Children of God

"Look. John. Face facts," he advised finally. "No matter what you think of him or his motives, Da

John’s eyes hadn’t dropped, but it was begi

"Right, and Frans is a shameless mercenary! So we buy him off! And anyway, he thinks Carlo is crazy—"

"Frans has a wonderful gift for colorful exaggeration." Emilio sat up and rested his arms on the table. "John, Carlo is cold and unscrupulous and completely selfish, but he is a long way from crazy. Even if he were barking mad, I wouldn’t count on Frans’s cooperation with your plan, such as it is." John bristled, but Emilio continued, "The Camorra has a long reach and a longer memory. Frans would be ru

"An excellent analysis, Sandoz!" cried Carlo as he walked into the room. "Positively Machiavellian. Really, Candotti," Carlo said dryly when John jumped at the sound of his voice, "secrecy is the first principle of conspiracy! The commons room is hardly the place for this sort of thing." He turned his merry gray eyes from John’s now roseate face to Sandoz’s, lined and still. "And you, Sandoz? Have you no wish to return to Gina and my daughter?"

"What I wish is irrelevant. The fact is, I was a part of their lives for only a few months." John gasped, and Emilio turned to him. "Years are passing at home, John. Even if we were to come about and return now, I could hardly expect to drop back in on them as though I’d been away on a business trip."

John looked stricken, but Carlo beamed. "I may assume then that you have reached a decision regarding my proposals—"

They would remember later that the impact sounded like a rifle shot.

There was a single unresonant bang, followed by an instant of utter silence in total darkness, and then the shouts and cries throughout the ship of men tumbling blindly when the engines cut out and they lost the gravity provided by acceleration.

The emergency lighting came on almost immediately, but with restored vision came the screaming of klaxons signaling a hull breach and then the high-pitched whine of compartment doors rolling shut and locking themselves down, endeavoring with mechanical efficiency to isolate regions of atmospheric pressure loss. A moment later, the spin imparted by the collision took over and every loose object in the ship was now flung away from the ship’s center of mass. John was thrown into the table’s edge, the breath driven from his lungs. Emilio, knocked sideways when the ship lurched, was now pi

"That’s the axis… in the tube!" Carlo yelled. He was spread-eagled, back against the bulkhead opposite Sandoz. The sensation was like that of an amusement park ride that had thrilled him when he was a child—a large padded cylinder that spun faster and faster until centrifugal force held people against the walls and the floor dropped out from under them. It was hard to breathe against a force that wanted to flatten him, so he kept his phrases short but calm. "Sandoz, there is a… red control button… to your left—. Yes. Be so kind… as to press that, please?"

Carlo tensed in sympathy while Sandoz struggled to inch a leg toward its target, and tried to move his own leg, just to see what it was like: very difficult indeed, with these G forces. There wasn’t enough strength in Sandoz’s ankle alone; working with his whole body, he arched away from the wall to bring the edge of his foot down on the button. The klaxon was silenced. "Well done," Carlo said, with an involuntary sigh of relief echoed by Candotti.

But now they could hear more ominous sounds: the creaking of the ship’s stony substance, the sound of water gushing from some pipe, the cyclonic hissing whistle of escaping air and the moan of stressed metal, like the mournful song of humpback whales.

"Intercom: all transceivers on," Carlo said, in a normal tone of voice, activating the ship’s internal communications system. One by one, he called the names of the men he could not see. One by one, Frans, Nico, Sean, Joseba and Da

"This is like… our drills," Nico’s voice gasped cheerfully. "We’re… going to be fine."

Face pulled toward the tabletop, John’s eyes bulged sightlessly at that sanguine pronouncement, but from somewhere in the ship came Frans’s voice, crying, "Brav’ scugnizz’, Nico!"

Carlo, too, continued to sound serene. "Gentlemen," he called, knowing he could be heard throughout the ship, "I believe… the Giordano Bruno must have struck a micrometeorite. Since… we have not been reduced to… mineral dust and a haze of organic… molecules, we may deduce that whatever we hit… was very small. But we are… moving very quickly, which accounts for… the result of that impact." He began to find his rhythm, his breathing easier now. "Ah! You see, Sandoz?" Carlo asked, gray eyes moving in his immobilized head, "the vacuum is sucking dirt from… the Wolverton tube… through the cha

The hissing stopped, and the tornado inside the transparent tube was suddenly replaced by an apparently solid mass of soilmix, flung with a thud against the walls of the cylinder, just as Sandoz and Carlo were themselves pi

Rolling his eyes wildly, John could just glimpse Carlo at the edge of his field of vision. "You mean… all that’s between… us and space is… dirt?" John gasped frantically.

"That, and the… love o’ God," came Sean Fein’s strained voice over the intercom.

Carlo somehow managed to laugh delightedly. "If there is anyone among our passengers… who is so inclined, you might consider… praying to the soul of James… Lovell, patron saint of hard-luck spacefarers! He… was surely watching over us this morning, my friends. Listen!" he ordered, hearing the photonics systems powering on and resetting themselves. "Get ready to fall. If all goes well, the inertial guidance system will… begin firing the attitude rockets soon—"

There were short, heartfelt prayers and curses—both consisting entirely of the name of Jesus—and more cries of fear, startlement and pain as the AI guidance system began firing its jets, which automatically registered their own effects on the stability of the ship and readjusted the Bruno’s pitch and roll and yaw with brief thrusts. In the commons, globules of orange juice formed up in momentary spells of weightlessness, and the carnival ride gave way to a nauseating kaleidoscope of scrambled eggs and dust, with Emilio’s fork spi