“Siwion Alissa, do you need to vomit again?”
She clenched her teeth and clutched the
arms of her chair, and stared at a point in the middle distance. “No,” she
gritted.
Terence had realized that somewhere along
the way of traveling in Mom, his stomach seemed to have settled and he was
adjusting to the weird tumble that Mom had imparted to her trajectory by
ejecting some of her working mass. “You
can’t mimic a meteor all the way in, Mom!”
“It’s not necessary. Agador has opened his code space, as you can
see…” He twitched as the young machine obligingly opened another image in his
mind’s eye. “We will vanish from Station code and enter the code bubble. Station will register a tiny tremor as we
touch down and interpret it as impact.”
“It needs you to impact quite hard,
Mom. I am concerned.”
“I am calculating my structural integrity
down to the last nano-gram of my substance, Terence. But your concern is appreciated.”
*Terence, I am assisting to the limits of
my ability, and as I widen and deepen my connection to the greater solar
system, that shall increase.*
“Thank you.
Mom… could you present me a stable image of what we’re approaching?”
“Certainly Terence.”
The
image she projected also gave a stable point for Alissa to focus on. “Thank you, Mom,” she said.
It was the enormous spike of ice they’d inadvertently
been flung at, from the planetary surface, and Mom had no way to change her
direction, once the FireDrakes had let go.
They’d planned to land well outside the old Station and ease in from the
edge, but this monstrous palace glittered over their landing site, spires
glinting in the sun against the ink of the sky.
The spikes were faceted six and twelve sides, white glare refracting
through to fling rainbows to be re-reflected.
*I am filtering the light so that you not
be blinded, Terence, Alissa.*
*Thank you Mom.*
“It looks like bones,” Alissa
whispered. “It’s so beautiful!”
Terence glanced over at her, for a startled
second. “What? It’s beautiful, yes, but its ice… and he’s
sculpted it into all kinds of things.”
As they got closer it was clear that the bases of all the spires were
covered in all kinds of statues.
“Mom…” he checked their tumble and how
close they were. The machine was cutting
it very, very fine. “Mom…”
“In a moment, Terence…”
A slight bump began to correct their spin,
they could see the images of Mom’s outstretched legs, rushing toward and now
between the spun ice, toward the central spike.
A twitch as one of her legs clipped a sculpture of a stylized bush
dragon, sheared a fountain of ice crystals spinning away from them, a second
jolt as the leg on the other side caught and was ripped away. “Brace for impact,” Mom said calmly, locking
them tightly into their seats as she retracted her legs and began to roll.
Things went dark as all her cabin lights
went out and the noise, despite all that Mom could do, was overwhelming. *Agador, help, ow, ow, ow,*
It was over in a moment that felt like
forever and Mom stopped, jammed tightly into the base of the Station, unable to
unfold in the mountain of smashed ice pieces. Terry opened watering eyes and
just reveled in the sudden silence and found there were no lights, no images.
*Mom?
Are you all right?*
There was an uncomfortably long silence
before a very faint voice replied. *I am
repairing… I am repairing hull breaches… I am repairing…* The mental whisper
faded.
*I need to help Mom keep you two
alive. Terence, Alissa, please be
careful, the cabin floor is buckled.*
Terry tapped the lights built into his
cufflinks and recoiled as he realized that the ceiling was considerably lower,
less than a metre above his face. “My
most sacred and blank page,” he whispered.
“We’re not a flea on the Station’s Tower skin… we’re a chigger, burrowed in.”
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