The Rescue Page 3

  Raedawn didn’t hear all that rationale. All she heard was, “You don’t know what’s useless.” She stood up and flung the data screen to the floor, where it bounced once in the light gravity and spun around on one corner for a second before it landed facedown.

  “I know you’re useless! You measure this and calculate that, but when it comes time to actually do something, you just sit back and watch it happen!” She clenched her fists, visibly struggling for control.

  He scooted away and stood up himself. “Hey, I didn’t see you doing much, either, but I didn’t—”

  “Damn you!”

  “—accuse you of being a slacker. There’s nothing either one of us could have done.”

  “Well, there should have been.”

  He slapped the fingers of his right hand into the palm of his left. “Like what? Name something. Tell me, and I’ll do it.”

  She opened her mouth to shout at him, but all she could say was, “You—you—arrgh!” She clenched her teeth and growled like a cornered animal. The sound raised the hackles on David’s neck.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” he said, holding out his hands. “Take it easy.”

  “Take it easy? Take it easy? Earth gets sucked into the void and you want me to take it easy? Well, screw you, Mister Rational Block of Ice. Get the fuck out of my comm shack.” She took a step forward.

  He took another step back. He wasn’t about to let her push him out the door. “Come on, Raedawn, I know you’re upset, but there’s no reason to get mad at me. I didn’t do anything.”

  “Exactly! You didn’t do a goddamn thing. So go do something now. Take your precious data”—she turned to the main control console and yanked the continuous memory backup module from its socket—“and go do something useful with it.” She shoved it at him, would have punched him in the gut with it if he hadn’t stepped back again.

  Giving him the backup was a useless gesture since the whole base was networked, but he took it from her outstretched hand anyway.

  “Go on, get out of here!”

  “All right, I’m going.” He sidled past her and walked to the door, then turned around and said, “Look, I’m sorry. I honestly don’t know what else I could have done. But I promise if I figure anything out, you’ll be the first to know.”

  She kicked at the screen on the floor. It skittered across the polished lava and banged into one of the equipment racks, still displaying the magnetic field strength as it tumbled. “I don’t give a shit if you tell me. Just do it.”

  David shook his head sadly and stepped into the tunnel corridor, then closed the door softly behind him. His footsteps echoed down the tunnel as he made his way back toward the lab. There was never anybody in this end of the colony, but all of a sudden it seemed even emptier than before. Kuranda and his soldiers were off getting themselves killed for supplies, and who knew where the others were. David wondered if they even knew what had happened yet.

  He stopped in the middle of the tunnel and looked back the way he had come. Beyond the comm center, strung out like beads on a necklace, were the administration offices, barracks, and so on. The few people who hadn’t gone on the Tithonium raid must have heard the commotion and asked what was up, must have tapped into the telescope feed and watched the same events unfold from wherever they were, but he didn’t know that for sure.

  If there was anyone who didn’t know, David envied them their ignorance. Let them keep it a little longer.

  He turned back toward the lab and walked slowly down the corridor, thinking. Desperately thinking, to banish the horror that lurked in the back of his brain. Zero-point energy. Intense magnetic field strength. Plasma. Where did it come from?

  Where was it going?

  4

  The nuclear generator was still waiting for David when he entered the lab. He studied it for a moment, then shrugged and flipped on the power. The base was going to need every bit of equipment functioning at peak efficiency if they were to survive.

  He wondered how Kuranda was doing. If the operation succeeded, David knew he would hear about it soon enough, over and over again from every soldier involved.

  And if it failed? He tried not to think about what it would be like to cower underground for the rest of his life, hiding from hostile troops while he and the others waited for some vital system or another to break down beyond repair. Life on Mars would be hard enough even if Kuranda and his troops could conquer the whole planet. If they lost their first battle, the survivors could look forward to the life Hobbes had attributed to man in a state of nature: nasty, brutish, and short.

  The whole point of civilization was to prevent such savagery. It often didn’t, but David preferred it to the alternative. Civilization was humanity’s only hope of survival.

  The lasers were once again making their six-sided star-burst pattern. He checked to make sure the magnetic containment field was switched off—it wouldn’t do to have an open fusion reaction only centimeters from his face!—then he leaned in to see the focal point while triggering the deuterium injector.

  There was a brief flash of brilliant red light as a microgram or so of deuterium vaporized in the lasers’ focus. It flared out in a teardrop shape with the tail pointing to the right; that meant the injector was aimed slightly left of dead center. More of the reactant was being vaporized on that side.

  He adjusted the vernier control a few arc-seconds to the right and tried again. Egg-shaped this time. A few more arc seconds and it was a perfect sphere. Just to make sure, he adjusted it farther, and smiled when he saw another red plasma egg with the narrow end pointing to the left instead. He adjusted it back to center and closed the access hatch, sealing off the reaction chamber, then with a grunt from the effort he lifted the lead radiation-shielding collar off the workbench and slid it into place over the top.

