Century Rain Part 75

But Auger had no idea how to turn off the automated voice messages. Almost as soon as the first one had ended, another chimed in, informing them that safe radiation limits for the crew had now been exceeded.

Then they hit again, and rebounded, and hit again, and then the nose of the transport came around through sixty degrees, so that the next kick imparted a sickening roll to their motion, which only became worse with the next collision. With each rotation, Auger was pushed into her seat and then dragged out of it, her entire body straining against the webbing. The wound in her shoulder, numb for hours, now began to rea.s.sert its presence. The stress-energy contours were flowing too fast to read, the interpretive system just as confused as Auger. Not that it made a d.a.m.ned bit of difference. When you had lost all control, flying blind was almost a mercy.

Something else was ripped away from the hull with a squeal of tortured metal. She felt a pop in her skull as the air pressure suddenly notched down.

"We just lost-" She did not have time to complete her sentence. Air shrieked out of the cabin, becoming thinner with every breath. Through blurred eyes, she saw Floyd's panicked expression as his body was buffeted to and fro by the same cartwheeling motion that was shoving her in and out of her seat. She struggled to reach her good arm up, feeling as if she had to push a boulder out of the way. Her hand closed around the striped yellow toggle of the emergency mask hatch. She pulled it down, cursing the system that should have dropped the mask automatically. She pressed the hard plastic of the mask to her face and took a cold and instantly reinvigorating breath.

She motioned for Floyd to do the same and waited impatiently while he located his mask and slipped it on gratefully. "Can you hear me?" she asked.

"Yes," he said at last, but his voice sounded thin and distant.

"The blow-out's stabilised. I think we're down to about a third of normal operating pressure. We'll need to keep-"

The words were jolted away from her as the careering, tumbling ship smashed itself against the wall again. She heard more chunks of hull ripping away. Most of the displays were by now either dead or showing nothing comprehensible. Auger tried to focus on the ETA, but even that kept changing, varying by tens of minutes with each rotation as the ship reinterpreted its tunnel speed. Another jolt followed, sending a compression wave up her backbone that whiplashed her skull against the back of the seat.

She blacked out for an instant, drifting back to consciousness through a b.l.o.o.d.y haze of red-tinged tunnel vision. Her hands seemed impossibly distant and ineffectual, anch.o.r.ed to her body by the thinnest of threads. Her thoughts were foggy, unfocused. She was dreaming this, surely? No, she wasn't: she was in it. But even the prospect of imminent death had lost some of its edge now. Perhaps blacking out really wasn't such a bad option after all...

She looked at Floyd and saw his head lolling from one side of the chair to the other as the ship rotated. His mouth was open, as if in a gasp of ecstasy or dread. His eyes were narrow, pink-tinged slits and fresh blood seeped from beneath his bandage.

Floyd was out cold.

The ship kept tumbling; tumbling and crashing and slowly dying. Auger tried to press herself more tightly into her seat, clutching the armrests and stiffening her torso against the padded back. From a distance, as if from another room, a woman's voice said, "Warning. Final approach to portal in progress. Final approach to portal in progress. Please ensure all systems are stowed and all crew members are braced for deceleration procedure. Failure to comply..."

"Please shut the f.u.c.k up," Auger said, and then prayed for unconsciousness.

The jolting and buffeting reached a climax. There was an instant-it couldn't have lasted more than two or three seconds-when it seemed completely impossible that either the ship or its fragile human cargo would survive the next few heartbeats. The rapidity and severity of the collisions were just too severe.

But the end never came.

The tumbling continued, but-with the exception of the occasional thud or b.u.mp-the brutal collisions ceased. Even the tumbling settled down, becoming regular and almost tolerable. Once again, it was as if the transport had sailed off the edge of a precipice and was now in a deceptive free fall: a spiteful remission from the damaging impacts that were bound to resume at any moment.

But they didn't.

"Numbers," Auger mumbled through a bloodied, swollen tongue.

But the numbers told her nothing. The ship had finally become blind and senseless, unable to a.s.semble any coherent picture of its surroundings. A change in the tunnel geometry, Auger thought-that was the only thing that could explain what had just happened. The collapse process must have somehow caused the end of the tunnel near the throat they were approaching to swell wider, increasing the diameter of the tunnel so that the transport had much further to travel between impacts with the sides.

She could think of no other explanation. They had certainly not undergone the crushing deceleration that would have been necessary to halt them within the recovery bubble. And they were still tumbling. The ship hadn't been caught or snared or arrested by anything.

But the tunnel would have had to swell ludicrously wide. They hadn't suffered a serious impact for at least two minutes, just those minor knocks. Had the picture changed so dramatically that those were, in fact, the glancing impacts? Had the tunnel walls become softer somehow, better able to absorb the collisions?

Another thud, and then something even stranger: a drumlike pitter-patter of tinier thuds, like rain.

Then nothing.

Floyd made a groaning noise. "I wish those elephants would stop sitting on my head," he said.

"Are you all right? What do you remember?"

