Ark

86

From her perch on the manipulator arm Venus saw the detached panel come tumbling out, and then bits of garbage and a spray of mist, and bodies that wriggled like landed fish. She was glad she was too far away to make out who it was, especially the children.

All this she saw from within the warmth of her suit, the hum of her life-support fans in her ears, immersed in her own slightly musty smell. She considered diving down there to help, maybe detaching herself from the arm and using her SAFER jet pack to plunge in among the tumbling people, wrestle them back into the light through that hole. But it would be a futile gesture. Even if they were not already dead there was no air in the hull, no way she could get them into shelter in time. And she’d probably just doom herself. Best to wait and then descend on the arm, and enter the hull in her suit, and see who was left to save.

If anybody. The thought hit her that nobody might have survived, nobody but her. That she might soon be crawling back into a hull become an airless tomb, alone, seventy light-years from Earth.

There was a sparkle of light in the corner of her eye. It was the shuttle, blipping its attitude engines. She felt an immediate stab of relief. Of course she wasn’t alone, at least somebody had survived in the shuttle. Now it must be maneuvering to dock with its dedicated port once more.

But she saw, shocked, that the vernier blips were pushing the shuttle away from the hull. The motors fired again and again, and exhaust products pulsed out of their tiny nozzles in brief fountains. But each tiny thrust was the wrong way; the shuttle accelerated away from the hull and toward the stars.

No, not to the stars. To the warp bubble. And Venus saw it. The shuttle had been sabotaged, the control circuitry reversed. Sabotaged purposefully to send whoever was hiding out inside it into the bubble wall.

At last whoever was aboard got the message. A new constellation of pulses shone around the rim of the shuttle, its stubby wings. You want to fly down, you used the controls that should take you up… But it was too late to kill the momentum already built up.

A figure in a pressure suit came squirming out of an airlock. Once free of the shuttle, it was propelled forward by a kick from a SAFER backpack. She recognized the suit, from the ident markings on the leggings. It was Wilson Argent’s.

It took long seconds for the warp tide to crumple the shuttle hull, like an invisible hand crushing a paper toy. When the pressure cabin gave way the atmosphere gushed out in a dazzle of water-ice crystals. A single body drifted in space, naked and slight, before falling into the warp barrier to become a bloody comet.