XXXII

Everybody complains about the weather, and we have the technology now to do something about it, should we choose to. But we don’t. The fact is, we need bad weather. A day at the beach is much more enjoyable if we know that somebody, somewhere, is getting rained on.

 —Gregory MacAllister, “Reflections,” Collected Essays

Hours to breakup (est): 27

Abel Kinder watched the numbers rippling across his screens. Off-the-chart high-pressure front moving down into the Nirvana Ocean to collide with extreme low pressure along the eastern coastline of Transitoria. Tornadoes spawning inland. Hurricanes boiling across waters normally too cold to support hurricane activity.

He punched Marcel’s button.

“What do you have, Abel?” the captain asked.

“More heavy weather. When do we make the pickup?”

“Nineteen hours and change.”

“I don’t suppose you can speed it up.”

“Negative. The schedule’s out of our control. How heavy?”

“Extremely. I’ve never seen these kinds of readings before. Tell them to expect wind and rain. Especially wind.”

“How much?”

“A lot”

Tom Scolari and Cleo, who had watched the asteroid rise into the night with such unabashed pleasure, were taken afterward to the Zwick. It was a small, boxy ship, bristling with antennas. universal news was emblazoned on its hull.

Janet informed him that they were assigned to the onboard Outsider team. “There’s another job coming up in about seven hours. Until then, you can relax.”

They were taken in charge by a short, unobtrusive man who might have been a librarian, and a tall willowy blonde with the manner of an aristocrat pretending to be a commoner. “Name’s Jack Kingsbury,” he said. “I’m the ship’s welder.” He managed a grin.

The woman was Emma Constantine. “It’s good to have you on board,” she said, with affected interest. “You people have been doing an extraordinary job.” She had perfect diction.

“You’re the rest of the team, I assume,” Scolari said.

Emma wasn’t. “I’m August Canyon’s producer.” She inspected them. “You two have a change of clothes with you? Damn, I don’t understand that. They promised they’d see that you had some fresh clothes.”

“Who promised?” asked Cleo before Scolari could react.

“My contact on Wendy. We wanted to do an interview. Live. But you both look a trifle mussed. Let me see if we can get something that fits.”

Marcel had lost contact with the ground party. He sat disconsolately on the Star’s bridge while Lori tried to raise less through the electrical storms that now blanketed the atmosphere.

The Star’s working spaces were far more luxurious than Marcel’s cramped command area on Wendy. The bridge had leather panels, soft-glo lighting, full-wall flexscreens, and a captain’s chair that would have looked good at the C.O. Club.

He understood why this was so: On the Star, the bridge was part of the tour. It was the only operational part of the great ship that the passengers actually saw, so power and opulence were de rigueur. Only when they commenced the final series of course adjustments would the visits be halted.

Nicholson irritated Marcel. It was hard to say why. The man was friendly enough. Having reached the decision to assist, he never failed to respond quickly and effectively to the needs of the operation. He did what he could to make Marcel and his people comfortable, and he went out of his way to tolerate Beekman, who was capable of occasional flashes of arrogance. It might have been that he tried too hard to live up to his image of what a starship captain should be. He talked as if he, Marcel, and Beekman operated on a higher plane than everyone else. He was quick to criticize, quick to suggest that the mission would have more chance of success if only they had more people on board like themselves.

He took aim particularly at the volunteers. They were amateurs. How could they be expected to get things right?

But the amateurs, Marcel pointed out several times, had so far done quite well.

In the short time he’d been on the Evening Star, Marcel had concluded that Nicholson had never learned the difference between maintaining distance between himself and his officers, and becoming aloof. The captain looked like a lonely man, and probably had no friend anywhere on the vessel.

Beekman and one of his physicists were huddled in a corner. Beekman had led the team that had analyzed course, velocity, and aspect of the Alpha shaft as it came free of the assembly. He and Drummond had calculated what was needed to turn it around and arrange for it to show up with the appropriate alignment tomorrow morning at the designated spot at the correct time on Deepsix.

There were a dozen or so visitors on the bridge, mostly overweight middle-aged couples talking about dinner or the evening’s presentation in the Star Theater, which was to be a live production of Barry English’s Indigo. Marcel had suggested canceling, because they expected to be making course adjustments through the evening, but Nicholson was afraid someone might be alarmed, or displeased, or resentful. The ship’s movements were expected to be nominal. And, of course, everything would be known well in advance.

Beekman finished his conversation, excused himself, and came over. “We’re in business,” he said. “Everything’s falling into place.”

“Good.” Marcel pushed away from the console while Beekman took a seat. “You and your people have been outstanding, Gunther.”

“Thanks. We were concerned that the rotation would put too much stress on the shaft. That it would break somewhere. Or that the welds wouldn’t hold. But we seem to have gotten through okay. I do believe you might actually pull it off.”

“We might, Gunny. Or maybe you will. You and John and that army of part-time welders. Who’d’ve believed it?”

“Well, let’s parcel out the credit when we have them home. There’ll be a course adjustment in nine minutes. It’ll be very slight. Nicholson knows.”

“You’ve made my day, Gunny.”

“You don’t look happy. What’s wrong, Marcel? The elevator thing?”

“Yes. Right now, it’s scary.”

“It’ll be all right. They’ve got Kellie to help them. Are we talking to them yet?”

“No. They’re still out.”

The lander moved into position immediately in front of the elevator. Rain beat down on it, and lightning flared and boomed around them. Kellie, in the pilot’s seat, was also fighting heavy winds along the face of the cliff.

“We’ll have to make this fast, Hutch,” she said. “I don’t know how long I can stay here.” She was referring to the power levels needed to sustain hover mode.

“Okay,” Hutch said.

“Something else. The elevators are inside a gridwork.”

“We know.”

“Okay. Then you also know it’s a crosshatch of beams, supports, and plates. That’s what’s holding you up. There must be tracks in there, and the elevators run up and down the tracks. Everything’s old and jammed up. The metal’s got to be warped. So the elevator can’t ride freely.”

“What are you trying to tell us, Kellie?”

“There’s a clean break about fifty meters down. You get down there, and it just opens out into the great beyond. Bye-bye baby.”

“All right. It feels pretty stable now. Let’s go.”

“Who’s first?”

“Randy.”

Nightingale looked at her, almost pleading. His face was ashen.

What did he want her to do? Leave him there?

The lander eased down until it lined lip directly with the elevator. Kellie opened the hatch and MacAllister showed them a line. “It’s tied to the seat anchor, Randy,” he said.

Nightingale nodded anxiously. “Okay.”

MacAllister stared at Hutch, across a space of only a few meters.

He looked scared, too, but he was trying to appear nonchalant. How about that? The guy was a trooper after all.

The lander rose and fell, caught in an updraft. It rolled toward the elevator, then drifted away. “Not too close,” Hutch said.

“Lot of wind here.” Kellie’s voice in her earphones.

Mac coiled the rope and measured the distance. “Ready, Hutch?”

“Yeah.”

It spun toward her. She reached for it, watched it fall short. Mac reeled it in and tried again. Still short.

“You’re too far out,” he told Kellie.

Hutch heard a soft damn. The lander drew off, trailing line. When Mac was ready she started another approach.

The lander rose on a cushion of air. It dropped suddenly and to Hutch’s horror MacAllister almost fell out. Nightingale stiffened. “Goddam downdrafts,” said Kellie.

Mac retreated from the hatch. “You okay, Mac?” Hutch asked.

“You see what happened there?”

“I saw,” Kellie told him. “Get a tether.”

He was gone for a few moments. Then he emerged again wearing a line tied around his ample waist. The problem, of course, was that if he did fall out, Kellie couldn’t leave the controls to haul him back in. She’d have to go all the way to the bottom to retrieve him.

“All right,” said Mac, his voice surprisingly steady. “Let’s try it again.”

“This is a little delicate,” said Kellie. “When you get the line, you’re going to have to move fast.” Hutch understood: If the wind caught the lander in the middle of the operation, it would rip the line, and whoever happened to be attached to it, out of the elevator.

Kellie made her approach. Hutch kept her eyes on Mac, watching him gauge his distance. The line was coiled in his right hand. The lander turned sideways, sank, wobbled, came back. It climbed, getting above her.

Mac saw his chance and the line came spinning in her direction. It unraveled and it was slick from the rain, but she scooped it out of the air and held on to it.

“Okay, Randy,” she said. “Let’s move it.”

He shrank back, and she could see the struggle being fought behind his eyes.

“We don’t have time to monkey around,” she told him softly. “We stay here, we die.”

“I know.”

She waited for him.

“Hutch.” Kellie’s voice. “Let’s go. I can’t hold it here forever.”

“We’re working on it.”

Nightingale stepped forward and closed his eyes. She coiled the line around his middle, crossed it under his armpits, and secured it in front. No way he could fall out of that. But he resisted as she tried to walk him to the opening.

“Hutch,” he said, “I can’t do this.”

“It’s okay, Randy. You’re doing fine.”

The elevator dropped again. Banged to a stop.

“Hutch!” said Kellie.

Nightingale got to the door and looked out at the lander. Rain blew in on him.

“Don’t look down,” Hutch said.

“Hurry it up,” said Kellie.

“Hutch?”

“Yes, Randy?”

“If this doesn’t work—”

“It’ll work.”

“If it doesn’t—” He was reaching for the rim of the opening, found it, gripped it. The line stretching from him to the aircraft tightened and loosened as Kellie rode the drafts along the face of the precipice.

Hutch stepped up behind him and gently peeled his fingers away. “It always works,” she told him. And pushed. He went out silently, without the scream she’d expected.

He fell. It must have been a sickening few seconds, but it ended quickly when the line took hold and he rolled out in a long arc beneath the lander. Kellie pulled quickly away while he swung back and forth, clutching the line, saying O God over and over.

Mac began to haul him in. Hutch watched Nightingale kick frantically, and she feared he might have a heart attack. “Relax, Randy,” she told him. “You’re okay. The hard part is over.” And she continued talking to him in the most soothing tone she could muster until Mac’s hand reached down finally, seized his vest, and dragged him into the aircraft.

The lander tilted slightly and started around again. Mac reappeared in the hatch with his line. “Okay, me proud beauty,” he said. “You’re next.”

The elevator shook. Another quake, maybe. And it started down again. She backed away from the opening and got off her feet. Rain drummed on the roof. The elevator kept dropping, and it seemed for a few seconds to be almost in free fall. Her heart came into her throat. Then metal squealed, and the elevator banged to a stop.

Kellie was calling frantically. “I’m okay,” Hutch said.

“Maybe not.”

Hutch’s heart, which was still fluttering, missed a beat. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m sinking.”

Spike depletion.

She watched the lander dropping lower. Kellie slowed the descent, hit the jets, and regained some altitude. She came around again. “We’re going to have to get it right the first time,” she said.

Mac stood in the airlock with his line. Kellie glided in overhead, killed the jets, reversed thrust, and brought the lander to a dead stop. It began to fall.

“No,” Hutch said. “It won’t work.”

It was dropping too fast. Mac looked desperately in her direction.

“I’m going to have to land and recharge,” Kellie said. “Hutch, I’m sorry. I don’t know any other way to do this.”

Hutch nodded and waved good-bye. “Take it down. I’ll be here when you come back.”

It was getting dark. Winds were high, and she had no sensors. A night rescue would be out of the question.

Kellie was fighting back rage and tears. “You can’t stay in the elevator, Hutch.”

Hutch watched the lander kick in its jets and bank away to the east. “Is it that bad?”

“It isn’t good.”

She looked out at the storm. And at the gridwork, the crossbars and diagonals and guide rails off to either side. If she could get to them.

A bolt of lightning exploded overhead, throwing everything into momentary relief.

The outside of the elevator was smooth, without handholds. Despite the low ceiling, the roof was out of reach. She saw no way to climb onto it, not without something to stand on.

It slipped again. Something banged hard against one of the walls.

She backed away and tried to think. It was hard, knowing what might happen at any moment, to keep her head clear .

She gathered up her vine, went back to the opening, and looked again at the roof. Then she got down on her belly, leaned out, and peered underneath. A pair of cables hung from the underside. And she saw the break, only a few meters down. A missing guide rail.

The way things were going, she had only a couple of minutes.

Hutch produced her laser, moved to one side of the doorway, and cut a hole belt high in the wall. Then a second one farther to the left at the level of her shoulders and a third one above her head directly over the first. The e-suit was supposed to protect her from extremes of heat and cold, but she wasn’t sure what would happen if she put her foot on hot metal. On the other hand, she didn’t have time to stand there and wait for everything to cool.

“Hutch—” Kellie’s voice, broken up by the storm. “—on the ground and charging.”

“Okay.”

“Can you get out of the car?”

“I’ll let you know.”

She went back to the doorway, measured distances, tried to convince herself there was no difference between what she was trying and climbing onto a garage roof, which she had done many times in her girlhood.

She leaned out and grabbed the highest of the handholds. The rain took her breath away. Even though she was protected from it by the suit, the psychological result was the same as if the field were not there. The McMurtrie Effect again.

She gathered her courage, swung out onto the face of the elevator, inserted her foot into the bottom hole, climbed quickly up, and crawled onto the roof. The cable housing was centered, and the roof angled slightly down away from it. Her first impulse was to make for the housing, to get as far from the edge as she could. But that would accomplish nothing.

