Ilium

60 The Equatorial Ring

Rolling in the terrace darkness with Caliban, it felt to Daeman as if the monster were trying to tear his arm off. Indeed, the monster was trying to tear Daeman’s arm off. Only the metallic fibers in the thermskin and the suit’s automatic response to seal all rends kept Caliban’s teeth from ripping the meat off Daeman’s arm and then tearing the bones one from the other. But the suit wouldn’t save Daeman for much longer.

The man and man-beast crashed into tables, rolled among post-human corpses, bounced off a girder, and rebounded in microgravity from a glass wall. Caliban would not release his grip and hugged Daeman tightly to him with long fingers and prehensile webbed toes. Suddenly the creature relaxed its bite, pulled its slavering head back, and lunged for Daeman’s neck again. Daeman blocked the lunge with his right forearm again, was bitten to the bone again, and moaned aloud as they bounced back to the terrace railing. In spite of the suit’s automatic closing, blood jetted out in discrete spheres, bursting on impact with Daeman’s suit or Caliban’s scaly hide.

For a second they were wedged against the terrace railing and Daeman was staring into Caliban’s yellow eyes, only inches from his own. He knew that if his punctured forearm wasn’t in the way, Caliban would bite through his osmosis mask and rip his face off in a second, but what really passed through Daeman’s mind at this moment was a simple phrase and an astounding fact—I’m not afraid.

There was no firmary standing by to fax his dead body away and fix it in forty-eight hours or less, no blue worms waiting for Daeman now—whatever happened next was forever.

I am not afraid.

Daeman saw the animal ears, the slavering muzzle, the scaly shoulders, and he thought again how physical and fleshy Caliban was. He remembered from the grotto the obscene pink of the animal-thing’s bare scrotum and penis.

As Caliban pulled his teeth free to lunge again—even while Daeman knew that he couldn’t block the lunge toward his jugular a third time—the man reached down with his free left hand, found yielding globes, and squeezed as hard as he’d ever squeezed anything in his life.

Instead of lunging, the monster jerked its head far back, roared so loudly into the thin air that the noise echoed in the almost airless space, and then the beast struggled to break away. Daeman ducked low, shifted both hands lower—his right arm bled, but the fingers on that hand still worked—and squeezed again, hanging on and being dragged behind as Caliban writhed and kicked to break free. Daeman imagined pulping tomatoes with his powerful hands, his human hands, he imagined squeezing the juice out of oranges, of bursting pulp, and he hung on—the world had receded to the will to hang on and squeeze—and Caliban roared again, swung his long arm, and struck Daeman hard enough to send him flying.

For several seconds, Daeman was not conscious enough to defend himself or even to know where he was. But the creature did not use those seconds—he was too busy flailing and howling and holding himself, his scaly knees flying high as Caliban tried to crouch and hunch in midair. Just as Daeman’s vision began to clear, he saw the monster flail his way back to the terrace, grab the railing, and fling himself the fifteen feet between him and Daeman. The long arms and claws were already halfway to him.

Daeman groped blindly amidst the chairs and tables around him, found his iron pipe where it had bounced, lifted it to his shoulder with both hands, and savagely swung the metal into the side of Caliban’s head. The sound was most satisfying. Caliban’s head snapped aside and his flailing arms and tumbling torso crashed into Daeman, but the man flung the beast to one side—feeling his own right arm going numb now—and he dropped the pipe, leaped for the terrace railing, and then kicked up toward the semipermeable exit thirty feet above.

Too slow.

More used to the low-gravity, powered by hate now beyond human measurement, Caliban used hands, feet, legs, and momentum to rebound off the terrace wall, catch the railing with his toes, crouch, spring, and beat Daeman through the air to the marked panel above them.

Seeing that he wouldn’t win the race to the glass, Daeman grabbed a girder protruding fifteen feet from below the marked panel and arrested his movement. Caliban landed on the ledge, arms out, blocking the approach to the white square. Daeman saw that there was no way that he could get around or past those wide arms, those raking claws. He suddenly felt the pain from his torn and punctured arm hitting his mind and torso like an electric shock, then felt the growing numbness there as warning of the weakness and shock that must soon follow.

Caliban threw his head back, roared again, showed his teeth, and chanted—“What I hate, He consecrates—what I ate, He celebrates! No mate for thee—more meat for me!” Caliban was ready to spring after Daeman as soon as the human turned to flee.

Seeing the raw scars on Caliban’s chest, Daeman found himself smiling grimly. Savi hurt him with her shot. She didn’t die without a fight.

Neither will I.

