Time

Something had gone wrong.

Then the asteroid shuddered and shook her loose, and she sailed upward into space.

There was a flash, ahead of her, in the direction of Bucephalus.

Now more objects came hailing over the horizon: complex, glittering, turning, moving in dead-straight lines, all in utter silence. Pieces of wreckage.

In that moment she knew she wasn’t going home again.

Emma Stoney:

The three of them were back at the artifact.

There was a shudder hard enough to make Emma cling to her tether. Little sprays of impact-smashed asteroid dust shot up from the ground.

Cornelius looked at his watch, a big mechanical dial strapped to his wrist. He made a clenched-fist, grabbing gesture. “Right on time.”

The tremor, or whatever it was, subsided. Emma looked around. Nothing seemed to have changed. The sun was wheeling slowly over her head. The blue circle protruded from the dust as if it had been there for a billion years, oblivious to the affairs of the humans who squabbled over the asteroid’s battered surface.

Malenfant said, “What have you done, Cornelius?”

“An X-ray laser.” Emma could hear the exultation in Cornelius’ voice. “A little Star Wars toy of my own. Small nuke as the power source… Well. It worked. And we felt it, all the way around the asteroid to here, through three miles of rock.”

Emma snapped, “How many people have you killed?”

Cornelius, clinging to his tether, turned to face her. “They would have killed us. It was us or them. And we couldn’t give them access to the portal.”

“Why not? My God, they represent the government. And besides, there were troopers coming down off that ship. Sliding down a wire to the surface. I saw them. Do you really think you’ll have killed them all?”

“Take it easy,” Malenfant said. “First we have to figure out what’s happened. Did they have time to trash our hab, the O ‘Neilll If not, that’s the only place on the asteroid to survive, the only way any of us can get home.”

“You’re suggesting we can make some kind of deal?” Emma asked, incredulous.

“Emma, you know me. I spent my life making deals—”

And that was when somebody shot her.

June Tybee

June coughed and found she had vomited, orange juice and fruit

bar and other shit spraying over the inside of her faceplate.

She was dangling from a single tether, as if the asteroid had turned to a roof over her head. Another couple of tethers curled around her, ripped free of the regolith. There was only space below her, an infinite place she could fall down into forever.

The ship wasn’t there any more. It looked like it had burst like a balloon. There was just a cloud, slowly dispersing, of fragments: metal and plastic and ripped-off insulation blanket.

There were bodies, of course, fragments in the cloud. Some of them were unsuited, just shirtsleeved: the invalid troopers, maybe the pilots. They had never had a chance.

For some reason that, the merciless killing of those helpless people, made her more angry than anything else, more even than the fact of her own stranding here, the fact that she would never see Tom or Billie again.

She had to get back to the asteroid before her last tether gave way. Cautiously, hand over hand, she pulled herself along the curling rope.

When she got close enough to touch the regolith, she pounded more pitons into the surface.

She broke radio silence, and tried calling. The subsatellites still squirted over her head, darting this way and that like busy metal gnats, unable to comprehend the fact that the giant ship that had brought them here was gone.

No reply.

She had been the farthest from the ship at the moment of the explosion; maybe that was why she had been spared. There might be others, disabled somehow. If that was so there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.

Before she’d left the ship they’d been shown the position of the main squid habitats — since destroyed by the chemical laser — and the humans here, Malenfant and his associates. They had been heading for the far side of the asteroid.

That was where she must go.

The asteroid was a small place. She would surely find the enemy before her consumables expired. Even if not, she must leave enough margin to get back to their ship. If she wasn’t going home, neither were they.

She pulled out her tethers and began working her way once more around the asteroid. She had a positioning system built into a heads-up display in her faceplate, coordinates fed to her by the surviving subsats.

It wasn’t so hard.

She came through the wreckage of a squid bubble habitat.

There was little to see here. The habitat membrane had simply been burst open. Only a few shreds of fabric, a cluster of anonymous machinery, was left here. No squid. Presumably they had all been sent sailing off into space when their world ended, as had her own buddies.

Good. She only hoped the squid had been smart enough to understand death.

A little after that, she found herself coming into view of the blue circle. She pressed herself against the regolith. Such was the tight curvature of the asteroid, the claustrophobic nearness of its horizon, that she was uncomfortably close.

Three figures were standing near the artifact, loosely tethered. They moved to and fro in her sights, gesticulating, talking.

As she’d been trained, she braced her toes in the regolith and fixed her tethers tighter before she raised her weapon. Otherwise the recoil might blow her clean off Cruithne. She aimed. Unlike on Earth, the slug would travel in a dead-straight line, not significantly perturbed by Cruithne’s miniature gravity. She’d trained others for this; now they would never have a chance to put those skills to use.

She fired. And again.

Reid Malenfant:

The invisible slug hit Emma hard in the leg. She was knocked off the surface. The tether attached to her waist reached its full extent, jerked taut, and pulled her back. She came slamming down to the surface, landing on her back. And then she bounced, drifting upward and back along the length of the tether.

“Emma? Emma!” Clumsily, ignoring his own tether drill, Malenfant hurried to her. He hauled her in by her tether, like landing a fish, and picked her up. Her thigh was a bloody ruin. Malenfant could see blood boiling and popping. “We need a tourniquet.”

Regolith splashed at his feet.

Cornelius grabbed his arm. “No time,” he said. “They’re coming for us.”

Malenfant looked around at the pocked landscape. He could see nobody. There wasn’t even any sound to help him tell where the shots were coming from.

Another splash, another new crater.

There was no shelter, anywhere.

The blue circle towered over Malenfant, framing darkness. “This way,” he said. “Into the portal.”

Cornelius pulled back. “It’s one-way. We won’t be able to get back.”

“I know.” Malenfant studied Cornelius, wishing he could see his face. “But we’ll be alive. And something might turn up.”

“Like what?”

“Trust me,” Malenfant said.

And, clutching Emma in his arms, he loosed his tethers, braced against the regolith, and jumped.

There was a blue flash, an instant of astonishing pain—

PART FOUR Manifold

The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations…

— THOMAS CARLYLE

Maura Della:

Open journal. April 14,2012.

Maybe I’m just getting too old.

I should have expected this, this brush fire of panic that has swept the planet after every TV news channel and Net site carried the pictures of the Blue kids sailing out of a nuclear explosion. After the confusing messages and visions from the sky, a consensus seems to have emerged: that we were shown a false future, that the Carter prophecy is real, that we have just two centuries.

To some extent the human race today seems to react as a single organism to great events. After all, we live in a wired world. Memes — information, ideas, fears, and hopes — spread around the media and online information channels literally at light speed.

It may be that this mass reaction is the greatest single danger facing us.

Anyhow I guess this is what happens when the lead story — all over the TV and radio channels and info Nets of a wired-up humankind — is doomsday…