Exile (20 page)

The Cassini Division was broadening into the sky now. Already the rings had eaten nearly twenty-five degrees of night, and the giant planet had yet to bulge into view. By then, of course, the real show would be over.

"Time?" Wrath-Pei said.

"Just . . . three minutes, Your Grace."

Wrath-Pei made an impatient gesture, shifting in his chair, which whirred imperceptibly to accommodate his uneasiness.

"When will the Screen kick in?" he asked, already knowing the answer.

"At one minute and thirty seconds, Your Grace." Anticipating the next question, the boy announced, "We are now at two minutes and forty-five seconds."

Impatience metamorphosed into the thrill of anticipation, and Wrath-Pei suddenly hit the armrests of his chair with his balled fists, unable to contain his hunger. The chair gimbaled forward like an animal bucking its rear legs, nearly throwing him to the ground before instantly settling back again.

"Ohhh, I can't
wait!"
Wrath-Pei said. "Ti—"

"Two minutes and ten seconds, Your Grace."

Now the B and C rings, wide and bright, were nudging the Cassini Division broadly up into view. Soon the faint D ring, barely visible from Titan, would pull the planet's limb after it.

"You're sure about all this?" Wrath-Pei suddenly snapped, last-minute fears, as always, besetting him.

"Unquestionable," the boy said instantly. Arms straight at his sides, black sleeves ending in the knobby stumps of fingerless hands, the boy stared straight into his darkened visor, head moving in slight circles as he studied his private data.

"One minute and fifty seconds, Your Grace," the boy announced. After ten seconds of silence he said, "One minute and forty seconds."

Now Wrath-Pei's excitement grew exponentially with his attention. He rocked gently forward in his chair, staring hard at the deep wide black of the Cassini Division while at the same time trying to anticipate the point at which his close-up view, gratis the Schumacher telescope, would pop into space before him.

"They said I would be able to see something before—"

Ahead in space, off in the center of the black band, Wrath-Pei saw a tiny flash of light.

"There!"

"Yes, Your Grace," the boy announced. "That is exactly—"

He immediately broke off and said, "One minute and thirty seconds."

Before Wrath-Pei's eyes, the night burst open into an invisible Screen. Wrath-Pei thought he heard the gyros of the giant Schumacher telescope behind him wheel slightly, sharpening the focus of the picture hanging in air before him: a slice of space deep inside the Cassini Division, a jumble of tiny bright stones and faint cloudy flows of dust. And, in the exact center of the view, a spacecraft.

"You should be able to detect the partial impact

of a moment ago, Your Grace," the boy said. Wrath-Pei leaned farther forward, squinting. "Yes . . ."

There, on the front right nose of the craft, was a crushed spot.

"That's what I saw? The flash?" Wrath-Pei asked. "Without doubt," the boy answered.

"And . . ."

"Fourteen seconds to total impact, Your Grace."

"Audio?"

"In . . . three seconds, Your Grace."

With held breath, Wrath-Pei waited.

"Now, Your Grace."

Then Wrath-Pei heard them, the dying men, trying desperately to avoid their fate and change their course. A jumble of shouting voices—all four of them, Wrath-Pei detected—mixed together, but Wrath-Pei easily picked out Commander Tarn's loud commands as he tried to shout his underlings down. Vaguely, Wrath-Pei could hear the hiss of escaping oxygen from the first hit the craft had taken.

"Just do what I say!" Tarn shouted. "Try to turn the forward sta—"

"Two seconds, Your Grace."

Tarn's voice turned into a sudden scream, louder than the others.

"The window—!" someone, not Tarn, shouted.

Then there was a glancing flash of light, and the object they fast approached, which was artificial, fired a beam of pencil-thin violet light which cut the spacecraft into neat slices, starting at the stem and continuing to the stern.

There was a final burst of audio screams which abruptly ended, though Wrath-Pei could follow the suitless men's twisting agony as they flew away from the cut wreckage and writhed out their last moments in the airless space between two beautiful Saturnian rings.

One of the bodies, still moving, floated too near the smooth orb of the defensive satellite that had attacked the spacecraft, and the artificial orb fired another thin line of fire that cut the man in half.

Looking closer, Wrath-Pei was pleased to see that it was Commander Tarn.

Sated, Wrath-Pei leaned back in his chair. "Off," he said.

Instantly the close-up view before him went away, replaced by the sight of Saturn's yellow, fat, banded bulk rising in the wake of its ring system.

Wrath-Pei yawned and, with the aid of the chair, stood up.

"It is very pleasing to me that you were able to calculate that performance so well," Wrath-Pei said to the boy. "How could you know that the first object, the

"Ring particle, Your Grace. It was approximately a half meter in diameter."

"Yes, ring particle. How did you know it would be in exactly that position, to give them that initial blow, alert the defensive satellite, and rupture their hull?"

The boy said nothing.

"You may be flippant, if you like," Wrath-Pei said.

"I see no other way to answer the question," the boy said. "The ring particle was there . . . because it was there. It was always meant to be there."

Wrath-Pei yawned. "Whatever. You did well, Lawrence."

The boy's head bowed slightly, and his lipless mouth, just visible in his black hood, opened slightly in satisfaction.

"And now, to bed—" Wrath-Pei began.

"There is a transmission, Your Grace," Lawrence announced, his eyes studying the inside of his visor. Wrath-Pei waited.

"It is Prime Cornelian, Your Grace."

Wrath-Pei said nothing for a moment, then snapped, "Put it on."

Again the Screen flashed into view before WrathPei's eyes. Only now instead of the satisfying picture of Commander Tarn's bisected torso writhing out its last moments of life, Wrath-Pei was faced with the horrid anomaly of Prime Cornelian, or, as Wrath-Pei called him privately, the Bug.

