Departures

Back at the top of the runway, a Muscovite in red and gold waited for the starting light. Rannveig said, “It has to be disheartening for Dmitri Shepilov to stand up there knowing what his predecessor has just done.”

“I suspect he’s been through worse,” Bennett commented, reading from Shepilov’s data sheet. “He comes from a guards regiment of Muscovite ski troops, and he saw combat against the Siberians in the Ural skirmishes a couple of years ago. After that, a ski jump should be small potatoes.”

“I wonder,” Angus Cavendish said with a grin.”Then it was only the eye of his sergeant on him, not the whole of Earth and Luna.”

Shepilov’s speed down the ramp was slower than al-Kuwatly’s at every checkpoint, but still respectable. He launched himself at just over a hundred kilometers an hour, a jump that projected out close to an even eleven kilometers.

Coverage of the next athlete, a man from United Europe, was brief; attention switched away to al-Kuwatly, who was heading down toward his landing. “I don’t look for any trouble from him,” Cavendish said. “He’s still half a kilometer up, almost two minutes away from putting his skis to the ice, but already he’s in good position, as he should be. Nothing’ll go wrong here.”

The slow-motion shots of what happened next would be replayed endlessly. Seeing everything live, Bennett was chiefly conscious of how fast sportcasting banality turned to horror. He had actually been laughing at Cavendish, for no sooner were the Scotsman’s words out of his mouth than they were all watching al-Kuwatly’s hands open and his ski poles drift away.

Everyone in the studio stared in consternation at the sudden misty globe around al-Kuwady’s head, the rime forming on his faceplate and the sides of his helmet. “His suit’s failed!” Rannveig cried, a split second ahead of Bennett and Cavendish.

They could do nothing but watch. Had it been he up there, Bennett knew he would have been thrashing wildly, clawing at his helmet to try somehow to maintain the pressure. But the jumper from the Arab World held the posture he had been in at the moment of disaster. Only very slowly did his bent arms begin to straighten and slump to his sides.

As a veteran spacer, Cavendish was the first to recognize what that meant. “Murder!” he shouted. “That’s a killed man up there, else he’d be making shift to save himself.” He might have been reading Bennett’s mind, but he generalized where the younger broadcaster had not.

Al-Kuwady’s flight path did not, could not change. Trailing vapor, he plunged toward the landing slope. He hit the ice like a thrown cloth doll, then bounced and tumbled bonelessly. If he had not been dead already, the impact would have killed him.

Sickened, Bennett turned away from the big monitor screen behind the broadcasters. As a result, he was the only one of them looking at the bank of screens to one side that showed what all the active cameras were picking up. He saw Dmitri Shepilov raise his right arm; it looked as if the Muscovite was starting to point. Then vapor spouted from his helmet, too. “Shepilov’s hit!” he cried.

No one had paid any attention to Louis-Philippe Guizot, the jumper who came after the Muscovite. Perhaps because he was from United Europe, Bennett’s yell made Rannveig check another of the side screens for his safety. Guizot was only a few hundred meters from the takeoff ramp when his image was also shrouded by fog. “On, no!” Rannveig cried, and covered her face with her hands.

Bennett learned to hate Mimas’ low gravity. Shepilov had been near the apex of his jump when he was hit; he flew on, a corpse, for five dreadful minutes before crashing on the landing slope as al-Kuwatly had before him. It was even worse with Louis-Philippe Guizot. Propelled by the leap he had taken before the assassin struck, he soared above Mimas as if still alive, then spun down in a hideously lazy descent.

“This is madness!” Bennett said.”Who but a madman could think to mar the Olympic Games with violence? Even in war-torn ancient Greece, the Olympic truce held good; the modern games have been the victim of attack only twice, and the last time was more than a hundred years ago.”

The director spoke in his ear. His voice went hard as he relayed the news to his distant audience: “We have just received a radio transmission claiming responsibility for the atrocity that has taken place here today. Here is a recording of that transmission.”