Century Rain Part 74

"We're in a heap of trouble, aren't we?"

"Yes," Auger said. "And I'm shot and not feeling at my sharpest. But we'll get out of this, don't you

worry."

"You sound rather sure of yourself."

"I didn't come all this way for nothing," she said, a frown of determination etched firmly into her

forehead. "I'm not going to let a little s.p.a.ce-time difficulty spoil my day."

"Why don't you get some rest," Floyd said, "see if you can catch some sleep before things get too b.u.mpy? I think I can just about cope with the ship at the moment."

"Are you a good driver, Floyd?"

"No," he said. "I'm a lousy driver. Custine always says I drive like a grandmother on Sunday."

"Well, that fills me with confidence," she said, reluctantly releasing control of the ship to Floyd and trying to relax.

Floyd took the joystick, feeling the slight lurch as the ship fell under his control. Perhaps it was his imagination, but the ride already felt rougher. It was as if they had left a smooth stretch of road and were now rumbling over a dirt track. Around the cabin, the fixed instruments and displays appeared slightly blurred. He squinted, but that did nothing to make the view clearer. Somewhere behind the metal panelling of the cabin, something made a shrill, tinny vibrating sound, as if it was about to work loose. Floyd tightened his grip on the joystick, wondering how bad things were going to get before they got better.

THIRTY.

Auger woke to intense turbulence, the ship shaking and shimmying as if only an instant away from swift annihilation. Through blurred, gummed eyes, she glanced at the princ.i.p.al instruments, remembering as much as she could of Skellsgard's technical briefing. The situation was acute: far, far worse than when she had gone to sleep. According to the numbers-and again, a lot depended on her imperfect interpretation of those dancing, tumbling digits-the collapsing end of the tunnel had almost caught up with them. Simultaneously, it had accelerated them even faster. It was as if they were caught in the pressure wave in front of an avalanche: pushed ahead, but with an ever-dwindling lead that would soon see them engulfed.

The ship was showing signs of mortal damage. Many displays were simply dead or showing only static. Some dials were inactive, jammed against their limits. Others were wheeling around like dervishes, spinning like the altimeter in a dive-bomber. The guidance display on her side of the cabin revealed ragged blind spots in the flowing contours of its stress-energy grid. In her mind's eye, she visualised critical machinery-sensors and guidance mechanisms-ripped clean away from the hull, trailing sizzling hot electrical ganglia with them. Warning lights were flashing, and yet the klaxons were mysteriously silent.

"Floyd," she said, her mouth sluggish and dry. "How long was I under?"

"A few hours," he said. He still had his hand on the joystick, and as she watched he made tiny, precise adjustments.

"A few? It feels like-"

"More than a few? It was probably more like six, or maybe even twelve. I don't know. I guess I lost count." He looked at her, his face a study in exhaustion. "How do you feel, kid?"

"Better," she said, rubbing experimentally at the wound. "Groggy...sore...but better. The UR must have eased the inflammation, taken care of the bleeding."

"Does that mean you'll hold together until we reach the end of this funfair ride?"

"Should do," she said.

"But you'll still need help when we arrive?"

"Yes, but don't worry about that. If we get there, they'll take care of me."

The ship veered violently, then knocked hard against something and slid on a sideways trajectory with

an ominous bone-crunching rumble. Floyd grimaced and pulled the joystick hard over. Auger heard the

sequenced pop of the steering jets and wondered how much propellant Floyd had already consumed

holding them together until now.

"I was out for twelve hours?" she said, his words just sinking in.

"Maybe thirteen. But don't worry about me. The time simply flew by."

"You did good getting us this far, Floyd. Seriously, I'm impressed."

He looked at her with a genuine and rather touching surprise, as if the last thing he had been expecting

was praise.

"Really?"

"Yes. Really. Not bad for a man who shouldn't exist. I just hope the effort will turn out to have been

worth it."

"You're still worried about what will happen at the other end?"

"We're going to pop out of this tunnel much faster than the system was ever designed to deal with-like

an express train hitting the buffers at full tilt."

"You have a bunch of people at the other end, right? People like Skellsgard?"

"Yes," she said, "but I don't know how much good they're going to be able to do. Even if we could

warn them...but we can't even get a message through to them. You can't bounce signals up the pipe while there's a ship in it. Not according to the book, anyway."

"Won't they have any warning at all?"

