Part 40 (2/2)

Morganti squinted and shaded her eyes from the s.h.i.+ne. ”Is that a hydrogen bomb?”

”If it was,” Indrapramit said, ”Your eyes would be melting.”

Coffin laughed, the first sound he'd made since he'd a.s.sented to understanding his rights. ”It's a supernova.”

He raised both wrists, bound together by the restraints, and pointed. ”In the Andromeda Galaxy. See how low it is to the horizon? We'll lose sight of it as soon as we're in the shadow of that tower.”

”Al-Rahman,” Ferron whispered. The lift wall was darkening to a smoky shade and she could now look directly at the light. Low to the horizon, as Coffin had said. So bright it seemed to be visible as a sphere.

”Not that star. It was stable. Maybe a nearby one,” Coffin said. ”Maybe they knew, and that's why they were so desperate to tell us they were out there.”

”Could they have survived that?”

”Depends how close to Al-Rahman it was. The radiation-” Coffin shrugged in his restraints. ”That's probably what killed them.”

”G.o.d in heaven,” said Morganti.

Coffin cleared his throat. ”Beautiful, isn't it?”

Ferron craned her head back as the point source of the incredible radiance slipped behind a neighboring building. There was no scatter glow: the rays of light from the nova were parallel, and the shadow they entered uncompromising, black as a pool of ink.

Until this moment, she would have had to slip a skin over her perceptions to point to the Andromeda Galaxy in the sky. But now it seemed like the most important thing in the world that, two and a half million years away, somebody had shouted across the void before they died.

A strange elation filled her. Everybody talking, and n.o.body hears a d.a.m.ned thing anyone-even themselves-has to say.

”We're here,” Ferron said to the ancient light that spilled across the sky and did not pierce the shadow into which she descended. As her colleagues turned and stared, she repeated the words like a mantra. ”We're here too! And we heard you.”

-for Asha Cat Srinivasan s.h.i.+pman, and her family High Iron There had always been jobs that paid hardworking men well: men of scant social grace, men with histories, men of mahogany or copper or freckled skin unacceptable to their era. Paid well, that is, if you didn't mind losing a few fingers, catching a red-hot rivet in a tin funnel-the way Clardy's great-grandfather did-and didn't mind the risk of dying, a stain like a burst mosquito, on the pavement eighty-six stories down.

Pete Clardy's family were ironworkers from way back. Buildings didn't go up that way anymore, boots on steel. Which is why Clardy found himself hanging in microgravity in a bar called Mike's on an unhappy excuse for a planetesimal.

Clardy drank a beer, which was skunked, but he didn't complain. It was all skunked; it was still beer. He had his spotless boot propped on a spotless bench and his back wedged into the corner where the yellow plastic wall met the grey one. He missed dirt sometimes, dammit.

”d.a.m.n Finnegan anyway,” he muttered.

Yurcic looked up from her own beer, polis.h.i.+ng the sweat off the side onto her cheek before the droplets got big enough to drift. She c.o.c.ked her head at him, shaved strip of artificially copper hair drifting across her forehead. ”What?”

”I said, 'd.a.m.n Finnegan.' For not putting up the cash for a wake.” Clardy drained his beer, punched another one-also skunked-and sipped more slowly.

Yurcic shook her head. ”Had a wife.”

”I gotta kid. I still left you guys a little something, if....” Clardy knocked his own narrow, grease-black crest of hair out of his eyes. It was the same way his more-times-great-grandfather might have worn it. Clardy didn't know the source of the tradition, but it was practical enough.

”Yeah. If.” Yurcic took her beer a little more slowly. Wise, he thought, given that the compact, stocky, little body under her coverall couldn't have pushed fifty-five kilos, Downside. Like Clardy, she kept one foot on the floor, white-clean magnetic boot holding her down. ”You've got a kid?”

”Girl.” He smiled, paternal pride wrinkling the corners of sharp, black eyes. ”Sixteen. Smart. Mother won't talk to me since I got out of the joint, but takes my money just fine. Katy-she's gonna go to college.”

