Duun and he both went down, rolled, and the truck lurched into motion, leaving the plane dwindling behind. On the horizon more suns burst, and one flowered in the sky and faded in a smudge of smoke.
Duun held onto him. Thorn trembled, felt Duun unfasten his mask for him and let him fill his lungs with cold gasps of air. Duun clenched him the tighter as the truck whined and jolted and the gantry towered into view, white girders against the smoke-ravaged sky. It braked. “Out,” Duun said, and helped him balance as he got up, vaulted the rear of the truck to the ground and was there to steady him when his feet hit the pavement.
“Come on. Run!” Duun dragged him for the gantry, for the white wall that was a shuttle fin. There was an elevator, its door open, and a woman who motioned at them hurry, hurry, in a violence like an oath. They made it in: the woman shut the door and moved a bar-switch that set them moving up. The whole elevator reeked of their suits and sweat and fear, and Thorn staggered as it lifted. Duun’s hand met his chest. “Hold on, dammit, Thorn! Hold on!”
Thorn locked his knees, leaned on the wall with his forearm. Girders whipped past the window in a blur; then the woman jammed down the switch and the car slammed to a stop. The door opened, showing them a thick-walled open hatch.
“Come on,” Duun said, and shoved Thorn into it and followed. Thorn looked back in distress as explosions came like distant thunder.
Still outside, the woman swung the hatch shut, disappearing in a diminishing crescent of the murky sunlight. Thump. (What about her?) The world seemed an unsafe place, no place to leave alone. But Duun spun him about and all but threw him into a seat in this cubbyhole of a place, one of three seats built flat on this dimly lighted floor.
“Belt in,” Duun said, and Thorn groped for belts as Duun fell into his seat and got them, fastened them for him and got his own helmet off. Duun hugged it to his breast and pushed a button on the arm of the seat. “We’re set, we’re set back here.”
“Understand you clear.”
Thorn stripped his helmet off with his wrists; Duun helped him, bent and stowed it in a bin in the floor beside his seat. The lid latched and echoed hollowly. Thorn lay there breathing in great gasps while Duun secured his own belts. “They’re waiting on the attendant to get down the escape route,” Duun said, his own head back, his eyes shut. “Driver of that truck’s got to get out too.”
“What about the plane?”
“Maran and Koga-they’re headed out and over to Drenn. Refuel and up again.It’s their wing that’s taking the beating out there. They’ll have a window-ours: they’ve got to take that missile screen down again for us to clear this port.”
(People are dying. Everywhere those shells go off. All those people-)
A thunder began to grow. (They’re hitting close to us.) Sweat flooded Thorn’s body in a sickly sense of doom; then the sound went to his bones and the force came down on him, dizzying and all-encompassing. Another thunder began, pieces of the ship rattling, as if it was all coming apart. (We won’t make it, we won’t make it-some missile will stop us.)
The weight grew, pressing him down into the couch.
They were leaving the world. Everything. There was void ahead, incomprehensible and without end.
(I looked up at the moon and tried to see where they were, but of course I couldn’t.)
(The world’s wide, minnow, wider than you know.)
(The world’s beautiful. Haven’t you seen it in pictures?)
* * *
* * *
XIV
There was peace, eerie peace and stillness, in which moving cost little and breathing cost far less. A gentle air touched Thorn’s face and a breeze stirred against his cheek.
Duun floated above him, balanced crazily on one arm that gripped the back of the seat. Thorn blinked, and Duun freed him of the restraints. A little move of Thorn’s arm against the seat freed him from the cushion.