“Oh no!” Swan said. “At what?”
“At the Venus sunshield.”
“Oh no!”
The other people in the bathroom were beginning to look at her. She went out into the hall and almost took the elevator down to the park, just on instinct; but she had left Wahram at their restaurant table, and besides, she couldn’t run from this. “Damn,” she said. “I have to tell Wahram.”
“Yes.”
“How much time before it hits?”
“Approximately five hours.”
“Damnation.” She thought of Venus—the dry ice seas under their carpet of rock, the cities on the coasts and in the craters. She ran back up the stairs to the picture window restaurant and sat down across from Wahram. He looked at her curiously, alert to her distress.
“All right, I have to make a confession first,” Swan said. “I told Pauline about the strange qube problem because I wanted to hear what she thought of it, and I figured she was isolated in me and it would be all right.” She raised a hand to forestall whatever he was about to say; he was already pop-eyed with alarm. “I’m sorry, I should have asked you I suppose, but anyway it’s done, and now Pauline has been in touch with Wang’s qube, and it’s telling her there’s a new qube security system in place that has lowered the limit of detection, and they’re seeing a new pebble attack in the process of coalescing, an attack on the Venus sunshield.”
“Shit,” Wahram said. He gulped, stared at her more pop-eyed than ever. “Pauline, is this right?”
“Yes,” Pauline said.
“How long before these pebbles hit?”
Pauline said, “Just under five hours.”
“Five hours!” Wahram exclaimed. “Why such short notice!”
“The attack is coalescing in such a way that it will hit edge-on to the sunshield, and so most of the pebbles have been out of the plane of the ecliptic until just recently. There are no new detectors yet distributed out of the plane, so they’re just now showing up. Wang’s qube was just about to warn Wang about it.”
“Can you display your data in a 3-D model?” Wahram asked. Swan put her right hand against the table’s screen, and in the texture of the table appeared a glowing image of the Venus sunshield—a great circular sheet, spinning around the hub at its center point, somewhat like Saturn’s rings around Saturn. Red lines indicating the detected pebbles were coming in from many directions, looking like magnetic lines converging on a monopole. When massed together, they would tear through the thin concentric panels of the shield, and if the conglomerate was large enough, reach the hub and destroy the controls. The remainder of the giant thing would go Catherine-wheeling through the night, mirror banners twisting and knotting in the black vacuum. And Venus would be cooked.
“Has anyone alerted the Venusian defense system?” Wahram asked.
“Yes, Wang’s qube did that, and now Wang too, but the sunshield’s AI did not find that the data transmitted represented a hazard. We suspect something is wrong with it.”
“Did the sunshield AI explain itself?” Wahram asked. “I need to see that whole exchange, please. Display as text,” and then he was reading the table screen so intently that it seemed his exophthalmic eyes might pop out of his head entirely. Swan let him read and conducted her own quick conversation with Pauline.
“Pauline, say we can’t convince the sunshield’s AI to act, is there anything we could do from here?”
Pauline took a few seconds, then said, “A countermass arriving at the pebbles’ meeting point at the rendezvous moment and hitting the mass at a tangent would push the paired mass off to the side, thus missing the sunshield. After the impact, the sunshield’s security system would presumably react to any detritus flying its way. The countermass should have approximately an equivalent momentum to the pebble mob, to vector the paired mass away successfully.”
“How big is the pebble mob?”
“It looks like it will mass about the equivalent of ten ships of this size.”
“This ship? So… if this ship was moving ten times faster than the pebbles?”
“That would make a momentum equivalency, yes.”
“Can this ship get there in time, and going fast enough?”
By now Wahram was listening to them rather than reading.
“Yes,” Pauline said. “But only by accelerating at this ship’s maximum acceleration, and starting as soon as you can.”
Swan looked at Wahram. “We have to tell the ship’s crew about this. And everyone else too.”
“True,” he said, taking up his napkin and patting his mouth. He surged to his feet. “Let’s go up to the bridge.”
By the time they got there, the officers of the ship were already gathered before their AI’s biggest screen and were looking into a graphic of the pebble array very similar to the one Wahram and Swan had been looking at.
“Oh good,” Wahram said when he saw it. He was huffing a bit from the run down hallways and up stairs. “You see the problem we have.”
The ship’s captain glanced at him and said, “I’m glad you’re here. Indeed a big problem!”
Wahram said, “Swan’s qube says our ship here can serve to ward off the attack, by colliding with the pebbles at their rendezvous point.”
The captain and everyone on the crew looked startled at this idea, but Wahram gave them little time to adjust: “If we decide to do this, are there enough lifeboats for everyone aboard?”
“ ‘Lifeboat’ is not the right word,” the captain said, “but yes. There are lots of small ferries and hoppers on board, and most of the passengers could be put in them. Also there are more than enough personal spacesuits to send everyone out on their own. There are supplies in the suits to last ten days, so in that sense they’re better than the ferries, which don’t carry that kind of emergency supply. Everyone would get picked up, either way. But…” The captain looked around at the ship’s officers. “I should think the Venusian defense system would take this kind of thing on. Are we sure they won’t? And”—gesturing at the screen—“is this image evidence enough for us to change course, accelerate, and abandon ship?”
