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“Repulse is working,” Gawain said, about the instant my stomach felt the slam of the engines. “Stop rotation.”
Don’t!I thought irrationally, because I trusted nothing to start working again once it had been shut down in this mad place, and if rotation stopped working the way it did when we would go into a dock at station, we would end up null G in this stuff, subject to its laws. We were not, for mercy’s sake, coming in at a safe dock with crews waiting to assist, and there was no place to put the Maid’s delicate noseprobe, all exposed out there.
Gstarted going away. We were locking into station-docking position, the crew going through their motions with heart-breaking calm, doing all the right things in this terrible place; and the poor unsecured Maidwas going to be chaos in her station-topside decks.
A touch came at my fingers. It was Lancelot’s hand seeking mine. I closed on it, and reached beside me for Vivien’s, which was very cold.
She had, Lance had said it, pla
“The lady will need you,” I hissed at Viv, gripping her nerveless hand till I ground the bones together. “She needs us all.”
That might have helped. There was a little jerk from Viv’s hand, a little resistance; and I winced, for Lance closed down hard on mine. My lady and Griffin screamed—we hit, ground with a sound like someone was shredding the Maid’s metal body, and our soft bodies hit the restraints as the ship’s mass stopped a little before that of our poor flesh. I blanked half an instant, came out of it realizing pain, and that somehow we had not been going as fast as I feared a ship might in this place (which estimate ranged past Cand posed interesting physics for collision) or what we had hit was going the same general direction as we were, at an angle. Mass, I thought, if that had any meaning in this place/time ... a monstrous mass, to have pulled us into it, if that was what it had done. Our motion had not stopped in collision. The noise had not. We grated, hit, hung, grated, a shock that seemed to tear my heart and stomach loose.
“We’re up against it,” Modred’s cool voice came to me. “We’d better grapple or we’ll go on with this instability.”
Instability.A groaning and scraping, and a horrifying series of jolts, as if we were being dragged across something. The Maidshifted again, her dragging force of engines like a hand pushing us.
Clang and thump. I heard the grapples lock and felt the whole ship steady, a slow suspicion of stable Gthat crawled through the clothes I wore and settled my hair down and caressed my abused joints and stomach and said that there was indeed up and down again. It was a kilo or so light, but we had G. Whatever we were fixed to had spin and we had gotten our right orientation to it.
The crew was still exchanging quiet information, doing a shutdown, no cheers, no exuberance in their ma
My lady Dela swore and wept, a throaty, loud sound in the stillness about us now. She freed herself of the restraints and crossed the deck to Gawain and Ly
It was a curve, lit in the queasy flarings, a vast sweep, a symmetry in the wreckage, as if the thing we were fixed to were some vast ring. Ship bodies were gathered to it like parasites, like fungus growth, with red and black beyond, and the wrecks themselves all spotted with holes as if they were eaten up with acid light illusion of the chaos-stuff, or something showing through their metal wounds, like glowing blood.
“Whatever we’ve hit,” Percy said quietly, “a lot have gone before us. It’s some large mass, maybe a station, maybe a huge ship—once. Old ... old. Others might fall through the pile into us the same way we’ve hit them.”
“Then get us out of here,” my lady said. “Get us out!”
Gawain and Lynette stirred in their seats. Wayne powered his about to look up at her. “My lady Dela, it’s not possible.” He spoke with the stillest patience. “We can wallow about the surface, batter ourselves into junk against it. If we loose those grapples we’ll do that.”
I thought she would hit him. She lifted her hand. It fell. “Well, what are you going to do?”
Gawain had no answer. Griffin set his hands on my lady’s arms, just stood there. I looked at Lance and he was white; I looked at Vivien and she plainly blanked, standing vacant-eyed in her restraints. I undid them, patted her face hard until I got a flicker in her eyes, put my arms about her and held her. She wrapped her arms about me and held on.
“The hull is sound,” Modred said. “Our only breach is G-34. I’ve sealed that compartment.”
“Get us out of here,” Dela said. “Fix what’s wrong with us and get us out of here, you hear that? You find out how to move in this stuff and get us away.”
The crew slowly stopped their operations, confronted with an impossibility. I held to Viv, and Lance just stood there, his hand clenched on one of the safety holds. I felt a profound cold, as if it were our shared fault, this disaster. We had failed and the Maidwas damaged—more than damaged. All the crew’s skill, that had stopped our falling, that had docked us here neatly as if it was Brahmani Station ... in this terrible, terrible place....
“We’re fixed here,” Lynette said. “There’s no way. There’s no repair that can make the engines work against this. The Maidwon’t move again. Can’t.”
There was stark silence, from us, from Dela, no sound at all over the ship but the fans and the necessary machinery.
“How long will we survive?” Griffin asked. He kept his steadying hold on my lady. His handsome face was less arrogant than I had ever seen it; and he came up with the only sensible question. “What’s a reasonable estimate?”
“No immediate difficulty,” Gawain said. He unfastened his restraints and stood up, jerking his head so that his long hair fell behind his shoulders. “Modred?”
“The ship is virtually intact,” Modred said. “We’re not faced with shutdown. The lifesupport and recycling will go on operating. Our food is sufficient for several years. And for the percentage of inefficiency in the recycling, there are emergency supplies, frozen cultures, hydroponics. It should be indefinite.”