Utopia

Gildern stepped alongside Fiyle and put his hand on Fiyle’s forearm. It looked like a gentle, even friendly, gesture, but the fingers on his arm clamped down as tightly as any vise.

Jadelo Gildern led Norlan Fiyle away. And it was abundantly and unpleasantly clear to Norlan that he was nowhere near getting out of the game.

Part 3 Impact Minus Thirty

14

THIS IS REAL, Davlo Lentrall told himself, once again. For the first time in your life, you are part of something real. You’re one of the ones actually doing the job. He sat down, exhausted, at the wardroom table, and set his tray down in front of him. Something Kaelor died to prevent, because it could kill so many. Davlo blinked and shook his head. It was hard to keep thoughts like that at bay. He knew he should eat, knew he needed to keep his strength up in order to keep working, but he was too tired to be hungry. He would just sit a moment by himself, before he forced himself to eat. He was in bad shape and losing weight, he knew that. But it took a real effort of will to care.

Why had they sent him here? Governor Grieg himself had suggested-or rather, politely ordered-that Davlo should join the spaceside part of the operation. Davlo was not entirely sure why. Had the governor thought it would be some sort of reward-rather than a torment-for Davlo to see the thing he had dreamed of taking place? Had the governor, quite accurately, perceived Davlo as borderline unstable, someone who might best be put out of the way before some clutch of reporters got their claws into him?

He looked out the porthole of the Settler spaceship, looked out into space, out at the realest thing he had ever seen in his life. There it was, just ten kilometers away. Comet Grieg, an ice mountain cruising through the darkness of space.

It was no abstraction inside a computer, no simulated image in a holographic generator. It was real. It was there. And it was huge, far larger than he had imagined it being, far larger than mere numbers could have told him. It took up half the sky, and seem to take up more. It was a dark, brooding shape of dirty gray, half lost in shadow. A monster out of the darkness, and, thanks to him, it was aimed straight at Inferno.

It was, roughly speaking, an oblong spheroid, but that made the shape of it sound simple and abstract. It was a real world, if a small one, with a geography complicated enough to have kept a generation of mapmakers busy. Its surface was so pocked with craterlets and covered in crags arid gullies and cracks that it was hard to study anyone feature on the surface before it got lost among all the others.

Comet Grieg was one of a special class of so-called “dark” comets. Inferno’s star system had plenty of normal comets, of the classic “dirty snowball” type composed primarily of water ice and other volatiles. But for reasons that still were not entirely understood, star systems with poorly developed planetary systems also seemed to produce a large number of dark comets-and Inferno shared its star with only two planets barely large enough to qualify as gas giants, a wizened little asteroid belt, and the usual sorts of deep space debris-comets, asteroids, planetesimals, and so on.

Called “dark” because they produced relatively small tails, and were composed of darker material, dark comets were closer to being asteroids encased in ice than anything else. Grieg had a particularly large proportion of stony material, but it contained plenty of water ice and other volatiles. A hazy nimbus of gas and dust and ice shards floated about the behemoth, bits of debris from the size of molecules up to the size of small aircars that had either been knocked loose by the natural heating and outgassing as the comet neared the sun, or else thrown clear by human interference.

A searchlight from a closer-in ship stabbed through the cloud of debris and struck the surface of Comet Grieg, flooding one small area on the surface with a light so bright, so clear, it did not seem to belong on such a darkened surface. A smooth and perfect cylindrical shape stuck up out of the comet’s surface. Davlo recognized it. It was one of the dozens of thrusters planted on the comet’s surface. He had helped calculate their placement, and played at least a small part in working out the firing sequence that had been used to eliminate the comet’s spin. It had been in a wobbling two-axis tumble when the task force had arrived. Now the spin had been restored and refined, and the comet’s nose was pointed straight at the sun.

But the sun would have no further chance to melt this comet. Davlo looked from Comet Grieg to the sunshade, a huge and insubstantial parasol floating in space a kilometer or so sunward of the comet, forming a permanent solar eclipse as seen from the surface of Grieg.