The Eternal Flame (49 page)

Carla tried to analyze the scenario objectively, even as she pictured Carlo free-falling into the void. If the guards were caught by surprise this way, they were unlikely to have a chance to harm him. Outnumbered, but not trapped, their wisest move would be to flee rather than take any kind of stand.

“How do we get so close, undetected?” she asked.

“They can’t have lookouts everywhere,” Tamara replied. “Starting from here, we go straight out onto the surface, and then we travel as far as we can while sticking to the slope. The guide rails around this airlock won’t take us all the way to the tent, so we’ll make the last step with air jets. They’ll be expecting someone coming the easy way, following the rails from their own nearest airlock; they won’t be gazing out at the stars, searching for silhouettes. And if we come in from on high as fast as we can, they won’t have much chance to see us and react, whichever way they’re looking.”

“Coming to a halt against the surface isn’t an easy maneuver,” Carla pointed out.

“Is there anyone here who
didn’t
pass safety training for the fire watch?” Ada inquired.

Nobody owned up to that. It was true that the safety exercises included a soft landing on the spinning slope—using an air jet to hold yourself in place long enough to get a handhold on a guide rail—but avoiding an audible thud against the rock hadn’t been part of the assessment criteria.

Carla looked around the room, trying to judge what the response would be if she asked Tamara to heed her wishes and call off the rescue. The kidnappers hadn’t harmed Macaria, even after she’d given them the tapes and was of no further use to them. If this raid went badly, anything could happen.

Either choice would be a gamble—and when she’d had no alternative she’d talked herself into believing that the vote alone would make all the difference. But did she want to trust Carlo’s life to the skills of her friends and allies, or to some fantasy of generosity-in-victory by the people who’d snatched him in the first place?

“We’re going to need to get the timing absolutely right,” she said. “If one of us hits the tent too soon, we’ll have lost the whole advantage of surprise.”

Ada said, “I have an idea about that.”

Carla felt the guide rail above her shift slightly as it took her weight. She paused and looked up at the supporting post, daring it to slide right out of the rock and be done with it. Though the safety rope bound her to her five companions, the jolt of her fall might tear out enough adjoining posts to spill them all.

Nothing happened. She glanced down into the stars, mystified that the threat of free fall could disturb her so much more than the condition itself. Having to dangle and swing from the rails wasn’t physically arduous, but what was hard to take was the constant feeling that the structures she depended on might give way. Whatever improvements the engineers had made, some of these rails predated the launch itself.

She started moving again. Tamara, ahead of her, was setting the pace and Carla didn’t want to slow her. She thought of Carlo, blind in his prison sack, and wondered if he’d recognize the terror of his own sudden fall as a prelude to freedom.

As they advanced, the silhouette of a small dead tree rose up against the orthogonal stars ahead—proof that some things could cling to the rock through any disturbance. A few strides back, Patrizia was advancing briskly, keeping up with Ada, almost mirroring her movements. Carla felt a pang of guilt; why had she allowed her to come along? Whatever loyalty Patrizia felt toward her, and however much respect she had for Carlo’s cause, she’d had none of the training and experience of the
Gnat
’s crew. If she hadn’t been with Carla when Ada came looking for her, there would have been no question of dragging her into this. But it was too late to argue the point and try to send her back.

When Tamara reached the end of the rail, Carla drew her own body to one side to give everyone behind her an unobstructed view of their leader. Tamara waited, looking to the east. She’d chosen the violet end of Sitha’s trail—Sitha being one star that all of them could recognize—to mark the direction through the void in which they would be flung.

The bright borderline, where the old star trails ended in a blaze of shifted ultraviolet, marched up from the horizon. Carla saw Sitha rising, but merely sighting it wasn’t the cue. The star had to lie at right angles to the zenith—and mercifully, that judgment wasn’t hers to make.

Tamara gave the signal, a sweep of her lower right hand, and released her hold on the rail.