She watched the network of diagonal and horizontal bars move slowly past. Move up. They were round and desperately narrow. No thicker than her wrist. What kind of building materials did these people use, anyhow?

She edged toward the gridwork, tied one end of her vine around her waist, and stepped off the roof onto a passing crossbar. The elevator kept going, and she leaned away until it was clear. Then she looped her vine around the bar, pulled it tight, and realized she’d stopped breathing. She lowered herself into a sitting position, both legs off one side of the rail although she’d have preferred to straddle because it would feel safer, but it just wasn’t comfortable.

“Hutch?” Kellie’s voice.

“I’m off the elevator.”

“You okay?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Where are you?”

“Sitting on a crossbar.”

More lightning. They lost communication for a moment. When it came back, Kellie said, “How safe are you?”

“I’m okay.”

“We’ll have enough of a charge in an hour or so.”

“Don’t try it. You’ll get us all killed. Wait till morning.”

“Hutch—”

“Do what I’m asking you to. It’s the best chance for everybody.”

The elevator was still moving steadily down. Then it stopped, and for several minutes it seemed locked in place. Finally it dropped out of the framework, out of the guide rails, and began to fall. A long time later she heard it hit the forest below.

BREAKING NEWS

“One of the two persons stranded in an elevator early this morning remains in danger...”

Nicholson would have preferred to be in his cabin in the Adiron-dacks. He wanted nothing so much as for this entire business to be over and his part in it to be forgotten. He believed he was safe. But he’d been shaken, and he hated being put into a position that required him to continue to make decisions that might backfire. He was, in fact, determined to see that nothing went wrong, that he emerged blameless from the mission. If he could accomplish that, he would consider himself very fortunate.

Secondarily, he would like to see a successful rescue. Not only because it would help his case, but because when his own immediate fears had passed, he’d begun to feel some sympathy for the four people trapped on the ground.

He was aware that his priorities, had they been known, would have reflected poorly on him. And that judgment embarrassed him, putting an even heavier load on his shoulders. But he couldn’t help how he felt. He resented Marcel, not for anything Weady’s captain had actually done, but because he hadn’t been able to come up with a rescue plan that didn’t involve additional risk for Nicholson.

There was a mild jar as the ship began the course correction. He sensed the mass of the object that the Star was hauling. Saw it in the sluggishness of the ship’s responses. And that was the way of it at the moment: the Star was tied to this impossible alien shaft, much as Nicholson was tied to his decision to allow two passengers and a lander to drop out of orbit.

Power flowed through the bulkheads as the four superluminals struggled to move their burden onto the designated course. They had no serious capability for lateral maneuvering. While the ships could change their own heading through the use of strategically placed highly flexible thrusters, only the main engines had the sheer capacity to affect the Alpha shaft. That meant they could, in practical terms, only move it forward, relying on gravity fields and inertia to do the rest.

But Lori reported, well into the maneuver, that they were still on target. To Nicholson the entire operation seemed hopelessly complicated. But he had as yet no reason to believe that the plan would not work. Other than his own instincts.

The engines went neutral. Power was being applied elsewhere, by one or more of the other ships. They couldn’t calibrate power levels up and down, so the computers adjusted by firing the engines of the various ships in whatever combination was necessary to achieve the desired result. It was a symphony.

One of the auxiliary screens carried a generated image of the Evening Star. It was in the center of a group of constellations, warm and luminous against the void. The shaft was represented by a fingernail-thin line, which extended to the edges of the display. Arrows pointed, 44 km forward to Zwick, and to the rear, 62 km to Wildside.

He refilled his coffee cup, and he saw Marcel talking earnestly with Beekman. The schedule they’d worked out told him there’d be another few hours of maneuvering. Of correcting the long rotation and nudging Alpha into its precise trajectory.

Marcel finished his conversation, looked around, and caught Nicholson’s eye. “How about some breakfast, Erik?” he suggested.

Nicholson glanced at Beekman. “I wonder whether we shouldn’t stay here. In case something happens.”

“Something’s already happening,” he said. “You know Hutch is stranded.”

“Yes. I’d heard.”

It was after 4:00 a.m. “I don’t think there’s much we can do for the next few hours. Lori has all the data she needs. The Outsiders are ready to go as soon as conditions permit.”

“Suppose there’s a problem?”

“If it’s a little one, we can deal with it.”

“And if there’s a big one?”

“It’ll be over,” said Beekman matter-of-factly. “We are past the point where we can make major adjustments.”

Maybe it was just as well to sit down with Clairveau and Beekman. If the operation succeeded, people would remember the image of the two captains and the head of the science team, putting the rescue together.

The electrical intensity of the storm showed no sign of diminishing. Rain pounded down on her, and the wind howled.

The immediate danger rose from the possibility one of the bolts would hit the grid. The e-suit would protect her from a low-level discharge, but she’d never survive a lightning strike. Fortunately, the elevator frame did not jut up into the air. It disappeared into the ruins atop the mountain. Nevertheless there was a lot of exposed metal. A bolt was inevitable.

She could see no way off the iron. The rock wall was smooth. The few bushes clinging to it would never support her. There was a tree above and not far to one side. It looked old and scrabbly, and she thought it had all it could do to hang on itself. Furthermore, it would have been a long jump, one she was pretty sure she couldn’t make.

Kellie was constantly on the circuit, between bursts of interference checking on her, asking whether she was okay.

The rain battered her. The suit kept her dry, but it was hard to see.

“You’re sure there’s no way you can get off the iron?” Kellie asked.

Hutch shook her head wearily. They’d been over it and over it.

“That settles it.”

“No. Don’t come up. Wait it out.”

“But—”

“I’ll find a way to get clear. My best chance is for you to stay put.”

Another bolt exploded overhead. She jumped and would have fallen off her perch had she not been secured. She’d almost gotten used to the constant fear, which left her feeling numb and exhausted. The tree sagged in the heavy rain.

The gridwork trembled. Quake or thunder, it no longer seemed to matter. She looked off to the east. Jerry would be rising soon, although the sky would be too heavy to allow her to see it. Thank God for small favors.

When the lander began to drop, Kellie had accelerated, gained altitude, and returned to the mountaintop, hoping that they might be able to find a way to effect a rescue from above. But the peak was still blanketed with fog, despite the heavy winds. The electrical activity had knocked out communication with Wendy, so there was no one to guide them in. When MacAllister urged her to try anyhow, she’d prudently pointed out that getting them all killed would do nothing whatever for Priscilla Hutchins.

Instead, she’d opted for a shelf halfway down the mountain. They could hear the ocean coming in, so she wanted to stay high.

MacAllister stared morosely out the window into the flickering darkness while rain hammered at them.

They growled at one another and complained about sitting and doing nothing. Late in the evening Mac finally fell asleep. Nightingale, having no one left to argue with, sat morosely in his chair until Kellie wondered whether he was awake. At about midnight, she lost communication altogether with Hutch.

The lightning continued through the night. She slept fitfully, and woke once to overhear a whispered conversation between her passengers. Nightingale was confessing to having delayed the rescue, was taking responsibility for Hutch’s situation on his own shoulders. She could imagine what he was thinking: Priscilla had stayed behind so he could get off. Once again, a woman had rescued him at the cost of her own life. To her surprise Mac told him it could have happened to anybody.

He was hard to figure, that one. Mac characteristically turned a cynical face to the world. Yet he had urged her to try for the rescue, even when she told him it couldn’t be done, not in the dark, not in this wind, that they’d only be throwing their lives away.

He’d said very little since Hutch and Nightingale had left that morning to explore the hexagon. It must be hard on him, she thought. He’s used to center stage. Everybody takes him seriously, hangs on his every word. He stays at the best hotels, enjoys media attention everywhere he goes. Now suddenly he’s reduced to survival mode, hang on to your tether, life and death in the balance. And nobody gives a damn who he is. The only issue for the past twelve days has been: What can he do? And the reality is, he’d been able to do more than she would have thought.

When they got home, she decided, if they got home, she was going to ask Marcel to give Mac a commendation. That would be something worth seeing, Gregory MacAllister showing up at the Academy to receive an award. He’d never complained, other than to yell at inanimate objects, like Jerry. He’d done everything possible within his physical limitations, and he’d not turned out to be the general pain in the rear she’d expected when they began.

“My God,” he said. The cabin brightened and darkened. Thunder ripped through the night.

“That one hit the elevators,” Nightingale said.

“Hutch!” Mac tapped his commlink and spoke into it. “Priscilla. Answer up.”

It was close to dawn, five hours to rendezvous with Marcel’s scoop. But there was as yet no break in the darkness. Nightingale was sitting despondently, listening to the wind. MacAllister was bunched up behind him, his teeth clenched against every lightning strike.

MacAllister had never been comfortable with the sobriquet Hutch. It was a warehouse worker’s name, utterly inappropriate for a gallant, if foolhardy, young woman. He wondered if all these people had tin ears.

He’d begun composing a tribute to her. It would appear in The Adventurers’ Quarterly, the publication he’d edited for six years, and which still featured his occasional contributions.

“Anything?” he asked Kellie, who’d been trying the commlink again.

She shook her head. Just the heavy crackle of interference.

“It must be time,” said Nightingale.

“Not yet,” she said.

MacAllister went back to his project. Priscilla was from a small town in Ohio.

Where was she from? He’d have to look that up. It didn’t make any difference, of course, whether it was Ohio or Scotland. Or even whether it was a small town.

Priscilla was from the lower Bronx.

It played just as well.

She worked for the Academy of Science and Technology, a pilot collecting standard pay, making the wearying runs between Earth and the dig site at Pinnacle or the black hole at Mamara.

Twenty years ago she was part of the expedition that discovered the Omega clouds, those curious constructs that erupt in waves from galactic center to attack swimming pools and twenty-story buildings. While everyone else on that mission wrote a set of memoirs, Priscilla Hutching simply went back to piloting.

We forgot about her. And we might never have noticed who she really was. Except that eventually they sent her to Deepsix.

He made a noise in the back of his throat and scratched out galactic center. It sounded too much like a park.

Nightingale got up and made for the coffee dispenser. Kellie had been trying off and on to read, but he could see she was making no progress.

Mac had almost finished when she straightened up. “Okay,” she said. “The wind’s down a bit. Everybody belt in.” It was, he thought, brighter outside, but not by much.

He heard the whine of the engines and drew his harness down over his head. Panel lights blinked on. “Hang on,” she said, and MacAllister felt the vehicle lift into the storm. In the same instant Kellie flicked on the running lights. They rose past walls and driving rain and writhing trees.

The lander fought its way into the sky while Nightingale tried again to raise Hutch.

Mac gazed hopefully out at the precipice. Occasionally, when the angle was right, he could see the gridwork. “Do we know where to look?” he asked.

“She was on the far left,” said Kellie. “At sixty-three hundred meters.”

Mac took to watching the altimeter.

In front of him, Nightingale was barely breathing.

“Elevator’s gone,” Kellie said. That was no surprise.

Nightingale swept the gridwork with binoculars.

“Any sign of her?” asked Mac.

“I’ll tell you if I see something,” he snapped.

Kellie stabbed at her link. “Hutch, you out there?”

The static broke momentarily, and they heard her voice!

“—Here—”

They all tried to talk to her at once. Kellie got them quiet. “Where are you?” she asked.

“Where you left me.” The transmission broke up. “—see your lights.”

“Okay, hang on. We’ll be right there.”

“Good. I’d be grateful.”

“Hutch, what’s your situation?”

“Say again?”

“What’s your situation?”

“I’m okay.”

“I see her,” said Nightingale.

“Where?” Kellie asked.

“There.” He jabbed his finger.

She was dangling from one of the crosspieces. Mac took only a moment to look, then reached behind him for the cable. He looped one end around the seat anchor and pulled it tight. Nightingale opened the inner airlock.

“Don’t forget yourself,” said Kellie.

He hadn’t. Not after last time. He retrieved his own tether and tied himself firmly to the same base.

Kellie reminded them also to activate their e-suits. She matched air pressure. “Ready to go,” she said.

A gust of wind hammered the lander, and Mac crashed to the floor. Nightingale helped him up.

Kellie opened the outer hatch. Wind and rain spilled into the airlock. And Mac saw why Hutchins was still alive. She’d converted her rope into a sling, looped under thighs and armpits, and lowered herself off the girder. Away from the metal.

“Hang on, Priscilla,” he told her, though he knew she could not hear him over the roar of the storm.

“Are we close enough?” asked Kellie. The lander rose and fell.

“No,” he cried. “We’re going to have to do better than this.”

“I don’t know if we can.”

The cable was general-purpose lightweight stuff. Something to be used for securing cargo or possibly marking off a dig site. In this wind he wanted something more like Hutchins’s heavy vine.

He missed a couple times, and then shut off his e-suit long enough to remove a shoe. He tied the cable to it and waited for the right circumstances: a drop in the wind and the lander in close. When it happened he threw the shoe and the cable. The shoe sailed over the crossbar. Hutch swung back, swung forward, grabbed the line. She hauled it down and looped it around her middle and secured it under her arms.

Mac took up the cable and got ready.

“Hurry,” Kellie pleaded, while she fought the storm and the down-drafts.

