Authors: David Langford
Quick
, came the pain-signal in Force shorthand.
Correction: plus 90 centimeters X axis, minus 50
centimeters Y axis
. I made the moves on the grid, too big, too late.
Birdcage
was still turning. Ten to one we were all dead.
...It had been one hell of a job out there in free-fall, even with high-powered folk like Winkel on the team. The engineers overloaded two orbital factories getting
Birdcage
slapped together with all the parts being made simultaneously for sheer lack of time. No time, then, for anything resembling a proper job.
The concrete slab was a real find, shielding from an orbital reactor they’d been tinkering with when the war looked like making energy shortages. They socketed the thing for the steel bars, and bored a hole through the middle. One side was still hot from reactor trials, and out of kindness to me they made that side the one that would face the DEVOURER, where it would be getting a damn sight hotter. There weren’t safe facilities for working with something that size, either, and three or four engineers were hauled off with rad-poisoning from neutrons, even worse than gammas.
Winkel said he’d had another good reason for wanting to come up into orbit. He reckoned he could
“make some interesting observations.” Turned out he didn’t only mean watching me and
Birdcage
crumple like paper in the gravity and then get eaten: his idea was that if that happened he could go back to
Overlord
station in the sync orbit and observe what happens when a nucleus-sized black hole acts like a python and slowly stuffs a whole planet down its maw. Always supposing, of course, that the thing didn’t come too near
Overlord
on any of its swings in or out. “I should think there’s quite a considerable margin of safety,” Winkel said when Rossa suggested that little risk to him. But I never knew all his reasons. I heard him once on
Overlord
, sternly telling Fusco (who was supposed to be on a flying visit) that she mustn’t take the shuttle down again until everything was over. She ticked him off furiously; but she didn’t go. Instead, other StraProgCom faces appeared on
Overlord
...
“We missed our big opportunity,” Rossa said to me quietly. “Now if only we’d instructed Corvus Station to destruct
here
after we leave the neutral zone, we might have made a clean sweep of military leaders and earned the undying gratitude of everyone below...”
“You’re not serious?” I still couldn’t always tell.
She looked at her feet, wriggling the toes inside her shoes. “I could be
persuaded
to be serious in that particular direction,” she said darkly.
Not too many hours after, it was time to board
Dragonfly
and cross a million kilometers with
Birdcage
on tow, accelerating/decelerating all the way and burning 90 percent of the fuel margin: some other boat, perhaps
Silverfish
, would follow with fuel to bring us all back, or all but one. The last thing I remember going through my mind before they pushed
Birdcage
off down the slope was that General Lowenstein’s game-theory gave me one last edge over Rossa even now. Whatever happened,
I
wasn’t likely to have to make excuses or apologies afterward. You take what crumbs of comfort you can get.
...Maybe the final correction had worked and maybe it hadn’t. There was a final margin for error, a radius which was exactly half of 1.926643 centimeters.
Pain
. The 20-second marker. Inside 100 meters now. Was I imagining it or was I being pressed more firmly against the deck by the fake gravity of the tide force? Outside, the universe was searing blue fog. Somewhere further in, the glare of radiation would have blasted the aluminum dust into vapor --
don’t waste time thinking about things like that
. By now they’d know on
Dragonfly
, they’d know if that hotspot had shifted so far and changed so much there was no chance of my pulling back to the straight line. I hoped they wouldn’t tell me if that was the way it was. Too late, really too late now for any correction. I reached for the twin vertical tubes, grabbing the one that wasn’t lined up, the one that wasn’t leaking gamma from the beam shining up through
Birdcage
.
You take care of yourself in the small ways even when you’re going out in a big way. And Jesus Christ, no one had ever gone out just like this before, a safe bet no one ever would again. Squeezing through a 1.9 hole a bad trip? Forget it: this time I was booked for a hole too small to see.