Instead of turning to flee, Daeman pulled himself horizontal on the girder, squatted, gathered his remaining energy in his legs, put his head down, and launched himself straight at Caliban’s chest.

It took Daeman two or three seconds to cross the space between them, but for an instant the monster seemed too surprised to react. Food was not supposed to act in this impertinent manner—prey was not supposed to charge. Then the creature realized that his dinner was coming to him—wearing the thermskin he desired—and Caliban showed all of his teeth in a smile that became a snarl. The beast threw his arms and legs around the incoming human in a grip that Daeman knew the monster would not release until the man was dead and half-eaten.

They went through the membrane together, Daeman feeling the sensation of tearing through a curtain of sticky gauze, Caliban bellowing into thin air one second and into cold silence the next. Together, they tumbled into outer space, Daeman hugging Caliban as fiercely as the monster was clutching Daeman, the human’s left hand pressed up against the monster’s underjaw, trying to keep those teeth away for the eight or ten seconds he thought he needed.

The thermskin suit reacted immediately to vacuum—tightening fiercely into Daeman’s flesh, constricting until it acted as a pressure suit, sealing off even molecular gaps that would bleed air or blood or heat into space. The osmosis mask inflated the clear visor and switched the movement and purification of the man’s recycled breath to 100 percent. Cooling tubules in the thermskin let Daeman’s natural sweat flow quickly through channels, cooling his sunward side even as body heat was transferred to the part of his body in minus-two-hundred-degree shadow. All this happened in a fraction of a second and Daeman did not even notice. He was too busy thrusting Caliban’s jaw and muzzle upward, keeping those teeth away from his throat and shoulder.

Caliban was too strong. He shook his head, freed it from Daeman’s weakening pressure, and then threw open his mouth to bellow before ripping the man’s throat out.

Air rushed out of Caliban’s chest and mouth like water from a punctured gourd. Saliva froze even as it spewed into space. Caliban clapped his long-fingered hands over his ears, but not in time—blood globules spewed into space as the creature’s eardrums exploded. The blobs of blood began to boil in vacuum and, barely more than a second later, the blood in Caliban’s veins began to boil as well.

Caliban’s eyes started to swell and more blood spurted from his tear ducts. His muzzle moved up and down as his mouth worked like a fish’s, wheezing silently in vacuum, gasping for air, but no air came. The surface of Caliban’s bulging eyes began to freeze over and cloud white.

Daeman had wrenched himself free, tumbled across the outside terrace—almost floated helplessly off into space, but caught the metal-mesh railing—then hauled himself hand over hand to where the familiar sonie was tethered to the metal surface. He didn’t want to run. He didn’t want to turn his back on Caliban. He wanted to stay and kill the thrashing monster with his gloved hands.

But one of those hands wasn’t working now—his torn right arm now hung useless as he kicked the final ten feet to the low vehicle. Harman. Hannah.

A human would be dead by now, unprotected in space—knowing so little about anything, Daeman instinctively knew that—but Caliban was not human. Spewing blood and frozen air like some horrible comet boiling away its own surface as it approached the sun, Caliban tumbled, flailed, found purchase on the gridded metal of the terrace, and kicked his way back through the semipermeable wall, back into air and relative warmth.

Daeman was too busy to watch. Pulling himself down prone into the driver’s cushions, he turned his gaze to the metal shelf where the virtual control panel should be. It was off.

How do I activate it? What do I do if I can? How did Savi start it up?

Daeman’s mind was blank. His vision narrowed as black dots danced in his field of view. He was hyperventilating and close to passing out as he worked frantically to recall the image of Savi flying the sonie, activating the controls. He couldn’t remember.

Calm down. Easy. Easy. It was his voice, but not his—an older voice, steady, amused. Take it easy.

He did, forcing first his breathing back to a sane rate, then willing his heartbeat to slow, then focusing his vision and his mind.

Didn’t she use some voice command? That wouldn’t work here in space. No air, no sound—Savi had told them that. Or perhaps Harman had. Daeman was learning from everyone these days. How then? He forced himself to relax a step further, and then closed his eyes and tried to recall the image of Savi flying them all away from the iceberg that first night flight.

She passed one hand under this low cowl, near the handgrip, to activate things.

Daeman moved his left hand. A virtual control panel flashed into existence. Able to use only his left hand, closing his eyes when he had to remember more clearly, Daeman moved his fingers through control sequences on the multicolored virtual panel. The forcefield flicked on and pressed him down against the cushions. A second later, a roar startled Daeman into looking up, but it was only air flooding into the secured space, just as he’d commanded with his fingers. With the air, came a voice, “Manual or autopilot mode?”