"Maybe. Skellsgard has equipment to monitor the condition of the link-but I don't know if it's going to

be able to tell her that the link itself is collapsing. But she also told me about something called bow-shock distortion. It's like a ripple we push ahead of ourselves, a change in the geometry of the tunnel propagating ahead of the transport. They have equipment to pick it up, so that they can tell when a ship is about to come through the portal. I think it gives them a few minutes' warning." Auger scratched at a crusty residue that had collected in the corner of one eye. It felt dense and geologic, hard and compacted like some mother lode of granite. "But that won't help us," she said. "They'll have even less warning than usual because we're going so much faster than we should be."

"There must be something we can do," Floyd said.

"Yes," Auger said. "We can pray, and hope that the tunnel doesn't speed us up any faster than we're already moving. Right now we might just walk out of this alive. Any faster, and I think we've had it."

"If we get to that point, would you mind not telling me? The coward in me would rather not know."

"The coward in both of us," Auger said. "If it's any consolation, Floyd, it'll be quick and spectacular."

She checked out the numbers again. No act of denial could avoid the fact that they were now travelling thirty per cent faster than the ship she'd taken on the inbound leg of the journey. The ETA now had the total trip taking less than twenty-two hours. Of that time, about sixteen hours had already pa.s.sed. And they were not getting any slower.

"Floyd," she said, "do you want to take a break? I can fly the ship for a while."

"In your condition? Thanks, but I think I can keep my eyes open for a few hours more."

"Trust me: it's going to take both of us to get this thing home."

Floyd studied her for a moment and then nodded, relaxed his grip on the joystick and almost immediately slumped back into his couch and into a deep sleep. It was as if he had given himself permission to slip into unconsciousness, after holding it at bay for so long by a sheer act of will. Auger wondered how many hours at sea had honed that particular skill and wished him sweet dreams, a.s.suming that he had the energy to dream. Perhaps unconsciousness would be the kindest state for both of them to be in, when the end approached.

"Find a way out of this," she said aloud, as if that might help.

The four hours that followed were the longest she could remember. She had taken the last of the UR pills, hoping that this was the right thing to do. For the first hour, she felt a shrill, slightly unnerving clarity of mind. It was like the ringing caused by a finger circling the wet rim of a wine gla.s.s. It felt fragile and not quite trustworthy, making her wonder if she was, indeed, making the right decisions, even when they felt absolutely, unquestionably correct. When, at last, that bell-clear intensity began to dull and she started to feel foggy-headed, unable to focus on any particular problem for more than a few seconds, it came as a kind of relief. At least now she had objective evidence that her thought processes were likely to be impaired. She could factor that dullness into her activities, allowing for it wherever possible. It was, she supposed, a measure of her lessening hold on reality that she could even consider this a minor victory.

The ship was moving even faster now: fifty per cent above conventional tunnel speeds, and still accelerating. By now, Auger had enough of a grasp of the numbers to estimate their emergence speed, and the news was not cheering. They would hit the Phobos portal at twice the expected rate, and even that was likely to be an underestimate, since the rate of acceleration was itself beginning to quicken as the geometry of the pinched tunnel underwent convulsive readjustments. The apparatus in the recovery bubble would never be able to cope with that kind of momentum. The transport would smash through the arrestor cradle and the gla.s.s sphere of the bubble, then smear itself against the plasticised walls of the chamber a couple of kilometres inside Phobos. It would be a very lucky day if anyone made it out of that mess alive, let alone Auger and Floyd.

Spectacular? h.e.l.l, yes.

But the speed hurt them in other ways. The forward-looking sensors had already been damaged by tunnel collisions, but even in those areas that were not affected by blind spots, the sensors could not peer far enough ahead to give ample warning of micro-changes in the tunnel structure. Obstacles and wrinkles that the guidance system could normally have coped with-steering around them with finessed, calibrated, fuel-conserving bursts of steering thrust-now came upon the ship too quickly for it to respond in time. The ship was still managing to dodge the worst of them, but the effort was draining the steering jets at a worrying rate.

But even that was not the main thing on Auger's mind. For a while, she did not even think about the problem of slowing down, or the bullet in her shoulder, or the Slasher activity in Paris.

She thought about Floyd, and how she was going to explain things to him.

