Skye Object 3270a (18 page)

R
eaching the construction zoo was a matter of timing . . .
and insanity
, Skye amended, when Devi pointed out the zoo in the distance. She squinted at the chain of lights, looking at them sideways, trying to force them into better focus. Her vision improved with remarkable speed—and abruptly Skye realized why. She spun on Devi. “The zoo is coming really fast, isn't it?”

“About as fast as you were falling at the end of your record setting jump,” Devi said quietly. Then he added, “It's within the tolerance of the jump cables.”

Zia groaned. “That jump almost broke me in half! Now you're telling me I have to do it again?”

“No,” Skye said. “I'm the only one who needs to go.”

“The two of us,” Devi corrected. “You could have trouble getting the lifeboat open.”

“Make it three,” Buyu said. “There's a lot more to the zoo than your lifeboat, Skye. It could be dangerous.”

Zia sighed. “Buyu's right. There could be lydras. So I'm going too—but
zeme dust!
—
why is the zoo moving so fast?”

“It's not the zoo,” Skye said. “It's us.”

Devi grunted. “The elevator column turns with the planet. We go around once every day—whether we're at the top of the column or the bottom. Which means that everywhere except at PSO, we're not in orbit. We're either going too fast, or we're going too slow. That's why, if we stepped away from the column, we would fall away—either toward the planet or away from it, depending on where we are.”

Zia nodded slowly. “But the construction zoo
is
in orbit,” she said tentatively. “So it goes around the planet at its own speed?”

“Right. And that's a different speed then ours. The zoo takes about two hours longer to make a full circle.”

Buyu spoke thoughtfully. “So it's not really shooting towards us. Actually, we're catching up.”

Devi nodded in agreement. “Though you can't tell by looking.”

They were silent a moment, watching the approaching lights. Then Skye added softly, “If their periods are only two hours different in every day, then it'll be days before the elevator and the zoo pass one another again, won't it? Devi, you got us here just in time . . . and this is our only shot.”

In the time they had been talking, the construction zoo had grown much larger. Now Skye could just make out circular sections of the great ship being assembled in the zoo, tiny white rings strung in a line, one after the other, their neat order disturbed here and there by softer shapes that she could not identify.

“This is it,” Devi agreed somberly. “There's no way we can camp out here until the next transit. We have to cross now.”

When Skye turned to look at him, she discovered him down on his knees on the wide plain of the counterweight. He was setting up a knee-high tripod that held the launch gun. She'd seen the gun before, when they were planning this expedition. It was a modified version of the festival guns used to launch dissolving streamers high in the air of Silk. Devi had boosted its power, and added a low-intensity laser beam for targeting. The harmless laser would strike an object and be reflected back to a sensor on the gun, giving them an exact measure of just how far away it was, and the relative speed of its approach. “The targeting system will track the zoo, while calculating its distance, direction, and speed,” Devi had explained. “Then it will launch our cable.”

“Cord,” Skye corrected. The cables used for jumping off the elevator column were called cords. The end of the cord would strike the target and bond to it, creating a seamless high-strength joint. Several seconds after that, the slack would run out. By that time they would all be tied in. When the cord went taut, they would be yanked off the counterweight together.

Of course a sudden, extreme change in speed could be deadly—running into a wall at a thousand meters per second was never a good idea—so the cord would stretch, just as it did on a jump, to cushion the shock. Hopefully, it would be enough.

With her palm raised, Skye turned to Zia. “I'm scared.”

Zia slapped her open hand, completing the jump ritual: “And I'm your mother.”

“Okay,” Devi said, peering at a display on the back of the gun. “We've acquired the target.”

“We have enough cord, right?” Zia asked nervously.

“Sooth. Just enough. The zoo will pass between four and five kilometers above us.”

Skye looked at the approaching construction zoo. Now she could easily see the white rings that would someday be part of the great ship. Following after them, she made out a smaller, darker wheel, with lights all around its curved edge. That would be the workers' habitat. They would need to stay away from that.