Daeman tugged his osmosis mask up a bit, almost wept as he breathed in the first sweet air he’d tasted in a month, and said, “Manual.”

The control grip flicked into place, surrounded by a virtual aura. The stick felt solid in Daeman’s left hand.

Forgetting the tie-downs until he saw the elastic bands rip free and fly into space, Daeman lifted the sonie ten feet above the metal terrace, twitched the stick, fed power to the rear thrusters, went off course, quickly realigned before smashing into metal instead of window, and hit the semipermeable square doing thirty or forty miles per hour.

Caliban was waiting on the ledge inside. The monster leaped for Daeman’s head and his trajectory was perfect, but the forcefield was on. Caliban bounced off and tumbled into the empty air at the center of the tower.

Daeman made a wide turn, getting used to the steering, twisted the control stick to add more power. The sonie was doing sixty or seventy miles per hour when Caliban looked up, the beast’s bleeding eyes went wide, and the bow of the sonie plowed into the monster’s midsection, sending him flying across the open tower space and crashing into girders and glass on the far side.

Daeman would have loved to stay and play—the want of it ached more in him that the screaming pain from his right arm—but his friends were dying below. He banked the sonie and dived straight down toward the city floor more than ninety stories below.

He almost didn’t pull up in time—the sonie sheered turf, cut through kelp, and sent dead grass flying—but then Daeman got the thing flying level and cut back on the speed a bit. His twenty-minute flailing trip from the firmary took him three minutes on the flight back.

The entrance wall was not quite wide enough for the sonie. Daeman backed the hovering machine up, gave it more throttle, and made the semipermeable entrance permanently permeable. Shards of glass and metal and plastic followed the sonie as Daeman flew it between dark, empty healing tanks. He winced as he caught a glimpse in some of those tanks of the dead white bodies of those humans they hadn’t saved in time. Then he was stopping the sonie, killing the forcefield, and jumping out next to two more bodies on the floor.

Harman had left the blue thermskin suit on Hannah, keeping only the osmosis mask for himself in the final minutes. The man’s naked body looked bruised and pale in the reflected light from the sonie’s headlights. Hannah’s mouth was open wide, as if in a final, futile effort to force more air into her lungs. Daeman didn’t waste time to see if they were alive. Using only his left arm, he scooped each of them up and laid them in the two couches on either side of his own. He paused only to jump out again, throw Savi’s pack in the back couch, and to toss the gun onto the armrest of his own couch before he was back in place and activating the forcefield.

“Pure oxygen,” he said to the sonie as the air-rush began. The clean, cold air became thicker, making Daeman’s head swim it was so rich. He fumbled in the virtual control panel, setting off several caution alarms before finding the heat. Warm air radiated from the console and various vents.

Harman began coughing first, then Hannah a few seconds later. Their eyes flickered, opened, finally focused.

Daeman grinned stupidly at them.

“Where . . . where . . .” gasped Harman.

“Take it easy,” said Daeman, slowly moving the sonie toward the firmary exit. “Take your time.”

“Time . . . the time . . .” gasped the older man. “The linear . . . accelerator.”

“Oh, fuck,” said Daeman. He’d forgotten about the onrushing structure, never once looked up or over his shoulder in space to see it coming.

Daeman twisted the sonie’s throttle full open, slammed through the hole where the membrane had been, and accelerated toward the tower exit.

There was no sign of Caliban in the tower. Daeman slewed a wide curve, threaded the needle through the tower exit pane, and climbed from the outside terrace into space.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” breathed Harman.

Hannah screamed—the first sound she’d made since being fished out of the healing tank.

The two-mile-long linear accelerator was so close that the wormhole collection ring at its bow filled two-thirds of the sky above them, blotting out sun and stars. Thrusters were firing in quad-pods all along its absurd length, making final course corrections before impact. Daeman didn’t know the names of everything at that moment, but he could make out every detail of the gleaming cross-braces, polished rings now cratered with countless micrometeorite strikes, racks of cooling coils, the long, copper-colored return line above the main accelerator core, the distant injector stacks, and the swirling, earth-and-sea-colored sphere of the captured wormhole itself. The thing grew larger as they watched, blotting out the last of the stars above, and the shadow of it fell across the mile-long crystal city beneath them.

“Daeman . . .” began Harman.

Daeman had already acted, twisting the throttle ring full over and looping up and over the tower, the city, the asteroid, diving for the great blue curve of the Earth even as the linear accelerator covered the last few hundred meters behind them.

