Maelstrom by Paul Preuss Read Free Book Online Page B

head came entirely away.
     
“I’ve got you,” Sparta said.
    When the locking pin in the floor of the bell was pulled, all connections to Rover One’s motive power, external sensors, and long-term life-support systems were severed and sealed. Yoshimitsu was blind now, his AR suit rendered useless. With the aid of recirculating filters the three inhabitants of the bell would normally have six hours to live, maybe a little more.
    Sparta backed cautiously out of the trench she had dug in the mound, holding the sphere aloft until they were clear of the landslide. Then, as fast as she could, she turned and scuttled back the way she had come, holding the survivors egglike in front of her.
    Sparta’s decision not to wait was proven sound when a few seconds later the ground began to shake, and a thousand tonnes of fresh rock poured down the cliff to dam the canyon behind them. Sparta didn’t bother to radio an I-told-you-so to Port Hesperus.
    Her burden did not obscure her view. Artificial Reality is more easily adjusted than the other kind, so Sparta merely tuned her sensors to peer through and around the pressure sphere in front of her, leaving only a kind of double exposure, or ghost presence, to reassure her of the health of the bell’s inhabitants.
    Cannon-fire crashes of distant lightning pursued her as she scurried down the twisting channel between walls of slickrock. When the ground waves arrived seconds later stones plunged through the thick atmosphere all around her, but she reached the canyon mouth safely. The final dash across the plain should have been easy.
    Halfway to the shuttle, a massive tremor set the ground to flapping like a sheet in the wind. The sudden upward movement of rock against the crush of atmosphere flattened the rover. Sparta’s midlegs took most of the force; one bent beneath her. An instant later the trough of the wave passed, and atmospheric suction yanked the pressure sphere out of Sparta’s grasp.
    She jettisoned the useless midleg and ran forward over the heaving ground. The bell bounced ahead of her, bounding over a ledge, over a broad shelf, down another ledge. Leaping, she caught it. She rolled the sphere upright and steadied it. As she was reattaching the communication couples, she noted the spurt of molten lithium from a rupture in the refrigerating coils–
She discovered that her left hindleg was also useless. She dropped it where she stood.
    The bell’s passengers were piled on the floor behind the pilot’s chair. Merck’s blond hair was stained with bright blood from a cut across the top of his high forehead. Forster looked seriously perturbed, though not visibly damaged; he was massaging his chin. Yoshimitsu had been strapped in; he seemed unaffected.
“Your coils are ruptured,” she said. “We’ve got maybe ten minutes left before your coolant’s gone. Tie yourselves down. I’m going to drag you to the shuttle.”
     
Merck looked up, befuddled, holding his bleeding scalp. “Is this really essen . . . ?”
     
“Do it, Albers, if you want to save yourself!” Forster snapped at him. Forster had stripped the belt from his coveralls and was using it to tie himself to the back of the pilot’s chair.
    Merck, after a moment of confused indecision, did likewise. The two passengers huddled against the floor as Sparta circled the bell, gripped it with her forearms, and started dragging it backwards across the eroded landscape.
She radioed a terse message to Azure Dragon. The space station was already sliding over the curve of the planet; when the delayed reply came back it was a simple acknowledgment.
    Sparta’s progress was slow. She was short two legs and had to keep the sphere from rolling over, further crushing its refrigerating coils. The egg left a bloody track as it was pulled along–a thin bright stream of metal jetting from the ruptured coil, emerging red hot, then quickly cooling to splashes of liquid silver on the rock.
Watching the rate of loss, Sparta could