”I've got a kid too,” she said. ”Wish my old man had thought so highly of me.” Yurcic finished her beer. ”You're right. This ain't much of a wake. Hel-lo....” He followed her gaze. ”Fresh meat.” Spine stiffening just a little as he noticed the attenuated body in the white coveralls.

She nodded. ”That was quick.”

”s.p.a.cer,” he said. ”Look at the scrawny muscles. He's from Outside, not even Upside.”

”Must be off the Eagle” The Bombay Eagle, a non-Company s.h.i.+p, had made station the day before. ”What's he doing in miner whites?”

Clardy sucked his lip. ”Floater got kicked off,” he said at last, with satisfaction, nipple of the beer clinking against his teeth. ”Had to take an honest job. Screwed up aboard s.h.i.+p somehow, and they terminated his contract.”

”Huh. How can you tell?”

Clardy motioned with an index finger. A thick wad of synthetic covered the back of the floater's hand. ”They ripped his service chip. He can't go home.” The s.p.a.cer caught the line of his gaze and gave him a hesitant smile. Clardy glanced away.

Yurcic laughed and killed her beer. ”So either of us can go home, Clardy?” Clardy grunted. ”Hope he's not on my crew, that's all.”

He was.

He offered to rope Clardy in, even, though the senior miner mocked him for his caution. ”Booster pack,” Clardy said. ”I drift, I come back.”

The s.p.a.cer-O'Shaughnessy, still wearing a thick head of red hair to go with the freckles-nodded. ”Anybody come after me if I Fall?”

”Got your pack on?”

O'Shaughnessy nodded again. Clardy coughed in his hand before he pulled his own helmet on, sealing the zipstrip with a touch. He reached out, slammed and sealed the s.p.a.cer's faceplate, leaned their heads together. ”Keep it on. It's a long way Down. Outsider.”

The s.p.a.cer flinched away from the disdain in his voice. Clardy had reason to think of that later.

”Pocahae,” Clardy muttered as he seated the last of ten charges, setting the detcord, and sealing the net around the little rock they'd picked out of the swarm of others. He fired his pack and backed away. It wasn't his tribe, but what the h.e.l.l: the sentiment applied. Today is a good day to die.

The rock read rich in ferrous compounds, a good strike. A lot of them were water and hydrogen ice, useful, but the real money was in the high iron. More in the bank. If he lived long enough to put his kid through school, Clardy was going home with money to retire on not too long after it.

High iron. A whole different meaning now than when his great-great-grandfather had worked the Empire State, his great-grandfather the World Trade Center. His People had been prized in the trades even then.

Clardy's forefathers weren't afraid of heights. Clardy laughed at the thought and turned his head to regard the sprawl and wonder of the great seething sulfurous arch of the planet, ringed in a dirty white wedding band, covering half his horizon. The other way the view was cold and limitless, stars like floating phosph.o.r.escence in a bottomless sea.

He looked over at O'Shaughnessy, clumsily tying off his side of the net that would hold the ore fragments together after the blast. The tow line was set. Clardy backed away. He didn't bother to tell the new kid to find cover before they blasted.

He'd learn or he wouldn't last. Not like anybody would notice one less floater, Upside. G.o.dd.a.m.ned floaters. The old joke: Would you want your sister to marry one?

h.e.l.l no. His sister had, and he'd never see her again. She'd signed aboard the Montreal, and the Montreal almost never came home. She wouldn't be back in-system from her first three legs, to Byhand and out to Yonder, until Clardy was ready to retire for real. Not that he expected to live that long.

When he was being honest.

The net wasn't tight on O'Shaughnessy's side, but Clardy didn't mention that either. O'Shaughnessy'd learn. Or he wouldn't last.

Some old sense of honor might have twinged in Clardy, but he shook it off. Some people just didn't belong up in the iron.

He powered up his pack, and, streaming blue light like a toy model of a s.p.a.ceman, took cover before the blast.

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