For an instant the city towers were above them as the sonie looped, and then just slightly behind when the hurtling mass struck the city and the asteroid, the wormhole sphere crashing into the towers and the long city a second or two before the exotic-metal structure of the accelerator itself. The wormhole silently collapsed into itself and the accelerator seemed to accordion neatly into nothing, but then the full force of the impact became apparent as all three of the humans turned in their couches and craned their necks to see behind them.

There was no sound. That struck Daeman the hardest—the pure silence of the moment. No vibration. None of the usual earthly clues that some great cataclysm was taking place.

But taking place it was.

The crystal city exploded into millions upon millions of fragments, glowing glass and burning gas expanding outward in all directions. Great, ballooning balls of flame bulged outward a mile, two miles, ten miles, as if trying to catch the diving sonie, but then the huge fires seemed to fold inward—like a video image running in reverse—as the flames consumed the last of the escaping oxygen.

The city on the opposite side of the asteroid from the impact was propelled off the surface of the stony worldlet, coming apart in a thousand discrete trajectories as the glass and steel and pulsing exotic materials flew and blew apart, most sections celebrating their own separate orgies of destruction, punctuated everywhere with more silent explosions and self-consuming fireballs.

A second after the first impact, the entire, mile-long asteroid shuddered, sending concentric waves of dust and gas into space after the city debris. Then the asteroid broke apart.

“Hurry!” said Harman.

Daeman didn’t know what he was doing. He’d dived the ship toward Earth at full velocity, staying just ahead of the flames and debris and waves of frozen gases, but now various red and yellow and green alarms were showing all over the virtual control board. Worse than that, there was sound outside the sonie at long last—a suspicious hiss and crackle growing in seconds to a terrifying roar. Worst of all, an orange glow around the edges of the sonie was quickly turning into a sphere of flame and blue electrical plasma.

“What’s the matter?” shouted Hannah. “Where are we?”

Daeman ignored her. He didn’t know what to do with the throttle and attitude control. The roar rose in volume and the sheath of flames thickened around them.

“Are we damaged?” shouted Harman.

Daeman shook his head. He didn’t think so. He thought perhaps it had something to do with coming back into the Earth’s atmosphere at such speed. Once, at a friend’s house in Paris Crater, when Daeman was six or seven, despite his mother’s admonitions not to do so, he’d slid down a long banister, popped off onto the floor at high speed, and then slid on his bare hands and knees along his mother’s friend’s thick carpet. It had burned him badly and he’d never done that again. This friction felt something like that to Daeman.

He decided not to tell Harman and Hannah his theory. It sounded a little silly, even to himself.

“Do something!” shouted Harman over the roar and crackle all around them. Both men’s hair and beards were standing on end in the center of all this electrical madness. Hannah—bald, even her eyebrows gone—stared around her as if she’d wakened to madness.

Before the noise drowned out everything else, Daeman shouted at the virtual controls, “Autopilot!”

“Engage autopilot?” The sonie’s neutral voice was almost inaudible under the entry roar. Daeman could feel the heat through the forcefield and knew that couldn’t be good.

“Engage autopilot!” shouted Daeman at the top of his lungs.

The forcefield fell in on the three humans, squeezing them tightly to their couches as the sonie flipped upside down and the stern engines fired so fiercely that Daeman thought his teeth were going to rattle out of his head. His arm hurt terribly under the deceleration pressure.

“Re-enter on pre-programmed flight path?” the sonie asked calmly, speaking like the idiot savant it was.

“Yeah,” shouted Daeman. His neck was aching from the terrible pressure and he was sure that his spine was going to snap.

“Is that an affirmative?” asked the sonie.

“Affirmative!” screamed Daeman.

More thrusters fired, the sonie seemed to bounce like a thrown rock skipping off a pond’s surface, was wrapped twice more in reentry fire, and then somehow straightened itself out.

Daeman raised his head.

They were flying—flying so high that the edge of the Earth was still curved ahead of them, so high that the mountains far beneath them were visibly mountains only by the white snow texture against the brown and green earth colors—but flying. There was air out there.

Daeman cheered, reached over and hugged Hannah in her blue thermskin suit, then cheered again, raising his fist toward the sky in triumph.

He froze with his fist and eyes raised. “Oh, shit,” he said.

“What?” said Harman, still naked except for the osmosis mask now dangling around his neck. Then the older man looked up, following Daeman’s gaze. “Oh, shit,” he said.

The first of a thousand fireballs—debris from the city or the linear accelerator or the broken asteroid—roared by them less than a mile away, trailing a vertical wake of flame and plasma ten miles behind it, almost flipping the sonie over with the violence of its passage. More meteors roared down at them from the burning sky above.