Ilium

58 The Equatorial Ring

At first they couldn’t get Hannah out of the tank. The heavy piece of pipe wouldn’t dent the plastic glass. Daeman fired off three rounds from Savi’s gun, but the flechettes barely knicked the tank’s surface before ricocheting around the firmary, smashing fragile things, ripping into already decommissioned servitors, and barely missing both men. Finally Harman found a way to clamber to the top of the tank and they used the pipe as a lever to first lift and then rip off the complicated lid. Then Harman pulled his thermskin visor lower, tugged on the osmosis mask, and leaped down into the draining fluids to pull Hannah out. With the main power out, lights off, and tank glow fading to nothing, they worked mostly by the light of the single flashlight.

Naked, wet, hairless, her skin looking raw and new, their young friend looked as vulnerable as a baby bird as she lay on the wet firmary floor. The good news was that she was breathing—gaspingly, shallowly, alarmingly rapidly—but definitely breathing on her own. The bad news was that they couldn’t wake her.

“Is she going to live?” demanded Daeman. The other twenty-three men and women in the tank were obviously dead or dying and there was no way to get to them in time.

“How do I know?” gasped Harman.

Daeman looked around. “Temperature’s dropping in here without the power to heat things. Another few minutes, it’ll be below zero, just like outside in the main city. We have to find something to cover her with.”

Still carrying the gun but mostly heedless, not looking for Caliban, Daeman ran through the darkening firmary. There were human bones, haunches of decaying flesh, motionless servitors, bits and pieces of beakers and tubes and pipes, but not so much as a blanket. Daeman ripped a square sheet of clear plastic from the covering they’d already torn to seal the semipermeable entrance and returned.

Hannah was still unconscious but shivering uncontrollably. Harman had his arms around her and was rubbing her flesh with his bare hands, but it didn’t seem to be helping. The plastic folded awkwardly around her thin, white body, but neither man thought it was holding in any body heat.

“She’s going to die unless we do something,” whispered Daeman. From the shadows of the now-dark healing tanks, there came a sliding sound. Daeman didn’t even bother to raise his gun. Steam from the liquid oxygen and other spilled fluids was filling the firmary.

“We’re all going to die soon anyway,” said Harman. He pointed toward the clear panels above them.

Daeman looked up. The white star that was the two-mile-long linear accelerator was closer—much closer. “How much time left?” he asked.

Harman shook his head. “The chronometers disappeared with the power and Prospero.”

“We had about twenty minutes to go when the problems began.”

“Yes,” said Harman. “But how long ago was that? Ten minutes? Fifteen? Nineteen?”

Daeman looked up. The Earth was gone and only stars—including the bright shape rushing at them—burned cold in the clear panels. “The Earth was still visible when this crap started,” he said. “Can’t be much more than twenty minutes ago. When the earth reappears . . .”

The blue and white limb of the planet moved into sight among the lower panes. “We have to go,” said Daeman. There were more crashes and slidings in the dark behind them. Daeman whirled with the gun high, but Caliban did not emerge. The firmary gravity was failing now as well; pooled fluids were lifting themselves from the floor and trying to float, accreting themselves into amoeba shapes, seeking to become spheres. Savi’s flashlight reflected back from slick surfaces everywhere.

“How do we go?” asked Harman. “Leave her behind?” Hannah’s eyelids were not quite closed, but they could see only the whites of her eyes. Her shaking was lessening, but this seemed ominous to Daeman.

Daeman had tugged up his mask—there was just enough air in the firmary to breathe, although it still smelled like a meat locker with the power off—and now he rubbed his beard. “We can’t get her to the sonie with only two thermskins. She’d die of exposure in the city, much less in space.”

“There’s the sonie forcefield and heater,” whispered Harman. “Savi had them on when we were flying high.” He’d tugged his own mask up again, and his breath fogged in the cold air. There were icicles in his beard and mustache. His eyes looked so tired that it hurt Daeman to look at them.

Daeman shook his head. “Savi told me all about how cold and hot it was in space, what vacuum does to the body. She’d be dead before we got the forcefield powered up.”

“Do you remember how to power it up?” asked Harman. “How to fly the damned thing?”

“I . . . don’t know,” said Daeman. “I watched her fly it, but I never thought I’d have to. Don’t you remember how?”

“I am so . . . tired,” said Harman, rubbing his temples.

Hannah had quit shaking and now looked dead. Daeman peeled his thermskin glove back and put his bare palm on her chest. For a second he was sure she was gone, but then he felt the faint, bird-rapid beat of her heart.

“Harman,” he said, voice strong, “get out of your thermskin.”

Harman looked up at him and blinked. “Yes,” he said stupidly, “you’re right. I’ve had my five Twenties. She deserves to live more than . . .”

“No, you idiot.” Daeman began helping him tug off his suit. The air was already turning Daeman’s exposed face and hands to ice; he couldn’t imagine being naked in this cold. The air was thinning as they spoke, their voices sounding higher and fainter. “Share the thermskin with her. Count to five hundred, then peel it off her and warm yourself. Keep swapping unless she dies.”

“Where are you going to be?” gasped Harman. He’d tugged the thermskin off and was trying to pull it on the unconscious girl, but his hands and arms were shaking so badly from the cold that Daeman had to help him. Immediately the thermskin adapted itself to Hannah’s body and she began shaking again, although the suit was holding in almost 100 percent of her body heat now. Harman set his osmosis mask over her face.

“I’m going for the sonie,” gasped Daeman. He handed Harman the gun, but had to lift his own osmosis mask to make himself heard since the other man wasn’t on suitcomm any longer. “Here. You keep this in case Caliban comes for you two.” Daeman lifted the four-foot-long length of pipe they’d used as a crowbar.

