“Jimmy!” Vinh screamed at the front of the cabin. “What about thePhamNuwen?” The red emergency lights seemed to sway around him; the shouting brought him close to blacking out.
Then Diem’s voice came hoarse and loud. “I… I think it’s g-gone.” Fried, vaped, none of the masking words were easy anymore. “I don’t have anything now, but the four nukes… Lord, they were right on top of him!”
Several other voices interrupted, but they were even weaker than Jimmy Diem’s. As Vinh started back up the line toward him, the one-tenth-gee burn ended. Without light or brains, what was the lander but a dark coffin? For the first time in his life, Ezr Vinh felt the groundsider’s disorienting terror: zero gee could mean they had reached designated orbit, or that they were falling in a ballistic arc that intersected the planet’s surface….
Vinh clamped down on his terror and coasted forward. They could use the emergency console. They could listen for word. They could use the local autopilot to fly to the surviving Qeng Ho forces. The pain in his head grew beyond anything Ezr Vinh had ever known. The little red emergency lights seemed to get dimmer and dimmer. He felt his consciousness squeezing down, and the panic rose and choked him. There was nothing he could do.
And just before things all went away, fate showed him one kindness, a memory: Trixia Bonsol had not been aboard the
EIGHT
For more than two hundred years, the clock mechanism beneath the frozen lake had faithfully advanced itself, exhausting the tension of spring coil after spring coil. The mechanism ticked reliably down through the last spring… and jammed on a fleck of airsnow in the final trigger. There it might have hung until the coming of the new sun, if not for certain other unforeseen events: On the seventh day of the two-hundred-and-ninth year, a series of sharp earthquakes spread outward from the frozen sea, jolting loose the final trigger. A piston slid a froth of organic sludge into a tank of frozen air. Nothing happened for several minutes. Then a glow spread through the organics, temperatures rose past the vapor points of oxygen and nitrogen, and even carbon dioxide. The exhalation of a trillion budding exotherms melted the ice above the little vehicle. The ascent to the surface had begun.
Coming awake from the Dark was not like waking from an ordinary sleep. A thousand poets had written about the moment and—in recent eras—ten thousand academics had studied it. This was the second time that Sherkaner Underhill had experienced it (but the first time didn’t really count, since that memory was mixed with the vague memories of babyhood, of clinging to his father’s back in the pools of the Mountroyal Deepness).
Coming awake from the Dark was done in pieces. Vision, touch, hearing. Memory, recognition, thought. Did they happen first one and then another and another? Or did they happen all at once, but with the parts not communicating? Where did “mind” begin from all the pieces? The questions would rattle around in Sherkaner’s imagination for all of his life, the basis for his ultimate quest…. But in those moments of fragmented consciousness, they coexisted with things that seemed much more important: bringing self together; remembering who he was, why he was here, and what had to be done right now to survive. The instincts of a million years were in the driver’s perch.
Time passed and thought coalesced and Sherkaner Underhill looked out his vessel’s cracked window into the darkness. There was motion—roiling steam? No, more like a veil of crystals swirling in the dim light they floated on.
Someone was bumping his right shoulders, calling his name again and again. Sherkaner pieced together memories. “Yes, Sergeant, I’m away… I mean, awake.”
“Excellent.” Unnerby’s voice was tinny. “Are you injured? You know the drill.”
Sherkaner dutifully wiggled his legs. They all hurt; that was a good start. Midhands, forehands, eating hands. “Not sure I can feel my right mid and fore. Maybe they’re stuck together.”
“Yeah. Probably still frozen.”
“How are Gil and Amber?”
“I’m talking to them on the other cables. You’re the last one to get his head together, but they’ve got bigger hunks of body still frozen.”
“Gimme the cable head.” Unnerby passed him the sound-conducting gear, and Sherkaner talked directly to the other Team members. The body can tolerate a lot of differential thawing, but if the process doesn’t complete, rot sets in. The problem here was that the bags of exotherm and fuel had shifted around as the boat melted its way to the surface. Sherkaner reset the bags and started sludge and air flowing through them. The green glow within their tiny hull brightened, and Sherkaner took advantage of the light to check for punctures in their breathing tubes. The exotherms were essential for heat, but if the Team had to compete with them for oxygen the Team would be the dead loser.
A half hour passed, the warmth enveloping them, freeing their limbs. The only frost damage was at the tips of Gil Haven’s midhands. That was a better safety record than most deepnesses. A broad smile spread across Sherkaner’s aspect. They had made it, wakenedthemselves in the Deep of the Dark.
The four rested a while longer, monitoring the airflow, exercising Sherkaner’s scheme for controlling the exotherms. Unnerby and Amberdon Nizhnimor went through the detailed checklist, passing suspicious and broken items across to Sherkaner. Nizhnimor, Haven, and Unnerby were very bright people, a chemist and two engineers. But they were also combat professionals. Sherkaner found fascinating the change that came over them when they moved out of the lab and into the field. Unnerby especially was such a layering: hardbitten soldier atop imaginative engineer, hiding a traditional, straitlaced morality. Sherkaner had known the sergeant for seven years now. The fellow’s initial contempt for Underhill schemes was long past; they had been close friends. But when their Team finally moved to the Eastern Front, his manner had become distant. He had begun to address Underhill as “sir,” and sometimes his respectfulness was edged with impatience.
He’d asked Victory about that. It had been the last time they were alone together, in a cold burrow-barracks beneath the last operating aerodrome on the Eastern Front. She had laughed at the question. “Ah, dear soft one, what do you expect? Hrunk will have operational command once the Team leaves friendly territory.You are the civilian advisor with no military training, who must somehow be tucked into the chain of command. He needs your instant obedience, but also your imagination and flexibility.” She laughed softly; only a curtain separated their conversation from the main hall of the narrow barracks. “If you were an ordinary recruit, Unnerby would have fried your shell half a dozen times by now. The poor cobber is so afraid that when seconds count, your genius will be caught on something completely irrelevant—astronomy, whatever.”
“Um.” Actually, he had wondered how the stars might look without the atmosphere to dim their colors. “I see what you mean. Put that way, I’m surprised he let Greenval put me on the Team.”
“Are you kidding? Hrunk demanded you be on it. He knows there’ll be surprises that only you can figure out. As I said; he’s a cobber with a problem.”
It wasn’t often that Sherkaner Underhill felt taken aback, but this was one of those times. “Well, I’ll be good.”
“Yes, I know you will. I just wanted you to know what Hrunk is up against…. Hey, you can look on it as a behavioral mystery: How can such radically crazy people cooperate and survive where no one has ever lived before?” Maybe she meant it as a joke, but itwas an interesting question.
Without doubt, their vehicle was the strangest in all history: part submarine, part portable deepness, part sludge bucket. Now the fifteen-foot shell rested in a shallow pool of glowing green and tepid-red. The water was in a vacuum boil, gases swirling up from it, chilling into tiny crystals, and falling back. Unnerby pushed open the hatch, and the team formed a chain, handing equipment and exotherm tanks from one to the next to the next, until the ground just beyond the pool was piled with the gear they would carry.
They strung audio cable between themselves, Underhill to Unnerby to Haven to Nizhnimor. Sherkaner had been hoping for portable radios almost until the end, but such gear was still too bulky and no one was sure how it would operate under these conditions. So they each could talk to just one other team member. Still, they needed safety lines in any case, so the cable was no extra inconvenience.
Sherkaner led the way back to the lakeshore, with Unnerby behind him, and Nizhnimor and Haven pulling the sled. Away from their submarine, the darkness closed in. There were still glimmers of heat-red light, where