Strung through the center of the nearest white rings was a long line of irregular blobs, like poorly-made beads on an invisible wire. They glinted different colors, from pure white, to rose, to red and blue and purple. There was even an empty space between two of them, that Skye guessed to be a bead of purest black, made invisible by the black background of space, and the harsh light of Kheth. “Those beads,” she said softly. “They're construction material for the great ship, aren't they? Like the ingots we saw in the loading bays. They're made of different kinds of matter.”

“Sooth,” Devi said. “They look irregular because they've been partially used. There's a big cache of ingots halfway down the line of rings. That's where we'll find the lifeboat. Hey. Look at the far end of that ingot chain.”

Skye squinted as she looked at the last bead in the string. It was smaller than the rest, bright orange in color. And . . .
it moved!
She gasped when she saw it. The bead unfolded, blossoming into a flower whose petals were long, writhing tentacles, blazing orange in the light of the distant sun. “It's a lydra,” she said in wonder.

“Sooth,” Zia agreed. “A full-sized construction beast. It's getting construction material from the ingots.” Then she added in a soft voice, “We'll need to stay away from the big lydras.”

Skye couldn't decide just how big this one was, but it had to be far, far bigger than even the biggest monster in the shipping crate.

“There's something else we'll need to stay away from,” Buyu said, his arm raised as he pointed at an object far beyond the line of the construction zoo.

It was only a dot in the distance, but when Skye squinted she could make out a flash of red and green lights. “It's a ship,” she said. “Tannasen?”

“Sooth,” Buyu agreed. “That's
Spindrift
, coming in to pick up supplies.”

When Devi spoke, he sounded grim. “
Spindrift
is equipped with robotic arms. If Tannasen sees us, he could try to grab us.”

“
Yuck
,” Zia said. “That's not the kind of hug I've dreamed about. We have to stay out of sight, gang. As best we can.”

Skye knelt by the gun, studying the display. Her skin suit flexed, then hardened, helping her hold the position in the microgravity environment. The zoo was only eighteen kilometers away, and rushing on them with frightening speed. She could see the gun turning on its mount as it tracked the first ring in the line. “We should tie into each other already,” she said, slipping her pack off her shoulder. Her gloved hand brushed Ord's frozen tentacle. Ord had not moved or responded in any way since they'd gone outside the elevator car. She could almost feel the chill of its tissue – a stunning cold that settled around her heart.

She drew a deep breath to steady herself.
What we
'
re doing
. . .
it
'
s more important than anything else.
This thought didn't make her feel better about Ord – it only made her more determined.

She reached into her pack, and pulled out three pairs of cylindrical cassettes. Each pair was linked by a few millimeters of jump cord, with more cord spooled inside. “I'm going first,” she announced.

Buyu, Devi, and Zia all started to protest, so Skye said it louder. “I'm going first! No argument, okay?”

Something in her voice must have convinced them she meant it, because this time no one said anything.

She handed one pair of cassettes to Devi, and one to Zia. Then, with the third in hand, she felt behind her back for the socket she had recently added to her suit. She found it, and a moment later the cassette snapped into place. “Got it!”

“Compatibility check in progress,” her suit DI announced. “Ten, nine, eight . . .”

“I'm in too,” Devi said as he locked a cassette into the back of his own suit. “I'm going second.”

Skye felt a slight pressure on her back as Devi tugged at the dangling cassette, unspooling a meter of thin gold cord. He snapped its end into the jump socket on the belly of his suit. Now they were linked, back to front.

Zia tied in behind Devi. Buyu linked to Zia. When they were pulled off the counterweight, the cassettes would unreel hundreds of meters of jump cord, cushioning the shock of their leap across the void, and putting distance between them so they wouldn't crash into each other.

Skye looked up, to check on the progress of the construction zoo—and gasped. It was almost directly overhead. She glimpsed three huge lydras at work among the separate sections of the great ship.

Quickly, she turned back to the gun. The muzzle was pointing straight up. Grabbing the cord that dangled from a cassette on the gun, she inserted it into her belly socket.

