lost souls. “Do you know where we're going?” she asked, suddenly uncertain. “What are we looking for?”
Chaim nodded, ahead of her. “More or less. I almost worked at one of these places; they gave me an orientation. I want to see the reactor, and what kind of damage there's been.”
Mythili glanced down at the radiation counter at the wrist of her suit. It still registered nothing; she followed his slow, searching progress without further questions. The light grew stronger as they neared the ragged break in the dome's fragile outer shell. She found herself wondering that a hit which had apparently come so close to the reactor itself had not damaged it enough to cause even a small leakage.
“Watch your step—” Chaim was silhouetted as he bounded up and over the heap of rubble from a collapsed wall. She followed him like a dancer over the shifting surface, saw him turn sharply left through a breach in a higher, heavier wall.
A sudden shout rattled in her helmet as he disappeared from sight. She threw herself forward in a long bound, and another, until she could see him again. He was struggling to get to his feet again, where he had fallen in another pile of girders and rubble. But just beyond him was the thing that had wrung the cry from him—a vast hole opening in the surface of the vaster floor.
Mythili caught a protruding end of beam, pulling herself up short at Chaim's side. “What happened?” not directing the question at him, but at the hole beyond him.
“It's gone.” His own thoughts followed hers to the rim of the pit. “The reactor—it's gone!”
She clung harder to the beam-end, strangling the useless words that tried to form in her throat.
“I don't know. I don't know.…” Chaim muttered, drawing himself up. “God help me. But this—” he waved a hand at the blasted wall, “—must've been done on purpose, for a way to get the thing out of here. Maybe the blast was what slowed the rock down enough to trap it here. They must've been in a hell of a hurry to rip it out the hard way.”
“Then you think someone found this place after the first attack, and—stole the reactor out of it?”
He grunted. “Yeah.”
“But what happened to it? Why wasn't there ever any record of it?”
“I don't know. If it happened during the war, it could be nobody ever knew it happened. Maybe the reactor's in use somewhere in the Demarchy right now. Or whoever stripped it might have got blasted themselves, and the
