He almost didn’t pull up in time—the sonie sheered turf, cut through kelp, and sent dead grass flying—but then Daeman got the thing flying level and cut back on the speed a bit. His twenty-minute flailing trip from the firmary took him three minutes on the flight back.
The entrance wall was not quite wide enough for the sonie. Daeman backed the hovering machine up, gave it more throttle, and made the semipermeable entrance permanently permeable. Shards of glass and metal and plastic followed the sonie as Daeman flew it between dark, empty healing tanks. He winced as he caught a glimpse in some of those tanks of the dead white bodies of those humans they hadn’t saved in time. Then he was stopping the sonie, killing the forcefield, and jumping out next to two more bodies on the floor.
Harman had left the blue thermskin suit on Hannah, keeping only the osmosis mask for himself in the final minutes. The man’s naked body looked bruised and pale in the reflected light from the sonie’s headlights. Hannah’s mouth was open wide, as if in a final, futile effort to force more air into her lungs. Daeman didn’t waste time to see if they were alive. Using only his left arm, he scooped each of them up and laid them in the two couches on either side of his own. He paused only to jump out again, throw Savi’s pack in the back couch, and to toss the gun onto the armrest of his own couch before he was back in place and activating the forcefield.
“Pure oxygen,” he said to the sonie as the air-rush began. The clean, cold air became thicker, making Daeman’s head swim it was so rich. He fumbled in the virtual control panel, setting off several caution alarms before finding the heat. Warm air radiated from the console and various vents.
Harman began coughing first, then Hannah a few seconds later. Their eyes flickered, opened, finally focused.
Daeman grinned stupidly at them.
“Where . . . where . . .” gasped Harman.
“Take it easy,” said Daeman, slowly moving the sonie toward the firmary exit. “Take your time.”
“Time . . . the time . . .” gasped the older man. “The linear . . . accelerator.”
“Oh, fuck,” said Daeman. He’d forgotten about the onrushing structure, never once looked up or over his shoulder in space to see it coming.
Daeman twisted the sonie’s throttle full open, slammed through the hole where the membrane had been, and accelerated toward the tower exit.
There was no sign of Caliban in the tower. Daeman slewed a wide curve, threaded the needle through the tower exit pane, and climbed from the outside terrace into space.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” breathed Harman.
Hannah screamed—the first sound she’d made since being fished out of the healing tank.
The two-mile-long linear accelerator was so close that the wormhole collection ring at its bow filled two-thirds of the sky above them, blotting out sun and stars. Thrusters were firing in quad-pods all along its absurd length, making final course corrections before impact. Daeman didn’t know the names of everything at that moment, but he could make out every detail of the gleaming cross-braces, polished rings now cratered with countless micrometeorite strikes, racks of cooling coils, the long, copper-colored return line above the main accelerator core, the distant injector stacks, and the swirling, earth-and-sea-colored sphere of the captured wormhole itself. The thing grew larger as they watched, blotting out the last of the stars above, and the shadow of it fell across the mile-long crystal city beneath them.
“Daeman . . .” began Harman.
Daeman had already acted, twisting the throttle ring full over and looping up and over the tower, the city, the asteroid, diving for the great blue curve of the Earth even as the linear accelerator covered the last few hundred meters behind them.
For an instant the city towers were above them as the sonie looped, and then just slightly behind when the hurtling mass struck the city and the asteroid, the wormhole sphere crashing into the towers and the long city a second or two before the exotic-metal structure of the accelerator itself. The wormhole silently collapsed into itself and the accelerator seemed to accordion neatly into nothing, but then the full force of the impact became apparent as all three of the humans turned in their couches and craned their necks to see behind them.
There was no sound. That struck Daeman the hardest—the pure silence of the moment. No vibration. None of the usual earthly clues that some great cataclysm was taking place.
But taking place it was.
The crystal city exploded into millions upon millions of fragments, glowing glass and burning gas expanding outward in all directions. Great, ballooning balls of flame bulged outward a mile, two miles, ten miles, as if trying to catch the diving sonie, but then the huge fires seemed to fold inward—like a video image running in reverse—as the flames consumed the last of the escaping oxygen.
The city on the opposite side of the asteroid from the impact was propelled off the surface of the stony worldlet, coming apart in a thousand discrete trajectories as the glass and steel and pulsing exotic materials flew and blew apart, most sections celebrating their own separate orgies of destruction, punctuated everywhere with more silent explosions and self-consuming fireballs.
A second after the first impact, the entire, mile-long asteroid shuddered, sending concentric waves of dust and gas into space after the city debris. Then the asteroid broke apart.
“Hurry!” said Harman.
Daeman didn’t know what he was doing. He’d dived the ship toward Earth at full velocity, staying just ahead of the flames and debris and waves of frozen gases, but now various red and yellow and green alarms were showing all over the virtual control board. Worse than that, there was sound outside the sonie at long last—a suspicious hiss and crackle growing in seconds to a terrifying roar. Worst of all, an orange glow around the edges of the sonie was quickly turning into a sphere of flame and blue electrical plasma.
“What’s the matter?” shouted Hannah. “Where are we?”
Daeman ignored her. He didn’t know what to do with the throttle and attitude control. The roar rose in volume and the sheath of flames thickened around them.
“Are we damaged?” shouted Harman.
Daeman shook his head. He didn’t think so. He thought perhaps it had something to do with coming back into the Earth’s atmosphere at such speed. Once, at a friend’s house in Paris Crater, when Daeman was six or seven, despite his mother’s admonitions not to do so, he’d slid down a long banister, popped off onto the floor at high speed, and then slid on his bare hands and knees along his mother’s friend’s thick carpet. It had burned him badly and he’d never done that again. This friction felt something like that to Daeman.
He decided not to tell Harman and Hannah his theory. It sounded a little silly, even to himself.
“Do something!” shouted Harman over the roar and crackle all around them. Both men’s hair and beards were standing on end in the center of all this electrical madness. Hannah—bald, even her eyebrows gone—stared around her as if she’d wakened to madness.
Before the noise drowned out everything else, Daeman shouted at the virtual controls, “Autopilot!”
“Engage autopilot?” The sonie’s neutral voice was almost inaudible under the entry roar. Daeman could feel the heat through the forcefield and knew that couldn’t be good.
“Engage autopilot!” shouted Daeman at the top of his lungs.
The forcefield fell in on the three humans, squeezing them tightly to their couches as the sonie flipped upside down and the stern engines fired so fiercely that Daeman thought his teeth were going to rattle out of his head. His arm hurt terribly under the deceleration pressure.
“Re-enter on pre-programmed flight path?” the sonie asked calmly, speaking like the idiot savant it was.