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“The pilot challenged us to appear here sometime in June, Twenty-Two Twenty-Three. According to best estimates, it is now January of Twenty-Two Twenty-Four.”
“Then why the hell did you go to Tau Ceti?”
“It was the next star on our tour-much closer to our sun type than Epsilon Eridani and also closer to similar star types Eighty-Two Eridani and Sigma Draconis.”
“You knew! And now he’s got Delia!”
“Free will doesn’t mean I have to consider every-” “Start looking for her. How big a Bernal sphere is it?”’
“How did you know it was a Bernal sphere?”
Baker paused, then said, “More memory overlap. He had all sorts of corpses in the control room, right?”
“Yes.”
“Have you found him?” Maybe if I can retrieve all of Ki
“He may be lying in wait for us,” the computer said. “I have all defenses online, lasers set in spiral tracking. A Bernal is such a large target, though, it would take a long time to wipe out every weapon or control center by purely random shots. He would be able to destroy us if he wanted to, merely by turning on his lasers before he transferred out to us.”
“Straight, so we’re dead. Now try and find him.”
“There is an object about four kilometers in length exactly twenty-three degrees ahead of the lifeship in the same orbit.”
“Prepare shuttle two for launching. I’m going to transfer over there and take a look.”
“Jord-we can always clone another-”
“He can’t have her! Bre
“The other madman, yes.”
“I’m going in.” He loaded the shuttle with laser gloves, rifles, and packets of explosive. From the armory, he removed a small fission cylinder charge and secured it in the back of the shuttle.
“Weren’t you interested,” he asked, “in how Bre
“Perhaps he achieved a dysfunctional mental state similar to Virgil’s.”
“That’s what I intend to find out before I blow him to bits. Maybe I’ll learn how to handle Ki
“Your velocities are not yet matched, so I shall transfer you to a distance of ten thousand kilometers and you can move in from there.”
“Why don’t I fire my rockets here so I’ll be matched and drifting toward him already when I appear?”
“Fire them twenty-three degrees in from the tangent.”
He did so, brought the craft up to a safe speed, then shut down all systems but those of his own suit and those of the transfer unit. He pushed the button and vanished from space.
Now I meet Ki
His breath rattled in his head. His fingers gripped the fore-mounted meteor laser. Far ahead of him, something glinted on and off with insistent regularity. Slowly it grew in apparent size. Baker watched for any sign of defensive action.
At the thousand kilometer mark, he hit the braking rockets, hoping their chemical flare would not be too noticeable. Here goes nothing.
The Bernal sphere revolved on its axis, but held no alignment on the star it orbited. Its solar mirrors and power panels lay in disarray, pointing in all directions. Baker let his shuttle drift slowly closer. At ten kilometers he carefully sca
Nothing. And it would take at least two minutes to power up a laser even if he had his solar panels aligned. We’d have been hit by now if he were pla
He hit full power and zeroed in on the docking port at the tip of the axial tower that supported the mirror array. From his experience with Fadeaway, he was now familiar with the layout of such habitats. He braked and drifted into the open hatchway. Loading a supply pack with explosives and the fission device, he do
All right, Dante, here I come.
He jumped across to the airlock and manually sealed the door behind him. It would not pressurize. He laid a charge against it, opened the outer hatch again, set the fuse and jumped outside. A bloom of metal shards, air, and chunks of shattered plastic blew outward. He waited until the shrapnel expended its momentum ricocheting around inside the airlock, then sped through the opening into an evacuated corridor.
Can’t go voiding every passageway to get around. Dee might be in one of them.
On the next set of pressure doors, he used his hand laser to cut away the forward seals enough to fill the small chamber with atmosphere. The i
Dead bodies lay scattered about the corridors, floating in the zero-gee axial section of the long polar tower, sprawled about in the gravity areas. Most of them had died by obvious or likely suicide. Some had killed one another in orgiastic violence.
He climbed inward toward the command center, hand over hand through a narrow tube, leading with his laser glove. He floated before the hatch. Partially ajar, it swung inward under the force of his shoulder. He hung back, waiting, then tossed a detonator from one of the charges inside the room. It exploded with a loud crack.
No reaction. Straight, here I come.
Baker kicked into the control center, raising the rifle as soon as he had cleared the hatchway. Only the seated dead greeted him. He spun around. Nothing but more mummies. Only one seat lay empty, its control panel as dark as the others.
Damn.
Keeping one hand on his rifle, Baker powered up the control station from the emergency batteries. Using what vid links still operated, he checked the tower portion of the habitat. Most of the compartments were open to space. Only the central shaft held atmosphere all the way through to the sphere itself, which appeared to be intact. That it still held an atmosphere surprised Baker more than the strange perspectives caused by the shifting beams of light reflected from the skewed mirror array.
I’ll never find him like this.
He searched the control station and adjoining compartments until he located a functional flying harness. Strapping it on, he rocketed down the axial tube toward the habitat sphere, making his way through hatches and airlocks. He shot through a final opening; the surface dropped away from him in all directions. He was inside the cavernous main enclosure of the habitat.
It was like no place he had ever been before. Larger by far than Fadeaway, Bernal Bre
He aimed the jet pack toward the center of the axis. Still weightless, he noted that the rotational rate of the sphere was slow-it probably imparted only a lunar gravity equivalent at the equator. Shadows and patches of light skipped, bent and skittered over the landscape as in some deathly monochrome kaleidoscope. Everywhere he looked lay white ash, gray land, and blackened buildings. He closed his eyes to the madly shifting light and cut his motor.
Now what, Sky King?
He switched on his outside microphones and turned them up to full amplification. The soft sounds of stillness reached him. Then something rustled. Somewhere, no farther away than the sphere’s radius of eight-tenths of a kilometer, a woman screamed.