He felt oddly calm. Almost happy. He might not succeed in damaging the cloud, but he’d strike a blow. Make it recognize he was there.

And he wondered if, somewhere deeper than his conscious mind had been able to go, he had foreseen this eventuality, had almost planned it. It accounted for his intense interest in the Hawksbill, his drive to have Julie explain everything.

The possibility strengthened his resolve, suggested that he would be successful after all, that there was something at work here greater than he knew. A destiny, of sorts. He didn’t believe in such nonsense, and yet now, in these final moments, it was a possibility to which he could cling.

He found the manual controls and flicked them on. Watched lights come up. He told it to activate the engines. Go to jump.

A voice, not Bill’s, responded. “Unable to comply. The unit is not charged.”

“Override all injunctions.”

“Unable to comply.”

“This is Juliet Carson. Override.”

“Please enter code.”

Well, he’d expected it. But the system was designed to prevent tinkering, and not outright sabotage.

There was an explosion up front somewhere. Near the bridge.

He aimed the laser cutter, ignited it, and took a long look at the engine. The design of these things hadn’t changed much since his day.

He applied the torch to the metal and prayed for time. Cut through the outer housing. Cut through the protective shell. Get to the junction box, the same device that had failed in the fusion engines.

It was hard work because he needed the lamp to see into the housing. So he had to use a hand to hold the lamp, and a hand to hold the cutter, and a hand to keep from floating away.

But finally he was in.

And it was simply a matter of removing the flow control, and power would pass into the system and start the jump process. Or in this case, because the protective bubble wasn’t adequately charged, it would release some antimatter fuel and blow the ship into oblivion. Maybe, if he was extraordinarily lucky, it would find a vulnerable spot in whatever system controlled the cloud. And put it out of action, too.

It wasn’t much of a chance, but it could happen.

He thought of calling Kellie, of telling her how sorry he was, of letting her know it was moments away. But it would be better not to. More compassionate. Let it come as a surprise.

He would have preferred to wait until he got deeper into the cloud. But he had no way of knowing when the power would fail altogether. And then he’d have nothing.

Another Klaxon started, and shut down. He sliced the flow control.

LIBRARY ENTRY

Sometime within the next few days, the civilization which refers to itself as Korbikkan, which we call Goompah, will be wiped out. The omega will collide with their world and devastate its handful of cities while we sit watching placidly.

So far, there is no word of any serious action being taken on their behalf, no indication we have planned anything except to try a decoy, and if that doesn’t work, which it clearly won’t, we’ll make it rain, and then claim we tried to help. The problem is that the effort, such as it is, is being run by the usual bureaucrats.

It’s too late for the Goompahs, I am sorry to say. And the day is coming when another crowd of bureaucrats of the same stripe will be charged with rescuing us from the same unhappy result. It gives one pause.

— Carolyn Magruder Reports

UNN broadcast

Monday, December 8, 2234

On the ground at Roka.

Monday, December 8.

DIGGER HAD JUST finished inserting a projector under the roof overhang of a shop that sold fish when the news came.

“They’re off the circuit.” Julie’s voice. “All channels.”

It was probably just a transmitter glitch. But a terrible fear clawed at him. He should have refused to let her go. He’d known from the beginning that he should have kept her away from that thing. He could have simply raised so much hell that they’d have backed off. If Collingdale wanted to go, let him go. But let Bill take him. Why did he have to have Kellie along?

“Digger? Do you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t mean there’s a major problem.”

“I know.” He was standing on top of a storage box, and he didn’t want to come down. Didn’t want to move. “Pick us up,” he said. “I’ll get Whit.”

Whit tried to be reassuring, thing like this you always think the worst, she’s a good pilot. They decided where they’d meet, and Digger passed the word to Julie. An hour later they were back on the Jenkins, leaving orbit.

THE RUN OUT to the cloud took four hours. It was a frantic four hours for Digger, who tried tirelessly to raise the Hawksbill, and for the others, who didn’t know what to say to him.

When they arrived in its vicinity, they found the box kite, cruising quietly ahead of the omega, gradually pulling away from the giant. Bill reported that he was in contact with the surveillance packages the Hawksbill had been using to monitor the omega.

“But I do not see the Hawksbill itself,” he added.

There was no wreckage, no indication what could have happened.

They must have gotten too close.