The laser appeared in Hutch’s right hand. She showed the laser to them, signifying what she was about to do.

Mac glanced at the seat anchor, and tightened his grip. Nightingale, standing in the hatch, was not tethered. Mac pushed him back, out of harm’s way.

Priscilla cut the vine and dropped down out of sight. The cable jerked tight. Mac held on, felt Nightingale move in behind him, and they hauled her in.

When she was safely on board, a wave of laughter engulfed them. Priscilla hugged Mac and kissed Nightingale. Kellie accelerated and shut down the spike to preserve its power supply. Then Hutch embraced her, too. They were happy, exhausted, tearful. She thanked them, wriggled out of the rope and cable, expressed her unbounded joy at being back in the lander, and hugged everybody again. She untied Mac’s shoe and returned it ceremonially.

“Welcome home,” said Kellie.

Mac eased himself into his seat. “Nice to have you back, Priscilla,” he said.

She collapsed beside him, rubbed her thighs where the vine had supported her, and closed her eyes. “You wouldn’t believe how good it is,” she said, “to be here.”

Kellie had been climbing steadily. Suddenly they emerged above the clouds. The air was less turbulent, but Nightingale caught his breath. He was looking up.

Mac followed his gaze. They could see the vast arc of the onrushing planet. The entire southwestern sky quailed beneath that purple monster. They could see into it, into its depths. Mac felt chilled. “What now?” he asked. “Do we make our rendezvous?”

“Not yet,” said Hutch. “It’s too early. We’ve got more than four hours left.”

He grimaced and looked down at the boiling clouds. “Do we really have to go back down there?”

Bill and Lori surprised the staff by showing up in tandem onscreen on the Star bridge. “I’m pleased to announce that maneuvering is complete,” said Lori. “No further power applications need be made. Alpha will arrive at the designated point over the Misty Sea in the proper alignment at the specified time.”

“Well done,” said Bill. He seemed quite pleased.

Kellie found high ground near the base of the mountain, and set down.

Hutch went back into the washroom. When she came out a half hour later she looked scrubbed down, and she was wrapped in a blanket, waiting for her clothes to dry. “I hope nobody minds the informality,” she said.

“Not a bit of it,” said MacAllister, with a leer.

They passed around one of the bottles she’d salvaged from the Star. The wind blew, the rain fell, but for the moment at least, all was right with the world.

XXXIII

As there are some professions that demand believers in the amity of Providence, like those who work among the downtrodden, or who teach adolescents, there are others for which atheism is desirable. I am thinking particularly of pilots. When you are adrift among the clouds or the stars, you want someone in the cockpit who has as much to lose as you do if the party goes down.

—Gregory MacAllister, My Life and Loves

Hours to breakup (est): 20

Miles Chastain returned with Phil Zossimov to the net. This time he had his gear, a couple of assistants, and a load of material on two shuttles. Drummond waited with an Outsider team.

Miles been piloting superluminals for almost four years, the last three for Universal News. It paid well, and equally important at this stage of his life, the job took him to places where something was usually happening. He had, for example, hauled a news team out to Nok, the only world known to have a living native civilization, just in time to see the first shots fired in the latest round of an early-twentieth-century-style war. He’d accompanied the investigators to Kruger 60 when the Aquilar returned from the first probe across the Orion rift without its crew. He’d been the pilot when Universal did its award-winning special on the antique alien station orbiting Beta Pac III.

Now he was helping orchestrate the rescue off Deepsix. Not bad for a kid from a Baltimore row house.

He arrived within minutes after receiving the news that Alpha was on course, and no additional course changes would be needed. That meant Phil’s team could begin its phase of the mission.

To release the asteroid, Drummond had cut the net almost three-quarters of the way around its circumference. The net now drifted glittering in the sunlight, two halves, partially entwined, a kind of bright tattered banner trailing from a very long post.

Their first objective was to finish what Drummond had begun: complete the cut. Get rid of one of the two halves.

Drummond’s shuttle inserted itself within the drifting folds. One of his Outsiders exited the airlock and tied a cable to the half designated for disposal. He then returned inside the shuttle, which began to move away, straightening that portion of the net to prepare it for a laser cut.

Miles approached in the second vehicle and sliced through it until it was cleanly separated. Now Drummond’s pilot dragged the severed portion away and released it to find its own orbit.

He returned and secured the remaining half to the shuttle. Then he gradually braked, drawing it out. When he was satisfied, he released it.

Miles moved in again.

The idea was to convert the remaining section into a sack. The part of the net attached to the plate would, when it was lowered into the atmosphere, constitute the top of the sack; the opposite end, the former south pole, would become the bottom. The task facing Miles’s team was to join the severed sides near the bottom and bind them together, forming an area which would hang down toward the planetary surface, and into which, in just over six hours, the lander could descend. Or crash-land, if need be.

The shuttles took up positions on either side of the net, approximately one hundred meters up from the “bottom.” Miles and three of the Outsiders climbed onto it and used the shuttles to help draw the lower sections together.

The rest of the Outsider team, which totaled eight in all, joined the effort. They’d been drilled specifically for this operation, but Miles never stopped worrying. They’d practiced on the Star’s tennis nets, but that hadn’t been the most realistic simulation.

He watched his people move out across the narrow space between the net and the airlock onto the metal links floating nearby. They connected their tethers as they’d been instructed, removed from their packs the clips which Marcia Keel had manufactured from chairs and coffee machines and cargo shelving, and began the process of binding the lower section of the net back together.

One advantage, at least: no lasers were in use. He’d hated putting lasers in the hands of the people along the assembly, and would have flat out refused to do it on the net, had he been asked. Fortunately, it wasn’t necessary.

He was the only person out there with a go-pack. It was his responsibility to navigate along the edges, and to draw them close enough together that the Outsiders could connect them permanently. Only one drifted off during this phase of the operation, and Miles was quick to retrieve him.

He was uncomfortable about this aspect of the strategy. “This sack is three-quarters of a kilometer in diameter, Marcel,” he said over a private channel. “It wouldn’t take much for it to get tangled up. Then you’d have nothing.”

“What’s your suggestion?”

“I’d prefer to cut the thing down to a manageable size. Say 150 meters. Certainly no more than that.”

“How long would it take you to do it?”

He looked across the hundreds of square meters of drifting net. They’d have to go back inside, do some complicated maneuvering, do the cutting, come back out, splice it together. “Twelve hours,” he said.

“So that shoots it, no?” He could hear Marcel’s impatience. “Do it as planned.”

The Outsiders finished, and the bottom one hundred meters were stitched together into a sack. When they’d finished, Miles’s shuttle picked them up.

Now it became the Phil Zossimov Show. Phil had brought along some tubing, cut and shaped like a ring. Miles admired the young Russian. He’d made it clear an hour earlier that the thought of going outside onto the net terrified him. But he showed no sign of reluctance as he stood in front of the volunteers and activated his e-suit.

The tubing constituted most of the life-support system taken from Wildside. The various pieces were marked to enable the assemblers to put them together with a minimum of confusion. Under Phil’s direction, they went back outside.

Above the sack they had just made, the netting was open all the way to the plate. They cut sideways across the net just above the sack, opening a large space, and secured its edges to the tubing. When the tubing was in place, Zossimov connected a pump and a sensor.

He pumped air in until it became a rigid ring-shaped collar, forming a mouth about twenty-five meters wide. This collar would hold the net open, providing entry for the lander. The sensor, made from a hatch closer on Wildside, would activate a valve as soon as Hutch’s lander passed through. The valve would open and release the air, the collar would collapse, and the danger of the spacecraft falling back out would be all but eliminated.

The next task was to ensure that the rear of the net would not drift forward and close the sack or block the entrance.

To accomplish that they brought out a load of bars that had been manufactured from the metal taken from Wildside’s cargo bay, and designed with links so they could be connected to each other, end to end. There was also a supply of braces and supports.

Each bar was five meters long. (That had been the maximum length possible to get them in and out of the shuttles.) Altogether there were forty-six.

The Outsiders used them to assemble two rails, braced with supports. They connected the rails in parallel above and on either side of the ring, front to rear in the sack. When that had been accomplished, they had a container into which the lander should be able to maneuver.

All but Phil and Miles withdrew into the shuttles. Phil set the sensor.

“You sure it’ll work?” asked Miles.

“Absolutely.”

“How long will it take to close after the lander’s inside?”

“It activates as soon as they pass through. I’m no physicist, so I can’t tell you how fast the collar will deflate. But it shouldn’t be longer than a few seconds. Especially at that altitude.”

Miles inspected the collar. “I think we have ourselves a decent scoop.”

At about the time Miles’s people were climbing onto the net, the welding teams were spreading out across the hulls of the four super-luminals. Tom Scolari, Cleo, Jack Kingsbury, and an elderly man whom Scolari knew only as Chop, had responsibility for Zwick. The task should now be easy, because Jack and Chop had performed much the same assignment working alone earlier when they’d attached the star-ship to the Alpha shaft.

Scolari had been invited by Universal News to participate in an interview. Emma had found jumpsuits for him and Cleo, and the plan called for them to go on a live hookup when the job on the hull was finished. He was unnerved by the prospect, more frightened than he could ever have been about going outside.

It should have been easier to interview Chop and Jack, who’d been on board longer, and Scolari had wondered at first why Emma hadn’t done that. But it became clear very quickly that neither of the two was very articulate. Jack responded to everything with one-word answers. And Chop scratched a lot. Scolari was concerned that they’d be resentful, but neither brought the subject up. When he told them about the pending interview, Chop had commented that he was glad they hadn’t asked him.

Zwick was the leading vessel on the shaft, only thirty-eight kilometers from the net, which they could see shining in the sunlight. Sometimes it made Scolari think of a flag.

The shaft was currently welded to the belly of the Zwick. They went out through the cargo hatch on the port quarter and walked around to the underside, and it seemed as if the universe rotated as they did so, so that the hull was always down. It was an effect caused by the magnetic boots.

When they were ready, Cleo and Scolari retired to the rear, Jack and Chop went forward. They activated their lasers and began cutting the weld. Now that the shaft was safely on course, and no more corrections would be needed, they were to separate it from the ship and change its orientation. “Be careful,” Janet reminded them from her station in Drummond’s launch, which was up near the net. This was the most dangerous part of the operation for the Outsiders: cut too high, and they could slice or seriously weaken Alpha. Do that, they’d been told again and again, and repair would be impossible. The people below would die. Cut too low, and they could penetrate the ship. That indeed was not life and death. Everyone had been cleared out of areas vulnerable to puncture on all the vessels. But it would nevertheless, in Janet’s dulcet admonition, have been unprofessional. A mess that someone else would have to clean up later.

The clear lesson: If they had to screw it up, cut low.

Getting it right wasn’t all that hard, he discovered, so long as he kept his mind on what he was doing. The image of the gas giant, growing visibly larger by the hour, did tend to be a distraction.

They began cutting. Jack and Chop had done a good job the first time out. Their instructions had been to connect as much of the shaft as possible to the hull. They’d done that, and it required a long effort to free it. Zwick was by far the smallest of the superluminals, but she had accepted a twenty-six-meter length of the shaft before her hull curved away.

So they worked steadily, in the shadow of the giant. Scolari had heard that almost a full kilometer had been laid on the Star. Getting that off would be a monster job, but that was where they’d concentrated the volunteers.

Janet, as usual, was watching. Occasionally she offered advice or encouragement. She let them know that Wendy’s crew had finished, that the people preparing the net to receive its payload were making progress. She always referred to the lander as the payload. Scolari decided she watched too many sims.

They needed an hour and a quarter to break the shaft loose, and they did it without inflicting any damage. Jack, who was the team leader, informed Janet when they were done. She acknowledged, thanked them, and directed them to retire inside the ship. “But, don’t go far,” she said.

“How long?”

“About four hours.”

“We won’t last that long.”

It was hard to believe the sun had been in the sky an hour and a half. The wind roared across the lander. Rain hammered down, and the water coming off the mountain had become a torrent. They huddled inside the darkened cabin while the storm raged.

“I think conditions are deteriorating,” said Mac.

Hutch nodded. “That would be my guess. We’d better tie down if we don’t want to get blown into the ocean.”

They went outside and struggled to lash the lander to the trees. The winds were approaching hurricane force. That meant flying objects, branches, rocks, and even birds that had gotten caught, became missiles.

They were all short of breath when they got back inside. They fell into their seats, feeling safer but not by much.

On the bridge of the Star, Nicholson and Marcel received Drummond’s report. Only the giant liner itself was now still attached to Alpha.

Nicholson looked questioningly at Marcel. “Now?” he asked.

Marcel nodded.

Nicholson addressed the AI: “Lori, we are going to the next phase. You can turn Zwick around.”

“Complying,” said Lori.

“Lori?” said Marcel. “Have we had any luck yet reestablishing contact with the ground party?”

“No, Marcel. I am still trying and will inform you when I am successful.”

He nodded, and turned his attention to Zwick’s status board, which was posted on one of the navigation screens. The media vessel, under Lori’s direction, began to pull away from the shaft. Its thrusters would fire an orchestrated series of bursts, moving it out to one side, turning it around, and bringing it back, but facing in the opposite direction. Now, its main engines pointed toward Deepsix, it moved in once more to snuggle against Alpha.

