HE WON’T HEAR YOU
2416 CE
Doug blew the hatch and rode the gust of air out to where he could turn and see the worksite in the Uranian twilight. The mighty ship, nearly complete, loomed before him, a smooth, kilometer-wide steel stick. Close to Doug, a swarm of jostling white dots, thrusters flaring and winking among them, nestled in the dark shadow of a gigantic plate of gnarl-grain, cross-layered steel. The plate, two inches thick and five hundred meters square, was one of six attached at an edge to the five-kilometer-long barrel-shaped spine, so that viewed along the spine, the six radiated out like rays from a star.
This was the last uncompleted section of Tompuso‘s core, the heaviest and best-armored sector of the still-skeletal starship. Here the tourists would carry their cybrains, their archives, their air regenerators and other vital equipment, protected from radiation and space-junk flying in at lethal speed. Geordie had been working here, attaching a steel bulkhead.
Doug thrusted his way to the others. Now only an occasional terse command from Nye punctuated the silence. Doug maneuvered his way between two other men and came to where Geordie was pinned.
The bulkhead was a curved steel plate half as thick as the core plates, and about fifty meters on each side. It was a cylindrical sector, made to fit in the sixty-degree arc between two of the huge radial core plates; at one edge of it, forward along the ship’s spine, a flat, pie-shaped plate closed off an adjacent, completed chamber.
Geordie lay crushed against one of the core plates; Doug could only see his upper half. The bulkhead plate he’d been working on had drifted in its cable moorings, crushed the penman at the waist, and jammed at opposite edges where it met the core plates, cold-welding itself in place. Plasma torches flared as two penmen tried to cut it free at the far edge.
“That’s it,” a deep voice grated. “Get back to your assigned areas. All you coming off shift, back to the Hive. Now.” Wenrock.
“But he’s gonna die!” Nye spoke up for Geordie. “If we get him back to the Hole, he’ll be fine.”
Other voices echoed, “Yeah!” “Let us finish.”
“That’s three for you, Nye,” Wenrock said quietly. “Get over to Area Twelve.”
Silence. The plasma torches winked out. Nye floated away from Geordie, and Doug jetted in, ignoring Wenrock.
Geordie‘s eyes were closed. The plate had nearly cut him in half just below the waist. The square corner of the plate lodged in his gut. Bulging outward from the plate’s vise pressure, his suit sparkled red and violet and pearl.
“He won’t hear you, MacNee,” Wenrock said. “By now he’s got a death dose of met in him.”
“We’ve got to get him out,” Doug said, reaching out. He ran his heavy-gloved fingers along the plate’s murderous unsmoothed edge where it sliced into Geordie‘s belly, pincering the man’s body to a hand’s thickness.
“Doug,” came Geordie‘s voice, hoarse, faint.
“Geordie, I’m here.”
“Doug.”
“Geordie, hang on, we’ll get you back to the Hole.” Doug floated to where he could look down between the jammed plate and its completed neighbor. His helmet light showed a broad red stain on Geordie‘s legs, tiny blood-shards of ice hazing the vacuum nearby. It would not be long.