Wahram said, “We have to trust our AIs here, I think. They’re issuing their warning because we programmed them to react to input like this.”
“But they set up this fine-grained detection system on their own, I’m being told.”
“Yes, but I guess you could say we asked for that too. Wang asked for better protection. So—we’ve already made the decision to trust them.”
The captain frowned. “I suppose you’re right. But I don’t like it that the sunshield security doesn’t recognize this as a problem. If it did we wouldn’t have to throw our ship into harm’s way.”
“That may be balkanization rearing its head again,” Inspector Genette said from the doorway. “The Venus sunshield isn’t connected to the warning system that saw these pebbles, and it’s heavily firewalled from influences just like Wang’s qube. So it may not be equipped to believe the input.”
“What do the Venusians say?” the captain asked.
“Let’s ask them and find out,” suggested Wahram.
Swan said, “We have to tell them immediately, of course, but the Venusian leadership is notoriously opaque. How soon will they reply? And what do we do in the meantime?”
The captain was still frowning. He glared at Swan, as if because she had brought up the problem, it was her fault. “Let’s prepare to abandon ship,” he said unhappily. “We can stop at any point if it seems right. But if we confirm that we need to do this, we don’t have much time.” He stared at the screen and said, “We need to accelerate hard to make that rendezvous. Tell everyone to prepare for another flip. Mobile, what speed will it take in terms of g-force on the passengers to get to this convergence point in time?”
The AI spoke a string of numbers and coordinates, which the captain listened to closely. The captain then said, “We have to flip right now, then accelerate at a three-g equivalent for the next three h
ours, while angling slightly out of the plane, to a spot above the edge of the sunshield.”
This was bad news; suiting up in three g was hard, rarely attempted except in emergency drills.
“Tell everyone on board rated for spacesuits to please get started getting into them,” the captain ordered, then scowled. “Everyone else into the ferries. We need to accelerate immediately on making the flip.” Then, after looking around at his people on the bridge, he went to the intercom and began to explain the situation to the passengers himself.
This proved more complicated than he had perhaps anticipated, and Wahram and Swan left for the locks on their rooms’ floor before he was finished. Compensation for the ship would no doubt be a matter of ordinary Swiss insurance, and indeed it might come directly from the Venusians; some reward for their sacrifice was practically guaranteed, the captain was announcing as they took the elevator down; in any case it looked as if it was going to be necessary to abandon ship. The ship’s ferries and hoppers could hold all ten thousand people on board, but those qualified could and should make their escape in individual spacesuits, all of which had long-term supplies. In fact anyone who preferred suits to ferries could leave in a suit immediately on suit integrity check. All locks were available. They would be picked up within hours, he hoped, and it would become no more than an inconvenience, which would be regarded as heroic because it would save Venus. Only good things could follow from that. There was a necessity for speed to give their aid effectively, so unfortunately they would all be forced to operate under a three-g equivalent for the duration of their time on board. The inconvenience was greatly regretted, and assistance from the crew would be provided to all who requested it.
The announcement as it went on and on in its convoluted Swiss way was causing an uproar throughout the ship, which Swan and Wahram became aware of when they left their elevator on their floor. As they entered the lock room they heard voices calling out, seemingly throughout the ship, and they gave each other a look.
“Let’s stick together,” Swan said, and mutely Wahram nodded.
This flip was somehow more disorienting than usual, as if knowing it was anomalous made it into something like space sickness, or a dream in which one’s body floated away to disaster.
The bad feeling fell into another kind of nightmare when they got going again and the weight of their bodies fairly rapidly tripled. This was enough to drive everyone to the floor. People cried out at the shock of it, but the situation was understood, and after the first few moments most of the passengers rolled into a crawling position and did their best to crawl or roll or slither. Different methods were being tried, and some people were clearly having no success at all, lying there struggling as if pinned by an invisible wrestler.
In g like this, the differences in mass between people became striking and important. Smalls weighed three times as much as they usually did, like everyone else aboard, but that still left them at weights that human muscles had evolved to handle. This was made quite tangible by the sight of all the smalls on board still on their feet and walking around, some crouched like sumo wrestlers or chimpanzees, others strutting like Popeye, but in any case, upright and moving, and most of them working hard in impromptu teams to help their prostrated larger fellow passengers. Many of the most immobilized people littering the floors were of course the talls and rounds, who were now weighing in at more than four hundred kilograms and were often completely pinned by their weight. It was taking teams of three or four smalls together to roll these bigger people onto their backs and then grab them by the arms and legs and drag them toward the locks.
Swan herself was doing fairly well with crawling, though her bones ached. She knew once she got to a spacesuit and began to get into it, its AI would take over and jeeves the thing onto her. It would only be necessary to flex one’s shoulders and arms, like someone getting into coat sleeves, as the suit conformed itself onto one and sealed itself. Everyone had suited up under high g at least a few times in emergency drills, so now there was a sense that when they got to the changing room, things would be all right.