  When the generator was fully assembled, there would be another shield over the whole works to keep its intense magnetic fields from interfering with electronics, but he didn’t bother with that now. He wasn’t running anything sensitive at the moment, and there was plenty of rock between him and the comm center to keep the field from interfering much with signals there. Besides, he was only going to test it for a few seconds. Even if it did scramble communications, it would be over before anybody cared. It wasn’t like there was anything out there to receive anymore.

  The lights dimmed when he switched on the magnets. When the generator was running, it provided its own power, but it took a few hundred kilowatts to get the field strength up to operating levels. He checked to make sure the generator’s output was properly hooked into the colony’s main bus. It wouldn’t do to have a megawatt of electricity slamming into the system with the wrong polarity. It was correct, though, so he reached out to engage the injector, then stopped short with his hand just above the button.

  Black fog was curling around the top of the generator.

  The lead collar had turned gray-white with frost. He reached out and touched it, then yelped in pain and snatched his hand back. It wasn’t just cold; it felt like it had been bathed in liquid nitrogen!

  The black fog swirled outward, growing thick enough to obscure the radiation shield, and a tiny lightning bolt spit outward toward David’s face. He flinched back, banging into the workbench. What the hell was this? Were the field coils shorting out? If they were, the whole unit should have melted, not frozen. Besides, he had seen something that looked just like this only a few minutes before, and it hadn’t had anything to do with fusion generators.

  Or had it? Good God, had the tear in space that swallowed Earth been triggered by Earth’s own power stations? He looked at the expanding black cloud around the generator’s reaction chamber. Part of his mind screamed Shut it off! but he resisted the impulse. If this was the same effect, then it was a golden opportunity to learn what had happened, and maybe even how to reverse it, provided he didn’t suffer the same fate as Earth.

  He would give it a few seconds at least. Unwilling to risk his fingers again,
he picked up a screwdriver off the bench and reached out with it, careful to hold on to the plastic handle. When its silver tip reached the black fog, it disappeared as if he had pushed it into a solid object. He felt no resistance, though. He pushed a little farther, and a little farther, until half the shaft had disappeared. That was absurd; he should have hit the lead shield by now.

  He pulled the screwdriver out again and held his hand near it, then gingerly touched it, but it was merely cold. He rapped it on the workbench. It clanked like a screwdriver should.

  He stuck it back into the blackness, shoving it slowly inward until just the handle protruded. It definitely should have touched the shield long before that.

  When the commlink at his hip vibrated, he nearly jumped out of his skin. He dropped the screwdriver, which vanished into the dark fog without a sound. It didn’t hit the floor, or anything on the other side of the darkness, either.

  That was assuming sound could travel through it.

  He unclipped the commlink from his belt. “Hutchins.” He got a loud burst of static and a barely discernible voice. He pulled the device away from his head to spare his eardrum and on impulse, stuck the communicator into the inky black field and listened. He could still hear the static; it was muted but audible.

  He pulled the device out of the darkness and held it up to his head again.

  “It’s coming for us!” Raedawn’s voice suddenly burst through.

  He winced. “What?” he asked. “What’s coming for us?”

  “The black cloud! It’s”—another burst, then—“out a big tendril straight toward us.”

  His mind was still on the phenomenon in his own lab. “The black cloud? You’ve got one over there, too?”

  “Over here? What? Hello, Mars to David. I’m talking about . . . that ate Earth. Big black . . . lots of twisty arms and lightning bolts—remember?”

  The magnetic field was interfering with the signal, but not enough to make her unintelligible. “Of course I remember. I’m staring at a miniature version of it right here in the lab.”

  “You are? How’d it . . . so fast?” Curiosity and fear fought for dominance in her voice.

  “It just appeared when I turned on the fusion generator I’m repairing.”

  “Well turn it off, you idiot! It’s attracting the mother ship!”

  “I don’t think its a spacesh—”

  “Now! Turn it off now! It’s halfway here!” Fear had definitely won out.

  It finally hit him, too. Halfway to Mars already? Holy shit! He reached for the switch, realized that the fuzzy boundary of darkness was uncomfortably close to it now, and pulled back, looking for a screwdriver to flip it with. There wasn’t one; he’d already lost the only one within easy reach inside the anomaly.

  There wasn’t time to waste. Even if this local phenomenon wasn’t attracting the big cloud somehow, it was about to engulf the controls, and after that there would be no easy way to shut it off. David transferred the communicator to his left hand and reached out with his right for the emergency cutoff switch. He stabbed at the button and yanked his hand back.

  For the briefest of moments, his fingers tingled as if they had gone to sleep. He shook them, then switched the communicator back to that hand. “Okay, it’s off,” he said. “The field is collapsing.”

  It didn’t go out like a light, he noted. The magnetic field took only milliseconds to lose strength, but the patch of black fog persisted for three or four seconds, slowly growing indistinct and closing in on the top of the generator. It looked as if the radiation-shielding collar was sucking it in through tiny vents.

  The gray metal surface reappeared.

  “Son of a bitch,” he whispered. The screwdriver was stuck straight into it all the way to the handle.

  “What’s wrong?” Raedawn demanded. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing. Has the big cloud stopped?”

  “Not yet.”

