“Groundwater, Jenning. We’re in the cupola.”
“Well, stay put. And start working on contingencies to detach the cupola and fly it over to Halivah.”
“We’re on it, that’s the regular drill.”
Holle imagined the calm twilight of the cupola, the silent, wheeling stars beyond, the screens full of images of devastation within the hull. “Can you see what’s happening in here?”
“Most of the cameras are still functioning, though they’re going down all the time, and the comms lines are fritzing too. Decks Nine through Eleven are gutted. The mesh decking is melting, and dripping down into the hydroponic beds on Fourteen. Countermeasures aren’t working too well. The fire has got in behind the equipment racks. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Casualties unknown, we just can’t see.”
Kelly’s amplified voice suddenly cut out, leaving the hull filled with a cacophony of screams, the roaring of the fire.
“What about the hull temperature?”
“Rising, Holle. I can’t trust these readings, but-”
“Understood.” The greatest danger of all was that the fire would melt its way through the hull altogether, and breach the pressurized compartment. There was a last-resort procedure to avert that final catastrophe, a drastic step. Holle was starting to think there was no choice. She tagged her microphone. “Kelly, are you receiving?”
“We lost her feed, Holle,” Venus reported.
“Venus, I’m thinking of cutting the tether.”
“Kelly’s out of touch. I endorse your decision. Do it.”
Holle started climbing up a ladder away from the fire, into the gathering smoke. “Can you handle the follow-up from in there? Warn Halivah. Run the internal warnings, prepare for microgravity. Take over attitude control-”
“Already on it, Holle. It’ll be fine, it will work, we rehearsed for this.”
Holle said nothing more and pressed on with her climb. Her suit felt heavy and stiff, and her hands tired quickly as she fought the gloves’ stiffness to grasp at the metal rungs. Venus was right. Yes, they had rehearsed on the ground and since launch, simulating situations almost as drastic as this. But all their years of training hadn’t prevented the fire, or stopped the situation from degenerating to this lethal point.
She reached the domed roof of the hull. With an awkward twist she flipped over onto the upside of one of the catwalks that ran beneath the dome, and fixed a safety harness buckle to a rail. She paused, breathing hard. The smoke was dense here, making it almost impossible to see, and she wiped soot away from her faceplate with a suit glove.
She found the panel that covered the tether severance handle. She punched in a security code, and flipped open the panel. The handle itself was surrounded by warnings in huge lettering. She wrapped her gloved fingers easily around the handle.
“The situation’s deteriorating, Holle,” Venus called. “Do it.”
Holle snapped the handle down.
At a junction on the tether between the hulls, close to its central point, a small explosive charge popped, silent in the vacuum. A tiny cloud of debris dispersed quickly. Since Jupiter the two hulls had been rotating about the warp generator at their common central point, completing an orbit once every thirty seconds. Now the cable that connected them was cut, and the hulls drifted apart, the severed tether coiling languidly as hundreds of tonnes of tension was released. When the particles of debris reached the wall of the warp bubble they sparkled briefly, their substance shredded by ferocious tides.
It was as if the whole hull dropped like a falling elevator car. Holle drifted up from the catwalk, and with a stab of panic she grabbed at the rail, even though she was safely anchored.
She peered down through the catwalk at the inferno below. The decks, shocked into zero gravity, were full of clouds of junk lifting into the air, furniture, handhelds, bits of clothing, food fragments, tools, even loose bolts and screws, anything not held down suddenly mobile. But the fire was the crux. She thought she saw an immediate difference in the way the smoke was billowing, and maybe the flames licked a bit less eagerly at the decking and equipment racks.
That was the idea. By cutting the tether Holle had eliminated the artificial gravity from the hull’s interior. Without gravity there was no convection; hot air could not rise, and the processes that had been sustaining the fire, the updraft that drew in fresh oxygen to feed the flames, had been eliminated. The fire still had to be doused, and there were other dangers deriving from zero-gravity fires, which could smolder unseen for days or weeks. But at least with the fire choking on its own products there was a better chance that the hull as a whole would survive.
The alarm tone changed, and now Venus’s voice rang out, relayed from the cupola. “Prepare for vernier fire. All hands prepare for vernier fire…”
This was the next step. Right now both hulls, released from the tether’s grip, had been flung away from the center. They could not afford to fall too far; an encounter with the warp bubble wall would destroy them. So auxiliary rockets would be fired to hold the hulls somewhere close to the bubble’s center, and to still any residual rotation. Some time in the future the hulls could be brought back together, the tether reattached, the assembly spun up again.
If the verniers fired in the first place, Holle thought. If they or their control systems hadn’t been ruined by the fire. If there was the fuel remaining to rejoin the hulls and restore their mutual rotation. If, if, if. Holle had always held in her head an image of the long chain of events that all had to occur precisely as programmed if she were ever to walk safely on the ground of Earth II. Just now she could feel that chain stretching, its weakest links straining.
A small bundle floated below her, wriggling oddly. It was a baby, Holle saw, drifting in open space. Only a few months old, bundled in a diaper, it waved bare arms and legs. With eyes and mouth opened wide, the baby seemed to be enjoying the experience of swimming in the air. But now the hull banged, as if huge fists were hammering on its exterior wall. That was the verniers, firing in hard bursts. Holle, hanging onto her rail, felt the jolts as each impulse was applied. The baby caromed off a deck plate and bounced back up in the air, limbs flailing. It was frightened now, crying. Holle unclipped herself from the catwalk and descended like an angel, folding the baby in charred spacesuit sleeves.
65
June 2048
On the morning Thomas Windrup’s sentencing was due to be announced Holle woke in an unfamiliar room, with odd metallic colors and strange smells. This was not her cabin, not Seba, not the hull she had come to think of as home. In the weeks since the fire she had been stationed in Halivah, hot-bunking with Paul Shaughnessy in a tiny cabin improvised from one of their own maintenance lockups. She still hadn’t got used to it.
It didn’t take her long to get dressed.
Paul was outside the cabin with their pressure suits. He waited while she used the bathroom block. Then she led the way to the hull’s nose airlock, where they suited up briskly. Holle didn’t try to engage Paul in conversation. Today he was going over to Seba to see the sentencing of the man who had tried to kill his brother by sabotaging his suit. Paul’s anger had been barely contained since the incident, and it was best to leave him be.
They cycled through the lock and out into the dark, and latched their harnesses to the cable that now linked the hulls. This wasn’t a rotation tether, and wasn’t held rigid; the cable was just a guide strung between the two hulls along which they pulled themselves hand over hand, across the two hundred meters to Seba. Traveling this way was hard work, but it saved fuel.
The hulls drifted, stationary with respect to each other but not side by side, and not even parallel; Halivah was tipped up compared to Seba, so that the two hulls lay like wrecked ships on the bottom of Earth’s ever-
