“Lancer can keep this up for hours, but—ah, see, it’s altering orbit from the reaction already.”
“Damn thing’ll be fried good by—”
Movement from the Watcher.
A thin spout of crisp orange flame shot forward, spanning the distance to Lancer so quickly it appeared instantly as a bar of light between the two. It wrapped around the flux lines of the magnetic throat and exhaust, licking and eating at the ship, curling down the long magnetic tunnels, spewing into the drive tubes, burning everywhere, gnawing at the delicate electronics and fluxlife and humans inside.
Lancer’s drive sputtered. Died. The Watcher’s orange flame went on and on in a deepening, deadening silence, cutting and searing and boiling.
A low moan came over the group comm line. Nigel stood rigid, his chest locked, seeking a purchase on this.
We should have called it Pox, he thought. He looked around at the blind craters: blinkless sockets.
Above, a spot on the Watcher exploded in a shower of crimson and violet. Silent smoke and debris spread a gray fog. “Something in the gamma-ray beam touched off a delayed reaction,” Nigel murmured.
—and he felt himself again, after so many years, living in a place absolutely blank and waiting for each moment to write upon it, time like water pouring through, the quality that the Marginis aliens had tried to bring to humans and that Nigel had gotten a fragment of—they had come bearing enlightenment, the one wedding to the world that the machines lacked, sought, and knew only as a sucking vacancy.
Nigel saw in an instant, as the flame from the Watcher cooled, that he had lost it years ago—become tied to events by ropes of care which sank him, tugging him below the waves—and now had found it again, falling down there in that great perpetual night beneath his feet, found it by finally letting go. He stood empty now, his past pilfered from him, free of the baggage of age and death and having to be Walmsley’s Fool, free again to measure each moment by what it was, let’s all slide out of here one of these nights
Casualties! God so many of them look at those indicators
What happened what went wrong
endless clashing cross talk, human or Skimmer or EM, all welling up from the depths, the rattling chatter of minds forever cut off from integrating with each other but seeking, talking, yammering hammering on
Total electrical failure onboard looks like
Where’re the Life Support Indices I get damn little
He sucked in a gulp of air, and realized he had been holding his breath.
He thought of the beasts below. There was a natural alliance possible, they knew the piercing of mortality, felt the immemorial sweep carrying forward and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns.
amid the rush and ruination
over in the territory but they were all out in the territory now, the country of the strange—but linked to Earth and Skimmer and the mute, huge, blood-rich things below by cycles of talk and sign and inevitable death
Watcher’s damaged sir but still active I’m getting counts from it
damn we didn’t get it
Weak signal from Lancer, nothing on shipcomm at all
Lots of casualties, it got most of ’em in the hall
Ted? What about Ted
Nothing
Ted had never been a captain and had never had a ship.
The drive’s out! Blew it out! We got no way home—
The voices rang on, thin with panic.
He had been here before, in the land of the seemingly defeated. But they had not.
He remembered the radio clamor that carried the EMs through their blasted red world; remembered the booming songs he had heard in the ocean below his feet; remembered the cramped message received from Earth only hours ago about one man, Warren, and his scribbled words from the Skimmers; remembered how humanity seemed to him one unending sea of talk—unthinking, automatic, like breathing.
All the myriad voices, and I says all right, that suits me. He could hear them all—EM, Skimmer, human—from Pocks, no need to voyage back to Earth, and the incessant mad organic talk would go on.
Nikka whispered, “So many … gone …”
“Yes.”
“Now we’re … we’re like the Skimmers. Far from home and no way back.”
Carlos began to sob. He collapsed onto the gritty purple ice. He pounded at it with a fist. “We’re alone!” he cried out. “We’ll die here.”
There was a long silence on the stark bare plain. Then:
“Probably,” Nigel said. And for some reason, he smiled.
EIGHT
He waited for the Watcher to emerge.
Nigel’s heart still tripped with skittering excitement. Something in him recalled days long ago, when he had boosted up above Earth’s filmy air in transatmospheric craft. There had been the same steady tug of acceleration as the sluggish plane skated up into the thin reaches of atmosphere. Then the rocket part of the hybrid would thunder into life, ramming him at the hard blue-black sky. He had gone up that way on his first deep space mission, to the gas-cloaked asteroid Icarus. But that small world had turned out to be a ruined spaceship, and so had launched him on a long career of flinty risk, of unastronautlike disobedience.
