Seveneves - Страница 105

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Slowly she removed her hands.

She was sticking her tongue out. It looked like a piece of metal was caught in her teeth.

On a closer look, it was clear that J.B.F. now had a pierced tongue. It had been done cleanly and professionally; there was no bleeding, no apparent signs of infection or discomfort. A stainless steel bolt about two inches long had been inserted vertically through the piercing, fixed in place with nuts and washers above and below the tongue. It was too long to fit into Julia’s mouth, so it kept her tongue stretched out. Above and below, the rod pressed against her lips.

“Oh Jesus Christ,” Dinah said.

Julia tapped at the bolt with one finger, then made screwing and unscrewing gestures with both hands. The nuts had been doubled, and torqued tightly against each other. Dinah took a multitool from a holster on her belt and unfolded its needlenosed pliers, then borrowed Ivy’s. By twisting gently in opposite directions she was able to loosen the nuts. Julia pushed her away and unscrewed the nuts with her fingertips, then gently extracted the bolt. Her tongue retracted into her mouth. She put one hand over her lips and leaned back against a bulkhead for a few moments, moving her jaw to work up some saliva and get limbered up.

When she finally spoke, Julia sounded weirdly normal, as if delivering remarks from the White House briefing room. “When we surrendered,” she said, “they took my gun, and they tortured Spencer Grindstaff until he spilled everything he knew about the IT systems here. All the passwords, all the back doors, all the details as to how it all works. Exactly what they would need in order to take the place over. Then they killed him, and. .”

“Ate him?”

Julia nodded. “They have a sort of hacker type among their group. When he came on board just now, he went to a terminal and began to execute this plan. Steve Lake tried to stop him. One of the others had the gun — shot Steve to death. That was always part of their plan. They knew that only Steve could stop them.”

“How many bullets are left in that thing?”

“I’m sure it is empty now. Most of them are using knives and clubs. They didn’t expect a real fight, because. .”

“Because they thought we’d all be zipped up in our storm shelters,” Dinah said, “like lambs to the slaughter.”

THE BIG BURN LASTED FOR THE BETTER PART OF AN HOUR. BY THE end of it, they’d consumed so much propellant and made Endurance so light that acceleration made the blood fall out of their heads and pool in their feet. Ivy piloted the ship lying flat on her back, lest she lose consciousness. The journey was punctuated by a few terrific bangs, and those who could stand to watch Endurance’s status readouts could observe various modules turning yellow, then red, then black as they succumbed to damage. Dinah watched through the eyes of several cameras as a ten-mile-long piece of the moon tumbled past them, overtaking them and zooming by just a few hundred meters to their starboard side. Nor was that the last such encounter; but with Doob acting as her wing man, calling out the biggest threats, and with Dinah making such use as she could of Parambulator, Ivy was able to steer them clear of the big stuff.

They had no way of knowing the progress of the combat aft. Zeke had spoken optimistically of their odds, but there was no telling how the damage they’d taken from bolides might have swung the course of the battle to one side or the other. Endurance’s automatic sealing off of damaged parts of the ship had now partitioned her into a number of separate zones between which movement was impossible.

Zero gee returned, meaning that the engines had shut off. They were now traveling as fast, on average, as the rest of the debris cloud. Dinah had only just adjusted to the steady acceleration of the big burn and now felt a wave of sickness come over her as the inner ear readjusted. Her eyes closed and she sank into a sort of catnap, floating loosely around the Hammerhead, thudding gently against a wall every so often when Ivy used the thrusters to avoid a rock.

Then she realized she’d been fully asleep for a time.

Part of her wanted to stay that way. But she knew that big things were happening, so she opened her eyes, half expecting to find herself alone, the last person alive.

Ivy was the only person awake, her face lit up by her screen. And for the first time in a long time, it looked the way it had used to when she’d been on the track of some fascinating science problem: alive, intent, fiercely joyful.

“Why’s it so quiet?” Dinah asked. For it seemed to her that it had been a long time since she had heard the crack of a bolide or sensed the thrust of one of Endurance’s engines.

“We’re in the shadow,” Ivy said. “A new Cone of Protection. C’mere.” She tossed her head.

