Why hadn't the drive engineers already acted? They should have realized what was happening by now and shut the drive down. But were any of them conscious? They were at the ship's aft extreme, where the whip of the frigate's undampened yaw had done its worst damage.
Hobbes had to reach the pilot's station.
Again she pushed against her chair, and managed to pull herself up. She took one unsteady step, bowed like a woman carrying a hundred kilos of stone on her back. Her hand reached out to grab the rail that surrounded the airscreen pit.
But she was too heavy. She faltered. Her legs gave way.
Her knee thundered down against the metal deck like a jackham-mer, and exploded with pain.
Suddenly, everything was silent and dark. Hobbes's ears heard only the far-off whine of some alarm. Second-sight icons floated in 223 the air, gibberish now. Everything seemed to be drifting around her. Then Hobbes realized that she was floating.
Freefall.
Someone had cut the drive.
Her blood was no longer gravity's hostage, and she could feel it rushing back into her head. Hobbes opened her eyes. Lucidity fought with the pain screaming in her knee. The bridge spun slowly around her, full of unfamiliar shapes and smells. The pilots were dead, and all of the gunners had been hit. A haze of ichor filled the air. Blood pumped from a gunner's chest wound; spurted globules rolled lazily through the air.
"Medical, medical," she said. But she heard the words echoed from all through the ship. Hobbes twisted to grab the airscreen rail.
But the motion wrenched her shattered knee, and she passed out from the pain.
TEN YEARS EARLIER (IMPERIAL ABSOLUTE)
House
It had taken a whole day to sculpt--shaping the snows with reflected sunlight, vented geothermal, and the occasional infralaser--but the sled trail was ready at last. It stretched ten kilometers, spiraling down the house's mountain peak through four circumnavigations before tipping through a narrow pass and down a steep moraine. The trail then descended into a glacial rift between towering walls of ancient blue ice, and terminated at one of the house's water-gathering points, now fitted with an access tunnel. For safety, the entire course was banked with three meters of powdery snow, and marked with cheery orange glowsticks at every turn.
The house was quite proud of itself. At last its encyclopedic knowledge of every centimeter of the estate had been put to use.
But not everything was under control. The mistress's guest had insisted on building the sled himself. Captain Zai had requested a bewildering variety of materials to be synthesized, adapted, and cannibalized. Apparently, sleds on Vada were made entirely of animal bone and skins, lashed together like macrame inside a hard frame. The house had serious reservations about trusting the mistress's safety to such a contraption, which had no internal diagnostics, native intelligence, or self-repair capacity.
Still, the house was impressed when Captain Zai finished winding the strips of salvaged leather garments around the mock ivory runners and frame, and jumped onto the sled, testing it with his full weight several times. The leather stretched, but held, the force elegantly distributed throughout the frame.
"How long have Vadans been building those?" the mistress asked. "Twenty thousand years," was Zai's nonsensical answer. The house knew that Vada had only been colonized for fifteen centuries. Twenty millennia ago was a time before the diaspora.
"You certainly hold on to the old ways."
Zai noddea. "Ever seen one before?"
"A sled? Laurent, I'd never seen snow before coming to Home. There isn't any on Vasthold. Well, perhaps at the poles, but we haven't gotten that crowded yet."
The house read surprise on the captain's face. "You'd never seen snow? And you bought a house in the antarctic? That was . . . adventurous."
"Adventure had nothing to do with it. Home is more crowded than Vasthold. This is the only place on the planet I can withdraw completely from apathy. But it's true, I always did want to see snow. On Vasthold we have children's tales about it."
"About sisters lost in a blizzard?" Zai asked. "Freezing to death?"
"Godspite, Laurent, no. I grew up thinking snow was magical stuff, rain turned white and powdery. Pillow feathers from the sky."
Zai smiled. "You're about to find out just how right you were."
He hoisted the two and a half meters of skin and pseudobone onto his shoulder.
The mistress narrowed her eyes at the sled, rising a little hesitantly.
"It looks sound enough," she said.
"Shall we find out?"
The house's mind shot down the sled trail again, searching once more for a poorly banked turn, a hidden crevasse, a dangerous ice patch.
All seemed in order.
As the mistress and her guest changed into warmer clothes, the house connected with the planetary infostructure, accessing several collections of oral and written folklore. In seconds, it had discovered hundreds of children's stories from Vasthold, and many more from the older world of Vada. Then its search spilled across the many planets where the two worlds' founder populations had originated, and hits came in the tens of thousands. The house found tales of animated snowmen and wish-granting white leopards, magical arctic storms >26 m and strandings on ice floes, stories of how the aurora was made and why the compass sometimes lied. It even found the tale Zai had mentioned, entitled "Three Vadan Sisters Lost in a Blizzard."
The two headed for the east door, the leather of the handmade sled creaking softly as the captain carried it downstairs. For the next minute or so, they couldn't hurt themselves.
The house settled in for a pleasant hundred seconds of reading.
"Of course, when I mentioned sledding I didn't mean downhill. Nothing quite so childish."
"Well, Laurent, we couldn't very well fly in a team of dogs."
"True. But what's a country house without dogs, Nara?"
"Dogs aren't fashionable on Home, I'm afraid."
He sighed. "So I'd noticed."
Zai turned down the heating in his uniform. His metabolism was enough to keep him warm inside Navy wool. The snow crunched under his boots with the bright sound of a recent fall. Perfect powder for sledding.
If only he had a long, flat stretch of it and a team of huskies.
Nara's blue eyes were flashing with a smile. "I'm relieved to see that you Vadans don't slavishly follow the Emperor's taste in these matters."