Fifteen seconds
. I pulled at the tube—for a crazy moment I thought the swivel had stuck, cold-welded in vacuum—it swung and clicked into place. Tube number two was lined up. On
Dragonfly
I would’ve looked like a shrinking black circle against the bluey-white glow, with one bright point centered like the compass prick someone had made when they drew the circle. Now they’d have seen that last light blink out. What was coming up through the thin shaft in the slab was vanishing into the wizard’s staff now, into the 1.9-centimeter hole and out God knows where. There was a big coiled spring in this tube, behind the
“staff,” and only the trigger was holding it back.
Birdcage
was one bloody great spring-gun, 1.9-centimeter bore, big bore for big game. My heart was smashing against my ribs like something wanting to be let out. I felt like the old Jacklin from before the Force, scared, but somehow it didn’t feel too bad.
Outside, the light kept changing. The closer I fell the brighter the fog; the closer I fell the bigger the shadow-cone
Birdcage’s
base was throwing on the fog outside the bars. The gravity slope was steepening and I could feel myself getting heavier.
Ten seconds
. Rossa started the one-second pain flashes then. Picture of her sitting in
Dragonfly’s
comp room with the machine calling off the seconds and her teeth set hard together as she hurt herself for me...
(“Through the needle’s eye,” she’d said near the end. “But you’re not a camel and you mustn’t try to go through ... If I’m to be theological, I wonder how many invisible black holes could dance on the point of a pin?” Around that time her talk had all been like that, bright like blown glass and just as ready to crack.)
Nine
. This had to be timed just right. They’d complimented me on my reflexes. Nice of them.
Eight
. Inside the fifty-meter radius now. Dozens of kilowatts per square meter burning at the bottom of this death wagon. And the tug to the floor was growing now; my feet were furthest from the center of mass and they felt it most.
Seven
. I reached my hand to the trigger. The sooner I fired the more chance there was that the hell of scattered radiation up front would knock out the MT gadgetry.
Six
. If I didn’t fire in time, the DEVOURER would climb up the shaft and eat me. It might just fall into the 1.9-centimeter hole as well, but ... The counterweight glittered blue at me. Good luck, Jacklin.
Five
. Finger on the trigger, taking up the slack. Or if I fired only a little too late, the two holes would meet close to the base of
Birdcage
. When the DEVOURER came within a meter of this silly craft’s center of mass I’d be feeling, what had Winkel said, 120 gravities or so in my midsection and more at my feet. I’d puddle down to the deck...
Four
. Get in rhythm, count with the ticks of pain, keep in sync with Rossa. But time seemed to be stretching out, didn’t time do funny things near black holes? No, Winkel had said, you’ll never get that close. “I hope,” he’d added.
Three
. What would Rossa and I do afterward? Was there going to be an afterward? Was the trigger going to move when I pushed it? Suppose the gammas had already firestormed my central nervous system, suppose my finger didn’t pull when I told it, suppose I was dead already, again, without knowing it ... I could feel the floor thrusting up at me harder and harder. I could feel a cold hollow in my guts, a hot flowing on one thigh. I was shit-scared, wet myself for the first time in ten years, oh Jesus, what’s happened to the markers, I’ve lost count...
Two
.
My finger wouldn’t move. Fire at one second out, twenty meters from hell. Hole meets hole. A good big
‘un will always beat a good little ‘un, the way they used to say. What if Earth tuned into the gateway now? My finger still wouldn’t move. How much of eternity do you have to count off before it adds up to one second? The reflexes buried inside me knew better than I did myself; I jerked, pulled hard at the trigger, stiffer than I’d thought, and the tube twanged under my hand as the floor pushed up harder and harder and the last welcome dose of boiling oil came washing over my other arm:
One
.