During the course of the maneuver, word came down that the Outsiders had released the Star.

On board Zwick, Scolari and the other volunteers returned to the hull and began the cumbersome process of reattaching the shaft. Now the vessel was pointed in the opposite direction, away from Deepsix. Almost immediately, one of the shuttle pilots warned them of an approaching cloud.

“Cloud?” asked Scolari.

“Meteors and dust. Get back inside.”

Scolari and Cleo needed no prompting. They made for the airlock, and warned Chop and Jack not to dawdle.

A few large rocks bounced off the metal. Minutes later, when they thought it was over, one penetrated the hull, knocked out the broadcasting studio and the library, and would have killed Canyon except that he’d left moments earlier to go to the washroom.

The warning had come from Klaus Bomar, who had taken Pindar and Sharon to mark the Alpha shaft. He was, as Pindar had observed, Canadian. A Toronto native, he’d been a commercial hauler, carrying supplies to the terraformers on Quraqua; and later he’d served as a longtime instructor at the Conciliar Spaceflight Academy near Winnipeg. He’d resigned his position there two months earlier, anxious to join the superluminals that were moving out to the new frontiers.

Klaus’s wife was dead, his kids were grown and gone, so he’d barely hesitated once he decided he’d had enough of classrooms. He’d signed on with TransGalactic because they paid well and the big luxury liners were visiting the places he wanted to see, black holes and star cradles and giant suns and cosmic lighthouses.

This was his first flight with TransGalactic.

He was dazzled by the ingenuity of Clairveau and Beekman, and amused at Nicholson’s ability to look as if he were commanding the operation.

He’d transmitted the warning to Zwik and another shuttle in the path of the debris field, then turned away in an effort to get clear.

Much of the debris orbiting Morgan consisted of nothing more that dust particles too small to be tracked by sensors. As Klaus completed his turn he veered directly into a high-velocity swarm that ripped the shuttle apart before he even knew he was in trouble.

XXXIV

There is a gem we all have that, when crisis comes, inevitably selects the wrong turn. It is why things run amiss, dreams remain unfulfilled, ambitions fail to materialize. Life, for most of us, is simply a series of blown opportunities.

—Gregory MacAllister, Deepsix Diary

Hours to breakup (est): 12

Hutch could have used a trank. The ones that Mac had in his pack weren’t supposed to affect the user after whatever period they were set for, so theoretically they should have been safe. But she’d always tended to react badly to the damned things. And she dared not risk impairing her judgment for the final flight.

The final flight. Up or down.

She tried to push her emotions away, out to some distant boundary. She thought about what lay ahead, tried to visualize this giant net that would be dropping out of the sky.

Precision, Marcel had been saying. Everything had to be done precisely right. One chance. The net would come down and it would go up. She’d have, at best, a minute or so to find the collar and navigate into it.

The mood in the cabin was subdued. MacAllister tried to lighten things a bit by proclaiming that if they came out of it alive he was going to seek out the bishop of New Jersey and submit to religious instruction.

They all laughed, but it had a hollow ring.

Periodically, without success, Hutch tried to regain contact with Marcel.

“I’ll be glad,” Nightingale said, “to get it over with. One way or the other.”

Hutch nodded as if she agreed, but she didn’t. Life was sweet, and she wanted to hang on to it as long as she could. But yes, she would be happy to end the suspense, to fly into Marcel’s celestial sack and get hauled up to safety. It was just hard to visualize something like that actually happening.

Mac broke out some fruit and nuts, but she had no appetite.

“Do you good,” MacAllister persisted.

“I doubt it.” Nevertheless, it seemed like something she should do. She selected a dark red globule that resembled and tasted like a pomegranate. Nightingale picked a few nuts and settled back to enjoy them..Mac made coffee and filled all the cups.

“We going to have any trouble getting aloft in this?” he asked, indicating the storm.

“We’ll be okay.” She’d powered up to the extent possible. There was more than enough fuel in the tanks to take them out to the rendezvous. Even enough to get back, if need be. If it would matter. “We’ll do fine. As long as it doesn’t get too much worse.”

They sat for a time, tasting the fruit, watching the rain.

“You guys all right?” she asked.

Nightingale nodded. “I’m sorry about the elevator,” he said. “I—”

“It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

Mac took a long sip of coffee. “Confession time, I guess.”

“What’ve you got to confess, Mac?” asked Kellie.

“I...” He thought about it.”... haven’t always been reasonable.”

“We know that,” said Nightingale. “The whole world knows it.”

“I just thought I wanted to say something. I’ve done some damage.”

“Forget it. I’m sure nobody holds it against you.”

“That’s not quite so, but it isn’t the point.”

“Mac, you once said something about people who waste energy feeling sorry for themselves.”

He frowned. “Not that I can recall. What exactly did I say?”

“‘Best way to deal with a conscience is to beat it into submission so it knows who’s in charge.’“

“I said that?”

Nightingale had been looking out at the rain during the whole of this exchange. Now he turned and fixed his eyes on MacAllister. “Not really. But it’s the best I can do on short notice. Let it go, Mac. It’s past.”

The lander shook as another wave rippled through the ground. MacAllister snatched his plate before it could slide off onto the deck. “The whole world’s coming apart,” he said.

Kellie adjusted her harness. “How much longer?”

“Soon,” said Hutch.

In fact, the winds seemed to be lessening. The rain slacked off, although it never really stopped. Hutch tried the radio again.

Suddenly the sky was filled with birds. They were all of one species, black with white wing tips, big, graceful, wings spread to catch the wind. Their flight was erratic, disorganized. To a degree, they were being blown across the sky. But they fought to maintain formation. The wind died, they regrouped, and then, like a single animal, they turned north. They know, she thought. They all know.

When the bombardment had stopped, Scolari and the other Outsiders went back onto the hull and finished the welding assignment. They laid the shaft directly down the length of the ship, as they had before. The same procedure was being followed by the Evening Star team. On the other two vessels, the crews were reattaching the shaft at twenty-seven- and thirty-one-degree angles. That would allow Wendy and Wildside, who’d be up front during extraction, to begin the process of inserting the shaft into orbit.

Shortly after they’d begun they heard about the death of the shuttle pilot who had warned them.

Scolari and his team finished in two and a half hours and came back into the airlock. All four vessels were again locked onto Alpha, except that they now faced the opposite direction.

Although he was new to TransGalactic, Klaus Bomar had been the oldest member of the Star’s crew, save for the captain himself. Because he was a contemporary, Nicholson had occasionally invited him to his cabin for a drink, and had ended by becoming quite fond of him. Marcel had been wrong about Nicholson: He did have an onboard friend.

The news hit Nicholson hard.

One of Wendy’s three shuttles pulled alongside Drummond’s vehicle. The airlock opened, and Drummond took on a physician: Embry Desjardain.

Drummond’s assignment was to stay near the sack, and pick up the ground team after they’d been hauled clear of the atmosphere. Embry was a precaution, in case a doctor was needed.

They introduced themselves and shook hands. Then Drummond turned to Janet. “I guess you’re relieved,” he said. “If you’d like to go back to the Star, your transportation’s waiting.”

She declined. “If you’ve no objection, I’d like to stay around for the rescue. You might be able to use some help.”

Drummond glanced at Frank, who thumbed a switch. “Okay, Karen,” he told the other pilot, “that’s it.”

Karen blinked her lights and moved away.

“Time to go,” said Hutch. “Let’s cut ourselves loose.”

Marcel, Beekman, and Nicholson posted themselves on the Star bridge. They watched with satisfaction the various status reports coming in. Everything secure. Everyone on station.

All that remained now was to wait while the momentum of the new assembly, the alpha shaft and the four superluminals attached to it, carried the net into the atmosphere above the Misty Sea.

Nicholson had been uncustomarily quiet. Finally, he turned to Marcel and shook his hand. “Good luck,” he said. And, repeating the gesture, “Good luck, Gunther.”

“Marcel.” Lori blinked onto his screen. “I had momentary contact with the lander, but I have lost it again.”

“Okay. Were you able to talk to them at all?”

“They’re in the air. On their way to the rendezvous.”

The three men nodded encouragement to each other. “Thank God. Was Hutch with them? Who did you talk to?”

“I talked with Captain Hutchins.”

Marcel’s eyes closed, and he breathed a prayer of thanks.

They flew through a sea of dark clouds, lightning strikes, roiling skies, and glowing red eruptions.

When finally they rose above the worst of the turmoil, Kellie succeeded in opening a channel to the Star.

“Let us trust we can maintain it this time,” said Lori. “It’s quite good to know everything is well. We’ve been worried. Are you on course?”

“We are indeed,” Hutch said.

“Just a moment, please. I’ll notify Captain Clairveau.”

Marcel showed up within seconds. “Hutch,” he said, “it’s good to see you.”

“And you, Marcel.”

“How’d you get down off the elevator? What happened?”

“Tell you when we get there. Everything’s in order here. We are approximately one hour ten minutes from rendezvous.”

“Good.”

“How are things at your end?”

She got more interference.

“... on schedule.” He refined the previous data, giving them the exact position where the scoop would arrive. And he transmitted some visuals. “As you can see, the whole thing looks like a sack made out of chain-link netting. Here’s the opening. A nice circular front entrance. More than wide enough for you to fly through. It’ll be facing east, and it’s near the bottom of the sack. Once you’re inside, there’ll be fifty meters of empty net below you. The collar will close. Just nestle in, set down the best way you can, and leave the rest to us.”

“We will.”

“We may have some more very minor adjustments to the coordinates, depending on how the atmosphere affects the net, but don’t worry about them because we’ll take you every step of the way.”

“Do we have a precise time yet?” she asked.

“It’ll reach its lowest point of descent in exactly seventy-four minutes and ...” He paused.”... thirty seconds. Immediately after that, it’ll start back up again.” Another hesitation. “Can you make the altitude?”

“Probably. If we can’t, don’t wait for us.” MacAllister paled. He needed reassuring, and she nodded confidently. “Just kidding, Mac. We’ll do this with ease.

“Keep in mind,” she added, “I have no easy way to navigate this thing. I’m not even sure which way is west anymore.”

“You’re doing fine. Although I’d like you to cut your speed by about thirty klicks and come left another eight degrees.”

Hutch complied.

“That’s good. I’ll stay with you. How’s the weather?”

“A trifle overcast.”

Hutch quietly pulled back on the yoke, relying only on the lander’s aeronautical capabilities to get to ten thousand meters. She would conserve her spike until she needed it.

Marcel transmitted more images of the lower section of the net. It would be hanging almost straight down out of the sky. Facing in her direction. “When you see it,” he explained, “it’ll be moving southwest at 180 kph. Its course will be 228 degrees—228.7. We’ll bring you in close. When I tell you, engage the spike, and just float in.”

“Marcel,” she said, “I would not have believed this was possible.”

“With a Frenchman”—he grinned—”everything is possible. Gravity will have hold of it by the time you get there, but we’ll already be in braking mode.”

“Okay.”

“We’re going to take you in just before we begin to move the shaft back out again.”

“And you say the opening’s fifty-three meters across?”

“That’s correct. Half a football field.”

“Can’t miss,” said Hutch.

“That’s what we thought.”

She said quietly, almost not wanting anybody to hear, “I do believe we’re going to pull this off.”

Nightingale looked down at the storms smeared across the sky. They were daubed with fire. Eerily lit black clouds boiled up into the higher altitudes.

He was having trouble controlling his breathing. Whatever happened, they would not be able to go back down there. God help him, he did not want to die out here. And he did not want the others to know how he felt. They were all scared; he realized that. But they seemed better equipped to deal with it.

Please, God, don’t let me go to pieces.

Marcel’s voice crackled in over the receiver, instructing Hutch to cut back speed or adjust course or go a bit higher. The voice was level and cool. Unemotional. Confident.

Easy enough for him to be confident. Nightingale would have given anything to be with Marcel at this moment, safely tucked away on one of the superluminals.

Hutch had said nothing about his behavior in the elevator, as far as he knew, to the others. Nor had she mentioned the incident to him, except to reply to his expressed regret. Yet he could read the disappointment in her eyes. The contempt. Years before, when MacAllister had held him up to worldwide ridicule, he’d been able to rationalize his behavior. Anybody could pass out under stress. He’d been injured. He’d not had much sleep during that period. He’d—

—whatever.

This time he’d failed in a more visible way. In a way he could rationalize neither to others nor to himself. When it was over, if he survived, he’d make for Scotland. And hide.

“Marcel, this is Abel. Deepsix is beginning to disintegrate.”

Marcel put the climatologist on-screen. “How? What’s going on?”

“Major rifts opening in the oceans and on two of the continents. Several volcanoes have been born on Endtime. There’s a fault line east of Gloriamundi. One side of it has been shoved six thousand meters into the air. It’s still coming up. There are massive quakes in both hemispheres. We’ve got eruptions everywhere. A couple have even shown up in the Misty Sea, not far from the lander’s last position.”

“They should be safe. They’re pretty high.”

“You think so? One just let go in Gloriamundi. Some of the ejecta will go into orbit.”

“Show me where they are,” he said. “The Misty Sea volcanoes.”

