'Ready,' said a voice belonging to nobody in the carm. 'Identify yourself.'
The lunchtime conversation went dead silent. The jungle giant male cocked his crossbow. She turned her back on him. 'I am Lawri the Scientist. Give us your status.'
'Fuel tanks nearly empty. Power depleted, batteries charging. Air pressure dropping, will be dangerously low in five hours, lethal in seven. Displays are available.'
'Why are we losing air pressure?'
'All openings are sealed. I will seek the source of a leak.' Lawri tapped the white switch again. 'That's what will kill us. We'll strangle without air. Too bad. It would have been quite a show, but you won't see it,' she flashed at the Grad.
'Why did you turn off the display?'
'Voice can't hear us till I tap it again. It can do almost anything if you say the wrong thing, just talking.'
'Would it talk to me?'
'You're a…' Her scorn became something else. 'It wants you to identify yourself, and it remembers. Hmm. Try it.' She tapped the talk button.
'Prikazyvat Voice,' said the Grad.
'Identify yourself.'
'I'm the Scientist of Quinn Tuft. Do we have enough fuel to get back into the Smoke Ring?'
For a moment the Grad forgot how to breathe. Then, 'We have a water supply. Won't it be separated into fuel?'
Voice paused. Then, 'If the flux of sunlight maintains its intensity, I will have fuel soon enough to affect a return. I note a mass near our course. I can use it as a gravity sling.'
'Would that be Gold?'
'Rephrase.'
'The mass, is it Goldblatt's World?'
The Grad tapped the switch before he began laughing. 'Go for Gold! If we live that long.'
The whispering aft had become obtrusive. With the air turning icy and Voice speaking from the walls, luncheon was sliding over to panic. Jeffer said, 'Gavving, you'd better tell them about the pressure. We don't have time to brief Clave.'
Lawri asked, 'Shall I do it?' She knew more aj,out what was going on.
Jeffer seemed appalled. 'Lawri, they'd think you started the leak!'
'Savages—'
'Anyone would.'
She couldn't decide if he meant it.
Gavving was telling the rest of the mutineers about the leak. He told it long, including what they planned to do about it. Jeffer tapped the white button. 'Pnikazyvat Voice. Have you found the leak?'
'I find no point of leakage. Air is disappearing.'
'Will we live long enough to get back into the Smoke Ring?'
'No. The course I've programmed would take twenty-eight hours. Air pressure will have dropped to lethal levels in ten hours. Times are approximate.'
Lawri couldn't remember how long an hour might be. Still…ten hours? It had been seven before the cabin got so cold. She wondered why Voice hadn't taken it into account. Sometimes Voice could be such a fool.
She said, 'Display the areas where you have looked for a leak.'
The yellow line diagrams of the cabin sprouted green borders along two-thirds of the interior. Red dots blinked elsewhere. 'Those are sensors that have died,' Lawri told Jeffer. 'Voice, implement your course correction.'
Jeffer added, 'Pnikazyvat Voice. Do not use the main motor at any time!'
'I will fire as I have fuel,' Voice said. 'First burn in ten seconds. Nine. Eight.'
'Everybody grab something,' Jeffer called.
Mutineers were pulling the extra ponchos over their clothing. They stopped to strap themselves in. The jungle giants moved against the aft wall and grabbed fixtures. 'Two. One.'
But only the attitude jets lit. The carm's nose swung toward the
Smoke Ring and stayed there while the aft motors fired. It lasted several tens of breaths. They would pass closer to Gold…which had become huge, a spiral storm seen edge-on, whose rim was already below them.
If Mark weren't tied, Lawri thought, and as the main motor fired, nobody would be able to move except Mark It was something to keep in mind. Jeffer didn't seem to realize that the thrust could be controlled, by touching the top or bottom of those rectangles to raise or lower the fuel flow.
Meanwhile…how could the leaks be blocked? If there was a way, Lawri was damned well going to find it before Jeffer did.
Chapter Twenty-one
Go For Gold
'KENDY FOR THE STATE. KENDY FOR THE STATE. KENDY FOR the State.'
The response came almost instantly, sharp and crisp through nearvacuum and dwindling distance. The CARM was out of the Smoke Ring. Kendy had clear sending for the first time since the mutiny. He sent: 'Status?'
The motors were functional, all of them. Fuel: a few teacupaful.
Water: a good deal. Solar power converters: functional. Batteries: charged, but running down as they changed water into liquefied hydrogen and oxygen. Sunlight flux from T3 would be steady in vacuum. There would be fuel.
The CARM was on manual. CO2 flux indicated a full load of passengers. The carbon dioxide was accumulating slowly; the life support system could almost handle it…and the cabin was leaking air. Oh shit, they were dying!
'Course record since initiating burn.'
It came. The CARM was rising. It would have passed near the L2 point-Kendy's own location, the point of stability behind Goldblatt's World-were it not for Goldblatt's World itself. And were it not for
Goldblatt's World, the CARM would presently fall back to safety… but the core of an erstwhile gas giant planet was pulling the CARM's orbit into a tilted near-circle entirely outside the Smoke Ring.
'Switch to my command.'
Massive malfunction.
'Give me video link with crew.'
'Denied.'
And the cabin pressure was dropping. Something had to be done.
Kendy sent, 'Copy,' and waited.
The CARM computer thought it over, slowly, bit by bit; geared up; and began beaming its entire program. It took twenty-six minutes.
Kendy looked it over-a simplified Kendy, patched with subsequent commands and garbled by time and entropy-while he sent, 'Stand by for update programming.'
'Standing by.'
Kendy didn't believe it. The long-dead programmer would have embedded protect commands. He simply hadn't reached them yet…unless they had deteriorated too? Kendy didn't have an update program, he'd been so sure. He'd have to assemble it from scratch.
The speed with which a computer can think was Kendy's triumph and tragedy. Always he was freshly surprised by the boredom of his evenfless life. It stayed fresh, because Kendy was constantly editing his memories. The storage capacity of his computer-brain was fixed. He was always near his limit. He had edited his memory of the mutiny, deleting the names of key figures, for fear that he might later seek vengeance against their
