In the large hold of the transport hauler that had taken in Voss’s fleeing pod, people sat on the deck in groups of twos and threes, watching the overhead holo image.
Voss sat alone and tried to touch the Link. The foreshortening of the holo’s high magnification made it seem that the ghostly habitat was pasted against the dark planet. He could not see the open forwards that faced the planet’s onrushing atmosphere.
“Save us!” someone shouted in his brain.
“What is happening…”
“It’s so cold…”
“I’m burning!”
Screams shot through him. Pain stabbed from behind his eyes, as if trying to escape, and Voss knew that the Link was struggling to deliver the last pleas of its dying human host, with no knowledge that its effort might damage those who had been spared.
“Be silent!” he commanded within himself, even though he had longed to hear the Link again.
“Help us!”
“We cannot see…”
People were holding their heads in pain. Some were lying down on the deck and moaning; others curled into fetal positions; many were already unconscious.
“Blackfriar!” Voss called out over the inner tumult, determined to make use of the Link while it lasted.
But he received no answer over the cries. He felt dizzy and leaned forward, then sat up again.
In the wispy field of the holo it seemed that the mobile was scraping across a large black stone. He closed his eyes and saw explosions. Glass ripped through his muscles. A hand closed around his heart, but he knew that the pain would end when the habitat struck the planet, silencing the Link.
He lay down on his side and waited as vermin crept through the tissues of his body, and tore at nerve endings.
“Help us!” cried the unsynchronous chorus within him.
Through teary eyes he saw the sharing of pain as people writhed around him on the deck.
“Be still,” he pleaded with the Link, “convey no more….”
But it was without control and did what chance permitted. Human voices flowed through its labyrinth, praying for help that it could no longer give while Voss waited patiently for the end. Nothing else would now free the linked survivors from the mind mass of injured and dying inside the habitat or prevent damage to those who were still whole.
He opened his eyes and watched the holo. The mobile was smaller, sinking forward end first into the planet’s ocean of air.
Suddenly he feared that the strike would not break the Link cleanly, that there might be a jolt of nervous energy as the mobile hit, enough to cripple all of the survivors in the shuttles.
As the pain in his body swelled, he knew that the Link was still struggling. It did not feel as he felt, but it knew that its end was near, yet still it continued to feed whatever systems were open, causing unintended harm. The child of human minds, the dream of past visionaries, babbled, unable to help its people as it faced destruction.
One more restart, a distant voice whispered to him, just one more…
He lay on his side, head on the deck, watching the silent, stately inevitability with which the mobile struck the planet.
For a fraction of a second, its one-hundred-kilometer length stood up out of the shallow atmosphere.
There was no time, in the first two seconds of its fifty-kilometers-per-second rush, to fragment.
In the third second it was smashed all the way into the ground.
He sat up, suddenly relieved of pain, as the subnuclear flash shot out in all directions, ionizing the air and vaporizing everything for hundreds of kilometers around the impact with skyshine alone.
Slower Shockwaves of heat went out, setting fires, and then putting them out with blasts of wind.
A big boom, he knew, was starting through the planet, rippling through its solidity, starting a dance that would wake up old volcanoes, birth new ones, and shake the ocean floors.
Antipodal vulcanism, he knew, would open huge volcanic seeps on the other continent, and the quaking would be as violent as at the impact site.
The shaking of sea bottoms would send out tidal waves more than a kilometer high to sweep the planet….
All in a day…
There would be little life left to starve when gas and dust shut out the sun and shrouded the planet in winter.