Winter Song (44 page)

    "Agreed," Karl said.

    The roar of the engines died away and for a few seconds silence hung over them all like a shroud. The thrusters whooshed, their tone higher than that of the main engines. For a horrible moment nothing happened, and Karl thought, We're stuck fast! Then they lurched clear of whatever obstruction had snagged them.

    They flew south this time, completing another quarter of an anti-clockwise orbit started when they began deceleration. At the pole they slowed, and Loki nudged the W
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back down to where they hovered centimetres above the surface, before nudging the comet with the ship's crown. Loki fired the main engines again, and a slightly straining whine denoted that they were on full power.

    "That's the last time we'll hear them," Karl said. "Strange. I'd begun to hate the sound of those engines, and now I'm almost sad to think that."

    "I'm bloody not," Bera said. "Don't be so sentimental, you old fool." She grinned, and he smiled back.

    Karl hadn't noted when Loki had started, but after several minutes he said, "How long do you intend to keep this up?"

    Loki said, "Seven point six zero one minutes."

    The time dragged – then, without warning, the ship slid sideways across the comet's ragged surface, the scraping so loud they had to cover their ears. "What are you doing?" Karl yelled.

    "We have completed the course adjustment," Loki said. "We'd wandered slightly as a result of the changes to our braking programme, and would have sailed through Isheimur's upper atmosphere. Now the comet should score a direct hit on the pole, and puncture the underground reservoir to one edge of the cap." It added, "I am now firing the right lateral rear thruster, and left lateral forward, in effect turning us. The main engines have seized while on, as I feared."

    Karl swallowed, his mouth dry, and wiped his palms on the legs of his suit. "Arnbjorn, you, Coeo and Orn suit up, and bring ours back, please."

    "Helmets as well?" Arnbjorn said.

    "Bring them, but no need to put them on," Karl said. "Yet."

    When the others returned, Arnbjorn helped Ragnar into his suit while the others changed quickly. The cockpit had held, but to the scraping noises were added ominous cracking sounds. Sooner or later we're going to hit a shard that'll punch a hole in the cockpit. Shit, shit, shit! What do I do now? "Loki, how long will it take to dump the reactor?"

    "It will take about two to three minutes to unlock all the bolts, then a few seconds to dump it."

    With a lurch, the W
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broke through a ridge, but even as the other crew members cheered, the ship crunched into the next one and held for a fraction of a second, before breaking free, and in the process slamming them back into their seats. The W
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flashed across the ragged polar icecaps of Fenris, so close to the micro-peaks that Karl could see every ridge, every striation in the icy surface.

    If we hit the surface full frontal at this speed, there'll be nothing left of us, however reinforced the hull is, he thought.

    "I will take us out for about fifteen minutes," Loki said.

    "We'll never stand it," Karl said. "We must be doing four or five gees."

    "Six point three seven seven," Loki said. "In sixteen seconds we have gained a kilometre a second away from the comet."

    "Then… turn… us… around," Karl grated. The pressure was crushing, and he feared for the others, especially Ragnar.

    "I have put us into a parabola," Loki said. "We need to initially head away from Fenris, to give us time to jettison the core and move as far around the comet as possible. If we do not put up with this discomfort–"

    "Discomfort!" Arnbjorn yelled, the effort making the tendons on his neck distend. "It's killing my father!"

    If we do not put up with this discomfort," Loki crackled again, "we'll slam into Fenris so hard none of us will survive." Arnbjorn screeched and Loki said, "I am truly sorry for the strain this is putting Ragnar under, but I see no way to avoid it."

    A minute or so later, Karl felt the ship turn in a wide circle, and then Fenris filled the monitor, which was on forward view. The ship plunged toward it.

TWENTY-FOUR

Loki's systems raised the lee-side shutter to reveal a half-shadowed white ball from which banners of water vapour streamed out the four thousand kilometres to them, before passing them by. "Have you started the reactor dump?"

