Where was the speck of light? She glanced at Frido, but he hadn’t spotted it either. She forced herself to remain calm; the wind was whipping up dust all around them, and it was always easier to track the rockets to burn-out than to catch sight of them as they lit up again.
There! Lower and westwards from where she’d been looking, faint but unmistakable. The cross-winds would have given the rocket an unpredictable horizontal push, keeping it from retracing its trajectory precisely—and Yalda suspected that she’d lost her bearings a little, telling herself that she’d kept her gaze fixed when she’d really been following some slowly drifting streak of color in her peripheral vision.
Frido spoke quietly, his words for her alone. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “It’s coming down too fast.”
Yalda couldn’t agree. He had watched more launches then she had, but he was more anxious too; his perceptions were skewed.
The flame grew closer, its intensity becoming painful; in her mind’s eye Yalda followed it down to a point just a few strolls from the launch site. Benedetta would meet them halfway across the plain, waving and shouting triumphantly.
She waited for the flame to cut out, watching the clock as the moment approached. But when it had passed, the engines were still blazing.
“Something’s wrong,” Frido repeated softly. “The burn must have started late.”
As he spoke, the flame went out. Yalda fixed the clock’s reading in her mind: six pauses after the scheduled time. If the entire burn had been delayed for six pauses, the rocket would have been moving more than ten dozen strides per pause faster than intended when the engines cut out and the parachute was unfurled. Falling faster, from a lower altitude.
“What can you see?” Yalda asked him. The recruits were starting to notice their whispering, but Yalda ignored them and watched Frido searching the sky with the theodolite’s small telescope. The unlit rocket itself would be impossible to make out from this distance, but if the parachute was open the white fabric would catch the sun.
Yalda saw it first—her view was wider, and no telescope was needed. Not a flutter of sunlight on cloth, but the full glare of burning sunstone again. She touched Frido’s shoulder; he looked up and cursed in amazement.
“What’s she doing?” he asked numbly.
“Taking control,” Yalda said. The engines had no provision for manual operation, but Benedetta must have dragged the useless timing mechanism out of the way and re-opened the liberator feed herself.
Fatima approached. “I don’t understand,” she complained.
Yalda addressed the recruits, explaining what she believed was happening. The timer must have jammed for a few pauses while the rocket was in free fall, delaying everything that followed. The parachute must have been torn away when it unfurled at too high a speed. The only way to slow the rocket’s descent now was with the engines. Benedetta would try to execute a series of burns that would bring her to the ground safely.
She said no more; all they could do now was watch and hope. But even with perfect knowledge and perfect control, a powered landing could only be a compromise. You needed to be as low as possible before you finally cut the engines, to spare yourself from the fall—but the lower you descended, the more the ground below you would trap heat from the rocket’s exhaust.
And Benedetta did not have perfect knowledge, just a sense of her own weight to gauge the engine’s thrust and an oblique view of the landscape from which to judge her height and velocity. As Yalda watched, the burn intended to slow the rocket’s fall went on too long; the piercing light hung high above the plain for a moment then rose back into the sky.
The flame went out, leaving the rocket invisible again. Yalda tried to think her way back into the cabin, to regain the sense of empathy she’d felt at the moment of launch. Benedetta had already shown quick thinking and resolve, but what she needed most was information.
The engines burst into life once more, showing the rocket far lower than before. Yalda watched it approaching the horizon, afraid it was not slowing quickly enough, but as it entered the dust haze, sending rippling shafts of light and shade across the plain, her spirits soared. It was easier now to judge its trajectory, and it looked as near to perfect as she could have wished. If Benedetta cut the engines at the lowest point, the fall might be survivable.
The flame dimmed slightly, but it did not go out. Yalda peered into the dust and glare, struggling to discern any sign of motion. Frido reached over and touched her arm; he was looking through the theodolite. “She’s trying to get lower,” he said. “She knows she’s close, but she doesn’t think it’s good enough.”
“Is it good enough?”
Frido said, “I think so.”
Then cut the engines, Yalda begged her. Cut the engines and fall.
