Then, at four hundred seconds into the Relight, the canopy tore free. It lifted slowly, twisting in the violet sky. There was no sign of the crewfolk who should have been sheltering under it. Worried murmuring grew. Nau did something with his cuff, and his voice was suddenly loud enough to be heard across the room. "Don't worry. They had several hundred seconds to see the canopy was going, plenty of time to move down into the shadow."
Qiwi nodded, but she said quietly to Ezr. "If they didn't fall off. I don't know why they were up there in the first place." If they had fallen off, drifted out into the sunlight...Even with thermal jackets, they'd just cook.
He felt a small hand slip into his.Does the Brat even know she didthat? But after a second he squeezed her hand gently. Qiwi was staring out at the main work site. "I should be out there." It was the same thing Qiwi had been saying since she came indoors, but now her tone was quite different.
Then the outside views jittered, as if something had hit all the cameras at once. The light leaking through the naked face of Diamond Two brightened into a jagged line. And now there wassound, a moan that grew louder and louder, its pitch scaling first up and then down.
"Podmaster!" The voice was loud and insistent, not the robotlike reporting of the Emergent techs. It was Ritser Brughel. "Diamond Two is shifting, lifting off—" And now it was obvious. The whole mountain was tilting. Billions of tonnes, loose.
And the moaning sound that still filled the auditorium must be the moorage webbing, twisting beneath the temp. "We're not in its way, sir." Ezr could see that now. The immensity was moving slowly, slowly, but its slide was away from the temp and Hammerfest and the moored starships. The view outside had slowly rotated, now was turning back. Everyone in the auditorium was scrambling for tie-downs.
Hammerfest was built into Diamond One. The big rock looked unchanged, unmoved. The starships beyond...They were minnows beside the bulk of the Diamonds, but each ship was over six hundred meters long, a million tonnes unfueled. And the ships were swaying slowly at the end of their mooring points on Diamond One. It was a dance of leviathans, and a dance that would totally wreck them if it continued.
"Podmaster!" Brughel again. "I'm getting audio from the crewleader, Diem."
"Well put him on!"
• • •
It was dark above the airlock. The lights did not come on, and there was no atmosphere. Diem and the others floated up the tunnel from the lock, their hood lights flickering this way and that. They looked out from the tunnels into empty rooms, into rooms with partitions blasted away, gutted fifty meters deep. This was supposed to be theundamaged ship. A coldness grew inside Diem. The enemy had come in after the battle and sucked it dry, left a dead hulk.
Behind him, Tsufe said, "Jimmy, theTreasure is moving."
"Yeah, I've got a solid contact with the wall here. Sounds like it's twisting on its mooring point."
Diem reached out from the ladderline and pressed his hood against the wall. Yes. If there had been atmosphere, the place would be full of the sounds of ringing destruction. So the Relight was causing more shifting than anyone had guessed. A day ago that knowledge would have terrorized. Now..."I don't think it matters, Tsufe. Come on." He led Do and Patil still faster up the ladderline. So Pham Trinli had been right, and the plan was doomed. But one way or another, he was going to discover what had been done to them. And just maybe he could get the truth out to the others.
The interior locks had been ripped out and vacuum extended to every room. They floated up past what should have been repair bays and workshops, past deep holes that should have held the ram's startup injectors.
High abaft, in the shielded heart of theFar Treasure that was where the sickbay had been, that was where there should be coldsleep tanks. Now...Jimmy and the others moved sideways through the shielding. When their hands touched the walls, they could hear the creaking of the hull, feel its slow motion. So far, the close-tethered starships had not collided-though Jimmy wasn't sure if they could really know that. The ships were so large, so massive, if they collided at a few centimeters per second the hulls would just slide into each other with scarcely a jolt.
They had reached the entrance to the sickbay. Where the Emergents claimed to hold the surviving armsmen.
More emptiness? Another lie?
Jimmy slipped through the door. Their head lamps flickered around the room.
Tsufe Do cried out.
Not empty. Bodies. He swept his light about, and everywhere...the coldsleep boxes had been removed, but the room was...filled with corpses. Diem pulled the lamp from his head and stuck it to an open patch of wall. Their shadows still danced and twisted, but now he could see it all.
"Th-they're all dead, aren't they?" Pham Patil's voice was dreamy, the question simply an expression of horror.