Dinah came around behind and hooked her chin over her friend’s shoulder. The monitor had several windows open. Ivy enlarged one of them to fill most of the screen. A legend superimposed at the bottom identified it as AFT CAMERA.

The field of view was entirely filled by a close-up image of a huge asteroid.

Dinah was an asteroid miner. She had looked at many pictures of asteroids in her day. She had learned to recognize them by their shapes and their textures. She had no difficulty in identifying this one. “Cleft,” she said.

Ivy reached out and touched the screen. Red crosshairs appeared beneath her fingertip, which she dragged across the big rock’s surface until centered on a vast black crevasse that looked like it nearly split the asteroid in two: the canyon that had given this rock its name. She pulled her finger away, leaving the crosshairs in the middle of the cleft. “I was thinking there,” she said.

“How about a little below, where it gets wider?”

“I don’t think we want a wide place. Too much exposure.”

“Go there, then,” Dinah suggested, reaching out and dragging the crosshairs to a slightly different location. “Then we can snuggle into the narrow part once we’ve gotten inside.”

“You ladies enjoying yourselves?” Doob rasped.

“Not as much as you’re going to in about an hour,” Ivy said.

“I’ll try to hold out that long.”

THERE WAS NO PROBLEM GETTING INTO IT. IVY FLEW ENDURANCE into the great crevasse like a Piper Cub into the Grand Canyon. Within minutes the walls were reaching far above them. The bottom was still lost in shadow.

Following Dinah’s general suggestion, Ivy then nudged the ship toward a part of the canyon, several tens of kilometers distant, where the walls converged and the radioactive sky became a narrow, starry slit above. Still she kept pushing onward, occasionally scraping the ship’s outlying modules against the walls, until she reached a place where she could go no deeper.

Looking both directions along the crevasse from this place, they could see spots where the sun was shining in. Here, though, they were protected from rocks and radiation alike. Ivy set Endurance down on the floor of the canyon. Cleft’s gravity was exceedingly faint, but it was enough to give words like that a little meaning, and it was enough to keep the ship lodged in one place until they decided to move it.

Which they never would.

Cleft

ON THE SURFACE OF CLEFT, A HUMAN WEIGHED ABOUT AS MUCH AS three pints of beer would weigh on Earth. Endurance weighed about as much as a couple of semi-trailer rigs.

Ivy lit the ship’s attitude control thrusters one last time and pivoted her tail up until it was vertical. Endurance was standing on her head, the torus aloft, iron Hammerhead nose-down on the iron floor of the crevasse. Dinah sent out some Grabbs to weld the ship to the asteroid. Ivy shut down the thrusters.

Endurance was no longer a ship but a building.

From the Hammerhead, now one piece of metal with Cleft, the Stack ran straight up like the trunk of a tree. Various structures ramified outward from it like boughs. Its widest part was the array of eighty-one arklets that had formerly made up the stern of the ship. These now projected upward like leaves.

Or so they imagined. They couldn’t actually go outside and look at it until they got out of the Hammerhead. During the battle, they had sealed the hatch. By the time they had brought her to rest and welded her down, the rest of Endurance had been quiet for a long time. Finally they opened the hatch and began to explore it one module at a time. They sent Buckies and Siwis out ahead of them to illuminate dark spaces and aim cameras into hidden corners. Tekla then went in, taking point, with Dinah and Ivy watching her back. They were armed with cudgels made from lengths of pipe. But they never had to use them.

It was some combination of crime scene, battleground, and disaster zone. Only about half of the modules were still pressurized. Some of them had become completely isolated and could only be reached by a person in a space suit. It took days to get to them all.

In one of them they found Aïda, the only other survivor from the heptad. Two days had passed since she had eaten the last of Tavistock Prowse, so she was very hungry, but otherwise in good shape. After becoming trapped by a combination of combat and bolide strikes, she had holed up in a water-filled storm shelter, then begun drinking its contents as she awaited rescue.

The total number of living humans was now sixteen. Several had suffered injuries from combat or from the consequences of bolide strikes. Anyone who had not taken shelter in the Hammerhead, or in a storm shelter, was suffering from radiation sickness. The healthy ones patched holes, repressurized modules, got the torus spinning again, and turned it into a sick bay, which filled up immediately.

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