The light grew brighter, but it remained in place. Yalda was confused, but then she understood: Benedetta hadn’t increased the thrust, but the rocket was now so low that it was heating the ground below it to the point of incandescence.
Frido let out a hum of dismay. “Go up!” he pleaded. “You’ve lost your chance; give it time to cool.”
The glow flared and diffused. The wind shifted, clearing the haze, and Yalda could see exactly what was happening. The ground was ablaze, while the rocket crept toward it, feeding the flames.
Yalda called out “Down!” and managed to push Fatima toward the bunker before the light became blinding and she stumbled. She lay where she’d fallen, her face in the dirt, covering her rear eyes with one arm.
The ground shuddered, but it was not a big explosion; most of the sunstone and liberator had already been used up. She waited for debris, but whatever there was fell short. When she relaxed her tympanum, all she heard was the wind.
Yalda rose to her feet and looked around. Frido was crouched beside her, his head in his hands. Nino was standing, apparently unharmed; the other recruits were still picking themselves up. Fatima peered out from the bunker, humming softly in distress.
In the distance, a patch of blue-white flame jittered over the ground. Yalda couldn’t tell if it was spilt fuel burning or the dust and rock of the plain itself. She watched in silence until the fire had died away.
“When Benedetta wanted to launch her imaging probes,” Eusebio recalled, “she just wore me down. Six dozen was what she wanted; six dozen was what she got. And if I’d been here for the test flight, it would have been the same. Whatever my misgivings, she would have talked me around them.”
Yalda said, “I wish we’d had a way of contacting her family. Or at least a friend somewhere. There must have been someone she would have wanted to be told.”
Eusebio made a gesture of helplessness. “She was a runaway. Whatever farewells she was able to say would have been said long ago.”
Yalda felt a surge of anger at that, though she wasn’t even sure why. Was he exploiting people, by helping them escape their cos? There was no crime in offering a way out, so long as you were honest about what it entailed.
The hut was lit by a single lamp on the floor. Eusebio looked around the bare room appraisingly but resisted making any comment. Yalda had spent the last ten days here, struggling to find a way to salvage something from Benedetta’s pointless death.
She said, “We need to be more careful with everything we do. We should always be thinking of the worst possibilities.”
Eusebio buzzed curtly. “There are so many of those; can you be more specific?”
“Igniting the planet.”
“Ah, the Gemma syndrome,” he said wearily. “Do you think the farmers rushing to plant crops in the blast zone came up with that themselves? Acilio has people out spreading the idea, and organizing paid relocations.”
“That’s an awful lot of effort just to spite you,” Yalda suggested. “Maybe he honestly believes there’s a risk.”
“A risk compared with what?” Eusebio retorted. “Compared with doing nothing while we wait to slam into a cluster of orthogonal stars? I’ve seen the image from the probe; that’s not a wild guess anymore, it’s a certainty.”
“The worst case,” Yalda persisted, “is that the engines on the Peerless malfunction in such a way that they deliver less thrust than they need to raise the mountain. And they sit there doing it for chime after chime—maybe bell after bell or day after day, if everyone who could shut them down is dead. There must be some point where whatever the Hurtlers did to Gemma would happen here. We’ve done tests to rule that out if all goes well—but we can’t test the most extreme case; there’s no scale model that will tell us what happens when a whole mountain of sunstone sits and burns from below, for days.”
Eusebio rubbed his eyes. “All right, if I grant you all of that… what do you propose?”
“An air gap, all around the mountain.”
“An air gap?”
“A trench,” Yalda explained. “As deep as the lowest engines, and maybe a stroll wide. Then we dig channels under the engines so that all the exhaust gas can escape freely. That would make a big difference to the heat build-up in the rock, if the engines end up running in place.”
“A stroll wide?” Eusebio closed his eyes and swayed backward, fighting not to use indecorous language.
Yalda said, “Look at it this way: a trench that wide would be enough to displace all those irritating farmers—for a reason they can’t really argue against. You could even ask Acilio to help pay for it, seeing as he’s so keen on fire safety.”
Eusebio opened his eyes and regarded her pityingly. “Yes, the need to take a reasonable, consistent position will win him right over.”
“No?”