in the glow of the arc lights.
Holle kept her mouth gaping wide. The gases in her belly swelled agonizingly before escaping in an explosive fart. She knew she had only seconds of consciousness-ten seconds maybe, less given the way she was using up her oxygen in an adrenaline-fueled burst of action.
She looked around. She had thrown herself in among the rebels, and even before the hull breach she had started shoving them down toward the airlock to Shuttle B. Now those left here were drifting, convulsing, going limp. Frost formed over their mouths and noses, and their flesh swelled as water turned to vapor in their blood and tissues. Even now they could be saved. But Holle could not save them all.
One more.
She saw Magda Murphy, stranded away from the walls, the handholds. Magda had her mouth wide open, the way they had all trained for this contingency. Magda was straining toward her baby, somehow she’d let go of her, but she was out of reach. Astonishingly the baby was still alive, apparently still conscious. Holle saw her flex her tiny fingers.
Holle could reach either Magda or the baby. Not both. An instant choice. Magda could have more kids. She grabbed Magda, plucking her out of the air. Magda struggled feebly, reaching for the kid. Her vision fogging, her flesh crawling with pain, Holle hauled the two of them down to the shuttle lock.
This would never happen again, Holle promised herself. Never.
86
From her perch on the manipulator arm Venus saw the detached panel come tumbling out, and then bits of garbage and a spray of mist, and bodies that wriggled like landed fish. She was glad she was too far away to make out who it was, especially the children.
All this she saw from within the warmth of her suit, the hum of her life-support fans in her ears, immersed in her own slightly musty smell. She considered diving down there to help, maybe detaching herself from the arm and using her SAFER jet pack to plunge in among the tumbling people, wrestle them back into the light through that hole. But it would be a futile gesture. Even if they were not already dead there was no air in the hull, no way she could get them into shelter in time. And she’d probably just doom herself. Best to wait and then descend on the arm, and enter the hull in her suit, and see who was left to save.
If anybody. The thought hit her that nobody might have survived, nobody but her. That she might soon be crawling back into a hull become an airless tomb, alone, seventy light-years from Earth.
There was a sparkle of light in the corner of her eye. It was the shuttle, blipping its attitude engines. She felt an immediate stab of relief. Of course she wasn’t alone, at least somebody had survived in the shuttle. Now it must be maneuvering to dock with its dedicated port once more.
But she saw, shocked, that the vernier blips were pushing the shuttle away from the hull. The motors fired again and again, and exhaust products pulsed out of their tiny nozzles in brief fountains. But each tiny thrust was the wrong way; the shuttle accelerated away from the hull and toward the stars.
No, not to the stars. To the warp bubble. And Venus saw it. The shuttle had been sabotaged, the control circuitry reversed. Sabotaged purposefully to send whoever was hiding out inside it into the bubble wall.
At last whoever was aboard got the message. A new constellation of pulses shone around the rim of the shuttle, its stubby wings. You want to fly down, you used the controls that should take you up… But it was too late to kill the momentum already built up.
A figure in a pressure suit came squirming out of an airlock. Once free of the shuttle, it was propelled forward by a kick from a SAFER backpack. She recognized the suit, from the ident markings on the leggings. It was Wilson Argent’s.
It took long seconds for the warp tide to crumple the shuttle hull, like an invisible hand crushing a paper toy. When the pressure cabin gave way the atmosphere gushed out in a dazzle of water-ice crystals. A single body drifted in space, naked and slight, before falling into the warp barrier to become a bloody comet.
87
“It’s OK. Not long now, honey. We’ll get through this. It’s OK. Just hold my hand…”
“Oh God. Oh shit. Why did this have to happen why now? Why today? I can’t believe this is happening to me…”
“I want Billy-Bob! Dad, I want my Billy-Bob! You wouldn’t let me go back for him…”
There was nothing Holle could do, not until this shuttle was unpacked. She estimated there were forty people crammed in here, shoved in by herself and Helen Gray, forty in a cut-down one-use-only minimum-mass landing glider meant to take twenty-five tops. She could barely move because of the people around her, people pushing against her back and belly and pinning her legs, their bodies around her head. It was a crowd in three dimensions, people shoved up against each other every which way.
And of those forty, many, ten or fifteen, had been seriously injured. People had grossly swollen limbs, hands, feet, faces. A little boy cried out, over and over, that he was blind. One woman was coughing up sprays of blood in huge racking convulsions, her lungs obviously torn; the people around her were trying to shove her through the crowd toward a wall, to keep her from covering the rest with her blood and snot and phlegm.
A screen on the shuttle’s control console, relaying an image from a camera in the airlock, showed Venus, an alien figure in a bright white spacesuit inside the hull, in an environment of cabins and food packets and drink cartons and drifting toys, laboring to make Halivah habitable again. They were lucky Venus had been out of danger. Holle made a mental note. From now on there had to be somebody in a pressure suit at all times, a faceplate snap away from independent life support.
Until she could get out of here Holle could do nothing but endure. She tried to tune out the weeping and the rasping breaths.
“If I get my hands on the asshole who thought it was a good idea to take off a fucking hull plate I’ll rip out what’s left of their lungs with my bare hands…”
“It’s OK. He’s fainted, that’s all. I didn’t notice, he can’t fall over in this crowd. He’s just fainted. As soon as we’re out of here he’ll be fine.”
“No, you’re wrong. This man’s dead. Jay’s dead! Look at him!”
“I can’t see! Dad, why can’t I see?”
There was a hammering on the shuttle hatch. Holle glimpsed Venus through the thick window, clumsy in her stiff pressure suit, hauling at the handle.
The hatch opened. Holle felt her ears pop, and she had a spasm of fear about more air loss, but the pressure drop was only slight. The people closest to the hatch immediately started to spill out, with gasps of relief. Once out they turned and helped Venus pull out those who followed. Soon there was a cloud of bodies drifting away from the hatch, in pairs and threes.
As soon as she could move, Holle shoved her way ahead of the rest. It was an immense relief to reach the comparatively open space of the hull, to stretch her arms and legs wide, to breathe in air that smelled clean if faintly metallic, air straight from the emergency reserve tanks.
She looked around. Venus had backed off to the fireman’s pole, where she had tethered herself and was dismantling her pressure suit. Helen Gray was at the shuttle lock, supervising the evacuation. Holle glanced along the length of the hull, and saw that a similar unpacking was going on at the lock that led to the cupola, another fan of weary, injured people working their way out into the open air. Grace Gray was screening those who emerged, and gently diverting the injured.
A baby floated by. Naked, its skin so swollen it had become twice its size, it was obviously dead. Holle couldn’t recognize it, didn’t know if it was Magda’s baby, the baby she had failed to save. For a second she froze, guilt and doubt and a kind of hideous self-consciousness pressing down on her.