But Wahram was not having as much success moving as Swan. He might have been 50 or even 75 percent again as heavy as her, and now that was telling. He was shimmying along like a wounded walrus, but it was slow going, and she could see he was getting tired. Happily Inspector Genette passed them, at work with two other smalls hauling a big tall, who looked like Michelangelo’s David but could only just keep his head off the ground as they slid him along. “I’ll be back,” Genette said to Wahram and Swan, and off they went, shouting in their high voices at each other. And in a few more minutes, all three of them returned. Genette stumped about them, cheerfully giving orders, and they dragged Wahram to a wall with a railing. Once there Wahram was able to pull himself along on his knees, red-faced and gasping. He fixed Genette with a bulbous eye. “Thank you, I can proceed now. Please go help someone who can’t. I’m happy to see how the laws of proportion help you here, my friend.”
The inspector paused briefly to mime a stalwart boxer’s stance. “Every small takes up the call! None never yet died by natural cause!” Then, more relaxed: “I’ll see you soon in the lock, I think we’ve almost got everybody there.”
In the changing room next to the lock there was a sense of hurry but not panic—not quite. It was true that almost everyone was lying on the floor or crawling around except for the smalls helping them, and this was a shocking sight, a clear sign of an emergency. But the suits were kept in floor lockers, perhaps for this very reason, and Swan opened a locker and hauled herself onto the bench next to it and shoved into her suit as fast as she could, so fast that it squeaked a little in complaint. When she had it on and it declared all secure, she crawled along the floor to help Wahram into his suit, and then to help other people who needed it. Some were really struggling, clearly hurting. It would be a huge relief to these people to throw them overboard. Some of them should not have been in plus-one g for any length of time, it appeared. Swan was afraid there would be strokes and heart attacks, and a momentary image of Alex came to her, and she tried to take heart from it; Alex would have been great here, calm and encouraging, enjoying herself. Some of these people might be complacent spacers and out of shape, and might have brought this on themselves, but in any case there they were, struggling, groaning, sometimes even crying out. Some were trying to get out of their clothes before getting into the suits, and they were having more trouble getting their clothes off than getting their compliant suits on. One wombman, nearly spherical in torso, had picked a suit too small, so that Swan had to help him get out of it (it was persistent) and pick a new one.
Gradually there grew a smell of fear in the sweated air. Swan crawled back over to Wahram, ignoring her knees’ complaints. He was in a suit that was too big for him, but its display said it was secure. Their helmets’ common band was full of chatter, and she held up fingers before his faceplate—three, then four, then five—and switched to that band, and there he was, humming to himself.
“Your suit is too big,” she said.
“It’s fine,” he said. “I like them this way, and a lot of these go unused, I’ve found.”
“That doesn’t matter. It’s safest to be fitted properly.”
He ignored that and began helping someone on the other side of him. Swan switched to the common band, where someone was saying, “So we’re jumping out just because this ship’s AI says we have to? Does that strike anyone else as odd? Are we sure it’s not some kind of mutiny? They had better have good insurance.”
This was answered ten different ways at once, and Swan clicked from the common band back to 345. “Do you want to go out together?”
“Yes,” he said. “Of course. We have to hold hands.”
She liked that. “Do you want to go sooner or later?”
“Later, please. I feel like I should help people.”
“Can you move around well enough to help?”
“I think so.”
/> They helped as best they could. Sitting people dragged prone people a few meters and passed them along to other sitting people. The crowd had to go in groups, filling the lock to capacity every time to speed the process along. Not many people wanted to go first, but there were shouts from behind, and people in the halls still just trying to get into the changing room, so there was a kind of osmotic pressure. The lock always filled pretty quickly; then they closed the door, waited for the lock to clear and then close outside and refill with air, then open again from the inside for the next lot. Even in the locks some people couldn’t move, and there were smalls in there working hard to kick and shove people out the open door; when the inner doors reopened, they were still there, their faces under their helmets suffused with a mad joy.
There were other locks on the ship, of course, which was a good thing, because the biggest personnel locks held groups of only about twenty, and each ejection was taking five minutes or so; so it would take a couple of hours to get everyone out who was going in a suit. Most of the launches and ferries were apparently already gone.
Swan kept helping people get organized into groups before entering the lock; that speeded the process. She and Wahram worked as a pair, very effectively considering that neither of them could move more than a little bit. Sometimes they answered anxious questions. The suits had a ten-day supply of air, water, and nutrients, and a certain amount of propellant. Rescue vessels had been alerted and were already on their way, so everyone would be picked up within hours rather than days. It would all be fine.
Still it was a spooky thing to dive off an accelerating spaceship into blackness and stars, clothed in nothing but a personal suit. Many a round-eyed person entered the lock, and Swan could sympathize, even though in ordinary circumstances she liked this kind of thing.
Some lock groups jumped out together, holding hands, hoping to stay together; once the ones still inside saw this on the screens, it became something almost every group tried to do. They were social primates, they would take the risk together. No one wanted to die alone.