Each of them, in turn, said much the same thing. Even Digger admitted the ship was lost, had to be lost, no other explanation for it. Yet he could not believe Kellie was gone. She was too smart. Too alive.

“They’d have let us know if they were in trouble, wouldn’t they?” he demanded of Julie.

“Maybe they didn’t have time. Maybe it happened too quickly.”

For a while, they lived with the hope that the cloud was between them and the Hawksbill, that it had somehow blocked off the ship’s transmissions as it was now preventing a visual sighting. But Digger knew the truth of it, although he would not accept it, as if refusing to do so kept her chances alive. He walked through the ship in a state of shock.

Julie invited him onto the bridge, tried to find things for him to do. In his heart he damned Collingdale, and damned Hutchins for sending him.

He could not have told anyone what time of day it was, or whether they were actively searching or just going through the motions, or whether there was anyplace left to look. He listened to Bill’s reports, negative, negative, to Marge and Whit talking in whispers, to Julie talking with Bill and maybe sending off the news to Broadside.

And he became aware that they were waiting for him to say the word, to recognize that there was no way the Hawksbill could be intact without their knowing, that it was hopeless, but that they would not stop looking until he told them to do so.

There was always a chance they were in the shuttle, he told himself. The shuttle could easily be hidden among all the jets and dust and shreds and chunks of cloud, its relatively weak radio signal blown away by the electrical activity in the area.

It was possible.

THE FIRST INDICATION there might be something out there came in the form not of a radio signal, but, incredibly, of a sensor reading of a small metal object, glimpsed briefly and then lost.

“Metal,” said Julie. “It was small.”

“The shuttle?”

“Smaller than that.”

The return of hope was somehow painful. He could lose her again.

“Where?” demanded Digger.

“Hold on.” The area around the cloud was a vast debris field.

Bill drew a vector. “Somewhere along that line.”

They picked it up again. “I believe,” said the AI, “it’s a set of air tanks.”

Air tanks? Then somebody was attached to them, right?

“Negative,” said Bill. “Tanks only.”

They tracked them and took them on board. Saw the Hawksbill label on the shoulder strap. Noted that they were exhausted.

“They’re out there,” said Digger. Julie nodded. Empty tanks meant someone had used them for six hours, then discarded them. You only did that if you had a spare set of tanks.

At least one of them was still afloat.

They checked the time: ten and a half hours since the signal had been lost. Six hours to a set of tanks.

How many spares could you carry?

Then Bill announced he’d picked up a radio signal.

KELLIE BURST INTO tears when they hauled her inside. Tough, stoic, always in control, she let them remove her tanks and go-pack and shut off the suit, and she made no effort to restrain her emotions. Her right arm was broken, and she had a few torn ligaments and a bunch of bruises, but she was alive and that was all that mattered.

She smiled weakly at Digger and told Bill she wished he were human so she could kiss him.

Bill promptly appeared, his younger, lean, devil-may-care version, with dark hair and dark skin and dark eyes that literally flashed.

“He’s gone,” she said of Collingdale. “He stayed with the Hawksbill.” She explained how it had lost power, how Collingdale had refused to abandon it, had decided they couldn’t survive, that he would ride it inside the cloud and detonate the Hazeltines.

“It doesn’t look as if he did any lasting damage,” said Whit.

“No,” agreed Bill. “The cloud will make its rendezvous with Lookout.”

Julie looked puzzled. “How’d you get clear? Of the blast and the cloud? You couldn’t have done it with that.” She was looking at the go-pack.

Whit handed her a painkiller, and they were taking her back to the med station.

“There was a plume,” she said. “A jet stream. It only took a few minutes to get to it, and it blew me out of the neighborhood pretty quick.” She looked at her arm. “That’s where I took the damage.”

ARCHIVE

The gulfs between the stars overwhelm us, as the eons overwhelm our paltry few years of sunlight. We are cast adrift on an endless sea, to no purpose, with no destination, bound where no one knows.

— Dmitri Restov

Last Rites

LIBRARY ENTRY

Mary,

I’m sorry to tell you that we lost David this morning. We all admired him, and everyone here shares your grief. I’m sure you’ll be receiving official notification from the Academy in a few days.

It might console you to know that he died heroically, in the best of causes. His action here appears to have thrown the omega off schedule and thereby bought some time. It’s likely that many who would have been lost at the Intigo will survive as a result of your fiancé’s efforts.

— Julie Carson

December 8