The smile on her gaunt and bloodless face looked almost gay.
“I won’t fail!”
“Guard her, Captain,” he snapped brusquely at me.
“Keepers of the peace have been lost in the past.
That must not happen again.
The security of AKKA is your first duty now.”
“Yes, sir.”
I gave him a quick salute.
“I understand, sir.”
Moving with a brisk and almost jaunty haste, as if he felt more eagerness than fear, he slid into the capsule and sealed the hatch. A pang of envy stabbed me as I thumbed the launching-cycle button.
“I wish—” Lilith whispered beside me. “I wish we were going.”
I said nothing.
They had at least a chance to find what was beyond the anomaly.
I thought we had no chance at all—but I saw no need to speak of that.
Silently, I caught Lilith’s hand.
It lay cold and lifeless in my grasp.
The inner valve thudded shut.
The pumps roared briefly.
The outer valve opened less than halfway—and stuck fast.
“Wait for me,” I told Lilith. “I’ll see what I can do.”
I scrambled into an emergency suit and cycled through the man-lock. Inside the main chamber, I slid around the capsule and found room to slip through the jammed valve.
Outside, I discovered that it had been fouled by a deflated plastic shaft—a spoke from the broken full-G wheel—blown across the lock.
Working in frantic haste, with emergency tools designed for smaller and more delicate tasks of repair, I slashed away the crumpled plastic tube.
The embedded steel cables still fouled the valve.
They were too tough for my cutter, almost too heavy for my torch.
Precious minutes were gone before I could part them. Then I found the valve still jammed, the servo-motor dead. Sweating in the suit, I toiled at the hand-wheel to widen the opening far enough so that I could guide the capsule past the knife-edge of the valve.
Outside, we found that we were screened from the invaders only by the flimsy wreckage of the full-G ring.
With laserphone dark, for fear of another shot, I jammed my helmet against the capsule to carry sound and shouted a warning to Ken Star that the invaders could see his rockets here.
He let me push the capsule safely beyond the ice asteroid before he fired.
That effort drained too much mass from my own pack.
When he used his laserphone, in the shadow of the asteroid, to warn me to drive clear, my thrusters were too sluggish.
The roaring jets of the capsule caught me, flung me spinning back toward the station.
Flying through the dark, thrusters dead, I caught a frightening glimpse of the anomaly.
The invading machines were still too far for me to see, but that terrible funnel of darkness had swallowed more of the reddened and distorted stars around it.
The trapped iron asteroid was brighter now, closer to its black throat, still falling ahead of the station.
Though that giddy glimpse of Nowhere left me cold and shaken, the more normal space around me was deadly enough.
Helpless to control my flight, I missed the gray starlit bulk of the ice asteroid.
Flying past it, I had time to wonder whether the direction and velocity of my unplanned flight lay within the critical cone that would take me into Nowhere.
Then a whipping metal tentacle struck me savagely.
10 Anomaly in Time
Bruised and dazed, I seized that flailing tentacle.
After one stunned instant, I knew what it was—a loose cable from the broken full-G wheel.
Though half the ring had been blown away by that exploding micro-missile, wreckage of the rest still spun around the ice asteroid.
The cable twisted away, slipping in my gloves.
I held on grimly, for I clung to life itself.
Desperately, I kept my grip until my un-guided flight was checked.
Laboriously then, fighting the centrifugal force that was like inverted gravity, I started climbing toward the axle of the broken wheel.
That took a long time.
Though I had been able to stop that first terrifying slide not far beyond the half-G point, the suit itself, even with empty mass-tanks, was still as heavy as my body. The gloves gave me only a precarious grip on the whirling cable.
I climbed and had to rest, climbed and had to rest.