The blue glow swept away as
Birdcage
shadowed half the sky. Gravity came full on, roaring up the scale like a rocket motor, writhing as the gateway sheared through lines of force. I was clinging to the tube and the blood sang out of my head; a pile-driver tried to mash me into my boots and bone splintered somewhere down there. A crack opened in the concrete overhead, its center a thin, broken line of hellfire. It was the end of the world. Then all the lights went out—
...Slowly, very slowly, I remembered there wasn’t really any difference between being unconscious and being dead. Not at the time. In free-fall it’s harder to pull out of dreamland: you’re still flying when you wake up. Where I actually was, was fastened by one boot’s magnets to a steel bar, one of the vertical bars that made
Birdcage
look like what it was called. There wasn’t any acceleration, and I hung at a crazy angle. Somehow in that last moment when the snake gobbled its own tail and space got cracked like a whip, I’d left the floor, or ceiling, and floated free until I fetched up here. A faint stink of urine in the p-suit ... my face burned when I remembered. I looked around the cage for something else to think about. The two battery lights hadn’t been welded on too reliably—the tide had popped them off the ceiling and they’d smashed against the deck. Broken glass in the air, and one naked filament still burning
... You could hardly see the dark up there where the slab had started to break up—maybe heat expansion in the multimegawatt glare, maybe the shifting gravity.
My ankle hurt badly where the bone had cracked. It wasn’t fatal, I guessed. A wider crescent of Beta Corvi light was shining on the ceiling, a new moon broken by shadows of the bars; that meant
Birdcage
had tilted, was still turning very slowly, maybe had been turning right at the last, but not enough to fail. I wondered how long I’d been out. Must still be heading off at a hundred kph or whatever final velocity we reached before...
I remembered the radio would work now. I felt for the switch with my tongue, a switch still slimy from the last time I’d tongued it: “...can you hear me? Please activate your suit beacon by pulling the red toggle at your waist. Message repeats.
Dragonfly
to
Birdcage
, can you hear me?” That reminded me of the one last thing Rossa and I had whispered about on the way here. The MT harpoon I’d fired at the DEVOURER was joined onto
Birdcage
by steel cable that might have snapped or might not. Winkel had wanted it for “further study.” Tough luck, Winkel.
The beacon toggle could wait a few minutes. I floated myself out between the bars of
Birdcage
and painfully made my way around to the other side of the circular plate where I’d stood all the way down.
Then, with my good left leg, I pushed myself off as hard as I could, off toward the blinding sun.
Thirty
When you’re dropping through the dark and expecting to die, you promise yourself things if you ever get out of this. All I’d wanted was to sit on a beach, watch white breakers falling, soak up the sun and wind, that kind of high-powered action. After a few years of that treatment, I’d thought, it might be time to think of doing something else.
Of course it wasn’t easy. There’d been medics crawling around me like termites for days, pumping liter after liter of gunk into both arms and buttocks to fight the (mild, they said) gamma burns I’d managed to pick up. There’d been thank-you sessions, TV cameras, more damned medals, and a man who wanted to set me up as a martial arts teacher because a lot of the traditions had been lost ... that last was something to think about. Now I was back on Port Island convalescing, wearing a boot three sizes too big on my right foot to make room for the stiff polymer jacket they’d sweated over the break and most of the way up to my knee. It was supposed to make walking no trouble at all. Walking hurt like hell. The beach was all shingle that squeaked and grated underfoot, and soaked up twice the energy you’d use walking on proper ground; the sun was there all right, white-hot, and you had to smear sticky stuff like the yellow tank fluid all over yourself if you wanted to stay in sunlight more than twenty minutes, this time of year; and when I sat and watched the too-green sea I didn’t get breakers, just tired little ripples that slouched to the shore, heaved themselves up a few centimeters and fell over dead from the effort.
Streaky clouds drifted in a sky that sank smoothly through hundreds of blue-greens that my eye couldn’t separate, down to an uncertain haziness where it fell into the sea. After half an hour or so—
“Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea coming out here after all.”
“Oh,” said Rossa, who’d been looking under pebbles. “You talk, do you? I
had
been wondering.” She threw the stone she was holding toward the sea. It didn’t quite get there.
“Sorry. Made myself tired walking here, and then it didn’t quite match up to what I’d been expecting.
But I meant, um, coming here from Earth hasn’t really done anyone much good, has it? The open war’s out of the way, but everyone’s still uptight about the blackmail business with the nullbombs...”