Kinder was right: Two were close to the lander’s flight path. But he couldn’t reroute them in any significant way. Not if they were going to be in place when the net arrived. Best just to ride it out and hope.

“Thanks, Abel.”

Kinder grunted, one of those pained sounds. Then someone pressed his shoulder, handed him a note. He frowned.

“What?” asked Marcel.

“Hold on.” The climatologist looked off to one side, nodded, frowned again, talked to the individual. Marcel couldn’t hear. Then he came back to the monitor. “Northern Tempus is doing an Atlantis.”

“Sinking?”

“Yes.”

One of the screens was focused on Wendy’s hull. Marcel saw movement, but it happened so quickly he wasn’t sure he hadn’t imagined it. “Thanks, Abel,” he said.

He was still watching the screen. A shadow passed across Wendy, and one of her sensors vanished. A communication pod broke open and its electronic components spilled into the void. He switched over to the AI and picked up Bill’s voice in midstride: “... to several forward systems. Intensity seems to be lessening ...” The voice failed, and the image flickered and went off. It came back, long enough for Bill to add the word assess; then it went down again.

Nicholson, in the command chair, took a report that communications with Wendy had failed.

He asked a technician whether she could restore them.

“Problem’s not on this end, Captain,” she said. Another technician was running the visuals backward.

Nicholson looked at Marcel. “What the hell’s happening over there? Can you make it out?”

“More rocks, I think,” said Marcel. “It’ll get worse as Jerry gets closer.”

The screen remained blank.

“What happens if we don’t regain contact?”

“We don’t need to. Bill knows what to do. All the AIs do. As long as there’s no emergency that requires us to make adjustments.”

Canyon sat in a pose one could only describe as relaxed attention. “So this was your first time outside a ship, Tom. Why don’t you tell us what was running through your mind when you went through the airlock?”

Scolari willed himself to relax. “Well, August, I knew it was something that had to be done. So I just made up my mind to do it.” It was a stupid response, but he had suddenly lost all capability to think. What’s my name? “I mean, it wasn’t something we could just walk away from. It’s a life-and-death situation.”

He looked over at Cleo, who was gazing innocently at the ceiling.

“And how about you, Cleo?” said Canyon. “It must have been pretty unnerving looking down and not seeing anything.”

“Well, that’s true, August. Although to be honest I never felt there was a ‘down.’ It’s not like being on the side of a building.”

“I understand you got hit by a storm of meteors. How did you react to that?”

“I was scared for a minute,” she said. “We just hid out until it was over. Didn’t really see much.”

“Listen,” said Scolari, “can I tell you something on my own?”

“Sure.”

“Everybody was scared out there today. I never knew when part of me might just disappear. You know what I mean? And even without the rocks, I don’t like not having something solid underfoot. But I’m glad I did it. And I hope to God those four people come back. If they do, it’ll be nice to know I had a hand in it.” He managed a smile. “Me and Cleo and the others.”

Miles Chastain was cruising the shaft, moving deliberately from one ship to the next, inspecting the work of the Outsiders.

Maleiva III was framed against the gas giant. The continents and seas were no longer visible, and the entire globe appeared to be wrapped in a thick black pall.

He was impressed that so many had been willing to risk life and limb during the course of the operation. He’d heard about the other events, the complaints by passengers ob the Star and by the science people on Wendy. He’d been through crises before, and he knew they tended to unmask people, to reveal who they really were, to bring out the best or the worst, whichever way an individual personality leaned. It was almost as if trouble stripped away the pretenses of daily life, the way Jerry Morgan was stripping Maleiva.

He was somewhere between Zwick, his own ship, and the Evening Star, headed down the shaft toward the net. The actual pickup of Hutchins and her people would be made by John Drummond’s shuttle. Marcel wanted them out of the lander and the net as quickly as the transfer could be made. Miles’s responsibility was to stand by in case of need.

He was alone. He’d returned Phil, the shuttle pilot, the assistants, and the Outsiders to the Star and had taken over the controls himself. He was approaching Zwick, which was facing him.

When the signal came, and they began to draw the shaft out of the atmosphere, they would be moving it into orbit. Once that had been achieved, it would become possible to retrieve the MacAllister party.

His message board lit up. Transmission from Zwick. Emma. Her usually sallow features blinked on-screen, but this time she was glowing. She invariably gave the impression, when she spoke to him, that she was thinking about something else, that she needed only give out instructions. That Miles himself was somehow inconsequential. Probably, he’d concluded on the way out, it resulted from dealing with too many VIPs. Everybody else became a peasant.

“Yes, Emma,” he said, “what can I do for you?”

“Miles, where are you located now?”

“In front of you. Coming up.”

“My schedule says you’re headed for the pickup.”

“More or less. I’m just going down there to be available.”

“Good. I want you to stop and collect us.”

“Why?”

“It’ll only take a minute.”

“Why?” he asked again.

“Are you serious? They’re about to do the rescue, or not, and you ask why we want to be there?”

He sighed. She was right, of course. “Okay. I’ll dock in about six minutes.”

“Good. And Miles, would you do something else for me?”

He waited.

“I want you to contact the other pilot, the one who’s going to make the pickup. Tell him we’d like to do a broadcast as they come on board. Ask if he’ll cooperate.”

“Why don’t you do that yourself?”

“Well, pilot-to-pilot... You know how it is. He’ll be more receptive if it comes from you. A lot of these people out here resent us. They think we’re in the way. Except when they need publicity for one reason or another. I just don’t want to miss this.” She was at emotional high tide. “It’s going to be the news story of the decade, Miles.”

“Emma, did you know the shuttles can’t dock with each other? You’ll have to go outside to make the crossing.”

“I didn’t know. But that’s not a problem.”

“They’re going to be busy. I don’t think they’ll want to make time for a news team.”

“Miles.” She came down a bit from her high. “I’d like very much for this to happen.”

Frank the pilot looked up at Drummond. “John,” he said, “I don’t have any objection as long as they stay out of the way. How about you?”

Drummond’s immediate instinct was to deny permission out of hand. But he couldn’t really give a reason why except that he disliked Canyon. Nevertheless, there was plenty of room in the shuttle, and he guessed it was prudent to get on the good side of the media. “Okay,” he said. “Tell them what you just told me.”

Gravity had taken hold of the sack. The net gradually lengthened and began to-tumble toward the troubled atmosphere. The collar was open and easy to see, and the people who’d rigged it had even managed to mark it with a system of lights. If there were no problems on board the lander, if the lander showed up at the time and place it was supposed to, the whole thing should be easy to pull off. Almost anti-climactic.

Frank disagreed. “The collar only looks big because we’re right on top of it. And we’re descending at the same rate it is. The lander’s going to be approaching at a more or less constant altitude. The net goes down and it comes up. The pilot’s got to time things so she hits it at precisely the right moment. If she misses, that’s the ball game.”

They rode quietly. The physician, Embry, stared moodily out the window. Janet Hazelhurst was thumbing through the onboard library, apparently just turning pages. Drummond was sipping coffee, lost in his thoughts.

“Eighteen minutes to rendezvous,”said the AI. “We are on schedule.”

The net continued to unfurl as it dropped toward the clouds. Drummond saw no tangles.

Frank slowed their descent. “This is as low as we want to go,” he said.

Drummond nodded. “So far, so good,” he told Marcel.

Another shuttle appeared and drew alongside. “The media have arrived,” said Frank.

Drummond activated his e-suit and went into the airlock, from which he watched two people move clumsily out of the other spacecraft. They floated across the few meters separating the shuttles, and he took each by the hand and pulled them inside.

Canyon wasn’t as tall as Drummond had expected, but there was no missing that mellifluous voice. He introduced himself with quiet modesty. “And this is Emma Constantine,” he said, “my producer.”

“We’ll want to set up here,” Emma told him, “if that’s no problem.” She indicated a section adjacent the airlock. “We’d like to do a quick interview with you before the rescue.”

“Okay,” he said.

“August will be asking you how you plan to go about this, who’ll be going out with you—”

“Wait a minute,” Drummond said. “I’m not going out. Frank’s going to do that.”

“Oh.” She turned away from Drummond, and her eyes suggested he had just vanished from human memory. Canyon smiled at him and shrugged.

Frank saw something he didn’t like on his navigation screen. “Everybody into their seats,” he said. “Buckle down.”

Nobody had to tell Canyon twice. He dived for the nearest chair. Emma was a little slower.

“What’s wrong?” asked Drummond.

“Debris field.” As soon as his passengers were locked in he began to accelerate.

The AI was talking to Frank, but the pilot had switched the conversation over to his earphones, obviously intending to avoid alarming the passengers. That alarmed Drummond.

“Everybody sit tight,” said the pilot. “Nothing to worry about.” They began to accelerate. “They’re behind us,” he explained. “We’re going to outrun them.”

“How bad is it?” asked Drummond.

Frank looked at one of the screens. “It’s a pretty big swarm. Coming fast. We wouldn’t want to be there when it arrives.”

Behind Drummond, Canyon was talking into a microphone. He caught snatches of it:”... rescue vessel in trouble ...”

“... meteors ...”

“... harm’s way ...” Suddenly the microphone was thrust in his direction. “... speaking now to John Drummond, who’s done most of the planning for this effort. He’s an astronomer by trade—”

“A mathematician,” Drummond said.

“A mathematician. And how would you describe our situation at the moment, Dr. Drummond?”

Drummond was impressed. He was speaking to an audience of probably several hundred million. Or would be when the signal reached home. How to describe the situation? He began to talk about the dust and debris that accumulates in a gravitational field. “Especially one around a body this massive.” Morgan’s image was on one of the monitors. He glanced at it.

Something banged off the hull. Drummond tightened up inside and became immediately concerned that the several hundred million viewers would see that he was terrified. “Are we broadcasting pictures, too?” he asked.

Emma, seated off to one side, nodded. They were.

It seemed suddenly to be raining on the shuttle. A hard staccato rattled across the hull.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Canyon softly, in a voice that underscored Drummond’s fears, “you can hear what’s happening.”

“How big is it?” asked Marcel.

“Big. Thousands of kilometers across. Frank’s on the forward edge of it. But he’s moving pretty quick and should be clear in a few seconds. I’ve also sent a warning to Miles.”

“What about Zwick?”

Actually, he already knew the answer to that. His screens showed the swarm moving directly across the media ship’s position. And, of course, unlike the shuttle, Zwick was unable to run.

After Emma and Canyon had left Zwick, the only people remaining on board were Tom Scolari, Cleo, Jack Kingsbury, and Chop. Scolari wasn’t entirely comfortable being on a ship that was in effect nailed to a pole, with nobody else there. They knew that the shaft had been caught in the grip of Maleiva III’s gravity well, and that it and everything attached to it was falling toward the surface.

They’d been assured there was no danger. It was a controlled fall. The AI would, at the appropriate moment, fire the engines, as would the AIs on the other three ships, and they would haul Alpha out of the well, along with the landing party.

All very simple.

Still, Scolari would have liked to see someone else on the ship, preferably someone wearing stripes on his sleeves who would know if something had gone wrong, and who’d be competent to fix things. It was why superluminals, which could be operated from the beginning to the end of a journey without human help, retained captains.

They were all in the common room. Cleo and Chop were munching on sandwiches, and Jack nursed a soft drink. Scolari would have preferred to be on the Star, where he’d have felt safer among the fifteen hundred tourists. Where people were actually on duty to make sure everything was okay.

They were reassuring one another when the AI broke in. “We have a swarm of dust and pebbles approaching at high speed,” it said in its smoky female voice. “Please retire to an acceleration station at once.”

They looked nervously at one another. “Are we in danger?” asked Chop.

“The danger is minimal,” said the AI. “However, in accordance with standard safety procedures, please put on an e-suit.”

Acceleration stations consisted of bunks installed throughout the ship. There was a rack of six against one bulkhead in the common room. They collected e-harnesses and breathers from the emergency panel and strapped them on. Then they activated the fields.

“It thinks a meteor might come through the hull,” said Cleo, looking scared.

Scolari put on his most reassuring manner. “It’s just a precaution.”

Chop’s eyes moved nervously around the interior. Kingsbury clapped a hand on Scolari’s shoulder. “When this is done, lad, I’d like to buy everyone a drink.”

They climbed in, and the restraints settled over them.

“Make mine Hebert’s,” he said.

“I’ll inform you,” said the AI, “when the emergency has passed.” There was, he told himself, really no reason to be alarmed.

“I wonder how far away they are,” said Chop. “The rocks.”

A new voice spoke in his earphones: “This is Captain Clairveau. Your AI has just informed me that you folks are alone on Zwick. Are you okay?”

“Jack Kingsbury here. We’re fine, Captain. I wonder if you can tell us what’s happening?”

Before he could answer, there was a hammerblow forward, the ship shuddered, and Scolari’s earphones clicked. The sound of the carrier wave changed.

“Captain,” said Scolari, “are you still there?”

There was another clang. It echoed through the chamber.

The transmission died.

An automated voice said, “Fourteen minutes.”

“We’ve reestablished communications with Wendy,” Lori told the bridge. “Zwick is still down.”

Marcel was studying the situation screen, which depicted the debris field as a blinking yellow glow. Some of the rocks were entering the atmosphere. But it appeared that the worst would be over in another couple of minutes.