“Compatibility check in progress,” the suit DI said again. “Ten, nine, eight . . .”

The gun went off.

Skye could not hear it of course—there was no air to carry the sound—but she saw a flash of motion as the anchor shot away. Gold cord payed out behind it, glistening like a single thread of a spider's web. She knew it must be unreeling several meters every second, yet it looked perfectly still.

Her suit DI announced, “Compatibility check complete. Integration at one hundred percent.”

The gun had picked as its target the first white ring in the construction zoo. Crouching on the counterweight, Skye watched the narrow section pass overhead.

In a tense voice Devi said, “Order your suits to release their bonds with the counterweight. Hurry! We can't be attached when the cord goes tight.”

Sooth
. Skye didn't want to think about what might happen if the suits were still bonded to the counterweight. Would the cord give way first? If so, the broken end could snap back with enough force to slice them to ribbons. If the suits broke, their bodies would probably tear apart along the same fracture lines.

“Deactivate all hot zones!” Skye ordered her suit DI.

The DI sounded puzzled. “Are you sure?”

“Yes! Yes.” She touched the cassette. “Look. I'm tied in.”

“That line is not secured—”

“I don't care!” Skye shouted. “Don't argue with me! Just deactivate all hot zones.
Now
. The line will be secured in just a few—”

The gun shattered. In the same instant, Skye felt a hard yank against her waist. The cord had gone taut! And the sudden tension had been enough to break the gun into three large pieces. Her eyes went wide as she watched the fragments spiral away into the void. Somewhere out there, the cord must have found a target . . . but she was still attached to the counterweight. “The line's secure!” she screamed at her suit DI. “Deactivate—”

She broke off in mid-sentence as she felt her boots peel free, from the heels to the toes. Before she quite knew what was happening, she was yanked off the counterweight. The force of it knocked the air out of her lungs. She hurtled upward, feeling like an abused dokey on the end of a giant's leash. A barely perceptible backward jerk let her know that Devi had launched behind her. Part of her was glad, but most of her was terrified. She watched the construction zoo pass overhead. She expected to find herself hurtling closer and closer . . .

But to her surprise, the zoo grew farther away. What was happening?

Think!
she ordered herself. It was hard, when she could scarcely get a breath beneath the crushing pressure of this lift.

Still, she tried to wrap her mind around the problem. It was a way of keeping her terror under control.
Think
.

Getting yanked off the counterweight was like jumping off the column, except she had already been moving at top speed while she stood there waiting. On a jump, she would fall for awhile before she hit the end of her cord, but today she was already at the cord's end in the moment she left the counterweight. So. If she could turn around, she would see the counterweight racing away.

There was no way she could turn around. A horrible pressure was crushing every cell in her body. She could not move, not even to twitch a finger.

But I
'
m alive!
she thought defiantly
.
I can still think.
So the cord must be stretching, as it was supposed to. Stretching to slow her down gradually, to absorb her momentum so she would not be smashed to jelly inside her suit—even if it felt that way.

It might have been a few seconds. It might have been minutes. She had no way of knowing. She was too scared to keep track of time. But at last the pressure eased. She gasped for breath and filled her lungs over and over again. She could hear somebody jabbering over the radio, but she could not make out the words. Her eyes were watering. She blinked several times and shook her head. Then she looked again.

The first white ring lay just ahead of her. It looked immense . . . bigger around than any building in Silk. She could make out an odd, circular grain in the white metal, so she knew it was close, maybe only a few hundred meters away. Strung through its center was the chain of colorful ingots she had seen before. Only now it was easy to see that each “bead” of refined matter was the size of a small house.

The ingots and the great ring hung in the dark, unmoving. Not receding. Not approaching – which meant she was moving at the same speed as the construction zoo.

She put out a cautious hand and touched the cord. It was taut. She could feel it sliding into the cassette. So. She
was
moving, but slowly. Very slowly. It had to be that way. If the cord hauled her in too quickly, she would be slammed against the ring and crushed.