Reality Dysfunction - Expansion

“Don’t do it. Jesus, Warlow, I’m begging you.”

“You know this has to be done properly. And I can ensure it is.”

“Not like this. Please, come back.”

“Don’t worry about me, Joshua. I’ve thought it out, I will be quite all right.”

“Warlow!” Joshua’s face was crushed into a mask of anger and desperation. He jerked round to look at Ashly. The pilot was moving his lips silently, eyelashes sticky with tears. “Say something,” Joshua commanded. “Get him back.”

“Warlow, for Heaven’s sake come back,” Ashly datavised. “Just because you can’t navigate properly there’s no need for this. I’ll do it next time, and do it right.”

“I would like you to do me a favour, Ashly.”

“What?”

“Next time you come out of zero-tau, in fifty years or so, I want you to come back here and visit me.”

“Visit you?”

“Yes. I am transferring my memories to Aethra. I’m going to become one of the multiplicity. I won’t die.”

“You crazy old bastard.”

“Gaura!” Joshua shouted. “Can he do that? He’s not an Edenist.”

“The datavise has already begun,” Gaura replied. “He is doing it.”

“Oh, Jesus wept.”

“Is everyone in their acceleration couches?” Warlow asked. “I’m giving you the chance you really need to escape the rings. You’re not going to waste that, are you, Joshua?”

“Shit.” A hot steel band was constricting Joshua’s chest, far worse than any gee force. “They’re getting onto the couches, Warlow.” He datavised the flight computer for an image from the cabin cameras, watching Edenists tighten the webbing around themselves. Melvyn was swimming about, checking they had done it properly.

“And what about the thermo-dump panels, have you retracted them? There’s only five minutes left.”

Joshua datavised the flight computer to retract the thermo-dump panels. Systems schematics appeared as he prepped the generators and drive tubes; mostly green, some amber. The old girl was in good shape. Sarha started to help him with the checklist.

“Please, Warlow?”

“Fly the bastards into the ground, Joshua. You can do it.”

“Jesus, I don’t know what to say.”

“Promise me something.”

“Yes.”

“Gotcha. You should have asked me what it was first.”

Joshua coughed. Laughed painfully. It made his vision all blurred for some unfathomable reason. “What is it?”

“Hard luck, you committed. I want you to be more considerate to your girls. You never see the effect you have on them. Some of them get hurt, Joshua.”

“Jesus, cosmonik and social worker.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

“You were a good captain, Joshua. Lady Macbeth was a great way to finish. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

Sarha was sobbing on her acceleration couch. Ashly was clenching and unclenching his fists.

“I would,” Joshua said silently.

Aethra showed them Gramine . The starship was traversing the ring surface with the suavity of a maglev train, straight and sure. Three thermo-dump panels were extended to the full, shining a dull vermilion. A long, narrow flame of blue ions flickered for an instant.

“Who’d have thought it,” Warlow datavised. “Me, an Edenist.”

Joshua had never felt so pathetically worthless as he did then. He’s my crewman.

The bomb exploded. It sent a flat circle of sheer white light flaring out across the ring surface. Gramine was a tiny dark speck above its centre.

Joshua fired the restraint bolts. Taut silicon-fibre cables tethering the Lady Macbeth to its rock shield recoiled from the hull, writhing in serpentine coils. Lights inside the four life-support capsules dimmed and sputtered as the one active auxiliary generator powered up the four remaining primary generators. Ion thrusters fired, hosing the dark rock with unaccustomed turquoise luminosity.

A sphere of plasma inflated at the centre of the white shroud thrown across the ring, fast at first, then slowing when it was five kilometres across, diminishing slightly. Black phantoms migrated across its surface. Gramine ’s lower hull shone brighter than a sun as it reflected the diabolical corona seething four kilometres below.

Thousands of fragmented rock splinters flew out of the heart of the fusion blast, overtaking the disbanding plasma wave. They had the same riotous glow of doomed meteorites caught by an atmosphere. Unlike the plasma they left behind, their velocity didn’t fall off with distance.

“Generators on-line,” Sarha called out. “Power output stabilizing.”

Joshua closed his eyes. Datavised displays filled his head with technicolour dragonfly wings. Lady Mac cleared the rock. Her radar started to fire hard microwave pulses at the loose shoal of ring particles, evaporating snowflakes and inflaming carbonaceous motes. Beams of blue-white radiance shone out of the secondary reaction-drive nozzles, rigid as lasers.

They started to rise up through the ring. Dust currents splashed over the monobonded-silicon hull, producing short-lived surf-bloom patterns. Pebbles and larger stones hit and bounced. Ice splattered and stuck, then slipped downwards to fall away in the turbulent glare of the drive exhaust.

A rock chunk crashed into the Gramine , shattering its hull open and decimating the internal systems. Cryogenic tanks ruptured, white gases scintillating from the dying fusion bomb’s energy barrage. Four life-support capsules raced out of the destruction, charred nultherm foam flaking away, emergency beacons blaring.

Lady Mac cleared the ring surface. Fifty kilometres above her a wave of scarlet meteors streaked across the starfield.

“Stand by for high gees,” Joshua said. The fusion drives came on, tormenting the abused ring still further. Lady Mac tilted round, and started chasing down the inside of the tapering orange vector tube in Joshua’s mind. He monitored the displays to ensure their course was aligned correctly as the gee forces built, then datavised an extra order into the flight computer.

“Joshua, what—” Ashly’s startled voice faded away as the bridge trembled softly.

The last combat wasp left its launch-tube.

“Watch it coming, shitheads,” Joshua purred. Jesus, but it felt good to see the vector lines emerge as the submunitions separated. Purple threads linking Lady Mac with the tumbling wreckage.

It took eight seconds for the submunitions to reach the Gramine ’s life-support capsules. A stipple of kinetic explosions boiled above the ring for a few scant seconds before the vacuum absorbed them as effortlessly as it did all human-born pollution.

The inside of the homestead cabin was even worse than Jay Hilton imagined hell must be like. She wouldn’t let any of the other children go outside, so they had to use buckets in the small second bedroom when they wanted to go to the toilet. The smell was atrocious, and it got viler every time they opened the door. To add to their woes, the heat had reached a zenith which even Lalonde had never matched before. They had opened all the shutters as well as the door, but the air was solid, motionless. The cabin’s timber creaked and popped as the frame expanded.

The physical ordeal was bad enough, but Jay felt so agonizingly lonely too. It was stupid, there were twenty-seven children crammed in around her so tight you couldn’t move without nudging someone. But she didn’t