Because with the tunnel unzipping behind them, Floyd was going to find it very difficult to make his way home. There would no longer be a hyperweb connection between Phobos and Paris; no way for him to make that return trip. Even if the two of them somehow survived the next few hours (and she preferred not to think about the odds of that), Floyd would still find himself marooned countless light-years from E2 and-more importantly-three centuries upstream in a future that didn't even regard him as a genuine human being, rather a very detailed living and breathing copy of one...a copy of a man who had lived and died in a time when the world still had a chance to fix the mess it was in. A man so happily ordinary that he hadn't left the faintest trace of himself in history.

Around two hours after he had slipped into unconsciousness, Floyd stirred beside her. There was no telling what had woken him: it could have been the increasingly rough ride, or the emergency klaxon that had just come on, accompanied by a recorded female voice calmly informing them that they were about to lose steering control.

"Is that as bad as it sounds?" Floyd asked.

"No," Auger said. "It's worse. A lot worse."

The guidance system had depleted most of the reaction ma.s.s in the steering jets. What was left would be good for about ten minutes...at most. Less if their speed kept increasing, which it showed every intention of doing. By Auger's reckoning, the pinch at the end of the tunnel had nearly caught up with them, and the pinch was still showing definite signs of acceleration. Maybe if she had Skellsgard's grasp of hyperweb theory, imperfect as it was, she might have been able to explain why that was happening and how it related to the underlying metric structure of the collapsing quasi-wormhole. Not that such knowledge would have been particularly useful in any practical sense, but...

"If we can't steer," Floyd said, "won't we crash into the walls? I mean, more than we've already been doing?"

"Yes," Auger said. "But the system reckons that we're only one hour from Phobos now-maybe less, depending on how much more we accelerate. There's a faint chance that the ship might hold together long enough to get us there, even with complete loss of guidance control. Emphasis on the 'faint.'"

"I won't pencil in anything for next week."

"It's going to be b.u.mpy-worse than anything we've experienced so far. And we'll still have the small problem of hitting the portal at two and a half times normal tunnel speed even if we make it that far."

"Let's just deal with one thing at a time, shall we? That friend of yours-Skellsgard?"

"Yes," Auger said.

"She sounded as if she knew what she was doing. She'll find a way out of this, if we can hold together until the end."

Poor Floyd, she thought, if only you knew what things are really like. The future might have been crammed with miracles and wonders, but it also offered truly awesome opportunities for s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up.

"I'm sure you're right," she said, doing her best to sound rea.s.suring. "I'm sure they'll think of something."

"That's the spirit."

"Final warning," the soothing feminine voice said. "Att.i.tude adjustment control will cease in ten... nine...eight..."

"Brace yourself, Floyd. And if you have any lucky charms, now might be the time to start sweet-talking them."

"Att.i.tude adjustment control is now off-line," the voice said, with a kind of cheery resignation.

For a deceptive ten or twenty seconds, the ride became dreamily smooth again. It was as if they had tobogganed off the edge of a cliff into the absolute stillness of midair.

"Hey," Floyd started to say, "that's not too-"

Then they hit something, the side of the ship grazing hard against the tunnel wall. It was a bigger jolt than anything they had experienced so far. They felt and heard an awful wrench as something large and metallic was plucked from the hull. Floyd grabbed the joystick and tried to correct their trajectory, but nothing he did had any effect on the oozing contours of the stress-energy display.

"It's useless," Auger said, with a stoic calm that even she found surprising. "We're in uncontrolled flight now." To emphasise this point, she released her own dead joystick and folded back the control console. "Just sit back and enjoy the ride."

"You're going to give up that easily? What if there's still some fuel left in the tanks?"

"This isn't a war film, Floyd. When the system says zero, it means it."

After the first collision, there was another hiatus as the transport rebounded to the other side of the tunnel. Auger still kept an eye on the grid and the cascading numbers. The ship's nose was beginning to point away from the direction of forward motion. There was going to be another bad jolt when they- The impact came sooner than she had antic.i.p.ated. It slammed through her like an electrical shock, snapping her jaw shut. She bit her tongue, tasted blood in her mouth. Warning lights flashed all around the c.o.c.kpit. One of the surviving klaxons came on, barking a two-tone scream into her skull. Another taped voice-it sounded suspiciously like the same woman-said, "Caution. Safe design limits for outer-hull integrity have now been exceeded. Structural failure is now a high likelihood event."

"Hey, lady!" Floyd said. "Tell us something we don't know!"