As the door swung closed behind him, Rolls heard her cry, “There’s nothing to change!”
There was no doubt in her voice; but Rolls thought he heard sadness.
Chapter Five
“There are no abnormal emanations from the target zone,” said the artificial intelligence controlling Hansen’s intrusion capsule.
In its current mode, the capsule’s radiation on all spectra was as close to zero as Consensus technology could arrange. That meant Hansen had no radar, no lasers—no emission rangefinding of any sort. He was dependent on the target to reveal itself when the intrusion capsule got close enough.
If North had managed to blank out a planet as thoroughly as Consensus scientists had shielded this capsule, the two were going to intersect with what would seem to be a hell of a jolt from Hansen’s side.
“On a dark stormy night . . . ,” Hansen sang.
Hansen had a pleasant voice, but he couldn’t carry a tune even on a good day.
“. . . as the train rattled on. . . .”
A good day was one on which Hansen wasn’t scared and strapped into a seat with only the dim blue numerals of the console to illuminate his surroundings. In low-observable mode, the AI shut down all non-essentials so that there was as little energy as possible to be trapped within the hull as heat.
It was out of his hands. There was nothing to expect from the next few moments except death, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. He’d been shot at before, but it wasn’t like that. Then he’d had a gun in his hand or at least the chance of getting to a gun. . . .
“. . . one young man with a babe in his arms,” Hansen sang tunelessly, “who sat there with a bowed down head.”
His palms were sweaty, his skin prickled, and he figured he knew now what it was like to be under artillery fire where life or death were at the whim of entities in the invisible distance.
“The calculated time of arrival is five seconds—” said the artificial intelligence.
There was no lack of data for the calculations—
“Four—”
—because the Consensus handlers had watched three fleets vanish at the intersection point.
“Three—”
The voices in the mist might think an intrusion capsule—
“Two—”
—could slip through where a fleet couldn’t, but Hansen didn’t believe that.
“One—”
If it wasn’t impact and instantaneous death waiting, what—
“N—” said the artificial intelligence, the first grunt of “Now!” before it cut off and the console display went dead black.
Hansen listened to the sound of blood coursing through the veins of his ears.
The next line of the song went, `The innocent one began crying just then . . .’ Hansen would’ve kept singing to show the bastards somewhere that being trapped in limbo until his air supply failed didn’t terrify him; but his mouth was too dry to form the words.
The hull of the capsule quivered. One of the hull plates shifted like a shingle that had rotted away from the staple holding it to the wall.
Light bathed Hansen through a crack that widened as the plate fell off completely. The capsule’s three-layer coating of absorptive materials had already sloughed like the carcase of a beached jellyfish.
The console displays were still dead.
Hansen should’ve been dead also. The amount of heat or other radiation it would take to make the capsule disintegrate would carbonize a human being before he knew what was happening.
Not that Hansen did know what was happening.
Three more hull plates fell away, clanging against one another and, more mutedly, on the ground beneath.
Hansen still couldn’t see much, just blue sky with some impressive cumulus clouds in the distance. He hit the quick-release plate in the center of his restraints and rose with a neutral look on his face.
Hansen was more than 200 meters in the air, on top of a huge building. He was looking out over the neat patterns of farmland, and—
The floor of the intrusion capsule gave way and dropped Hansen thirty centimeters to the ground. That shouldn’t’ve been unexpected, the way the upper hull was crumbling, but everydamnthing was a surprise just now. The read-outs and touch-sensitive panels on the console all had a frosted look as though they were withering under extreme heat.