spouting.
“I am entirely serious,” Sho said.
Enki had rotated to show that the notch was the beginning of a groove. The groove elongated as the worldlet rotated further. Tigris Rift. Its edges ramified in complex fractal branchings.
“I’m going where the proxies fell,” Margaret said. “I’m still working for you.”
“You sabotaged the proxies. That’s why they couldn’t fully penetrate the Rift.”
“That’s why I’m going-”
“Excuse me,” the suit said, “but I register a small energy flux.”
“Just a tickle from the ranging sight,” Sho said. “Turn back now, Dr. Wu.”
“I intend to come back.”
It was a struggle to stay calm. Margaret thought that Sho’s threat was no more than empty air. The laser’s AI would not allow it to be used against human targets, and she was certain that Sho couldn’t override it. And even if he could, he wouldn’t dare kill her in full view of the science crews. Sho was bluffing. He had to be.
The radio silence stretched. Then Sho said, “You’re planning to commit a final act of sabotage. Don’t think you can get away with it. I’m sending someone after you.”
Margaret was dizzy with relief. Anyone chasing her would be using the same kind of transit platform. She had at least thirty minutes head start.
Another voice said, “Don’t think this will make you a hero.”
Opie Kindred. Of course. The man never could delegate. He was on the same trajectory, several hundred kilometers behind but gaining slowly.
“Tell me what you found,” she said. “Then we can finish this race before it begins.”
Opie Kindred switched off his radio.
“If you had not brought along all this gear,” her suit grumbled, “we could outdistance him.”
“I think we’ll need it soon. We’ll just have to be smarter than him.”
Margaret studied the schematics of the poison spraying mechanism-it was beautifully simple, but vulnerable- while Tigris Rift swelled beneath her, a jumble of knife-edge chevron ridges. Enki was so small and the Rift so wide that the walls had fallen beneath the horizon. She was steering toward the Rift’s center when the suit apologized and said that there was another priority override.
It was theGanapati ’s lawyer. She warned Margaret that this was being entered into sealed court records, and then formally revoked her contract and read a complaint about her seditious conduct.
“You’re a contracted worker just like me,” Margaret said. “We take orders, but we both have codes of professional ethics, too. For the record, that’s why I’m here. The reef is a unique organism. I cannot allow it to be destroyed.”
Dzu Sho came onto the channel and said, “Off the record, don’t think about being picked up.”
The lawyer switched channels. “He does not mean it,” she said. “He would be in violation of the distress statutes.” Pause. “Good luck, Dr. Wu.”
Then there was only the carrier wave.
Margaret wished that this made her feel better. Plenty of contract workers who went against the direct orders of their employers had disappeared, or been killed in industrial accidents. The fire of the mass meeting had evaporated long before the suit had assembled itself around her, and now she felt colder and lonelier than ever.
She fell, the platform shuddering now and then as it adjusted its trim. Opie Kindred’s platform was a bright spark moving sideways across the drifts of stars above. Directly below was a vast flow of nitrogen ice with a blackriver winding through it. The center of the Rift, a cleft two kilometers long and fifty kilometers deep. The reef.
She fell toward it.
She had left the radio channel open. Suddenly, Opie Kindred said, “Stop now and it will be over.”
“Tell me what you know.”
No answer.
She said, “You don’t have to follow me, Opie. This is my risk. I don’t ask you to share it.”
“You won’t take this away from me.”
“Is citizenship really worth this, Opie?”
No reply.
The suit’s proximity alarms began to ping and beep. She turned them off one by one, and told the suit to be quiet when it complained.
“I am only trying to help,” it said. “You should reduce your velocity. The target is very narrow.”
“I’ve been here before,” Margaret said.
But only by proxy. The icefield rushed up at her. Its smooth flows humped over one another, pitted everywhere with tiny craters. She glimpsed blacksplashes where vacuum organisms had colonized a stress ridge. Then an edge flashed past; walls unraveled on either side.
She was in the reef.
The vacuum organisms were everywhere: flat plates jutting from the walls; vases and delicate fans and fretworks; huge blotches smooth as ice or dissected by cracks. In the light cast by the platform’s lamps, they did not possess the vibrant primary colors of the proxy link, but were every shade of gray and black, streaked here and there with muddy reds. Complex fans ramified far back inside the milky nitrogen ice, following veins of carbonaceous compounds.
Far above, stars were framed by the edges of the cleft. One star was falling toward her: Opie Kindred.
Margaret switched on the suit’s radar, and immediately it began to ping. The suit shouted a warning, but before Margaret could look around the pings dopplered together.
Proxies.
They shot up toward her, tentacles writhing from the black, streamlined helmets of their mantles. Most of them missed, jagging erratically as they squirted bursts of hydrogen to kill their velocity. Two collided in a slow flurry of tentacles.
Margaret laughed. None of her crew would fight against her, and Sho was relying upon inexperienced operators.
The biggest proxy, three meters long, swooped past. The crystalline gleam of its sensor array reflected the lights of the platform. It decelerated, spun on its axis, and dove back toward her.
Margaret barely had time to pull out the weapon she had brought with her. It was a welding pistol, rigged on a long rod with a yoked wire around the trigger. She thrust it up like the torch of the Statue of Liberty just before the proxy struck her.
The suit’s gauntlet, elbow joint and shoulder piece stiffened under the heavy impact, saving Margaret from broken bones, but the collision knocked the transit platform sideways. It plunged through reef growths. Like glass, they had tremendous rigidity but very little lateral strength. Fans and lattices broke away, peppering Margaret and the proxy with shards. It was like falling through a series of chandeliers.
Margaret couldn’t close her fingers in the stiffened gauntlet. She stood tethered to the platform with her arm and the rod raised straight up and the black proxy wrapped around them. The proxy’s tentacles lashed her visor with slow, purposeful slaps.
Margaret knew that it would take only a few moments before the tentacles’ carbon-fiber proteins could unlink; then it would be able to reach the life support pack on her back.
She shouted at the suit, ordering it to relax the gauntlet’s fingers. The proxy was contracting around her rigid arm as it stretched toward the life support pack. When the gauntlet went limp, pressure snapped her fingers closed. Her forefinger popped free of the knuckle. She yelled with pain. And the wire rigged to the welding pistol’s trigger pulled taut.
Inside the proxy’s mantle, a focused beam of electrons boiled off the pistol’s filament. The pistol, designed to work only in high vacuum, began to arc almost immediately, but the electron beam had already heated the integument and muscle of the proxy to more than 400°C. Vapor expanded explosively. The proxy shot away, propelled by the gases of its own dissolution.
Opie was still gaining on Margaret. Gritting her teeth against the pain of her dislocated finger, she dumped the broken welding gear. It only slowly floated away above her, for it still had the same velocity as she did.