“He won’t,” said Harman between racking breaths. “He’ll go for you. Then he can eat us all at his leisure.”

“Well, I hope we give him a bellyache,” said Daeman. He pulled down his osmosis mask and kicked and ran and floated toward the exit membrane.

It was only after Daeman had used the sharp end of the pipe to rip and tear a man-sized hole in the membrane, kicking through into the even lower gravity and deeper cold and dark outside the firmary, that he realized that he hadn’t told Harman that his plan was to come back with the sonie—to somehow get it through the window wall to pick them up. Well, too late to go back to tell him now.

Daeman had always had trouble keeping up with Savi and Harman when the three of them were first swim-kicking their way through the crystal city a month ago—an eternity ago—but now Daeman swam through the thin air like some low-gravity sea creature, a crystal-city otter, always finding the perfect place from which to kick off at just the right instant, paddling through the air with his three free limbs with pure economy of effort, somersaulting and pirouetting with perfect timing to find the next strut or table or even the next post-human corpse to kick off from for his next leg of the trip.

It still wasn’t fast enough. He could feel time winning this race, even as he looked up at the panels of the crystal city—the panels showing their dying glow, bringing an even deeper darkness to the kelp beds and body-strewn terraces where he kicked and swam—but there were no clear panels here through which he could see the onrushing linear accelerator. Will I hear it when it crashes through the crystal roof, or is the air too thin for sound?

He shook the question out of his head. He’d know when it arrived.

Daeman almost passed the crystal tower headed south when he looked up and saw that he was already directly under the hundreds and hundreds of stories of air rising into darkness above him.

He landed on the asteroid, held the pipe in both hands, swiveling, using only his thermskin lenses to penetrate the darkness. Humanoid shapes floated out there, some close, but their purposeless tumble suggested they were probably post-corpses, not Caliban. Probably.

Daeman tucked the pipe under his arms, crouched low, remembered Caliban’s long-armed squat, imitated it, and shoved off with all the remaining energy in his legs and arms. He floated upward, but slowly, far too slowly. He felt like he was barely moving by the time he got to the first extruded terrace some seventy or eighty feet up, and realized how weak he was as he used the terrace railing to push himself upward again, watching the shadows as he rose.

There were too many shadows. Caliban could leap at him from any of those darkened terraces, but there was nothing Daeman could do about it—he had to stay close to the wall and the terraces to keep pushing off, always moving, floating upward—quickly at first, then with dying speed until he chose the next terrace—feeling like a frog jumping from one stone and metal lily pad to the next.

Suddenly Daeman laughed out loud. His thermskin, beneath the dirt and mud and blood and grime, was green. He did look like some awkward, scrawny frog, squatting to push himself off vertically at every tenth railing of every tenth terrace. His laugh echoed hollowly through his commpads over his ears and shocked him back into silence except for his tortured breathing and grunts.

With a stab of fear, Daeman paused and did a somersault even as he floated higher. Have I passed the level where the sonie’s parked outside? The distance to the floor below seemed impossible—a thousand feet of empty air, at least—and the sonie was only . . . How many stories up? His heart pounding with panic, Daeman tried to remember the holo image in Prospero’s control room cell. Five hundred feet or so up? Seven hundred?

Sick with terror at having lost his way, Daeman floated out further from the wall and checked the panels of glass. Most glowed that sickly, ever-weakening orange. Some were clear this far up, silver with earthlight. None showed the white mark of the semipermeable membranes at the first airlock and Prospero’s door. Did I see such a window mark on the holo, or just assume there’d be one visible from the inside?

Floating almost to a halt now at the apogee of his last leap, Daeman wrenched his osmosis mask loose. He was going to vomit.

You don’t have time for that, idiot. He tried to breathe in the air up here, but it was too thin, too cold, too rank. Only semiconscious, Daeman pulled the mask back down. Why didn’t I bring the flashlight? I thought Harman might need it to tend to Hannah or to shoot at Caliban, but now I can’t make out the fucking windows.

Daeman forced himself to slow his breathing and to calm down. Before the gravity began pulling him down again toward that dark floor hundreds of feet below, he kicked and paddled his way farther out from the wall, rolling over onto his back like a swimmer looking up at the stars.

There. Another fifty feet up, on this wall. The white square on an opaque window panel.

Daeman did a pirouette, clasped the pipe between his chin and chest, and used both arms and his gloved hands in a powerful breaststroke. If he couldn’t get to that closest terrace now, he’d lose two hundred or more feet of altitude, and he didn’t think he had the strength to fight his way back up again.

He reached the terrace, grabbed the pipe with his left hand, and kicked his way vertical, timing it so perfectly that he slowed to a stop just as he reached the white-marked panel. Panting, his vision dimmed with sweat, Daeman extended his right arm—his hand and forearm passed through the membrane as if it were slightly sticky gauze.

“Thank you, God,” gasped Daeman.

Caliban hit him then, leaping out of the shadowed recesses under the next terrace up, long arms and longer legs wide and grasping, teeth glinting in earthlight.

“No,” grunted Daeman just as the monster struck, wrapping arms and legs and long fingers around the man, teeth snapping for Daeman’s jugular. The human managed to get his right forearm up to protect his throat—Caliban’s teeth ripping through flesh and meeting on bone—while the two forms, entangled and thrashing, blood fountaining in low-g around them, fell together through the thin air down to the next terrace, crashing into glass and plastic and wood and frozen post-human flesh as they tumbled into darkness there.