“Lori,” Marcel said, “do we have a picture of them anywhere? Of Zwick?”

“No. Only vehicle close enough is Miles, but he doesn’t have an angle. I’ll let you know as soon as we get something.”

The comm board lit up. “Captain Clairveau.” It was Drummond.

“Go ahead, John.”

“Bad news...”

Marcel held his breath. Drummond was still speaking, so it couldn’t be too bad. “What is it?”

“Transmitting visual.”

An auxiliary screen lit up and Marcel found himself looking at the net. The bottom of the net.

The sack.

Except that the sack wasn’t there anymore.

Where the net should have flared out to provide a haven for the lander, where the collar should have lighted the way, everything simply hung down toward the clouds, limp and dead.

“What happened?”

“Don’t know, Marcel. It must have been hit.”

He willed the image away.

“Must have been a strike directly on the collar,” said Drummond. “Or the supports. Everything collapsed.”

“Thirteen minutes,”said the voice.

The AI warned Scolari and the others that Zwick was about to fire its engines. The process of slowing and eventually reversing Alpha’s descent phase had begun.

It also informed them that communications with the other vessels had been reestablished.

XXXV

Survival in a crisis is often a matter of sheer good fortune. The good fortune may consist of the timely arrival of a platoon of Peacekeepers, of having a power source unexpectedly kick in, of sitting in the correct part of the aircraft. Most frequently, it is being with the right people.

—Gregory MacAllister, Spiritual Guidance forTentmakers

Hours to breakup (est): 10

“... not an unbeatable problem...” Marcel’s image seemed to lose definition on-screen. He was still talking, but Hutch was no longer hearing him.

“... can still maybe ease your way in ...”

She stared straight ahead, through the windscreen, into the ashen sky that went on forever. Off to her right, a huge pall of smoke trailed upward. A volcano, they were telling her. Behind her, somebody moved. But no one spoke.

“... bad luck, but we’ll just have to work around it...”

She clung to the yoke as though it could save her. Move it forward, drop the flaps, the lander angled down. Nice, dependable physics.

“... still manage ...”

She killed the sound, left him mouthing the words, staring at her with empty eyes. Curiously, she felt sorry for him. He had gone far beyond what anybody could have expected, and it had simply blown up at the last second.

A meteor strike. How could they have been so unlucky?

“What now?” asked MacAllister.

She could barely hear him.

“My God,” breathed Nightingale.

“How about nosing our way in?” said Kellie. “We know there’s an opening. All we have to do is find it.”

“Yeah.” Nightingale reached forward and squeezed her shoulder. “It doesn’t sound all that hard.”

She brought Marcel back. “You said the collar’s collapsed. But it had lights. Can you still light it up?”

“Negative,” he said. “There’s no response from it.”

“If we can find the collar, what’s to stop us from just pushing our way in?”

“Not a thing. It’s not exactly what we’d planned, but you might be able to do it. If it’s not too badly tangled. It’s hard to tell what the precise conditions are.”

Might. If.

“Hell, Marcel, the plans are by the board.” She stared at her instruments. “I hate to put it to you in these terms, but we don’t have any place to land.”

“I know.”

“Am I still on course?”

“Yes, Hutch. Dead on.”

Unhappy choice of phrase. She saw him cringe, realizing what he’d said, wishing he could recall it.

“There it is,” said Kellie.

It was a long filmy garment descending out of the sky. She watched it come down, saw the winds sucking at it, twisting it, pushing it first one way and then another. That surprised her, at this altitude, and she grasped finally how light the construction material really was.

But the whole thing had collapsed. It wasn’t just the ring. The support rails, which actually separated back from front and the sides from each other and consequently made the sack, were down, too. She could see them caught up in the linkage. One fell away as she watched. She tracked it down into the clouds below.

There was no sack to ease into.

“What are we going to do?” asked Nightingale, unable to keep the terror out of his voice. “What in God’s name are we going to do?”

She would at that moment have taken pleasure in throwing him out of the spacecraft.

“You’re coming in too fast,” said Marcel. “Cut back ten klicks. No, twelve. Cut back twelve.”

She eased off. And tried simultaneously to slow her heartbeat.

“Six minutes,” Marcel told her. “It’ll still be in the descent phase. At the very end. Just before it starts up again. You’ll have not quite ninety seconds to get on board. Then the net will start back up.”

“Can you give us a little more time?”

“Unfortunately not. If we try to do that, we’ll lose control of the shaft. Won’t be able to pull it out at all.” He looked as if he felt additional justification was necessary. “Hutch, if we don’t retract it on schedule, it’ll go into the ocean.”

She studied the sequence Marcel had given her. At the moment, two of the four superluminals were using their main engines to brake the descent. Over the next few minutes, that application of power would slow Alpha, bringing it briefly to a halt. Then it would start up.

She knew approximately where the opening should be, but she couldn’t see it, could see only a jumbled mass of chain linkage. “Anybody see the collar? Marcel, is it facing us? Is it still on the east?”

“I can’t tell, Hutch. Your picture is better than ours. The atmosphere’s been raising hell with the scopes.”

“I can’t see anything,” said Kellie. “It’s a tangle.”

“What do you think?” asked Marcel. “Can you do it?”

“It isn’t going to work,” said Kellie. “It’s too screwed up. You won’t be able to push into that.”

“I agree,” said Hutch.

“Hutch.” Mac’s voice went high. “We don’t have anything else.”

“Maybe we have.” She took a deep breath. “Okay. Everybody relax. And here’s what we’re going to do.”

Kellie’s dark eyes met hers, and a message passed between them, a question. Hutch nodded.

Kellie opened the storage cabinets and started pulling out air tanks. She handed one to Nightingale.

“What’s this for?” he asked, looking genuinely puzzled.

“Everybody into your e-suit,” said Hutch.

“Why?” demanded Mac.

Hutch’s voice was level. “We’re going to abandon ship.”

“Hutch,” said Marcel, “slow down. Cut back six klicks.”

Hutch complied. Her adrenaline was pumping, and she was trying to rush things. “How many tethers do we have?” she asked Kellie.

Kellie rummaged around in the cabinets. Hutch heard one of the e-suits activate. Nightingale’s.

“Two,” said Kellie. She gave them to Mac and Nightingale, and showed them how to use the clips. “Just hook it on the web, and it’ll lock.”

“Hutch,” said Nightingale. “Are you telling me we’re going outside? We’re going to jump?”

She nodded. “I can put you right next to the net, Randy. You can walk over.”

“My God,” he said.

Hutch turned back to Marcel. “How thick are the links in the net?”

“Narrow. Think of your index finger. Why do you ask?”

“I wanted to be sure our tethering clips would work. We’re going to bail out.”

“What? You can’t do that, Hutch.”

“Why not? Listen, it’s our best chance, and I don’t have time to argue.”

Kellie cut two more pieces of cable and handed one to Hutch. Hutch pulled on her air tanks and activated her e-suit.

“Yours and Hutch’s don’t have clips,” said Mac.

“We’ll do fine,” Hutch told him. “Now listen: When we get there, I’m going to lay this thing directly alongside. We’re going to match its rate of descent, so the only thing you’re going to have to do is lean out and grab hold. And climb on.”

Nightingale had gone chalk white.

“It’ll work, Randy. No reason it won’t. Once you’re across, clip yourself on. Okay? It’ll look scary, but you’ll be safe. When you’re there, and tethered, you can relax and enjoy the ride.”

She wanted to tell Nightingale they were going to be cutting things close, that there’d be no time to freeze in the airlock. But she restrained herself, knowing she might only cause the logjam she feared.

Kellie looked steadily at her. “Why don’t you let me take the controls?”

Hutch shook her head. “Thanks,” she said. “I got it.”

“I’ll toss you for it.”

“It’s okay.”

“Wait a minute,” said Nightingale. “What’s going on?”

“There won’t be anybody to hold it steady for her,” said Kellie.

“I’ll get out,” said Hutch.

Kellie persisted. “Maybe we should go back to trying to find the collar.”

“Won’t work. Forget it. I’ll manage.”

They were in close. They came out of a cloud bank and saw sunlight. The net hung out of the sky, directly in front of them.

Kellie was right, of course. The spike would hold the lander at a constant altitude, but the net was moving. Once Hutch let go of the controls, the net and the lander would separate very quickly. She could expect to get to the airlock and find the net thirty meters away.

Well, there was no help for it.

Damn.

“What about the wind?” asked Nightingale.

“No problem at this altitude.”

He was looking at her desperately. Poor son of a bitch was terrified. She tried to give him an encouraging smile. But there was no time to talk things over. She reduced the air pressure in the cabin to duplicate conditions outside. Then she opened the inner airlock hatch. “Mac,” she said, “you first. Go when I tell you.”

MacAllister nodded. “Thanks, Hutch,” he said. And then he gazed wistfully at her. “Thanks for everything.” He walked into the lock, and the outer hatch opened.

Never look down.

The net was hopelessly snarled.

“Wait till I tell you, Mac.” She moved closer, felt the links brush the hull. Be careful: She didn’t want to get tangled. “Okay, Mac. Go.”

MacAllister hesitated, and she caught her breath. Please, Lord, not another one.

Then he was gone. Hutch pulled qukkly away to give him room, to reduce the possibility of hitting him or the net with the spacecraft.

Kellie was leaning out, looking off to one side. “He’s okay,” she said. “He’s on.”

“Kellie, you’re next. Wait for the signal.” This way, if Nightingale panicked, he’d kill only himself.

Kellie leaned close to her in passing. “Love you, Hutch,” she said.

Hutch nodded. “You too.”

Kellie got into the airlock.

Nightingale was pulling more cable out of the locker. She wanted to ask what he was doing, but she was busy with other things.

Hutch brought the lander back in close. “When I tell you,” she said.

Kellie waited, muscles tensed.

“Now. Do it.”

Kellie stepped out into the sky. Hutch pulled away again.

“Okay.” Kellie’s voice rang on the circuit. “I’m on board.”

Two for two.

The net’s rate of descent was slowing. Hutch matched it and moved in again. “Your turn, Randy,” she said.

He stood looking at her. “How are you going to get out?”

“I’ll get out.”

“How?”

The net stopped, paused, and began to rise. Hutch adjusted the lander’s buoyancy, pushed into the linkage.

“Go,”she said.

He was standing immediately behind her.

“Not without you.” His voice sounded odd.

“Randy, I can’t hold it here forever.”

He leaned down, showed her the piece of cable he’d just taken from the cabinet, and began to loop it around her waist.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

The cable was about forty meters long. He hurried to the airlock and she saw that he’d tied the other end around his own middle. “After I’m out,” he said, “count to one, and come.”

“Randy, this is crazy. If I don’t get clear—”

“We both go. Up or down together.”

The net was rising more quickly, accelerating, but she stayed with it. It clinked against the hull.

Hutch might have untied the tether. But it gave her a chance. Hell, it gave her a good chance. “Okay, Randy,” she said. “Go!”

He disappeared into the airlock, and then he was gone. She veered off, giving him room, listening for him to tell her he was okay. But he was breathing too hard to speak, or maybe his vocal cords were frozen and the cable between them was snaking out of the cabin. I hope you’re hooked to something, buddy. She let go the yoke, leaped full tilt across the deck, and dived through the airlock, scooping the tether as she went so it wouldn’t become tangled with the lander. The net was already out of reach, rising and drifting away.

Nightingale would almost have preferred to stay in the cabin, with its comforting bulkheads and its seats, to go down with it, rather than throw himself into the sky.

There had been a moment, when he was tying himself and Hutch together, that he’d thought he was really looking for an excuse to avoid the jump. And maybe that’s what it had been. Maybe he’d hoped she would refuse his help, and he could then have simply, magnanimously, stayed with her, shielded from that terrible hatch.

But she’d trusted him, and that trust had fueled his determination not to humiliate himself again. The net had been within easy reach. He had simply taken it, gathered it into his arms, and dragged himself from the spacecraft. Then he was alone and the lander was veering away and he was hanging on, his eyes shut.

The net was rippling and moving. Nightingale clung to it, stood on it, felt its folds all around him, made himself part of it. He got his eyes open. The lander looked very far away, and the line that connected him to Hutchins lengthened until he feared he would be torn from his perch. Where was she?

Connect the tether.

He had to let go with one hand to do that. Impossible.

He concentrated on the links, on the smooth burnished surface of the chain, on the way they were fastened. On getting secured to the net before Hutch came out of the airlock.

On anything other than the open void that yawned all around him.

He pried a hand loose, gathered up the tether, which dangled from his vest, and hooked it to a link. Pulled on it. Felt it lock down.

The net was moving up, accelerating. He was getting heavier. Below him, Hutch came out of the lander, tumbling.

He lost sight of her. Loose cable spilled into the sky, and he slid both arms into the links, grabbed hold of Hutch’s line, which was tied securely around his middle, and braced himself. “I’ve got you,” he told her.

The jolt ripped the cable out of his hands and yanked hard at his midsection. It dragged the loop down past his beltline to his knees, tore his feet off the cable, and for a terrifying moment he thought they were both going to take the plunge. But his tether held. He grabbed frantically for her line and clung to it with one hand and to the net with the other.

