Flag In Exile

become the dome's number one access annex and watched huge, glittering panes of crystoplast rising delicately into place. Although the crystoplast was barely three millimeters thick and far lighter than an equal volume of glass, the smallest panel was over six meters on a side, and while Grayson’s gravity was less than that of Lady Harrington's home world, it was seventeen percent higher than Old Earth's. Only four years before, the men maneuvering them into place would have relied upon grunting, snorting cranes and brute force; now they used counter-grav to nudge the shimmering, near-invisible panes into position with cautious ease, and Gerrick felt a thrill of pride he hadn't yet learned to take for granted.

He turned in place to survey the entire site. This was one of the smaller jobs, for Lord Mueller had decided he needed a demonstration project before he committed to something the size of a farm or city dome, but he'd certainly picked a gorgeous spot to put it. When the project was finished, it would protect the brand new Winston Mueller Middle School, set atop a bluff overlooking God's Tears, the most beautiful chain of lakes on the continent of Idaho. The school's buildings were in, and once the bluff wore its dome like a gleaming, high-tech crown, work crews would plant Old Terran grass and lay out playing fields, and, Gerrick chuckled, Lady Harrington was donating one of her 'swimming pools.' The school administrator had expressed his thanks, but the poor man still seemed dreadfully confused by the whole idea.

Small as it was, the project was certainly one of the most satisfying Sky Domes had underway. Especially for him. The entire dome concept had been his, but in the beginning, he'd thought of it primarily as a fascinating challenge to adapt Manticoran technology to Grayson needs, without really considering all its implications. Now that those implications had become a reality, he felt a deep, complex joy, a happiness that mingled the satisfaction of a challenge met with that sense of accomplishment, of knowing he would leave his world a better place than he had found it, which only the most fortunate of engineers got to savor.

And, he admitted with a broad smile, the fact that he was also in the process of becoming one of the wealthiest men in Grayson's history was pretty nice icing for his cake.

He turned back to the east and watched as the first section went into the uppermost tier. The dome looked lopsided and dangerously unbalanced with that single pane leaning so far out over the center of the school, but Gerrick saw with an engineer's eye. He'd personally checked every decimal place of the stress calculations, and he'd designed a safety margin of well over five hundred percent into the support structure.

The paneling teams sealed the pane with an instantly-setting caulking compound and moved quickly to the west side of the dome. Despite the safety factor, they wanted to complete the first full cross section of roof quickly to balance the stress, and Gerrick approved. Engineers believed as firmly in their calculations as they did in God, but they also believed in minimizing exposure to the Demon Murphy.

Gerrick smiled at the familiar thought and looked down as the high, clear sound of a child's voice cut through the work site's noise. A group of kids, students-to-be in the middle school, had asked permission to watch the completion of the main dome, and their teachers, after checking with the site supervisors, had organized a field trip. Needless to say, the Sky Domes staff had impressed them with the dangers the construction equipment represented, and Grayson children learned early to take adults' warnings to heart. They were well back under the completed eastern wall, and they were staying there, but that didn't mute their avid interest. He could see their excitement even from here as they watched the panels drifting upward on their counter-grav like some sort of impossibly beautiful seed pods and chattered to one another, and he smiled. He'd talked to some of those youngsters himself this morning, and two or three had looked like they had the making of good engineers.

He let his eyes sweep proudly back up the glittering wall above the kids... and that meant he saw it all happen.

It started almost gently, as the most terrible accidents so often do. The first movement was tiny, so slight he thought he'd imagined it, but he hadn't. One of the primary load-bearing supports, a solid shaft of alloy orders of magnitude stronger than titanium set in a hole bored fourteen meters into solid bedrock and sealed with over a hundred tons of ceramacrete, swayed like a young tree in a breeze. But that support was no sapling. It was a vital component of the dome's integrity, and even as Gerrick stared at it in disbelief it was turning, twisting in its socket as if it had been tamped into place with so much sand and not sealed into the densest, hardest mineral building material known to man. It couldn't happen. It wasn't just unlikely, it was impossible, and Gerrick knew it, for he was the man who'd designed it ... but it was also happening.

His eyes whipped unerringly to the supports which shared that shaft's component of the dome's weight. An untrained eye wouldn't even have known which ones to look at; to Gerrick, it was as obvious as if he'd spent hours pouring over the schematics that very morning, and his-heart leapt into his throat with horror as he saw one of them shifting as well!

He stared at it for one terrible, endless instant, his engineer's mind leaping ahead to the disaster to come. It was only a moment, no more than four seconds, possibly five; certainly not more than six, yet that moment of stunned inactivity would haunt Adam Gerrick. It didn't make any difference. He knew that, didn't think it, but knew it. Too much mass was in motion. The inevitable chain of events was beyond the control of any man, and nothing he did or didn't do could make the slightest difference, yet Gerrick would never forgive himself for that moment of stasis.

A soft, almost inaudible groan came from the moving supports, and a pane of crystoplast popped free. The glittering panel dropped, no longer drifting and lovely in its counter-grav supports but slashing downward like a gleaming guillotine, and Adam Gerrick began to run.

He flung himself down the scaffolding, screaming a warning, running straight towards the collapsing horror of his dream. It was madness, a race which could end only in his own death if he won it, but he didn't think about that. He thought only of the children, standing in what was supposed to be the safest part of the entire site... directly under those creaking, groaning, treacherously shifting supports.

Perhaps, he told himself later, if he'd reacted faster, if he'd started running sooner, if he'd screamed a louder warning, perhaps it would have made a difference. The engineer in him, the part of his brain and soul which manipulated numbers and load factors and vectors of force knew better, but Gerrick had two children of his own, and the father in him would never, ever, forgive himself for not having made it make a difference.

He saw one of the kids turn and look at him. It was a girl, no more than eleven, and Adam Gerrick saw her smile, unaware of what was happening. He saw her wave at him, happy and excited by all the activity . .. and then he saw eighty thousand metric tons of alloy and crystoplast and plunging horror come crashing down and blot that smile away forever.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Honor Harrington sat in her quarters and stared numbly at nothing while Nimitz curled in her arms and buried his muzzle against her. For once, even he was quenched, too crushed to comfort her, for he, too, loved the children.

Thirty of them, she thought emptily. Thirty children, the oldest of them thirteen, wiped away in a moment of transcendent horror. Crushed to death, ground to mangled ruin under eighty thousand tons of wreckage, and it was her fault. Whatever had happened, whatever had led to the disaster, she was the one who'd originally bankrolled Sky Domes. It was her money which had made the company a success, and her eagerness to win jobs and income for her steaders which had spread it across the entire planet.

A tear flowed down her face, prickling and alien feeling to the artificial nerves of her left cheek, and she made no move to dry it. Children, she thought despairingly. Intentionally or not, she'd killed children.

And fifty-two other people had died with them, a cruel corner of her brain reminded her. Three had been teachers supervising their students, teachers who'd undoubtedly had a moment of horror to realize what was happening to their charges, but the others had been Sky Domes employees. Honor's employees, most of them her own steaders.

She drew a deep, shuddering breath and hugged Nimitz's warm, living weight while the tears flowed faster