"Prime Cornelian," Wrath-Pei said, bowing.

The insect nodded its head a fraction in greeting. "I . . . need to ask a favor," Prime Cornelian said.

Guessing already what the favor was, Wrath-Pei said in a munificent voice, "Ask away!"

"I need you back on Mars."

Amused, and not able to completely hide it, Wrath-Pei said, "Oh?"

"Yes," Prime Cornelian said. "And I need you to bring the young girl, Tabrel Kris, with you."

"An ...

That had been the favor he had been anticipating.

"But Cornelian!" Wrath-Pei said. "She is now a happily married woman! I could not possibly leave her husband behind!"

"Then bring the simpering idiot with you!" Cornelian snapped.

Enjoying the Bug's discomfort, Wrath-Pei made a show of tapping his chin in thought before answering.

He finally said, shaking his head decisively, "I'm sorry, Cornelian—I mean,
High Leader—I
couldn't possibly leave Titan at the moment. So much to do."

"I'm ordering you back here!" Cornelian raged.

"Oh? A moment ago you were asking a
favor,"
Wrath-Pei cooed.

"Call it whatever you want! But do what
I
say!"

Wrath-Pei made a great show of yawning and deliberately let the High Leader see him reach to disconnect the transmission.

"Wrath-Pei! Wait!"

Wrath-Pei arched an eyebrow in faint interest.
"Yes, High Leader?"

Showing his remarkable ability, which Wrath-Pei secretly envied, of utterly concealing his true feelings, the Bug offered, "I . . . may be able to get you an audience with Sam-Sei."

Wrath-Pei could not hide his astonishment.

I thought you would be interested, Prime Cornelian cooed. "In fact, Sam-Sei has indicated to me that he may want you . . . to visit him, here on Mars."

"Splendid! When—

"Soon, Wrath-Pei. He is still a bit . . . hesitant. But if the word is given . . ."

"Yes, yes," Wrath-Pei said, "of course I would be on my way immediately. And I'll bring the girl, if that's what you want."

"Good. And as a measure of your good faith in this matter, I should like you to do a tiny favor for me at this time."

"Anything!" Wrath-Pei said, suddenly impatient to be rid of the Bug, to give his thoughts over completely to returning to Mars—to unfinished business with Sam-Sei.

"What is it?" Wrath-Pei asked.

"A small thing. I should like you to relay a recording, which I will transmit to you after our chat, to the new gride. It is from her father. Let's call it my wedding present to her."

"Fine!" Wrath-Pei said; and before the Bug could chatter on, Wrath-Pei severed the transmission, leaving open a link for the promised recording to be relayed. He would screen it himself later on, but at this point, he had no interest in it whatsoever.

Sam-Sel

A mixture of heated emotions roared through Wrath-Pei. He sat for an indeterminate time staring at the space where Saturn was, but seeing only the horribly deformed visage of the Machine Master.

At his side, his hands flexed and unflexed, finding purchase finally around the handle of the ancient tool he wore there, holstered like a gun.

Wrath-Pei brought the aviation tin snips up to his eye level and ran his gaze lovingly over the two sharp blades.

Pulling the handles, he brought the blades slowly together in a razor-sharp, finely oiled lock.

"Lawrence," he said sweetly, knowing that the boy still had three toes on his left foot to attend to, which Wrath-Pei had been saving for a moment such as this, "I believe it's time for us to go in."

Suffocation.

Dalin Shar knew the word intimately now. He was nearing the place where he was almost begging for annihilation; each slow orbit of his soon-to-be coffin brought him achingly closer to the freighter wreck. He could now make out close details of the docking studs below the ruined front cabin, and had made a kind of tepid game out of trying to guess which of them his hexagonal craft would hit, less than an hour after his air was gone. It was a futile exercise, of course—he would be already dead—but the diversion was welcome. He had decided on one particular rust-colored knob, but his last slow orbit, showing him sadly pocked Luna and then the incrementally closer nose of the freighter—whose name he could now make out: Ad Aspera—had nudged his craft slightly away from that impact point, and in line with another, equally deadly, stud.

Any diversion was welcome.

He had stopped counting time. For the first two days he had contented himself with conserving
movement, breath, and food—and with following the course of his own countdown to death. Then there had come a point where he had decided that rescue by any means was better than suffocation and had attempted to get the Screen to develop some sort of transmission. This, of course, had failed.

Finally, sickening of the Screen's calmly irritating tone, Dalin had told it to shut down completely, leaving him in darkness.

Darkness .. . ."

In this semi-womb, with his food gone, his air turning stale and bitter-tasting, and only the sights of his porthole to divert him, it was easy to think of Tabrel Kris. Somehow he knew she was safe, for the moment. He wondered if she thought of him, of their brief time together that would have to suffice for all eternity.

If there was such a thing as eternity.

He knew that his mind was becoming poisoned. The oxygen content of the air was lessening with each breath; Dalin could almost hear the air purifiers and tiny oxygen pumps shutting down one by one, as the thin tanks wafered between the walls of the hexagon let out their own last breaths so that he might have his...

And there it came: the looming nose of the Ad Aspera, so close now that he could count the attachment locks on the surface of the rusty stud that would smash his little pod to bits on its next goaround. It was close enough to touch now; and if he just reached his hand right out, perhaps he could—

Suddenly the docking stud pulled away from him. Impossibly, it now stood a good hundred meters away. In fact, Dalin could no longer make out anything but the studs themselves, in a cluster, and the smashed front cabin of the
Ad Aspera,
whose name was no longer readable.

"What in damnation?" Dalin said wonderingly.

Suddenly his empty stomach lurched as the hexagon spun entirely around before coming to a dead stop.

Dalin heard two dull thumps followed by a solid clang before darkness descended on the inside of the pod.