Someone was asking whether he was okay. Hutch’s line was slipping away, and he gathered his nerve and let go of the net to get a better grip. He looked down at her swinging gently back and forth above the cloud tops.

He was afraid his own tether would part under the strain.

“Hutch?” he cried. “You okay?”

No answer.

She’d become an anchor, a deadweight, and he couldn’t hold on, couldn’t hold on. He squeezed his eyes shut, and his shoulders began to hurt.

He tried to pull up, tried to figure out a way to fasten her to the net, but he couldn’t let go with either hand, or he’d lose her.

Kellie was asking for a goddam status report. “Hanging by my fingernails,” he told her.

“Don’t let go,” said Mac. Good old Mac, always full of obvious advice.

His arms and shoulders began to ache. “Hutch? Help me.”

Stupid thing to say. She was swinging back and forth, God knows how far below the bottom of the net, and she obviously couldn’t help herself.

Why didn’t she answer? Was she dead? Killed in the fall? How far had she fallen anyhow? He tried to calculate, to give his mind something else to concentrate on.

“I can’t hold her much longer,” he screamed at the circuit, at anyone who was listening. He was bent over and she weighed too much and he couldn’t get her line up any higher. “Please help.”

Marcel came on. “Randy, don’t let go.”

“How much longer?” he demanded. “How much longer do I have to hang on?”

“Until you’re in orbit,” he said. “Fourteen minutes.”

His spirit sagged. Never happen. Not close. Fourteen minutes. I might as well drop her now.

Hutch had gotten the breath knocked out of her when she fell. She’d heard the voices on her circuit but they’d been distant and unintelligible until that last.

“Randy, don’t let go.”

“How much longer?”

She looked up at the line, arcing overhead for what seemed an interminable length, up to the net. Up to Nightingale, twisted and hanging on. Reflexively she thought about trying to climb it, to get to safety, but it was a long way. She couldn’t manage it under these circumstances, and she didn’t want to put additional pressure on Nightingale.

“I’m okay, Randy,” she told him.

“Hutch!” He sounded so desperate. “Can you climb up?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Try.”

“Not a good idea,” she said.

“All right.” He sounded so tired. So scared.

“Don’t let go, Randy.”

“I won’t, Hutch. God help me, I won’t.”

“It’s because we’re lifting you out,” Marcel told him. “Hang on.”

“What do you think I’m trying to do?” He delivered a string of epithets, howling curses at tethers and landers and starship captains.

“Randy.” Marcel’s voice, cutting through his rage.

“Yeah? Goddam, yes, what do you want?”

“We’re going to try something.”

Oh God, he wanted to let go.

“Thirty seconds,” said Marcel. “Just hold her for thirty seconds more.”

His arms and back were on fire.

“She’s going to get heavier,” Marcel continued. “But only for thirty seconds. Hang on that long, and it’ll be okay.”

“Why? What?”

“On a five count. One.”

“For God’s sake, do it.”

He waited. And abruptly the net jerked up. The line tore at him. Tore the flesh off his hands. Cut to bone.

He whimpered. He screamed.

He hated Hutchins. Hated her. Hated her.

Let go.

Please God let go.

The line curved away from him, disappearing under the net.

Won’t.

Voice in his head or on the circuit telling him to hang on.

Any moment now.

We’re almost there.

Won’t.

Won’t pass out. Won’t let go.

Mac’s voice, but the words unintelligible.

Not this time.

Not this time.

And suddenly the weight vanished. For a terrible moment he thought she was gone. But he floated free. Weightless. Zero gee.

He still held on.

“Randy.” Marcel now. “You have about forty seconds. Tie her to the net. Tight. Because it’s coming back. The weight’s coming back.”

His fingers ached. They refused to open.

“Randy?” Kellie now. “You okay?”

“I’m here.”

“Do what they tell you.”

“Half a minute, Randy. Get it done.” Marcel sounded desperate.

There was no down anymore. He drifted peacefully through the sky, waiting for the agony in his hands and shoulders to subside.

“Randy.” Hutch’s voice sounded small and far away. “Do it, Randy.”

Yes. He pulled slowly, painfully on her line. Hauled it in. Looped it through the net. And tied it. Knotted it. Square knot. Never come loose.

Not in a million years.

They were moving again, rising, the weight flowing back. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve got her.”

He hurt. Everything he had hurt.

But a joy unlike anything he’d ever known before washed through him.

XXXVI

Most of us sleepwalk through our lives. We take all its glories, its wine, food, love, and friendship, its sunsets and its stars, its poetry and fireplaces and laughter, for granted. We forget that experience is not, or should not be, a casual encounter, but rather an embrace. Consequently, for too many of us, when we come to the end, we wonder where the years have gone. And we suspect we have not lived.

—Gregory MacAllister, Deepsix Diary

“Hey!” Mac sounded frantic. “What just happened?”

“They went to zero gee,” said Kellie. “To give Randy a chance to get himself together.”

“How’d they do that?”

“You understand they were never trying to pull the net straight out of the atmosphere, right? You understand that?”

“Not really. But go ahead.”

“They had to angle the extraction, to get us into orbit. That neutralizes gravity and allows them to pick us up. They were probably turning into a parabola right from the start. What they must have done was to pick up the pace. Remember how heavy you got?”

“I have a vague recollection, yes.”

“That gains time. Then they cut the engines. In all four ships.”

“What’s that do?”

“The whole system begins to drop back. It puts us in free fall.”

“Did we want that?”

“Zero gee, Mac. It makes everything weightless. Until they restart the engines, which of course they had to do pronto. But it gave Randy time to get Hutch aboard.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“Probably that, too.”

One of the shuttles moved in just ahead of the Star and used a laser to cut through the Alpha shaft. This divided the system into two sections. The Star and Zwick remained attached to the trailing portion, whose length was reduced to a more manageable eighty kilometers; the other two vessels remained connected to the balance, which was over two hundred kilometers long, and which they could not hope to control. But other shuttles rendezvoused fore and aft to set Wendy and Wildside free, leaving the separated pieces spinning off into the dark.

The Star and Zwick, carrying what remained of the shaft, the net, and its four passengers, continued maneuvering cautiously toward orbit.

Hutch was still trailing behind the linkage. “Randy,” she was saying, “you did a helluva job.”

Nicholson came on the circuit to inquire after the welfare of his passenger Mr. MacAllister. And belatedly of the others. Whoever they might be, thought Kellie. The Star was planning a celebration in their honor.

Canyon showed up, en virtuo, to inform Kellie she was on live, and to ask if she was all right.

“Pretty good,” Kellie told him. He tried to conduct an interview, and she answered a few questions, then pleaded exhaustion. “Mac would enjoy talking to you,” she added.

When at last they achieved orbit, they didn’t need anyone to let them know. Their weight simply melted away. This time for good.

Marcel, sounding as cool and collected as he had through most of the crisis, congratulated them on their good fortune. “I thought,” he said, “you might like to hear what’s going on in the main dining room.”

They listened to the sound of cheers.

The sky was black. Not the smoky debris-ridden sky of the dying world below, but the pure diamond-studded sky that one sees from a superluminal.

Nightingale, still cautiously hanging on to the net, gave her a nervous little wave, as if he didn’t want to show too much emotion.

She was drifting toward him. “Hi, Hutch,” he said. “I didn’t freeze.”

No, you didn’t, she thought. And she said: “You were outstanding, Randy.”

“Welcome to the accommodations, Hutch,” said Kellie.

And Mac: “Nice to have you aboard. Next time you’ll want to reserve a better seat.”

Lights moved among the stars.

“You all right?” risked Nightingale. He reached for her, and she felt a sharp pain in her left shoulder when she responded. But what the hell.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“I’d never have dropped you.” Nightingale’s voice sounded strange.

She nodded yes. She knew.

“I’d never have let you go. Not ever.”

She took his head in her hands, gazed at him a long time, and kissed him. Deep and long. Right through the Flickinger field.

“There they are.” Embry pointed at the screen and Frank enhanced the picture. They were still far away, but she could make out Hutch, even amid the tangles. One of the others, Kellie probably, waved.

Frank set course and reported to Marcel that he was about to pick up the survivors.

Embry had already been on the circuit with them. “Be especially careful with Hutchins,” she said. “I think she’s got a problem.”

“Okay, Doc,” said Frank. “We’ll be careful.”

They closed on the net.

“Get Hutchins first. Just pull up alongside her. I’ll bring her in.”

“You need help?” asked Frank.

“It wouldn’t hurt.”

The situation demanded a human pilot, so Frank looked around for a volunteer. He’d gotten the impression, from bits and pieces of things said, and from nonverbal clues, that Drummond didn’t like the idea of going outside. Janet Hazelhurst caught his eyes and eased out of her chair. “Just tell me what to do,” she said.

Drummond tried to look as if he’d been about to offer, but had been too late.

Hutch watched the lights coming. It was okay to relax. She closed her eyes and floated. The shuttle came alongside, and she could hear voices on the circuit. Somebody was cutting through the tether, taking her off the net.

The pain in her shoulder got worse. Now that she was safe.

Hatches closed somewhere. More lights appeared. Bright and then dim. Lowered voices. Pressure on the injured shoulder. Restraints. A sense of well-being flooding through her.

Somebody was telling her it was over, she was okay, nothing to worry about.

“Good,” she said, not sure to whom she was speaking.

“You look all right, Skipper.”

Skipper? She opened her eyes and tried to pierce the haze.

Embry.

“Hello, Embry. Nice to see you again.” Randy was still there, off to the side, staying close. Then he became indistinct, as did Embry, the restraints, the voices, and the lights.

From Nicholson’s bridge, Marcel directed the fleet of shuttles. They deployed near the Star and Zwick and cut them free of the shaft. At Beekman’s suggestion, they salvaged six samples, each four meters long. Five were intended for research, and one would go on display at the Academy. At Nicholson’s request a smaller piece was picked up and earmarked for exhibition on the Star.

Another shuttle approached the connecting plate and separated it from the net and from the stump of the Alpha shaft. It hovered momentarily while its occupants inspected the symbols engraved across its face. Then they cut it neatly into two pieces of equal size. Shortly thereafter, Wendy approached and took both pieces into her cargo hold.

The remaining fragments of Alpha, and the net, floated away into the dark.

Because time was pressing, no immediate attempt was made to return the captains to their respective ships. Miles, in fact, was retained as acting captain on Wendy. Hutch, of course, was in no condition to be sent back to Wildside. Guided from the bridge of the Star, the shuttles were taken into whichever bays were convenient, and, with little more than a day remaining before the collision, the fleet began to withdraw.

By then conditions on the planetary surface had become so turbulent that the orbiting vehicles were themselves at hazard. Marcel guessed that much of the data coming in from the probes had been lost after Wendy’s communications went down. This assumption was confirmed by Miles. “They are not a happy group over here,” he said.

Beekman sympathized. “You can’t really blame them. Some of them have been preparing twenty years for this mission, and they lost a substantial piece of it.” He gazed steadily at the banks of screens, which displayed views of the impending collision, taken from an array of satellites.

Marcel really didn’t give a damn. He’d been through too much over the two weeks. He was tired and irritable, but they’d gotten Kellie and the others back, and that was all he cared about. Chiang Harmon had died down there. One of Hutch’s people had died, one of Nicholson’s passengers, and one of his crew. One of Nicholson’s pilots had died during the rescue. In the face of that, it was hard to work up too much regret that they had lost some details on the formation of high-pressure fronts during a planetary traffic accident. “We’ll do better next time.”

Beekman pursed his lips and looked thoughtful. “There’ll be no next time. Probably not in the life span of the species.”

Too bad, thought Marcel. But he didn’t say anything.

It seemed as if the entire atmosphere of Deepsix had become one massive electrical storm. Blizzards swept the equatorial area, and giant hurricanes roared across the Coraggio and the Nirvana. A mountainous tide soared thousands of meters above nominal sea level. The range along the northern coast of Transitoria, which had held back the tides so long, vanished beneath the waters.

The worlds moved inexorably toward each other. But it was a mismatch, thought Hutch, a pebble falling into a pond.

She watched from her bed in the Star’s dispensary. She’d required minor surgery for a torn muscle and a broken rib, and they didn’t want her moving around for a bit. With his hands wrapped Randy sat off to one side, wearing a shoulder brace. Mac was off somewhere giving an interview; and Kellie was down getting some goodies at the snack bar.

Hutch’s link chimed. Canyon’s voice: “Hutch, I’ll be down to see you later. Meantime, I thought you’d like to know we’re a big hit back home. They’re a couple days behind, of course. Last we heard, the whole world was listening while the tide broke through and got the whatchamacallits. They think you don’t have a chance now. Wait till they see the finish. You guys will be celebrities when you get back.”

“Nice to hear,” grumbled Nightingale.

“Anyhow, our numbers are through the roof.”

“Sounds as if you’ll do pretty well yourself, Augie,” said Hutch.

“Well, I can’t see that it’ll hurt my career any.” His eyes literally flashed. “Wait until they get to the lander!”

“Yeah,” said Nightingale. “That sure was a hoot.”

Canyon kept going: “Incidentally, you folks have acquired a sobriquet back home.”

“I’m not sure I want to hear what it is,” Hutch said.

“The Maleiva Four.”