"I remember thinking I needed a new career." He touched the side of his head, straining to hold up his

hand against the centrifugal effect of their tumbling motion. "Are we dead yet, or is it just me who feels

that way?"

"We're not dead," she answered. "But I don't know why not. We haven't had a major collision for a few minutes, but we're still spinning."

"I noticed. You have a theory for this state of affairs?"

"No," she said. "Nothing that makes any sense."

It was, she realised, very quiet. The ship made little creaking and groaning sounds, but there were no

klaxons blaring, no pre-recorded voices announcing impending disaster. It was exactly as if they were tumbling through...

"Can you make sense of those numbers?" Floyd asked, interrupting her train of thought.

"No," she said. "The ship hasn't got a clue where it is. What it's showing would only make sense if we'd left the portal behind. Which, obviously-"

"Maybe if we opened the window shields, we might have a better idea," Floyd suggested.

"You open those windows in mid-tunnel, you'll be wearing dark gla.s.ses for the rest of your life."

"I always thought they suited me. Can't you crank the blinds open just a crack? It might tell us

something."

She groped for an objection, but found none that she thought likely to convince him. Besides, he was

right: at the very least it would tell them something, even if the information had no practical value. But she would still rather know where she was. It was, she supposed, a basic human need.

"I don't even know if they'll open," she said, "after the pounding we took back there."

"Just try it, Auger."

She folded down the control console and found the switch that operated the armoured window shutters. Just when she had convinced herself that nothing was going to happen-that the shutters must be buckled tight-a fan of hard light cleaved the cabin in two. One of the shutters was broken, but the other was still operational. She allowed it to open to the width of three fingers, then held it at that position.

She squinted, raising a hand to shield her eyes. After more than a day in the subdued lighting of the cabin, the glare was intensely bright. But it was not the murderous electric-blue radiance of the tunnel.

The light blinked out.

The light returned.

"It's timed with our rotation," she said after a moment. "It's as if there's a light source to one side of us, rather than all around us."

"Does that make any sense?"

"No. But then neither does the fact that we're alive."

Floyd's seat was positioned too far from the window to let him see through it. "Can you see anything

you recognise?" he asked.

"No," Auger said. She allowed the shutter to open to its fullest extent, but she could still only tell that

there was a light source somewhere outside. "I'm going to leave my seat, see if I can get my head closer to-" "Easy, soldier. That's not a job for someone in your condition." Floyd was already trying to extricate himself from his seat harness, his fingers sliding over the complex plastic buckles.

"You can talk."

The harness released him. The tumbling continued, but because it was now regular and confined to one

axis of rotation, Floyd was able to push himself out of the seat without too much difficulty. He used one arm to brace himself against the cabin wall, and another to lever himself closer to the window, keeping one foot hooked around the rest at the base of the seat.

"Careful, Floyd," Auger said, as he pressed his face to the gla.s.s. "Do you see anything out there?" "There's a bright light off to one side," he said. "I can't see it directly. But there is something else out there."

"Describe it."

"It comes into view once every rotation. It's like..." He adjusted his position, the effort etched in his

face. "A bright smudge. Like a cloud, with lights in it. Lights around it, as a matter of fact. Some of

them moving, some of them flashing. There are dark things in front of the cloud, moving outwards." She tried to visualise whatever it was he was seeing, and drew a comprehensive blank. "That's it? That's all you can see?"

"That's about the size of it."

"Well, what colour is it?"

Floyd looked back at her. "I don't know. I'm not exactly the guy to ask when it comes to colours."

"You mean you're colour-blind?" Despite her fears, she couldn't help but laugh.

"Hey, isn't that a little rude?"

"I'm not laughing at you, Floyd. I'm laughing at us. We make quite a pair, don't we? The colour-blind

detective and the tone-deaf spy."

"Actually, I meant to ask you about..." But Floyd trailed off. "Auger, you may not want to hear this, but d.a.m.ned if that thing doesn't seem to be getting smaller." Whatever Floyd was seeing, it bore no relationship to anything Auger had been told to expect during her mission briefing. It meant, surely, that something very odd and unantic.i.p.ated had happened to them.

She felt a p.r.i.c.kle of comprehension, like an itch at the back of her head. "Floyd, I think I have an idea-"

"There's something else out there as well. It's very big. I can just see the edge of it."

"Floyd, I think we've slipped into a different part of the hyperweb. Skellsgard said there was no way any

other tunnel could intersect with the one we were in...but what if she was wrong?" Auger forced herself to calm down and speak more slowly. "What if there was a junction, and we found it by accident when we were bouncing around back there? Or what if we hit the wall so hard we actually punctured it and slipped through into an adjacent part of the network?"

"Are you listening to me, Auger?" Floyd said, staring at her as if she'd gone completely insane. "I'm telling you there's something really, really big out there."

"The light source?"

"No. Not the light source. It's on the other side of the sky. It almost looks like..."

Auger reached out to the console panel again. "Get back in your seat. I'm going to try something

hopelessly optimistic."

"My kind of girl. What are you going to do?"