Schild’s Ladder

She raised the pot to her shoulder, and started to shake the plant free. Tchicaya told his Exoself to keep as much as it could from falling; he sprang forward, grabbed the stalk, and forced the plant back into its container. As Christa toppled backward, his Exoself had him reach out with his other hand and secure the pot around the roots.

As he did this, in the corner of his eye he saw another anachronaut swinging the second plant by its stalk. The roots were already free of the pot, and the soil around them was falling away. Between the gnarled gray fingers of the roots were dozens of swollen white nodules. Tchicaya told his Exoself to prevent the nodules from coming into contact with anything solid. It knew how fast he was capable of moving, and how fast he needed to be. The task, it declared, was impossible.

The anachronaut slammed the roots of the plant down on the floor.

Tchicaya lost everything but his sense of motion. He was deaf and blind, falling, waiting for an impact. He’d been thrown into the air, so he had to come back down to the ground eventually. That made sense, didn’t it?

The impact never came, but his vision was restored in an instant. His suit had turned fully opaque to protect his eyes; now it had decided that it was safe for him to see again. He was outside the Rindler, falling away from it. He could see the damaged walkway narrowing into two hourglass waists on either side of the ruptured section, pinching it off, stopping the flow of air. A skein of filaments was already beginning to crisscross the wound.

He looked around for the anachronauts. He spotted one in the distance, silhouetted against the borderlight, sharing the velocity he’d acquired from the Rindler's spin but separated from him by the force of the blast. The limbs were fixed at unnatural angles; he was looking at a corpse. All the ships' bodies could switch modes and cope without oxygen, but between the explosion and the exposure to vacuum there’d been no prospect of anyone surviving unprotected. The rebels had had more time than anyone else to think about putting on suits before endangering themselves, but they’d apparently decided not to bother. That was either willful martyrdom, or the expectation that, whatever happened, no one was going to be left alive to come and rescue them.

Branco spoke. “Are you all right?”

“I think so.” If his suit had been damaged at all by the blast, it had since repaired itself, and his Exoself reported nothing more than bruising to his body.

“I’ll send the shuttle after you.”

Tchicaya said, “Thanks.” He waited, watching numbly as the necklace of the ship continued to recede. He was tumbling slowly around an axis that almost coincided with the direction of his motion; the Rindler never vanished from sight, but the horizon between the border and the stars wheeled in front of him.

Branco said, “Plan A might not be possible. They’ve glued the shuttle’s release bolts in place.”

Tchicaya pondered this, dreamily amused for a moment. The sheer strangeness of his situation had induced a sense of detachment; it was a struggle to think his way back into events on the ship.

“What’s happening at the hub?”

“We reviewed what the climbers were doing earlier, in the instrumentation bay,” Branco replied. “They were building a particle detector, with some powerful superconducting magnets. Which are now part of the devices they have with them.”

“The fuel must be shielded, though? Against stray magnetic fields?” The antimatter portion was kept in a purely magnetic container; that had to be robust.

“Do you have any idea how many orders of magnitude difference there is between stray interstellar fields and the strongest artificial ones?”

Tchicaya took this question to be rhetorical. “How close are Rasmah and the others?” He didn’t want to look for himself; he just wanted Branco to give him the good news.

“They’re close. But the rebels are already at the hub, setting things up.”

“And you believe they might be capable of spilling the fuel?”

“We can’t rule that out. It will depend how good their device is. If they’re smart, and if they have time, they could pump energy into two different flows that the containment fields couldn’t restrain simultaneously.”

Tchicaya said nothing. He closed his eyes. He’d screwed up, he’d let his guard down with the anachronauts, but Rasmah was unshakable. She’d stop them, if she got the chance.

Branco said, “We’re now seeing flows developing in the fuel.” His voice betrayed no hint of panic. After the loss of the Scribe, he’d told Tchicaya that he’d been through local death seven hundred and ninety-six times, but even if he was immune to existential qualms, the prospect of losing contact with the border had to be painful. “Listen to me carefully. There’s no way we’re going to get the shuttle free in the next few minutes, but we could use the debris-clearance laser to burn through the tether that’s holding the module to which the shuttle is docked.”

“What good would that do? The whole module is swarming with rebels.”

“There are five known rebels?—?who we’ve managed to contain by reconfiguring some walls?—?but there are also three other people. All three are declared Preservationists, but they might still be your allies. If I throw the module clear of the Rindler, and everyone else is lost, they might get the shuttle free. And if the Rindler survives, at least they’ll have a chance of getting back to us.”

Tchicaya said, “Who are the three?”

“Alejandro, Wael, and Mariama,” Branco replied. “I don’t know any of them well. But you’re the one who’d be left here with them, so you’d better decide whether that would be to your advantage or not.”

The retreating ship was vanishing into the borderlight. Tchicaya didn’t want the power to gamble with anyone’s fate, but the rebels had left the builders with no choice but to juggle odious alternatives, and now Branco had dragged him into the same quagmire.

If the rebels were trying to destroy the Rindler, it was because they believed they had nothing more to do here, which meant that the Right Hand was already primed to scribe Planck worms without further intervention. Sparing everyone in the module wouldn’t put the far side in any greater danger, so he should err on the side of saving those people, in the hope that they’d help him fight the Planck worms. If he was left here alone, drifting off into the distance, he might be able to control the Left Hand remotely for a while, but without the shuttle he’d eventually lose radio contact.

The rebels could still be mistaken, though. The first attempt to create the Planck worms could fail. If anyone aligned with the rebels remained, they could work to rectify those early mistakes; they’d have decades to achieve their goal, virtually guaranteeing that the far side would be obliterated. So maybe it would be safer to be left alone, to do whatever he could in the time he had.

It all came down to whether or not one or more of those three people had been swayed by the rebels, as Birago had been swayed. Birago, who’d always seemed passionate but reasonable, and nowhere near as fanatical as Tarek.

Alejandro, Wael, and Mariama.

Branco said, “We’ve worked out the strategy the rebels are using. It’s not the best, but it is effective. If they’re not stopped, they’ll definitely spill the fuel.”

Tchicaya said, “Cut it loose.”

He stared at the horizon, watching for some glint from the laser in action, but that was futile. He couldn’t see any part of the ship anymore, and the portion of the tether that was glowing white hot would only be centimeters long.

“Branco?”

“Nearly there. It will take a few more seconds. Rasmah’s just reached the hub. She’s fighting with two of the rebels.” Branco chuckled “Make that one.”

Tchicaya’s spirits soared. He asked the ship to show him the struggle.

There was no response. He asked again.

On the horizon, a dazzling bead of violet light appeared, outsining the border. Then his suit shut off his vision.