“By God,” said Nightingale, “who thought that up? Magnificent, August. My compliments to the cliche unit.”

When he was gone, she looked at Nightingale severely. “You were awfully hard on him. He means well.”

“Yep. But he’d have been happier if we’d fallen off the goddam thing.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Better story.”

Mac came into the room, carrying flowers, which had been grown in the Star nurseries. He beamed down at Hutch and held them out to her. “You look good enough to have for lunch,” he said.

She accepted a kiss and smelled the bouquet. They were yellow roses. “Gorgeous. Thanks, Mac.”

“For the Golden Girl.” He gazed at her. “What are they saying? The medical people?”

“They’ll let me up tomorrow.” She turned her attention back to Nightingale. “You,” she said, “should ease up. Let people do their jobs and don’t be such a.crank.”

“I enjoy being a crank.”

Roiling clouds of immense proportions billowed out of Maleiva III’s atmosphere. Fireballs erupted and fell back. And erupted again. The entire black atmosphere seemed to be expanding, fountaining into the sky, a burning river beginning to flow toward the placid disk of the gas giant.

“Here it comes,” said Mac.

Nightingale nodded. “Everything that’s loose anywhere on Deepsix is being ripped out now and sent elsewhere.” His voice was quiet. Resigned.

Mac shifted in his chair. “There’s no point getting sentimental over a piece of real estate,” he said.

Nightingale stared straight ahead. “I was thinking about the lights.”

“The lights?” Hutch’s brow furrowed.

“I don’t think we told you. Forgot in all the rushing around. At Bad News Bay. We saw something out in the water. Signaled back and forth.”

“A boat?”

“Don’t know what it was.”

Steam was pouring off Deepsix. Fire and lightning swirled across the vast expanse of its clouds.

Kellie came back with donuts and coffee.

MacAllister was still there a half hour later when Marcel, Nicholson, and Beekman came by to see how she was doing. Hutch thought all three looked tired, happy, relieved. They shook hands all around. “We’re glad to have you back,” Marcel said. “Things looked a little doubtful there for a while.”

“Did they really?” asked Mac. “I thought we had it under control all the way.”

Nicholson beamed at him. “We’re planning a little celebration tomorrow,” he said. Hutch caught the flavor of the remark, that dinner with the two captains was an Event, and that they should all feel appropriately honored. But he was trying to do the right thing. And what the hell, it was a small enough failing.

“I’d be delighted to attend,” said Mac.

“As would I.” Hutch gave him a warm smile.

Marcel introduced Beekman as the manager of the rescue operation. “Saved your life,” he added.

Hutch wasn’t sure what he meant. “You mean all our lives.”

“Yours, specifically. Gunther came up with the zero-gee maneuver.”

Tom Scolari called, and his image formed at the foot of her bed. He was wearing dark slacks and a white shirt open to his navel. Sending somebody a message, looked like. “Glad you came through it okay,” he said. “We were worried.”

“Where are you now, Tom?”

“On Zwick.”

“Good. Did you get interviewed?”

“I don’t think there’s anybody out here who hasn’t had a chance to talk on UNN. Listen”—his eyes found hers, and glanced over at Mac—”you guys put on one hell of a show.”

“Thanks. We had a lot of help. Not to mention your own. I understand you’re a pretty good welder.”

“I’ll never be without work again.”

“Next time you tell me not to do something,” she added, “I’ll try to take you more seriously.”

He grinned and blew her a kiss. “I doubt it.”

She woke up in the middle of the night and noticed they were no longer accelerating. It was, finally, over.

EPILOGUE

Cataclysms too vast to be defined as quakes threw forests and mountain ranges skyward, as much as twenty thousand meters, where they were caught between competing gravity wells, and eventually swept off. Tidal effects literally ripped Maleiva III apart. The swirl of gas and debris surrounding the world had become so thick that it blinded the opticals. The placid snow-covered plains around the tower, the baroque temple that had seemed almost Parisian, the lights at Bad News Bay, the memorial and the hexagon, all disintegrated in the general ruin.

Wherever fractures or faults existed, the rock was shredded, torn free, and hurled upward. The planet bled lava. The mantle disintegrated, exposing the core. Energy release was so titanic that it could not be viewed directly. Scientists on board Wendy, finally able to concentrate on the event they’d come to see, cheered and began to think about future papers.

Shortly before the collision, Maleiva III exploded and burned like a small nova. Then the light dimmed, and it dissolved into a series of individual embers curving through the night, falling finally into Morgan’s cobalt gulfs, where they left bruises.

Within hours, the shower of debris was gone from the sky, and only the bruises remained to mark the incident. Meantime, Morgan would continue on its way, barely affected by the encounter. Its orbit would not change appreciably. Its massive gravity would eventually scramble a few moons elsewhere in the system. But that was a couple of centuries away.

Hutch had assumed the dinner was to be in honor of the Maleiva Four. At first it seemed that way. They were introduced to the crowded main dining hall individually, applauded, and seated at the captain’s table. Everyone wanted to shake their hands, wish them well, get their autographs.

They were invited to make speeches. (“But we’d appreciate it if you kept your remarks to five minutes.” When Nightingale ran over, Nicholson took to glancing ostentatiously at the time.) And everyone got a picture taken with one or another of the rescuees.

There were also pictures from the adventure itself, and hundreds of these were put forward to be signed. Some were of the Astronomer’s Tower (which no one was any longer calling Burbage Point), others were from the interviews on the ground conducted by August Canyon, still others of the long empty corridors in the hexagon atop Mt. Blue. Here was Nightingale seated beside a campfire early in the trek, and Hutch hanging from the net as seen through the telescopes on the rescue shuttle. There was Gregory MacAllister shaking hands with well-wishers on their arrival at the Star. Someone had gotten a portrait of Kellie posed against a sky overwhelmed by Morgan’s World. She looked beautiful and defiant, and it rapidly became the favorite of the evening. Eventually, it would become the jacket for Deepsix Diary, MacAllister’s best-selling account of the episode.

Despite all this, the evening belonged, not to the Four, but to their rescuers. The three captains, Marcel, Nicholson, and Miles Chastain, took round after round of applause. Beekman and his team were credited with working out the general strategy. John Drummond, who did much of the orbital calculations, took a bow. And the cheers for Janet Hazelhurst were deafening.

The Outsiders were invited to stand, while the band played a few bars from a military anthem. The shuttle pilots were introduced. And Abel Kinder, who was credited with keeping the weather sufficiently calm until the rescue could be effected. Phil Zossimov, who developed the collar and the support rails that would have made things so much easier. Had they, as he commented wryly, only had an opportunity to work.

And there was finally a moment to remember those whose lives had been lost. Colt Wetheral, pilot of the Star lander. Klaus Bomar, the shuttle pilot. Star passenger Casey Hayes, who, as MacAllister pointed out, had died trying to salvage one of the landers. Chiang Harmon of the science research team. And Toni Hamner, who would not have been there at all, said Hutch, except that she stayed with a friend.

They set up a buffet. The ship’s best wines were uncorked. And Captain Nicholson announced that TransGalactic would pick up the tab. Passengers and guests were responsible only for whatever gratuities they might choose to leave.

Late in the evening, Hutch found herself alone on the dance floor with Marcel. When she’d arrived, fourteen standard days before (had it really been so recently?), he’d been only a colleague, an occasional voice in the cockpit, a person she’d seen at a seminar or two. Now she thought of him as the Gallant Frenchman. “I’ve got some news for you,” the Gallant Frenchman said. “We got the results back on the scan of the shaft. It’s three thousand years old.”

She was in his arms, in the exotic style of the time. Everybody’s arms felt good, his and Mac’s and Kellie’s and Tom Scolari’s and Randy Nightingale’s. Especially Randy Nightingale’s, the man who would not let go.

Three thousand years. “So we were right.”

“I’d say so. It was a rescue mission. The hawks were doing what they could to get a nontechnical people out of harm’s way. Or at least to give their species a chance to survive elsewhere.”

“Where, I wonder?”

Marcel placed his lips against her cheek. “Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll find them.”

Hutch recalled the predator appearance of the hawks. “They did not look friendly.”

“No. I thought not either.” Her lips found his. “Shows you how looks can deceive.”

There was, inevitably, a sim. Hutch was played by Ivy Kramer, an actress of truly magnificent proportions. Mac appeared in a cameo, not as himself, but as Beekman. The drama portrayed Erik Nicholson as the true hero of the rescue. This interpretation of events might have been influenced by the fact that the production company was owned by the same multinational as TransGalactic.

It introduced persons on board the Star who tried actively to sabotage the effort for murky reasons never quite made clear, and it depicted the crew of the Boardman striving heroically to retrieve their lost lander so they could come to the rescue. Hutch and Nightingale were tracked relentlessly through the hexagon by a shape-changing thing.

There were books, other than Mac’s. Action figures appeared and sold briskly. All four survivors were subjected to extensive interviews, and Kellie eventually became the official representative for Warburton, a company that manufactured sports equipment. E-cards featuring her with a set of golf clubs have since become a collector’s item.

An effort was made to get Nightingale to run for governor of Georgia, but he declined. His onetime wife, the daughter of a retired Academy director, made several unsuccessful attempts to renew their relationship.

Mac continued to write scathing commentary on assorted hypocrisies in high places and low, without which hypocrisies, he cheerfully conceded, civilized life would be impossible.

Hutch remained in the service of the Academy.

They all profited from the action toys, from the games, from various kinds of sports clothes, and also from the sale of a line of Deepsix Four (the name change to Deepsix had been urged by the action toy company) long-stem glassware, which inevitably featured a female figure dangling from a tether that disappeared into a cloud—an artistic embellishment—and the motto, Nunquam dimitte. Never Let Go.

Never Let Go.

It is now the official motto of at least three specialized military forces in Germany, China, and Brazil.

They named a high school in New York Park South for Kellie, a mall in Toronto for Hutch, and a Lisbon zoo for Nightingale. There is now a Colt Wetheral Memorial Library off Fulham Palace Road in London, and a Toni Hamner Science Museum in Hamburg. The Winnipeg space flight school in which Klaus Bomar used to teach now has a wing named for him. Mac received no such accolades, although he claimed that the local bishop had wanted to put his name on the new Correlates Religious Studies Center in Des Moines.

Awards were passed to almost everyone involved in the rescue. The most heavily recognized was Erik Nicholson, widely credited with persisting during the darkest hours of the effort. Beektnan received the Conciliar Award for Science, usually reserved for those instances when humanitarian applications of a breakthrough can be shown. Marcel was given a formal commendation from the Academy and became a figure of interest to the corporate world. Within a year, he’d been offered, and had accepted, a director’s post with TransGalactic. He’s now a vice president, makes more money than he ever dreamed possible, and talks a lot about the good old days. When he’s pressed, he admits to being bored.

Kellie, Hutch, Randy, and Mac continue to get together whenever occasion permits. They are frequently joined by Marcel, and occasionally by Janet Hazelhurst, the world’s most famous welder, and by one or another of their rescuers. Last year they took eleven members of the Outsiders to dinner at Iceman’s in Philadelphia.

Iceman’s is more than simply the finest restaurant in the Delaware Valley. It’s also on the ground floor.

AFTERWORD

STATEMENT BY GREGORY MACALUSTER

From Deepsix Diary

Let me stipulate that, while the questions raised concerning the failure of the Athena Boardman to come to the assistance of the vessels at Maleiva III were legitimate, they were not initiated by me, as has been charged by officials at Kosmik, Inc. In fact, they grew out of a reaction to the sim, which portrayed the Boardman captain in heroic terms. This in turn sparked an investigation, originally for the implied purpose of handing out awards. My only connection with the proceedings arose from the fact that I happened to be one of the persons left to do as best we could when Boardman went missing in action.

The problem for Kosmik quickly became one of potential liability, and they consequently reacted to the initial inquiry by doing what large corporations always do: First they stonewalled, and then when they realized that wouldn’t work, they found a mechanic at the Wheel and blamed the incident on him, citing failure to inspect a faulty RX-17 black box that rendered the launcher unstable. They gave him a formal letter of reprimand, fired him, and released his name to the media.

This was too much for Eliot Penkavic, the ship’s captain, who called a press conference, admitted to lying about the incident, and blamed the entire unhappy episode on Ian Helm, Kosmik’s new director of operations at the Quraqua terraforming unit.

Helm has denied everything, and Penkavic now faces prosecution.

But company spokesmen have had a difficult time explaining just what Penkavic hoped to gain by failing to assist when it was clearly in his power to do so, or why he had agreed to come to the rescue, then apparently changed his mind.

To get a clearer picture of what must actually have transpired, one has only to ask the basic question any policeman asks when faced with conflicting stories: Who stood to profit? The pilot to whom it made no difference whatever whether he went to Maleiva III or to Quraqua? Or the company big shot anxious to get to his new position with a shipload of time-sensitive personnel and supplies?

As I write this, Penkavic’s trial is less than a week away I am pleased to report that, since the arrival on the case of Archie Stoddard, the lawyer hired by this publishing house and best-known for securing substantial judgments against corporate scofflaws, rumors have begun to circulate that the so-called in-house investigation by Kosmik has taken on new life. And that Helm may be thrown to the wolves to head off the legal action that would clearly follow a finding of not guilty in the Penkavic case.