  He tried to pay attention to the bigger problem, but it was hard with such a mystery right in front of him. As he reached out to touch the screwdriver handle, he said, “It’s halfway here, you say? That means it’s about four light-minutes away. It won’t know we did anything for that long, and we won’t see its reaction for another four after that, so we don’t have to panic yet.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You’re not watching it reach straight for us.”

  The handle was cold, but he could touch it. He gripped it in his left hand and tugged, but it didn’t budge. It felt like it had been welded into place.

  Something didn’t feel right with his right hand. He lowered the commlink for a second, looked at his fingers, and stared in shock at the sight of all four fingertips melting into the plastic.

  He yelled “Yaaa!” and shook the device free. His fingers came loose with a wet, sucking sound, tingling all over again, and the communicator flew halfway across the lab before it hit the floor.

  Raedawn’s voice came out of it in tinny miniature from that distance. “What’s the matter?”

  “It—” It what? Tried to eat his hand? He had no idea what had just happened.

  He picked up the communicator, then quickly set it back down on the workbench. He examined it closely, searching for the marks his fingers must have made in it, but the case looked perfectly normal. There was a scratch along the side where it had hit the floor, but that was it.

  “What’s going on over there?” Raedawn asked.

  He leaned to speak into the communicator without picking it up. “I wish I knew. I’ve got a screwdriver stuck through the generator core like Excalibur in the stone, and my fingers just slipped into the commlink and out again.” On a hunch, he grasped the screwdriver with his right hand and pulled it free of the generator with no more resistance than if he’d been sliding it out of a cantaloupe.

  His fingers slid into the handle just as easily. He dropped the screwdriver on the workbench, then cautiously picked it up with his left hand. Nothing unusual happened. The plastic felt normal, and so did the metal blade. But when he pushed it up against the commlink, the blade sank into the case just as easily as his fingers had. He stopped before it shorted something out.

  For Raedawn’s benefit he spoke aloud as he pondered the meaning of what he’d seen. “It looks like whatever is exposed to the spatial anomaly either gains or loses some crucial quality that lets it remain solid. Except it only reacts with other things that have also been in the field. Very strange.”

  “What are you babbling about?” Raedawn didn’t sound happy.

  “Nothing. What’s the big cloud doing?”

  She didn’t say anything for a few seconds, then, “It looks like it’s slowing down. It’s not pointing right at us anymore, either. Yeah, it’s angling away a little bit.”

  “What direction?” David asked.

  “What difference does that make?”

  “Humor me. I bet it’s moving toward Gemini, right?”

  A few more seconds passed, then, “You’re right. So what?”

  “That’s our orbital motion you’re seeing. Mars is heading into Sagittarius at the moment, which puts Gemini right behind us. The cloud is reaching for the spot where we were when I shut off the generator.”

  “Oh.”

  He pushed the screwdriver into the communicator again, but it was harder this time, and he had to use his right hand to steady the device in order to pull it free. Of course his fingers stuck again, so he had to set down the screwdriver and pull the communicator away with his left hand. He flexed his fingers. They felt normal enough, but he couldn’t get over the fact that he had just reached through solid matter with them.

  “This is definitely some kind of dimensional thing,” he said. “The effect appears to be going away now, but it—” He had a sudden thought.

  “It what?”

  “Hang on. I’ve got to set this up so I’ve got something to study later.” He pressed the screwdriver into the commlink’s case again, but this time it barely went through. H
e had to push it straight in, and he misjudged the amount of force needed; the battery socket spit sparks and the earpiece howled for a second, then went silent.

  “Well, hell,” he said, but he wasn’t all that disappointed. Resources were scarce, but magic commlinks with screwdrivers slid into them were somewhat rarer.

  He got right to work examining it with a magnifying lens, looking for surface effects where the two objects intersected. There didn’t seem to be any; the plastic case didn’t bulge outward to account for the extra mass of the screwdriver, and the screwdriver didn’t neck down or bend where it entered the plastic. He was willing to bet that neither surface stopped at the boundary of the other; it looked instead as if they had slid through one another right down at the molecular level, their atoms taking up residence in the vast spaces in between one another.

  He would have to wait until they had solidified completely before he sawed them apart to see what that looked like inside. In the meantime, he examined the fusion generator. It seemed none the worse for wear. He lifted off the radiation shield and set it on the bench top—noting with relief that his fingers didn’t try to slip inside it now—then opened the access hatch to the reaction chamber. It still gleamed bright silver inside.

  Out of curiosity, he flipped on the power to the lasers again. They made their familiar six-pointed star, and when he triggered the deuterium injector, the plasma ball was a perfect sphere. He bet if he switched on the confinement magnets, the generator would still work.

  Rapid footsteps echoed down the tunnel. Someone was running. Had Kuranda’s soldiers returned already? David leaned out to see who it was and saw Raedawn heading toward the lab.

  She was out of breath. She stopped just inside the door, her hair sticking out wildly in all directions, her perspiration-soaked T-shirt clinging to her breasts and stomach, her hands shaking as she gripped the door frame for support.