Carla did the same, and the six of them fell into the void together. She glanced up to see the mountain receding and felt a rush of pure elation: to do this by choice, not by accident, wasn’t frightening at all. A few pauses later the rope joining her to Ada went taut as some small failure of synchronization caught up with them, but the jolt was mild.

Tamara was joined to Carla, but a second safety rope linked her directly all the way back to Macario, who’d been traveling at the rear of the group. Now the two of them started gathering up their ends of that longer rope, pulling themselves together. When they’d shortened it to a marked portion of equal length to the other five ropes, they hitched it to their harnesses, fixing the geometry.

Tamara gestured again, and Carla joined the others in firing a brief horizontal burst from her air jet. The loose hexagon spread out into a slowly turning, almost planar figure. At first everyone bounced around a little; the hexagon wasn’t perfectly rigid. But as the ropes dissipated the energy of people’s wayward motion, the hexagon’s stately rotation remained. Carla looked across at Macaria; behind her, the gaudy streaks of the old stars were changing places with the short, crisp trails of their orthogonal counterparts.

Tamara made a few small corrections on her own, to align the hexagon’s plane against the mountain. It was not like flying the
Gnat
or the
Mite
, but with care she could act as their pilot. So long as they were turning, centrifugal force and the rope’s deadening effect on any small departures would keep them in an orderly configuration.

The next stage was better handled cooperatively: on Tamara’s cue, they began firing their jets in unison toward Sitha, parallel bursts aimed at killing their velocity away from the
Peerless
. With one hand on the jet strapped to her chest and another on the second unit on her back, Carla could keep targeting the star even as the sky wheeled around and sent Sitha into her rear gaze.

Tamara halted the maneuver; they were approaching the mountain now. Carla glanced up but forced herself not to search for their destination. Tamara had chosen her own landmarks and made her own calculations. Ada had checked everything twice. The only thing to do now was to trust the navigators.

The slope grew closer with alarming speed. They were returning more rapidly than they’d been tossed aside, and the rocks themselves were now swinging around to meet them. Tamara made a series of corrections, tipping their trajectory to the south to take them past the territory they’d been unable to cross by rail. Carla’s body tensed at the threatened collision, and this new fear was far harder to dismiss: to fall into the void could be harmless, but there was no recovering from being dashed against the side of a mountain.

Finally, Tamara gestured for them to brake. Carla fired her jet toward the second target star, a nameless dazzle of violet on the borderline. The task kept her eyes away from the rocks, and when she finally stole a glance upward the jagged terrain had assumed an almost leisurely pace. She could see the tent easily now: the camouflage had lost its power for her. The slope around it was deserted. If there were lookouts they were all inside, peering out across the mountainside, expecting any intruders to come straight from the airlock.

Tamara had them shut off their jets. When the hiss from the nozzle fell silent, for a moment Carla felt as if she were suspended above the rock, but she knew that was impossible. A pause later she could see that they were still approaching, very slowly, not quite on target. Ada and Tamara took turns making adjustments, taking pains to keep the hexagon as level as they could. Carla stared up at the approaching ceiling, a few dozen strides away at most, then looked down just in time to catch Tamara’s last cue.

In almost perfect synchrony, the six of them unhitched their connecting safety ropes, took the hook-ends of their grappling ropes in one hand, then pointed their jets away from the rock and opened the valves wide to drive them home.

Carla hit the edge of the tent with her free upper hand stretched out above her, faster than she’d meant to, but close to the attachment point she’d aimed for. The jet was easily supporting her centrifugal weight, but it was threatening to send her skidding sideways. She reached up and thrust the hook into the fabric of the tent; the material was thickly woven, but the hardstone barb parted it easily and the supporting loop slipped in.

She shut off her jet, leaving her dangling by the grappling rope. She glanced around quickly: everyone was unharmed, in place, more or less at the same stage she was. Patrizia was fine.
And Carlo was in here, almost free now.
They just had to act quickly before the guards knew what had hit them.

