Ran turned and looked behind him. The rest of the Cold Crew—his crew—had spilled out of the hatch and was moving along the hull. Some of the men were hidden beneath the massive curve.
Ran walked onward. He reached the third staple. From that point, he could see all of Engine 7, the pod and strutwork almost down to the hull. A Grantholm soldier was locking in a fresh fuel connector with his adjustment tool. He was a tracery of highlights rather than a figure. The submachine gun slung across his back distorted the image still further.
It was time. The Empress of Earth slid again into sponge space.
On the one hand, everything was light; on the other, Ran was blind, stone blind, because the impulses tripping his rods and cones had no connection with the code which those impulses would have represented in the sidereal universe. He could see nothing, no thing. Not the hull beneath his feet, not the gauntlet which held his safety line.
But he could feel the track against the side of his boot, and his hook snapped in a familiar way into the upstanding staple. Ran slid onward, with the three meters of his adjustment rod out before him.
He had a long way to go to reach Engine 3, but he might meet a Grantholm soldier at any point in the track. Ran’s first warning would be the shock of his tool’s contact. If that happened, he would withdraw the rod to his arm’s length, then ram it forward again.
Ran knew from one past experience that he could strike hard enough to put the tip of an adjustment tool through a suit and half the body within that suit
Ran was very well aware that the Cold Crewman following him was likely to do the same, even though the fellow knew there was a friendly on the track ahead. In the Cold, a mistake was something that got you killed. By extension, an action that didn’t get you killed wasn’t a mistake, or at any rate not a serious one.
Another twenty meters, another staple. Ran unhooked and brought his line forward hand-over-hand instead of with a clean jerk as before when he could see the hook coming. When he was on with the Cold, he could sense motion within its flaring emptiness, but he’d been away too long to trust his instincts now.
The chilling light flooded through his flesh and marrow. Even if he closed his eyes, he would see the swirls that were almost patterns. When he was in the Cold, Ran thought that the bubbles of sponge space might be alive, might be Life itself in the abstract.
Might be God; but if they were, God was Siva the Destroyer.
He had felt the Cold every night for ten years in his dreams, and now he was home again within its desolation.
Another staple. Another. At the fifth point, Ran didn’t bother to reconnect his line. It slowed him down and bound him to the universe of which his soul was no longer a part.
At the fifteenth staple, Ran Colville reached down and it was there, the hook of another safety line, and he’d seen it in the glaring night before his gauntleted fingers fondled the curve, the catch.
He released the Grantholmer’s line manually. Apart of Ran’s mind knew that he should have set his own hook, but his soul was one with a spacetime which hated the universe to which Mankind had been born.
With the cunning of a hyena poised to tear the face off a sleeping woman, Ran took up the slack in the unseen Grantholmer’s line. When he felt resistance, he gave a fierce left-handed tug.
Through blind light as penetrating as a sun’s heart, Ran saw the startled soldier lurching toward him, spinning; his limbs flailing, his tool flying off on a trajectory of its own as the man tried to grasp his slung weapon in a soldier’s reflex.
Ran’s right arm cocked his adjustment tool like a javelin for throwing. In the event, he didn’t bother to bring the tool forward in the smashing blow his intellect had intended. Instead, Ran pirouetted aside like a bullfighter.