For Love and Glory

XXVIII

THE sky burned.

A fireball glared lightning-colored. It would have been blinding to behold, were it not shrouded in a vast nimbus that glowed blue, yellow, red with its own heat. Smoke streaked the vapors, ragged, hasty as the thing whirled. Currents twisted themselves into maelstroms. The limb of the flattened disc faded toward darkness. Tongues of flame leaped from it, arced over, streamed sparks behind their deluge. At the equator, many broke off and sprang free, cometary incandesences. Those that were aimed forward ran ahead of the mass that birthed them. Right, left, above, below, they passed blazing around the ships. They would not gutter out for thousands of kilometers more.

If any of those thunderbolts hits us, we’re done, Lissa knew.

Spacesuited, she clung to a handhold near the portside forward airlock and waited. A viewscreen showed a pale ghost of what lay ahead. Dagmar maneuvered now at fractions of a gravity. Magnetic fields must be crazily twisting her plasma jets as they left the ejectors. Shifts in direction brought momentary dizziness, as if chaos reached in to grab at her. The Susaian craft were outlined black across the oncoming lightstorm. Their impact had driven plates and ribs together, formed a single grotesque mass, two boughs reaching from a stump. It wobbled and tumbled. Shards danced around.

A fire-tongue streaked, swelled, was gone. It had missed Dagmar by a few hundred meters. At Lissa’s side, Valen caught a breath, half a cry. In her audio receiver it sounded almost like the scream of a bullet. Through their helmets she saw sweat runnel down the creases in his face. “You shouldn’t be here,” she told him. “You belong in the command globe.”

He shook his head. “The ship c-can cope. We need… every hand.”

At least, she thought, he has enough sense left to refrain from boasting he won’t send crew into any danger he won’t meet himself. The hazards are much the same wherever we may be, with that ogre booming down on us. But if he stayed behind, he wouldn’t be out among the meteors. And he’d have an overall view; he might make the snap decision a robot brain wouldn’t, that saves us.

No use. I’ve tried. He’s determined. And, true, we’re ghastly undermanned as is.

Lissa swallowed fear, anger, bitterness, and braced herself. They were about to make contact.

Weight ended. She floated free. Silence pressed inward, save for noises of breath and her slugging heart. Voices went back and forth, she knew, Dagmar’s and Moonhorn’s or Ironbright’s or whoever was in charge over there; but she wasn’t in that circuit. The screen showed her the silhouette of an extruded gang tube, groping for an airlock. Wormlike, obscene, amidst the terrible beauty of the flames. To hang here passive was to lie in nightmare. How long? Seconds, minutes, years? It had better be less than half an hour. That was about as much time as they had before death became inescapable. Could she choke down her shriek that long?

How had anybody stayed sane at Naia?

Contact. Linkage. Weight returned, low but crazily, sickeningly shifty as Dagmar matched the gyrations of the other hulls. The airlock valve moved aside. The mouth beyond gaped. Lissa pushed into the chamber before she should lose her last nerve. Valen followed. They collided, whirled about in clownish embrace, caromed off the side. The valve shut. For a moment they were adrift in blindness, and she wanted to hold him close.

The inner valve opened. Air brawled down the gang tube. The compartment beyond lay bared to vacuum. Lissa let the wind help her along. Frost formed briefly on dust, little streamers that glittered in the beams from wristlights.

She and Valen came forth into a cavern. Air fled and light fell undiffused, hard-edged. Things sprang solitary out of shadow that otherwise engulfed sight—save where the hull was rent and stars marched manifold past.

The rotations of the conjoined wrecks caught at your blood and balance, cast you about. Space was too confined for safe use of a jetpack. You must somehow recover, compensate, be a master juggler; and the ball you kept going was yourself.

Yourself and others. Susaians in their long, many-jointed spacesuits waited for deliverance. Most tumbled helpless. A number were violently nauseated, their helmets smeared with spew on which they choked. A handful of trained personnel were there to shepherd them as well as might be. The task was too much for so few. Victims, especially the injured, kept flopping and drifting away. The humans went after them.

Things couldn’t be so bad at the waist lock. It was joined to an unruptured section. Clumsy though they might be, Esker and his scientists could give the Susaian marshals some help. And elsewhere, Dagmar’s three robots flitted to a part torn entirely loose. They would break in and tow back those whom they found.

But this half of Amethyst had been barred from the rest. Damaged servos didn’t allow personnel trapped in it to transfer to the middle and await rescue. Instead, crewfolk from Supremacy must bring extra spacesuits and, as rendezvous neared, herd, drag, manhandle the people into this ripped compartment, the only one that Dagmar’s forward gang tube could reach when the middle one was engaged.

Lissa’s light picked out a thrashing, drifting shape. She went for it. Spin changed its path. She kicked against a crumpled plate, intercepted, clutched. Panicky, the Susaian struggled in her arms. “Hold still, you idiot,” she groaned.

Noises she could neither understand nor imitate gibbered in her ears. Some that were calm and steady came to damp them. The Susaian didn’t relax, but stiffened, became a load Lissa could manage. She heard the Anglay: “Honored one, I am informed that several victims are near the breach in the hull.” Back aboard Dagmar, translator, active, Orichalc was the living message switchboard.

Lissa bore her burden to the tube mouth and gave it an impetus. The passage was already half filled with bodies. A Susaian officer at either end clung by the tail to a handhold and issued orders. Several at a time, the fugitives were passing into the lock and thus to the Asborgan ship. Lissa kicked off toward the gap where the stars danced.

Hoo! Nearly went through it! She clutched a piece of metal in time and cast light rays about. The reptile-like forms appeared in the gloom, suits ashimmer. They had clung fast to whatever they found, lest they be cast adrift into space.

“Orichalc,” Lissa called, “tell them to link hands or tails or whatever and let go when I take the lead. I’ll guide them to the tube—”

Heaven vanished in a burst of brilliance. For a moment there was no more night. Throughout the cavern, each being, body, bit of wreckage sprang forth into sight. They had no color; that radiance showed them molten white. Thunder crashed in Lissa’s skull. The doomsday blow sent her off, end over end, barely aware. She heard a man howl and knew it was Valen. Dazzlement blew in rags. As if she dreamt, there passed across her: Very near miss. Electric field. Discharge. How close by now are we to the volcano?

Then a solidity captured her, and brought her to rest, and she heard, “Lissa, are you all right, oh, Lissa.”

Slowly, she looked about her. The fire-splash after-images began to fade; she glimpsed stars. The ringing in her ears diminished. I’m alive, she knew.

“Get into the tube,” Valen chattered. “Back aboard Dagmar. I’ll finish here.”

“No,” she said hoarsely. “You go on. Back to your work. We’ve damn little time left. I’ll join you in a couple of minutes.”

A sob caught in his throat. He released her and sped off.