Carla pulled the knife from her tool belt and plunged it in beside the attachment stake; she felt the tip go right through to the rock. She tried to extend the cut by lateral force alone—to slice around the stake’s retaining head in a neat circle—but she didn’t get far before the fabric resisted the blade. She pulled the knife out and thrust again, making a second cut, trying not to panic at the delay. How much could the guards hear, in airlessness? Rock was a good conductor of sound, but the fabric would carry it much less efficiently.

She made a third cut, a fourth. Together, these arcs still only did half the job. She joined two of them with yet another thrust, then did the same to the opposite pair. Two almost-half-circles enclosed the stake. At the edge of her attention she saw another corner of the tent already falling. If the guards had been oblivious until now, that advantage had just disappeared. Carla stabbed at her unfinished cut, joined the two large arcs on one side, aimed again. But before she could strike, the remnant of fabric tore under the strain and she fell with her corner away from the rock.

It was a short drop; the tent itself was still attached at four points. She looked up, hoping to see inside, but all she could glimpse was some exposed rock: the prison’s ceiling, glowing softly with red moss-light.

She lurched down again, as Tamara’s corner broke loose on her right. Two large air tanks came sliding down the fabric, almost striking her as they tumbled into the void, but she still couldn’t see anyone. She began hoisting herself up the grappling rope, hoping for a better view, but then the tent separated from the mountain completely.

Carla pulled herself over the edge, then unhooked the grappling rope and advanced by grabbing folds of the tent’s rough fabric. She saw a guard fleeing, silhouetted against the stars—a man, by the size of him, his air jet carrying him away across the slope.
So where was Carlo?
Had he fallen from the other side? She could see a host of small objects floating around her, but the center of the tent was too dark to show anything, still shaded from starlight by the mountain above. She crawled into the blackness.

Carla found the sack by touch alone. It had been secured to the tent with cords. She felt gently for the shape of Carlo’s body within; he started, but then became still. She pressed her helmet against the top of the sack. “It’s me,” she said. “You’re safe.” She heard a faint, unintelligible reply, then realized that her helmet was touching, not its double, but an unprotected skull. Inside the sack, Carlo was naked.

That was their response to Macaria’s escape: they’d stripped their remaining prisoner of any capacity to survive in the void. They must have set up an improvised cooling system to keep him alive, spraying the sack with air—those tanks that had fallen past her. But now he had nothing.

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right.” She unstrapped the air jet tank from her chest and cut a long, vertical slit down the center of her cooling bag. Then she put a hand on Carlo’s shoulder, waited until she was sure he would remain still, and slid the knife a short way into the sack. She slipped her hand in beside the blade—so that if he moved, his skin would meet her fingers before it could make contact with the knife—then she made an incision to match her own.

She put away the knife and reached in to lay a palm against his chest; his skin was warm, but he was not in danger yet. He took her hand and squeezed it for a moment, then released it. Carla put one arm around the sack, holding him against her as she cut away the cords threaded through the material of the tent. Then she bound him to her, aligning the air vents as well as she could.

The darkness had lifted; they’d fallen far enough for the stars to show around the mountain. Carla saw Tamara and Patrizia approaching, dragging themselves awkwardly over the limp fabric.

Tamara bumped helmets with Carla. “How is he?”

“No cooling bag, but we’re sharing. There was only one guard?”

“Yes.”

“So which way do we go back?”

Tamara looked down at Carlo; the setup wasn’t ideal for a long trip. “We’ll try the closest airlock first. I’ll send in an advance party to be sure it’s clear.”

The others joined them, and they linked up with safety ropes again—clustering together tightly instead of rebuilding the hexagon. As Tamara maneuvered them back toward the mountain, Carla watched the tent falling away, shrinking to a small dark speck.

At the airlock, Ada and Patrizia went through first. Carla stood on the entrance platform, Carlo’s body pressed against her. He had barely moved since they’d been joined, and she could feel the heat growing in his flesh. She wondered how many supporters the kidnappers’ faction could summon at short notice. She and her friends might yet find themselves outnumbered.

Patrizia emerged and swept her hands toward the ladder, like a host inviting guests into her home.