Rakki remembered nothing of the fall or of landing. The next thing he was conscious of was lying on a rock shelf, his body racked with pain and impossible to move, one leg twisted under him in a way that he knew meant it was broken. Night was falling, and he was already stiff with cold.
PART TWO
The Sky Warriors
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Vicki had proposed the names in recognition of Emil Farzhin’s theories while the ship was still a collection of structural plans and design specifications in the computers of SOE’s Engineering and Development Division. The main body of the vessel, which would remain in orbit above Earth, was called Varuna, after one of the ancient Sanskrit deities associated with Venus. The inertial-fusion drive section formed a detachable, independently-operable unit capable of descent to the surface, where it could function in low-power mode as an MHD generating plant in the way the Tesla Center team had originally envisaged. This part was named Agni, one of the manifestations of proto-Venus that had brought fire down upon the Earth. The entire vessel was a no-frills, utility undertaking put together in minimal time, with space and comfort sacrificed to hold the greatest number of occupants consistent with carrying the essentials of materials and equipment for establishing a bridgehead presence on Earth. Follow-up missions to expand and build upon the pilot program were being fitted out back at Saturn.
A year and a half had gone by since Keene joined SOE at Foundation to head the Agni part of the design program, working directly under Mylor Vorse. A year and a half of grueling analysis and drafting sessions often lasting round-the-clock; of working with the groups involved with structural configuration, propulsion-power integration, communications and computation systems, instrumentation and control systems, life support systems; of supervising benchmarks, test rigs, scaling trials, attending team meetings, management meetings . . . By the ways he had known back on Earth, it would never have been possible. Static firings and full-system testing in orbit around Titan had followed; then, finally, a shakedown trip out to Phoebe, the outermost sizable moon of Saturn and back. . . .
And now, three months after the shakedown trials to Phoebe, Keene was once again in orbit above Earth. He floated weightless in one of the outer-hull observation bubbles—the Varuna’s construction had been too hasty an affair for elaborations involving gravity simulation—looking down at what until now he had seen only as images that robot reconnaissance orbiters had sent back to Saturn: the graveyard of everything he had once known.
The fires that had raged across huge areas had long ago been extinguished by massive precipitations from an atmosphere saturated with evaporated ocean water, but the pole-to-pole murk of cloud and airborne dust still concealed almost all of the surface detail. Descending air currents over northern Alaska and below Africa produced clearer patches that revealed occasional glimpses of the shifted, newly forming polar regions, but they meant little, even with the aid of radar-mapped coastal outlines superposed on the screen image showing on a console to one side. Images had also come back from probes sent down through the cloud cover and landed at a number of places. They showed mountains of storm-driven ocean crashing against the Appalachian chain, now a peninsula between the shrunken Atlantic and the new arm of sea inundating the American Midwest; the new upthrust mountain barrier named the Barbary range, following roughly the line of what had been western North Africa and walling in the lakes that remained of the Mediterranean basins; the confusion of continental fragments, islands, and waterways, where New Guinea, the eastern parts of Australia, adjacent former archipelagos, and uplifted crustal blocks seemed to be compressing together into a new land mass that had taken over the name Oceania; still smoldering carpets of ash that had been Siberian forests. . . . But contemplating it in solitude through his own eyes directly, without the intermediary of electronic representation, reawakened a sense of communion with the destroyed world that he had not known since the time, almost five years ago, when he looked down from a similar vantage point in orbit while awaiting rescue by the Osiris.