“You’ve got me!" Horza yelled hoarsely.
“What."
The shuttle was still climbing, passing decks and towers and the thin horizontal lines of monorail tracks. All Horza’s weight
was taken by his
fingers, hooked in their gloves over the edge of the ramp door. His arms ached. “I’m hanging on to the goddamn
ramp!"
“You bastards!" screamed another voice. It was Lamm. The ramp started to close; the jerk almost broke Horza’s grip. They were
fifty meters
up and climbing. He saw the top part of the doors jawing down toward his fingers.
“Mipp!" he yelled. “Don’t close the door! Leave the ramp where it is and I’ll try to get in!"
“OK," Mipp said quickly. The ramp stopped angling up, halting at about twenty degrees. Horza began swinging his legs from
side to side.
They were seventy, eighty meters up, facing away from the wave of wreckage and heading slowly away from it.
“You black bastard! Come back!" Lamm bellowed.
“I can’t, Lamm!" Mipp cried. “I can’t! You’re too close!"
“You fat
bastard!
" Lamm hissed.
Light flickered around Horza. The underside of the shuttle blazed in a dozen places as laser fire hit it. Something slammed
into Horza’s left
foot, on the sole of his boot, and his right leg was kicked out as his leg burned with pain.
Mipp screamed incoherently. The shuttle started to gather speed, heading back over the Megaship and diagonally across it.
The air roared
around Horza’s body, slowly tearing his grip away. “Mipp, slow down!" he shouted.
“Bastard!" Lamm yelled agin. The mist to one side glowed as a fan of short-lived beams incandesced within it, then the laser
fire shifted
and the shuttle sparkled again, cracking with five or six small explosions around the front and nose section.
Mipp howled. The shuttle increased
speed. Horza was still trying to swing one leg onto the sloped ramp, but the clawed fingers
of his gloves were slowly scraping along the
roughened surface as his body was slipstreamed back behind the speeding craft.
Lamm screamed—a high, gurgling sound which went through Horza’s head like an electric shock, until the noise snapped off suddenly,
replaced for an instant by sharp cracking, breaking noises.
The shuttle raced over the surface of the crashing Megaship, a hundred meters up. Horza felt the strength ebbing from his
fingers and arms.
He looked through the helmet visor at the interior of the shuttle only a few meters away as, millimeter
by millimeter, he slipped away from it.
The interior flashed once, then an instant later blazed white, blindingly, unbearably. His eyes closed instinctively, and
a burning yellow light
came through his eyelids. His helmet speakers made a sudden, piercing, inhuman noise, like a machine
screaming, then cut out altogether.
The light faded slowly. He opened his eyes.
The shuttle interior was still brightly lit, but it was smoldering now, too. In the turbulent air whirling in from the open
rear doors, wisps of
smoke were tugged from scorched seats, singed straps and webbing, and the crisped black skin on Lenipobra’s
exposed face. Shadows
seemed to be burned onto the bulkhead in front.
Horza’s fingers, one by one, came to the edge of the ramp.
My God,
he thought, looking at the scorch marks and the smoke,
that maniac had a nuke after all.
Then the shock wave hit.
It slapped him forward, over the ramp and into the shuttle, just before it hit the machine itself, throwing it bucking and
bouncing about the sky
like a tiny bird caught in a storm. Horza was rattled about the interior from side to side, trying
desperately to grab hold of something to stop
himself falling back out through the open rear doors. His hand found some straps
and fisted round them with the last of his strength.
Back through the doors, through the mist, a huge rolling fireball was climbing slowly into the sky. A noise like every clap
of thunder he had
ever heard vibrated through the hot, hazed interior of the fleeing machine. The shuttle banked, throwing
Horza against one set of seats. A big
tower flashed by the open rear doors, blocking out the fireball as the shuttle continued
to turn. The rear doors seemed to try to close, then
jammed.
Horza felt heavy and hot inside his suit, as the heat from the bomb’s flash seeped through from the surfaces which had been
exposed to the
initial fireball. His right leg hurt badly, somewhere below the knee. He could smell burning.
As the shuttle steadied and its course straightened, Horza got up and limped forward to the door set in the bulkhead, where
the outlines of
the seats and Lenipobra’s slumped body—now spread-eagled near the rear doors—were burned in frozen shadows
onto the offwhite surface
of the wall. He opened the door and went through.
Mipp was in the pilot’s seat, hunched over the controls. The monitor screens were blank, but the view through the thick, polarized
glass of
the shuttle’s windscreen showed cloud, mist, some towers sliding underneath and open sea beyond, covered with yet
more cloud. “Thought
you… were dead…." Mipp said thickly, half turning toward Horza. Mipp looked wounded, crouched in his
seat, hunchbacked, eyelids drooped.
Sweat glistened on his dark brow. There was smoke in the flight deck, acrid and sweet
at once.
Horza took his helmet off and fell into the other seat. He looked down at his right leg. A neat, black-rimmed hole about a
centimeter across
had been punched through the back of the suit calf, matched by a larger and more ragged hole on the side.
He flexed the leg and winced; just a
muscle burn, already cauterized. He could see no blood.
He looked at Mipp. “You all right." he asked. He already knew the answer.
Mipp shook his head. “No," he said, in a soft voice. “That lunatic hit me. Leg, and my back somewhere."
Horza looked at the back of Mipp’s suit, near where it rested against the seat. A hole in the bowl of the seat led to a long,
dark scar on the
suit surface. Horza looked down at the flight-deck floor. “Shit," he said. “This thing’s full of holes."
The floor was pitted with craters. Two were directly under Mipp’s seat; one laser shot had caused that dark scar on the side
of the suit, the
other must have hit Mipp’s body.
“Feels like that bastard shot me right up the ass, Horza," Mipp said, trying to smile. “He did have a nuke, didn’t he. That’s
what went off.
Blew all the electrics away…. Only the optic controls still working. Useless damn shuttle…"
“Mipp, let me take over," Horza said. They were in cloud now; only a vague coppery light showed through the crystal screen
ahead. Mipp
shook his head.
“Can’t. You couldn’t fly this thing… with it in this shape."
“We’ve got to go back, Mipp. The others might have—"
“Can’t. They’ll all be dead," Mipp said, shaking his head and gripping the controls tighter, staring through the screen. “God,
this thing’s
dying." He looked round the blank monitors, shaking his head slowly. “I can feel it."
“Shit!" Horza said, feeling helpless. “What about radiation." he said suddenly. It was a truism that in any properly designed
suit, if you
survived the flash and blast, you’d survive the radiation; but Horza wasn’t sure that his was a properly designed
suit. One of the many
instruments it lacked was a radiation monitor, and that was a bad sign in itself. Mipp looked at a small
screen on the console.
“Radiation…" He shook his head. “Nothing serious," he said. “Low on neutrons…" He grimaced with pain. “Pretty clean bomb;
probably not
what that bastard wanted at all. He should take it back to the shop…." Mipp gave a small, strangled, despairing
laugh.
“We have to go back, Mipp," Horza said. He tried to imagine Yalson, running away from the wreckage with a better start than
he and Lamm
had had. He told himself she’d have made it, that when the bomb had gone off, she’d have been far enough away
not to be injured by it, and
that the ship would finally stop, the metal glacier of wreckage slowing and halting. But how
would she or any of the others get off the Megaship,