The Grantholm soldier slid past invisibly on a vector that took him clear of the starliner’s curved hull, off into an alien eternity. The victim must be screaming, but radio waves propagated as oddly as light did outside the sidereal universe. If the man was heard at all, it would be as a ghost whispering in the ears of Cold Crewmen unimaginably distant in time and space.
Ran Colville walked away from the track so that he would no longer be in the path of the crewman who followed him. There was nothing to do but wait, now, until the Empress dropped into star space and the Trident crew could return without danger from its own members.
Nothing to do but wait; and to feel the Cold drink him in; and to listen to the unheard screams of a Grantholm soldier whose death was a living sacrifice for Ran Colville.
* * *
“Ran,” the Cold said. He felt the word tremble through him. “Ran, come with me. Lift your right foot.”
His eyes opened. He stood in star space. The realization so shocked him that he flushed, and for a moment his skin burned as though he had been dropped into hot oil.
“Ran,” repeated the figure who held him. Their helmets were in contact, so Ran heard the words directly instead of through the radio link. “We’re going in now.”
“How l-long do we have before the next insertion?” Ran asked.
His voice cracked in the middle of the second syllable because his throat was dry. He must have been standing with his mouth open, hearing and seeing nothing, for—he couldn’t guess for how long.
Standing in the Cold, even though the Empress of Earth had returned to the sidereal universe at least once during the period.
The suited figure holding Ran jerked away. “You’re all right?” the voice said in amazement, through the helmet radio now. The voice was Wanda’s. She must have been calling to him as she trekked across the hull, unheard until their helmets made physical contact.
How long had he been mired in Hell?
“I’m fine,” he said, hoping that was the truth. “When do we reinsert?”
Ran began a swift, skidding pace in the direction Wanda urged him. He didn’t know where he was on the hull, didn’t know the hull of the Empress at all because each ship is different. He was fully aware that his safety line dangled loose, and that Wanda had loosed hers to fetch him from where he stood far from the tracks and staples.
“Not until Bridge recalibrates,” Wanda said. Their gauntleted hands, his left and her right, gripped, though the greater safety in the contact was spiritual, not physical. “And not until 1 bring you in. Commander Kneale promised that.”
“He’s alive?” Ran said. His mind fought its way to the surface through layers of icy, flaring slush. Memory of what had sent him onto the hull was slowly reasserting itself through the smothering Cold.
“He’s alive,” Wanda said. Her voice was detached. “We’re all alive, mostly. They killed a steward, nobody knows why. We found him in Corridor Six. And there was a passenger with her children, two little boys. They were hiding behind the counter of the Paris Bistro on Deck A and the soldiers thought they were us. . . .”
In the near distance, a Cold Crewman reset the nozzles of an engine pod manually. Delicate electronics failed quickly in sponge space, but men continued to do their jobs.
A figure shuffled across the hull toward Ran and Wanda. It carried something long and thin, but even in dim starlight the object didn’t appear to be an adjustment tool.
“So they killed them, the soldiers did,” Wanda continued in a voice as pale as the light of the distant galaxies. “And we killed the soldiers while they were looking the wrong way, Wade and Belgeddes killed them, and I did. And then we killed more soldiers.”
The third figure joined them. “Hold on to me,” an unfamiliar voice directed over the helmet radio. “I’ve hooked six safety lines together. No point in having a problem when we’ve gotten this far.”
“Wade?” Wanda said.