    "I have," Loki said. "I have set the fuel rods to degrade so that the material all flows together within an hour and a quarter. By then we must be in position on the far side from here so that we're sheltered from the blast. This will be a far bigger explosion than that which destroyed Ship – assuming that the reactor doesn't explode when it hits Fenris."

    After about a minute Loki said, "The safety protocols have been overridden."

    The ship reverberated with the clang of the explosive bolts jettisoning the reactor toward Fenris' shadowed side and the engines, deprived of power, died. Karl leaned back in his seat and exhaled. He then leaned forward at the acceleration – a tenth of a g – from the thrusters.

    They passed the reactor at a tangent, but so close that Karl fancied that he could read the manufacturer's warning printed on the side of one of the pipes. As he watched the five-metre-square block slowly fall away behind them, he breathed a sigh of relief. They were still almost three thousand kilometres away from the comet, but closing on it at over nine hundred a minute.

    The others had stayed silent while the W
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careered around the sky over Fenris, but now they cried, clapped, laughed, or – in Arnbjorn's case – leaned over Ragnar.

    The construct said, "I estimate that if the reactor survives the impact, it will take approximately seventy-eight minutes for it to become critical and detonate."

    The thrusters slowly pushed the ship northward, away from the slowly rotating, ungainly block of pipes and metal hurtling toward Fenris. Loki fired the forward thrusters again and again to slow the ship's headlong rush, but it was a futile battle – they had less than a sixtieth of the thrust available from the main engines, and had been travelling at more than sixteen kilometres a second faster than the comet when they had dumped the reactor.

    "This is going to sound stupid…" Bera said.

    "But?" Karl prompted.

    "We need to slow down, and be on the far side…"

    "And?" Karl said.

    "What if we just scraped along Fenris?" Bera said. "Used it as a brake?" She pantomimed sliding one palm over the back of her other hand.

    "It would smash us to pieces." Orn had leaned closer to listen.

    "Do the two halves of ship separate?" Coeo said. "The part we're in, and the part the engines were in?"

    Karl looked ahead, to where a faint puff was the only sign of the reactor crashing into the ice with almost unimaginable force. That's just a taster of what awaits Isheimur, he thought.

    "Loki?" he said.

    "We have no use for the engine pod," Loki said. "Without a reactor it is just dead weight. As an alternative, I could – if I spun us right around, void one of the pod's water tanks and the reaction from that would slow us slightly. It would leave us critically short of raw material for the hydrogen for the thrusters, but…"

    "Do it," Karl said. He turned to where Ragnar had been lowered to the floor by his son. "How is he?" Karl said. Arnbjorn shook his head and resumed tending his patient, who lay still but for his chest, which rose and fell. "Don't quit now," Karl muttered. "Hang on a while longer, Ragnar."

    Bera squeezed his hand on her way past to help Arnbjorn.

    On the monitor, ghostly giant fingers of steam writhed and plucked at the ship, which now sailed through the thick of the comet's tail.

    A judder marked the venting of much of the several thousand tons of water they had carried from all the way from Jokullag. Soon after they began passing the tiny ball of ice. "You're getting very close," Karl said, as Fenris loomed nearer and nearer.

    "You implied that my urge for self-preservation might outweigh my loyalty," Loki said. "I do not feel emotion any longer, but I still have some vestiges of the time I spent in your skull. The echo of the emotion that I feel is resentment at such an implication. So I am endangering myself as well as you, in the name of the greater good."

    A range of microcosmic mountains barely a hundred metres high loomed. The base of the engine pod scraped the peak, hurling a skittering Arnbjorn across the deck where he collided with a panel and lay still – luckily everyone else was strapped in.

    As the ship tilted downward, Loki fired the engine pod's ventral thruster to lift it, and the crew-pod's dorsal thruster to press that end down, lifting the engine pod further. Somehow the ship missed plunging rear-first into the next mountain; instead they careered toward the peak beyond, hitting it hard enough to rip the latticed gantry connecting the pods loose, and again needing the now-leaking thruster to fire another burst. A third such scrape loosened the gantry further, and moments later, the ventral thruster exploded, blowing much of the pod to pieces. A fourth such scrape wrenched the entire remainder of the pod and the gantry free of the command pod. Loki fired the dorsal and left lateral thruster and missed the bulk of the wreckage by a whisker.

