Reesa turned from trying to help the moaning, blinded Captain Bu. “Something’s shooting at us!” she gasped. “Oh, God! Those poor people down there! Jake’ll never get back now!”
And even in the shock and terror of that moment Viktor heard her use his name.
“We ought to get into space suits,” Viktor bawled, and then cursed himself. What space suits? They had all gone down to the surface with the landing party.
It was Captain Bu who best kept his head, in spite of terrible pain. He cupped his hands over his blasted eyes and shouted orders, instructions, and demands to be told what was going on.
There was a well-ordered drill for air-loss incidents. True, the drill assumed that the full ship’s company would be present to slap on the sticky patches and trigger the airtight door closings. Also true, the drill had been set up for a wholly different Ark, one that had not existed for decades, an Ark with all its pieces still intact. In the shedding of so much of the ship, to burn in the antimatter reactors or simply to be paradropped to the surface of Newmanhome, many storage spaces had been lost, or shifted around, and misplaced, and the unexpected strike from Nebo had completed the damage. The compartments where the sticktight patches were kept no longer existed.
And it no longer mattered, really. Patches wouldn’t do the job. Ark had not merely been holed, it had been gouged through by the laserlike blasts from the surface of Nebo. The part of the hull where the optics had been mounted was gone, burned away entirely; the ship was as blind as Captain Bu himself. Thruster fuel had exploded in another place. The whole center keel of the ship was bent; airtight doors weren’t airtight anymore. The only part that still maintained integrity—almost maintained it—was what was left of the old freezer compartment. Gasping in the rapidly thinning atmosphere, Reesa and Viktor tugged the blinded, moaning captain through the bulkhead hatch to the cryonics deck and dogged it shut.
“Wait!” Viktor cried. “What about Rodericks and the others?”
“Didn’t you see? They’re dead! Close that hatch!” Reesa shouted. And, when Viktor had it clamped, it was just in time. The air in the cryonics deck was thin, but at least its pressure remained steady.
“If those shots ever hit the antimatter . . .” Reesa whispered, and didn’t finish.
She didn’t have to. If whatever it was that was firing on them from the surface fired again, and if that shot were to strike the antimatter containment—then nothing else would count. There wasn’t much antimatter left in Ark’s fuel chamber, but if what was there got loose Ark would become a mere haze of ions.
She turned to the blinded Bu, while Viktor prowled restlessly around the freezer compartment, looking for he knew not what. A weapon? But there was no one nearer than the surface of Nebo to fight. No one had dreamed that Ark might ever need long-range weapons.
And no one had dreamed, either, that anything on the surface of Nebo might try to kill them. Viktor wondered if anyone in the lander had survived. More likely, they were dead already—as he and Reesa and Bu were likely to be, at any moment.
Then a thought struck him. Ark did have one serious weapon, of course . . .
He bounded back to where Reesa was trying to find something to bind Bu Wangzha’s burned-out eye sockets. “We could blow up the antimatter ourselves!” he cried.
Reesa turned and stared at him. “The radiation,” he explained. “If we set the antimatter off, the radiation would burn half the planet clean!”
She was staring at him unbelievingly. But she didn’t have to answer. Captain Bu spoke for her. “Let go of me, Reesa,” he said, sounding quite normal. He sat up, his hands over his destroyed eyes. He breathed hard for a moment, and then said, “Viktor, don’t be a fool. In the first place, we’re cut off from the controls. There isn’t any air there. And we shouldn’t blow up the planet anyway.”
Viktor averted his gaze from the horrible eye sockets. “At least we’d hurt them!” he said savagely.
Bu shook his sightless head. “We couldn’t destroy the whole planet. The most we could do is prove that we’re dangerous—and what if they then decide that the people on Newmanhome have to pay for our act? What chance would they have against something like those lasers?”
“What chance do they have now?” Viktor snarled.
“Not much,” Bu said calmly, “but better than we have up here. The air won’t last forever, and there’s no way we can get out of here.”
“So we’re dead!” Viktor snapped.
Bu gazed at him with the sightless eyes. Viktor averted his gaze, but the captain’s face was almost smiling. “If you’re dead,” he said, “you might as well be frozen.”
“What?”
“The freezers are still working, aren’t they? And even blind, I think I can get the two of you stowed away.”
“Captain!” Reesa gasped. “No! What would happen to you?”
“Exactly what will happen to all of us if we do nothing,” Captain Bu said comfortably. “Frozen, you have a chance to survive until—” He shrugged. “To survive for a while, anyway. Don’t worry about me. It’s a captain’s job to be the last to leave— and anyway, I have faith, you see. The Lord promised salvation and eternal bliss in heaven. I know He was telling the truth.” He grimaced against the pain, and then said in a businesslike way, “Now! You two get out the preparation boxes and the rest of the freezer equipment, and show me where everything is. If you start it, I think I can finish the job by touch.”
“Are you sure?” Reesa began doubtfully, but Viktor caught her arm.
“If he can’t, how are we worse off?” he demanded. “Here, Bu. This is the perfusor, these are the gas outlets . . .”
And he let the blind man do his job, fumblingly as he did, even while the hulk of the old ship shook every now and then with some new blow or some fresh excursion of the control rockets. It was the only chance they had—but he knew it was a forlorn hope. It was being done wrong, all wrong . . .
And it was wrong, a lot wronger still, when he opened his caked, sore eyes and looked up into the eyes of a red-haired woman in a black cowl. It wasn’t until she said, “All right, Vik, can you stand up now?” that he realized she was his wife.
“You aren’t Captain Bu,” he told her.
“Of course not,” she said, sobbing. “Oh, Viktor, wake up! Captain Bu’s been dead for ages. Everybody has! It’s been four hundred years.”
CHAPTER 13
The slow approach of old Ark didn’t frighten the matter-copy on Nebo. Still, caution was built into Five, and it watched the thing very carefully.
Five had plenty of time for watching. Once its little fleet of stars was well launched on its aimless flight—really aimless, because it was not to anywhere, simply away—Five had very little to do.
That wasn’t a problem. Five didn’t become bored. It was very good at doing nothing. It simply waited there on its slowly cooling little planet, observing the dimming of its star as the stellar energies were drained away into the gravitational particles that drove the cluster along. Five didn’t have much in the way of “feelings,” but what it did have was a sort of general sense of satisfaction in having accomplished the first part of its mission. It did, sometimes, wonder if there was meant to be a second part. For Five the act of “wondering” did not imply worry or speculation or fretting over possibilities; it was more like a self-regulating thermostat constantly checking the temperature of its process batch, or a stockbroker glancing over his stack of orders before leaving for the day, to make sure none remained unexecuted. Five was quite confident that if Wan-To wanted anything else from it, Wan-To would surely let it know.
All the same, it was, well, not “startled,” but at least “alerted to action,” when it detected the presence of an alien artifact approaching its planet.
Five knew what to do about it, of course. Its orders included the instruction to protect itself against any threat; so when the thing fired a piece of itself toward the planet’s surface, Five simply readjusted some of its forces and fired high-temperature blasts of plasma at both the object in orbit and the smaller one entering the atmosphere. When it was sure neither was functioning any longer, Five deployed a small batch of graviphotons to move the larger object away from its presence—not far; just in a sort of elliptical orbit that would keep it out at arm’s length.
That left the part that was already in Nebo’s atmosphere.