A Deepness in the Sky

"Shit!" It was Jimmy Diem. At the front of the cabin, the crewleader was pounding on a command console. Somewhere behind Vinh there was the sound of vomiting. It was like one of those nightmares where everything goes nuts at once.

At that instant, the lander reached end-of-burn. In the space of three seconds, the terrible pressure eased off Vinh's chest and there was the comforting familiarity of zero gee. He pulled on his couch release and coasted forward to Diem.

From the ceiling it was easy to stand with his head by Diem's and see the emergency displays, without getting in the crewleader's way. "We're really shooting at them?"Lord, but my head hurts! When he tried to read Diem's command console, the glyphs swam before his eyes.

Diem turned his head a fraction to look at Ezr. Agony was clear in his face; he could barely move. "I don't know what we're doing. I've lost consensual imaging. Tie yourself down... ." He leaned forward as though to focus on the display. "The fleet net has gone hard crypto, and we're stuck at the least secure level," which meant that they would get little information beyond direct commands from Park's armsmen.

The ceiling gave Vinh a solid whack on the butt, and he started to slide toward the back of the cabin. The lander was turning, some kind of emergency override—the autopilot had given no warning. Most likely, fleet command was prepping them for another burn. He tied down behind Diem, just as the lander's main torch lit off at about a tenth of a gee. "They're moving us to a lower orbit...but I don't see anything coming to rendezvous," said Diem. He poked awkwardly at the password field beneath the display. "Okay, I'm doing my own snooping....I hope Park isn't too pissed... ."

Behind them, there was the sound of more vomiting. Diem started to turn his head, winced. "You're the mobile one, Vinh. Take care of that."

Ezr slid down the aisle's ladderline, letting the one-tenth-gee load do the moving for him. Qeng Ho lived their lives under varying accelerations. Medicine and good breeding made orientation sickness a rare thing among them. But Tsufe Do and Pham Patil had both upchucked, and Benny Wen was curled up as far as his ties would permit. He held the sides of his head and swayed in apparent agony. "The pressure, the pressure..."

Vinh eased next to Patil and Do, gently vac'd the goo that was dribbling down their coveralls. Tsufe looked up at him, embarrassment in her eyes. "Never barfed in my life."

"It's not you," said Vinh, and tried to think past the pain that squeezed harder and harder.Stupid, stupid, stupid. How could it take so long tounderstand? It was not the Qeng Ho that was attacking the Emergents; somehow it was quite the reverse.

Suddenly he could see outside again. "I got local consensus," Diem's voice came in his earphones. The crewleader's words came in short, tortured bursts. "Five high-gee bombs from Emergent positions....Target: Park's flag... ."

Vinh leaned across the row of couches and looked out. The missiles' jets were pointing away from the lander's viewpoint; the five were faint stars moving faster and faster across the sky, closing on the QHSPham Nuwen. Yet their paths were not smooth arcs. There were sharp bends and wobbles.

"We must be lasing at them. They're jinking."

One of the tiny lights vanished. "We got one! We—"

Four points of light blazed in the sky. The brightness grew and grew, a thousand times brighter than the faded disk of the sun.

Then the view was gone again. The cabin lights died, winked back on, died again. The bottommost emergency system came online. There was a faint network of reddish lines, outlining equipment bays, airlock, the emergency console. The system was rad-hardened but very simpleminded and low-powered. There wasn't even backup video.

"What about Park's flagship, Crewleader?" asked Vinh. Four close-set detonations, so terribly bright—the corners of a regular tetrahedron, clasping its victim. The view was gone but it would burn in his memory forever."Jimmy!" Vinh screamed at the front of the cabin. "What about thePhamNuwen?" The red emergency lights seemed to sway around him; the shouting brought him close to blacking out.

Then Diem's voice came hoarse and loud. "I...I think it's g-gone." Fried, vaped, none of the masking words were easy anymore. "I don't have anything now, but the four nukes...Lord, they were right on top of him!"

Several other voices interrupted, but they were even weaker than Jimmy Diem's. As Vinh started back up the line toward him, the one-tenth-gee burn ended. Without light or brains, what was the lander but a dark coffin? For the first time in his life, Ezr Vinh felt the groundsider's disorienting terror: zero gee could mean they had reached designated orbit, or that they were falling in a ballistic arc that intersected the planet's surface... .