    Alarms buzzed and honked across the command deck, until ceasing abruptly. "I have turned them off," Loki said. "The situation is that we are holed on decks three, six and seven, and losing air badly on decks five, seven and eight. Seals on the stairwell doors will keep the air on this deck secure."

    "Bera, check on Arnbjorn, would you?" Karl said. "Coeo, Orn, with me. We'll patch the holes as best we can." They ran down the corridor to the stairwell, and leaning into the doors, squeezed through the constricting exits.

    Karl toggled the radio on his suit as he exited onto deck three; "Loki, what did all that do to our velocity? And what air, water and fuel for the thrusters do we have to get us through the next, what, four hours?" He grabbed pieces of panel, a plastic bag, anything that would fit flat over the holes in the hull.

    "Three hours forty-two minutes, Karl," Loki answered. "We can use the water tanks on decks ten and eleven, and split them into hydrogen for the thrusters, and fresh oxygen for us. Where you are patching the minor holes, those decks should still be habitable, but I fear that the decks with significant breaches are now vacuum."

    "Velocity?" Karl repeated, grabbing a desk, and tipping it over against a wall where tiny fragments were hurtling through gaps.

    Still fourteen kilometres per second faster than Fenris, although the explosion will accelerate the fragments. But we do not need to ride your comet down, we are re-entering under our own impetus."

    "Trajectory?" Karl said.

    "I will keep working to flatten it, Karl."

    "Shit," Karl said, realising that if it needed flattening, they were in too steep a trajectory.

    "Indeed."

They gathered on the bridge, a weary, bedraggled collection. Karl's head was bowed, and his shoulders slouched. Bera gripped his arm, wincing and touching her clavicle with her free hand. "The belt cut into me when the ship whiplashed us," she said to his raised eyebrow. "But we're still alive," she added fiercely. Coeo's right hand hung at an awkward angle.

    The pitted hulk that had been the W
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sailed on, facing frontward, forward thrusters firing constantly. The timer counted down the seconds, showing two thousand left to detonation, then a thousand, still counting down, the comet falling away at a rate of fourteen kilometres per second, until it was barely visible even on the monitor and the counter read seven hundred. Then when it was over fifty thousand kilometres away a white, blinding pulse overloaded the screen so that it blanked momentarily.

    When it reset, the comet was shearing apart in a glittering chrysanthemum of shards.

    The watched its shattering silently until Loki said, "The core detonated seven hundred seconds early. Clearly its collision with Fenris damaged it." It added, "But it could have exploded much sooner."

    No longer falling away, the largest fragment closed the gap on the racing ship so slowly that it was almost imperceptible. Smaller pieces moved faster; minutes after the explosion the W
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juddered under a hail of pellets. Then larger pieces rocked it violently, and finally a giant invisible hand seemed to take the ship and shake them, trying to tip them out. Just when Karl thought that the hull must crack under the strain, the shaking subsided.

    They were weightless, only their harnesses holding them in place. Karl unclipped his. "Time to check for damage," he said. A clamour of voices volunteered to accompany him. "Orn," said Karl. "The rest stay." The clamour resumed. "Oi!" Karl bellowed, and they fell silent again. Karl held up his forefinger: "Ragnar's too frail," he said and held up his index finger: "Arnbjorn's needed to ensure succession." Ring finger: "Coeo's required to spread the word to his people that peace has broken out." Little finger: "Bera stays here to provide first aid."

    Ignoring her hissed "First aid? What am I, Nursemaid Bera?" Karl joined Orn who was waiting in the doorway to the corridor, which they had never replaced.

    They bounced feather-light out of the cabin and Orn muttered, "I think they're just a little annoyed with you."

    Karl laughed. "That was the idea. Gives them something to complain about, rather than just brooding."

    "That was rubbish, wasn't it?" Orn said. "All that talk of succession, and spreading the word among Coeo's people – we're dead, aren't we?"