over such distances, a booby trap is nigh impossible, and so they will save any course corrections they need to make until the last moment.’
‘What sort of distances?’ asked Brigitta.
‘Those two rubble piles are one point two million kilometres apart, and nearly the same distance away from us. The
‘What’s your window?’ Brigitta now asked.
‘With the likely spread,’ said Saul, ‘twenty hours, but right now is the best time.’
He sent a coded command to one of the radio transmitters on the rim, and just a few seconds later all three screens blanked for a moment then came back on. The middle screen showed two glaring eyes of red and orange, steadily expanding. On the other two screens the two explosions were expanding oblate discs of fire beginning to extrude spindles of flame above and below. Just visible, within the sides of each disc, were arc-shaped clouds of shattered and molten rock.
‘By the time the shrapnel from each explosion intersects with the
‘And
Saul glanced at her. ‘Maybe not, since the crew might be more frightened of Galahad than the possibility of their ship being hit.’
A sound like the rending of metal impinged on his hearing, but it was brief, echoing and distant, and Clay found himself once again in Serene Galahad’s aero as it plummeted towards the ground. Then the side of his face smacking against his bedside shelf brought him rudely back to consciousness. He swore, realizing his cabin seemed to have tilted up on one side, and was glad that he’d taken the precaution of climbing into his anchored sleeping bag. He pushed himself away from the shelf, as a further sound like wind howling down a pipe told him one of the side-burn fusion engines had fired up. As his cabin seemed to right itself, he quickly contacted Scotonis.
‘What the hell is happening?’ he demanded.
‘We’re changing course,’ replied Scotonis. ‘We’ll be making another correction in fifty minutes.’
‘Changing course? You don’t say.’
‘I’m sure I just did,’ was Scotonis’s laconic rejoinder, and then he shut down the call.
Clay swore again as he struggled out of his sleeping bag and into his ship suit. It was frustrating that, now he and Scotonis were effectively conspiring against Galahad, the captain felt free to voice opinions he would otherwise have kept quiet. It would have been nice to be able to reinstate, in all crew cabins, the inducers he had taken offline, but such an act would probably get him killed. Scotonis, Trove, Cookson, and the others among the crew whom they had selected to have implants removed and collars shut down, neither trusted nor liked him.
Once out into the corridor, he quickly began to make his way towards the bridge but, after fifty metres or so, he came up against a closed bulkhead door. He slammed his fist against it. They were cutting him out, they were either going to betray him to Galahad or just . . .
Then he spotted a red light flashing on the panel beside the door, and belatedly remembered what that meant. The section of the ship beyond the door had depressurized. Now he remembered the sound he had heard in half-sleep. He again called Scotonis.
‘Have we been hit?’ he asked.
‘Twice,’ said the Captain.
‘I can’t get to the bridge,’ said Clay, only after he said it realizing how self-concerned that sounded, and quickly added, ‘Was anyone hurt?’
‘The first glanced off the hull but the second penetrated,’ said Scotonis. ‘And, yes, people were hurt. In fact, you’ll be able to see for yourself shortly. The hole was sealed by automatics and the damaged area is repressurizing right now.’
Clay wanted most of all to turn round and head back to his cabin, but forced himself to stay. He leaned against the wall, staring at the panel as the light changed from red to orange, then to yellow and gradually to green. The door emitted a thump as it came off its seals, then, on its top pivot, it swung up inside the wall. Two corpses fell through at Clay’s feet, while another one behind them still seemed to be trying to hold on to the floor.
Clay stared at them in horror. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen corpses before; he doubted there was anyone on Earth who hadn’t, even before Alan Saul’s attack and before the Scour. How could he have been a close adviser to Galahad and not see them? In fact, how could he have not seen every stage in the transition from living human being to the bulgy-eyed sacks of flesh lying at his feet? His horror stemmed from the sure knowledge that if he had woken just a few minutes earlier, it might have been him caught in this corridor trying to breathe vacuum. It would have been him lying there with his tongue protruding, broken capillaries in his eyes and face, and vacuum- dried blood in his ears.
He stepped over them and moved on, the air smoky all about him, only realizing after he was ten metres beyond them that all three casualties were crew, and that two of them were ones who had joined his and Scotonis’s conspiracy. Moving further along, he found another crewmember simply standing with her back against the wall. This woman had managed to pull on a survival suit and just stared at him without comprehension.
Beyond her the corridor was a mess. A hole a metre across had been punched through the wall; whatever made it had come down at an angle, so as to take away most of the floor. Jagged twists of hot metal splayed out from around the edges of the initial hole, insulation hanging like moss below it, and the whole area was now iced with fire-retardant foam. Clay walked up between both the holes and peered into them in turn. The one in the wall was only a few centimetres deep, having been otherwise filled with breach sealant, but the one in the floor went down at an angle for at least twenty metres before terminating at more breach sealant. It seemed likely that whatever had hit the ship
